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In case you wondered too, this is 124 light-years from us.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Apperantly it seems to be the presence of " dimethyl sulfide ". It seemingly only produced, on earth at least, by life. So using us as a baseline it seems pretty interesting. > DMS is generated by the degradation of dimethylsulfoniopropionate, which is present in many species of marine algae and plants, including dinoflagellates and coccolithophores
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Apperantly it seems to be the presence of " dimethyl sulfide ". It seemingly only produced, on earth at least, by life. So using us as a baseline it seems pretty interesting. > DMS is generated by the degradation of dimethylsulfoniopropionate, which is present in many species of marine algae and plants, including dinoflagellates and coccolithophores
In Nick Lane's Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World, he talks about the importance of both methane and carbon dioxide and how they exist at the extremes of a complex metabolic oxidation-reduction cycle. Methane stores a lot of chemical energy in its C-H bonds which can be burned directly, or metabolized through repeat oxidation events to ultimately form CO2, which plants utilize with the help of the sun to form m…
If one day we get a visitor from this planet, they'll jump on our planet the same way human astronauts jumped on the Moon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Complex animal life took 3.5 bn years to emerge on Earth, How certain are we it took that long (the first time)?
The fossil record. There is little evidence of very complex animal life before about 541 million years ago, which is when the Cambrian explosion begun.
See also: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-industri...
It'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.
In Nick Lane's Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World, he talks about the importance of both methane and carbon dioxide and how they exist at the extremes of a complex metabolic oxidation-reduction cycle. Methane stores a lot of chemical energy in its C-H bonds which can be burned directly, or metabolized through repeat oxidation events to ultimately form CO2, which plants utilize with the help of the sun to form m…
I wonder what life looks like on a planet which is over 8 times more massive than the Earth. Do animals have spines at all on a planet with almost 8g gravity? Does life even get to evolve into complex systems like animals under this much gravity? How about plants? Do they grow up or spread out instead? If one day we get a visitor from this planet, they'll jump on our planet the same way human astronauts jumped on the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fossil record. There is little evidence of very complex animal life before about 541 million years ago, which is when the Cambrian explosion begun.
Given the surface of the planet is such a dynamic environment, I wonder how much evidence we should expect even if it did exist. See also: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-industri...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Complex animal life took 3.5 bn years to emerge on Earth, How certain are we it took that long (the first time)?
Not certain at all, it’s based on last universal common ancestor estimates(LUCA) and supported by (lack of) fossil record.
I thought the Cambrian Explosion's fossil record was pretty sizeable - in fact, it's named after the place where the fossil layer was first discovered. I didn't know it was related to a common ancestor. Are you thinking of something else or am I missing something major?