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Stellar Apocalypse Shows Water
Andy_Howell writes "Astronomers using the SWAS satellite found a cloud of water vapor around the aging giant star CW Leonis, and the most plausible explanation is that the star incresed in lumiosty during its giant phase and is boiling away its comets. This is the first evidence for water in another solar system. In five billion years, our sun is expected to do the same thing."
I want to know wether there are pillars underneath
this water.
"In five billion years, our sun is expected to do the same thing."
I better start living my life now then and download as much porn as I can before time runs out
However, outside of a stellar atmosphere, you can easily form other molecules containing oxygen, and since hydrogen is the most abundant element, water is going to be formed in reasonably large quantities.
As for dying stars being able to melt comets when their main sequence progenitors could not... This is not a surprising result. When a star enters the red giant phase, the outer layers of the star may cool off, but the luminosity (the power output) of the star goes way up (think Betelgeuse). Even if the outer portion of the star is cooler, it's still going to be warm enough to melt ice!
Finally, I'm not sure what the big deal about all this is anyway. Astronomers have been observing H2O masers around red giants and star forming regions for years. We've known for a long time that water is out there...
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Looks at his watch. "Only 4 billion, 999 million, 999 thousand 999 years, 364 days 23 hours and 59 minutes to go"
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Maybe we can use this water to clean up that ring of debris around Uranus.
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It's a pretty sad day for /. moderation when a clueless post such as this gets moderated up to "4, insightful".
It is actually very remarkable that molecules exist in space at all. Why? There are two sides to the process -- creation and destruction.
(*) Creation : Interstellar space is in general very tenuous , and so the likelihood that any two atoms combine in the gaseous phase to form a molecule is very improbable.
(*) Destruction - Once a molecule is created, it doesn't live forever. Space is a very harsh environment, and any molecules created are subjected to harsh cosmic radiation, the stellar radiation field (resulting from all stars surrounding it), as well as stellar winds and shocks. Any of these processes is cabable of disrupting molecules.
When you go ahead and do the naive estimate for the abundance of a molecule balancing creation and destruction rates, assuming only gaseous phase processes, you find that it is highly unlikely to find any substantial amounts of molecules in interstellar space. Indeed, when astronomers first invented instruments capable of detecting rotational mode transitions of molecules like CO and H_2O in interstellar space, their theoretician colleagues told them to forget the plan.
The reason why we have clouds of molecular gas in our galaxy today is a rather amazing one which no one originally anticipated. Besides gas, there are also small, solid dust grains belched out from winds from cool red giant stars in their final phases of evolution. Atoms collide and freeze out onto the surfaces of these grains, where they can remain for a very long time, migrating very slowly along the surface via Brownian processes. Every once in a while, it will bump into another or molecule frozen out in a similar fashion, thereby creating a more complex molecule. The dust grains catalyze the generation of molecules -- without them, we wouldn't have such an abundance of molecular gas in the galaxy today. Indeed, astronomers believe star formation in the early universe was substantially different from that which occurs today because such dust grains would have been completely absent.
I think this result is particularly surprising since one might expect that any winds or shocks thrown off by a star capable of boiling away a comet might also tend to powerful enough to destroy the molecules generated. If that really is the mechanism involved, it is a remarkable coincidence that the winds are just powerful enough to ablate the comets, but not so powerful as to destroy the molecules present.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
Uh, it can't be detected unless it sublimates.
The detection system undoubtedly relies on the absorbance of light (passing through the vapor cloud, originating from the central star) at wavelengths peculiar to interference by H20...
mefus
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um, er... eh -- *click*
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
In five billion years, our sun is expected to do the same thing
The story about Andromeda colliding with the Milky Way earlier today said that this would happen in 15-billion years. How is a person supposed to make contingency plans with all of this conflicting information!?
Actually many of the stars which make up the constellations have fairly large proper motions.
The constellations that the greeks saw were actually visibly different than the ones we see today.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
Water is small.
Really small.
And to get enough water to stay collected in a vaccum (where water likes to sublimate quickly) so that we can detect it from this far away is rare.
Now for its existence elsewhere in the universe, that's a no-brainer. It DOES. It's a simple molecule.
I mourn for the stupidity of Ice Pirates myself. Alas, that craptacular bad comedy of misadventure is still available for rent.
"Try perrier, drawn from pristine dying solar systems"
"Beer Molecules" is actually a misunderstanding, since there's various compounds that make up beer, all with different molecular structures. It's mainly water, some alcohol (C2H5OH - again, not massively complicated, but a bit tougher to make than water) and various compounds that give it it's taste. Chances of all of these appearing in the right concentration to make it drinkable are slim, to say the least, but then it is an infinite universe (probably).....
PS - Slashdot really needs to come up with a way to type subscripts in chemical formulas.
This means aliens won't come steal our precious water and sell it $1,000,000,000/gram on the galactic market after all. What a relief!
Maybe this is bad news. Maybe NASA was hoping to get out of the red by selling water to thirsty aliens. So much for the Culligan module on Alpha (or whatever it's called today)
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
there was this Slash Story on how the compounds for life are all over space.
Farscape is starting to look reasonable.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It sounds like in five billion years the sun will do no such thing. After the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide, there won't be anything left but rapidly nova'ing stars and vast stretches of burning gases. Something radically other than human will be here to witness that weird night sky.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Do we need to put Hemos on a suicide watch? First the article on the Milky Way colliding with Andromeda, and now this story, both with references to the sun boiling away in 5 billion years, I'm wondering if he's slipped into some Woody Allen type depression.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
But HA! We got the grasslands! It's not all computers and slashdot out there... Go enjoy what we have before your cheap monitor makes your eyes fall out.
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
You're right. However, we can assume all we want without proof. Yes, water is an incredibly simple compound, and it's fairly easy for hydrogen and oxygen to combine to form it. But this is proof.
It's like we can reasonably be sure there is intelligent life somewhere else in the universe (there's not much here, what with all the ACs running around), but we have no proof. It's incredibly unlikely that humanity is the only sentient life in the universe, but until SETI@home finds something or E.T. lands in Southern California (although, if he did, who'd notice?) we can't be sure if we're alone or not.
Nice sarcasm though.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
In five billion years, our sun is expected to do the same thing.
/. crew isn't responsible for running the universe. We'd always be worried about how much time we have left before V.A. Solar System filed Chapter 13, and we'd all be annoyed at all the 'First Metor Impacts' and 'First Solar Flares'
and from Earlier today:
A lof of people know that our Sun will be a red giant in about 15 billion years, and its size will increase dramaticaly beyond the Mercury orbit and we will burn.
Boy, I'm glad that the
The worst part, however, would be the constant revisioning of physics because posters could never get their facts straight.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
We're already fully aware of water having either existed on other planets in the past or existing now as in the case of the moons of Jupiter. Life can sustain in wildly different environments, not just temperate grasslands.
I'm sick of all these doomsday theorists. Isn't it obvious? Some script kiddies saw another IRC hub to take down and accidentally vaporized an entire solar system!
I can just see the slasback heading this week... EFNet IRC blows up, so does IRC in another galaxy.
I expect that 5 billion years from now our species will have been eradicated by disgruntled aliens who were refused a refund by Emporer Gates. The easy thing about these sort of predictions is that if me and this guy are wrong, who cares? We're both dead.
This might be trivial, but isn't 'proving water' a bit of a scientific non-issue? I would have assumed that most scientists consider molecular chemistry pretty... universal (ignore the pun). Now if this was *liquid* water, or an actual ocean...
I mourn for the impossibility of Ice Pirates. Alas, that marvelous dry universe of adventure is not ours.
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Several billion years from now, the Sun will become a giant star and its power output will increase five thousand fold. And the press has blatantly ignored this issue and instead concentrates on scandal and violence! I'm no scientist but this could have significant consequences on global warming.
You think water would be everywhere. You think we'd be finding the stuff all over the place.
I decided to subject this theory to the scientific method:
Hypothesis: as stated above.
Test: I walk out into my back yard. I see the Atlantic ocean.
Conclusion: Damn, he's onto something. I see a whole lot of water out there.