Updates from outer space: from Earth to K2-18 b

There are some interesting news about the research of exoplanets, but the first step starting from our planet, the Earth. Indeed, Evelyn Macdonald and Nicolas Cowan used the satellite Scicast to detect the transit spectrum of our planet. The idea is to deduce the atmosphere composition, obtaining the Earth's organic signature, and in this way data to confront with exoplanets transit spectrum.

Macdonald, E. J., & Cowan, N. B. (2019). An empirical infrared transit spectrum of Earth: opacity windows and biosignatures. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 489(1), 196-204. doi:10.1093/mnras/stz2047

About two weeks after the pubblication of the previous paper, an international team of astronomers have discovered water vapor in the atmosphere of K2-18 b, an exoplanet that orbit in the habitable zone of the red dwarf K2-18. While it was initially considered a mini-Neptune on its 2015 discovery, the improved data on K2-18b has classified it as a super-Earth, although its size and density make it unlikely to be composed entirely of rocky iron and silicates.

Tsiaras A., Waldmann I. P., Tinetti G., Tennyson J., Yurchenko S. N. (2019). Water vapour in the atmosphere of the habitable-zone eight-Earth-mass planet K2-18 b. Nature Astronomy. doi:10.1038/s41550-019-0878-9

This is water (and snowflakes)

posted by @ulaulaman via @zuppadivetro about #water #snowflakes

When water freezes, the molecules take a definite position in their relations one to another. Snow flakes are made up of molecules in similar manner, always hexagonal, but like most creation of nature, there are seldom two alike.

---

(via zuppadivetro)

L1448-MM: water in space

posted by @ulaulaman about #Astronomy:

One of the most interesting research topics is the star formation. The high weigth chemistry elements could diffusein the universe only with the life cycle of the stars: the birth, the syntesis of helium and of the other elements, the great explosion that (diffusero) in space carbon, iron and so on. But also the early stages in star formation could send in cosmic vacuum some light elements like hydrogen, or also water!
One place in which it can observe not only star formation but also water jets is the L1448 dark cloud in Perseus molecular cloud

In particular there is an interesting object, L1448-MM that presents two bright spots of emission, the cross (A) and the star (B) in the following figure

This is water

posted by @ulaulaman thanks to @archivioDFW

This comics watercolor is drawned by Davide Osenda, a computer engineer and cartoonists. His first comics is about mathematics, the italian graphic novel L'ultima lezione a Gottinga (The last lesson in Gottinga), about Cantor and the mathematics of transfinite numbers. Now it seems that he's working to a comics inspired by This is water, a speech by David Foster Wallace. So I propose you the audio of that speech: