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Astronomers discover super-Earth around Barnard's star
- commonsense1234 8y agoits only a matter of time we find other living organisms. The odds are staked so high against not finding any.
- quickthrower2 8y agoHow do you figure? The distances are tremendous, and it seems like we ate guessing at what the climate is like on the nearest exoplanets. How would we spot life? Wed need probes to travel near the speed of light to have any chance. That's a long way off.
- restalis 8y agoI think the comment was made in relation to star's age, as it is one of the oldest in our galaxy. If life requires time to develop, this planet gave it a good shot at that. Also, the planet's climate may have been more favorable to life in the star's heyday, which means that even if nothing living will be around when we'll get there, that still makes it a very promising archeological place.
- ilove_banh_mi 8y agoWe should send palaeontologists, not archaeologists.
- aphextron 8y agoWe have spectroscopy. Complex biological molecules can be identified through spectrographic analysis of starlight passing through the exoplanet’s atmosphere. JWST is equipped with a near infrared spectrograph to do exactly this.
- overcast 8y agoTraveling near the speed of light or at it will never happen. Infinite energy / mass problem. Plus everyone back at earth will have aged equivalent to the number of light years away, while it may feel only like a couple weeks on the ship. Unless we develop some type of wormhole technology, we're pretty much confined to our immediate system for any realistic exploration and communications.
- restalis 8y agoLet's say we'd eventually find those other living organisms. What then? (BTW, the odds of that life to be a sentient one are much lower.)
- carry_bit 8y agoStart worrying that a great filter might be in our future rather than our past.
- labster 8y agoI, for one, plan on eating them. (Not the sentient ones)
- dwaltrip 8y agoStart investing more heavily in becoming a space-faring civilization? Also, try to learn about these other life forms.
- restalis 8y agoI argue that space-faring civilization goal should be independent of alien encountering.
- dwaltrip 8y agoI agree. But I imagine it would help some people get more excited about it.
- marcosdumay 8y agoIf the Great Filter is ahead of us, becoming a space-faring civilization sooner increases the odds of surviving it. (And that's the main argument for the Great Filter being behind us, it is hard to imagine that we are fighting against astronomical odds to become space-faring.)
- XorNot 8y agoThe argument the great filter is ahead of us though is based on the observation that even with slower then light spacetravel, over the timeframes of the existing universe a species could still colonize the entire Milky Way in something like a 100,000 years with von Neumann probes (of which organic life would be a good basis for building one). There should be life everywhere it's possible by technological panspermia - but we don't seem to observe that. What stops elder civilizations from doing this, is the big mystery. Unless of course, as a poster above notes, if we fire up the JWST and discover chlorophyll-fringes in the spectra of just about every rocky planet we can see. That'd imply a lot.
- aphextron 8y agoMy recurring dream for the JWST is that we switch it on and get immediately overwhelmed with indirect spectroscopic evidence of biology within multiple exoplanets, ushering in a whole new era of science. Watching that launch will be the most heartstopping moment of my life.
- gorn 8y agoI dream to be there during the launch as well. Could you enlighten me on how JWST could find the evidence of life?
- aphextron 8y ago>Could you enlighten me on how JWST could find the evidence of life? Near Infrared Spectroscopy [0]. JWST will be the first instrument in space capable of performing NIR spectroscopy, which will be used to analyze the starlight shining through exoplanets' atmospheres for evidence of biological molecules. [0] https://dms.cosmos.esa.int/COSMOS/doc_fetch.php?id=3372219 https://dms.cosmos.esa.int/COSMOS/doc_fetch.php?id=3372219
- ryanmercer 8y agoMy recurring dream for the JWST is that it actually ever launches. :( >Watching that launch will be the most heartstopping moment of my life. You got that right. When Elon launched the car I was like "eh this will be just like any other launch" then as the launch started I was perched on the edge of my chair shouting "CLIMB CLIMB CLIMB BABY CLIMB" at my phone. JWST will be one of the most nerve-racking moments of my life if I watch the launch due to it's many delays.
- bgirard 8y agoI can see why people would focus on the risk of a flashy explosion, but I think the real risk will be with the deployment process and having gotten everything right with JWST. ESA launches are very reliably, JWST is a one time design.
- tedsanders 8y agoCitation needed? If the odds of life spontaneously starting and then surviving are really low, then there really may be no other life in our galaxy (<1 trillion stars) or even the observable universe (<1 trillion trillion stars).
- eloff 8y agoCitation needed? We have a sample size of just one (our solar system). But we already know that life on Earth began very soon after it cooled enough to have liquid water - that gives us some confidence that it can't be that hard for life to start. We know life's been around on Earth for ~4 billion years, surviving multiple insane climate swings from subtropical vegetation and species living in the Arctic to the entire planet freezing over, multiple massive impacts from space, insane volcanism that people today just would not even recognize as volcanism. Hopefully that means life's somewhat durable.
- cmrdporcupine 8y agoIf what you mean by 'life' is bacterium, sure. That's all that was here for 3 billion years. I don't think we'd find that very exciting. Eukaryotes are basically a fluke. The symbiosis event that created Eukaryotes from a random combination of Archaea and Bacteria appears to have happened only _once_ in the entire history of the earth. It's arrogant to assume that life as we know it is both inevitable and inevitably complex in a manner similar to our complexity. A practically infinite universe means potentially infinite diversity, including phenomenon that may not recognize as life at all to us, but should be equally interesting.
- Balgair 8y ago> The symbiosis event that created Eukaryotes from a random combination of Archaea and Bacteria appears to have happened only _once_ in the entire history of the earth. That story is very much in flux still. We're not very certain on how that occurred, let alone how many times over those billions of years.It's linked to the Great Oxygenation Event, likely, but we're still in the very early stages of understanding that era. > A practically infinite universe means potentially infinite diversity, including phenomenon that may not recognize as life at all to us, but should be equally interesting. As is usual in science, it depends. If you are dealing with matter like us, then there are only a few universal solvents (5? I can't find the citation). In those solvents, there are a countable amount of ways that the chemistry will allow for 'life' to 'evolve'. The ways that the life can then evolve are really complicated and diverse, but there does seem to be a evolution/development trade-off, where you have to go through developmental 'keyholes' to get to a new level of complexity. Is that infinite? I've no idea, but it feels like a different ordinal of infinity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_evolutionary_history_of_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_evolutionary_h...
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- russdill 8y agoFinding living organisms would in general be bad news, but it depends on the type of life. It would tell us about why we don't see a universe filled with intelligent life. It would increase the probability though that the great filter is ahead of us, especially if the life is multi-cellular.
- millstone 8y agoNon-living organisms would be even more interesting!
- dvh 8y agoBarnard's star is a flare star so the surface probably gets randomly fried.
- chrispeel 8y agoBecause of its age, Barnard's star has less flare activity [1]. Also, from the Nature article [2] we read "Barnard’s star is also among the least magnetically active red dwarfs known..." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0677-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0677-y
- Topgamer7 8y agoIt would only take ~50 years to reach Barnard's star with a theoretical fusion engine according to a research study named Project Daedalus. Someone shoot a probe at the planet and maybe our kids can see some cool imagery!
- m_mueller 8y agoYou could also do it with existing nuclear fission technology (Project Orion). 3% speed of light seems to be quite feasible with that. If there‘d be no other way to save humanity, a generation ship with that technology would probably be built today.
- Robotbeat 8y agoProject Orion, the one that can hypothetically do 3% light speed, is definitely fusion as well. And the very high Isp versions of it are incredibly challenging to build (as you need like a magnetic shield to deflect the nuclear plasma ball). The more modest Isp versions are more realistic, but won't get you there.
- m_mueller 8y agoI see, but still, at least the energy source itself would be proven technology in the form of H-bombs right? As for the shielding, do you mean the pusher plate or the nuclear shape charge in the bombs themselves? Does going from fission to fission+fusion bomb make such a big difference that couldn’t be overcome just with more/stronger material and/or ablative shields?
- rbanffy 8y agoWith 100 tons of propellant and the best imaginable VASIMR engine we could send a 10 ton payload (mostly nuclear reactor) there in... 2600 years. We need better engines. A Daedalus-class fusion drive would be a great option, but first we'd need to develop it.
- taf2 8y ago
- nategri 8y ago"Super-Earths" are among the most numerous planet type in the galaxy. The term just means they mass somewhere between 1 and 10 Earths, and says literally nothing else about the planet. Why is this interesting news?
- pmiller2 8y agoBecause it's right in our backyard? At about 6 light years, this star and its planet(s) are the second closest extrasolar star system to Earth, after Alpha Centauri.
- rbanffy 8y agoAnd since it rotates around a relatively dim star, imaging it directly is much easier than a planet much further away. Also, super earths are more common only because we can find them with the tools we have. By looking at our own backyard, I can tell you round rocks smaller than Earth are much more numerous than any other roughly spherical thing orbiting the Sun.
- mgleason_3 8y agoAnd likely lifeless without liquid water, hmmm...
- Robotbeat 8y ago*on the surface. It's beyond the frost line, so probably has deep icy oceans.
- Roboprog 8y agoEuropa experiences tides from Jupiter This planet may or may not have a companion to keep it pliable below its crust other than a few volcanic vents
- Robotbeat 8y agoYou do not need tidal heating to have a liquid ocean. A thick enough crust will insulate the primordial and decay heat below.
- HillaryBriss 8y agoso, are we just-ok-Earth now?
- cjhanks 8y agoEch, down-voted for humor. Sometimes I wonder if the HN crowd has a minority contingency of hunchbacks licking salt and sucking on dewy moss for sustenance.
- HillaryBriss 8y agoyeah. :-) once in a while my attempts at humor somehow dodge down voting, but not this time. tough crowd. tough crowd.
- hndamien 8y agoIt's very tough out there on the HN comedy circuit. Exhibit A - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633615
- chc 8y agoI love chocolate sorbet, but I don't want chocolate sorbet on my pants. I feel the same way about empty jokes in discussion threads. If you are contributing to the conversation, your joke will probably get upvoted for the insight it brings. If your joke doesn't contribute to the conversation (e.g. the joke above was just a pun), it will rightly get downvoted because that's what you're supposed to do with comments that don't contribute to the conversation. There are lots of other places on the Internet we can go for jokes — most forums, actually — so I think it's OK for some places to try to push for a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
- nur0n 8y agoI think the lack of information (conversely, the increase in noise) is what is being downvoted. It is possible, although much more difficult, to be both funny and informative. That being said, it cracks me up when people get downvoted so heavily for jokes!
- autocorr 8y agoOne of the most exciting things about this discovery is that because Barnard's star is so close, the planet should have a maximum angular separation of 0.22 arcseconds. Directly imaging the planet in reflected light from the star [1] will be no problem for next generation telescopes in terms of resolution and sensitivity -- telescopes like the 30 meter class facilities being built now or a hypothetical ~10 meter space telescope called "LUVOIR". Current cutting edge instruments like the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) can already get to about 0.2 arcsec resolution, but it operates in the infrared and can only detect down to about a Jupiter-mass depending on how hot the planet is. The really exciting thing about imaging a planet in reflected light is that you can study the composition of the atmosphere in much greater detail than current methods [2]. This is likely the first system that astronomer's will target when they seek to make direct observations of a rocky planet's atmosphere outside of our Solar System. [1] Ss opposed to the thermal infrared, which works best for young planets which have substantial residual heat from their formation. [2] Such as when an exoplanet transits in front of it's host star, the atmosphere will absorb some light. However it appears this technique is only sensitive to the very thin upper parts of the atmosphere, and we don't learn much about the rest.
- EthanHeilman 8y agoHow many years is such a discovery away?
- dmurray 8y agoThe Extremely Large Telescope in Chile, which fits the "30 meter class" description, is scheduled to be operational in 2024.
- mturmon 8y agoLuvoir is expected to launch in the mid-2030s. It is one of at least two exoplanet detection-and-characterization missions that is under study by NASA.
- privong 8y ago> Luvoir is expected to launch in the mid-2030s For others who are not familiar with the NASA studies, "expected" is probably too strong a word and "proposed" is probably more accurate. LUVOIR is one of four flagship mission concepts which NASA has provided with seed money. They will all be evaluated during the coming 2020 Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The recommendations from that survey will then be used as guidance for NASA. So if the Decadal Survey ranks LUVOIR as a top priority (the missions are all so large that it is unlikely more than one would be funded), and if they meet their proposed timeline, then it would launch in the mid-2030s. So it's not yet a given that LUVOIR will happen (another mission could be more highly ranked), and the timeline should be taken with a grain of salt.
- JauntTrooper 8y agoI'd love to see a simple, 2D map of our corner of the galaxy now that we've discovered so many planets. Something like the closest 25-50 stars, color coded by type of star and planets (cool/hot/gassy).
- fhars 8y agoHere is a slightly older overview of our neighbourhood (the stars haven‘t moved much since then, but you‘d have to add the more recent planet information): https://zompist.com/nearstars.html https://zompist.com/nearstars.html
- JauntTrooper 8y agoNeat, thanks for the link! What I'm really thinking though, is a simpler looking map. Like a political map of the world, the kinds you had hanging up in your 2nd grade classroom. I'm surprised no one has made one yet of our starry neighborhood. I'd make one, but I unfortunately cannot draw or do any graphic design to save my life.
- nimish 8y agoIf Jack Williamson was correct then we probably shouldn't probe deeper, lest the Medusae find us... Would be interesting to see if it could bear life despite being frozen.
- saiya-jin 8y agoWell tardigrades wouldn't mind that much, but it would be hard to evolve to that point. The point is, evolution seems to find a way no matter how harsh the environment is, as long as the life already started
- Tepix 8y agoAre there any concepts for an engine that consists of a "classic" particle accelerator to achieve a high ISP?
- Aic1kuir 8y agoThat's what most electromagnetic thrusters do.
- ataturk 8y agoI'm tired of these exoplanet articles that take far too much license with the "artist's rendering." They found an exoplanet they don't know shit about it, but some artist gets paid (ostensibly) to create some cool looking video game planet picture to draw in the eyeballs. I want as much as anyone to know there is life someplace besides this awful mess we have here as it might convince humans to get their act together. But I want the truth of it, not bullshit.