Two Earth-Sized Bodies With Oxygen-Rich Atmospheres 111
tugfoigel writes "Astrophysicists at the University of Warwick and Kiel University have discovered two bodies the size of earth with oxygen-rich atmospheres — however, there is a disappointing snag for anyone looking for a potential home for alien life, or even a future home for ourselves. These are not planets, but are actually two unusual white dwarf stars." The objects, 220 and 400 light-years distant, are believed to be remnants of stars between 7 and 10 solar masses. Such stars, the largest that evolve to white dwarves, have been sought for years. If the stars were a little more massive they would collapse to neutron stars, or so the theory goes. Here is the paper on the arXiv.
That's okay. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:That's okay. (Score:5, Funny)
And Captain Kirk would still find a way to pork it without spontaneously combusting.
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Better yet, don't. Please.
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And Captain Kirk would still find a way to pork it without spontaneously combusting.
I wondered where the Horta [wikipedia.org] got its eggs fertilized.
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SHATNEROLOGIST ALERT!
Mod parent down, he is an "OTS" believer from the FCOS. These people roam the world to spread their evil teachings from the First Church of Shatnerology, a corrupt organization that teaches masturbation to its disciples.
For those asking, "who the hell is OTS" -- here you can find the truths: http://www.shatnerology.com/ots.html [shatnerology.com]
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Only if Chuck Norris lets him.
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Oh yeah? Well, your mom is an Earth-sized body with an oxygen-rich atmosphere. If you know what I mean. ;)
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Fixed that for ya
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Well, they're talking about two Earth-sized bodies, so I guess the other one is ur dad. Take that!
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It's a matter of what is best to focus our efforts on. We looks for life in environment similar to ours for two reasons:
Short-term) Life that developed in an environment similar to ours may be similar to us, and therefore we may actually have a chance of noticing it.
Long-term) If we ever do spread out from this planet, then we will be focused on environments most suitable to us.
Posting AC because I've already spent mod points in this thread.
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All known arrangements of life either consume oxygen or produce it, either way we will find free oxygen anywhere we find such life.
All known arrangements of life depend on liquid water, even in those under-glacier lakes or deep ocean thermal vents, liquid water is necessary. Therefore we will find liquid water anywhere we find such life.
Unless there is some arrangement for life than is fundamentally different from ours, on a molecular level, then oxygen and liquid water will be found anywhere life will be
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Unless there is some arrangement for life than is fundamentally different from ours, on a molecular level, then oxygen and liquid water will be found anywhere life will be found.
There are a number of other options that have been theorized. I don't know about the alternatives to oxygen (some gaseous form of sulfur, maybe?), but the main ones I remember are substituting silicon for carbon, and ammonia for water. A quick Google search turned up sulfuric acid as another possible solvent. I'm not a chemist - is
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You're wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_respiration [wikipedia.org]
We have discovered forms of life on this planet that do not require oxygen to live. For some of them, oxygen is actually a poison, and they can't survive in Earth's surface atmosphere. The life forms found around sulfur vents at the bottom of the ocean are an example of anaerobic life, as are some of the species of bacteria found deep within the Earth's crust.
Water is still an important part of the equation, but there are substitutes for Oxygen
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So I am, are there examples of organisms that use anaerobic respiration? The linked article didn't provide any.
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Yes... off the top of my head I can't give you specific species names, but I remember an episode of Quirks & Quarks on the CBC a few months ago where they interviewed a woman who was talking about the 5 greatest threats to the environment... in it, she mentionned that the so-called "dead zones" in the ocean, where there's a massive algae bloom that ends up dying and sinking to the bottom of the oceans... as it rots, all of the oxygen in the area is taken up by the bacteria doing the decomposing, causing
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All known arrangements of life either consume oxygen or produce it, either way we will find free oxygen anywhere we find such life.
Uhh. What? Life on Earth was already at least few hundred million years old when cyanobacteria figured out the trick to produce oxygen, and obviously nothing consumed it before that either, because there wasn't any oxygen to consume. And boy was it bad for the critters that weren't used to it when those buggers started releasing the stuff into the atmosphere en masse, they call it the friggin' oxygen catastrophe.
There are STILL things that die [wikipedia.org] when exposed to oxygen, many of them pathogens (not much free ox
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Re:bummer... (Score:4, Informative)
nomenclature (Score:1, Funny)
In the image SDSS 1102+2054 looks blue. Shouldn't we call them blue dwarfs? Or should we call them smurfs?
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Ach crivens! Whut aboot us, ye daftie?
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Ach! An' me withou' me mod-points! I'll kick meself in the heid!
Re:nomenclature (Score:5, Funny)
That was the initial idea, but unfortunately there were already numerous related trademarks held by the porn industry.
Deceptive headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
Original paper title: "Two white dwarfs with oxygen-rich atmospheres"
The newspaper headline: "2 Earth-sized bodies with oxygen rich atmospheres found- but they're stars not planets"
Slashdot headline: "Two Earth-Sized Bodies With Oxygen-Rich Atmospheres"
The submitter could have simply stated "Two white dwarf stars with oxygen-rich atmospheres" but then who would have clicked further.
Re:Deceptive headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
Feel manipulated? Watch the news on TV or read a newspaper when you really want to be manipulated.
Re:Deceptive headlines (Score:5, Funny)
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Try an osteopath - they've really studied their subject and are practically specialist doctors. Chiropractors are masseurs that like to take risks.
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Osteopaths can be hard to find in some parts of the world... I'm seeing one right now for a shoulder that was dislocated, and he's very good... he's also the only one that's currently practicing in the city, possibly the province, and has a waitlist of several months in some cases.
You don't tend to find Osteopaths in North America.
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Out of curiosity whereabouts are you, if you don't mind my asking? We actually have a, well, surplus is the wrong word but, we have a lot of upcoming osteopaths in the UK that are outpacing the number of practices in some regions. I'm just thinking that if there is a shortage over there, then it might be an opportunity for some. Though if people over there don't grasp the difference between an osteopath and a chiropractor, then that might hold things back...
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I'm in Ottawa, Ontario... and yeah, feel free to send them over... Pierre, the guy I'm seeing, trained in England and France, but is originally Canadian.
It's not that people don't understand the difference between an osteopath and a chiropractor... it's that most people haven't even heard of an osteopath. The fact that your private supplementary insurance will usually cover an osteopath in the same category that it covers physiotherapy and chiropractors is irrelevant... most people buying that kind of thing
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Remember the first rule of journalism: "It's always better to manipulate than never."
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That manipulation does not make this manipulation any better.
Classic fallacy!
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I watch the news on occasion. Problem is, this headline is on par with the worst sensationalism mass media has to offer.
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Re:Deceptive headlines (Score:5, Funny)
In related news SETI Has Detected Intelligent Radio Signals From Space.
They are currently working on better methods to filter out the earth TV broadcasts being reflected back from the moon.
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Re:Deceptive headlines (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Deceptive headlines (Score:4, Funny)
It was a Fox News with a ShamWow commercial.
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Re:Deceptive headlines (Score:4, Informative)
the estimated masses are around one solar mass, which means they are no where near earth-sized
From the Wiki article [wikipedia.org]: "[White dwarfs] are very dense; a white dwarf's mass is comparable to that of the Sun and its volume is comparable to that of the Earth."
Be very careful about calling other people stupid when you're about to say something demonstrably false.
Re:Deceptive headlines (Score:5, Interesting)
The radius is not explicitly stated in the paper, and the estimated masses are around one solar mass, which means they are no where near earth-sized.
Wrong. WDs are *ridiculously* dense, with a rho of about 10^6 g/cm^3, so a 1M_sun WD has a volume of like 2*10^31 cubic meters, which means the radius is around 8000 kilometers. R_earth is about 6400 kilometers, so Earth is actually really useful to get an intuitive picture of how these guys look.
The cool thing about WDs is that they shrink in volume when you add mass. Which means they get denser the more mass you add. Even cooler is that lots of them are in a co-orbit with other stars in a binary system, and they steal mass from the other star, so it's not so strange to see WDs gaining mass and getting denser over time.
It turns out there is one special mass at which the electron degeneracy pressure [wikipedia.org] holding the star up is not enough to fight the force of gravity pushing it inward. (This mass is about 1.4 times the mass of the sun, depending on whether the star is rotating.) At that point the thing collapses from the size of earth to about the size of a soccer ball in less than a second, generating one of the most spectacular explosions in nature. I mean this thing is blown apart at around 3% of the speed of light and is 5 billion times brighter than the sun.
This is called a "type Ia supernova" -- a pretty boring name for what is, technically speaking, the awesomest thing in the universe.
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[..] it's not so strange to see WDs gaining mass and getting denser over time.
Ah, these are American in origin?
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Naw, dense would imply large amounts of muscle mass and little fat, so they can't be American :P
Schwarzschild radius (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite so small, as the Schwarzschild radius [wikipedia.org] of the sun is about 3 km.
Actually, it's believed that type 1A supernovae do not reach gravitational collapse [wikipedia.org], they explode in a runaway carbon fusion before reaching the Chandrasekar limit. It's type II supernovae [wikipedia.org] that explode the way you mention.
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Don't forget one of the most interesting things about Type 1a's: they're always the same size. Because it happens from gradual accumuluation, the star is always at the same mass when it goes off, and is thus always the same brightness.
This, along with a few other standard candles (such as Cepheid Variables) allow us to know how far away things are -- brightness we see is related to both absolute brightness and distance, so when you know the absolute and relative brightness you can calculate the distance.
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Pish, putting a spin on things is old news. If you own a NIV Bible, congrats, you already own a book where theologians twist the source material to censor embarrassing verses.
Take Songs 5:4 for example:
It's like taking "You
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Do you mean bigger? White dwarfs are all fairly close to the earth in size. They are still far more massive, however A white dwarf probably retains 70-80% of the mass of the original star... 5-7 solar masses in this case. These are apparently near the border area, not quite massive enough to crush the space out of their atoms and become a neutron star. A neutron star is way smaller... with a radius of 10km or less.
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The upper limit on a white dwarf's mass is the Chandrasekhar limit (roughly 1.4 solar masses); The paper posits that the two dwarfs in question have masses of .9-1.2 solar masses.
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Reading the paper you can see these white dwarfs are a lot less massive than that. About 1 solar mass.
Chandrasekhar limit says the electron degeneracy pressure can only hold up a white dwarf of up to about 1.4 solar masses, anything bigger becomes a neutron star. At the range you're talking about (5-7 solar masses) you're probably looking at black holes.
White dwarfs are a lot heavier than earth, but due to their immense gravity they compress themselves into a size not much larger than a terrestrial planet.
Cough, Cough... (Score:1, Informative)
Ever heard of the Smoke Ring??
Cough, cough.
Man...
white dwarfs not white dwarves (Score:3, Informative)
Re:white dwarfs not white dwarves (Score:4, Interesting)
The real historical plural of dwarf is dwarrows. Dwarves is bad grammar, but is in common enough usage that it's pointless to argue. "Dwarfs" just makes you look illiterate, as if you spelled the plural of fish as "fishs."
The preference for Dwarves instead of Dwarfs is actually fairly recent. In the foreword for The Hobbit, Tolkein comments that in English the only correct pluralisation of Dwarf is Dwarfs, but that he uses Dwarves "only when speaking of the ancient people to whom Thorin Oakenshield and his companions belonged".
So either Dwarves or Dwarfs would be correct, as both have been in common usage in living memory, but Dwarrows wouldn't exactly count as modern English.
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No, astromatt's understanding of the rules of grammar is correct. Because "White Dwarf" refers to an entity unrelated to a "dwarf", it's pluralised as a proper noun (which generally ignores suffix manipulation). If you knew two people named "Dwarf", you wouldn't say "the two dwarves" (which would only be valid if Dwarf and Dwarf were very short and you were intentionally pointing it out), you'd say "the two Dwarfs".
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No, astromatt's understanding of the rules of grammar is correct. Because "White Dwarf" refers to an entity unrelated to a "dwarf", it's pluralised as a proper noun (which generally ignores suffix manipulation). If you knew two people named "Dwarf", you wouldn't say "the two dwarves" (which would only be valid if Dwarf and Dwarf were very short and you were intentionally pointing it out), you'd say "the two Dwarfs".
I'm not a master of the finer nitpicks of the English language, but "white dwarf" is not a name - it's a class like being a star, pulsar, planet, asteroid, meteorite, comet or whatever. Try reading something like a Star Trek science report to yourself "Three pulars, two supernovas, two neutron stars and five white dwarves." No way are those "White Dwarf", "White Dwarf", "White Dwarf", "White Dwarf" and "White Dwarf" as in the "five White Dwarfs".
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The real historical plural of dwarf is dwarrows.
You are aware that Tolkien was writing fiction when he wrote that, are you?
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You are aware Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon linguistics at Oxford, and wrote numerous papers on the Anglo-Saxon and earlier roots of just such words as Dwarf, aren't you. The quote you are characterising as fiction appears in his lecture notes to students and in substantially the same form in one of his scholarly publications. As one of the world's top half dozen leading experts in the field, it is to be hoped his instruction was not entirely fictional despite your claim.
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Yes, yes, Tolkien was a noted philologist with plenty of knowledge about real-world languages... who had a huge hobby of making up fictional ones.
In fact, middle-earth was something of an afterthought... a place to put all those interesting fictional languages and pair them up with other fictional cultures.
While "dwarrow" is a logical, grammatical way to pluralize "dwarf" I still maintain that the word is a Tolkien invention.
I would be very interested if someone could provide an citation of the word "Dwarro
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I stand corrected, thank you
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Yet two dwarfs can sail from two wharves...or two wharfs, for that matter.
English is Britain's revenge for the loss of their empire.
so can we gate to them? (Score:2)
so can we gate to them?
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The second you step through that stargate is the second you become "Chunky Salsa" on the gate ramp. Try again....
White dwarfs' salvation lies in our hands (Score:1)
It is man's destiny to save these stars from eternal, er, hellfire?
This... (Score:1)
...explains Kryptonian physiology.
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I don't think a white dwarf can orbit a red giant. Rather the opposite, I would guess, if the configuration is at all possible.
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The red giant would tend to be more massive, so the white dwarf would orbit it.
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Strictly speaking, since they're both exerting gravity on each other, and neither is stationary, they're actually orbitting each other... But that's getting pedantic.
But to the GP, it's worth pointing out that a White Dwarf has a theoretical upper limit on size of about 1.4 solar masses, whereas the Giant and Supergiant stars are typically between 10-80 solar masses, sometimes significantly bigger. The Pistol Star, for example, in Saggitarius, is estimated to possibly be as much as 150 solar masses. :)
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To be as precise as possible, any two objects orbit each other on an axis called the barycenter, which may lie within the more massive object, but it's there nonetheless.
When We Finally Find Them (Score:2)
When we do find a planet fairly like Earth, will we then finally be able to stop having news stories that start off making noises about "Earth-like" but quickly devolve into "having one characteristic that can be compared to Earth, such as a particular element, but in all other respects are entirely unlike Earth"? This particular story was perfectly good without the bogus 'grabber'.
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Yes, this is causing a huge strain on news stories and an overall problem to humankind.
Please let us find new planets so the stories about false positives can stop.
Suck it up Space Cowboy (Score:2)
At least you got air to breathe and it's not a neutron star......
Never mind the bone pulverizing gravity and the extreme heat, 1 out of three earth like conditions is enough for anyone.....
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At least you got air to breathe and it's not a neutron star......
Even if we found another planet whose atmosphere contained oxygen, human beings require a pretty specific concentration of oxygen to breathe unassisted. Too highly concentrated and you get oxygen poisoning [wikipedia.org], not concentrated enough and you get lack-of-oxygen poisoning [wikipedia.org].
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But at least, in an oxygen-containing atmosphere, it should be possible to create an inside atmosphere with just the right amount of oxygen with relatively simple technology. Especially if the oxygen level is too high, it should be trivial (assuming the air outside is not otherwise poisonous): Simply replace a smaller amount of inside air (with too little oxygen, because people consumed it) with outside air.
apartment on the sun (Score:2)
Why does this preclude life? (Score:1)
Why does this preclude alien life?
If we learn anything from past experiences.. (Score:2)
Do not colonize the planet after a terrorist sets off a nuclear device nearby.
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Do not colonize the planet after a terrorist sets off a nuclear device nearby.
I'd guess it's more dangerous to colonize a planet before a terrorists sets off a nuclear device nearby. Because in that case, you're there when the nuclear device is set off.
White Dwarfs are real. (Score:2)
Pssh you guys don't take anything. (Score:1)