[HN Gopher] Scientists find strongest evidence yet of life on an...
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Scientists find strongest evidence yet of life on an alien planet
Author : prossercj
Score : 108 points
Date : 2025-04-17 13:11 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| tmshapland wrote:
| I've been waiting to see atmospheric composition results from
| JWT. It seems like JWT was first put to work on other tasks.
| Anyone know of other studies from JWT like this?
| niwtsol wrote:
| Here is a list of approved programs for JWST -
| https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/approved-progra...
|
| You can filter by cycle & purpose - I think you want GO 4 then
| look at Exoplanet Atmospheres and Habitability?
|
| Related, but here is the Spectra of K2-18 image -
| https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2023/139/01H...
| tmshapland wrote:
| This is cool! Thank you for responding with this! Really neat
| to see the K2-18 spectra too.
| incognito124 wrote:
| duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43714203
| gamescr wrote:
| https://archive.is/bEYGH
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43711376
| 1024core wrote:
| What about just looking for oxygen in a planet's atmosphere?
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Might be a noise floor from all the interstellar medium oxygen?
| schainks wrote:
| Third line of the summary:
|
| > Gases found are the same as those produced by algae on Earth
|
| AIUI, the sensors used for this discover don't look for just
| _one_ gas, but as many as possible. So Oxygen is probably
| included in that list.
|
| Life needs more than just oxygen gas in the atmosphere to
| thrive. The right combination of gasses is a better signal that
| life could be there versus just the presence of one gas.
| Galatians4_16 wrote:
| Plenty of abiotic oxygen sources, even on Earth.
| rbanffy wrote:
| And plenty of life for which Oxygen is a poison.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| For example, the anaerobic bacteria in your gut do not
| venture out into your other organs because they cannot
| survive in the presence of so much oxygen. There are of
| course membranes and such keeping them in check too, but I
| was surprised to learn that the oxygen gradient played a
| role.
| dakr wrote:
| Free oxygen combines with other things very readily, so you
| need a steady source to replenish it. Abiotic sources may not
| be common/strong enough. It's been a long time since I've
| kept tabs on that research, however.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Not all life needs (or wants) oxygen. Plenty of earthlings die
| quickly when exposed to it.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Surface gravity is a bit higher than Earth (12 m/s2), but totally
| bearable for humans. The smell of the atmosphere, on the other
| hand, will be something the first human visitors will never
| forget ;-).
| wordglyph wrote:
| So no dunkin basketballs?
| rbanffy wrote:
| 12 m/s2 doesn't seem too bad.
| bobxmax wrote:
| just gotta crack that pesky FTL travel
| rollcat wrote:
| I'm still trying to wrap my head around why does FTL violate
| causality (even in the specific case of "space folding", a
| theoretical instant jump from one point in space to another).
|
| Let's simplify the problem (take a spherical cow in the
| vacuum), say we have planets A and B, 100 LY away from each
| other, time flows at exactly the same rate near both, clear
| path in between them, they move through space at the same
| speed and relative direction, etc.
|
| I'm on planet A. I send out a signal towards planet B. I jump
| to planet B and wait 100 years. I observe the signal.
|
| Now my simplistic assumptions probably suggest that this
| isn't that much different from sending out a carrier pigeon
| while I take the train to its destination and wait. Very
| obviously I'm not Einstein. What am I missing?
| csb6 wrote:
| I didn't know either, but this article [0] has some
| thorough explanations.
|
| I think the basic idea is that when two people are
| experiencing time dilation, FTL communication makes it
| possible (according to relativity equations) for a
| recipient to receive a message, reply to it, and have the
| original sender receive the reply before the point in time
| (in the original sender's point of reference) the original
| sender sent the initial message, which clearly violates
| causality.
|
| I think your scenario would not break causality because you
| are assuming both A and B are experiencing time at the same
| pace, so there would be no way to take advantage of time
| dilation.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyonic_antitelephone
| fracus wrote:
| I'm curious how many generations of natural selection it would
| take humans to adapt to the new gravity assuming we had no
| technology to do it.
| glenstein wrote:
| A great question. And one fascinating but maybe disturbing
| thing we have seen from the ISS is the body seems to be
| pretty aggressive with bone decalcification in lower-G
| environments. I don't know if there's a corollary for
| higher-G, and the mechanism is orthogonal to questions about
| heritability, but meaningful changes happen even within the
| life span of a single person.
| kolanos wrote:
| I read it would smell like cabbage.
| astrolx wrote:
| Funny enough, DMS is a fermentation byproduct in beer brewing
| and it's detectable for us at low concentration. The off-flavor
| it can cause is indeed "cooked corn" or "cabbage".
| [https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/how-to-
| brew/acceptabl...].
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| And still there's uncertainty about intelligent life existing in
| Jersey City.
| glenstein wrote:
| Everything about it feels like BFD category for potential
| microbial life if true. And all the circumstantial details seem
| to point in the same direction. Potential hydrogen-rich ocean
| planet in a habitable zone, in alignment with theory about most
| plausible models for environments that might support life.
|
| It's got no known abiotic process for being generated, but a
| clearly understood connection to life, and is apparently very
| reactive and would have to be actively re-generated at mass scale
| to sustainably show up in an atmosphere.
|
| Nothing should be taken as proven, but it feels staggeringly
| plausible, and in my opinion would be the biggest of the "big if
| true" space stories I've ever seen in my lifetime.
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