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.
For emission spectroscopy has been a thing since 1859 when Gustav Kirchhoff figured it out but for stellar emission spectroscopy it was Joseph von Fraunhofer in early 1800s? Although 1866, Pietro Angelo Secchi may have also discovered stellar emission spectroscopy 1848.
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…
Wow, that's really close so far as these things go. With the nearest star being 4ly, this can be reached with essentially the same tech level if we'd want to visit that with a rover or generational ship one day
What's also crazy is if we did send a rover over there to hunt for life, and they found it, we'd have to wait 125 years to hear the result. We all sit around knowing to listen to the skies sometime in October of 2185 to hear if the rover found life within the first month of its landing. If we ever send a team to live there, we'd hear broadcasts of their lives from 125 years prior. A real portal in time - so cool.
> 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?
I don't think anybody knows enough to tell you what kinds of reactions happen on planet-wide environments without an oxidizing atmosphere.
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…
It would be really cool to run an experiment like this. Have some population of rats living in a large enclosure that is held in a large centrifuge for decades and see how they evolve.
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…
I think 8g would be pretty hard to escape from, at least with chemical rockets.
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…
Gravity is only about 1.25 g, according to Wikipedia. Density matters. The earth and Saturn have about the same surface gravity.
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…
The classic sci-fi "Mission of Gravity" explores what life would be like on a rapidly rotating planet where one experiences 3g at the equator and 700g at the poles.