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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)."
Note that the "K" you mention in the article is always capitalized, and, yes, it's standard nomenclature to use a postfixed "K" to represent Kelvins.
10K means 10 Kelvins, that is, 10 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. It's not degrees Kelvin. 10k would be 10000 of something that is either unitless or of units that are not given.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
10K, not 10k...
10K is not vague. It is 10 Kelvin
No, not at 10k, but at 10K, in other words 10 degrees .
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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?
I think this is just an evil plot to get us all downmodded -1 redundant ;)
We all replied with the same thing within seconds of one another.
The parent of your post knew the answer, and knew we'd all correct him at the same time!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I knew my tap water tasted funny.
Yes. All (OK, for the pendants, MOST OF) the post-hydrogen elements come from stellar fusion. In oxygen's case, from helium fusion.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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!
This is my sig.
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.
A better question is when will people realize that the Bible never specifies the date of creation. Only idiots take the story literally.
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.
You, ah, DO realize that God told us all of this, far before we could understand it, right?
Complaining about apparent nuance in the deity's creation is kind of like complaining that your stoner parents are straight-laced professionals now, even though they tell you they were stoners whenever you ask.
I could tell you how easy it is to reconcile the six-day creation with the universe's apparent age without the introduction of deception, but you've obviously made a religious choice to be atheist, and nothing I can say would dissuade you from that.
Instead, how about the gospel in 26 words? "God exists, He loves you, and even though you probably deserve to go to hell, He's willing to let you off if you love Him back."
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...
While we have theorized that not all of those are needed, the truth is that we haven't found so much as a single primitive cell anywhere else. And we haven't found one single location in the entire universe with all five save for our home planet. You sound like a seasoned explorer of space, who has spent countless years braving the depths of interstellar space, visited hundreds of remote star systems, only to be faced with disappointment time after time.
I really feel for you.
The kind of a claim you're making is even more of a hyperbole than claiming that there are no mexicans working in the kitchens of New York City restaurants, because you haven't seen one in Dubai.
I do not give in to terrorists. Someone who loved me wouldn't send me to eternal punishment for finite transgressions. An infinite and all powerful creator God can not desire anything, for being all powerful and infinite they have everything they could want before they want it.
I'm not an Atheist, I'm Agnostic. It's just that, if the Christians are correct out of all the myriad beliefs, I would rather go to hell than submit to an insane terrorist God, which is what the God of the Christians looks like to me, from their own description of him.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
Right. Well, there's still the whole "If you don't love me I will punish you infinitely for your finite sins" angle. That alone makes the Christian God batshit insane in my book.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Pedant, not pendant. A "pendant" is a piece of jewelry or some other hanging object. A "pedant" is the sort of person who corrects someone who mistakenly writes "pendant" when they mean "pedant."
I guess all my science books are fiction as well, since they all contain similes, allegories and the like in the aid of explaining scientific principles. There's actually a much better way to rationalize how a book like "The Bible" is able to contain fact & fiction at the same time...
The word "bible" (not "The Bible"), comes from a plural form of biblion. Biblion (singular) meant papyrus writings (which was the equivalent of a book back then). Thus, "a bible" means "a collection of books".
Now look at "The Bible"
That's what we programmers call "encapsulation". When one part of a program's code has a design flaw, the whole thing isn't gonna sink like the Titanic. Encapsulation means the work as a whole is modular and flaws are only local problems. (This also means relevance is local, so that snake in Genesis is quite arguably *not* the devil, but rather just an asshole snake, since the devil is only mentioned in other books (to the best of my knowledge)).
So when the Book of Leviticus says that dwarfs, hunchbacks, people with defects of eye sight are all abominations (or whatever), I can easily toss it aside, invalidate the credibility of the Book of Leviticus, and it has absolutely no bearing on anything outside of the rest of the book. (Just because some of the preloaded software on a computer may suck doesn't mean *all* the preloaded software sucks, right?)
It also means that not everything has to be read the same way. It's a modular-work. Parts were created at different times, and very different places. Even in different languages. So of course you can take one part literally and another figuratively. For a modular work as big as that written in so many times & places to be read the same way the whole way through would should seem a bit improbable.
If man were created without the possibility of sin, he wouldn't be truly free. He wouldn't have the choice of living within or without God's presence. Again, not very interesting for God.
Why would God's sense of right and wrong be any more artificial than yours? And where does your sense of right and wrong come from? And how does your sense of right and wrong differ from the Biblical sense of right and wrong?