Slashdot Mirror
Europa's Acid Ice Fields
tr0llb4rt0 writes "The New Scientist reports on recent observations that suggest the ice on Jupiter's moon Europa may be highly acid with a pH of near zero, and have a surface layer of hydrogen peroxide.
Two theories have been put forward. One says that the acid has been formed at the surface layer from oceanic salts reacting with the intense radiation from Jupiter, the other that sulphuric acid is coming directly from the ocean, with the water reacting with sulphur produced from undersea volcanos.
Wilst reducing the chances of life on Europa, it is not ruling it out completely, as there are terrestrial extremophile bacteria which thrive in highly acid environments."
Strange title considering life on Earth is thought to have been borne out of the toughest conditions.
I understand they are just saying "tough", but if life likely arose from similar (harsh) conditions, I don't think it would be that unlikely.
Disregarding the validity of this claim (which I find somewhat questionable), if it is true, it may put some things in doubt. However, life has been seen to survive in extreme circumstances, such as undersea vents, where it is able to use the chemicals released by the vents as sources of energy. So, not all hope is lost.
Just think twice before going for a swim...
webpage
If anything I would say that a highly acidic environment supports the idea that life could form on Europa. If you compare Europa to the Earth model then it seems that the acidic environment was similar to the old Earth where most of the organisms were extremophiles that did not use oxygen but sulfur and other substances. Earth didn't gain much oxygen until photosynthesis took a foothold and when that happened it killed off most of the organimsms because oxygen destroys chemical reactions that aren't suitable. Also, most of the organisms that exist today are the real extremophiles since they are adapted to deal with non-acidic/cold/hot environment since the original Earth was very hostile (I doubt my wording made any sense). So I would say that the acidity supports the thought that life could exist (especially the presence of sulfur).
Spelunkers in caves observing extremophile bacteria that were literally eating away the cave with the sulfuric acid end products of their metabolism. Their experiments were finding levels of acid were largely driven by biological processes.
What about life forms based on silicon and sulphur (as opposed to carbon and oxygen).
I'm not sure that we might even be able to recognize it as life despite observing it. We are living in a universal time period where there have been enough supernovae explosions to create an abundant supply of carbon and oxygen, plenty more will be required before there will be enough to chemically kickstart silicon based life.
There's no way of knowing if that kind of life will work on an evolutionary platform, maybe it will maybe it won't, for us it's DNA, what will it be for them?
Easy solution? Glass or Pyrex. Or if you want to be a bit more sophisticated, some sort of polymer.
Or you could still use metal, but take an ablative approach...Essentially standing on thick stilts. Make sure they stand vertical (as opposed to at an angle) else they'll only provide a short-term delay rather than a long-term one.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
If it is possible for organisms to survive this kind of acid here on earth, are there organisms that can survive zero pressure, low temperatures, and high background radiation?
What if some bacteria escaped earth's atmosphere -- maybe a meteor kicked it up, or it was randomly carried by wind up and out of the reach of earth -- and settled on Europa, Mars, Venus, or some other planets?
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
or Canada... same thing, really.
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2533735
Saturn Moon 'Could Look Like Sweden'
By John von Radowitz, Science Correspondent, PA News, in Seattle
A probe due to land on Saturn's moon, Titan, could discover a world that looks "a little bit like Sweden or Northern Canada", one of the mission's scientists said.
The Cassini spacecraft is due to reach Saturn in July after an epic journey lasting seven years.
On January 14 next year, the American orbiter will send a European lander parachuting down to the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan - one of the most mysterious bodies in the Solar System.
No-one knows for certain what the probe, called Huygens, will find as it drops through Titan's smoggy methane and nitrogen atmosphere which is four times thicker than the Earth's.
But scientists have found new clues using the Earth's biggest radio telescope as a giant radar to bounce signals off the moon's surface.
Images from the 300-metre wide Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico indicate the presence of seas and lakes - but not of water. These would be seas of ethane and methane liquified by Titan's frigid surface temperature of minus 179 degrees Celsius.
If Huygens lands in such a lake of liquid lighter fuel it will float on the surface, taking photos and collecting data. Scientists hope the probe would also survive an impact on soft ground or snow, but landing on a hard or rocky surface would destroy it.
Dr Ralph Lorenz, a mission scientist based at the University of Arizona in Tucson, USA, yesterday described what he expected Huygens to encounter.
Despite Titan being such an alien world, its physical appearance was likely to be similar to parts of the Earth, he said.
He told the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Seattle: "I think what we'll see is a rugged, but muted landscape.
You don't have the sort of freeze and thaw shattering process that gives you lots of sharp mountains.
"I think we'll see a lot of impact craters. Impact cratering occurs everywhere in the Solar System and on Titan, being a fairly sluggish environment, erosion is fairly slow.
"A lot of these will be filled with liquid to form circular lakes, rim-shaped lakes, bullseye lakes; horseshoe lakes. So I think we'll see something maybe a bit like Sweden or Northern Canada."
He said the probe would hit the surface at five metres per second. "If we landed on a solid lump of ice or a rock then its got to be all over," said Dr Lorenz. "If we landed on snow or something like sand then we should survive and continue to transmit data."
Nearly half the size of Earth, Titan is the only moon in the Solar System with a thick atmosphere. Scientists believe there may be a deep layer of water ice beneath the hydrocarbon surface.
An intriguing possibility is that asteroids or comets hitting the surface might have melted the water ice and cause it to mix with the methane and ethane. This could theoretically give rise to organic chemicals - including amino acids, the precursors of life.
Dr Lorenz said 20 gaseous organic chemicals had been detected on Titan, and many more may exist in solid form on the surface.
However he thought although the first steps towards biology may be seen on Titan the world was too cold for the development of life itself.
"If you were to introduce microbes down there they might survive, but the question of how life evolves is a different story," he said.
The chemical composition of the Europan surface as revealed by earth-based spectrascopy may bear little resemblance to the bulk chemical makeup of the surface ice or ocean beneath. Photochemistry due to Jupiter's radiation environment only operates very close to the surface. How anyone can come to the conclusion that the result is "bad for Europan life" when such life may lie many kilometers beneath the surface is beyond me.
an ill wind that blows no good
Two notes:
1. The large amount of oxygen on Earth is a result of the the presence of life, not a prerequisite for it.
2. Even if a particular element has a low universal abundance, there can still be a local concentration of it high enough to "kickstart life" (as might be the case with silicon and sulpher on Europa).
If you ever get a severe burn that removes the top layer of skin, first aid will include an airtight dressing. Oxygen on unprotected tissue hurts.
By the time you get past the lungs, oxygen is locked into special carrier molecules and shuttled to mitochondria. Most parts of your body aren't exposed to it, and even so there's cumulative cell damage from oxidation that's been theorized to be a cause of aging.
We've adapted to it, even "learned" how to get energy from it, but we did that with wrapper layers.
Oxygen-releasing algae were the ultimate environmental catastrophe.
You need much, much, much more than your odd supernova explosion to get life. Given the complexity of life, and the complexity of the beginning of life, it is, even with the universe being so huge, very well possible that life did emerge at only one place in the universe. To get life forms from the elements may be a chance of only 1 to 10^100. The size difference between the smallest life forms and the largest molecules is many orders of magnitude (I believe 6-10, so it differs a million to 10 billion times in size). This is not easily overcome. History has proven that it can be overcome, but given the unlikelyness, it may have happened only once.
IIRC, you can use a catalyst to crack peroxide into steam and O2. And I know SA is like the 'Mister Log' of chemicals; but I am pretty sure it can be made to exothermically react with water. ['NEVER pour water into concentrated SA' warnings, et al.] .
... well, just about anything. Fine metal powder, maybe activated charcoal, organic solvents, etc. The most obvious catalyst for H2O2 decomposition is light, which is why commercially-distributed bottles of the stuff are brown. Heating it above 80 C or so will also do the trick. So that part ought to be easy.
. .
Anyone chemically-enabled out there do the math and figure out how much output you get from it?
Hydrogen peroxide will be decomposed by
The decomposition happens to be exothermic, giving off about 98 kJ per mole of H2O2 decomposed. (Standard heat of formation of O2 (g) = 0 kJ/mol, of H2O (l) = -286 kJ/mol, and of H2O2 (l) = -188 kJ/mol.)
The heat of solution of sulfuric acid is -95 kJ/mol, so you'll get 95 kJ per mole of sulfuric acid you can put in solution. (1 mol H2SO4 is about 98 g.) Of course, that heat of solution is assuming that you have pure liquid H2SO4. If it's already in solution, the heat production is dramatically reduced.
Whether or not that kind of energy is enough for your purposes... depends on what you want to do with it. There's certainly a more efficient method.
A completely seperate _Domain_ of life, only recently delineated from bacteria an eukaryotes. Analysis of acid mine drainage sites have found these microbes living in pH -3.5, and actually actively drive down the pH themselves. See http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/archaea/archaea.html.
Jill Banfield, a Macarthur Grant recipient, has done quite a bit of work on this.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance