Hubble Reveals a New Class of Extrasolar Planet

[InCiDeR]

Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have come up with a new class of planet, a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. It?s smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth.

An international team of astronomers led by Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) made the observations of the planet GJ 1214b.

?GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of,? Berta said. ?A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.?

The ground-based MEarth Project, led by CfA?s David Charbonneau, discovered GJ 1214b in 2009. This super-Earth is about 2.7 times Earth?s diameter and weighs almost seven times as much. It orbits a red-dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 2 million kilometres, giving it an estimated temperature of 230 degrees Celsius.

In 2010, CfA scientist Jacob Bean and colleagues reported that they had measured the atmosphere of GJ 1214b, finding it likely that it was composed mainly of water. However, their observations could also be explained by the presence of a planet-enshrouding haze in GJ 1214b?s atmosphere.(...)

http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1204/

Maybe the dolphins now will have someplace to go when things get messy...

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[abberline]

if its that hot how does that not affect the water ? I get the feeling this is a newby question but i'll feel better knowing

GJ 1214b is located in the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent Bearer),

Just read this bit ^ now thats one for the guy with that insane occult linkage site (reever posted a link to it not long ago)

[Heretic]

if its that hot how does that not affect the water ? I get the feeling this is a newby question but i'll feel better knowing

my take:

pressure can also generate heat, like how a nail gets very hot after being hit repeatedly by a hammer, constant pressure does the same and generates the lava rock flows in the earths mantle which is highly viscous. We are exposed to only a minimal spectrum of possible pressures that exist elsewhere outside the habitable zone we live in astronomically speaking. It is simply outside our current paradigm like trying to imagine a "new never before seen color". Cosmology and supporting math dictates there is lots of strange stuff out there.

from the article:

“The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like ‘hot ice’ or ‘superfluid water’, substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience,” Berta said.

so when you toss elements (especially heavier ones with high atomic numbers) in an atmosphere which could be sustained by atmospheric pressures foreign to that of earth (it doesn't rain back down to the surface), you could get some pretty bizarre "alien like" results that we earthlings may have difficulty relating to. Superfluidic substances have little to no viscosity and can move super fast around objects with little to no friction generated by inertia alone. Even pass through porous materials without altering the path of it due to little friction, and although there is a slowing effect, it is minimal to what we would expect under our own earth-like pressures.

Imagine solid liquid helium clouds moving through the air like quick-silver liquid mercury moving through trees without disturbing them at high rates of speeds. If a "lambda point" for a gas can be reached naturally by an atmosphere and become sustained...it would be rather alien to us, and the movie "The Yellow Submarine" comes to my mind. Super fluidic water is trippy stuff and there may be similarities in deep underwater currents in the lower layers of the Earth's seas in which a near super critical states are achieved via pressure and it behaves more like a gas than a liquid.

Hot Ice, and in this context not just crystallized sodium acetate trihydrate alone IMHO but I can't be sure what would be in such an atmosphere, is just reactionary crystallized material that has either happened so fast (creating pressure and again back to that nail...or even how epoxy forms chemically), or with certain chemical reactions that it produces its own heat or even light in an exothermic reaction.

[abberline]

thanks Burke great post.

I had in mind other worldly kinds of elements and maybe the ozone (for want of a better term) holding gasses in a very different state to what we know,
It sounds quite Lovecraftian.

So how big a revelation is this in terms of what we knew already - was this all theoretical before? ( I know from the article its not 100% what they have found anyway)

[Heretic]

So how big a revelation is this in terms of what we knew already - was this all theoretical before?

IMHO absolutely, as far as "new and surprising" they do tend to grandstand a bit to generate public interest because many of these programs are on the chopping block and funding is needed, so as far as "how surprising" I would say it is somewhat more minimal then it is portrayed.

when news ways to perceive the macro or micro cosmos are revealed via breakthroughs in technology come about, there is a huge buzz in the academic circles and a lot of excitement and childlike expectation to have minds blown creates this buzz and all kinds of really cool brainstorming takes place where chatter leads to ideas being exchanged across the scientific spectrum that is a bit divorced form the norm as they tend to stay in thier holes doing thier work fully engrossed and absorbed

You see glimpses of it here and there, in the historical record of various discussion between Einstein and other physicists of the day discussing the possibility of black holes, time travel, and data backed conjecture and speculation, this is where theory is born and all kinds of possibility is reasoned but gets lost in the buzz. The same happened in the beginnings of quantum discoveries which opened huge new doors and created a buzz

The most recent glimpse I have seen are the recent discussions that have come about as scientists like Niel deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins have made public appearances to do Q&As with the public and created a "lecture circuit" for the sole purpose to revitalize the interest and expand on the importance of science in the modern world where Intelligent Design has made itself an enemy of evolution with attempts to strike it from the school curriculum and have gained impressive ground. You can do a youtube search for either of those names and watch many of these events.

It is an interesting evolution in astrophysics that has brought these discoveries to bear through the launching of a few new telescopes in the last 5-6 years inspired by the revelations discovered by the hubble telescope. They have new gadgets on them that can detect exoplanets now that we know where to look due to hubble, and it has revealed that what we expected to find is not the case at all. there are huge gaseous planets with small orbits around huge stars with no interference to what we expected in theory by observation and conjecture from looking in our own system and projection on how solar systems form, some ideas have been scratched and lost ground while new ones are formed and or gain ground,

the big one for instance is that planetary bodies circling the star(s) is the norm and not the exception. The drake equation is not only fully realized but surpassed due to this, life out there is now seen as an inevitability and "life" is a natural result of complex chemistry in nearly all strata of the most extremely hostile of environments and the Goldilocks theory has been nearly abandoned by all but the ardent believers in it

there really is a innate humility in astrophysics most tend to not see unless they take a closer look, and even though some of the scientists are snooty and seem to have a superiority complex due to education, that is also mirrored in how some of the conspiracy crowed views "the sheep", it comes across as a superiority complex perhaps to those sheep when confronted by someone who has done research and educated themselves, while at the same time we are humbled by what is unknown and theory abounds with out latching onto speculation as fact in the more mature folks who have been in the place of "first discovery" thinking they have found "the truth" to only realize that this dodgy world of the truth movement has just as many holes and dead ends as the mainstream does and that there are subtle layers to this world as well

it is just a matter of POV, which perspective you view it from

so in essence from my "closer looks" I have noticed a similar humility in them, and there is an equality and humility and even respect for the masses that is missed but does come out from time to time, most of the more "cutting edge" fields of science like astrophysics, quantum physics, and theoretical particle physics you find this innate humility because you are faced daily with how little you know and how much there is to see and try to understand with no clue how to do so

[alienHunter]

ATT jacked me up...

So I can't clearly follow the dialogue but, it would be kind of anomalous to find a large planet in the 'goldilocks' zone of terrestrial like planetary systems. Gravity don't be working that way. Larger than Earth and smaller than Uranus is a huge range that doesn't really convey that much info.