16 new super-Earths – but what do they prove?
| September 13, 2011 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, News |
artist's conception of a super Earth
From “Astronomers Find 50 New Exoplanets: Richest Haul of Planets So Far Includes 16 New Super-Earths” (ScienceDaily, Sep. 12, 2011), we learn:
The HARPS team, led by Michel Mayor (University of Geneva, Switzerland), have announced the discovery of more than 50 new exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, including sixteen super-Earths [2]. This is the largest number of such planets ever announced at one time [3]. The new findings are being presented at a conference on Extreme Solar Systems where 350 exoplanet experts are meeting in Wyoming, USA.
“Super-Earths” are “potentially rocky worlds that are more massive than our planet,”as opposed to gas giants like Neptune.
Curious how the term suggests much more than that.
“The harvest of discoveries from HARPS has exceeded all expectations and includes an exceptionally rich population of super-Earths and Neptune-type planets hosted by stars very similar to our Sun. And even better — the new results show that the pace of discovery is accelerating,” says Mayor.
“In the coming ten to twenty years we should have the first list of potentially habitable planets in the Sun’s neighbourhood. Making such a list is essential before future experiments can search for possible spectroscopic signatures of life in the exoplanet atmospheres,” concludes Michel Mayor, who discovered the first-ever exoplanet around a normal star in 1995.
The thought seems to be that we’ll surely find a planet like Earth, but the reasoning process may be flawed.
Biology isn’t physics. What we think should exist may not happen to. Suppose we set out to find a native North American monkey. It makes sense. Many places on the continent are warm enough for monkeys. After a thorough search, we conclude that there just isn’t one. The same could be true of the coveted “planet that hosts life.” If solar systems can get on fine without any such thing (and they surely can), they may not exist. If we are not prepared to address that, it’s our problem, not the solar systems’.
Follow UD News at Twitter!
16 Responses to 16 new super-Earths – but what do they prove?
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
The Yahoo! News article repeatedly called them “alien planets.” Is every planet besides earth an alien planet? I suppose you could call them “extraterrestrial” which is about the same, but what could be more redundant than saying we found a planet that isn’t earth?
Or is that just supposed to conjure up images giant crabs, Yodas, and blue women?
What a loaded statement:
Perhaps Dr. Ross can help them on their definition of ‘potentially habitable planet’ so that they may have a better grasp what a ‘potentially habitable planet’ actually is:
further notes:
Yes, ScottAndrews.Sometimes it’s hard to decide how much of it is science and how much wishful thinking.
A few more nifty buzzwords thrown in: (it really gives me a lift.)
Exoplanet. A planet outside of our solar system. Again, this almost certainly applies to any new planet found. But it sounds way cooler. Would you rather be a “planet expert” or an “exoplanet expert?”
Extreme Solar Systems. From the website for the first conference,
They study the habitability of binary star systems. I’m at a loss for words.
Spectroscopic signatures of life.
Having a list of planets to search is good. Finding life on another planet so you know what the spectroscopic signature you’re searching for even looks like is better.
In order to give a little bit more clarity to the extreme fine tuning that goes into making a ‘privileged planet’ that can support advanced life:
Here are a few facts that may make this ‘fine-tuning’ more evident. Most people are aware that the gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, etc.. are necessary to protect the earth from bombardment of comets and asteroids:,,,
,,,But few people are aware that even diminutive Mercury must have the precise orbit that it has, or life would not be possible on earth;
further notes:
Here is a little video on Guillermo Gonzalez, who probably deserves more credit than anyone for bringing the privileged planet principle to everyone’s attention and who suffered persecution at the hands of atheists for doing so:
The search for exoplanets is an extremely interesting area of research, based on real, observational science. Further, the search for life on other planets is a perfectly legitimate scientific enterprise. We should be careful not to confuse the issues and think that finding other habitable planets, or life on other planets, has any direct relevance to the evolution/ID debate. Substantively, it is identical to all the discoveries in the past 50 years about life in remote and inhospitable regions of our fair planet, which were unexpected.
I for one would be extremely excited if life, even primitive life, were found outside our solar system. What an incredible piece of knowledge that would be! Such a discovery would not change in any way the considerations that support ID.
Gonzalez and Richards deserve ample credit for bringing some sanity to the science and beating back the silly notion that if life exists here it must be ubiquitous in the universe. However, let’s be very careful to not to mistakenly conclude that “rare” life means “no” life. Even if life was designed by an intelligent being, there is no reason (other than philosophical/religious reasons) to think that such life would be limited to our planet.
Eric,
I don’t mean to denigrate those who search for other planets or life on them, even if I don’t personally see the benefit. It’s not my time (maybe my taxes.)
The relevance (as I see it) is in how carried away the media gets with reporting this stuff and inflating its significance. Alien planets? Really? “Richest Haul of Planets So Far?” What does “rich” mean in this context? Doesn’t “haul” have the connotation of collecting or retrieving, as opposed to cataloging? Yes, I’m splitting hairs. But they’re making this sound like more than it is.
It’s like OOL. Every new experiment makes it sound like they’re getting closer to finding how all those “building blocks” got stacked up. But they don’t know if they’re getting closer because they don’t know if it’s even there at all, and there’s good reason to think it isn’t.
It gets people to click links, but I hope they can tell the reality from the hype.
Eric you state:
Perhaps, but people looking for life ‘out there somewhere’ shall have a far more fruitful time finding ‘life’ out there somewhere if they turned their sights a bit higher than the just the stars and planets of this universe:
of ‘higher dimensional’ interest;
I’m curious – you really don’t see the benefit of searching for other planets or life on them? If we found life elsewhere then it would answer a lot of questions about the universe and our place in it.
For instance: if we found life on Mars and it was related to us, that would say a great deal (probably that life actually can migrate between worlds). If it was unrelated to use, and arose on Mars indepenedently, then it means that life can be expected to be commonplace in the universe (the chances of the only two places in the universe bearing life being neighbouring planets is almost infinitesimal).
Grunty you state:
Though I would say that the chances that microbial life migrated to Venus, Mars, and/or the Moon, from Earth, from a past cataclysmic impact event on Earth that threw chunks of the Earth up into orbit, where those chunks eventually made their way to those places is not beyond reasonable, what i do hold to be unreasonable is that those microbial lifeforms could exist on Mars, Venus, and/or the Moon for any extended period of time, much less could that hypothetical microbial life flourish. For the Moon and Venus this fact is fairly clear to see, since we can readily see that the extremely harsh environments of those places would prohibit life from ‘living’. For Mars this is a bit more difficult to see. But to try to make it a bit more clear. Life does not exist completely independent of of its environment. In fact life, even microbial life is highly dependent on the ecology of its environment. i.e. The right nutrients have to be present, in the right mix, on the surface of any given planet for long periods of time. Yet without a hydrological cycle, and a tectonic cycle, and various other cycles, working in conjunction with each other, any microbial life that happened to flourish in a ‘niche’ on the surface of Mars somewhere would fairly soon, (geological timescale speaking), be at severe imbalance with its ecological niche since it would produce to much of one elemental compound whilst consuming all the ‘nearby’ available resources of necessary ‘life-enabling’ nutrients. Without a precise balance between life and ecological cycles, life, even microbial life, will soon run out of a necessary nutrient that enables life.
notes: Dr. Ross has a fairly extensive, heavily referenced, list here for the Requirements to sustain bacteria for 90 days or less;
Here are a few more assorted notes:
Grunty,
Those are a lot of ‘ifs.’ Yes, the answers to those questions would be interesting. But one problem is that too many of the answers can ever be ‘no.’ They can never discover that what they’re looking for isn’t there. There are always more planets.
Maybe this is just my perception, but news stories like this give the impression that they expect to find something, not just that they’re looking for it. And there’s no reason for them to expect that. It’s as if they’re looking for a reason to expect what they expect.
And I’m very skeptical of anyone who says they can detect life at such distances. But they don’t even make that claim. They are looking for the ‘signature of life.’ They can detect the signature without knowing if there is life, which means they don’t really know if the signature of life really is just that. What’s the point?
Grunty: “If it was unrelated to us, and arose on Mars indepenedently, then it means that life can be expected to be commonplace in the universe (the chances of the only two places in the universe bearing life being neighbouring planets is almost infinitesimal).”
Perhaps, if by “arose on Mars” you mean that life arose on Mars by purely naturalistic and materialistic means. But of course that would be an unwarranted assumption. If we do find life elsewhere we can be pretty sure that it did not arise by naturalistic and materialistic means any more than life on Earth did.
ScottAndrews:
Some biological processes produce a chemical signature that is unique to them. If those chemical signatures are found, it will be a very good indication that life has been found. Of course, it won’t be “visual” proof in the sense of being able to collect samples and take pictures of the critters, but it is based on sound inferences. It is a good bit of forensic/detective work.
I agree that there are some, perhaps including those in the media, who are itching to find life elsewhere because they have a philosophical commitment to the idea that life on Earth is not unique. I think that is the wrong motivation — just as I think a philosophical commitment to the idea that life on earth *is* unique is a faulty motivation to object to the search for extraterrestrial life.
Certainly the answers can be “no” but often a negative result in science tells us a great deal (currently, the failure to find Higgs’ bosons at certain energy regimes, for example – it allows us to eliminate certain aspects of theory and thus better home in on the most likely theoretical framweork).
Your comment about what scientists expect to find is rather confusing. I don’t think you really understand the scientific process. Experimentally, scientists are trying to gather evidence. That evidence tests their theories. Sometimes the evidence helps to confirm (note: never “prove”) those theories. Sometimes the evidence contradicts them and those theories turn out to be wrong, but that is in itself very revealing and leads to better theories. For instance, no astronomer “expected” to find large gas planets near stars – it was thought impossible – yet those were precisely the first exoplanets found, and it meant revising theories of planetary formation. No we have a much better understanding of how they form.
Eric Anderson has given the reasons why scinetists search for certain signatures of life, with which I agree.
Eric,
I won’t go so far as to deny that traces of certain chemicals can be detected in an atmosphere light years away. But I am very, very skeptical. For one thing, has anyone ever tested one of these atmospheres to confirm the findings?
Also, when IDists state that the odds of life forming spontaneously are so remote as to never happen in the entire universe, the claim is made that life didn’t have to exist in this form, that there could have been many. (Whether that mitigates the problem is another question.)
If these folks believe that, then which ‘signature of life’ are they looking for? Oxygen and CO2 – the signature of life on earth – or the signature of one of these many unknown possible forms of life?
If they are looking for oxygen and CO2 then they are assuming certain constraints which would make what they are looking for even more improbable than it already was.
The third page on this following site shows some of the extreme interdependent, ‘life-enabling’, complexity of different types of bacterial life on Earth. ,,,
,,,Please note, that if even one type of bacteria did not exist in this complex ecological cycle of interdependence, that was illustrated on the third page of the preceding site, then the entire group of different bacteria would soon die out. This essential ecological interdependence, of the most primitive bacteria that we have evidence of on ancient earth, makes the origin of life ‘problem’ for Darwinists that much worse, for now not only do they have to explain how a ‘miracle’ happened once with photosynthetic bacteria, but they must now also explain how all the different bacteria, that photosynthetic bacteria are dependent on, arose just in time to allow photosynthetic bacteria to continue to survive. As well, though not illustrated on the preceding site, please note that the long term tectonic cycle, of the turnover the Earth’s crustal rocks, also plays a important ‘foundational’ role in the overall ecology of the system that must be accounted for as well.