Strange alien world made of 'hot ice'

Strange alien world made of 'hot ice'

space.newscientist.com

A bizarre world of scorching hot ice shrouded in a steamy atmosphere may have been found, according to new observations. Characterising the Neptune-size planet is an important milestone on the way to detecting and characterising Earth-like planets that could harbour life.

Astronomers have discovered more than 200 planets orbiting other stars, called extrasolar planets or exoplanets. Almost all of these were detected by the way their gravity makes their parent stars wobble. But this technique, called the radial velocity method, reveals very little about the planet except for the size of its orbit and an estimate of its mass.

Astronomers can learn a lot more by watching "transits" of planets that pass in front of their parent stars as seen from Earth. Careful analysis of the dimming this causes can provide clues to the planet's composition and structure. But the brightness dips are small and difficult to detect for all but the largest planets.

Now, astronomers have observed the smallest ever transiting planet. It has turned out to be a strange world, unlike anything seen before.

The planet, which orbits a small star located 30 light years from Earth called GJ 436, was actually discovered in 2004 using the radial velocity method (see Two new rocky super Earths found). At that point, astronomers deduced that it was about as massive as Neptune.
Exotic ice

But now, a team led by Michael Gillon of Geneva University in Switzerland have observed the planet transiting its host star using a telescope at the Observatoire Francois-Xavier Bagnoud (OFXB) in Saint-Luc, Switzerland.

They have been able to measure the planet's width, which provides clues to its composition and structure. It turns out to be about 50,000 kilometres wide, roughly four times the width of Earth and about the size of Neptune.

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this so very cool. it will not be long before we will find a second earth like planet that habours life

space.newscientist.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

I am very excited by all the research going on here as well. But everyone needs to hold their horses just a little bit.

The "Goldilocks" parameters for life and the model that is being used to determine whether or not a planet is potentially like our own or not is still fairly error prone.

What happens when we detect a planet that appears approximately the same size as ours, has the same amount of water on it and is the same temperature: then when we get there, we find the chemical composition from our telemetry readings are only telling half the story? What happens when the "water" turns out to be so pH imbalanced and paired with other elements as well as range of temperatures that we are back to a planet that is just as hospitable as say Mars or even the moon, Io?

Yes, this research is most certainly a start, but it is not the answer many people may be looking for when trying to determine whether life exists outside our planet or not. I can say that what all this exoplanet research does is perpetuate grants for the scientists who must spend great amounts of money to gain access to the relatively few powerful earth-based telescopes to make these observations.

Newtron

Actually, in my own opinion, these scientists are being entirely too narrow-minded as to what they believe is suitable for life. Just because we are what we are, due to our chemical makeup, doesn't mean that any life sustaining planet has to have the same material.

I think spotting these planets is a good thing, but since we're not going there, we should be looking at the possible life-sustaining planets/moons in our own solar system. I think by doing that, we're likely to find that if we think outside of the box, we'll discover that life isn't always made how we think it is.