Hubble Finds Sign That Habitable Planets Could Exist Beyond Solar System 57
cold fjord writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "Astronomers have detected the tell-tale signs of a shattered asteroid being eaten by a dead star, or white dwarf. The Hubble telescope spotted the event some 150 light-years from Earth. The researchers tell Science Magazine that the chemical signatures in the star's atmosphere indicate the asteroid must contain a lot of water. This makes it the first time both water and a rocky surface — key components for habitable planets — have been found together beyond our Solar System. ... Of the 1,000 planets so far identified beyond our Solar System, none has been definitively associated with the presence of water." More at Smithsonian Magazine.
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More evidence of similarity (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1995 my physics teacher told me we'd never have direct evidence of extrasolar worlds. Now I tell my physics students that I wouldn't be surprised if we found evidence of extrasolar life (probably in the form of a planet with a high concentration of oxygen in its atmosphere).
It's a great time to be alive and to be a scientist!
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is it a class M planet?
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If it is, it should have some roddenberries.
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Statistics have to be started from somewhere (Score:2)
Because a set of statistics for rocky worlds outside of this solar system with water now has a 1 in the column where it used to have a zero. We now have a data point where we used to have nothing, and that is a beginning. It's really the entire point of the Kepler mission when you think about it, to gather data so that we can better generate state statistics. We need data and in any number of critical fields the slot has a 0 in it.
Science starts somewhere and this is an indicator that were not wasting our r
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When I was in school the idea that we would ever actually take a physical picture of a planet around another solar system was science fiction. Decades later and we have pictures of many planets around other solar systems and even planets that do not orbit a solar system at all.
I like the sentiment of your post, but we currently don't even have a 1 pixel picture of a planet around another star than our sun. The current methods, at least until we get James-Webb [wikipedia.org] and better telescopes out there, are using the wobble effect from the gravitational effect of the planet on the star, spectral analysis, and such indirect methods of observation.
Still it is pretty cool to look at the current list of habitable exoplanets [wikipedia.org] and think of the types of worlds there are out there. The discovery in t
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You are quite right about the wobble effect used to help find candidates. It's extremely difficult to get direct pictures, however we have done it. Since it sounds like you have some interest in the subject I'll provide some links for you to read on. Interestingly enough the planet first planet we directly pictured had been captured by Hubble and overlooked for years as we didn't have the technique for combing through the data at the time!
http://www.universetoday.com/26353/new-technique-allows-astronomers-t [universetoday.com]
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Thanks for sharing the links. I'm very happy to be wrong on this, and it's interesting to see the progress made in the last couple of years on exoplanet discovery.
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In 1995 my physics teacher told me we'd never have direct evidence of extrasolar worlds.
This is a confirmation of the first of Clarke's Three Laws [wikipedia.org]. They are:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Whats so special about water? (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't get whats so special about water. Water has a pretty limited temperature range where its liquid, which is the form in which people consider it special. Water is a decent solvent, and thus rips apart lots of interesting structures (Thats a bad thing for life right?). Its shape is bad for building things. If its just that somehow hydrogen bonds + liquid = magic life juice, then there are lots of other choices (and that makes little sense).
Also, why are rocks key components? Even life here had little t
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Neither is required as they don't preclude other possibilities, of course. But our one data point shows life happens on a rocky world with lots of water, so we suppose it is one configuration likely to yield life elsewhere as well in lieu of knowledge about whether it is actually all that helpful or not, which requires further examples.
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Water is a decent solvent, and thus rips apart lots of interesting structures (Thats a bad thing for life right?).
It's an amazing solvent, and a universal solvent. You in fact consist of mostly water, you bag of meat. Excuse me, I need to go swallow some more... water. (Okay, beer....)
Also, why are rocks key components? Even life here had little to do with rocks initially
In space things tend to be rocky or gaseous. If it's gaseous, it's hard to hang together.
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Let's say that water and rocks are very good ingredients on their own, assuming we're interested in variations of 'chemically based' life:
- water has interesting physical properties (you mentioned most of them), but one of them is its dielectric constant, very important for facilitating catalytic conditions (self-replicating molecules?)
- these physical properties allows it to solubilize minerals and a fair range of
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Who would have thought that one of the most common substances in the universe would be found outside solar system! The wonders of science.
Yeah; if you do a bit of googling, you'll find that various "authorities" list water as the 3rd or 4th most common molecule in interstellar space. So the real mystery is why anyone would consider it news that water is found in the signature of some remote object. The default assumption should be that anything not hot enough to break up a water molecule into its constituent atoms (or H + HO) will contain lots of water molecules.
But I suppose that's too complex an idea for your typical media writer to ge
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Don't know about you, but I think it's incredibly cool that we can actually **DETECT** an asteroid being swallowed by an star. It's only a couple of decades ago that the idea of being able to even detect a planet around another star was considered absurd. And being able to tell what it's mad of? Abso-fracking-lutely amazing.
White Dawrf Tweets Back To Science Magazine (Score:3, Funny)
The White Dwarf in question had this to say on Science Magazine's Twitter Feed: "I made you a watery body with rocky surface, but then I ated it"
So nice Hubble grabbed this honor... (Score:1)
Water does not equal life (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds familiar. While this is an intriguing find it does not mean that life outside our solar system is anymore possible than it was before.
This is similar to the buzz around finding possible water on Saturn's moon:
Saturn's Moon--Does Water Equal Life? [icr.org]
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Well, since we've run experiments where applying high voltage arcs (lightning simulations) to the basic chemicals like water, carbon, nitrogen, etc, produced amino acids... I think evidence of water and rocks is just about all I need to believe life is possible outside our solar system.
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Holy crap, how did you get me to click on a link to a creationist website??
Well, I'd think that the title, " Saturn's Moon--Does Water Equal Life?" should have been a tipoff. Few actual scientists would use the word "equal" there. Rather, they'd use a word like "implies" or "suggests". Reading the scientific results as saying that life exists iff there is water is a major failure in logic that you expect from creationists and media folks, and of course the data doesn't say that at all.
This sort of misreading is often characterized by the term "straw man" [wikipedia.org]. It may mean that t
Tang (Score:2)
tenses, motherfucker (Score:2)
Or rather, it used to before it totally & tidally got the shit kicked out of it.
Isn't it a bit of a jump from "asteroid with rocks and water in it" to "rocky planet with liquid water on it"?
Not that I don't think they're out there. The aliens have to come from som ...' baling near line 23 ..
W&6 ';@
c a r r i e r . l o s t
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We should get ready for the meteor shower that heralds the arrival of Kal-El.
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https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=84960 [archlinux.org]
Shitcock.
Sure (Score:2)
If by "habitable planets" you mean "one habitable asteroid" and by "could exist" you mean "could have existed"...
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No no no, see, that's not how it works.
When a new habitable planet is discovered, world governments will lay claim to it in the name of the oligarchs, and "regular people" will not be allowed to benefit from its discovery. Only politically well-connected people will go, and only politically well-connected corporations will have any part of the development of the mission.