Webb observes exoplanet that may have an exotic helium and carbon atmosphere
science.nasa.gov
science.nasa.gov
"A Carbon-rich Atmosphere on a Windy Pulsar Planet", PSR J2322–2650b.
No one bothered to link to it, but fortunately Google picked it up.
What a weird setup.
I love all of this crazy stuff we've been finding recently. And not that this planet could support it, but I also love what this unexpected diversity in planetary bodies means for the possibility of weird and unpredictable formulas for life.
I hope we keep finding crazy stuff like this. I hope it accelerates. I hope we find life soon. I need it.
Whatever the first civilization is to cause something like vacuum collapse could destroy the entire universe at the speed of light. Maybe it's already happened somewhere and is currently propagating our way.
Also, I would bet on there being lots of little filters rather than one great one. Stack a dozen or so independent filters that only 1% of upstart life can develop through, and you can easily explain the apparent absence of life capable of broadcasting their existence, making life as developed as humanity extremely rare.
Maybe only 1% of stellar systems are arranged appropriately with a Jovian planet to sweep the inner system clean of killer comets and meteors. Maybe the conditions for unicellular life only occur on 1% of nominally terrestrial worlds. Maybe only 1% of unicellular life develops in a way that has a hereditary mechanism that is susceptible to random mutation, so evolution has something to work with. Maybe the jump from unicellular to multicellular is extremely unlikely to occur; it did take billions of years on Earth after all, its clearly not something that you can count on happening a week later. And maybe the chance that multicellular life develops in a direction that will eventually develop animals capable of making advanced tools is extremely rare too. Real life evolution isn't like a game of Spore, it's not a computer game with a defined goal that some force is working towards. Evolution likes robust reproducers like bugs a lot more than it likes clever monkeys. Maybe when intelligent animals do happen to evolve, they, like dolphins or octopus or corvids, almost always lack the physical characteristics necessary to put their brains towards the problem of the scientific method and industrialization. Maybe when such species even do exist, they usually socially stagnate in preindustrial times, as humanity did for a long time, and get stuck there because their culture values social stability more than innovation. Maybe only 1% manage to not nuke themselves out of existence within a few years of inventing nukes.
Stack a few of these sort of considerations up, and before long Fermi's "paradox" stops seeming very paradoxical.
Life may have existed elsewhere but it can be incredibly difficult to get started, let alone having higher intelligence coexist in the same vicinity of space at the same time!
Tack on that it appears space is expanding faster than the speed of light…
(The worst example of this I've seen was a few years back, when CNN briefly used a picture of a cow to "illustrate" an article about coconut milk).
Now, would clouds around such a weird planet take such a familiar shape? I doubt it. But going with that familiar shape is probably better then making up something weird to happen at the stretched ends.
The terminator is only secondarily significant here, but since it lies in a plane perpendicular to this axis, any bands should be parallel to it. But since this means that there will be a "hot side" and a "cold side" and convective cells between these will probably eliminate any banding.
> it's still spinning pretty dang fast, enough that the gas doesn't have
> to settle into hot and cold sides.
Except that by spinning on the same axis [more correctly, on axes normal to the same plane] at the same rate the atmosphere is stationary in the co-rotating frame. That's what it means to be tidally locked. The gas is already divided into a hot side (always facing the star) and a cold side (always facing away).
They use H2 instead of He. Is that good enough?
* It's probably too hot there (2000K in the cold part) for fullerene. The atmosphere there is mostly C2, C3 and CO. (CO is mentioned in the paper as a very good guess, but not mentioned in the press release.)
* If you fill a fullerene with H2 or He, it will float less instead of more.
I didn't think they would float (but I can see how "hanging out" could be read that way).
Anyway, at so high pressure and density, I expect molecules with big voids to be crushed.
Now I'm wondering if the planet is tidally locked, otherwise the forces on the extended and retracted bits of the lemon would shift widely as the planet rotates. Actually we could then model the extended bit as a giant tidal wave, er, tidal cloud. What a world.