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Monster Storm Reveals Water On Saturn
cold fjord sends this news from NASA:
"A monster storm that erupted on Saturn in late 2010 – as large as any storm ever observed on the ringed planet -- has already impressed researchers with its intensity and long-lived turbulence. A new paper in the journal Icarus reveals another facet of the storm's explosive power: its ability to churn up water ice from great depths. This finding, derived from near-infrared measurements by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, is the first detection at Saturn of water ice. The water originates from deep in Saturn's atmosphere. 'The new finding from Cassini shows that Saturn can dredge up material from more than 100 miles [160 kilometers],' said Kevin Baines, a co-author of the paper who works at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 'It demonstrates in a very real sense that typically demure-looking Saturn can be just as explosive or even more so than typically stormy Jupiter.'"
Actually, talking about planets the term "ice" is often used to describe the solid form of other substances, most commonly frozen CO2. and even in the case of water, the common everyday ice is only one of two possible solid states for water. I presume the high pressure, tightly packed and heavier than (liquid) water solid form isprobably called "heavy ice"?
I presume the high pressure, tightly packed and heavier than (liquid) water solid form isprobably called "heavy ice"?
There are 15 known solid phases of water. They're called things like Ice-III.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Yup. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer explained it well. What goes for Hubble, goes pretty much the same for Cassini (I know, I worked for CICLOPS) and for many other planetary missions.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/badhst.html
The ICE, duh! Didn't your RTFA? Oh, wait, this is Slashdot.
The gas-liquid-solid gets thicker and thicker as you go down. The pressure gets so great that the hydrogen molecules get their electrons squeezed out of them, which means that the hydrogen becomes a sea of freezing liquid metal.