[HN Gopher] Webb observes exoplanet that may have an exotic heli...
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Webb observes exoplanet that may have an exotic helium and carbon
atmosphere
Author : taubek
Score : 125 points
Date : 2025-12-19 13:16 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (science.nasa.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (science.nasa.gov)
| seph-reed wrote:
| The aliens living there have silly high pitch voices.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| You should hear what the clowns on Sol-3 sound like.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| They are also rich, it is diamonds everywhere.
| tclancy wrote:
| Same with Canada, at least according to Pavement.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Kyplanet had a video on this.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7pu0Dhu87o
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| jondwillis wrote:
| Hopefully we find evidence for post-great-filter life too...
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| datameta wrote:
| Maybe it even is happening but will never reach us from
| their local observable sphere.
| gerad wrote:
| Guess it's good that space expands faster than the speed
| of light.
| exe34 wrote:
| if you haven't read Schild's ladder, you're in for a
| treat :-D
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Great filter might involve harsh tradeoffs like "no
| stupidity allowed". Do you really want to know it?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 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.
| neom wrote:
| 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.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 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.
| neom wrote:
| 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.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Despite our advantages intelligent hominids were an
| endangered species confined to a small pocket of africa
| for ~80,000 years.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The easiest filter is just that life may be incredibly
| difficult to get started. There's a huge complexity gap
| between abiotic glop and any known working cell capable
| of Darwinian evolution. Origin of Life research is
| basically various flavors of handwaving to get over this
| gap.
| api wrote:
| It'd be interesting if there turned out to only be a few
| life bearing worlds in the entire cosmos. But we just
| have no idea. Not enough information.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| We're missing the biggest filter of all: Time.
|
| Life may have existed elsewhere but it can be incredibly
| difficult to get started, let alone having higher
| intelligence coexist in the same vicinity of space _at
| the same time_!
|
| Tack on that it _appears_ space is expanding faster than
| the speed of light...
| exe34 wrote:
| you might like dragon's egg! intelligence on a neutron star.
| pokstad wrote:
| "Stripped stellar core" is a crazy concept I could never come
| up with on my own. A literal diamond in the sky.
| viraptor wrote:
| What the HeC?
| westmeal wrote:
| Getting flung around a gamma ray emitting pulsar while baking on
| diamonds doesn't seem very groovy
| dcminter wrote:
| I wonder if there are bucky balls full of helium hanging out
| under pressure in there?
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| 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.
| gus_massa wrote:
| 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?
| yk wrote:
| 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.
| Meneth wrote:
| 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.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| 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).
| andrewflnr wrote:
| What angle? The cloud bands are running at right angles to the
| terminator and roughly parallel to the axis of tidal
| stretching. Are you looking at "Image B"? That one might look a
| like tricky, but it's just because you're looking a bit upwards
| at one of the poles, so you can see the curvature of the cloud
| bands around the planet.
|
| Now, would clouds around such a weird planet take such a
| familiar shape? I doubt it. But going with that familiar shape
| is probably better then making up something weird to happen at
| the stretched ends.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Coming up around 2041 (hopefully) will be the
| https://habitableworldsobservatory.org - which will be the first
| telescope sensitive enough to detect Earth-like exoplanets around
| Sun-like stars! Check out the "Simulated Observation of the Solar
| System" video toward the bottom of that page, coolest thing I've
| seen in a while!
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| There are chemiseries and metabolisms out there beyond our
| wildest imaginations
| uplifter wrote:
| If I'm standing near (but not directly on) the pointy part of the
| lemon shaped planet, do I feel like I'm standing on level ground,
| or am I on a slant?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| The surface shape of the planet is pretty much defined by what
| feels gravitationally flat at that point, so it would feel
| flat. If it wasn't flat, the gas would flow "downhill" until it
| did. (Oh, yeah, by the way, gas, so you're not going to be
| "standing" per se.)
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