I doubt that Titan has an atmosphere that contains water. Since it is extremely cold there any water would be ice in the first place. The surface temperature is about 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

Mars did have water for quite a long time I presume. Nonetheless, it did not have sufficient gravity and pressure to keep it from escaping to space in the longer term.

If they are small planets the water vapor would have escaped off into space as it did on Mars long ago.

The three planets referred to in the report are said to be of Jovian size. Just where the water went, if they ever had much, is an interesting question. So is the question of how such planets could have formed without substantial amounts of water. These new findings are thought to be challenging to current theories of Jovian planet formation.

If they are of Jovian size then they are not Earth-Like

'Hot Jupiter' Exoplanets Cast Doubt On Planet Formation Theories

Scientists searching for worlds outside of the Solar System say that three such planets — distant gas giants that resemble Jupiter — are surprisingly dry.

The atmospheres of these exoplanets, known as ‘hot Jupiters’, contain between one-tenth and one-thousandth water vapour than predicted, measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope show. The findings, published 24 July in Astrophysical Journal Letters, are at odds with theories of how planets form.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/25/hot-jupiter-exoplanets-planet-formation_n_5620372.html

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Scientist Believe To Have Watched The Birth Of A Planet

Many scientific discoveries happen by accident. Gravity. Penicillin. And now the formation of what appears to be a new planet.

At the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, a team of researchers came upon a rather intriguing spectacle happening 553 light years away. They came upon a protoplanetary disk (a large formation of materials in the shape of a disk, orbiting a new star) around a new star known as HD 100546. While studying the gas within the strange disk using spectro-astrometry they could detect tiny changes within the materials.

http://www.thepncvoice.com/scientist-believe-watched-birth-planet/35894

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NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory Finds Planet That Makes Star Act Deceptively Old

A planet may be causing the star it orbits to act much older than it actually is, according to new data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This discovery shows how a massive planet can affect the behavior of its parent star.

The star, WASP-18, and its planet, WASP-18b, are located about 330 light-years from Earth. WASP-18b has a mass about 10 times that of Jupiter and completes one orbit around its star in less than 23 hours, placing WASP-18b in the “hot Jupiter” category of exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system.

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/september/nasa-s-chandra-x-ray-observatory-finds-planet-that-makes-star-act-deceptively/index.html

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Thanx for the update Lynn:)

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rOZZ
Music
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Welcome Julie :)

Astronomers discovered a new planet with water vapour in its atmosphere

Astronomers have discovered a new planet that is holding water vapour in its atmosphere. They named the newly discovered planet, as HAT-P-11b. The Neptune-sized planet is the smallest planet to be discovered with presence of water in its atmosphere. Data collected from NASA’s Hubble, Spitzer; Kepler space telescopes gave the evidence of water’s presence and clear skies on the newly found planet.

http://thewestsidestory.net/2014/09/27/17738/astronomers-discovered-new-planet-water-vapour-atmosphere/

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NASA's Hubble Maps the Temperature and Water Vapor on an Extreme Exoplanet

A team of scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has made the most detailed global map yet of the glow from a turbulent planet outside our solar system, revealing its secrets of air temperatures and water vapor.

Hubble observations show the exoplanet, called WASP-43b, is no place to call home. It is a world of extremes, where seething winds howl at the speed of sound from a 3,000-degree-Fahrenheit “day” side, hot enough to melt steel, to a pitch-black “night” side with plunging temperatures below 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.


http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/october/nasas-hubble-maps-the-temperature-and-water-vapor-on-an-extreme-exoplanet/index.html#.VDb6hRZFrz8

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No Joke: Astronomers Say Alien Planet Resembles Uranus

Let the grade-school jokes begin: Astronomers say they have detected the first known Uranus-like planet circling an alien star. The exoplanet is part of a double-star system that's 25,000 light-years from Earth, known as OGLE-2008-BLG-092L. Its presence was detected using a method known as microlensing, which takes advantage of the light-bending effect of massive stars to magnify faraway objects.

The newfound planet, reported by Ohio State University's Radek Poleski and his colleagues, is four times as massive as Uranus (heh, heh), and orbits at a similar distance (about 19 times farther away from its primary parent star than Earth is from the sun). Planets with masses in that range have been detected before, but not that far out. Ohio State's Andrew Gould, a co-author of the research paper appearing online in The Astrophysical Journal, said in a news release that the alien Uranus may help explain how our own solar system's ice giants ended up where they are:

Let the grade-school jokes begin: Astronomers say they have detected the first known Uranus-like planet circling an alien star. The exoplanet is part of a double-star system that's 25,000 light-years from Earth, known as OGLE-2008-BLG-092L. Its presence was detected using a method known as microlensing, which takes advantage of the light-bending effect of massive stars to magnify faraway objects.

The newfound planet, reported by Ohio State University's Radek Poleski and his colleagues, is four times as massive as Uranus (heh, heh), and orbits at a similar distance (about 19 times farther away from its primary parent star than Earth is from the sun). Planets with masses in that range have been detected before, but not that far out. Ohio State's Andrew Gould, a co-author of the research paper appearing online in The Astrophysical Journal, said in a news release that the alien Uranus may help explain how our own solar system's ice giants ended up where they are:

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/weird-science/no-joke-astronomers-say-alien-planet-resembles-uranus-n226576

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It amazes me that they are able to make such determinations at that distance.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

It amazes me that they are able to make such determinations at that distance.

I know what you mean Bob - even though it's four times bigger than... erm... [insert]our[/insert] ... Uranus :) it still boggles my brain.

It amazes me that they are able to make such determinations at that distance.

+1 Thanx for the post Lynn:)

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rOZZ
Music
Pictures

Are astronomers being fooled by 'mirage Earths'? Planets orbiting dwarf stars look habitable from afar but are actually barren

Recently, scientists have postulated that the most abundant stars in our galaxy, red dwarfs, despite being no more than 20 per cent the mass of the sun, might be able to host habitable planets.

But a new study has warned that any 'Earth-like' worlds we spot in the habitable zone of these stars will be nothing more than an illusion – owing to the intense radiation they receive early in their life.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2859376/Are-astronomers-fooled-mirage-Earths-Planets-orbiting-dwarf-stars-look-habitable-afar-actually-barren.html

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+1

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I believe that they are plentiful in the Universe. But per Galaxy--maybe only a very few. As we develop the means to look out to say 1000 light years we can test this. If we can measure things like atmosphere composition, ground temperature, orbit eccentricity, magnetic field, ozone presence, water and land mixture, stable spin and so on then we will know more.

Assuming that we are doing a proper job of listening via SETI--we should have heard anyone out to maybe 100 light years and more by now. Thus we may conclude that if there are "Habitable" planets out at these distances, then the inhabitants have not progressed to the point of having developed electronics a few hundred years ago.

Adding:
and we are doing some 100y of radio transmission on Earth...so anyone around 50ly radius would respond by now (if he wanted)! ;)

So, I agree with you! Not so much inteligence around...or they are SHY!

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non-profit org. Play4Life in Zagreb, Croatia, EU

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and we are doing some 100y of radio transmission on Earth...so anyone around 50ly radius would respond by now (if he wanted)! ;)

So, I agree with you! Not so much inteligence around...or they are SHY!

It is likely the television and radio signals we have been sending out into space are too weak to distinguish from background noise at interstellar distances.

...

and we are doing some 100y of radio transmission on Earth...so anyone around 50ly radius would respond by now (if he wanted)! ;)

So, I agree with you! Not so much inteligence around...or they are SHY!

It is likely the television and radio signals we have been sending out into space are too weak to distinguish from background noise at interstellar distances.

if that was the case, SETI@home would not exist...and it does!
also: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/3390.html

so far noone has been calculating how far the signals from Earth would go to Space...as the emitters got more and more powerful from 1890 on...

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non-profit org. Play4Life in Zagreb, Croatia, EU

so far noone has been calculating how far the signals from Earth would go to Space...as the emitters got more and more powerful from 1890 on...

Recently emitters have been getting less and less powerful as the spectrum has become more and more crowded.

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...

and we are doing some 100y of radio transmission on Earth...so anyone around 50ly radius would respond by now (if he wanted)! ;)

So, I agree with you! Not so much inteligence around...or they are SHY!

It is likely the television and radio signals we have been sending out into space are too weak to distinguish from background noise at interstellar distances.

if that was the case, SETI@home would not exist...and it does!
also: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/3390.html

so far noone has been calculating how far the signals from Earth would go to Space...as the emitters got more and more powerful from 1890 on...

Here is a quote from a website about how far signals have gotten from us.

"Because of this inverse square law, all of our terrestrial radio signals become indistinguishable from background noise at around a few light-years from earth. For a civilization only a couple hundred light-years away, trying to listen to our broadcasts would be like trying to detect the small ripple from a pebble dropped in the pacific ocean off the coast of California – from Japan."

http://zidbits.com/2011/07/how-far-have-radio-signals-traveled-from-earth/