Timeline for In what detail can you examine a distant planet's atmosphere?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
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| Feb 28, 2023 at 20:57 | comment | added | Yulian | Thank you a ton, you've trully exhausted my question! For once my curiosity has been satiated and with all of your knowledge that you shared, I just can't wait to start worldbuilding that time period! Thank you again! :D | |
| Feb 28, 2023 at 19:57 | comment | added | AtmosphericPrisonEscape | @Yulian: With High-resolution spectroscopy of the near-future you could probably detect a few useful molecules and prove there's an atmosphere. Not more than that. You wouldn't know where the molecules sit, but I guess you could handwave-magic that away in a scifi-setting with "advanced hybrid AI-climate physics models". Concerning your JWST question in another comment: See Fig. 4 in sci.esa.int/documents/34594/36271/… We'd need milliarcsecond, not arcsecond resolution power for your distant stars, and $10^3-10^6$lower contrast curves. | |
| Feb 28, 2023 at 18:32 | comment | added | Yulian | And 100 parsecs is a 1/6th of the distance I'm aiming for, so I'm guessing there would be no reliable way to get anything else than a vague estimate, or even worse, just an assumption, out of the planet's atmosphere? | |
| Feb 28, 2023 at 18:30 | vote | accept | Yulian | ||
| Feb 28, 2023 at 16:31 | history | edited | AtmosphericPrisonEscape | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added section about detection biases
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| Feb 28, 2023 at 15:22 | comment | added | AtmosphericPrisonEscape | @Yulian: If infrared interferometry tech existed, and it would be efficient to throw it into space in large ELT-like arrays (L2 would be way more stable than Near earth orbit, also consider that currently 2-3 ELTs worldwide are scheduled to come online in the 2025-2030s ), then the angular resolution could help you to separate stellar from planetary signal. This should be enough for the characterization of a nearby (<100 parsec) terrestrial exoplanet in the habitable zone of a reasonably quiet star. | |
| Feb 28, 2023 at 15:19 | comment | added | AtmosphericPrisonEscape | @Yulian: Well, as a baseline I wouldn't expect much good info on worldbuilding.se, most answers I see here are just parroted science memes. ELT=Extremely large telescope, yes. An ideal array would be in space, as you want to observe in the infrared, but the atmosphere blocks most infrared (hence, JWST in space). An array helps as a game changer mainly with angular resolution, not necessarily with signal strength (the signal is proportional to only the number of dishes, whereas resolution is propto their distance, which is modular). | |
| Feb 28, 2023 at 14:26 | comment | added | Yulian | Goodness gracious, you didn't throw in just 2 cents, you put here more useful info than everyone else combined! Thank you a ton for everything that you wrote! Now, I've got some questions to dig a bit deeper: -ELT means "Extremely Large Telescope", right? -Would an array of such telescopes be more efficient spread on Earth, on Earth's orbit or on the L points? -With that ELT array deployed, would we get a precision when it comes to the composition in the sets of tens, or to the sets of ones? | |
| Feb 28, 2023 at 12:48 | history | answered | AtmosphericPrisonEscape | CC BY-SA 4.0 |