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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"?
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.
They invited us over for a swim and a BBQ, you need to bring your own swimsuit though
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.
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...
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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.
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!
If they were Jovian overlords, then we could celebrate.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
See, if Venus had done a better job controlling their illegal immigration issues, we wouldn't be having this problem.
Water is abundant in the universe. To get the stuff off a planet, you basically have to boil it off (using a combination of temperature (see Venus) and/or low pressure (see Moon, Mars)). Otherwise, if you have hydrogen (most common stuff in the universe) and oxygen (pretty common stuff in the universe), you're going to end up with water.
Now, liquid water, that's another story.
How can it be so abundant on Earth, and nowhere else?
Earth is dry compared to objects that pretty much consist of water with some rock mixed in. Earth has a little bit of water sitting on the surface, and that's it.
Neither Saturn nor Jupiter are failed stars. Let Phil explain you this a bit better than I could
C'mon, their air has no oxygen. In fact, bottle of oxygen would be there what bottle of propane is here. It could make a bang, but wouldn't blow everything. With proper nozzle on it, you can light a match and cook just fine. However... you can't put the fire out with a splash from a lake! Their "water" "aids" "oxidation" of "fuel" (oxygen), unlike ours. Whooh, after writing all that with all that quotation marks, finally I see how Earth-biased our chemistry is. If we were from some other surroundings, we would probably had made different grouping of chemical compounds. giving more attention to those which are ubiquitous over those which are "exotic", "rare" and "unlikely". We have so much oxygen on our planet, there are probably some aliens somewhere out there who think our planet is totally poisonous and corrosive hell, like if we were to learn about world mostly covered in hydrochloric acid, with atmosphere abundant in gaseous chlorine.
You can find the whole press release about the correlation between the Tiger Stripes and jets of Enceladus here.
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!"?
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."
That explanation is, somewhat lacking. It explains very well why Jupiter is not a brown dwarf. "Failed star" isn't quite so specific.
Basically, Jupiter is one extremely massive body. It's far more massive (more than twice as much) than all the other planets (even all the other gas giants, including similarly sized Saturn) combined. It's also made of MOSTLY hydrogen (prime element fueling a star), and interestingly enough, the center of mass between the Sun and Jupiter is actually OUTSIDE of the surface of the Sun. Not much outside of it admittedly, but no other planet in our system comes anywhere near it, and it's much like the Pluto/Charon system though not as exaggerated; the objects to some degree orbit each other rather than just one orbiting the other.
So, we really need a good understanding on how binary star systems form. If they both coalesce from the same cloud, then Jupiter can indeed be seen as an "almost" star that had all the right components, and could have formed in a way similar to a binary system, but it simply didn't pickup enough mass during formation.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I said in my explanation that Jupiter is indeed not a Brown Dwarf, and that the linked text did explain that well. My point is that being excluded from the technical designation of brown dwarf does not exclude it from the less specific, and not as specifically defined designation of "failed star".
I'd also question your term "real astronomer". I minored in astronomy in college and am still an avid amateur. Perhaps Galileo wasn't a "real astronomer" either since he never obtained a PhD in the discipline.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
God, I must deserve a big helping of DEE-DEE-DEE, because I can't see much detail in that movie consisting of a whopping four (count them, 4) fuzzy, grainy frames*. Especially since I'll never get a better opportunity to see for myself that EU is undeniably true, and yet I'm not convinced. If EU has any elements of truth to it, then (as you so defensively gushed) it will win out eventually and you EU proponents will all be heroes. But all I'm seeing right now is a Richard-Hoaglandish theme: whining about being Kept Quiet By The Establishment(TM) while pointing out "amazing" and "undeniable" details in fuzzy images instead of writing serious scientific papers that include testable predictions.
*Note: I'm not saying those 4 frames convince me the NASA interpretation of conditions on Enceladus is "undeniably true," either. I'll be interested to see what turns up as we look at Enceladus over the years. But I know the professional scientific community is able to update its hypotheses and theories to match observed reality. Here's hoping the EU camp can do that too.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
I didn't view the movie, but from the description provided by our resident EU theorist, it seems to be something easily explained by Cartesian geometry and oft-encountered in orbital mechanics.
As the radius of the plume increases, yet its speed remains the same, its angular velocity decreases, so it fall behinds objects below it moving the same speed along a concentric path. Thank goodness for this or we wouldn't have geosynchronous satellites as we know them and Copernicus might never have figured out heliocentrism. Also, I'm unsure how much of the movement is due to the rotation of Enceladeus and how much is due to the motion of Cassini, which would change the perspective of the plume. The EU proponents can easily determine that last part (something more interesting than Cassini moving relative to Enceladeus is happening) by getting the timestamps and orbital data from NASA and crunching some numbers, but that might be considered a testable prediction.
Additionally, the GP's argument is not any more supportive of the electric universe theory than it is of the Enceladians with Super Soakers Theory. He doesn't even give a useful theoretical description of why EU better explains the motion of the jets than conventional theories, much less refer to any work done to determine if it is likely or even possible. NASA has at least done calculations to determine what it would take to create the jets under their proposed mechanism.
Thank you professor obvious. Plasmas are by definition electrical. For the record, modelling plasmas electrically is only valid if they have a net charge relative to surrounding objects on large scales. There is no trivial mechanism for that to occur, and without it the net force is zero. In that regards it actually turns out to be convenient for the universe that gravity is only attractive.