Alien Oxygen Atmosphere Discovered (on Stars!)

Our planetary surveys are nowhere near Star Trek's strike rate - they keep finding worlds stuffed with green-skinned females, humanoid societies, and thinly veiled metaphors for the situations they left behind a few hundred light (and regular) years ago.  We find rocks which could freeze, explode and crush organic life just by looking at it.  Now we've found a couple of Earth-sized oxygen atmosphered bodies, which would be all the way M-Class except for one thing: they're stars.

Specifically, they're "white dwarfs": old stars who've burned all their hydrogen fuel, gone through the red giant stages where they fuse their way up to heavier elements, but lack the mass to supernova and collapse into neutron stars or black holes.  This is actually what'll happen to most stars, a relatively calm and cold fate, but there's no explosion so you don't hear about it much.

The stars were identified by scientists sifting through data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), an eight year examination of the universe with a two point five meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory.  Working at the University of Warwick and Kiel University, they identified stars with oxygen atmospheres at the very edge of the supernova-explosion mass limit.  More massive stars can fuse heavier elements, and these stars had just enough mass to fuse all their carbon, exposing their oxygen-neon core, but not quite enough to collapse that core into explosion.

The stars are instead sustained by electron degeneracy pressure, where every atom just about elbows all the other atoms away, and will remain so until it's eventually eaten by a black hole.  Because you have to remember that everything eventually will be.

Luke McKinney

2 Earth-sized bodies with oxygen rich atmospheres http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/2_earth-sized_bodies/

Comments

[James]

Wow you can write a few paragraphs without going into some 60's like rant. Good for you.

[christmas gifts]

Wow....Does it mean there are aliens even on the stars? I don't know much about these things but it always amazes me about aliens and the world outside our planet.

[Narendra Nath]

Our anticipations depend on the precision and accuracy of cosmic measurements. So we need not give weightage to such news unless confirmed by more than couple of location and measurements made independently. Just having oxygen is onething but having a life form is another on either a planet or a star!

[ccAudi]

What it means that scientists design technology to yield results that confirm their wishes and needs. 'I found a planet!"... sure it's 30x the size of Jupiter and orbits 10 miles above the surface of the star. Hardly... Now we find oxygen in atmospheres of planets we believe exist based on pue conjecture. Nah, it's not true. It's making gold from combining tin and lead.