WE MIGHT HAVE JUST DETECTED ALIEN LIFE
THIS IS NOT CLICKBAIT IM SERIOUS

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, we analyzed the atmosphere of the exoplanet K2-18b.


K2-18b is half the size of Neptune, and so is right between the sizes of a really big rocky planet or a really small ice giant, so we don’t really know which one it is. What we do know though is that it has a thick atmosphere made of mostly hydrogen, and it might have an global ocean of water.
This type of planet is called a Hycean Planet, or a planet with a thick hydrogen atmosphere and a huge ocean.

But hydrogen and water isn’t the only thing that was detected. Methane and carbon dioxide were also found, which are chemicals created by life. However, they are also created by non-living processes, so c02 and ch4 isn’t a definite biosignature yet.
What is a biosignature is dimethyl sulfide, a chemical produced by so many ocean bacteria it’s called the “smell of the sea”.

Hints of dimethyl sulfide were detected on K2-18b, an ocean planet. This detection is not confirmed, and needs more data, but if it is real, then we just detected our first sign of alien life outside the solar system.

telling minecraft players about planets
its been a while, but today's planet is Phailinsiam

(Fail-in-see-ahm)

Phailinsiam, also known as GJ 3470 b, is an ice giant exoplanet about 96 light-years away from Earth. It's 12x bigger than Earth, making it a bit smaller than Neptune.

Phailinsiam, despite being an ice giant, is over 600 degrees fahrenheit. It's only called an "ice" giant because it's likely made of mostly water, like Uranus or Neptune. But Phailinsiam won't remain an ice giant much longer.
That's because it's atmosphere is currently being blasted into space at a rate of 100,000 tons per second. That means it looses half the mass of planet Earth every billion years. At that rate, in just a few billion years, Phailinsiam will lose its atmosphere entirely and just become an exposed core, or a Chthonian Planet.

Phailinsiam's atmosphere is also the most well-studied of any exoplanet, and we even know the color of the planet: a hazy blue. So, it makes sense that the planet was named after a blue Siamese sapphire.

Made a new video for my colonization of the solar system project: youtu.be/vtY8nr0UdTQ?si=Ycz8xSdSU3AjpPCc

Member interviews are officially back! Peep our interview with YokaiS and learn a bit about their modeling, animation, robotics, data packing and inspirations!

The potentially rocky exoplanet size comparison
This is a chart I've made of various rocky exoplanets, compared to Earth. They are:

WD 1145+017 b: the smallest known exoplanet, its about the size of Haumea

Draugr, Poltergeist, and Phobetor: These were some of the first few exoplanets ever discovered, and they orbit a dead star called a pulsar. Draugr is about the size of Mercury and Poltergeist and Phobetor are 4x bigger than Earth.

Kua'kua: Also known as LHS 3844 b, this is an exoplanet about the size of Earth, which has been studied by the James Webb Space Telescope and was confirmed to have almost no atmosphere.

Kepler-452 b: a potentially habitable exoplanet 5x the mass of Earth.

Janssen: this one's also known as 55 cancri e, but is properly named Janssen. It's a lava planet 8x the mass of Earth.

Kepler-22b: another potentially habitable exoplanet, about 9x the mass of earth

Enaiposha: This planet, also known as GJ 1214b, is the most likely candidate we have for a planet made almost entirely of water, or an ocean planet. "Enaiposha" literally means "large body of water" in the Maa language.

TOI-849b: the largest known rocky planet, at 40x the mass of Earth. It's most likely the exposed core of a gas giant that got its atmosphere blown away by radiation. This is also known as a Chthonian Planet.

Here's part one of the Colonization of the Asteroid Belt, part of my Colonization of the Solar System series im uploading to youtube!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-TA3LQef9A

Just found a second size comparison I thought was cool

This is the planet Janssen compared to Earth and Mars.
Janssen is a giant lava planet 8x more massive than Earth orbiting a star called Copernicus.

These are 10 real gas giant exoplanets in our galaxy, with jupiter for comparison.

All 10 of these planets are "hot Jupiters" meaning they're large, gas giant planets that are scorching hot. Some of these reach over 2,000 degrees.
(Also note: other than HD 189733 b, we dont know what these planets look like, these are just artists interpretations. Even for HD 189733b, we only know that its blue in color, not what its clouds look like)

india has become the first country to land on the south pole of the moon with their successful chandrayaan-3 mission today

Telling Minecraft players about planets 16
technically this is like 20 but i didnt count the last few so whatever

Today's planet is Perwana

Perwana is a gas giant planet orbiting a star called Shama. It's about half the mass of Jupiter and orbits its star between the distance Earth and Mars orbit the Sun.
Shama, the star, is smaller than the Sun and only half as bright.

"Shama" is an Urdu word for "lamp" or "flame", and Perwana is another Urdu word meaning "moth". The planet and star were named by astronomers from Pakistan in 2019. They're also called HD 99109 and HD 99109 b respectively, but the Perwana and Shama names are less boring and recognized as official, so I'll use them.

So, Shama and Perwana make up a pretty typical stellar system. A small star orbited by a small gas giant. If it was just this, the system would be pretty unremarkable, we know of hundreds just like it.
What makes it unique is what could be there.

A study from 2007 suggests that Perwana could host Earth-sized trojan planets in its orbit.
But first, what is a trojan planet?

A trojan is a type of object caught in the orbit of a larger planet, trapped in places called Lagrange Points, where the gravity of a planet and the star it orbits are equal, making the objects stay in place. All the planets in our solar system have trojan asteroids caught in our orbits. Earth has a few, Jupiter has a few thousand. Theoretically, a planet could form in these Lagrange points, making the two planets share an orbit.
However, this is usually unstable, as the gravity of the two planets eventually cause them to collide.
However, with Perwana, its different. Because of the size of the planet and the star, as well as Perwana's distance, stable trojan planets are possible. They could even be the size of Earth.

These trojan planets are only hypothetical, and havent been seen, but they could even potentially be habitable, because Perwana is inside the outer edge of Shama's habitable zone, where the temperature is right for liquid water to exist on a planet's surface.
This means that, optimistically, Perwana could potentially have two Earth-sized habitable planets in its Lagrange points, immediately doubling the chances for life to exist in the system.

The loneliest stars in the Universe

Most stars form inside galaxies. A galaxy is just a massive conglomeration of millions or billions of stars with a lot of gas, dark matter, and usually, a really big black hole in the middle.
But galaxies arent peaceful. Galaxies collide with each other, merge, destroy each other, etc. When you look at the Universe on large time scales, the galaxies are constantly fighting each other. Our galaxy, the Milky Way is going to collide with the much bigger Andromeda Galaxy in 4 billion years.

Luckily, galaxy collisions are mostly safe. Galaxies are very spread out, so even when they collide, the chances of individual stars or planets hitting each other is very, very low.
Key word there is mostly safe.

Sometimes, gravitational disturbances from galaxy collisions can throw stars out of galaxies entirely. Like, for example, a star is in the path of the Andromeda Galaxy's central black hole as its moving toward the center of the milky way. the gravity from that black hole could slingshot the star out of the galaxy entirely.

These types of stars are called rogue stars, or stars without galaxies. They are the loneliest objects in the universe. Some of them could have planets, but those planets are equally lonely. For any aliens that could exist on a planet orbiting a rogue star, they would be trapped there forever, unable to ever leave or expand, because all the other stars would be too far away.

Two facts make this even scarier.

1. Some estimates say half of all the stars in the universe are rogue stars.
2. When the Milky Way/Andromeda collision happens in 4 billion years, its estimated that our solar system has a 12% chance of being ejected from the galaxy and becoming a rogue star.

Constellations vs. actual constellations 
another space post wow

I’m sure most of you know what a constellation is. It’s a group of stars in our sky that look like they make up some sort of shape. But what some people don’t know is that the stars in constellations don’t actually have anything to do with each other.

Most stars in constellations don’t stay in their constellations forever, and move around the galaxy on million year-long journeys. In just a few hundred thousand years, this “stellar drift” will make all of our constellations unrecognizable. The dinosaurs saw a completely different set of stars than we do now.
The exception to this rule is the Big Dipper. Unlike the other constellations, almost all the stars in the big dipper (except for Dubhe and Alkaid) actually are moving together and are close to each other. They’re a part of a large group of stars called the Ursa Major Moving Group. A moving group is a bunch of stars that formed at the same time in the same area, and are moving in the same direction.

The Sun is actually inside outskirts of the Ursa Major Moving Group right now. But it’s not a part of it, as the solar system is 12 times older than the rest of the moving group. A few million years ago, the Sun just so happened to wander into the moving group, but we’re on our way out now.

There are a lot of moving groups in our sky, and sort of act like constellations that are better than constellations, because the stars in them are actually linked. The most well known moving groups are the Beta Pictoris Moving Group, the Arcturus Stream, and the Pleiades. They’re named after the brightest stars in the group, that being Beta Pictoris and Arcturus (the Pleiades means “seven sisters” because there are seven bright stars in it)

The Sun used to be a part of its own moving group, but as it aged, the moving group eventually fell apart as the stars drifted around the galaxy. But some stars from our ancient moving group are still around today. The siblings of the Sun are somewhere in the Milky Way, waiting to be discovered.

So, TLDR:
Constellations are lame, moving groups are better

on this episode of telling minecraft players about planets: What the heck is TOI 849 b

TOI-849b is a real planet discovered by the TESS telescope. It orbits way too close to its star to be habitable and is a few thousand degrees in temperature. We know of a lot of planets like this, so this isn’t that surprising.

What is surprising is its size.
The radius of the planet is about 3x bigger than earth’s, smaller than Neptune and making it a rocky planet, not a gas giant.

Rocky planets are usually only 8x bigger than earth in mass, maximum. That means the biggest rocky planets are only about 8 times heavier than Earth. Two examples of that are the planets Janssen and Enaiposha, both rocky planets 8x the mass of earth (though Enaiposha is thought to be an ocean planet).

TOI 849b is forty times the mass of Earth

It’s a planet made of rocks that’s heavier than Uranus and Neptune combined. That’s really not possible. It’s by far the largest rocky planet we’ve ever found.

There’s only one theory we have to explain TOI 849b: it used to be a gas giant, but all the gas was blown away into space from the radiation from its star, leaving nothing but the planet’s massive core behind.
This would make TOI 849b a very rare class of planet called a Chthonia, or a gas giant planet without any gas, just a rocky core. So far, it being a Chthonia is the best explanation for how it exists.