Newly Discovered Planet: Hot, Muggy And (May Be) Livable

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/09/12/140407389/newly-discovered-planet-hot-muggy-and-maybe-liveable

by sytelus • 15 years ago

65 35 15 years ago

dongsheng• 15 years ago

Does that mean it's possible to have living creatures on that planet? Looks like a prefect environment to grow bacteria.

hartror3• 15 years ago

Yes, IF there is water on the planet. So far we're not sure how Earth came to have so much water and it is thought that our water was a relatively recent addition in our planetary formation. The method HARPS uses, which discovered this planet among 50 others announced today, is spectrography on the host star to detect the wiggle as the planet orbits.

This method doesn't give us the density or composition of the planets, which are the other two values of primary concern in evaluating it for whether it could host life or not.

As always Bad Astronomy provides a no BS rundown of this all this news: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/12/50...

guelo• 15 years ago

That would be life as we know it on earth, there could be life that uses different chemistry. But really the life questions seem unanswerable since all we can detect is the wobble of these distant stars.

bfe• 15 years ago

These discoveries are so tantalizing, yet so frustratingly data-poor. We know now that the galaxy around us is teeming with planets, with untold new configurations and environments we can't imagine waiting to be discovered. We need bigger telescopes.

lucaspiller• 15 years ago

Am I right in assuming that the stated temperatures are just estimates based on proximity to the star? The Bad Astronomy article suggests this, but doesn't explicitly state this.

rquirk• 15 years ago

Also for people interested in planet detection there was a Google Tech Talk posted not too long ago about the methods they use. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av67Ab0tF-8

jodoherty• 15 years ago

Perhaps the water on earth became trapped as part of a migrating space biosphere, just one of many oceans floating around in space, insulated by the frozen ice coating the outside and given energy by small collisions with other matter until it collides with a solid body and forms a planet like ours.

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

Plenty of speculation in that article too. A little more science is all.

Tichy2• 15 years ago

Hm, perhaps the right bacteria could convert the whole planet into cheese :-/ ponders startup idea...

yuvadam• 15 years ago

"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

-- Arthur C. Clarke

adriand• 15 years ago

Before I die, I would like humans to find evidence of an alien civilization. At the same time, as I gaze at my peaceful backyard, I can't help but wonder what the consequences might be, and whether I really want my ordinary life disrupted by something none of us can predict.

Tichy2• 15 years ago

If human history is any indicator, I think it would probably not go down well. I think most of the time newly found civilizations were being obliterated by their discoverers.

klodolph• 15 years ago

> "Temperatures there may range from 85 to 120 degrees with plenty of humidity," the AP adds.

Well, that's two different stories entirely, depending on whether those are degrees Fahrenheit or degrees Centigrade. Before I take my vacation there, I would like to know whether the ambient temperature is high enough to denature my proteins.

aquateen• 15 years ago

Is it really that ambiguous given the submission title?

hugh34• 15 years ago

I'd say it's still ambiguous. Liveable for us or liveable for something?

Even on Earth we have hyperthermophiles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophile) which can tolerate temperatures of up to 122 celsius.

And before anyone says "water boils at 100C", that's only at Earth-ambient atmospheric pressure.

piv0t• 15 years ago

It doesn't matter; either is great. 85-120 degrees Farenheit would be like it is today, while 85-120 degrees Celsius would be how earth was like during the age of the dinosaurs. Either temperature is ideal for life (as we know it).

splat• 15 years ago

> 85-120 degrees Celsius would be how earth was like during the age of the dinosaurs.

Are you sure about that? I know that some extremophiles can survive temperatures in excess of 100 degrees C, but they're all single-celled creatures. I don't think complicated organisms can survive temperatures at which water boils.

EDIT: The Earth was anywhere from 2 -- 8 degrees C warmer when the dinosaurs were around than it is today. But that's still very far from boiling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.png

nhebb2• 15 years ago

It wouldn't be muggy (humid) unless there is water. Shouldn't npr's title be "Hot And (May Be) Muggy, Livable".

count• 15 years ago

The article says there is plenty of humidity:

"Temperatures there may range from 85 to 120 degrees with plenty of humidity"

nhebb2• 15 years ago

Humidity means water vapor. You can't have water vapor without water. The article says "water may be present". QED.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

Investigation and exploration is directly related to imagination and emotion. Because of the great political impact involved, we need to have plans in place to directly image these planets.

Show people a picture of another Earth and that will drive a lot of scientific research. When Columbus returned from the New World, the idea that there was another world out there had just as big (or bigger) impact for the first few decades as people actually going there.

I'm with Hawking on this. Earth is getting crowded, stale, stagnant, and in some ways unstable. We need a very clear vision that there is somewhere else to go should we put forth the effort.

hugh34• 15 years ago

Investigation and exploration is directly related to imagination and emotion. Because of the great political impact involved, we need to have plans in place to directly image these planets.

Plausible technology might, in our lifetimes, be able to resolve this planet as a dot. But you'll never get more than that.

What is interesting is that it's easier to measure the composition of its atmosphere than to resolve it as a dot. Find me a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere and it starts looking very likely that we might have life there.

On your other point, though, I don't think there's much point in having a political will to send people to another star. We're still (at the very least) hundreds of years away from the point where we can even start to think sensibly about how we might want to do it. It's like Columbus wanting to go to the moon.

bh42222• 15 years ago

Investigation and exploration is directly related to imagination and emotion.

Let me try and rephrase that: Funding is directly related to politics, which to a large degree is emotion.

Because of the great political impact involved, we need to have plans in place to directly image these planets.

I would guesstimate that paying a top political consultant (maybe Carl Rowe himself) to sell more science funding is approximately One Thousand times cheaper and easier than imaging a plant over 30 light years away.

So the strategy I would propose is a lobby group, which would lobby politicians of both parties at all levels of government, to get more science funding.

And if we can't get enough people together to agree and fund this group, then we as a people do not deserve more discovery and exploration.

scott_s• 15 years ago

Bringing this out again: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456

But, even if we magically had the ability to colonize another planet, that wouldn't solve any problems. Did colonization of North American significantly reduce the population of Europe? Not at all. The main benefit to Europe was another trading partner who had different kinds of goods. Which was beneficial to Europe, but it did not solve the kinds of problems people seem to think colonizing another planet will solve.

signa11• 15 years ago

fredrick-pohl's novel 'jem' investigates this theme pretty nicely. highly recommended if you have not read it already.

renegadedev• 15 years ago

Hot, muggy, may be liveable. Are we talking about Florida? (disclaimer: I maybe live there)

mattmanser• 15 years ago

We're not all that confident about where there's water in our own solar system. We seem to discover 'possible' water on the moon or Mars every week. And yet we know this planet is warm and watery? Oh, did you not notice the constant use of the word 'may'.

So I call Utter Bollocks.

This is the worst type of science. It's like the old archaeologists, 'China had Bronze making, therefore everyone got it from them'. They were wrong and we had to wait till science developed carbon dating to prove them wrong.

It's pure speculation dressed up as science. A wild guess based on our own solar system. A population of 1 does not a survey make.

And the artist's impression at the top really makes me cringe. Who is giving these plonkers money to spend on artist impressions?

Unfortunately this is all a direct consequence of the way scientific funding works. But as someone who has a scientific mind it makes me die a little inside when I see this kind of thing.

hugh34• 15 years ago

I haven't been able to find any original sources yet (and I'm not about to watch that podcast) but I'm fairly sure that what they have found is a planet in the habitable zone. And that's pretty darn neat in itself. (What was really missing was information about its size and density.)

As for the bits about it being "muggy", I can only assume that this is something the journalists, looking for an angle, tricked the scientists into saying. We can't say anything definitive about chemical composition of these planets at this stage, we can only infer things from their temperature and density.

crxpandion• 15 years ago

The first line says it all: "That's how The Associated Press describes the way scientists are describing..." That's a lot of description without much proof.

Newly Discovered Planet: Hot, Muggy And (May Be) Livable

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