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insufficientmind t1_ixdvrmk wrote

I can't wait for the analysis of the atmospheres of rocky planets in the habitable zone; like the Trappist-1 system. This could lead to our first glimpse of life in the universe other than planet earth, if we're lucky!

Anyone have an idea when we'll get the first results of that?

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texasjek t1_ixeo4l4 wrote

JWST has been watching the Trappist system a lot. But each planetary transit only lasts for like 5 hours and that's only enough time to use a couple of filters each time. The data hasn't been released yet because the scientists involved have 1 year to work on the data before they have to release it. They can release it before then if they want.. I hope they do soon

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-_1_2_3_- t1_ixfy5jb wrote

What’s the orbital period of the planets we are looking at in the Trappist system?

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HonestCup20 t1_ixg92t0 wrote

What's the odds that they even release something like this "finding life" or "signs of intellegent life" if they did find it? I mean wouldn't they persue this stuff on the secret side without most of public knowing about it? i hope not, i hope we get to discover all that together, but ultimately we're not in charge of that stuff.. the govt funds a lot of these operations, so they get the say in what happens with the results.

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rainnnndrain t1_ixhens1 wrote

No, they wouldn't dude lol. Odds are way higher scientists would tell the public instead of keeping extraterrestrial life a huge secret. That's conspiracy type thinking

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sanitation123 t1_ixe100i wrote

Aren't all Trappist planets too close to their host star for much of anything? I think they all basically orbit closer than Mercury orbits our star.

But that does not take away from the sentiment. Would love to finally see definitive evidence of life.

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Cr0n0x t1_ixe29os wrote

Would it be possible to be extremely close to a star as long as It wasn’t super bright or super hot, or is that not a thing.

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sanitation123 t1_ixe2uch wrote

I'm pretty sure it is. I imagine all stars have their own goldilocks zone. I don't know enough about this stuff though.

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yurnxt1 t1_ixfcbnl wrote

You are correct, all Stars have a habitable "goldilocks" zone, at least theoretically however, all stars are not created equally. For example, it's possible for an exoplanet to be perfectly situated within a stars goldilocks zone but also be effectively uninhabitable due to any number of factors. One such star related factor that could make the development of life on a planet very difficult if not impossible would be a situation where the exoplanet is in the goldilocks zone but it's host star is far to active in terms of solar flares/radiation and or other sorts of violent disruption that comes from said exoplanet's host star on a frequent basis.

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TIK_GT t1_ixe4mix wrote

Don't the planets get tidally locked then?

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sanitation123 t1_ixe5639 wrote

There could be areas on tidally locked planets that are habitable near the terminator between day/night.

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nefelibatainthesky t1_ixe5tvi wrote

And if they have oceans or thick atmospheres, the heat can be more evenly distributed

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Karjalan t1_ixfelu7 wrote

Yeah. All stars have a "habitable zone", which is, roughly, the distance a planet would have to be to not be too hot or cold for liquid water to form.

Many other things come into play, the amount of stellar radiation beyond heat, the size of the planet, the planets atmosphere composition, and in the case of many smaller stars, if a planet is tidally locked.

Math/simulations of tidally locked planets have shown that it is possible to get a comfortable temperature and have areas of liquid water due to convection and the overall atmosphere composition and density... But it's obviously a different scenario to what we have on earth.

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mesa176750 t1_ixejv7i wrote

From what I remember, and it's been a few years since I read up on it, there are a few planets within the habitable zone of the star, but because the star is a red dwarf, that means that the planets are pretty close to the star relative to its mass and they are probably tidally locked. Tidally locked planets theoretically could have a "eyeball" like pattern where the back side is frozen solid, the "pupil" is scorching hot, with an "iris" zone that is semi-temperate because it is cooled from the frozen region that never sees the light from the sun and warmed by the side that is constantly in the sun.

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doc_nano t1_ixejbu4 wrote

They do orbit very close, but are still within the habitable zone because their star is an ultra-cool red dwarf. The fact that they orbit so close/quickly was part of what made them (relatively) easy to detect.

I think there are still serious doubts about them harboring life because their proximity to their star and its radiation might prevent any long-term retention of an atmosphere. But opinions seem to vary and we likely won't know for sure until more data come in.

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urmomaisjabbathehutt t1_ixfiuco wrote

The star is a type K red dwarf if i remember correctly, several of the planets lie in the temperate zone are near earth size and expected to contain large amounts of volatiles (hence atmospheres, possible water...)

a possible issue in such compact system with planets orbiting so close to the star could be solar flares sterilising the nearby planets but who knows trapist 1 contains 7 known planets so i'm sure we will learn something

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wanderlustcub t1_ixgrq08 wrote

Several of the TRAPPIST-1 planets are in the star’s habitable zone.

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LumberjackWeezy t1_ixhx5l2 wrote

I think our first glimpse will be within our own Solar System. Not on Mars, but on one of the ice moons.

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Sigura83 t1_ixew9hk wrote

Haa, I read that as "photosynthesis" and had a moment of adrenaline

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isleepinahammock t1_ixflhnx wrote

If the worst predictions of climate change come to pass, and we do collapse or regress to a much reduced or primitive state, our descendants will say:

Men were as Gods in those days. They could shout loud enough to be heard on the other side of the world. They could fly through the air like birds, and even soar beyond the bonds of Earth itself. Some say the Ancestors even tasted the air of worlds orbiting the distant stars!

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songsofadistantsun t1_ixg4otm wrote

I feel like civilizational collapse is more likely than not in the next century, so if all space exploration fails, I want to be able to say we finally answered The Big Question - is their life beyond Earth - while we had the chance. Like the Moon landings, that's something our descendants would be able to keep forever, no matter what happens to the world.

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cyrixlord t1_ixf6ir3 wrote

wow, who knew there was concrete in photochemistry

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12edDawn t1_ixfwyei wrote

Ok, this is off-topic, but...

>instruments that, together, provide a broad swath of the infrared spectrum and a panoply of chemical fingerprints inaccessible until [this mission],” said Natalie Batalha...

Does anyone know why is "this mission" in brackets? Don't they usually bracket/parenthesize parts of quotes when the person being quoted didn't actually say those words? What did Batalha actually say and what possible reason could they have for paraphrasing it? I see this a lot in NASA-related articles and I'm wondering if there's something I don't know.

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Easy_Money_ OP t1_ixg35vo wrote

In journalism it’s usually because they didn’t say those words, yeah. Most likely there was a previous sentence where the speaker referred to Webb, then in the quote they say something like “and a panoply of chemical fingerprints inaccessible until it”. The antecedent isn’t clear there. That’s my guess, I’m not sure if NASA does it for a different reason

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isleepinahammock t1_ixfqrou wrote

You know what would be really fun? Imagine a few years from now, when we've got atmospheric profiles of several dozen extrasolar planets. Imagine creating a museum display for a science museum, "The Taste of Alien Worlds" or similar. Then have some means that visitors could smell or taste our best guess at what these atmospheres would smell/taste like. Smell has an immensely powerful emotional connection, and I think it would be amazing to smell an alien atmosphere while also watching a summary of the info we have on the planet. Such a thing would go beyond mere knowing facts, but to provide a visceral, emotional experience of what it would be like to see these worlds around other suns. I'm not sure how you practically present specific smells to thousands of visitors, but it seems like the type of problem that has likely been solved before. Maybe some sort of scratch-and-sniff or similar, IDK.

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ianindy t1_ixfzz7n wrote

They did something like that at Epcot in Disney world. It was in the Universe of Energy building I think. They took you to the time of the dinosaurs and you could smell the sulphur in the air.

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songsofadistantsun t1_ixg4t67 wrote

I remember that smell from when I went to the Banff hot springs. The acidic pool full of mineral deposits looked cool, but any closer than a few meters and you can't fucking breathe

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jormungandrsjig t1_ixga9i3 wrote

How close are we to detecting the signatures of life?

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Decronym t1_ixg37rw wrote

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

|Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |FAR|Federal Aviation Regulations| |JWST|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |SLS|Space Launch System heavy-lift|

^(3 acronyms in this thread; )^(the most compressed thread commented on today)^( has 38 acronyms.)
^([Thread #8334 for this sub, first seen 23rd Nov 2022, 04:21]) ^[FAQ] ^([Full list]) ^[Contact] ^([Source code])

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insman17 t1_ixfi1e4 wrote

I thought that what climate change was based on!

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designer_of_drugs t1_ixfa3z9 wrote

It was recently pointed out to me that we could have had 9 JWST’s for the cost of this the useless Artemis program. Imagine how much science could actually be done! Instead we’d going to send three guys to live in a closet sized base on the moon to break a bunch of rocks.

Good job NASA 👍🏻

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Got_ist_tots t1_ixffl3g wrote

It is possible that they have a better idea of what will further the study of the universe

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designer_of_drugs t1_ixffspy wrote

Moonpologism: Defending the impulse to go the literal least interesting place in the solar system.

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SlimyRedditor621 t1_ixfs6c8 wrote

Least interesting place that coincidentally is the closest to us and if we can get the infrastructure set up, will provide a powerful base of operations for missions to other places?

Mars and Venus might be more interesting but if we can't set up shop on the moon then abandon any hope of leaving Earth for any other reasons.

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that_one_dude13 t1_ixge4t8 wrote

The moon has some pretty severe pull ( ;] ) over the earth. Kinda spooky to think about anything messing with it, I'm more of a fan of a series of floating bases. Idk I feel like messing with the mass of the moon In the slightest way will cause a typhoon to swallow japan.

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godbot693258 t1_ixhj0cc wrote

Even if we had a huge settlement on the moon with billions of people we would only effect the mass of the moon by something like 0.0000009% not enough to do anything.

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that_one_dude13 t1_ixhju9q wrote

Doesn't make me feel better, all this talk about space elevators and transit stop offs spook me. There's so many tiny factors that there is no way humans could figure out all the impacts, and I'm doubtful quantum computing could do it either. IT just feels like Maybe we need to be reallllllllllllly sure before we start messing more the way the earth functions imo.

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godbot693258 t1_ixhluv4 wrote

we do not have the destructive capability to effect a large planet or moons mass/ orbit in any major way. The reason have damaged the atmosphere so easily is because it is so ridiculously thin it is 0.8% of earths radius which is thinner than the skin of an apple if it was equivalent sized to the earth.

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that_one_dude13 t1_ixhmuzb wrote

We also haven't built anything that encompasses the earth or our pal in the sky , I feel as even a "ring" around the planet with what ever mystery building material they make it out of would have to have some impact.

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godbot693258 t1_ixhn71u wrote

Again that is something that is way beyond our current technological capabilities. The best we are going to do in the near future is a small base.

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that_one_dude13 t1_ixhnku0 wrote

In the original comment you responded too I was referencing things that aren't in our current capabilities either. I guess it was a statement for our great grandchildren to consider rather then it being directed at anyone in particular, although I do think there is merits to starting to plan shit out as early as we can comprehend the project at hand. If not for anything other then inspiration for the hypothetical planning period . Edit* I guess I was talking about bases on the specifically,

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Got_ist_tots t1_ixffxtm wrote

Unless it's used to develop a base with possible water that can be converted to hydrogen fuel to further the exploration of the universe

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designer_of_drugs t1_ixfgb0l wrote

Resource extraction for the purpose for commercial use: sounds like a good job for private industry. Which is what’s going to end up happening in very short order. NASA should be doing science. Let commercial interests do the mining.

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thenerdydudee t1_ixfhfve wrote

I think complaining about scientists going on a mission to the moon while we have billionaires blowing several times that on social media sites or low orbit photo shoots is pretty wild.

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12edDawn t1_ixfxcgi wrote

And part of that science might be going to Mars, which could very well be FAR easier from the Moon.

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alheim t1_ixg1ut4 wrote

Incredibly ignorant comment right here.

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designer_of_drugs t1_ixg26qs wrote

I did not originate the idea that NASA should be doing exclusively unmanned science missions. There is a long history of support for it in the scientific community.

What’s SLS/Artemis up to now? 100 billion? Come on.

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