Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea9708

151 56 7 days ago

WillAdams2• 7 days ago

Is it wrong that I was hoping for something along the lines of:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-would-we-know...

except where they are noting how helium is being allowed to escape and not being captured as was previously done by the now shut down U.S. National Helium Reserve.

burgerone• 6 days ago

Am I missing something or does that article only contain the back story and nothing actually noteworthy?

WillAdams2• 6 days ago

It contains the story of how Carl Sagan convinced the Voyager crew to turn its sensors towards earth so as to see if life could be detected using its quite minimal sensor suite --- I thought it had a link to the original published paper.

The fate of the Strategic Helium Reserve is a different issue and there are many articles and op. ed. pieces on it --- the Wikipedia article should cover this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve

ck24• 7 days ago

wow 50 light years is indeed "nearby" in relative terms

nearly 6x the size of earth though, good luck trying to launch a probe off that surface

NASA has a neat "exoplanet catalog" which is about to leap in size next few years with new telescopes and techniques

* https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/lhs-1140-b/

pixl97• 7 days ago

6x time size (diameter?) or 6 times the mass. Evidently the Earth used to be much larger in size but not mass because of large amounts of trapped hydrogen/helium. It's since leaked from the crust and been blown off into space.

ck24• 7 days ago

the catalog says 6.38x mass in one place and 5.6x mass in another

they must be able to calculate mass from orbital physics?

so you'd need a rocket 6x the size of SaturnV or whatever they are using for Artemis to escape it and most of that rocket is to lift the weight of the fuel for said rocket so it might be physically impossible to build such a creature at current level of tech

(might be yet another angle to "why no ETs" unless they are WAY more advanced)

Tagbert• 6 days ago

Do you have any reference for that? I have a hard time seeing how that would be true once the components were coalesced but maybe before that.

westurner6• 7 days ago

There is a market shortage of helium but shouldn't be:

There's also helium in methane, but unfortunately few places crack out the helium from natural gas.

TIL Helium kills Kudzu and powers fusion power plants.

mapsedge2• 7 days ago

Helium kills Kudzu

That right there is reason enough to try to synthesize it in massive quantities.

idiotsecant• 7 days ago

When you're done with it can I borrow your particle collider capable of mass synthesis of helium

ColdStream• 7 days ago

It is the four layers of resources, each one is smaller than the next.

1. What is the total theoretical resource?

2. How much of it do we actually now the location of

3. How much is technically recoverable?

4. And most importantly, how much is economically viable?

The last one is really the crux of the problem nowadays, there is a lot of helium but most of it just isn't in a high enough quantity to make the investment to built processing for it. Thus most of it just float off into space.

There will come a point when the price hits high enough to justify the cost but that also means higher costs to the end user.

tw043• 7 days ago

4. And most importantly, how much is economically viable?

But literally the least important factor beyond “should we have started yesterday”. The amount of waste humanity has perpetuated in just the last 100 years because something wasn’t “economically viable” this fiscal quarter makes my head hurt.

onion2k• 7 days ago

There will come a point when the price hits high enough to justify the cost but that also means higher costs to the end user.

This makes me wonder if it'd be worthwhile starting a company to capture it now, and just stockpile it until it's rare enough to be able to use my stockpile to control the price. The DeBeers diamonds playbook applied to helium, or maybe the Peter Thiel build-a-monopoly-to-win approach.

mmooss• 7 days ago

The OP is about helium on an exoplanet. That's unlikely to impact helium supplies on Earth.

teeray• 7 days ago

Rocky, you say question?

King-Aaron• 7 days ago

Amaze amaze amaze

js8• 6 days ago

Turns out aliens love talking funny and safe balloons too.

mapsedge2• 7 days ago

Only 880,000 years at our current average speed. Mind blowing, that.

goalieca2• 7 days ago

That’s still a few times older than our species.

Retric2• 7 days ago

Species is a rather arbitrary line here. Humans split from Neanderthal ~500k-800k years ago but could still interbreed 40k years ago. We’re likely more closely related to our common ancestors at that point of divergence than Neanderthal suggesting given the opportunity modern humans could interbreed with our ancestors ~500k-1m years ago.

Of course that’s just genetic compatibility, there’s plenty of other ways to define species.

trhway3• 7 days ago

NASA and Starlink have already been using ion drives with 10x ISP of chemical rocket engines. Using such drives a 3 stage with existing nuclear reactors as energy source can get to 150-200 km/s.

While it haven't been built yet, nothing seems to prevent ion drive even with 100x ISP of chemical rocket. That means we can get 1000-2000 km/s (acceleration with existing reactors would take about 100 years) and get to the closest star in 1000 years.

deepsun• 6 days ago

The problem is radiation. Empty space is not really empty, there are stray atoms floating around. Very scattered, but at a high impact momentum penetrate the ship ionizing anything in their way, and making the ship itself radioactive.

Not even talking about stray high-energy particles from distant supernovas and magnetars -- those irradiate ship regardless of its speed.

Aardwolf• 6 days ago

It would be neat if it were a steampunk-style civilization traveling around their atmosphere in helium airships. But probably just helium escaping from rocks...

doublerabbit• 6 days ago

The transport elevator wouldn't be located in a light house now it?

Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone

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