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Wednesday, December 10, 2008

I'm far from a science geek, and even I think this is cool
Posted by Jill | 8:15 PM
Mr. Brilliant can watch science programs for hours on end. If there's a program about black holes, or some old PBS rerun with Carl Sagan, he's there. For me, anything that makes me feel as insignificant as the study of the universe does is just one more depressing fact of life. So I focus my attention in a smaller direction and that's how I keep my sanity -- such as it is.

But even I think this is pretty cool:
Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers detected the steamy signature of water vapor in the light coming from a large exoplanet circling around a star about 63 light-years from Earth. Though it's not the first sign of water vapor around this planet, it's the strongest evidence yet.

The planet, HD 189733b, is what's called a "Hot Jupiter" — a boiling, gigantic gas planet more akin to our own Jupiter or Saturn than to a terrestrial planet like Earth. It's not a good candidate itself for alien life, but the successful detection of water vapor here, in the location and quantities that theorists predicted, bodes well for further studies of more promising locales for extraterrestrial life.

"It means we're starting to understand these objects a little bit better than we did when we first started," astrophysicist Adam Burrows of Princeton University told Wired.com. "It’s a trial run for the much more detailed investigations that will be possible in the years to come as we take this stepping stone from giant planets to terrestrial planets."

Though water vapor is thought to be fairly common on planets — even our own Jupiter has it — the discovery of its presence on another world is significant and points the way toward future discoveries, scientists say. Yesterday scientists announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had found carbon dioxide, which under the right circumstances could be connected to life, on the same planet. The presence of methane has also been detected.
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