Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B
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Re: Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B
#2Gosh - imagine that place!
I wonder how old this world is, and how stable its enviroment is/has been. Complex animal life took 3.5 bn years to emerge on Earth, of course that's a meaningless data point by itself but intuitively for this place to have an ecosystem or complex life it needs to be old.
Still, even without this what a wonderful and weird environment.
Re: Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B
#3Seems to be down. This page seems to work: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2...
Re: Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B
#4404 not found, did they maybe remove the article for some reason?
Re: Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B
#5Re: Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B
#6This feels like a big deal. The website seems to be getting hammered as it is working on and off.
Re: Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B
#7This feels like a big deal. The website seems to be getting hammered as it is working on and off.
What makes it feel like a big deal? Carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen are extremely abundant. Those molecules are relatively low energy combinations of the elements. I would be surprised to not find them in the atmospheres of big rocky planets.
Re: Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B
#8Gosh - imagine that place! I wonder how old this world is, and how stable its enviroment is/has been. Complex animal life took 3.5 bn years to emerge on Earth, of course that's a meaningless data point by itself but intuitively for this place to have an ecosystem or complex life it needs to be old. Still, even without this what a wonderful and weird environment.
> Complex animal life took 3.5 bn years to emerge on Earth,
How certain are we it took that long (the first time)?
Re: Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B
#9It's mind-bendingly cool that people can figure out the composition of an atmosphere without actually being close to that atmosphere.
Had not heard of dimethyl sulfide before. That's a good keyword to know.
Re: Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B
#10> These initial Webb observations also provided a possible detection of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). On Earth, this is only produced by life. The bulk of the DMS in Earth’s atmosphere is emitted from phytoplankton in marine environments.
Given a sufficient quantity of reactants/reagents, could DMS be produced via a natural process, or is this a sufficiently unfavorable reaction that it's unlikely?