First active chemistry on an exoplanet revealed by Webb telescope
nature.com
nature.com
> The team were also surprised to detect sulfur dioxide, which had appeared as a mysterious bump in early observation data. Its presence suggests a photochemical reaction is taking place in the atmosphere as light from the star hits it, similar to how our Sun produces ozone in Earth’s atmosphere. In WASP-39b’s case, light from its star, slightly smaller than the Sun, splits water in its atmosphere into hydrogen and hydroxide, which reacts with hydrogen sulfide to produce sulfur dioxide.
Wikipedia has this to say about sulfur dioxide in our solar system:
> On other planets, sulfur dioxide can be found in various concentrations, the most significant being the atmosphere of Venus, where it is the third-most abundant atmospheric gas at 150 ppm. There, it reacts with water to form clouds of sulfuric acid, and is a key component of the planet's global atmospheric sulfur cycle and contributes to global warming.[11] It has been implicated as a key agent in the warming of early Mars, with estimates of concentrations in the lower atmosphere as high as 100 ppm,[12] though it only exists in trace amounts. On both Venus and Mars, as on Earth, its primary source is thought to be volcanic. The atmosphere of Io, a natural satellite of Jupiter, is 90% sulfur dioxide[13] and trace amounts are thought to also exist in the atmosphere of Jupiter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide
This doesn't necessarily mean that the the exoplanet has active volcanism, but it could be an explanation.
I am feeling quite optimistic, the spectroscopy of jwst has me quite pumped... If worst came to happen, I might still be able to eek out a win on my bet with ELT in Atacama... But I think that jwst will be enough!
It's similar to the phosphine discovery on Venus, which is indicative of life but certainly debatable. Though in the phosphine case I think there's debate over whether or not they actually detected phosphine? Regardless, I too am excited about the possibility of detecting signs of intelligent life soon.
There is no guarantee life on another planet will even have the same DNA structure we have, let alone adhere to the model we've come to agree on for Earthen life. We only have LUCA to understand our own life forms, and zero idea what became and begat LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). The word "Common" is important there, because we know there was a lot of life before LUCA.
I took an Origins of Life course that really opened my eyes about how complicated things get when looking for life at different scales.
It's reasonable to expect some kind of DNA-analog: a system, not necessarily using familiar amino acids, that does a similar job.
We live in a relatively cold and squishy regime. I suspect the range of possible DNA-analogs is much wider than we think it is. Many will exist in not-at-all-Earth-like conditions.
JWST is only reporting chemicals inferred because of the way they change the spectrum of light in the atmosphere. That requiresassive concentration of one chemical.
They also have a follow up video about using Jupiter to create a jovoscope and there's also more about creating a telescope using the sun (although since the sensor would need to be so far away from the Sun, we would essentially need to launch a different spaceship for each target that we tried to image).
Just for fun, if you wanted to form the word from Greek roots instead of mixing Latin into it, it'd be "dioscope".
If you stick with the Latin, it's ambiguous whether the combining vowel should be -i-, agreeing with the Latin root ("joviscope") or -o-, agreeing with the Greek root ("jovoscope").
(And for completeness, if you wanted to do it entirely in Latin, the word would probably be "jovivide", but it is generally Not Done to form verbal compounds like that in Latin, unless the verb you're using is either ferre or gerere [both meaning "carry"].)
An example of a real Latin word formed in the same way is "circumspectus" (someone who looks around) => English "circumspect", so one could say in English "jovispect".
Word compounds from a noun stem with the last vowel changed to "i" + a verbal stem + the thematic vowel, in either the masculine or the feminine gender, are numerous in Latin and formed from many verbs, not only from "ferre" and "gerere".
For example there are many animal names, e.g. sanguisuga (blood-sucker = leech), caprimulgus (goat-milker = nightjar), ossifraga (bone-breaker = bearded vulture), vipera (alive-baby-birth-giver = viper) and others. There are also some insulting names formed in this way in Latin, but those are NSFW, so you may try to guess them, as they also correspond in English to the pattern *-*er, like "blood-sucker".
This one seems like a stretch?
I'm also curious why you interpret the formation as "noun stem with final vowel changed to i", as opposed to "noun stem followed by epenthetic i".
The vipers are unusual between snakes by giving birth to live young, instead of laying eggs, like most snakes.
Both "noun stem with final vowel changed to i" and "noun stem followed by epenthetic i" have happened.
The former to the stems ending in "a" or "o", the latter to the stems ending in a consonant. An alternative interpretation would be that for the stems ending in a vowel the final vowel was removed and an epenthetic "i" has been added, but this is a more artificial interpretation, because there was never an intermediate stage having an "o" stem or "a" stem without the final vowel.
There also exists one case of an older compound word where the initial noun was a stem ending in "i", but the final "i" has been dropped, and the verb remained as a bare root, without forming a stem by the addition of a vowel: "avspec-", which means bird-watcher (with the nominative written as "avspex", i.e. "auspex" in the modern spelling, the source of English "auspices"), from "avi-" = bird and "specere", the non-frequentative form of "spectare". Another example of an old compound word with no epenthetic "i" and with only the bare root of the verb is "juudic-" = judge (justice-sayer, from "juus" and "dicere"). With the exception of a few inherited old compound words like these, all the compound noun+verb words coined more recently used an "i" ending for the noun and a verb stem terminated in the vowel corresponding to the gender.
While you were partially right that the compounds with "ferre" and "gerere" are the most numerous, for the obvious reason that one can form such a compound word for any object that can be carried, there are a large number of Latin words made from nouns with other verbs.
*Earth’s atmosphere
Using Earth as a gravitational lens would give you a focal point about 15000 AU (a quarter of a light year) away, far outside the solar system. But with atmospheric diffraction, you can get a focal point within the Earth–Moon system.
The video has a clickable chapter list and a time scrubber, and the other chapters are closely related.
It’s very frustrating to see deceiving titles and the actual content related to the title is 2% of the entire video..
If you were hoping for the technicalities of it, then I can see how it's not what you want. I know what I think is enough about the history of telescopes, so I skipped that part, but I thought the history behind how he came up with the idea fits squarely into the title.
On the other hand almost everyone clicking a video called "Guide to replacing a toilet float valve" is actually looking to replace a toilet float valve.
The concept is by Slava Turyshev and titled "Direct Multipixel Imaging and Spectroscopy of an Exoplanet with a Solar Gravitational Lens Mission". I'm only a casualstronomer and don't consider myself qualified to provide further details. Should be easy enough to find though!
It explains the extraordinary idea of using the sun as a gravitational lens.
The latter seems achievable, if tricky.
Only the discovery of its existence can end the search.
It would be enough to convert a number of atheists to religion… or to simulation theory.
Whereas new telescope = here’s some active chemistry as expected is business as usual.