Webb observes exoplanet that may have an exotic helium and carbon atmosphere
science.nasa.gov106 points by taubek 3 days ago
106 points by taubek 3 days ago
The 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).
Paper on which the article is based: 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.
Kyplanet had a video on this.
“Stripped stellar core” is a crazy concept I could never come up with on my own. A literal diamond in the sky.
Great 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.
Hopefully we find evidence for post-great-filter life too…
Earth 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.
You can generate arbitrarily low probabilities for anything by stacking arbitrary fractions. If evolution has no goal, then the absence of radio loud civilizations does not demand explanation, it is only paradoxical if you implicitly believe that intelligence plus technology is a natural attractor state.
Yes, agreed. Furthermore, high tech tool makers not being a goal of evolution is certain, not merely a supposition, there's no anthropomorphic force driving life in that direction. The natural attractor states of evolution can safely be assumed to be the niches evolution has repeatedly discovered and recreated on Earth numerous times, the cases of convergent evolution. If we were digging up fossils of technology created a hundred million years ago by a high tech species of birds or something, and more from another period from yet another totally different lineage, that would substantially change the math. But all the evidence on Earth points to a species like ours being a very rare thing for evolution to create.
Agree. And also: The universe contains multiple substrates, degrees of freedom, organizational proprties etc that could support advanced intelligence while being effectively totally invisible to a species/civilization like ours.
Great filter might involve harsh tradeoffs like "no stupidity allowed". Do you really want to know it?
Speaking 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.
Maybe it even is happening but will never reach us from their local observable sphere.
Pretty 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.
What the HeC?
I wonder if there are bucky balls full of helium hanging out under pressure in there?
I found this similar idea done in a lab: https://cen.acs.org/articles/83/i3/Filling-Fullerene.html
They use H2 instead of He. Is that good enough?
Indeed, 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.
Getting flung around a gamma ray emitting pulsar while baking on diamonds doesn't seem very groovy
The aliens living there have silly high pitch voices.