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from the still-less-vapor-than-the-phantom-console dept.
kef writes:
"Water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere of exo-planet Tau Boötis b, which was was discovered in 1996 and is just 51 light years away. From the article:
To analyze the atmosphere surrounding Tau Boötis b, scientists looked at its faint glow. Different types of molecules emit different wavelengths of light, resulting in signatures known as spectra that reveal their chemical identity.
Scientists have used spectrographic analyses to find water signatures on other alien planets before, but only when those worlds passed in front of their parent stars. Tau Boötis b does not transit in front of its parent star from our viewpoint on Earth, but Lockwood and colleagues were able to tease out the weak light emitted by the planet using the Near Infrared Echelle Spectrograph (NIRSPEC) at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii."
[ED note: The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal (paywalled), but they are also freely viewable on Arxiv.]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bd on Saturday March 01 2014, @10:18PM
Disclaimer: I'm not an astrophysicist. I did read the thesis of a friend of mine who is now an astrophysicist, to find spelling errors, once. but I don't think anybody noticed...
I do not think this paper was about detecting life, even as a remote possibility.
The planet in question is circling an F-type star, which is a little bit larger than the sun (1-1.5 solar masses), so far so good. But there, the similarities to the solar system end. The star forms the \tau Bo"otis star system as a binary together with an M-type red dwarf. Additionally, a year on the planet has a length of 3.3 days, and it is a hot Jupiter type of planet (6 times the mass of Jupiter).
That facilitates the detection of spectral lines from the planet, as the planet is quite hot and emits light by itself. So we detect the light of "water" like we would detect the light of a white glowing piece of hot steel (or a star).
Not a friendly environment for life.
The presence of the planet has been known for about 15 years. People were interested in the basic properties of the planet, like size, mass, orbit, inclination, composition of the atmosphere. A problem was that different measurement methods over the years yielded different results. This group found a strong signal for water in the atmosphere of the planet. Using that discovery, they were able to find out how this might have influenced older measurements to produce these disagreeing results.
So they now know more about what the planet is like and a little bit about its atmosphere.