No, not what Earth will look like if negotiations in Copenhagen continue as they are. Another extrasolar planet has been found, and has some intriguing properties that suggest it might (emphasis might) be covered in water:
Earlier this year, the CoRoT spacecraft found the first transiting super-Earth, called CoRoT-7b. Broiled by its host star, the planet may be a rocky body covered in pools of lava on the side that always faces the star.
Now, astronomers have found the second transiting super-Earth around a nearby red dwarf. Called GJ 1214b, it is about 19 times as large as Earth by volume but only 6.6 times as massive. Such an object could be composed primarily of water – likely in liquid form – with a modest amount of rocky material at its core. Calculations show it must also have an atmosphere. Its proximity to the red dwarf, however, makes it slightly too hot to be habitable.
“Super-earths” are planets (orbiting other stars, obviously) that are greater than Earth in size, but smaller than the “gas giants” that inhabit the outer reaches of our solar system. From the little evidence we have so far (including the family of planets orbiting Gliese 581), it seems that they are diverse bunch, with some that might just resemble the Earth along with lava-covered hellholes and frozen iceboxes.
Now all we need are some super-telescopes to collect spectrum data from these super-Earths, so we can find out what they’re made of.
Maybe a super-ladder as well so we can climb up to the asuper-earth if we so desire.
(In Brian Aldiss’ book Hothouse, he envisages a future earth in which the moon has ceased to spin, and ginormous spiders actually spin webs between the earth and the moon. Fun book!)
It’s called the Hubble Space Telescope, and the researchers have asked for time to do just that.
Pretty cool.
How interesting.
From the parochial perspective of our solar system, it is interesting to wonder about how a planet could obtain such an enormous amount of water. I don’t know whether people have investigated this question.
Well once upon a time, there was a bloody big hydrogen-fuelled zeppelin, and…
@Sasha: ddrrrr… it like rains all the time!
I’m sick on this shitty little Earth dudes, I want to inhabit SuperEarth!
Then again maybe we’d be considered super vermin, considering what we’ve accomplished on Earth.
But …. I can’t swim very well.
What to make of this then?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020126/climategate-goes-serial-now-the-russians-confirm-that-uk-climate-scientists-manipulated-data-to-exaggerate-global-warming/
Denialist whack-a-mole tactics, I expect, tssk.
The key word is “probably.” expect it to be requoted as “the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had …tampered with Russian-climate data.”
Sacha @3
It was me.
I was watering the garden and just didn’t stop.
Baraholka, I bet you were washing your car with a hose too, huh?
friggin anarchist.
Personally I’d like to think it just popped into being. Kinda like the bowl of petunias and the whale (apologies to DA).
steveh
Lots of people would like to think the Universe just popped into being. This avoids having to consider that God might exist and, more to the point, what humankind’s relationship might be with God.
Merry Christmas
Barra
I understand that the “popping into being” idea is a serious theory.
Sacha @3: There is plenty of scientific literature discussing models of planetary system formation out there (cf. the excellent textbooks by Ross Taylor like this one, amongst others).
In a nutshell: there was no shortage of water in the early solar nebula (or, presumably, corresponding dust ‘n’ ice discs around other stars). If a growing planet had enough gravity to retain volatile liquid/gaseous water, or was far enough out for the water to stay frozen, then that abundant primeval water stayed put. Hence the icy moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and the large amount of water present in the outer planets of our Solar System. Smaller, closer-in and hotter bodies like our Earth either were not able to retain water out of the primeval cloud or had it boiled off in the early days of the Solar System. The relatively thin veneer of ocean that we have now is the pathetic leftovers that have seeped out since, plus any additions from late-arriving chunks of outer solar system (i.e. comets).
A bigger planet, around a more feeble star, would be able to retain relatively immense amounts of water right from the start, and would look very like this Waterworld. This is even more the case if it actually started further from its star and then spiralled in due to tidal drag before the dust cleared, which is a popular mechanism for explaining the relatively large number of exoplanets that have been found to lie much, much closer to their stars than you’d expect, extrapolating from our locale.
The “popping into being” idea is that the probability of a universe popping into being is not (quite) zero, therefore it’s gonna happen.
As Barra says, much more rational to assume that God popped into being, popped himself some planet spanners (really good ones, like Kinchrome or something cause he’s GOD dude), and got busy.
It’s turtles all the way down.
Hiya Sean,
It is not all at rational to assume God popped into being. God, by definition, is self-existent so does not need to pop into being, so the statement ‘God popped into being’ is self-contradictory.
And I didn’t say, contra to what you assert, that God popped into being.
As far as ‘turtles all the way down’, that’s as equally rational as ‘its black holes all the way down’.
Hawking explains the “popping into being” theory in “Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created From Nothing” (2007) http://richarddawkins.net/articles/806.
Its an entertaining read. The theory is based on work done by:
So non-existence is posited merely as a state which can be moved from or to and is achieved by traversing all possible paths, including the one in which invisble pink unicorns tap daqce on pins at the restaurant at the end of the Universe. You are expected to take this seriously, even once you swallow the concept of non-existence as a valid state.
Hawking goes on
As I understand this, Hawking is talking about the expansion of the Universe from a singularity. Which seems to me that Hawking wants to have his invisible pink unicorn and eat it too. If the Universe is non-existent, where did the singularity come from ?
Perhaps I misunderstand the article? I am happy to be corrected.
But for now there you have “popping into being”. As might be expected from an untestable and highly entertaining idea from the realms of pure creativity it is full of preposterous nonsense and downright contradiction.
But because it is labelled “Science” many swallow it without bothering to read the
label. And for many on the Left anything that ejects God from the room is axiomatically justified.