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Jupiter Moon Ganymede May Have An Ocean
matth writes: "This article talks about how Jupiter's moon, Ganymede, may have a salt water ocean on it. Kind of interesting in light of all we have been talking about with water on planets and what not. If NASA does find water on a planet, the implications could be outstanding, on the other hand, they have yet to find any water on any planet for sure.. yet.... More on Ganymede here."
The issua of the existence of water in the Jovian Moons was solved long ago. Since Voyager, a large segment of the scientific community came into the conclusion that is a main component of most Moons and specially Europa. Later other evidence showed that water plays a very specific role in the formation of most satellites beyond Jupiter. There is even a phenomena generally called "water volcanism" that suggests that water acts in certain planets, much the same way as we see volcanism in our Hawaian volcanos. This is still under question as all we have is pictures of Triton showing something similar to this.
Anyway it was a long time question wether this water had a presence in liquid form. At the beginning only Europe suggested such a phenomena. Densities are so low in this planet that many strongly suggested that Europe was mostly a "water world". Besides its "glass-like" surface gave a weight in these argumentations. Ganymede, Calisto and other planets beyond Jupiter were considered to possess water but in "dirty-forms", that means strongly mixed with minerals.
Now the findings seem to cast a new light on the formation of the Solar System. It seems that water is playing a bigger and more fundamental role in its formation. Somehow this suggests the lack of water as an "exclusion" rather than a rule. The Moon, Mercury or Venus become more "outsiders" rather than players in thsi game.
It is a well known fact that Mars has a great deal of ice at both poles. So much for no planted without water (I assume they meant liquid water)
I realize that you probably mis-spoke, but the phrase struck me as funny.
It struck me as funny too. Actually, I didn't misspeak (as such), but perhaps some clarification is in order. I believe absolutely that live exists elsewhere. Intelligent life, I'm not so sure about (the Drake Equation >= 10000 notwithstanding). The discovery of such life, be it on Europa, Ganymede or Minbar, is inevitable, given a long enough time scale. But if silicon-based life -- intelligent or otherwise -- were to be found, it'd go beyond coolness and come out the other side. It'd open up whole new vistas for science.
Finding ET live during my lifetime, btw, would cause me to be pleasantly surprised.
Not that these folks are necessarily right, but the topic has a long and detailed history with exobiologists, many of whom do consider it possible, if not likely.
Just because your imagination doesn't stretch that far, doesn't mean it's not possible. Maybe college will open your eyes a little, huh? (When you get there.)
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
AFAIK this is just what's being discussed for the Europa-ocean probe. It'll need a power supply for the instruments anyway, so you might as well just use that to keep it warm for the "drilling."
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
Imagine you find a new lifeform in Earth's ocean depths. It may have a weird shape and color, but it will be DNA-based. A lifeform on another planet is likely to be alien at the molecular level. Even if it's only the size of a bacteria, it will be of a huge interest to biochemists.
they have yet to find any water on any planet for sure.. yet.. Last time I checked Jupiter's moon, Europa had a massive layer of ice completely covering its surface.
It is mans desire to kill other men and explore his land, country, world, universe that leads him to innovate technologically for the most part.
It think we should encourage exploration as the more healthy of the two.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
But I would be willing to bet that an aquatic civilization could teach us a few things about fluid dynamics, and motion through fluids (both of which I know almost nothing about).
Since writing may be a tad difficult, a lot of information might get passed down by songs or legends. And I suspect that they may have to develop some form of calculus to describe very advanced turbulence equations. So being a college student there would suck because every exam would be oral, and we all know how well people perform in front of crowds.
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
You got that bit right, at least.
Do you have any idea how valuable a sample of alien life (even the most primitive algae) would actually be? Any exobiologist would give his eye-teeth to be able to study a sample of alien DNA-eqivalent. It would change the field of comparative biology from pure speculation to hard science - heck, the confirmation that life exists (or existed) outside the earth would probably be the most significant thing we have ever discovered.
Think about it: finally, PROOF that life can emerge and evolve given half a chance, PROOF that the earth is not a cosmic accident or God's little private joke. Liquid gold does not compare in value, and nor does oil, not even with two frat-boy oilmen in the Oval Office.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Sounds like you're misinformed. It would take very futuristic technology to drill that deep on Earth, never mind sending the necessary equipment on a space probe.
Find free books.
on the other hand, they have yet to find any water on any planet for sure.. yet
This explains why I've been thirsty all my life here on earth.
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
There are critters that live on our ocean floors subsisting purely on the chemicals spewed out of volcanic vents. Bacteria at the base of the food chain subsist on the crud that pours out, and other critters eat them, and so on up to crabs, worms and other kinds of life.
The sun powers ALMOST all life on earth by "feeding" autotrophs -- but life can exist without solar energy.
Personally, I believe that anywhere you find liquid water and light (OR a renewable source of high-enegry chemicals), you'll find life. I bet that the ocean floors of Europa and Ganymede will have colonies of life much like what we see around the subsea volcanic vents here on Earth.
As a biochemist I can hardly wait to see what alien life will look like at the molecular level.
Man, there's a new scary movie idea.
.... how about The Abyss?
new? not really
rLowe
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
But, IANAP (I am not a planetologist *grin*)
D
All right I now count 5 bodies in this solar system that have, had could or could have had life on/in it. Earth, Mars, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. But that's just life as we know it, not life as we don't it, that might live in lower tempratures or have strange chemistries and what not. Still, everytime they publish something like this the Drake equation goes up a notch. And that is really fascinating.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Why is water so important? It's an excellent solvent for which reactions can take place in, it has plenty of unique properties and it is also involved in many biochemical reactions itself.
So the presence of water is a strong indication that life *might* be on water-holding planets.
So what? Many people don't care if there's life out there. The fact is, if we discovered life on Mars, Ganymede and Europa, then it's pretty much a dead cert that life is *everywhere* in the universe. If that implication doesn't bother you, I don't think I know what does.
(1) I said 'As far as we know', because while it's true that most experts agree that water is necessary for life, not all of them do.
It's universally agreed that water is required for our kind of life, i.e. cellular based life, but what about other types of life that you see depicted in some of the more realistic SF novels? Those hydrogen gas-bags in Clarke's 2001 series aren't completely implausible.
I recently interviewed Dr. Jack Cohen from Warwick University about the plausibility of extra-terrestrial life, including whether water was a prequisite for my site Astrobiology: The Living Universe. You can read the interview here.
It may have a weird shape and color, but it will be DNA-based.
For a long time I got annoyed by books/tv programmes/whatever that talked about 'alien dna'. However, I've come to realise that any life -- wherever it originates -- is likely to be DNA based. Not will be, I hasten to add, but likely to be. Why? Because the building blocks are very common.
Despite all the talk in science fiction of silicon based lifeforms, it's still far more likely that anything will be carbon based. Any life is likely to use what we call organic molecules; scientists have even calculated that adenine, one of the four bases, can be formed in space. Given the prevalance of amino acids around the universe, I'd be (pleasantly) surprised to find life anywhere based on anything else. I'd say, though, that DNA based life is, if not ubiquitous, then at least common.
Nit-picking? probably. I do agree that alien life would be phenomenally interesting from a scientific POV, but to echo the original poster, the ocean still holds untold secrets, from which we have much, much to learn.
Hey, maybe there's an advanced civilization underneath! Since they're stuck under a 120 mile crust, they can't see planets and stars, so they cannot discover universal gravitation, and cannot invent calculus. The college student dream!
They seemed to have a lot of information on that moon for not knowing there is an Ocean on it.
You know, all this money could be saved if they just went to Sri Lanka and asked Arthur C. Clarke what's exactly out there.
He's predicted so many things during his long literary career it's eerie.
It calls to question, if we're looking for the same things in space that we already haven't fully studied on earth, that we should be spending more time studying our ocean's depths. Who knows what "alien" life we might find?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Nope, a comet is a ball of ice, so technicly it does have water, although it is frozen solid. Comets also have lots of dust and rock chunks frozen in them, so they would not be ideal to get water from, besides comets have extremely elliptical orbits, so the massive difference between summer and winter would make life highly unlikey...
Shit adds up at the bottom...
okay, what exactly is the significance of water there?
it's not as if it was on the surface - or even close to it. then it's been suggested that the water might be similar to our own oceans [including the oil spills? sorry, just can't help myself...].
that means of course, that it's unlikely to ever be able to support any type of plant life beyond primitive algaes [algii].
so what's the big deal? nobody is likely to fly all that distance to drill 120 miles through solid ice and rock and then pump up saltwater - heck they wouldn't do it if it was oil, or liquid gold, or 100% pure, liquid silicon.
not to mention that we wouldn't have the technology to do something like that in the first place.
let's face it, this is just another PR exploit by NASA trying to keep it's funding.
While I think NASA should get all the funding they want, I also believe that this type of non-news will be counterproductive in the long run. If they keep going in this way, it's likely that when they finally find something newsworthy, then noone will care.
Just an uniformed opinion...
In this case, the ocean might be similar to Earth's mantle in function: the still-frozen crustal ice floats on it, much as the Earth's low-density continental and lithospheric rock "floats" on the denser, plastic mantle.
Just one more comment. It may be that some of the outer Solar System objects (Pluto and Charon, plus some of the outer-System moons) have no "geologic crust" in the sense of a separate rock component: they may be nothing more than large "dirty" snowballs which never differentiated. They would still have a "surface", however...
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
back in middle school, of course that was only 4 years ago, but it sure seems like a long time. Anyway, I don't see why it would be such a huge deal, as it seems like there should be plenty of places in the universe that likely have water, it just needs to be warm/cool enough. BTW, I don't know why everyone seems to think water=life. It would certainly be theoreticly possible for life to survive without water, and it is also possible for a planet to have no life even with water. Of course, we need water to live, so we assume that all 'life' would need it, which is certainly not true. The 'water' on ganymede is actually an underground ocean, which could be heated geothermally (I know geo- isnt the proper prefix for this, seeing as how it isnt the earth, but I dont know what else to call it.)
:)
What I really want to see is some actual mars exploration going on. Time to terraform.... heheh, just watched The Arrival today...
Shit adds up at the bottom...
The title suggests that Ganymede has an ocean on its surface. The article clearly says that it has an ocean below its crust! What's more is that it says there might be a stable layer of water trapped between two layers of ice 90 to 120 miles below the surface of Ganymede.
I'm looking at this a bit differently. The water on Ganymede sounds like it could be analogized to the mantle underneath the Earth's crust. It's convection and movement is responsible for the Earth's magnetic field, and it is a melted version of the crust above it. The analogy is a stretch, but I think that is a more accurate way of viewing what this water actually is. Granted, this is still an analogy...