Slashdot Mirror
Water Vapor Seen 'Raining' Onto Young Star System
tonganqn writes "Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope scientists have discovered huge amounts of water vapor in the young star system, called NGC 1333-IRAS 4B. From the article: 'The water vapor is pouring down from the system's natal cloud and smacking into a dusty disk where planets are thought to form. The observations provide the first direct look at how water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it, begins to make its way into planets, possibly even rocky ones like our own.'"
Pirst Fost
Aw...and I was always welcoming our old icy meteorite overlords.
><));>
I can imagine large clouds of thin Oxygen and Hydrogen gas. But how do you get the gas dense enough to actually react. In those gaseous nebulas, the "gas" is nearly a vacuum. And water isn't going to come from anywhere but gaseous hydrogen and oxygen.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This is your God speaking. Stop watching me piss before I become an angry god......
How does NASA let this kind of filth be posted on their websites? Doesn't the Administration have censors to prevent these kinds of morally dubious scientific discoveries?
Like hell if I'm ever going to let my children visit that star system.
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
Would this "disk" be Blue-ray or HD DVD?
I'm wondering because the resistance to dust and water (mud) could be a deciding factor in the format wars.
The more I read about the discoveries in the solar system the more I'm inclined to believe Einstein's remark: "The micro cosmos is the macro cosmos". iow; we might be all part of an enormous chair or other substance. Think about it; even if you burn a chair you might destroy the object but what about the molecules or better yet; the individual atoms? What if the 4th dimension simply lies in size which, in some unknown scheme, is "wrapped" and thus endless ?
What if you stopped taking drugs for five minutes?
Man, somebody's been a little happy with with the negative mods today. Parent is funny, not a troll.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I guess this means that Spitzer has discovered a spritzer?
Rob
. . . we'd see giant terraforming spacecraft from competing interstellar coalitions laying down clouds of spores among the proto-planets in the hopes that life that arises on future worlds will be of their bio-tradition.
Well, not really, but it's cool to think of.
you mean there could be hot wet vapor coming from Uranus?
I read this in a book somewhere... the sequence of events are eerily familiar, what was it called... Oh, yes thats right! - gasp - the BIBLE.
..."
also like the quote "We have captured a unique phase of a young star's evolution,
You know the universe is nothing like we perceive it. If the universe is so large that it takes light millions of years to get here then we only know the universe of yester-million-year. We have no clue what it is actually like today.....
In light of this, I would like to say that we should all just give up and be glad that god gave us beer. Now that is the path to true enlightenment.
*clears throat, goes for slightly maniacal tone*
Electric Universe! Come on, man, just think about it. It takes time to develope these things. Before we had the fancy, new Electric Universe, we had the Water-Powered Universe.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
How does water vapor even exist in a vacuum?
"Why did only one stellar embryo of 30 show signs of water? The astronomers say this is most likely because NGC 1333-IRAS 4B is in just the right orientation for Spitzer to view its dense core. Also, this particular watery phase of a star's life is short-lived and hard to catch."
IANAA. Is this a reasonable explanation?
...No One Can Hear You Stream!
I just hope it's not chocolate rain!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Is this really like our own? From what little I know about planetary geology, I seem to recall that water did not just rain down on our planet, but was possibly created at or near our early planet from constituent atoms. Could someone clarify this?
I wonder if this high energy, water rich, dust rich, environment
could provide an environment where basic building blocks of life like
amino acids, lipids, and such could form.
Then these blocks could get frozen into the water vapor,as comets, and sent roaming.
... = mud. You might have thought Glastonbury was muddy, but that's just peanuts to space...
Seriously, this might solve how a disc of cigarette smoke-sized particles can condense to form planetesimals, and thus planets.
is never seen.
(Someone deserves an (image word) for their inaccuracy!)
They're watching us, water in our solar system, raining down upon the rock planet, 3rd from the sun.
This could as well be vaporware
Below the story Slashdot has "Related Stores - Firehose: ..." At first I thought it was being suggested by submitter that a fire hose is being used to inject water into new planets.
What? Your post doesn't make sense.
You might not like this definition(it's not the scientific one), but I'll post it anyways:
vapor,
n 1: a visible suspension in the air of particles of some substance [syn: vapour]
As for density, the article is about a star-forming region, where densities are much higher. That's the whole point; gravitation is bringing all this matter together into a big cloud, and densities are becoming high enough that molecules -- especially ultra-stable ones like water -- can form.