Posted on 02/03/2004 7:20:26 PM PST by vannrox
The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the first planet outside the solar system known to have oxygen and carbon in its atmosphere, scientists said Monday.
The findings showed that scientists can identify gases in the atmosphere of planets lightyears away from Earth, which could eventually allow researchers to find a planet with an atmosphere that could sustain life.
The planet, nicknamed Osiris and known as HD 209458b, is a gas giant 150 lightyears from Earth. It orbits a star similar to the sun, the scientists said.
The findings of the team of scientists, led by Alfred Vidal-Madjar of the Astrophysics Institute of Paris, will be published in the US-based Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Before this latest discovery, Osiris was the first planet known to orbit around a star with an atmosphere and evaporating hydrogen.
Scientists often look for the presence of oxygen in planets when searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life, the scientists said.
"Naturally this sounds exciting -- the possibility of life on Osiris," Vidal-Madjar said. "But it is not a big surprise as oxygen is also present in the giant planets of our Solar System, like Jupiter and Saturn."
The scientists, however, were surprised to discover carbon and oxygen atoms in the upper part of the atmosphere, where the chemicals are broken down into basic elements.
Conversely, in Jupiter and Saturn, carbon and oxygen are in a combined form as methane and water deep in the planets' atmospheres.
Osiris' oxygen and carbon gases appear to blow out of its atmosphere toward space at 35,000 kilometers (21,748 miles) per hour.
"We speculate that even heavier elements such as iron are blown off at this stage as well," said Alain Lecavelier, a team member.
This type of evaporation has led the scientists to believe in the existence of a new class of planets, which they said could soon be discovered by telescopes on Earth and in space.
At 150 lightyears, it's a bit far from Home, but I'm game. When do we go!
Just FYI - they don't use mass spectrometers. Mass spectrometers are machines with an altogether different purpose (see here). They do use spectroscopy, but not mass spectroscopy (probably UV/Vis spectroscopy).
And we're going to let the thing burn up in the atmosphere in few years. A waste in my opinion.
Also, re your freep mail, threads don't 'get old' after only a couple of days. There are some threads here that have been ongoing for months. Lot's of threads get revisited or started anew after months have gone by.
At any rate, I am not the only person to have voiced this view on this subject- I've seen a few other freepers say the same thing on other threads.
I don't like to throw a perfectly working device in the garbage just because it's old. Some people are just like that. My father-in-law has a cellar full of such things. Washing machines, stoves, tires. He can't bear to part with it all because they still work or in many cases need fixing but in his mind 'they could be fixed'.
I think it has something to do with the fact that he grew up in Germany during and immediately after WWII. Things were very scarce then.
Note: this topic is from February 3, 2004. Thanks vannrox.
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