NASA Gets a Rare Look at a Rocky Exoplanet's Surface [LHS 3844b]

Jet Propulsion Laboratory Spitzer Telescope site ^ | August 19, 2019 | Calla Cofield

[Telepathic Intruder]

Christiaan Huygens once looked at Mars with a telescope, and said it would be an awful waste of space if Mars were uninhabited. But it's very likely that the entire universe is, with only a few tiny exceptions. How many factors make life possible, and how closely do they all have to coincide? Obviously you need the right temperature for liquid water, an atmosphere, a good amount of heavy elements including carbon, and a stable sun. But there are also a myriad of smaller things that may or may not be necessary. A magnetic field, a large moon, continental drift, a Jupiter-like planet in the outer solar system to shepherd away rogue asteroids, etc. How often do all these factors combine as in our case? And yet, Earth is still hit by occasional extinction events. A single gamma ray burst could end the whole show. Life may be so rare in the universe that we are the only example, at least in this galaxy.

Just an optimistic thought to put an extra skip in your step.

[SunkenCiv]

Cosmology and Exoplanets Win 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics
James Peebles, who helped found the field of cosmology, shares the prize with Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, discoverers of the first exoplanet around another sunlike star
By Clara Moskowitz on October 8, 2019
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cosmology-and-exoplanets-win-2019-nobel-prize-in-physics1/

[SunkenCiv]

"To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow." -- Metrodorus, 4th c BC Greek philosopher

"Heaven and earth are large, yet in the whole of space they are but as a small grain of rice. How unreasonable it would be to suppose that, besides the heaven and earth which we can see, there are no other heavens and no other earths." -- Teng Mu, 13th c AD Chinese philosopher

[misanthrope]

Great thread!

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks! "Hey, Rocky, watch me pull an Exoplanet ouf ot my hat! Nothin' up my sleeve..."