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For everyone imagining an industrial revolution 700 light years away - unfortunately WASP-39b isn't well suited: "WASP-39 b is a hot, puffy gas-giant planet wi

For everyone imagining an industrial revolution 700 light years away - unfortunately WASP-39b isn't well suited: "WASP-39 b is a hot, puffy gas-giant planet with a mass 0.28 times Jupiter (0.94 times Saturn) and a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter, orbiting just 0.0486 astronomical units (4,500,000 miles) from its star"

deleted 4y ago
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jcims 4y ago
It's diameter is ~112k miles, or roughly 2% of the distance to its star. It's hard to imagine the amount of chaos in that atmosphere. I would think all of the churn from the gravitational gradient would end up effectively tidally locking it?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  That could work both for and against life.
  - jcims 4y ago
    Totally agree. Particularly if it becomes tidally locked and you end up with a ring-shaped habitable zone that's out of the direct heating/radiation of the sun and fed by convective currents coming from the cold side.
anonporridge 4y ago
Why would the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere ever be used to assume an industrial revolution in any scenario? The atmosphere of both Mars and Venus are 95% CO2. Earth had plenty of CO2 before humans even existed. In fact, there were periods hundreds of millions of years ago where Earth had drastically more CO2 (up to 9000ppm vs 420ppm today) than it does today.
- addaon 4y ago
  "Assume" is a strong word, but if we observed an exoplanet with free oxygen in the atmosphere and stable levels of bioindicators (methane etc) for a period, and then saw CO2 spike from nearly zero to significantly higher levels... well, it's evidence of something.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    Sure, but that's not related to this study. Maybe that's something we'll detect over the course of hundreds of years of observing, but the shear scale of the time of the universe makes the chances that some other alien species just happens to be going through an industrial revolution while we're around to observe it, are so astronomically small as to barely be worth considering. In your example, an intelligent species in an industrial revolution would probably be at the bottom of the list of likely explanations, simply because of how statistically unlikely it appears to be.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jcims 4y ago

It's diameter is ~112k miles, or roughly 2% of the distance to its star. It's hard to imagine the amount of chaos in that atmosphere. I would think all of the churn from the gravitational gradient would end up effectively tidally locking it?

jacquesm 4y ago
That could work both for and against life.
- jcims 4y ago
  Totally agree. Particularly if it becomes tidally locked and you end up with a ring-shaped habitable zone that's out of the direct heating/radiation of the sun and fed by convective currents coming from the cold side.

anonporridge 4y ago

Why would the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere ever be used to assume an industrial revolution in any scenario? The atmosphere of both Mars and Venus are 95% CO2. Earth had plenty of CO2 before humans even existed. In fact, there were periods hundreds of millions of years ago where Earth had drastically more CO2 (up to 9000ppm vs 420ppm today) than it does today.

addaon 4y ago
"Assume" is a strong word, but if we observed an exoplanet with free oxygen in the atmosphere and stable levels of bioindicators (methane etc) for a period, and then saw CO2 spike from nearly zero to significantly higher levels... well, it's evidence of something.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  Sure, but that's not related to this study. Maybe that's something we'll detect over the course of hundreds of years of observing, but the shear scale of the time of the universe makes the chances that some other alien species just happens to be going through an industrial revolution while we're around to observe it, are so astronomically small as to barely be worth considering. In your example, an intelligent species in an industrial revolution would probably be at the bottom of the list of likely explanations, simply because of how statistically unlikely it appears to be.