Yeah not in a way detectable to radio telescopes though. If an atmosphere is stoichemetrically ‘far’ from equilibrium, this implies a biogeochemcical process that is pushing it out of equilibrium.
Oxygen very quickly gets reduced out of the atmosphere. Thats the whole point of it as a bioindicator molecule. There aren’t many other species of molecule that are such a clear indicator of the presence of redox reactions. Preter oxidative respiration, If nitrogen was the electron receptor, but its species like ammonia might be visible via radio telescope. Google great oxygen holocaust. We know photosynthesis was happening before then, but oxygen wasn’t the terminal electron receptor.
Oxygen would be a smoking gun, because you don’t keep oxygen in an atmosphere if something isn’t replenishing it.
I also got about 1/2 way through typing almost the same response below about gases that naturally degrade quickly, not being able to accumulate to high enough concentrations to be detectable at these distances but @TropicalDingDing did so more eloquently than their name would indicate possible, so I’ll let you read theirs here: lemmy.world/comment/8258449
It’s a good biosignature but a real smoking gun would be if a planet has intelligent life that’s not always so intelligent. Then, we might detect chlorofluorocarbons or some other synthetic pollutant.
“Well, we detected an alien civilization but their atmosphere is in way worse shape than 1950’s London and they’re 100 light years away. I guess we’ll keep checking and see if they get their act together or not.”
The time thing is interesting, but I feel like no one talks much about the appearance of passing objects. That is, I wonder how the image of a passing celestial object might distort due to length contraction and any other effects. I’m still trying to understand that. This article seems pretty digestible, so far.
Are those… Philips screws? Looks like maybe two dots indicating JIS (shallower angle, less cam-out, and #1 cause of stripped screws on Japanese motorcycles) but I’d really like to know why a hex or torx screw wasn’t used
I was curious about that too. They look like Torq-set to me, being that the slots are offset from the center of the screw. If that’s the case they’re shouldn’t be any cam out at all.
In either case the fasteners that were stuck appear to be Hex head, and the phillips looking fasteners just held a protective cover in place (?)
I would imagine NASA would know better than to use Philips for anything lol.
By the way there is a link on the page to more images of the assembly
The paper doesn’t calculate the radius of the star’s Roche limit, instead opting to calculate the orbital period of the Roche limit. I’ve never done a Roche limit calculation for stars, but I have for planets/moons, and I’m not seeing anything that suggests it’s different than for planets. So, I think I did this correctly (excepting typos):
The star’s Roche limit is about 1.5 million km from its centre (~1 million km above its surface), and the planet’s orbit is about 2 million km from the star’s centre. Assuming a circular orbit, which should be the case at these distances, the orbit has a circumference of about 12.7 million km, and the planet is whipping around at a speed of about 2.3 million km/h, or 0.2% the speed of light.
So much math here that my head is already overheating. I need to find the time to learn all this math. Kudos to you internet stranger on your examplary calculations.
The numbers are big, so it can be intimidating, but the math isn’t too bad. It’s a little bit of multiplication and division. The most daunting bit is a cube-root, which you can find on most scientific calculators these days.
It’s hunting down the numbers you need to use that’s the trick, and making sure they’re all in the right units.
The equation for the Roche limit is the most complex math, but that’s just something you look up:
Roche Limit = 2.44 x {the radius of the star} x cube-root(( {the mass of the planet} / {the radius of the planet}^3 ) / ( {the mass of the star} / {the radius of the star}^3 ))
All of the things in the braces are also just values you look up.
The article mentions the star being a dwarf. Are dwarf stars older and in a degrading state. Would the star have had less gravitational force when younger.
How would a plant form that close if the gravitational pull from the star was this strong.
Dwarf stars are technically any star that is in its core phase of life. They are dwarves in comparison to giant stars. The sun is a G-type dwarf star, for instance.
The star is a K-type dwarf, which means it is cooler and smaller than the sun (stars are labelled froom hottest/most massive coolest least hot/least massive: O, B, A, F, G, K, and M for historical reasons).
Planet formation is a complicated and still somewhat young field of study. Planets being close to their stars was a real shock 20 years ago when we stared finding them. The best models we have for this is planetary migration, where the planets form farther aewy from the star, but friction/drag forces from the nebula from which they formed causes them to slow down and fall into smaller orbits.
This planet continues to see its orbit degrade for even more complex reasons, related to both drag – it is interacting with the star’s atmosphere, which is causing it to slow – and tidal effects. When you’re close enough to a massive, rotating body that the differences in gravitational pull strength due to things like variations in density become significant, the rotating body will force you into an orbit that matches its rotation length. If you’re already orbiting faster than it is spinning, that means it will slow you down. But slowing down will cause your orbit to shrink, which shortens the time it takes you to complete an orbit, which will make the central body slow you down more, which will shrink your orbit, which…
Not in the same way, no. None of our planets are touching the Sun’s atmosphere in the same way this planet is, and none of them are orbiting at rates that are faster than the Sun’s rotation. If anything, tidal interactions would want to speed up the planet’s orbits, and push them into higher orbits.
But eventually the Sun will become a red giant star, which will change some of these relationships. We will see competing effects then: The Sun will begin shedding its outer layers, which will create a higher drag environment for the planets (that were not swallowed during the Sun’s expansion) which would tend towards inward migration, but this will also lower the Sun’s mass, which will lend itself toward an outward migration.
Jupiter is not currently migrating inward, nor are any of the other planets. If inward migration happens after the Sun becomes a red giant, those other outer planets will not get anywhere close to it. As a red giant, the Sun will approximately fill Earth’s orbit. Jupiter’s orbit is 5x larger than this; Saturn’s is 10x larger, and by the time the Sun actually grows this large, all of the planets’ orbits will be even larger than they are today, thanks to gradual mass loss.
None of the outer planets are expected to fall into the Sun at any point in time.
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