Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
It wouldn't, of course. But there could be life as we don't know it. There's nothing magic about oxygen: it's merely a good oxidiser and we have lots of it. In some exotic environments on Earth, there's life that doesn't respire oxygen; and how did you think it got there, in the first place? Photosynthesising plants made it all. What do you think they breathed?
Complex organic chemistry + lots of energy + a rich environment = ...well, we don't know, really. But it's bound to be interesting.
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
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
You can find the whole press release about the correlation between the Tiger Stripes and jets of Enceladus here.
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