Heaviest element yet detected in an exoplanet atmosphere
eso.org
eso.org
https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA03476
Can't imagine what kind of crazy magnetic field action is going on in ultra-hot gas giants who are so close to their host star that their orbital period is 1-2 days.
Vaguely connected to this statement. Can anyone recommend any stories (preferably hard sci-fi, although I'm assuming anything tackling this sort of thing would automatically filter into that genre) regarding exotic elements, extreme conditions in space, or those sorts of things?
Like Neutron Star or Cannonball Express by Larry Niven. That sort of thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starquake_(novel)
Someday I should read Baxter's Xeelee sequence, mentioned under "See also":
- "Both WASP-76b and WASP-121b represent some of the highest S/N datasets currently available, the presence in both of the studied planets may indicate that this heavy species can be common in the atmospheres of ultra-hot Jupiters."
*640 light years away*
Hmmm, how are we going to do this?
Inventing a better telescope would be quicker. Granted we would only see how they looked like ~640 years ago, but that's not a long time for measuring their technology level, especially if their average lifespan is similar to ours.
2022-640=1382
The age of tech. advances such as water mills and three-crop rotation.
Pollution levels in the atmosphere would still be dominated by volcanic activity. No guarantee that this planet would ever get anywhere...
This is a very non-standard use of the term 'pre-history'.
By using the sun as a giant lens:
Absorption spectrums have never let us down, and are used all the time.
For this one place in the universe to have an exotic particle with an adsorption spectrum is pretty much impossible. To have an adsorption spectrum that is an exact mach for Barium is just adding a second impossible on top of the first.
Given the choice between something surprising and a doubly-impossible phenomena, the choice is clear.
Devil's advocate: we have never had the chance to actually verify an exoplanet absorption spectrum. Could be that they are letting us down every time.
In this solar system, yes, absorption spectrums seem to be reliable. Anywhere else is extrapolation.
But more directly, absorption spectra are so intimately tied to the QM of the molecules and elements involved that they’re probably unique. (Hunch/not seen a proof.) This is also the most experimentally verified theory known.
Edit-the best I can think is have every satellite built with a particle detector as a standard. No idea if those could be scaled down.
Edit2-seems doubtful.
There is not a single absorption line, but a very large number of such lines, at different frequencies between which the relationship is not simple.
When several different absorption lines are measured and match the spectrum of a certain atom or ion, the chances of any other phenomenon causing correlated absorptions for all those different frequencies are negligible.
Molecular spectra are much more complex than atomic spectra and they have many closely spaced absorption lines, so there may be some confusions between different molecules when the observations are made in a limited frequency band, in which some molecules behave similarly, even if they would behave differently in other frequency bands that are not accessible for observations.
It's amazing how often it seems that scientists are "surprised" - i.e. their theories were not borne out by the observational evidence. Perhaps because it's surprising, that makes it more headline-worthy, therefore there would be a bias in what gets reported. It would be interesting to see a meta-analysis of the "surprise" factor for study results.
News website tend to focus on the "surprising " word because writers (in this case the PR firm who wrote the press release) have been taught to write "stories" with "characters" who feel "emotions" to engage with the audience, perhaps in a completely opposite way than how researchers themselves describe their discovery in science journals.
It's not like they are shocked or disappointed. To me, it just reads they received info they will now be looking at further than they were expecting to need. Maybe intrigued would be appropriate instead if you consider "surprised" to be as lazy as "very".