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Saturn's Moons Harboring Water?
eldavojohn writes "New bizarre images of Saturn's moons are exciting scientists as there may be some indication of water, possibly at very low depths in the frigid environment they possess. From the article, 'Titan's north pole is currently gripped by winter. And quite a winter it is, with temperatures dropping to -180C and a rain of methane and ethane drizzling down, filling the moon's lakes and seas. These liquids also carve meandering rivers and channels on the moon's surface. Finally, last week NASA and Esa revealed images from Cassini which confirmed that jets of fine, icy particles are spraying from Saturn's moon Enceladus and originate from a hot 'tiger stripe' fracture that straddles the moon's south polar region. The discovery raises the prospect of liquid water existing on Enceladus, and possibly life.' You can find the images here."
"a rain of methane and ethane drizzling down, filling the moon's lakes and seas."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Titan's lakes and seas are already methane or ethane. Maybe they mean "filling the moon's valleys"?
And all this time we've been worried about an invasion by the Martians...when we should have really been worried about the invasion from the Saturnians!
.sig
Now if they could score a lot of water off of asteroids and other ultra-low-gravity objects, we'd be golden, esp. the theories floating about concerning "dead comets", which IIRC are almost all water ice.
That's where IMHO we need to be throwing exploration money; to get the low-hanging fruit first.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The fact that some of Satrun's moons have water is nothing new, Tethys for example has a density very near 1 g/cm^3 indicating that it is likely mostly made of water ice. The real interesting thing here is that tidal heating could create pools of warmed liquid water neneat the surface.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
With Saturn being like a somewhat failed star that one of its moons would resemble a sister planet to earth with water and everything. Now life is another matter, at least in a form that we know...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
How could life, as we know it, exist in an atmosphere dominated by methane? Even if there was liquid water, how do we know that it is rich enough in oxygen to support life? I'm thinking that there is nothing to see here. Look somewhere else.
The game.
I know this is wildly offtopic, but Saturn is just simply soo cool! If you want to get ANYBODY hooked onto astronomy, just show them a picture of Saturn. I shudder to think of the day we will strip-mine Saturn (or equivalent heinousness), and will defile the planet with our greed. At least, we can hope.
a rain of methane and ethane drizzling down, filling the moon's lakes and seas.
I'm guessing this is a non-smoking moon?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Saturn's Moons Harboring Water?
CmdrTaco's pun routine is up and running this morning I see...
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Harboring water? It's pun-tastic.
It must be. How can you harbor *without* water?
ESA is an initialism standing for European Space Agency. If you write NASA with capital letters (in proper English one should do this) you should do the same with ESA.
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
I really like the fact that there might be water out there in the solar system. How can it be so abundant on Earth, and nowhere else? It's just every time that there is something about water on other surfaces in our solar system, it's seems gimmicky. Remember, water on Mars? Moon? And we never hear anything else about it.
Methane rain drizzling down to form lakes and rivers? :-(
Is that the celestial equivalent of wet farts?
That must be proof of an Intelligent Evil Designer if any.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You can find the whole press release about the correlation between the Tiger Stripes and jets of Enceladus here.
Methane instead of water, get it? Harbors are on the seas/land interface.
She discusses the Cassini mission in detail, including what we've learned about Titan and this strange behavior on Enceladus. It beats reading dead text.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/178
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
I was intrigued about why the names of those tiger stripe cracks are middle eastern cities. Googling I found this article which notes that there is a convention of naming features on this moon after places in the Arabian Nights. The page is cool and tells you what a sulcus is. And there's is a link on that page to a giant 6mb map with names of features on it.
Am I the only one who read the slashdot intro and thought, "I soooo want to go there!"?
How the hell do you strip-mine a gaseous planet?
I know this is wildly offtopic, but Saturn is just simply soo cool! If you want to get ANYBODY hooked onto astronomy, just show them a picture of Saturn. I shudder to think of the day we will strip-mine Saturn (or equivalent heinousness), and will defile the planet with our greed. At least, we can hope.
You do realize Saturn id a gas giant? You can't strip mine gas. But if we ever develope any technology to siphon materials from Saturn I don't understand your aversion to it. The reason we find strip mining on earth so distasteful is due to it's disruption of the local ecology and to a lesser importance it damages the esthetic's of the area. However if there is no ecology then an argument about esthetic's alone seems rather empty.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Old news don't ya think? I found out about a life bearing Saturn Moon just by watching Cowboy Bebop... Get with the program! =)
--
X's and O's for all my foes.
Personally, I find aesthetics to be a perfectly valid reason to preserve the pristine nature of something, be it a natural area here on Earth or somewhere out in the stars. Whole theories of philosophy have been predicated solely on aesthetics. Simply because you're an uneducated boor who can't appreciate beauty for its own sake, doesn't mean that the rest of us should suffer to live in your cold, sterile world.
That said, I don't necessarily think we could ever damage Saturn to the point of destroying its beauty... it's huge! And if we do somehow develop the ability to damage it, I would hope that there would be more people like me who want to preserve it than people like you who are willing to destroy it for some temporary advantage.
You've got your own special tag!
which is totally what she said
Scientists here on Six-six dismissed the possibility that there may be life on the three-one, despite the recent detection of methane on its worldhost.
"First," said astrobiologist Zune Ipod, "although the worldhost does in fact contain methane, there has been no evidence of any methane on its only detected world. Second, there has been no liquid of any kind detected on the worldhost system's world. Although there are various liquids on the worldhost, the primary liquid detected is dyhydrogen oxide, which is a deadly poison. In fact, it is so hot on three-one and its worldhost that dyhydrogen oxide is a gas on most of the worldhost's atmosphere. If you were to move our world to worldhost three, not only would all life vaporise, if somehow it didn't the gaseous dyhydrogen oxide would kill all living organisms.
"Its worldhost is far too small for its world to harbor life, even if it wasn't so incredibly, hellishly hot. It is so hot that methane only exists as a gas, while the deadly dyhydrogen oxide exists as solid, liquid, and even gas.
"We are holding open the possibility, however, of life on one of system five's four major worlds."
Some science fiction writers have speculated on the possibility of the existance of some wierd sort of life at those hellishly hot temperatures, but those stories are simply juvenile fiction.
Click here for page two
Saturn is harboring water? Oh great, when did Bush declare war on water? I guess he figures the terrorists are 60% water, and then Katrina... So now NASA has a new mission to seek out and destroy all extra-terrestrial water?
It's science fiction, I know, but...
Take a gander at Charles Stross' Accelerando or Ken MacLeod's The Cassini Divison for ideas around "strip mining" the gas giants.We'll strip-mine the other planets later!
I would like to point people especially to the video at http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=1702&js=1&navjs=1. Now, watch the rotation of the planet, then re-start the movie and observe the lack of movement for the jets. You can see for yourself that the jets are rotating across the planet rather than with it, presumably along the rilles. The video is rather undeniable. Within the EU view, the hot point sources constitute electrical plasma guns that are excavating materials from the surface of the planet, leaving rilles in their wake. For a fuller treatment of the situation, visit http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060313moonjets.htm.
People, you will perhaps get no better opportunity to see for yourself that space plasmas can be highly electrical. The field of astrophysics is incorrectly modeling these plasmas as fluids, as if they only respond to gravity. But the space plasmas instead respond to electromagnetic forces, as decades of laboratory plasma research have already confirmed for us.
This is not the first time in the history of science when the momentum of belief has overcome reason. From The Electric Life of Michael Faraday by Alan Hirshfeld, page 73:
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Looking for water? We got water here. Two thirds of the surface of this planet is covered with water, several miles deep in places. We got all the water that you'll ever need or want right here. For free.
...and grow up.
Looking for life? We got life here. Lots of it. In fact there's so much life here that our main global industry is the creation of machines that are used to kill life here. Guns, munitions, bombs, atomic bombs, death planes, death satellites, endless first-person-shooter video games to prepare our young for killing. You want life? We've got plenty! Help yourself!
The point is that spending millions of dollars to look for life and water on other planets is insane. We already have plenty of it (it being whatever you're looking for) right here, right now.
What the people who are spending millions (hundreds of millions actually) of dollars on space travel are looking for is an easy paycheck that comes with a science-fiction fantasy attached. They should admit this to themselves and stop bullshitting the rest of us.
Then they should go become Hollywood screenwriters and contribute something useful to our society.
Am I pushing your buttons? Am I pissing you off?
Get real.
Thank you for pointing that out. I was going to as well.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
The above message was clearing written by some loser with a serious attitude problem who clearly doesn't understand the beauty and elegance and absolute necessity of space travel. How could anyone be so dense? Must not have had cool science books with cool pictures as a kid. Tough. But, this being Slashdot, where space travel has the same status as Jesus in Oklahoma, it would be easy to just blast this fool back to slime by mod-ing him (her? it? shit!) down to -100. A deep and endless black hole that Slashdot reserves for losers who interrupt our beautiful discussion of really cool methane sparklers.
But we shouldn't!
Because there are millions of people out there who think exactly like this pathetic fool loser. And all these pathetic fool losers just like this guy actually control the money that we need to bring the absolute necessity of space travel into reality. If any of this cool shit is going to happen, we have to convince these pathetic fool losers to give us the money. And to do this we have to blow their arguments away in order that they too can come to see the beauty and elegance and absolute necessity of space travel, just like we do.
So let them speak! We will listen. We will study the ravings of these pathetic fool losers and turn their own words and twisted logic into arguments that are crystal brilliant diamonds of logic that clearly demonstate the beauty and elegance and absolute necessity of space travel!
So, no, don't mod them down. Have pity and patronize them. They will eventually come over to our side. Hell, if they're on Slashdot, they're already most of the way there.
Simply because you're an uneducated boor who can't appreciate beauty for its own sake
Thank you for highlighting how empty your argument is.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
When is this pop-sci trend of anytime something about space comes into the news the tagline has to be 'may contain life'. It's a poor excuse becuase it's sheer speculation. What we DO know is that there is water there. There is also loads of hard radiation and no visible cities, green belts, or anything else remotely indicating that there is life. Get a life folks. Do science for science's sake, if someday in the far future we actually encounter life, celebrate then, but until then find a different reason for exploration.
I hear that phrase written in to articles all too often... makes me imagine a bunch of overly excited and dramatic Japanese schoolgirls in white lab coats and disco platform boots.
If I read grandparent's link correctly, it seems to be saying that Jupiter is the product of acretion in the planetary disc, a process which never produces a star; in order to be a star, or even a failed star, the body has to arise direclty from the cloud, not from the disc, as Jupiter is thought to have. So if the sun and jupiter had "both coalesce[d] from the same cloud, then Jupiter" would be "seen as an 'almost' star." That's my reading at least.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
If I read that article right, then in a binary star system consisting of a relatively massive star and a closely orbiting smaller star like a red dwarf, the smaller star would, by the definition offered by Dr. Plait, also be a planet, as it could have formed from the disk of material around the larger star, but still attained sufficient mass for sustained hydrogen fusion.
That and the Pluto debate goes to show how it may often be pointless to nitpick definitions in astronomy or any other field where there are an apparently continuous spectrum of elements.
How the hell do you strip-mine a gaseous planet?
Mega Maid?
It's Life, Jim. But not as we know it.
First of all, beauty is subjective.
Secondly, odds are Saturn isn't uniquely beautiful in the universe, or even the solar system. For example, Jupiter has equal diversity in moons (Europea, Io, etc) and atmospheric cloud bands even more fascinating than Saturn's that will likely outlast Saturn's iconic rings (which some suspect will gradually thin out and disappear over the next few million years).
Third, what if we strip mine it build something even more beautiful or better yet, useful? Like maybe an artificial habitat that gives billions more people the opportunity to live and therefore enjoy the beauty of the universe.
The USA would be more concerned if it was harboring terrorists, not water.
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It was a pun, using two meanings of the word "harbor". One is a noun and the other is a verb, so it shouldn't be too hard to notice...
The shareholder is always right.
The remix album of Oxygene 7-13 - 'Odyssey through O2' has a few vocal snippets (i presume voiced by JMJ) before each grouping of 3-4 tunes, and one of those mentions '..smoking some golden beams...'
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Ask Lando Calrissian. I think he's got the technique sorted.
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