You might say, “Big deal! We’ve known that Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all have atmospheres for a long time.” (The atmosphere of Venus was discovered 300 years ago.)
What’s extraordinary about this achivement is that this planet is 150 light-years away. The planet in question is larger than Jupiter and is very unlikely to have life of any kind. But it means that we should be able to detect the atmospheres of other planets outside our solar system. If we should find a planet with an Earth-like atmosphere, it would be nearly conclusive evidence that life is there because our own current atmosphere is the result of life (all those plants putting out oxygen, you see).
I have to add something here. This observation was made with MY CAMERA. Well, I don’t own it (any more than any other US taxpayer does) but it’s the one I worked on for five years: STIS. I helped calibrate the thing, and I just bet that a few of the files I created were used for these observations. A tiny claim to fame. Woohoo!
No, no! I didn’t discover the planet! I just helped calibrate the camera they used. I’m sorta like the guy who sealed the wood on the Santa Maria. I wasn’t there on the discovery voyage, but in a small way, I helped.
Bad, did you ever meet the Butt Head Astronomer? He and Asimov are the two people I really wish I had met. When your book comes out, I hope you will announce it here, unless the posts require subscriptions and you don’t have one, of course.
lesseeee…1 cm = .3937 inches… multiply by 100…carry the 1…
Hey! That’s pretty tall!
Seriously though, congrats on the work. I’m not a huge astronomy buff, but this is really just exciting news. I mean, it’s bigger than ice on the moon! It’s bigger than Oort Clouds. It’s, um, bigger than sliced bread on Mars.
It wasn’t that long ago that we couldn’t even verify if there were other planets out there, let alone their atmosphere. This is a great leap forward.
I’ll bet SETI’s doing cartwheels tonight.
I just want to say, it’s big news, but I don’t think it’s bigger than water on the Moon.
We knew these other planets (at least most of them) should have atmospheres… their size leads us to believe that they’re all gas giants. The news is that now we can dectect what type of atmosphere, and the new technique may eventually help us find even smaller planets that can’t be detected as easily by “wobble”.
The atmospheric content is close to what they expected, just a bit off, so that’s not big news.
Ice on the Moon was something we didn’t expect. It’s also something that could be very useful if we ever get off our rumps and start exploring again. If we had an extensive exploration program for other planets, and there were enough ice there to be worth-while, we would want to set up a base on the Moon. The ice could be mined, and split into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. We could then either use the Moon as a fuel stop, or have a cargo run set up to carry the fuel back to orbit… either way, easier and more efficient than lifting from the Earth with all the fuel needed to go to Mars, or anywhere else we needed to go.
I think the finding about the atmospheric content is secondary to the fact that they detected the planet at all. Remember, this is the first time in history that an extrasolar planet has been directly detected in any way. Every time before this was indirect, by their influence on their parent star, or through gravitational lensing. There was a claim that Hubble had detected a planet before (called TMR-1c) but that was retracted; a lot of us rather knew it wasn’t a planet right away, but it took a while to conifrm it.
And yes, I met Sagan when I was but a lad, in high school. I shook his hand after a speech he gave in DC, but that’s it.
You know, there’s a funny thing about discovering a planet… you gotta name it.