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NASA news conference: Thursday. See link. It's all about ET!

  • 30-11-2010 02:56AM
    #1
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 588 ✭✭✭


    Here ya go.

    MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-167


    NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2


    WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

    The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency's website at http://www.nasa.gov.

    Participants are:
    - Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington
    - Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif.
    - Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
    - Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Fla.
    - James Elser, professor, Arizona State University, Tempe

    Source: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_M10-167_Astrobiology.html

    Let the speculation begin!


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Comments

  • Closed Accounts Posts: 23,316 ✭✭✭✭amacachi


    Probably just a planet in the 3 Bears Zone or whatever they're calling it these days.


  • Moderators, Education Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 35,178 Mod ✭✭✭✭AlmightyCushion


    This has the potential to be awesome and it sounds like it will be. Unfortunately history of these NASA events has shown us it'll be a bit meh.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 12,428 ✭✭✭✭expectationlost


    it will be about indirect biochemical evidence of bacterial life on Titan

    why not talk about what they did find they about what they didn't


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 979 ✭✭✭Keedowah




  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 12,428 ✭✭✭✭expectationlost


    Keedowah wrote: »

    no. they didn't can we discuss what they did find.


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  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 9,248 ✭✭✭Plug


    Its going to be some kind of gas that helps life or something boring. But I hope its something crazy!


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 3,871 ✭✭✭Conor108


    After the Chandra incident a few weeks ago I don't have high hopes for this.

    HOWEVER what time is 2pm EST in GMT?


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 2,150 ✭✭✭Johnmb


    Conor108 wrote: »
    After the Chandra incident a few weeks ago I don't have high hopes for this.

    HOWEVER what time is 2pm EST in GMT?
    I assume EST is Eastern US time, which is 5 hours behind us, so 7pm


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 861 ✭✭✭yawnstretch


    Yup, this could be a massive thing but no one cares because of all the hype-crap, "ooh we found a cloudy shaped black hole 5 zillion light years away that may just be a miscalculation" we've been getting since I was born.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 5,182 ✭✭✭nyarlothothep


    Thread is misleading! I thought that they had actually encountered sentient alien life.


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  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 3,943 ✭✭✭wonderfulname


    Lets think positive, this time we could be the alien overlords...


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,007 ✭✭✭stevoslice




  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 861 ✭✭✭yawnstretch


    Someone on that site made a good point that if anything interesting about ETs had actually been found you can bet your arse it'd be Obama delivering the news.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,818 ✭✭✭Tea drinker


    Someone on that site made a good point that if anything interesting about ETs had actually been found you can bet your arse it'd be Obama delivering the news.
    Maybe they spotted his passport somewhere?


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 18,966 ✭✭✭✭syklops


    This has the potential to be awesome and it sounds like it will be. Unfortunately history of these NASA events has shown us it'll be a bit meh.

    In the past, I'd say 6 months there have been 2 or 3 of these "NASA to do press conference next tuesday about some really exciting thing", which all turned out to be a bit Meh as you said.Unfortunately its a bit like the boy who cried wolf, and I think with this one most people are at the stage of "Meh, wolf, yeah what ever".

    I really hope I'm proved wrong but my cynicism has served me well recently.

    If they really wanted to excite people about something, they should just release it, and let the media hype it up for them. There are few things more exciting than that phrase "We are interrupting regular programming to bring you extraordinary news from...". Unfortunately, it happens very rarely, and never for good reasons.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 12,428 ✭✭✭✭expectationlost


    well mr bad astronomer said well they have to wait for the journals to release so they can't say anything about it, but nasa could say a little more or isn't that what embargoes are for responsible newsmedia to moderate the expectation


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 9,248 ✭✭✭Plug


    Its about a poisonous lake on earth that has microbial life:rolleyes:


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 33,733 ✭✭✭✭Myrddin


    Plug wrote: »
    Its about a poisonous lake on earth that has microbial life:rolleyes:

    As in extremeophiles? I don't think thats exactly press conference material, but after the recent announcements it wouldn't surprise me either.

    Its nothing sentient, because for one we wouldn't be told unless there was a chance of an amateur discovering the same thing. Secondly as was stated, it would be coming from a politician instead of NASA.

    If it's going to 'impact on the search for extra-terrestrial life', one might conclude by those words it wont end the search, and will purely aid it. My bet is either confirmation that the microbial fossils found in the Mars asteroid were in fact not just random shapes and were indeed Martian microbes, or as Plug stated above, some form on microbe here on earth we havn't seen before which can survive in a vacumn/lava field/insert other inhospitable place here. It's NASA for god sake :D The right stuff seems to be the microbes these days!


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 10,287 ✭✭✭✭Standard Toaster


    Link
    Super Venus steampunk planet!

    Last year, astronomers discovered a remarkable planet orbiting another star: it has a mass and radius that puts it in the "super-Earth" category — meaning it’s more like the Earth than a giant Jupiter-like planet. Today, it has been announced that astronomers have been able to analyze the atmosphere of the planet (the very first time this has ever been accomplished for a super-Earth), and what they found is astonishing: the air of the planet is either shrouded in thick haze, or it’s loaded with water vapor… in other words, steam!

    eso_gj1214_art.jpg


    This is very cool news. Um, hot. Whatever.
    Here’s the deal: GJ 1214 is a dinky red dwarf star 42 light years away. It’s only about 1/5th the size of the Sun, and shines with only 1/300th of the Sun’s brightness. A project called MEarth studies such nearby red dwarfs, looking for dips in their starlight that indicate the presence of a planet: when the planet passes in front of the star (called a transit), it blocks the light a little bit.

    eso_gj1214transit_art.jpg



    The cool thing about transits is that if we know the radius of the star and how much the light dips, we can immediately get the size of the planet! The bigger the planet, the more light is blocked. If the planet blocks, say, 1% of the light, then it has a radius 1/10th that of the star (the area of the disk of the planet is related to the radius of the planet squared, so if the planet’s radius is 0.1 times the star’s, then the area of the planet’s disk compared to the star’s disk is 0.1 * 0.1 = 0.01 = 1%).
    In 2009, astronomers found just such a dip in GJ 1214’s light, meaning there was a planet there (called GJ 1214b). The radius of the planet turns out to be about 2.6 times that of the Earth. That’s much bigger than we are, but still much smaller than Jupiter (which is 11 times the Earth’s diameter). But don’t go thinking it’s Earthlike: it orbits the red dwarf at a distance of only 2 million kilometers, screaming around the star once every 38 hours! Even though the star is much cooler than our Sun, from that distance the planet gets cooked to a temperature of about 200° Celsius (~400° F). Ouch.
    The thing is, the way the light dipped indicated the planet was bigger than models indicated it should be. One thing that can do that is an atmosphere, in this case one about 200 km (120 miles) thick — much thicker than ours.
    OK, got that? Astronomers have detected that a planet 420 trillion kilometers away — 250 trillion miles — has an atmosphere!
    That in and of itself is incredible. But wait! There’s more.
    Astronomers observed the planet when it passed in front of the star, analyzing the light very carefully. As starlight passes through the planet’s atmosphere, certain colors of it get absorbed, and these are like fingerprints that can be used to figure out the atmospheric composition. Most models predicted a heavy hydrogen content, but the observations indicate none is there! That means either there are thick layers of haze in the upper atmosphere of the planet, obscuring any hydrogen below them — much like Venus or Saturn’s moon Titan, blocking the view lower down — or there is a vast amount of water in the planet’s air. And at a temperature of 200° C, that water would be in the form of vapor. In other words, steam.
    Steam! Amazing.
    It’s unclear which scenario is more likely, but either way this is an amazing accomplishment. I suspect (opinion time here!) that water vapor is the culprit; according to the astronomers’ data, there aren’t any known haze particles at the pressure and temperature indicated that could form clouds thick enough to explain the observations. That doesn’t mean there is no haze; just that current models of how these processes work come up empty for this situation. And more observations may yet be able to distinguish between haze and water vapor in the planet’s air.
    But there’s something else I was to add, something I haven’t seen in the papers or the press releases. Observations of how hard the planet is tugging on its star have yielded the mass of the planet: it’s 6.5 times as beefy as we are. So we have the mass and the radius of the planet, and that means we can calculate many other features, like its density — which turns out to be very low, only about 1/3 the density of the Earth! That means this planet must be very deficient in heavy metals compared to the Earth, or else it would be much denser.
    Interestingly to me, having the mass and radius also means we can find the surface gravity of the planet: in other words, how strongly gravity would pull you down if you stood on its surface. Given the large mass, you might expect the gravity to be much stronger than Earth’s, but in fact when I did the math I was surprised to find that the surface gravity is almost exactly the same as we feel here on Earth!
    I know this is a distant world, much larger, more massive, and hotter than Earth, shrouded in a thick atmosphere far different than ours, orbiting a Sun about as different from ours as can be… but weirdly, knowing I’d weigh about the same standing there as I do here somehow makes the planet seem a lot less, well, alien.
    It’s easy to forget that these aren’t just distant points of light, or simple artist drawings. These are worlds. And every one of them is different, strange, wonderful, and awe-inspiring.
    And this new result serves as a brilliant reminder: we live in an age where we can taste the air of alien planets from trillions of kilometers away!
    I can think of no better paean to science.


    In-ter-est-ing.
    250 trillion miles miles away, amazing they can detect anything at all.


  • Moderators, Education Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 35,178 Mod ✭✭✭✭AlmightyCushion


    Link



    In-ter-est-ing.
    250 trillion miles miles away, amazing they can detect anything at all.

    It was probably just a smudge on the lens. :D


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  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 9,248 ✭✭✭Plug


    What time irish time is it on? and also a link please. cheers.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 18,966 ✭✭✭✭syklops


    Plug wrote: »
    What time irish time is it on? and also a link please. cheers.

    About 8pm tonight Irish time.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 861 ✭✭✭yawnstretch




  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,351 ✭✭✭djhaxman


    It does change things. It means that exoplanets with different chemical make-ups in their atmospheres can't be written off now as potential sources of life.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 18,966 ✭✭✭✭syklops


    Are there any theories that this organism may be extra-terrestrial itself?


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,314 ✭✭✭sink


    syklops wrote: »
    Are there any theories that this organism may be extra-terrestrial itself?

    Arsenic based lifeform from outer space just happens to land in the most dense natural concentration of arsenic on the planet? Bit of a long shot don't you think? Much more likely to be terrestrial.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 18,966 ✭✭✭✭syklops


    sink wrote: »
    Arsenic based lifeform from outer space just happens to land in the most dense natural concentration of arsenic on the planet? Bit of a long shot don't you think? Much more likely to be terrestrial.

    The arsenic based life form itself was a bit of a long shot to begin with. Or at least it was up until a few days ago.

    I was thinking more along the lines of "Arsenic based life forms fall all over earth from outer space, cant survive and dies. except for the only place where there are concentrations of arsenic.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,094 ✭✭✭dbran


    "Nuke them from orbit. Its the only way we can be sure."

    Thats what Segorney Weaver would say:D


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 861 ✭✭✭yawnstretch


    From what I've been reading on slashdot, this life form is still carbon-based BTW. It uses arsenic instead of phosphorous (an important building block of DNA) however.


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  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,314 ✭✭✭sink


    From what I've been reading on slashdot, this life form is still carbon-based BTW. It uses arsenic instead of phosphorous (an important building block of DNA) however.

    As I understand it as a non-scientist. Arsenic forms the backbone of the dna molecule so to speak. One of the reasons arsenic is so deadly to phosphorus based life is that the arsenic molecule is very similar to phosphorus and during cell division arsenic can be mistaken for phosphorus causing cell division to fail. An organism that can't create new cells will promptly die.

    So the reason why it's deadly to us is also the reason why it's a good candidate to form the basis of alien life.


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