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Webb observes exoplanet that may have an exotic helium and carbon atmosphere
- seph-reed 10mo agoThe aliens living there have silly high pitch voices.
- Waterluvian 10mo agoYou should hear what the clowns on Sol-3 sound like.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoThey are also rich, it is diamonds everywhere.
- tclancy 10mo agoSame with Canada, at least according to Pavement.
- pfdietz 10mo agoKyplanet had a video on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7pu0Dhu87o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7pu0Dhu87o
- echelon 10mo agoGreat video! What a weird setup. I love all of this crazy stuff we've been finding recently. And not that this planet could support it, but I also love what this unexpected diversity in planetary bodies means for the possibility of weird and unpredictable formulas for life. I hope we keep finding crazy stuff like this. I hope it accelerates. I hope we find life soon. I need it.
- jondwillis 10mo agoHopefully we find evidence for post-great-filter life too…
- echelon 10mo agoSpeaking of "great filter", I often wonder about the hypothetical case that we live in a fragile universe. Whatever the first civilization is to cause something like vacuum collapse could destroy the entire universe at the speed of light. Maybe it's already happened somewhere and is currently propagating our way.
- GoblinSlayer 10mo agoGreat filter might involve harsh tradeoffs like "no stupidity allowed". Do you really want to know it?
- octopoc 10mo agoYes because the alternative is extinction, any price is worth avoiding that
- mikkupikku 10mo agoEarth life may already be post-filter. Also, I would bet on there being lots of little filters rather than one great one. Stack a dozen or so independent filters that only 1% of upstart life can develop through, and you can easily explain the apparent absence of life capable of broadcasting their existence, making life as developed as humanity extremely rare. Maybe only 1% of stellar systems are arranged appropriately with a Jovian planet to sweep the inner system clean of killer comets and meteors. Maybe the conditions for unicellular life only occur on 1% of nominally terrestrial worlds. Maybe only 1% of unicellular life develops in a way that has a hereditary mechanism that is susceptible to random mutation, so evolution has something to work with. Maybe the jump from unicellular to multicellular is extremely unlikely to occur; it did take billions of years on Earth after all, its clearly not something that you can count on happening a week later. And maybe the chance that multicellular life develops in a direction that will eventually develop animals capable of making advanced tools is extremely rare too. Real life evolution isn't like a game of Spore, it's not a computer game with a defined goal that some force is working towards. Evolution likes robust reproducers like bugs a lot more than it likes clever monkeys. Maybe when intelligent animals do happen to evolve, they, like dolphins or octopus or corvids, almost always lack the physical characteristics necessary to put their brains towards the problem of the scientific method and industrialization. Maybe when such species even do exist, they usually socially stagnate in preindustrial times, as humanity did for a long time, and get stuck there because their culture values social stability more than innovation. Maybe only 1% manage to not nuke themselves out of existence within a few years of inventing nukes. Stack a few of these sort of considerations up, and before long Fermi's "paradox" stops seeming very paradoxical.
- YJfcboaDaJRDw 10mo ago[dead]
- exe34 10mo agoyou might like dragon's egg! intelligence on a neutron star.
- pokstad 10mo ago“Stripped stellar core” is a crazy concept I could never come up with on my own. A literal diamond in the sky.
- pfdietz 10mo agoI just shows how energetic a close neutron star orbit is, that it could basically disassemble a star.
- viraptor 10mo agoWhat the HeC?
- westmeal 10mo agoGetting flung around a gamma ray emitting pulsar while baking on diamonds doesn't seem very groovy
- dcminter 10mo agoI wonder if there are bucky balls full of helium hanging out under pressure in there?
- MeteorMarc 10mo agoIndeed, unimaginable what is possible! There will also be traces of H, N, O, S etc due to comets crashing in, so room for carbon chemistry once temperature permits.
- gus_massa 10mo agoI found this similar idea done in a lab: https://cen.acs.org/articles/83/i3/Filling-Fullerene.html https://cen.acs.org/articles/83/i3/Filling-Fullerene.html They use H2 instead of He. Is that good enough?
- gus_massa 10mo agoTwo side remarks: * It's probably too hot there (2000K in the cold part) for fullerene. The atmosphere there is mostly C2, C3 and CO. (CO is mentioned in the paper as a very good guess, but not mentioned in the press release.) * If you fill a fullerene with H2 or He, it will float less instead of more.
- dcminter 10mo agoI'm no chemist, but I was under the impression that high pressure might allow for the creations of fullerenes even at these kinds of temperatures. I didn't think they would float (but I can see how "hanging out" could be read that way).
- gus_massa 10mo agoI have a chemistry specification in high school, anyway the conditions are weird. It's like inside a burning coal, but much hotter, 2000K instead of 700K. The density is 2g/ml so it's more like a liquid than a gas. It's far away from the usual conditions in a lab, so my knowledge/intuition are not very useful. Anyway, at so high pressure and density, I expect molecules with big voids to be crushed.
- yk 10mo agoPretty cool, or more probable hot. Though I highly doubt it is something resembling a planet up close, it is more likely some kind of remnant from forming the neutron star that just happened to have the right size and ended up in the right orbit to show up in exoplanet surveys.
- Meneth 10mo agoPaper on which the article is based: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae157c https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae157c "A Carbon-rich Atmosphere on a Windy Pulsar Planet", PSR J2322–2650b. No one bothered to link to it, but fortunately Google picked it up.
- MarkusQ 10mo agoThe artist's conception, with Jupiter-like bands running at an angle through the principle tidal axis really bugs me. If there's some bizarre mechanism that makes this even remotely plausible, it ought to have been explained. If (as I think is more likely) it's just a case of someone who didn't understand the article commissioning and approving and illustration by someone else who didn't understand it... why? Why even bother? It would be clearer with no illustration than with a misleading picture. (The worst example of this I've seen was a few years back, when CNN briefly used a picture of a cow to "illustrate" an article about coconut milk).
- andrewflnr 10mo agoWhat angle? The cloud bands are running at right angles to the terminator and roughly parallel to the axis of tidal stretching. Are you looking at "Image B"? That one might look a like tricky, but it's just because you're looking a bit upwards at one of the poles, so you can see the curvature of the cloud bands around the planet. Now, would clouds around such a weird planet take such a familiar shape? I doubt it. But going with that familiar shape is probably better then making up something weird to happen at the stretched ends.
- MarkusQ 10mo agoRight, that's what I'm objecting to. With tidal forces that strong, there should be no rotation parallel to the axis of tidal stretching. In the two-body reference frame the axis of rotation should be identical to the axis of rotation (tidal locking). So it should keep one pole towards the star. The terminator is only secondarily significant here, but since it lies in a plane perpendicular to this axis, any bands should be parallel to it. But since this means that there will be a "hot side" and a "cold side" and convective cells between these will probably eliminate any banding.
- andrewflnr 10mo agoWell, if it's tidally locked (which it probably is and the paper doesn't disabuse me), then both its rotation and orbit are about 8 hours on the sameish axis. So it's still spinning pretty dang fast, enough that the gas doesn't have to settle into hot and cold sides. I can't fully parse the part of the paper where they talk about the wind structure, but they do seem to think it still has some banding. Section 5: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae157c https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae157c (linked elsewhere, here again for convenience).
- 7373737373 10mo agoComing up around 2041 (hopefully) will be the https://habitableworldsobservatory.org https://habitableworldsobservatory.org - which will be the first telescope sensitive enough to detect Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars! Check out the "Simulated Observation of the Solar System" video toward the bottom of that page, coolest thing I've seen in a while!
- hamilyon2 10mo agoThere are chemiseries and metabolisms out there beyond our wildest imaginations
- uplifter 10mo agoIf I'm standing near (but not directly on) the pointy part of the lemon shaped planet, do I feel like I'm standing on level ground, or am I on a slant?
- andrewflnr 10mo agoThe surface shape of the planet is pretty much defined by what feels gravitationally flat at that point, so it would feel flat. If it wasn't flat, the gas would flow "downhill" until it did. (Oh, yeah, by the way, gas, so you're not going to be "standing" per se.)
- uplifter 10mo agoMakes sense, thanks. I guess it would only feel like a slant if the "force" causing the odd shape, the gravity of the pulsar, was removed. Then all the extended gas would fall back towards the center, while a solid planet might be able to maintain its odd shape. Then that pointy end would be like a giant mountain, in terms of how it would feel to be on. Now I'm wondering if the planet is tidally locked, otherwise the forces on the extended and retracted bits of the lemon would shift widely as the planet rotates. Actually we could then model the extended bit as a giant tidal wave, er, tidal cloud. What a world.
- andrewflnr 10mo agoThe "solid" planet actually wouldn't keep its shape either. :D Part of the definition of a planet is being in "hydrostatic equilibrium". Even rock is basically a liquid at the scale of, say, Ceres. But yeah, you've got the idea.