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Water Seen in Atmosphere of Distant Planet


Waspie_Dwarf

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Astronomers Detect Water in Atmosphere of Distant Planet

March 14, 2013

KAMUELA, HI – A team of international scientists using the W. M. Keck Observatory has made the most detailed examination yet of the atmosphere of a Jupiter-size planet beyond our Solar System.

According to lead author Quinn Konopacky, an astronomer with the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto and a former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) postdoc, “We have been able to observe this planet in unprecedented detail because of Keck Observatory’s advanced instrumentation, our ground-breaking observing and data processing techniques, and because of the nature of the planetary system.” The paper appears online March 14th in Science Express, and March 22nd in the journal Science.

“This is the sharpest spectrum ever obtained of an extrasolar planet,” said co-author Bruce Macintosh, an astronomer at LLNL. “This shows the power of directly imaging a planetary system—the exquisite resolution afforded by these new observations has allowed us to really begin to probe planet formation.”

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And people say that it's rare. We've discovered so few planets and already we've found water lol

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I wonder how long it would take to get there. It took the Mars rover 6 months to get to Mars.

Anyone interested In doing the math?

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And people say that it's rare. We've discovered so few planets and already we've found water lol

Which people would that be? Not scientists that's for sure, they will tell you that water is one of the most common molecules in the universe. What they will tell you is rare is the conditions for liquid water.

As the planet HR 8799 c is a gas giant what we are seeing here is most definitely NOT evidence of liquid water on a planetary surface, we are seeing water vapour in a planetary atmosphere.

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I'm all for being smart and intelligent but these names that you guys and by guys i mean scientist are dumb and sound pretty dull.HR8789cis that the best you guys could come up with?anyway many people know there are many planets in the universe more than capable of life,that have water and etc.but that's nothing new to me at least.I'm not sure about the rest of the population though.give these planets better names.as for discovering new planets the whole universe is full of them there's more than a billion galaxies

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I'm all for being smart and intelligent but these names that you guys and by guys i mean scientist are dumb and sound pretty dull.

As you are for being smart and intelligent you are no doubt aware that exoplanets are named after the stars they orbit. You will also be aware that all, except a few bright stars, are given designations defined by which survey catalogued them. I'm sure that you are also aware that this helps astronomers locate particular stars, something that giving them random names would not.

As you are all for being smart and intelligent I am sure you realise that, as there are more stars and, therefore, planets in just our galaxy than there are words in all the languages on Earth then you will realise that giving every star and planet in the galaxy an "interesting name" is simply not an option and so astronomers resort to using a scientific and logical systematic approach.

But then you think scientists are dumb, so I guess you didn't realise any of this.

Edited by Waspie_Dwarf
typo
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I wonder how long it would take to get there. It took the Mars rover 6 months to get to Mars.

Anyone interested In doing the math?

I'll use an orbiter instead. It's far cheaper than a rover, Curiosity cost $2.5bil, while the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter cost $720mil. It also took 43 less days to reach Mars, than Curiosity.

The current distance between Earth and Mars is 2.3799 AU. Or about 356,027,972 KM. Or about 2,212,255,462 MI.

HR 8799 is 130 LY from Earth. Or 822164 AU.

In 210 days an orbiter can travel about 2 AU. (Number of days it took MRO to reach Mars)

So, 1 AU = 105 days.

Meaning 822164 AU is equal to 86327220 days.

There's 365 days in a year.

86327220 divided by 365 is 236,513 years.

If I did that right it'd take 236,513 years for an orbiter to reach HR 8799. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched in '05. So, maybe 8 years later we could shave a short amount of time off that.

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If I did that right it'd take 236,513 years for an orbiter to reach HR 8799. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched in '05. So, maybe 8 years later we could shave a short amount of time off that.

Until we have some totally new kind of propulsion technology we are not going to be able to shave a significant amount off that flight time. Exoplanets lie tens or hundreds of thousands of years away from us in terms of travel time (and that is just for those that are close).

Science currently tells us that faster than light travel is not possible and so, unless a way is found around Relativity is found, or Relativity is proven to be wrong, then reaching most exoplanets in a single generation will never be possible.

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Even reaching 99% of Light Speed would be a huge step. 99.1% is massively faster than 99%. Point being, even reaching 99% of light-speed would be great.

If that documentuary that guy is doing is to believed, the world governments already have such technology.

http://www.sirius.neverendinglight.com/

That's got the trailers on. I'm sure it would be interesting to watch, but when money is involved I always take everything with a pinch of salt. Donations are supposed to be for making the documentuary as no broadcaster will take it on. The reasoning, I believe, for the 'government' not releasing this technology is because 'they' want money gathered from oil. Interesting idea, but, really? If humanity had the ability to travel even close to Light speed, or even double the speed we have now, you could find planets with stuff. Oil, diamonds, gold, copper, iron, silicon.

I really should invest in hellium.... Running out of the stuff so it'll be worth a lot in 20 years time.

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I think the math above may be a little off. Mars will never be 2.2 billion miles from earth. This year pluto will be 3.1 billion miles away. Mars doesn't come close to that. At its furthest distance from earth, it'll be around 249,000,000 milions miles. You take the Speed of light which = 186,282 miles per second x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 to find out what the speed of light does in a year which = 5,874,589,152,000 (5.8 Trillion). Then you take 5.8 Trillion X 130 which = 763,696,589,760,000. HR8799 is 763,696,589,760,000 (763 Trillion miles away from us) I'm gonna use the speed of Voyager 1 Space probe which we sent out 35 years ago, traveling 38,000 MPH about to exit our solar system. 38,000 Mph x 24 hours x 365 days = 332,880,000 Miles covered in one year by Voyager 1 probe. 763,696,589,760,000 divided by 332,880,000 = 2,294,209.8 So the answer is, if we could travel to HR8799 going 38,000 MPH, it would take us 2,294,209 Years to get there! (2.3 Million years)

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Fun Fact - The FASTEST man made object EVER in history is the Helious 2 Space probe! It reached speeds up to 150,000 Miles per hour! Nothing man made has ever gone faster! Even if we could use this type of propulsion on our journey to HR 8799c, it would still take us 581,199 years to get there!!

Fun Fact - The FASTEST man made object EVER in history is the Helious 2 Space probe! It reached speeds up to 150,000 Miles per hour! Nothing man made has ever gone faster! Even if we could use this type of propulsion on our journey to HR 8799c, it would still take us 581,199 years to get there!!

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Hi Troublehalf, that's an interesting site. I had never seen it before.

Not sure why aliens care about us though. After reading a horror story this morning about Russian's slaughtering their race horses (well, read the first line and couldn't even go on) I don't have much faith in the human race. At all.

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Going to other planets other than Mars is not an option until we find a new type of propulsion and the energy to achieve it. Even if you managed to travel at near light speed and avoided getting fried by rays of light that would be lethal at that speed (the light spectrum would be blue shifted, so visible light would become x-rays), it would still take more than a life time to get there.

Edited by Finity
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it would still take more than a life time to get there.

Not necessarily true. One of the weirder effects of Relativity is time dilation. Time passes at different rates for objects travelling at different velocities. The upshot of this is that if you are on a spacecraft travelling at near light speed you could travel between stars in a single life time, however although you will have hardly aged, when you returned to Earth you will find that many years (potentially thousands) will have passed and everyone you knew will be long dead and buried.

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And people say that it's rare. We've discovered so few planets and already we've found water lol

Yep, and its even on the moon...... we worked that out... took a while tho.... 1969 - 2013.

Funny how we are now finding water on distant planets at the drop at a hat.

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Yep, and its even on the moon...... we worked that out... took a while tho.... 1969 - 2013.

Funny how we are now finding water on distant planets at the drop at a hat.

Which people would that be? Not scientists that's for sure, they will tell you that water is one of the most common molecules in the universe. What they will tell you is rare is the conditions for liquid water.

As the planet HR 8799 c is a gas giant what we are seeing here is most definitely NOT evidence of liquid water on a planetary surface, we are seeing water vapour in a planetary atmosphere.

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Water should be found everywhere, the only exceptions being where there are processes that remove it. Consequently, finding water somewhere doesn't strike me as noteworthy.

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