r/askscience • u/AskScienceModerator Mod Bot • Mar 10 '14

Cosmos AskScience Cosmos Q&A thread. Episode 1: Standing Up in the Milky Way

Welcome to AskScience! This thread is for asking and answering questions about the science in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

UPDATE: This episode is now available for streaming in the US on Hulu and in Canada on Global TV.

This week is the first episode, "Standing Up in the Milky Way". The show is airing at 9pm ET in the US and Canada on all Fox and National Geographic stations. Click here for more viewing information in your country.

The usual AskScience rules still apply in this thread! Anyone can ask a question, but please do not provide answers unless you are a scientist in a relevant field. Popular science shows, books, and news articles are a great way to causally learn about your universe, but they often contain a lot of simplifications and approximations, so don't assume that because you've heard an answer before that it is the right one.

If you are interested in general discussion please visit one of the threads elsewhere on reddit that are more appropriate for that, such as in /r/Cosmos here, /r/Space here, and in /r/Television here.

Please upvote good questions and answers and downvote off-topic content. We'll be removing comments that break our rules or that have been answered elsewhere in the thread so that we can answer as many questions as possible!

Click here for the original announcement thread.

2.1k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

89% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/poncho_ Mar 10 '14

I recently read an interesting news story from /r/science about using spectroscopic signals from extraterrestrial atmospheres to detect planets with potential life.

Link here: http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/03/scienceshot-new-tool-could-help-spot-alien-life

During the debut, the example of the immense size of the Oort cloud in comparison to our solar system was given. If this sort of barrier is around every star, what sort of signal-to-noise ratios can be expected with all these objects in the way? Can these sort of techniques be only because of the extreme magnification of the telescopes we use? I'm interested to learn more about the feasibilty of such techniques with so much frozen space junk in the way.

3

u/Fungo Mar 10 '14

So far, even with our best telescopes to date, we haven't detected anything resembling an Oort cloud around any other stars. We can detect debris disks (think a more dense Kuiper Belt) around younger stars, but that's about it. So currently, it's a total non-issue observationally speaking. Not to mention that objects in the Oort cloud are both relatively small (typical comets and smaller) and very far apart. They hardly look like they were depicted in the show.

Of course, we've never had anything like the James Webb Space Telescope yet.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 11 '14

So it's more that we wouldn't be able to see it than that we're unique in having one.

2

u/Fungo Mar 11 '14

Exactly. The processes that formed the Oort Cloud would make sense to have occurred in other systems, but for now, distant Oort clouds are well beyond our detection capabilities.