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James Webb Space Telescope detects water vapor around alien planet
- dadjoker 4y agoThe more discoveries like this are made, the stronger the anthropic principle becomes.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoAnd the likelihood we're going to bite it "soon" (as in the geological/universal time scale sense)
- meepmorp 4y agoWe're actively making the only habitable world we know of in the universe harder for us to live on. Maybe "soon" on shorter time scales.
- ianai 4y agoThey’re unsure whether it’s from the planet or the star. Can’t they just check whether it’s from an ion of water or the stable molecule? (Which IIRC is a question of the spectra observed.) I remember from undergrad the chemistry in stars would often have pretty extreme ionizations like OH^-12. If it’s a high ionization and still on the planet that seems unlikely to be habitable as we know it (or something fleeting from a lightning strike).
- wcoenen 4y ago> If it’s a high ionization and still on the planet that seems unlikely to be habitable as we know it "habitable as we know it" is already ruled out by the 430 degree Celsius surface temperature of the planet that was mentioned in the article.
- ianai 4y agoCouldn’t find that. Then sounds like it’s an ion and explains the ambiguity.
- jobs_throwaway 4y agoI wonder if that's uniform. Say around the poles, could there be more temperate spots?
- jkubicek 4y agoThe planet is tidally locked to the star, so absent an atmosphere, the side of the planet facing away from the star will be freezing. If there is an atmosphere then the opposite side of the planet may be a bit more mild?
- ianai 4y agoActually if it’s tidally locked a lot of complications could be involved. If the backside of it managed to be hot it’d probably imply an atmosphere or young planet (guessing) or maybe a recent flip (see link). All just my naive thoughts. https://youtu.be/SJWKExj7-IA https://youtu.be/SJWKExj7-IA Sure would be something if such planets could have atmospheres. That’d seem to imply a temperature gradient from the hot to cold side and would provide a mechanism for heat transfer.
- ericmay 4y agoSorry I know this is low effort but "Can’t they just check" in the context of the James Webb Space Telescope and NASA operating it did make me chuckle. I'm pretty sure they checked :)
- foobarian 4y agoI interpret this more charitably by replacing "can't they just check" with "I wonder why this couldn't be answered by checking"
- botanical 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
- ianai 4y agoThanks. Next time I’ll remember to not comment.
- Cymrukicks 4y agoWhy it gave me a chuckle too? Not everyone is an expert on everything here.
- ianai 4y agoThis isn’t Reddit.
- andrewflnr 4y agoWhich is exactly why comments like "Next time I’ll remember to not comment" are out of place.
- lumb63 4y agoTrust the experts. Never question anything.
- downvotetruth 4y ago> GJ 486 b takes less than 1.5 Earth days to orbit its star and is probably tidally locked Are there any discovered planets where a year is confirmed to be a day?
- sdflhasjd 4y agoThat surely can't be correct? An orbit of literally 36 hours would mean it would be going much too fast
- shric 4y agoNot when it's 0.01734 AU from its star, and therefore 1.7% of the distance compared to the earth to its star.
- sdflhasjd 4y agoI just found that on the NASA site, it really is just a tiny orbit. I got the impression the planet was in a habitable zone from the article.
- chmod775 4y agoThe article mentions that its surface temperature is around 430 degrees Celsius. It's that "low" because its star also radiates way less energy than our sun. But still, "habitable zone" means liquid water, which you might not find there given the pressures/temperatures involved. Maybe sufficiently cold spots could exist in the areas facing away from its star. So could you say it's in the habitable zone? Depends on your understanding of the term.
- svachalek 4y agoI think it's fair to say that we as a species have no idea what is a habitable zone. We're extrapolating from a set of 1, and even in looking for liquid water you're better off looking at moons far from our Sun than on Mars which is in our habitable zone.
- jl2718 4y agoYou mean like Venus? Why is this interesting? Is it because of the water, or because of the technical capabilities of the instrument?
- phailhaus 4y agoLiterally the subheading: "If confirmed, the presence of an atmosphere would be a breakthrough for exoplanet research."
- ramraj07 4y agoI mean yes, but also meh. They’re making the progress they need to but purely deducing from logic why will it be surprising that a good fraction of exoplanets have water when when a good fraction in our system do. The main breakthrough is detecting anything at all on an exoplanet which can hopefully expand to more biologically relevant molecules in the future.
- jjk166 4y agoWe don't know if planets orbiting close to red dwarfs can keep their atmospheres, so finding an atmosphere on such a planet would settle that debate. That the atmospheric composition detected is water is mostly irrelevant.
- alberth 4y agoThe phrase "alien planet" seems so odd to me in this context. Maybe this is an industry term, but for layman - it sounds like its saying "where ET lives" and we found water on ET's planet.
- tshaddox 4y agoI don’t think it’s an “industry term” in astronomy. I suspect it’s pretty much a given when discussing a planet that, unless the planet is referred to as Earth, it’s not Earth. And I suspect in the context of the JWST it’s pretty clear that it’s not Earth (does JWST ever look at Earth?).
- svachalek 4y agoIf JWST ever looked at Earth I'm pretty sure it would pop, like an ant under a magnifying glass. I think they were going for "planet not in our solar system" which is properly termed an exoplanet.
- davidmr 4y ago> does JWST ever look at Earth? Sadly not. They went through an enormous amount of effort to keep it from having to look anywhere near Earth. Here’s what it would see if it could, though: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/articles/what-would-earths-atmosphere-look-like-from-the-webb-telescope https://webbtelescope.org/contents/articles/what-would-earth...
- ben_w 4y agoJWST can't look at earth without major damage, as it is in a halo orbit around the Earth-Sun L2 point, which means pointing the optics (which are carefully protected from direct sunlight by that fancy five-layer sunshield) at Earth, also involves pointing those optics vaguely at the Sun.
- amelius 4y agoIn astronomy? Shouldn't that be biology?
- akiselev 4y ago
- dredmorbius 4y agoWhat most struck me from this article was this 'graph near the end: Should GJ 486 b have a thin atmosphere or no atmosphere at all then the hottest region of its dayside should be directly under the red dwarf star. If this hottest point is offset, however, this could indicate the presence of an atmosphere that is thick enough to circulate heat. Given that GJ 486 b is one-third the size of Earth, and orbits its star at one half of one percent the distance from Earth to the Sun, we can resolve where thermal intensity is highest on the planetary surface at a distance of 26 light years and despite the nearness of the star itself ... is pretty mind-blowing.
- penguin_booze 4y agoCan someone shed light on how names like 'GJ 486 b' are arrived at? Looks to me like something pulled out of a random number generator and piped through a base64 encoder or something like that, but surely there's a method to the madness?
- arp242 4y agoGJ 486 or Gliese 486 is the 486th star from the Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars. The letter "a" refers to the star, the letter "b" refers to the first exoplanet discovered, "c" to the second, etc.