/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.11203102]

Will the ELT discover life in other planets?

[Anonymous No.11203265]

>>11203102
bump

[Anonymous No.11203269]

Will the what discover what?

[Anonymous No.11203274]

>>11203269
the Extremely Large Telescope. it's an upcoming ground based telescope that will be more powerful than the JWST.

will it discover life on other planets? some people think it might

[Anonymous No.11203283]

>>11203274
>The "Extremely Large Telescope"
So this is the power of high IQ science...

[Anonymous No.11203324]

>>11203274
>more powerful than the JWST.
my flip phone camera is better than that hunk of junk
>16 years behind schedule
>2400% over budget
>still no results

[Anonymous No.11203335]

>>11203102
ELT will confirm existing evidence that professional academics can have long careers without ever producing anything of value, an idea forwarded by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions in 1899.

[Anonymous No.11203388]

>>11203102
no, all it will discover is that literally every grain of sand is sacred to abos

[Anonymous No.11203465]

what kind of resolution is this gonna give us? we're gonna play paparazzi on extra terrestrial life? no.

[Anonymous No.11203742]

>>11203102
No
http://planetary-science.org/astrobiology/rare-earth-hypothesis/

[Anonymous No.11203774]

>>11203283

[Anonymous No.11204285]

>>11203465
The ELT will be able to do spectrographic analysis of rocky exoplanet atmospheres. If they find say a ton of oxygen, that is a strong indicator of life.

>>11203742
The rare earth hypothesis is well, a hypothesis. We haven't meaningfully tested it yet. The ELT will allow us to start the initial checks.

[Anonymous No.11204916]

>>11203102
>>11203274
It would not have the capability to resolve another planet well enough to discover life on it. It may be able to resolve extremely large space things created by life, but that'd be about it. Discovering a tool wouldn't be discovering life.

[Anonymous No.11205524]

>>11204285
habitable tidally locked planets when?

[Anonymous No.11205761]

>>11204285
>The ELT will be able to do spectrographic analysis of rocky exoplanet atmospheres. If they find say a ton of oxygen
science fiction, they will only be able to make outlandish claims to justify wasting megacash on stupid boondoggles which go nowhere.

[Anonymous No.11205785]

>>11203335
Very based

[Anonymous No.11205877]

Just point it at Alpha Centauri and all the other potentially habitable star systems already

[Anonymous No.11205885]

>>11203274
>more powerful than the JWST.
In visible light.
JWST is mostly for infrared and near infrared, which doesn't work very well on the ground since the coldest place on earth still has ambient temperatures far higher than what you're trying to observe.
I'm genuinely more hyped for the SKA.
Once Kepler and TESS data gets thoroughly mined there should be some good candidates to point the next generation telescopes and observatories towards.

[Anonymous No.11205965]

>>11205877
They supposedly wrapped up some observations earlier this summer that should detect or rule out anything > 2 Earth masses in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A at least. Haven't heard much more from it, though.

[Anonymous No.11205967]

>>11203102
it still isn't big enough to see your dick

[Anonymous No.11205982]

>>11205965
That's good news at least. Isn't there a pretty good chance of finding potentially habitable planets at Alpha C? Proxima already has one

[Anonymous No.11206000]

>>11205982
I dug up the article I remember reading about it from: https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2019/06/11/first-light-for-near-searching-for-planets-around-centauri-a-and-b/

Proxima technically is Alpha Centauri C, jury's still out on whether or not it can actually be habitable. I personally doubt it is lifebearing, maybe if we're lucky it can be terraformed or otherwise settled in the far future.

[Anonymous No.11206037]

>>11206000
>Proxima technically is Alpha Centauri C,
That's what I meant tho
>jury's still out on whether or not it can actually be habitable. I personally doubt it is lifebearing, maybe if we're lucky it can be terraformed or otherwise settled in the far future.
I agree it's probably not likely but at least there are pretty decent odds for Alpha C having habitable planets somewhere.

My favorite aside from that one is TRAPPIST-1. Absolutely based planetary system.

[Anonymous No.11206060]

>>11205885
you're a stupid science fanboi, you don't know shit other than what you read on feggit
> than what you're trying to observe.
you're never going to observe anything other than jacking off to bill nye the gay on facebook for upvotes, you're a stupid twat, i bet you live with your mom and suck on her tits, your type disgusts me.

[Anonymous No.11206902]

>>11205524
>habitable tidally locked planets
Not gonna be a thing. It'd end up being one long highway circumnavigating the entire terminator with suburbia housing on each side.

[Anonymous No.11207642]

>>11206902
That depends on water and pressure.

[Anonymous No.11207782]

>>11203324
Your phone camera can image infrared?

[Anonymous No.11208058]

>>11207782
Old cameras could since they had low quality IR filters and the filters for the blue pixels admitted significant IR light.

Anyways JWST is just sitting there, observing nothing.

[Anonymous No.11208088]

>>11207782
neither can jwst

[Anonymous No.11208118]

I highly doubt it.

If we do find life on other planets it will not be by ground based telescopes, but robots with microscopes searching for microbial life. The mars rovers have a higher chance of finding life than ELT will.

[Anonymous No.11208135]

>>11208118
Or some kind of test to check the soil.

[Anonymous No.11208175]

>>11204916
>OLT
>cancelled
Why even live.

[Anonymous No.11208287]

>>11205524
>>11206902
See >>11206037

[Anonymous No.11209018]

>>11205761
have you got enough piss to go with all that vinegar you're full of, anon?

[Anonymous No.11209020]

>>11204285
>The ELT will be able to do spectrographic analysis of rocky exoplanet atmospheres. If they find say a ton of oxygen, that is a strong indicator of life.
Imagine this: they point it at a planet and find hydrocarbon combustion byproducts in it's atmosphere. ;-)

[Anonymous No.11209418]

>>11208118
>>11208135
Free oxygen is considered a good indication of life.

[Anonymous No.11209462]

>>11208287
>>11207642
lol no

[Anonymous No.11209493]

>>11206000
> I personally doubt it is lifebearing, maybe if we're lucky it can be terraformed or otherwise settled in the far future.
I doubt we will need to settle other planets when we will be able to have interstellar ships. Just build habitats in space.

However alien life is a billion year old biochemistry lab-so research and exploration missions to other planets could happen by posthumans.

[Anonymous No.11209496]

>>11208118
>If we do find life on other planets it will not be by ground based telescopes, but robots with microscopes searching for microbial life. The mars rovers have a higher chance of finding life than ELT will.
Actually it depends. There could be life on Mars, Venus and Jupiter clouds, possibly Enceladus and Europa.But by the time we have probes there detecting it, it's possible we already will know of life on exoplanets.

[Anonymous No.11209515]

>>11204916
>Keck telescope

[Anonymous No.11209530]

>>11205885
>since the coldest place on earth still has ambient temperatures far higher than what you're trying to observe
Also Earth's atmosphere strongly absorbs infrared light, meaning even if you could cool your telescope AND the column of atmosphere between you and your target down to temperatures lower than the objects you're trying to observe, you still won't see those objects. To infrared light our atmosphere is as hazy as Titan's atmosphere is in visible light.

[Anonymous No.11209541]

>>11208118
It pretty much comes down to sample size.

We can land rovers on Mars and maybe put a few melt probes into Europa and Enceladus. In the mean time, we could build massive orbital telescopes capable of thousand-kilometer-per-pixel observations of nearby exoplanet systems, which means we'd have the resolution necessary to study the atmospheric compositions of hundreds if not thousands of planets.

If we look at the absorption peaks of an exoplanet atmosphere and we find anything similar to Earth, that indicates presence of life. I'm not only talking about a few millibar of oxygen, I'm talking about atmospheres with >10% oxygen by volume and detectable amounts of organic molecules like methane. To have lots of oxygen like that without life would require mechanisms that we do not understand, because pretty much nothing other than life can liberate that much oxygen rapidly enough that it can build up to those concentrations. The presence of reducing chemicals in the atmosphere would also prove that the planet itself doesn't simply have a superabundance of oxygen and therefore a decent amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, either.

[Anonymous No.11209544]

>>11209496
>Jupiter clouds
No, that's something that was kicked around by Carl Sagan as a thought experiment, but in reality it has no basis in science.

[Anonymous No.11209772]

>>11204916
ELT
https://www.google.com/maps/@-24.5891667,-70.1916667,724m/data=!3m1!1e3

https://www.google.com/maps/@-24.5891667,-70.1916667,3a,75y,212.8h,83.51t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipPTvoxhpraJluTmfsXz_RAn5UAAeM9vfAT07d3i!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipPTvoxhpraJluTmfsXz_RAn5UAAeM9vfAT07d3i%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi0-ya286.08737-ro-0-fo100!7i8704!8i2497

Seems there's nothing much there yet. They sure are taking their god damn time. It seems like this will be a grant milking farm and everyone reading this post will more than likely be dead long before this gets done if it doesn't get canceled for taking too long and costing too much.

[Anonymous No.11209778]

>>11209772

[Anonymous No.11209951]

>>11209544
>No, that's something that was kicked around by Carl Sagan as a thought experiment, but in reality it has no basis in science.
There's ton of ejecta from Earth that landed in Jupiter clouds over the millenia with microorganisms in them

[Anonymous No.11210052]

>>11209462
Got a real argument? We discussed weather on toidally locked planets here a few years ago and one astro-anon brought up a paper that did the calculations. For the given parameters you can end up with a sunlit desert and all water solidified as ice and thus trapped on the night side. With enough water and atmospheric pressure you get a permanent rain on the night side with rivers bringing the water back to the sunny side, keeping the cycle going and a much more even temperature.

[Anonymous No.11210054]

>>11210052
>Got a real argument?
Not needed. You give all the damaging materials and evidence every time you post.

[Anonymous No.11210187]

>>11210054
https://web.archive.org/web/20160407131738/http://home.uchicago.edu/~junyang28/Papers/Hu_Yang_Ocean_Exoplanets_PNAS.pdf
> For sufficiently high greenhouse-gas concentrations or strong stellar radiation, ocean heat transport is more efficient than atmospheric heat transport and can cause ice free on the nightside, greatly enlarging the habitable area of tidally locked SuperEarths