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Cassini 'Tastes' Organic Material at Enceladus
Riding with Robots writes "As previously reported, the robotic spacecraft Cassini recently flew through the mysterious geyser plumes at Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. Today, NASA released the preliminary results of the flyby, including some intriguing findings, such as organic materials 20 times denser than expected and relatively high temperatures along the fissures where the geysers emanate. 'These spectacular new data will really help us understand what powers the geysers. The surprisingly high temperatures make it more likely that there's liquid water not far below the surface,' said one mission scientist."
Does someone want to tell me what definition of "organic" they are using, which can be found in comets and moon geysers?
"Compounds containing carbon".
That's all it means, really. Methane is a common one.
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> "Enceladus' brew is like carbonated water with an essence of natural gas," said Waite.
Gawd, i knew it. The primordial hell-brew of the universe is Mountain Dew.
That which does not kill us makes us... st
traditionally organic meant that it was produced by life and not synthetic- then we figured out how to synthesize a lot of these chemicals and now it pretty much means contains carbon and usually hydrogen. carbon dioxide for example contains carbon but isn't considered organic and neither is pure carbon. water is a vital component of life as we know it and is almost always associated with organic compounds at least in vivo although it too is not considered organic because it doesn't contain carbon, it does however contain hydrogen and oxygen which are very common in organic compounds.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
or to be more precise by citing wikipedia:
Organic chemistry is a specific discipline within chemistry which involves the scientific study of the structure, properties, composition, reactions, and preparation (by synthesis or by other means) of chemical compounds consisting primarily of carbon and hydrogen, which may contain any number of other elements, including nitrogen, oxygen, the halogens as well as phosphorus, silicon and sulfur.
it should be noted however that otherwise "organic" compounds containing boron or silicon are often not characterized as being organic, usually they are referred to as being part of organometallic chemistry. th is even though boron and silicon are not strictly metallic, they are in fact semiconductors.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Whether they find life there or not, I think Jupiter should be considered an enemy planet
if they spin it the right way, that they literally found moons made of petrochemicals in the outer solar system their budget would triple overnight ;)
I'm wondering if that, in fact, happened - that there was one almighty pulverization and the modern Enceladus is the result of the lighter material condensing around a surviving fragment of sufficient size to act as a nucleus. In that case, though, there should be another moon formed from the heavier material condensing around another fragment, showing an abnormally high density, in much the same way that the Earth and its moon unevenly divide the material of the original planet.
So far, I've not seen anything that suggests that is the case, but since so little is actually known, I guess it's well within the realms of possible at this point.
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According to wiktionary, both definitions are correct. As for this article, they are referring to carbon based material. Or so we hope.
Organic material, eh... We should seed the planet with microbes, come back in a million years and see what evolves there. Would that prove evolution or the god theory?
chicken.
They were produced without synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or unnatural additives of any kind.
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...but they don't contain real girl scouts
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
I thought the "tasting" was a bust...
Only one instrument had problems. The others worked.
Table-ized A.I.
No, what they mean is that no man made pesticides have been used on the moon.
Nope. You need both carbon and hydrogen, and CO2 has no H. I believe the simplest organic molecule is methane, CH4. It's also hydrocarbon, which means it contains only carbon and hydrogen. Alternatively formaldehyde, CH2O, could be considered simplest, depending on how you define "simple". Then you get more complex stuff by adding more carbon (and hydrogen as much as that new carbon needs), and by adding other elements, like replacing an H in a hydrocarbon with an OH gives alcohols, most importantly from C2H6 to C2H5OH.
And now we get to the real problem with extraterrestial organic molecules. There's usually so much methanol (CH3OH), that drinking the stuff would be rather lethal. So you still need to do distillation to get pure enough ethanol. So there's no point sending people out there, because it's as easy to just make the ethanol here on earth using traditional methods. That's why it's better to send robots.
Just to be picky, you don't actually need hydrogen. I reckon most chemists would count hexafluorobenzene as organic. Even with just carbon and oxygen, benzene-1,2,3,4,5,6-hexacarboxylic acid trianhydride (C12O9) would be classed as organic.
A better definition might be, "Contains carbon, does not contain metals (inc. semimetals)", with carbon dioxide and carbonate excluded for historical reasons" :).
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