My initial idea for this project was to find a correlation between age and happiness. But as I looked through data, the relationship of happiness and life expectancy around the world caught my eye. I’m sure you’ve all heard the expression “laughter is the best medicine”, and think about when you were laughing, you were probably happy. So is there any merit behind this statement? To find out I charted some numbers in my own HR-diagram. The data looks at an average level of happiness from many countries around the world and compares it to the average life expectancy of said country. Here is the end result:

Compared to the typical HR-diagram there is not a true ‘main sequence’ since each country is separate and does not progress over time. One could say the main sequence of the EI-diagram is around a happiness of 4-8, and a life expectancy of anywhere between 50-80 years. On the other hand, a correlation is quite apparent; as happiness increases so does life expectancy. But is this due to purely being happy or other factors? One alternate explanation is that countries displaying lower life expectancy are also third-world countries while ones showing a higher life expectancy are countries such as the US or Switzerland. This trend could be explained by lack of proper health care and less happiness due to poor living conditions. So it is hard to sort out what the real cause is. I am willing to bet that happiness does, by itself, have a positive effect on health. One example being Costa Rica, which is considered a third-world country, but it has the highest happiness rating (at 8.5) and a high life expectancy (80yrs). Therefore, happiness must play some role unless there is an underlying bias not being addressed. Realistically a combination of factors including happiness, quality of life, sanitation, and diet all effect the length of a persons’s life.

Sources:

Veenhoven, R., World Database of Happiness, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Assessed on (10/16/13) at: http://worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl

While many believe the search for extraterrestrial life to be inherently tied to the observation of neighboring stars and their subsequent systems, some have decided to turn their gaze elsewhere. Recently, a team of astronomers in Hawaii discovered a new exoplanet, not orbiting a star, but floating alone through space.

At 80 light-years away, PSO J318.5-22 is the lowest mass, free-floating object found to date. That’s not the surprising part, however. What has got scientists running around like coffee-frenzied hamsters is the discovery that the surface temperature of said rogue planet is about 1,100^O Kelvin, or 1,520^O Fahrenheit for the laypeople. Granted, while that is far too hot for habitation, it does point out a very important fact: it is possible for free-floating exoplanets to retain heat in the cold abyss of interstellar space. Fascinating, I know. But this actually has huge implications for the search for life beyond Earth.

It has been hypothesized before that rogues might be able to maintain their heat away from any parent star. Hypothetically speaking, if a planet had a thick atmosphere with a high hydrogen content, its intense greenhouse effect would be able to retain a much higher surface temperature than Earth’s atmosphere is capable of. In addition, being far away from any star would mean that harmful UV radiation, which strips most orbitally-bound planets of their outer atmospheres, wouldn’t be able to reach said planet. Thus, its retention capabilities would be unaffected for most of its lifetime. When you add this to the fact that radioactive decay will continue to produce heat deep in the planet’s core, enabling almost permanent volcanic activity, you are left with a nearly self-sufficient island of heat in the interstellar sea. An island that could even maintain temperatures above the melting temperature of water (or higher, in the case of PSO J324.5-22), and thus feature large surface oceans.

Based on research done here on Earth, scientists believe that it is very possible that life could originate and evolve under these conditions. One of the leading theories for how life began on Earth says that microbes were born around deep sea volcanic vents, utilizing chemical energy from minerals found in volcanic material. Such vents could potentially exist on free-floating planets, although the potential for complex or intentional life is very small, given the impossibility of photosynthesis in the darkness of space.

While we can’t say that the possibility of life on PSO J324.5-22 is very high, what we can say is that this discovery has changed our understanding of habitability, and opened our eyes to an entirely new avenue in the pursuit of extraterrestrial life. 

http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.0457

http://cdn4.sci-news.com/images/2013/10/image_1450_1-PSO-J3185-22.jpg

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/10/tech/space-new-planet/index.html

150 million light years away, in the constellation Perseus, a new discovery has been made. There, a white dwarf star named GD 61 has been shown to support a planetary system. Just last week, researchers at Cambridge and the University of Warwick published an article with convincing evidence that the system can support Earth-like planets.

This image shows the white dwarf star GD 61. Image credit: Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg / SIMBAD via Sci-News.com.

For a planet to be Earth-like, it must have a similar size and composition. If the planet is then located in the habitable zone of a star similar in size to our sun, it would be hard NOT to imagine life there. The problem is, we aren’t sure just how common other “Earths” are!

To determine this requires years of careful observation, noting how many of these exoplanets we are able to find. This article, published in the journal Science, was the first to find a star system (outside our own) that we could prove contained planets made of water and rocky material.

An artist’s interpretation of what Earth-like planets may look like. Photo: Robert Hurt via solstation.com.

The researchers used Hubble, Keck I, Keck II, and NASA’s FUSE to detect a large asteroid orbiting the star. It was large and approximately 26% water by mass. It is very similar in size and composition to Ceres, the largest asteroid detected so far in the Kuiper Belt (of our own solar system). They hypothesize that it was formed from the breakup of a small, terrestrial planet like Earth, that met its demise as its star died. Even if it was not, scientists say it is impossible that the system could contain planetessimals so large without accreting planets.

This is an artist’s impression of a rocky and water-rich asteroid being torn apart by the strong gravity of the white dwarf star GD 61. Image credit: Mark A. Garlick, Space-art.co.uk / University of Warwick / University of Cambridge via Sci-News.com

These hypothetical planets (which they are now trying to detect, but may have been demolished) would have orbited a sun-like star and have been composed of water and heavy elements like oxygen, silicon, and magnesium: key ingredients for life! It had not been found earlier because most research is conducted on living star systems (ones that still actively fuse atoms in their cores; i.e. not white dwarves). Perhaps only a few billion years ago, there could have been a planet with abundant life, just like ours!

The future of our sun: a red giant. Photo credit: Karen aka CharmedQuarkGirl on Flickr.

In fact, this extrasolar system gives researchers an eerie look into our own future. In approximately 12 billion years, this might be what our neighborhood looks like. As the sun progresses through its life, it will turn in to a red giant and then a white dwarf, just like GD 61. Who knows what future civilizations will think if they spot the remnants of our home floating around a dead star?

Sources:

http://astrobiology.com/2013/10/watery-asteroid-discovered-in-dying-star-points-to-habitable-exoplanets.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD_61

Recently astrophysicists at Cambridge and Warwick have discovered a rocky, yet water rich asteroid orbiting a white dwarf (GD 61 to be specific) about 170 light years from our solar system. But this was no ordinary rock.The rocky body was found using images from the Hubble and the Keck telescope on Hawaii, but through reanalyzing the images a rich presence of oxygen was discovered. Exactly how is put better by the scientists themselves: “The Hubble and Keck data allows the researchers to identify the different chemical elements that are polluting the outer layers white dwarf. Using a sophisticated computer model of the white dwarf atmosphere, developed by Detlev Koester from the University of Kiel, they can then infer the chemical composition of the shredded minor planet” (Boris Gaensicke). This lead scientist to conclude that the rocky body had once been a part of a larger planet comprised of at least 26% water by mass. Compared to the Earth’s only .023%, that’s a lot of water! So why is this presumably life-less rock important to us. We have previously discovered water out side of our solar system, but this is the first time it has not been in the atmosphere of a large gas giant.

An Artists Depiction of the Asteroid

The planet was likely destroyed around 200 million years ago by gravitation force when GD 61 went from being a star slightly larger than our sun to a white dwarf and when the a yet to be seen larger planet knocked the smaller one out of its normal orbit. Physicists have compared the previous planet to one called Ceres that is thought to be one of the largest contributors to water here on Earth. The destroyed planet also probably had ice below the surface like Ceres. Hopefully this new knowledge can tell us more about the formation of our solar system and the necessities required for life.

Sources:

Photo: (Crdt. Mark A. Garlick, space-art.co.uk, University of Warwick and University of Cambridge)

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/4407/20131011/water-rich-asteroid-orbiting-star-gd-61-shows-life-exist.htm

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/uow-wdi100313.php

Often times, the search for life in the universe is left to science. And often times, the search for meaning in the universe is left to philosophy. Are the two fields much different from each other? The field of philosophy often examines the natural world, posing questions in hopes of finding answers. Science does the sames. The field of philosophy also changes over times, as new discoveries and questions arise from previous answers. The same can be said for science. So why is it that the two areas of study are often disassociated from one another? Why must the two be separated?

Philosophers and scientists are one and the same

Both philosophy and science share a common goal: to better understand both the universe and humanity’s role in it. But there seems to be a divide in one aspect; philosophy often uses questions to find more questions, while science uses answers to find more answers. Philosophy searches in the infinite, while science exists in the finite world. Yet these studies are not as divided as one might think. In fact, philosophy can be used in the scientific world to help keep the scientists’ perspectives in check, so that they might have a sense of morality as they begin their experimentation. And philosophy can also benefit from science because it allows for the philosophers to pose new, in-depth questions to what has been found in the physical world. Even though these two fields can often be regarded as opposites, they share more in common than one might think.

A comic on science and philosophy

In the end, both science and philosophy promote both questioning and personal exploration. Both contain answers, and both contain questions. While they are not exactly the same, they contain many similarities, and can be used together to form a better understanding of life in the universe.

Image Sources:

http://undsci.berkeley.edu/images/us101/philo_sci.jpg

http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2011/300/8/6/science_vs_philosophy_by_dye882003-d4e5n4k.jpg

Scientists have recently discovered a low-mass planet, drifting around in space without a star to orbit.  Difficult to discover due to the lack of a bright star nearby to signal its location, free floating planets are in fact easier for scientists to study than those near stars.  WIthout a source of brighter light nearby, actual direct imaging of the planet can be taken without the interference stars normally give.  The planet was discovered while scientists in Hawaii tried to find Brown Dwarf stars, using the Pan-STARRS 1 wide-field survey telescope.  However unlikely due to the raw amount of data that the PS1 telescope receives, a grand total of around 4,000 terabytes, the planet was discovered over the course of a two-year mapping project that also discovered the distance of the planet to Earth.  Although much larger and younger, the planet strongly resembles the conditions found upon Jupiter, which scientists hope will be able to shed new light on an early gas-giant’s life.  

http://annesastronomynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Artists-conception-of-PSO-J318.5-22..jpg

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/10/tech/space-new-planet/index.html?iref=allsearch 

http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/info/press-releases/LonelyPlanet/

A planet’s lifetime is finite.  Even our own cosmic utopia Earth will die out when the Sun reaches later stages of its life.  As a star ages, it expands, heating up and shifting its habitable zone further than the orbit of Earth-like planets.  As a result, liquid water ceases to exist on these planets, killing any chance of surface life on the planet.  In our case, we have about 1.7 billion years left before Earth turns into a terrestrial hot-house like Venus is today.  The Sun will be about 118% brighter and hotter than it is today, evaporating out oceans.  Considering Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years, about 70% of its lifetime in the Sun’s habitable zone has already passed.

Scientists believe that the best place to look for intelligent aliens is around small stars called red dwarf stars.  These stars are only about 1/5 the size of the Sun, but this results in a habitable lifetime for planets that well exceeds Earth’s.  These stars, scientists believe, should be the main targets of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) missions, since any civilization there doesn’t have the same time constraints as those around large stars.  Additionally, NASA’s Kepler mission has turned up evidence of many Earth-like planets possibly located around red dwarfs.

 A visual guide to a star’s habitable zone based on its size.  Source: Discovery

Kepler gives us information about distance from Earth, orbital period, and size.  It does not, however, give us any information about the atmospheric composition, tectonic activity, or tilt of the planet.  It also doesn’t help us determine the age of the host star, meaning we do not the evolutionary status of any hypothetical life that exists on these worlds.  Using this information, researchers have determined that the exoplanet Gilese 518g is “the most habitable exoplanet found to date”.  It orbits a red dwarf star, which means that its habitable conditions are believed to exist for another 5 billion years longer than Earth’s.

There is, of course, the threat of tidal locking occurring quickly on planets that are close to the red dwarf, because its smaller size actually accelerates the process.  If tidal locking occurs, life on planet will become impossible.

The most fun part of scifi is separating the sci from the fi. So, naturally, after watching Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, featuring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, I feel the need to tear apart the plausible from the improbable, just as the shards of space debris tear apart the Hubble telescope in the opening scene…
Spoiler alert? Perhaps… Though it honestly doesn’t matter. The events of the film are almost non-importnat compared to how it makes you feel just sitting there, watching it.

The opening scene shows Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) fixing a piece of the Hubble Telescope and Clooney (does it really matter what his character’s name is?) plays the technician assisting her. The crew then receives a message that the Russians blew up their own satellite with a missile (the judgement of the Russians is an insulting inaccuracy in its own right). The debris then proceeded to gain on Hubble and obliterate the telescope, spaceship and (most of) the crew.

Impending Obliteration 1 of the Hubble Crew

Obliteration 2 of the International Space Station

There are a few things wrong with this scenario. First, The debris would most likely orbit closer to Earth than the other satellites because of its acceleration.  As the Russian satellite was impacted by the missile, its acceleration would have increased (f=ma), bringing it closer to Earth, where orbiting objects have a higher acceleration. We can see how this works in the following equation:

We can see that acceleration (a) and distance from earth (R) are inversely proportional, meaning that as acceleration increases, the radius decreases.

Basically, if the Hubble, International Space Station, and Chinese Space Station, as well as the debris were orbiting at the same altitude, they would be orbiting at the same speed, and would never meet each other.

Though to add insult to injury, satellites do not orbit Earth at the same speed, anyway. Therefore, even if the space debris was able to accelerate at the same altitude, it would not of hit Hubble and ISS and the Chinese Space Station.

While on the topic of orbitals, and how each satellite has its own, I would like to point out the scene where Clooney and Bullock fly from Hubble to ISS using a jet pack.:

The astronauts make their way from Hubble to ISS via jetpack.

This is one of the biggest inaccuracies. Sometimes spaceships do not even have enough fuel to escape Hubble’s orbit.  A mere jet pack would not get the job done.

Despite its loopholes, the movie wasn’t half bad. It was hard to see Clooney and Bullock as their characters, rather than simply Clooney and Bullock. Though their stardom outshines their characters, they did an excellent job conveying the emotions that made the movie so successful. The whole time, the audience is at the edge of their seats, from a nice mix of plot and character reaction.

The scientific inaccuracies can be overlooked when we realize the real story being conveyed: It is of a melancholy woman who, when put in the biggest survival situation of her life, learns to appreciate life and find the will to live, once again. We couldn’t get such a dramatic coming of age with real science, now could we?

During its search for brown dwarfs, the PS1 telescope stumbled across a special planet, one that is not orbiting around a star. To be precise, it’s not moving at all, completely stationary. This planet, named PSO J318.5-22 after its discovering telescope is also one of the lightest, if not the lightest, free-floating object we have ever discovered. And it is the first free-floating planet we’ve discovered. Chemically, this planet contains elements one would normally find in a gas-giant orbiting a young star. Although PSO J318.5-22 is only 12 million years old, basically fresh out of the womb in terms of planetary ages, it is certainly don’t orbiting around anything at all. It is 80 light-years away from Earth. When you mass it with Jupiter, it would weigh roughly 6 times more than it.

A particularly special thing about this lonely planet is its color. When we first named colors of stars: white dwarfs and brown dwarfs, it’s because at a distance, white dwarfs look white, and in fact, they are extremely white, and brown dwarfs look brown to us but they are in fact very red in color. The extraordinary thing about PSO J318.5-22 is that even through a telescope, it looked redder than a brown dwarf did. And since it is not orbiting or close to a star, it is much easier for us to observe it. This is certainly a breakthrough in science because we have not previously discovered a lone planet. There will certainly be more similar and more astound discoveries in the future, especially since we have only recently in the past decade began to rapidly discover exoplanets. As Dr. Eugene Magnier of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa describe this discovery, “searching for a needle in a haystack”. Apparently, this particular discovery of the PSO J318.5-22 was like finding a needle in ” the biggest haystack that exists in astronomy”. As small as the probability is, time will be the cornerstone of astronomical discovery in years to come.

http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/5739/a-strange-lonely-planet-that-has-no-star

Knowing when one is going to die is a frightening idea. I am sure very few people want to know their date of death. Predicting when a human or any other animal will die is impossible, unless you trust fortune tellers. Recently a more trustworthy group, tye scientists at the UEA’s school of Environmental Sciences, have been working on predicting when we all will die and they discovered when. That is, they formulated an accurate estimate as to when Earth will not be habitable.

Conservative and optimistic estimates of our solar system’s habitable zone.
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Unit7/life.html

According to their research, in 1.75 to 3.25 billion years, the Earth will no longer be in our solar system’s habitable zone. We will exit the habitable zone because as our Sun evolves it becomes larger and as it grows larger it becomes brighter. Brightness and solar temperature are inextricably linked, therefore the Sun will heat up as it grows bigger and brighter.Increasing solar temperatures, will force the habitable zone to grow wider and migrate farther from the Sun. Fortunately, and unfortunately, Earth orbits the Sun in an ellipse fixed at 1.5×10⁸ kilometers from the Sun’s core. Our enduring orbit, has provided Earth with stable conditions conducive to life for the last four billion years. Unfortunately, we cannot follow the habitable zone’s outward migration and the implications of being outside the habitable zone are quite severe.

The Sun will eventually become a red giant. Consequently it will be larger, brighter and hotter.
http://www.physics.uc.edu/~hanson/ASTRO/LECTURENOTES/W07/Evolution/Page4.html

Once outside, the intensity of the Sun’s heat will initiate a runaway greenhouse effect. Higher temperatures will cause liquid water on Earth’s surface to evaporate and travel high into the atmosphere. At such altitudes, UV radiation, unblocked by the ozone layer below, will destroy water vapor, leaving only hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The hydrogen molecules will zip off into space as they easily reach Earth’s escape velocity. Without sufficient amounts of hydrogen, Earth will lack the ingredients to create water. As water vapor is destroyed in the upper atmosphere, liquid water on Earth’s surface will continue to evaporate into the lower atmosphere. To compound the situation, evaporated water vapor in the lower atmosphere will contribute significantly to the warming because it is a greenhouse gas. The subsequent hotter temperatures will allow the atmosphere to hold more water vapor. As a result, more surface water evaporates and a destructive positive feedback loop sets in that will heat Earth’s surface and bake its crust far past the point of habitability.

Earth’s future is bleak. At least, we know when this will happen and that is not for a very long time. Us, humans will long be extinct, suffocated in the aftermath of a large asteroid impact or felled by our own internal conflicts. But, we could somehow survive long enough for ‘leaving the habitable zone’ to be a daily concern, and by then hopefully we will have colonized Mars. Thus, we could perpetuate our existence a few more billion years. Eventually, Mars will not be in the habitable zone, so we would have to move  again, and again when the Sun explodes, and again when the exoplanet we have conquered becomes inhabitable and again when that star explodes, and again, and again, and again. Then we will have returned to our migratory beginnings, as hunters and gatherers, except on galactic scale.

Sources

“Earth’s Habitable Lifetime.” Astrobiology Web. N.p., 20 Sept. 2013. Web. 10 Oct. 2013. <http://astrobiology.com/2013/09/earths-habitable-lifetime.html&gt;.