61–70 of 142 posts
That spectrum is so noisy. How can they infer the blue fit from the (noisy) white points? The data look almost consistent with flat (no detection). And even if there is a detection, it looks like many other models could potentially fit the data...
Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05218
Figure 2 pp. 14 of the preprint shows much more plausible error bounds on the curve fit. That press release "best fit" curve is merely an artist's conception.
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…
120 light years away. Time to get the ufo tech out already.
is Faster Than Light travel even possible? I'm asking in a serious way. I have always read that its impossible, at least within our current knowledge. the only semi-plausible theory I've ever heard is that Blackholes might one day yield some way of traveling quickly across the universe but nobody has shown anything substantiated around that or anything else.
Paywalled paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0878-9 Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05218 Figure 2 pp. 14 of the preprint shows much more plausible error bounds on the curve fit. That press release "best fit" curve is merely an artist's conception.
The preprint of the Webb based paper is here [0] from here [1].
[0]: https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01HA2G716KS9YGAGVY1WBVFJ8Y.pdf
[1]: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2...
That spectrum is so noisy. How can they infer the blue fit from the (noisy) white points? The data look almost consistent with flat (no detection). And even if there is a detection, it looks like many other models could potentially fit the data...
The bump at 4.3um looks real, and it seams to be an standard absorción of CO2. https://www.quora.com/Does-CO2-absorb-all-infrared-frequenci...
The bump at 1.2, 1.4 and 2.4um looks real. I found this showing a peak for CH4 at 2.325um. http://www.astrochem.org/data/CH4H2O.php
[Sorry for the sources, but I'm not an expert is spectroscopy.]
My guess is that they assumed something like
a% * CH4 + b% * CO2 + c% * H2O + others
and get the best fit for a%, b%, c%, ... using the white points. Later, using these numbers they draw the blue line.
The peak for DMS is not clear for my untrained eye, so I can't guess what they did there. (Perhaps it's just the best fit.) It would be nice to see the a graph of the blue line they guessed with DMS and a superimposed red line with and atmosphere with an alternative atmosphere where the DMS is replaced with something uninteresting (N2? H2O? More CH4? I have no idea what is uninteresting here.)
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.
>When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization—things like cities, factories, and roads—the geologic record doesn’t go back past what’s called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It’s “just” 1.8 million years old—older surfaces are mostly visible in cross section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts.
While I think its highly unlikely (I mean less than 0.00001% possible) the means in which we would could even detect it are complicated
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-e...
That spectrum is so noisy. How can they infer the blue fit from the (noisy) white points? The data look almost consistent with flat (no detection). And even if there is a detection, it looks like many other models could potentially fit the data...
Right, show a posterior distribution not some hallucinated point estimate.
[0]: https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01HA2G716KS9YGAGVY1WBVFJ8Y.pdf
Gosh - 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.