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How Water Forms in Interstellar Space at 10K
KentuckyFC writes "Water is the most abundant solid material in space. But although astronomers see it on planets, moons, in comets and in interstellar clouds, nobody has been able to show how it forms. In theory, it should form easily when oxygen and atomic hydrogen meet. The problem is that there is not enough of it floating around as gas in interstellar dust clouds. So instead, the thinking is that water must form when atomic hydrogen interacts with frozen solid oxygen on the surface of dust grains in these clouds. Now Japanese astronomers have demonstrated this process for the first time in the lab in conditions that simulate interstellar space. That's cool because all the water in the solar system, including almost every drop you drink on Earth today, must have formed in exactly this way more than 5 billion years ago in a pre-solar dustcloud (abstract)."
Isn't the universe like 6000 years old ? Oh, and earth really is flat.
That thinks this article was a tad poorly written?
For example...
Water forms in interstellar space at 10k
Forgive my possible ignorance, but 10k what? Degrees? (Celsius or Kelvin?) Pascals? Distance? Does a postfixed "K" represent something different within the scientific community that I simply didn't know about?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Where do all the Oxygen atoms come from ... I'm guessing fusion from within stars?
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That's cool because all the water in the solar system, including almost every drop you drink on Earth today, must have formed in exactly this way more than 5 billion years ago in a pre-solar dustcloud
Why must it? Could you justify that statement?
Gravity alone tends to cause interstellar clouds to collapse into stellar accretion disks, and then into stars and planets.
Although the Hydrogen and Oxygen in the original cloud may have had almost zero chance of getting together, once the cloud collapsed into relatively dense planetary atmospheres, why couldn't water have formed then?
Nor any drop to drink
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in the immortal words of Keanu Reeves: "Whoaaa"
also forming in that dustcloud 5 billion years ago were minute traces of lysergic acid diethylamide. slight traces of which may also enable you to appreciate the far-out implications of you being a 5 billion year old dustcloud waterchild
duuude
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I knew my tap water tasted funny.
You're saying ALL the water in Earth's oceans came from hydrogen atoms interacting with solid oxygen on the surface of cosmic dust particles ??? I think it's more likely that molecular oxygen and hydrogen reacted at higher temperature on our planet (much like a rocket taking off into space).
You don't have to try it figure it out. God just creates it. No scientific explaination needed. Now wasn't that easy.
Why must it? Could you justify that statement?
The problem is that the Earth doesn't have sufficient gravity to hold free hydrogen. Free hydrogen on earth goes by by into space. So that almost automatically rules out any free hydrogen / oxygen hypothesis... or at least renders it less likely.
Now, so, maybe there is some sort of hydrogen compound and some sort of oxygen compound that could react on earth to form water. Well, then, you'd have to ask, where's the traces of those reactions occuring, and, are there any minerals out there today that support those conclusions. Right now, you can find oxygen in just about any good old mineral, but hydrogen, I think that's an entirely different mater. I'm not a geologist, but I'm pretty sure that the only hydrogens we find on earth are from organic compounds, and they get it from a reaction that ultimately originates with water as one of the reagents.
Now, that is of course based on a geological understanding that goes maybe at most a mile or two into the earth's crust. There could be some sort of something in the mantle where, ahah, there is a ton of hydrogen... you know, like water is formed from some hydrogen bearing rock mixing with some oxygen bearing rock inside the earth and shoots up out of a volcano. IF you could somehow find a set of candidate rocks and then make a good case for it, inside the earth, consistent with what we already know from the geological record about how the earth was formed, then yeah, you'd probably refute the underlying assumption of these japanese scientists and be some kind of a hero.
But you'd be a bigger hero than that... because, if you actually could find a non-organic source of hydrogen on the earth you'd be a huge hero, because you would have discovered a fairly green non-fossil fuel. Good luck with that!
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more gay than they fas73r chip
Water is the most important thing needed for life. The hard part of life isn't explaining how water forms, but how inantimate, dead chemicals can become alive. As far as we know so far, life has never arisen anywhere but here, although despite any lack of proof it's assumed that we are not alone.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The Earth's gravity is not nearly strong enough to keep molecular hydrogen trapped. You might get a few water molecules formed that way, but most of any free hydrogen escaped as is.
I think it would be more accurate though to state that MOST water was probably created via the mechanism described in the article. I'm pretty sure there was some fraction of water that was created through other mechanisms.
but the interstellar dustcloud waterchild concept wins hollywood glamor points, while your more reasonable point of view is mundane and humdrum
it is a facet of scientific theory formation known as michael bayification: the more dramatic and trippy the theory, the more likely it is to spread in the popular press, and therefore to gain more traction in the minds of the average joe
"5 billion interstellar dustcloud water" is just so cool sounding man. while your point of view is full of zzz
so c'mon, get with the program, your ideas are just so drab. perhaps if you redescribed your theory as it would appear being mumbled by a secret military organization figurehead in a big budget disaster movie. make believe you are a 23 year old hollywood script writer perusing wikipedia in forming your scientific mumbo jumbo
repeat after me: "hyperplanetary accretion disc catalysis"
or "gravity well coupled reverse electrolysis"
there you go, now we are playing in the big leagues of science-theory-by-public-relations-ad-copy-writer
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Interestingly. 10 kelvin != 10 degrees.
The unit is 'kelvins' not 'degrees kelvin.' A degree means an increment between one extreme to another, which made sense for the Fahrenheit system (100 increments between the likely lowest and highest temperatures generally experienced in the environment the system was made in) and it made sense for the Centigrade system (100 increments between the freezing point and the boiling point of water at standard pressure.)
That's why degrees are also used in angles. 360 increments around a circle.
As the kelvin scale is absolute, referring to them as degrees isn't correct.
There is somewhere between 100,000 and 2,000,000 times as much water on earth as there is biomass(go ahead and find a better estimate on how much water there is, biomass is close enough to 2,000 billion tons, which is 6.7*10^14 kg).
Given a million years, not very much of that needs to be cycled each year for most of it to have been organic matter at some point, but it would be interesting to see just how much of the water in a plant is newly created(and the percentages of water that a plant destroys and creates in a given year would be cool too).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I always used to think that, except when I looked up the residence time of my local water supply ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cycle - deep ground water) I discovered that there is an 80% chance that I have not been drinking dino-piss after all...
Not every single drop of the water we use today is formed that way. There are lots of other ways water is formed.
... H2O !
:)
For example: Volcanic activity
Whenever there's some volcanic activity, you see steam coming up. Those are "NEW" water, as Hydrogen streaming out of the earth crust, it mixes with Oxygen in the air, and walla
I bet the Kilauea volcano in Hawai'i has given us quite a number of drops of H2O over the years.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Dredging my memory from a high school class about 30 years ago, photosynthesis utilizes water and recombines the molecules:
CO2 + H2O + sunshine => C6H12O6 + O2
Apologizes for the lack of subscripting; I tried and failed...
...and it is a 'story'... then would you agree to call 'The Bible' a work of fiction?
I'm curious - why must he be an atheist if he rejects the idea of a God that would leave people in an apparent state of deception (from GP poster's point of view)?
He could just as easily believe in a different God, or multiple Gods, or etc. which to him/her is truthful in every way.
Or he could be agnostic, saying that there may very well be a God, or multiple gods, but that he doesn't believe that the God described in OP is the kind of God he would choose to believe in.
--
As for the 26 words... I know human beings more benevolent and loving like that. I, for one, don't need the love of a random stranger in order for me to help them in any which way I can if I concern myself with their person. Put differently, from the perspective of somebody who were not to believe in 'God', what would 'God' have done for them that would have him deserve their love? On the up side - those who don't believe in God typically don't believe in Hell and all that, and probably couldn't care less about what God thinks and demands, as it becomes a moot issue.
I'm the guy who posted the thing about our water coming from the reaction between H2 and O2 *ON* our planet. You are saying that most of the hydrogen would have escaped. You have to remember that our atmosphere was not always the way it is now. If we had an atmosphere of just hydrogen or mostly hydrogen, for example, the hydrogen would not escape because it isn't contained within a heavier gas, therefore it wouldn't be buoyant. H2 has mass too, so gravity would trap it on Earth. Maybe there was a lot of hydrogen and only a little bit of oxygen in the air...and no nitrogen...who knows. All of our nitrogen could have come later; released by organic compounds that decomposed.
I don't know what happened back then but I'm simply stating that hydrogen CAN be trapped on Earth if the atmosphere isn't really heavy.
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Without looking into all your points, I am pretty damn sure that things don't happen as you describe.
You have three points here that don't go together:
- The only hydrogen compounds on earth are in organics and water
- Organics got their hydrogen compounds soely through reactions with water
- Free hydrogen escapes into space
If all of these were true, the total amount of water on earth would be constantly decreasing, and would have been for billions of years. This is not the case - the amount of water on earth is relatively constant. As far as I remember from my university chemistry and biology classes, organics don't, for the most part, break down water ever.
Now I don't know the **actual** hydrogen sink for life on earth, but I am pretty sure it isn't water as you describe.
One way to estimate this is to look at the carbon respiration of the planet. It takes 4 or 5 years for the amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere to equal the amplitude of the seasonal variation and the seasonal variation is a rough indicator of the amount of cycling that biomass does. If we assume equal molar quantities of water and carbon dioxide get cycled and note that we put about 7Gt of carbon into the air each year then at least 20Gt of water gets turned into hydrocarbons and turned back into water each year. The mass of the hydrosphere is about 1.4 billion Gt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean#Physical_properties so the biosphere ought to cycle that in about 700 million years. Less than a majority of water molecules are in their original (pre-solar) configuration.
I'm so glad that's settled.
I was thinking the other day, how am I supposed to just go through life without knowing how water is formed in space?
Would you please stop modding Planesdragon down for defending his beliefs? That's just crass.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Don't we all just hate it when off-topic trolls drag the discussion into the gutter. I'm glad someone knew how to use their mod-points wisely.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
10K of water ought to be enough for anybody.
Probably. It depends on how much of the hydrosphere is biologically active in a given period. If 95% of the biological activity involves 1% of the water, the cycle time is going to be much much higher.
Note that I am only pointing out that there is a big if, not trying to speculate on what the numbers really are.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"Water is the most abundant solid material in space. " Hmm, solid water. If only we had some term to describe this stuff.
I, personally, will not get over it. Too much progress has been made despite christianity's best efforts to hold it back, I refuse to let them regain any ground.
I agree. Were it not for christianity, we could have stronger, Roman values, and could merely justify the extermination of our enemies because they were weaker.
Look, you have all of these people arguing against the USA military actions around the world, as if, there was some sort of a cosmic judge that holds us wrong. This planet lives at the mercy of the USA and it is high time we make it pay for us.
The sooner we get rid of religion, and focus on survival of the fittest, we can eliminate the silly notions of the soul and with it the idea of fundamental rights. From there, we can proceed with the extermination of the third world, replacing weaker cultures with a stronger industrialized one, keeping the planet for those who have the values to use it, not merely subsistent parasites that besmirch the very name of humanity with their almost termite like existence.
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I find it interesting that most of you people are not just opposed to the idea of a creator but you are insanely and violently opposed to the idea. Like the mere mention sends you in to a fitful rage where you start pissing on yourself and bashing your face into sharp corners. Like holy crap man take a frikin chill pill. I didn't really mean that. As you were. God God God God God God God God God God God God God God God God God God God God GodGod God God God God God GodGod God God God God God GodGod God God God God God GodGod God God God God God GodGod God God God God God GodGod God God God God God GodGod God God God God God God Go nuts dude God God God God God God GodGod God God God God God GodGod God God God God God GodGod God God God God God God
Uh, yeah, like cause 10K is -441.4 degrees Fahrenheit or -263 degrees Celsius.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
...that is, 10 degrees Celsius above absolute zero.
That's almost as bad. What you meant to say was, "-263.15 degrees Celsius."
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
C6H1206 + H2O + yeast => CO2 + moonshine
Good thought. I'd guess that since the time for ocean circulation to bring the oceans vertical temperature distribution back into equilibrium after a instantaneous change in CO2 is a couple of centruries, most hydrogen is available to be evaporated or used by seaweed and plankton on that kind of timescale. A portion could be held as inactive archaic aquifers, but not the majority. Evidence of past inland seas suggests that icesheets do no persist on geological timescale and thus do not hold water all that long.
Isn't this the 3 or 4th time in the past year this story has been on the front page?
I'd always assumed that it was formed from ions:
- Oxygen atom collects a lose electron or two to form a negatively-charged oxygen ion.
- Oxygen ion collects a lose proton or hydrogen atom to form a hydroxyl ion (or "atom")
- Hydroxyl ion collects a lose proton, or
- Hydroxyl "atom" collects first an electron then a proton.
No surface necessary: The captures can start out very tenuous (say, due to interactions with additional particles or magnetic fields in a gas cloud) and then conserve momentum by radiating photons and recoiling as the captured particles descend through the energy levels toward a neutral molecule.
But I'm not an astrophysicist, so I have no idea how plausible that water-origin story is.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The more we learn, the more obvious it becomes that life, far from being a unique or rare thing in the universe, is actually an inevitable natural process, and will consistently and repeatedly erupt under environmental conditions that are actually very common across the universe.
then, uh, where is it? That's the Fermi problem. If life would have erupted under all sorts of conditions in the universe, somebody smart should have evolved besides us by now. After all, the earth is only a 1/3 the age of the universe and theoretically there could be and should be civilizations out there that are literally thousands, millions and billions of years older than our own.
But we have seen -nothing-.
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When will people realize that it is okay to be a young earth Creationist and still believe in science. The Darwinists have things mostly right, it's just that God created the Universe 6000 years ago and made it APPEAR to be much older. Time, as we observe it, is directly controlled by God and as such he can manipulate it to be anything He wills.
We actually did not exist two seconds ago. Everything you believe in, even the continuity of your life, is a morality play created by God every two seconds. The entire universe, every living thing, is just the luminous beings of heaven arranging thesmelves across the multiverse in a number of beings... the real you, the you that exists for two seconds, might well spend its next as a frog or a bacteria.
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In other words, according to the Bible, 1000 Human Years is equal to 1 God Day
That's ridiculous. You are talking about a rhetorical point in Psalms that has absolutely nothing to do with setting up a scale of time in Genesis.
The book of Genesis is a good story with a moral point. The idea wasn't to say how the earth was made, it was to paint a backstory which illustrates that sin and temptation are as old as the earth itself, which is undeniably true.
Do you really think God would go to someone who barely had invented fire, and try and explain the ins and outs of big bang theory? I mean, what would be the point of the human experience if we couldn't discover it for ourselves, and learn for ourselves?
So God -lied-. Get over it. He is God and he can do what He wants.
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You're absolutely right. However, so much of Christianity is built on the literal truth of the Bible, such that if you *can't* take it literally, then *everything* in the bible becomse suspect
Biblical inerracy is not the basis of religion. Christianity, Catholicism in particular, is an oral tradition religion that uses the bible as a common frame of spiritual reference..
The whole deal with the church wasn't so much as to say the bible was the sole truth, as it was to say that the church had the sole role in interpreting the bible. Nobody really had a problem with Galileo, in fact, he enjoyed the support of the Pope, until he started basically casting judgements about the bible itself, and that was a usurpation of the power of the church.
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We have quite a few assumptions in these sentences. It almost sounds like the humans are telling Nature what *must* have happened because the humans really are out of ideas. In order to uphold our elitist attitude that we can explain everything (even it requires a chain of assumptions and no real proof) we are saying what must have happened because if we can't think of any other explanation then the explanation we have must be correct. This will be a story when they have more than basic assumptions and demands upon Nature that imply we know what happened 5 billion years ago even though we weren't there. The fact they created water using a particular method in no way implies or dictates that some (let alone all) the water outside the lab formed the exact same way.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Just how fucking retarded are people that they must apply the words "lose" and "loose" incorrectly every fucking time?
I lose my temper when I see it.
I let loose with a chainsaw when I see it.
Idiots.
Nobody in this thread knows about the self-ionization of water? A given water molecule dissociates and recombines with a different hydrogen about every 10 hours, merely due to the fact that it's bumping into other water molecules.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-ionization_of_water#Concentration_and_frequency
So, going off of these tongue-in-cheek "waterchild" theories in the comments above -- perhaps Thales wasn't so crazy after all positing the origins of the universe as water-based?
I knew I'd get to throw out my (admittedly limited) Presocratic knowledge at some point!
If you actually study the creation myths, that means that god specifically created the water. In all of the early universe models, there is water both underneath the earth and above the sky. This blatantly obvious, since sometimes the water leaks out of the sky, and if you dig down into the earth, you find the water below. We of course, now know that the water is just droplets condensing to form clouds, and then accumulating to form rain, and that there's a water table, with solid rock below that. However, for their time, it was a very nuanced understanding.
Er, 'organics' somehow have the ability to 'crack' or 'fractionate' H2O? sans electrolysis?
Me thinks not.
Whatever these idiots are smoking, I DO NOT WANT IT!
NEW WATER is formed whenever hydorgen burns, requiring oxygen to burn. Chemistry 101.
I'll take that wager. With something on the order of one atom of hydrogen per cubic centimeter of interstellar space (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/DaWeiCai.shtml), or even two to four atoms per cubic meter of space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space), I think interstellar atomic hydrogen just in the Milky Way will be multiple orders of magnitude greater than all hydrogen on earth, including the hydrogen bound in molecules of water, etc. If you care to quantify the number of said molecules on earth, I'll compute the amount of space needed to equal that.
Wow, If I ever heard bull**** on Slashdot, this would be it.
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On the other hand, the reasons for separate Hispanic, Chinese, and Korean Protestant churches in the US are primarily language. Catholic churches didn't traditionally have this problem as much, because if everything's in Latin then only the people who've learned their Latin really understand the show (though the Italians and Spanish can catch some of it anyway.) But for the rest of us, and for Catholic churches after Vatican II, it's really nice to understand what the preacher is saying, especially on complex philosophical or emotional issues, and to be able to talk to each other the rest of the time, and the alternatives are to either hang out in separate groups or to share the world's most common language, which is Bad English.
Haitians in the Northeast US are an edge case - they've usually had separate churches because they're speaking Creole French, but of course the reasons they're black are because of slavery.
I used to go to a Southern Baptist church in New Jersey, and it was really annoying to hear some people refer to it as a "white" church - we were about 1/3 Chinese, a few black families, a few Colombians, a few Puerto Ricans, an Arab family, some southerners, some Yankees, some Vietnamese (well, technically they were Chinese from Saigon, but they spoke Hakka). Not bad for under 100 people. Eventually a Chinese-language church opened up nearby and most of the Chinese families started going to it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Space is really big and empty, and vaguely potentially habitable places to live are really rare and far apart - and starships that you can build in your backyard, or possibly even in your planet's backyard, are from the fiction side of science fiction, not the science side.
Even if there _are_ other intelligent beings out there, it's pretty unlikely that they'd be able to afford to burn the kind of resources it would take to do much starfaring. Even communications is really hard - if a species spends a million years broadcasting into space using frequencies and patterns we'd recognize as communications, that doesn't get you much coverage, and maybe they last probed our direction a century ago so we've missed our chance for the millenium, or maybe we just didn't recognize the signal they sent us last Tuesday because SETI wasn't pointed in the right direction.
Or, well, they figured that we're made out of meat, and didn't want to keep talking to us.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
... oh, never mind, everybody pretty much figured that one was coming anyway.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
We actually did not exist two seconds ago. Everything you believe in, even the continuity of your life, is a morality play created by God every two seconds.
We don't exist yet. All this isn't really happening. Three minutes from now we will spring into existence with false memories of not only our entire lives from birth, but also of the next three minutes.