Hubble Spots Hot, Blue Planet Where It Rains Glass

[Deathfish15]

I'm curious on a bunch of things:


1) How do they know the exact temperature of a planet millions of miles from Earth?


2) Chemical compounds of this planet are known how? For all they know, the blue is a new type of alien flying micro-jellyfish.


3) Everything I read about this article, other than that the Hubble has seen a blue planet, reads as a bunch of really crazy theories thrown around. Much to these theories are like those from the Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, which is 'so scientific' (just to give you a clue, that's the group that theorizes Washington didn't cross the Delaware by himself, instead aliens helped him cross it).

 

[BanicRhys]

Unfortunately I don't think we'll be able to get to that level of advancement in our life times, but you never know... one can only hope

http://www.universetoday.com/17044/bad-news-insterstellar-travel-may-remain-in-science-fiction/

Odds are we'll never reach that level of technology. Better we waste our money making our lives the best they can be than futilely strive to reach something that will forever be outside of our grasp.

Whether it be by war, astronomical disaster, rampant malicious AI or a planet-wide existential crisis, our tiny civilization is doomed to silently blink out like so many before it.

 

[CJ1145]

I suggest we dub it Space Australia.

 

[Buizel91]

Unfortunately I don't think we'll be able to get to that level of advancement in our life times, but you never know... one can only hope

http://www.universetoday.com/17044/bad-news-insterstellar-travel-may-remain-in-science-fiction/

Odds are we'll never reach that level of technology. Better we waste our money making our lives the best they can be than futilely strive to reach something that will forever be outside of our grasp.

Whether it be by war, astronomical disaster, rampant malicious AI or a planet-wide existential crisis, our tiny civilization is doomed to silently blink out like so many before it.

"May" remain in science fiction...not definitely

Interstellar travel may be impossible (for now) but hey, technology is progressing very rapidly, and come on, there is a planet in existence that rains Glass... if i said that 20 years ago everyone would say that is impossible as well...

And hey remember, we are colonising Mars soon xD

 

[BurningWyvern90]

I'm curious on a bunch of things:


1) How do they know the exact temperature of a planet millions of miles from Earth?


2) Chemical compounds of this planet are known how? For all they know, the blue is a new type of alien flying micro-jellyfish.


3) Everything I read about this article, other than that the Hubble has seen a blue planet, reads as a bunch of really crazy theories thrown around. Much to these theories are like those from the Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, which is 'so scientific' (just to give you a clue, that's the group that theorizes Washington didn't cross the Delaware by himself, instead aliens helped him cross it).

1.) It's...complicated. One way, if you have a planet that transits its star, is to see how much the luminosity of said star is decreased as the planet passes in front of it. Not all planets do that, though, and a lot that do barely do, so it can be hard to detect. There are other ways to figure it out with redshifting and sprectra. Especially if the planet is really far away from the star; then you can just use the spectrum and there you go. But I don't remember exactly how it works.

2.) The absorption/emission lines of a spectrum tell you what the chemical composition of the atmosphere is. Each element has its own specific signature, with very specific peaks at specific wavelengths (e.g. the Hα line). You can analyze and separate these out to get a readout of what's in the atmosphere, as well as approximate abundance.

3.) Yes, but Ancient Aliens is a load of crap. Probably the main reason is because there is a LOT of nasty calculus and spectral image analysis and other stuff going on that no one wants to read about in a news article.

 

[The_Great_Galendo]

Wait, I'm confused on one point. Overall, it sounds like it works like normal rain, except with rain, water vapour evaporates and heads back up into the atmosphere, allowing the cycle to continue.

How does that happen with glass? Wouldn't a glass chunk large enough to fall just kind of stay down, until eventually you had a planet coated in glass and that was the end of it?

The high speed winds would break apart surface glass once it had cooled (slightly), turning it back into silicon fragments to be carried back into the atmosphere.

A more likely possibility, in my opinion, is that the "surface" of the planet doesn't actually exist in the way that you're imagining it. Remember that you're talking about a gas giant (the hot type of planet, all other things being equal) that's larger than Jupiter (more mass implies more heat, assuming similar ages) and moreover, ten times closer to its sun than Mercury is to ours. In other words, this planet's really, really hot.

What seems more likely is that the planet has no solid surface at all; just a molten soup of scalding hot ocean that isn't gaseous only because of the immense gravitational pressure it's under. And material would evaporate from its ocean in the same way that water does from ours, continuing the, er, silicon cycle.

 

[Olrod]

What are the chances that this planet has silicon-based life on it?

I'm hoping: More than 0.

 

[Evil Smurf]

So rain sound like this? *SMASH, TINKLE TINKLE*? Cool

 

[GundamSentinel]

Utterly bizarre and amazing. Great to see reality still matching and outstripping science fiction on a regular basis.

Also:
Please use metric, decimal multiples really aren't that hard... >.>

Escapist is a US site, I'd go as far as saying the majority (or at least the dominating chunk) of viewers are from US. What do you expect? : /

Yeah, but if you have an international public and there's only 2 other countries around that still don't officially use metric, you'd expect people to be more scientific about it.

 

[kael013]

That's... awesome. Seriously, molten glass [i/]rain[/i]!? I love how utterly insane nature is.

Now I want an artist's impression of said molten glass rain -one that's realistic and takes the wind into account too. Also:

And I read elsewhere that because the windspeed is so fast, it's raining sideways, so presumably there are a lot of collisions mid-air that result in all kinds of fluid dynamic fun. It's like the LHC, but with molten glass.

That sounds beautiful.

 

[mechalynx]

Watch it become a lame scanning node in the next Mass Effect game.

That's... awesome. Seriously, molten glass [i/]rain[/i]!? I love how utterly insane nature is.

Now I want an artist's impression of said molten glass rain -one that's realistic and takes the wind into account too.

Right there with you

 

[llafnwod]

As an aside, how cool is this? It's a planet with winds that travel at speeds six times faster than the Earthbound speed of sound. It's a planet where instead of pleasant rain showers, you could potentially be pelted by jagged shards of white-hot glass that would slice you to bits if you hadn't already burst into flames from the planet's crazy-hot atmosphere.

Rain on Earth occurs when droplets of condensed water become too large to be kept up by air turbulence. Considering the size of raindrops and the higher density of glass, "jagged shards" are unlikely.

 

[Guffe]

Think of jumping there with a parachute, without the glasses and only the winds.
That'd fun, eh?!

 

[Machine Man 1992]

"HD 189733b"

What kind of planet name is that? Why are scientists so uncreative?

It's a planet that rains GLASS. How about we call it, Fire Pane, or Glitterdoom, or HolyshitImonfireandinamillionpieces?

 

[Machine Man 1992]

Think of jumping there with a parachute, without the glasses and only the winds.
That'd fun, eh?!

That's assuming the hypersonic, burning winds don't peel your skin off and cook whats left to a tender golden brown.

 

[lacktheknack]

Think of jumping there with a parachute, without the glasses and only the winds.
That'd fun, eh?!

That's assuming the hypersonic, burning winds don't peel your skin off and cook whats left to a tender golden brown.

Black.

Tender golden black.

And then turns you into carbon-sand.

On the bright side, your family doesn't have to scatter your ashes!

 

[Machine Man 1992]

Think of jumping there with a parachute, without the glasses and only the winds.
That'd fun, eh?!

That's assuming the hypersonic, burning winds don't peel your skin off and cook whats left to a tender golden brown.

Black.

Tender golden black.

And then turns you into carbon-sand.

On the bright side, your family doesn't have to scatter your ashes!

That's also assuming you could even get the door of your spaceship open; can you imagine the air pressure a 4500 mile per hour gust could generate?

 

[lacktheknack]

Think of jumping there with a parachute, without the glasses and only the winds.
That'd fun, eh?!

That's assuming the hypersonic, burning winds don't peel your skin off and cook whats left to a tender golden brown.

Black.

Tender golden black.

And then turns you into carbon-sand.

On the bright side, your family doesn't have to scatter your ashes!

That's also assuming you could even get the door of your spaceship open; can you imagine the air pressure a 4500 mile per hour gust could generate?

Unless it blows in the other direction, creating a vacuum against the side of the ship that rips the door off its hinges.

On the whole, skydiving = NOPE.

 

[In Search of Username]

This is the sort of amazing phenomena that lies outside of our planet, waiting to be discovered. Here's hoping Earth's governments come to realize how much we're missing by focusing all of our money on warfare and other trivialities that, in the grand scheme of human existence, amount to depressingly little.

Well if you were the 15 year old girl who the tabilban shot in the head for wanting to go to school, I think you might think differently. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jun/16/observer-ethical-awards-2013-malala-yousafzai

http://xkcd.com/1232/ I'm just gonna leave that there. We can't put off everything until everything's perfect here on earth, because that's never going to happen.

 

[Machine Man 1992]

Think of jumping there with a parachute, without the glasses and only the winds.
That'd fun, eh?!

That's assuming the hypersonic, burning winds don't peel your skin off and cook whats left to a tender golden brown.

Black.

Tender golden black.

And then turns you into carbon-sand.

On the bright side, your family doesn't have to scatter your ashes!

That's also assuming you could even get the door of your spaceship open; can you imagine the air pressure a 4500 mile per hour gust could generate?

Unless it blows in the other direction, creating a vacuum against the side of the ship that rips the door off its hinges.

On the whole, skydiving = NOPE.

In theory, you could build a large glider ship that uses the immense wind and air pressure to stay aloft indefinitely. Just ad some ceramic-carbon armor plating to resist the glass rain, and add computer to navigate the jetstreams and you're golden.