>But even so, the scientists were surprised to find barium, which is 2.5 times heavier than iron, in the upper atmospheres of WASP-76 b and WASP-121 b.

It's amazing how often it seems that scientists are "surprised" - i.e. their theories were not borne out by the observational evidence. Perhaps because it's surprising, that makes it more headline-worthy, therefore there would be a bias in what gets reported. It would be interesting to see a meta-analysis of the "surprise" factor for study results.

Would you not use surprised if you received results that differed from what you were expecting? I'm surprised something 2.5 time heavier than iron would be in the upper atmosphere at all. Wouldn't that be something that fell back to the surface? Then again, I'm not a planetary scientist type, so I'd probably be surprised much more frequently.

It's not like they are shocked or disappointed. To me, it just reads they received info they will now be looking at further than they were expecting to need. Maybe intrigued would be appropriate instead if you consider "surprised" to be as lazy as "very".

Of course their theories were borne out of observations, that's what theories are, a model of our world that fits past observations. When we make an observation that doesn't fit the model, it's surprising because it's by definition unexpected, but it's also an opportunity to update our existing models.

News website tend to focus on the "surprising " word because writers (in this case the PR firm who wrote the press release) have been taught to write "stories" with "characters" who feel "emotions" to engage with the audience, perhaps in a completely opposite way than how researchers themselves describe their discovery in science journals.

I think the word "surprised" gets a lot of unfair implication added. (Usually in the format, "why are you surprised that..." or "you shouldn't be surprised that..."). "Surprise" just isn't as dramatic an emotion as people seem to imply. It's not like the word "shocked". I might be surprised that a one-in-five occurrence happens. It doesn't mean I had some kind of conviction that it wouldn't.

Yes. More like, "I wouldn't have bet on it but ok".

The whole point is to try to find out stuff we don't already know

Surprised might mean "it's within the bounds of possibility but we have not observed it in the wild."

Technology signature?

We need to send a probe to make measurements... *googles WASP-76 b*

*640 light years away*

Hmmm, how are we going to do this?

Slowly and with a lot of patience.

> 640 light years away

Inventing a better telescope would be quicker. Granted we would only see how they looked like ~640 years ago, but that's not a long time for measuring their technology level, especially if their average lifespan is similar to ours.

> but that's not a long time for measuring their technology level, especially if their average lifespan is similar to ours.

2022-640=1382

The age of tech. advances such as water mills and three-crop rotation.

This is just about the time banking became a thing in Italy. Most(?) humans would still be in pre-history. Maybe you could detect increased activity along the silk-road if you look closely.

Pollution levels in the atmosphere would still be dominated by volcanic activity. No guarantee that this planet would ever get anywhere...

> Most(?) humans would still be in pre-history

This is a very non-standard use of the term 'pre-history'.

Or if "they" are a thousand years ahead of us technologically then 640 years ago could be when they started building space elevators and large orbital structures.

Sure, those don't feel much like tech at our current pace of change, but it's millions of years further up the tech tree than, say, feathers, thermoregulation, photosynthesis, or multicellular organisms.

> 640 light years away Hmmm, how are we going to do this?

By using the sun as a giant lens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d0EGIt1SPc

You have to wonder the certainty of what emission or absorption lines? from that distance .. They feel confident in the instruments they're using .. but.. if it is possible that's wild

They use the Doppler shift of emission lines in the starlight to find exoplanets, due to a planet pulling its star around their mutual center. To the tune of measurement precision in the realm of 1 m/s! It's all pretty wild

There exists the possibility this barium is actually suspended in the atmosphere through technological means.

On a 1500 to 2400 degree C planet?

Especially on such a planet.

There also exists the possibility that this planet contains donut-farting unicorns.

A bit of heresy: what makes you think that the element in question is barium and not some exotic particle with a similar absorption spectrum?

Because Occam's Razor.

Absorption spectrums have never let us down, and are used all the time.

For this one place in the universe to have an exotic particle with an adsorption spectrum is pretty much impossible. To have an adsorption spectrum that is an exact mach for Barium is just adding a second impossible on top of the first.

Given the choice between something surprising and a doubly-impossible phenomena, the choice is clear.

> Absorption spectrums have never let us down

Devil's advocate: we have never had the chance to actually verify an exoplanet absorption spectrum. Could be that they are letting us down every time.

In this solar system, yes, absorption spectrums seem to be reliable. Anywhere else is extrapolation.

How many years until we verify? 100? 1,000? 10,000?

Sounds like something we could check empirically. Some cosmic rays are protons from outside of the solar system. We could capture those and compare them with local protons to see if they're actually the same kind of particle. (We can check if two particles are the same kind or not by seeing what happens if we try to put them in the same place. If they're both protons, they should refuse to be put into the same state due to the Pauli exclusion principle.) As far as I know the experiment hasn't actually been done, though.

Those cosmic rays are an absolute gold mine of particle physics potential. Some of them easily exceed any accelerator we could build without going solar system scale.

Edit-the best I can think is have every satellite built with a particle detector as a standard. No idea if those could be scaled down.

Edit2-seems doubtful.

So we know of two meteors that hit earth from outside the solar system. (One was IDed by the US DOD as traveling well in excess of the solar escape velocity.) They’re what Avi Loeb is bootstrapping a search for now. If those can be recovered all sorts of things can be tested and identified. It’s possible interstellar meteors are already in inventories and even studied but we don’t know what to look for to ID their source as such, yet.

But more directly, absorption spectra are so intimately tied to the QM of the molecules and elements involved that they’re probably unique. (Hunch/not seen a proof.) This is also the most experimentally verified theory known.

We also haven't verified the absorption spectrum of every atom on earth. All science is extrapolation.

To my knowledge, that's only confirmed for Earth, Moon, Mars and a couple nearby asteroids. The rest is just extrapolation of our limited data. P.S. Those razors would better be kept in the bathroom as they only give an illusion of knowledge.

Is your argument that translational symmetry in physics is wrong?

*cough* phosphine gas in Venus atmosphere

Atomic spectra are very complex, but not so complex as to cause confusions between them.

There is not a single absorption line, but a very large number of such lines, at different frequencies between which the relationship is not simple.

When several different absorption lines are measured and match the spectrum of a certain atom or ion, the chances of any other phenomenon causing correlated absorptions for all those different frequencies are negligible.

Molecular spectra are much more complex than atomic spectra and they have many closely spaced absorption lines, so there may be some confusions between different molecules when the observations are made in a limited frequency band, in which some molecules behave similarly, even if they would behave differently in other frequency bands that are not accessible for observations.

The conditions are exotic for a planetary atmosphere, trivial for a physics or chemistry lab. If such particles existed, they would have been discovered long ago.

How about something like magenetic field-powered jets erupting from the planet's lower levels constantly dumping the material into the upper atmosphere, kind of like those solar field lines? Jupiter's magnetosphere is pretty impressive:

https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA03476

Can't imagine what kind of crazy magnetic field action is going on in ultra-hot gas giants who are so close to their host star that their orbital period is 1-2 days.

>Can't imagine what kind of crazy magnetic field action is going on in ultra-hot gas giants who are so close to their host star that their orbital period is 1-2 days.

Vaguely connected to this statement. Can anyone recommend any stories (preferably hard sci-fi, although I'm assuming anything tackling this sort of thing would automatically filter into that genre) regarding exotic elements, extreme conditions in space, or those sorts of things?

Like Neutron Star or Cannonball Express by Larry Niven. That sort of thing.

I just read through the recent Hannu Rajanaemi series (Quantum Thief, Fractal Prince, Causal Angel) which is all about that kind of thing. The Iain M. Banks novel "The Algebraist" is set mostly in the atmosphere of a gas giant planet and is pretty hard-sci-fi in outlook and plot.

Since you mention neutron stars, these are must-reads:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starquake_(novel)

Someday I should read Baxter's Xeelee sequence, mentioned under "See also":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeelee_Sequence

Streetlight effect? Per the authors:

- "Both WASP-76b and WASP-121b represent some of the highest S/N datasets currently available, the presence in both of the studied planets may indicate that this heavy species can be common in the atmospheres of ultra-hot Jupiters."