Arrogant religion takes another blow

Posted on June 5, 2010 by Michael

To the chagrin of religious egos, scientists have found Titan has conditions possibly suitable for life.

The first paper, in the journal Icarus, shows that hydrogen gas flowing throughout the planet’s atmosphere disappeared at the surface. This suggested that alien forms could in fact breathe.

The second paper, in the Journal of Geophysical Research, concluded that there was lack of the chemical on the surface.

Scientists were then led to believe it had been possibly consumed by life.

Researchers had expected sunlight interacting with chemicals in the atmosphere to produce acetylene gas. But the Cassini probe did not detect any such gas.

Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at Nasa Ames Research Centre, at Moffett Field, California who led the research, said: “We suggested hydrogen consumption because it’s the obvious gas for life to consume on Titan, similar to the way we consume oxygen on Earth.

It feels good that I don’t need to intentionally misinterpret scientific studies because they contradict long-held, traditionally based beliefs. The fact that there may be other life in our solar system isn’t all that surprising, especially since exceedingly strong evidence for ancient life on Mars has already been confirmed.

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Just a little more astronomy

Posted on October 28, 2008 by Michael

This is a bit much astronomy for a primarily biology blog, I know. Unless something great pops up, this will be the last astronomy post for at least a little while.

Some new research into the tidal forces of stars and their planets has yielded some interesting results.

Planets around small mass stars may only have a billion-year window during which life can form. This is the implication of research into the tidal forces that can pull a planet into a tighter orbit around a star.

The so-called habitable zone around a star is loosely defined as planetary orbits in which water would be liquid, not vapor or solid, on the planets’ surface. These orbits are closer-in for smaller (less bright) stars.

However, habitability is not a permanent property of a planet.

“For some planets around low mass stars, they are not going to hang around in the habitable zone forever,” says Rory Barnes of the Lunar and Planetary Institute at the University of Arizona. “They are going to be pulled out.”

The pulling is due to tidal forces that arise because the gravitational attraction between planet and star is not uniform over their surfaces.

Barnes and his colleagues have shown that the tidal forces around a small mass star can draw a planet from the habitable zone on the order of a billion years, as reported in a recent issue of Astrobiology Journal.

If some of these migrating planets can be detected, they could provide a test of the Gaia hypothesis, which says that life can force changes to a planet in order to keep it in a habitable state.

So basically life may only have a 1 billion year window to form. That certainly isn’t the case across the board since this research applies specifically to low mass stars. But is it at all surprising that life on Earth originated somewhere between 200 million and 1,000 million years ago, i.e., within the first billion years of the planet’s existence?

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