James Webb Space Telescope Detects Water Vapor Around Alien Planet (space.com) 25
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected water vapor around a distant rocky planet located 26 light-years away. "The water vapor could indicate the presence of an atmosphere around the extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, a discovery that could be important for our search for habitable worlds outside the solar system," reports Space.com. "However, the scientists behind the discovery caution that this water vapor could be coming from the world's host star rather than the planet itself." From the report: The exoplanet, designated GJ 486 b, orbits a red dwarf star located 26 light-years away in the Virgo constellation. Although it has three times the mass of Earth, it is less than a third the size of our planet. GJ 486 b takes less than 1.5 Earth days to orbit its star and is probably tidally locked to the red dwarf, meaning it perpetually shows the same face to its star.
Red dwarfs like the parent star of GJ 486 b are the most common form of stars in the cosmos, meaning that statistically speaking, rocky exoplanets are most likely to be found orbiting such a stellar object. Red dwarf stars are also cooler than other types of stars, meaning that a planet must orbit them tightly to remain warm enough to host liquid water, a vital element needed for life. But, red dwarfs also emit violent and powerful ultraviolet and X-ray radiation when they are young that would blast away the atmospheres of planets that are too close, potentially making those exoplanets very inhospitable to life.
That means astronomers are currently keen to discover if a rocky planet in such a harsh environment could manage to both form an atmosphere and then hang on to it long enough for life to take hold, a process that took around a billion years on Earth. [...] Even though GJ 486 b's host star is cooler than the sun, water vapor could still concentrate in starspots. If that is the case, this could create a signal that mimics a planetary atmosphere. If there is an atmosphere around GJ 486 b, then radiation from its red dwarf parent star will constantly erode it, meaning it has to be replenished by steam from the exoplanet's interior ejected by volcanic activity. The research appears in a paper on arXiv while it awaits publication in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. You can read more about it via NASA.
Red dwarfs like the parent star of GJ 486 b are the most common form of stars in the cosmos, meaning that statistically speaking, rocky exoplanets are most likely to be found orbiting such a stellar object. Red dwarf stars are also cooler than other types of stars, meaning that a planet must orbit them tightly to remain warm enough to host liquid water, a vital element needed for life. But, red dwarfs also emit violent and powerful ultraviolet and X-ray radiation when they are young that would blast away the atmospheres of planets that are too close, potentially making those exoplanets very inhospitable to life.
That means astronomers are currently keen to discover if a rocky planet in such a harsh environment could manage to both form an atmosphere and then hang on to it long enough for life to take hold, a process that took around a billion years on Earth. [...] Even though GJ 486 b's host star is cooler than the sun, water vapor could still concentrate in starspots. If that is the case, this could create a signal that mimics a planetary atmosphere. If there is an atmosphere around GJ 486 b, then radiation from its red dwarf parent star will constantly erode it, meaning it has to be replenished by steam from the exoplanet's interior ejected by volcanic activity. The research appears in a paper on arXiv while it awaits publication in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. You can read more about it via NASA.
Re:Finally some exciting science (Score:5, Funny)
And I know it's a woke world out there, but can we maybe not name it after a transvestite?
No problem, we'll name it after fine upstanding citizen J. Edgar Hoover
Re:Finally some exciting science (Score:4, Funny)
And I know it's a woke world out there, but can we maybe not name it after a transvestite?
The Frank-n-furter Rocky Horror Telescope it is! It'll blow your mind....and stuff.
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I shiver with antici...
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pation!
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Webb was never sold as an alien life detector. It was sold as a sharper image telescope.
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That's good. I was afraid they'd go with the Neiman Marcus model instead, or (god forbid) the Abercromie & Fitch one. You know - the one that would only focus on things it deems worth looking it.
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Webb was sold as the alien life detector.
Er what? When? JWST was sold as an IR telescope with capabilities beyond Hubble. Hubble has some limited IR capability as do other telescopes but to detect some things, there was a need for a telescope that operated near the temperature of space (3K) and away from heat sources (the sun, the Earth). Also Hubble has had its last repair mission almost 15 years ago and will need to be replaced eventually when it stops working.
Due to its spectrographs, JWST can detect elements and chemical compounds which indi
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... which is why the whole 5-layer sun-shield was developed. And I assume a set of software to track "position of sun shield" and "position of telescope mirror and secondary" to always keep the second in the shadow of the first.
But that's a technology that has been developed. So a second deployment would be relatively cheaper. (Assuming that JWST went through multiple designs previously, so the code and systems for working out orientation, movement etc has been thr
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You might be able to fit something similar in performance to JWST onto starship that didn't have segmented mirrors. You might be able to fit something similar in performance to JWST onto starship that didn't have segmented mirrors
Segmented mirrors is cheaper to build than a single mirror. Manufacturing a single large mirror costs way more as spinning a single piece of glass to be more than 6 m wide and have a roughness of 20nm is very difficult. Handling the mirror increases the logistical costs as Hubble's 2.4m mirror weighed 818kg whereas each of the 18 JWST mirrors weighs 20kg. Moving that mirror required very sensitive transportation.
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> Now that capability may have been oversold but it is not the main reason for JWST.
Yes.
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Density!! (Score:3)
"Although it has three times the mass of Earth, it is less than a third the size of our planet."
Wtf?? Assuming a third the size means a 3rd the radius then it has 3 times the mass in 1/28th the volume which means its 84 times denser! There is no known substance of that density that can exist other than the cores of stars or white dwarf material so WTF is it? It certainly isn't a "rocky" planet!
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Re:Density!! (Score:4, Informative)
Unless it was written by a hallucinating AI.
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A planet 1.3 x The earth's radius would have a mass of 2.2 x Earth's mass. At 2.8, the density is only 1.2x that of the earth. Given the low precision of all the numbers, I won't be surprised if it was actually just the same density as Earth.
Hmm. (Score:1)
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By coincidence, that's pretty close to 1.0 AU (the average distance from Sun to Earth). Probably just coincidence though.
However, the given (TFS) orbital period of the planet of 1.5 days would require a "star" mass of (mental calculation from Kepler's laws) about 200 solar masses. Which would be a bright star. Certainly a candidate for the largest star in the Milky Way (caveats : known to this date ; not enveloped in