First Whiff of Methane in Extrasolar Planet's Atmosphere
20 March 2008
Wiff of methane? Well... that depends on what you mean by wiff. It is probably just as easy to detect if a cow is farting in India by measuring ground vibrations in Cape Canaveral as it is to determine the chemical composition of a planet that is 63 light years away. Since even the nearest star is so far away we can not see any characteristics about it except the color light it produces, determining its orbiting planets and their chemical composition is quite difficult.
The Hubble Space Telescope is equipped with a NICMOS (Near Infrared Camera / Multi-Object Spectrometer). The spectrometer looks at the infrared light a star produces and compares it each time the planet crosses the path of its sun. Lucky for NASA this planet only has a year that lasts 2.2 days so they can get plenty of data from it. They have determined that the shift in light is very similar to how light would have shifted if it was passing through methane and water.
1. How many other elements could produce similar light shifts?
2. Is it possible that over the past 63 years of transversing the galaxy the light is not exactly the same as when it left?
3. It is possible there isn't even a planet orbiting that star and the light fluctuation is from something else.
NASA is interested in determining the composition of planets because it will help them know how they evolved and what the weather is like there. Personally I am not too concerned about what the weather is like because when the surface temperature is hot enough to melt stainless steel, I am probably not going to take a vacation there. A planetary scientist from the University of Arizona said the planet has a relatively low methane-to-hydrogen ratio. This would mean it is very dis-similar to its sun that is made of mostly hydrogen.
According to planetary evolution the planets form from the gas cloud that remains after the star is formed. This should mean that all the planets and moons would all be very similar to the sun and to each other. As we know this is not true. There is very little hydrogen in the rocky planets and a large amount in some of the gas planets. Why are the planets so different from each other if they all evolved from the same gas cloud? Planetary evolution is a large stumbling block because gravity should not be able to pull rocky planets together and especially can not pull gas planets together.
1. Why is NASA spending billions of our money to determine the weather on a planet 370,000,000,000,000 miles away?
2. How would knowing how a planet formed billions of years ago help us develop a cure for cancer, cure heart disease, or create more energy efficient cars?
Maybe NASA should be spending its dollars on more productive things.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=first-whiff-of-extrasolar-methane
