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Space is Full of Dirty, Toxic Grease, Scientists Reveal (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: It looks cold, dark and empty, but astronomers have revealed that interstellar space is permeated with a fine mist of grease-like molecules. The study provides the most precise estimate yet of the amount of "space grease" in the Milky Way, by recreating the carbon-based compounds in the laboratory. The Australian-Turkish team discovered more than expected: 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes of gloop, or enough for 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter. Prof Tim Schmidt, a chemist at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and co-author of the study, said that the windscreen of a future spaceship travelling through interstellar space might be expected to get a sticky coating. "Amongst other stuff it'll run into is interstellar dust, which is partly grease, partly soot and partly silicates like sand," he said, adding that the grease is swept away within our own solar system by the solar wind. The findings bring scientists closer to figuring out the total amount of carbon in interstellar space, which fuels the formation of stars, planets and is essential for life.
They found the dark matter.
Between intra-molecular gravitational forces and surface tension, that surprises me. I'd think you'd find big globs, not a fine mist.
Send out the Space Force to clean up the disgusting mess; and build a Dyson Wall around them.
Table-ized A.I.
(It got truncated, supposed to be "planets", not "plane")
Table-ized A.I.
They found the protomolecule.. Don't tell the Martians.
Sig ?
*As we know it.
I imagine that this grease will literally gum up the works.
There goes my dream of travelling between solar systems using interstellar hydrogen as fuel.
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Could someone convert that to american football fields for me? I can't do metric.
Thank you folks, I'll be here all week. Don't forget to try our potato bar.
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versus the last 13 billion or so years?
Of course space is full of grease.
Just think of what would happen if the galaxy were not properly greased. It would be like trying to drive a truck with no axle grease for the axles. Things would quickly come to a grinding halt from all the friction of the rotation of the galaxy.
And what's worse, it's not under warranty!
Check your premises.
10 billion trillion trillion tonnes of gloop, or enough for 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter.
I'm glad they converted it into something easier to get my head around.
Nope, no sig
"The Australian-Turkish team discovered more than expected: 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes of gloop"
In what volume?
"or enough for 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter"
This might be intended to help me visualize the problem. It does not do that.
I want my fries coated in a light mist of space grease. MMMMMM, space fats.......
--I like turtles...
"Space is Full of Dirty, Toxic Grease..."
"... clean up the disgusting mess..."
I'm not waiting for that. I plan to move to a clean universe.
As a reaction mass or some kind of raw material?
What's the conversion of butter to library of congresses?
...than any of the following:
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
1 x 10^34
1e+34
10 decillion
Come on. This is still Slashdot.
...when everything is a crime, everyone is a criminal.
That material ... could have some practical usage?
...to call us 'sheeple'.
`That's my Retirement Grease!’
The Space Force can use it to grease the treads on their space tanks. Pretty cool!
10 billion trillion trillion tonnes of gloop, or enough for 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter.
Turns out there was no Big Bang - instead, it was a Big Fry.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is there enough to use for propulsion? I imagine a space ship with a large magnetic funnel being projected in front of it. If the grease can be ionized, it can be pulled down the center of the funnel, accelerated, and shot out the back. The magnetic cloak would serve to accelerate the ship, block cosmic rays, and keep the grease from coating it.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
All I want to know is can we mine it and burn it in an engine?
And the last one, and the one before that, and all of them in the last hundred years or so.
It's still space, it' just not empty space.
Though it's honestly impossible to frame an appreciable context in the mind at those magnitudes, at least "e34" requires less time to make an abstract one.
Those who can't think logarithmically at all are welcome to continue saying Jillions.
next time clean out the grease traps before you toss the suns into the cooling vastness of space
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Deep Purple was right are all.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Just wait for the Big Rip.
Table-ized A.I.
Come on, you can't just say they all just sucked.
Yes, they all sucked, but they all sucked in completely different ways.
Until now there has been uncertainty over how much carbon is drifting between the stars. About half is expected to be found in its pure form. The rest is chemically bound with hydrogen in either a grease-like form, known as aliphatic carbon, or as a gaseous version of naphthalene, the main chemical component of mothballs.
Now we know why we haven't seen any moth based interstellar life. Time to update the drake equation again.
Naphthalene has no aliphatic carbons. They are all aromatic. No reference to naphthalene appears in the paper, I do not know what the newspaper writer was using as a source for this.
The explain what the research really did is that they created the conditions believed to be the source of much interstellar dust - outflows from carbon stars and measured its optical properties, and the type and proportions of bonds present. They did this because there is discrepancy between the amount of free carbon we can see in space, and the amount of carbon we believe should be there (for many reasons), and to clarify the dust absorption spectrum which scientists are still trying to fully understand.
They didn't discover any "new" types of carbon in space, what they did was improve the accounting for bond types, and produced a dust analog that closely matches unexplained absorption features. What the directly measured where the non-aromatic
carbon bonds, the ones that were aromatic are presumed with great certainty, given they had accounted for the other possibilities) to be those that were left.
No, they did not try to identify how large the carbon structures were, they were only counting bonds.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
and build a Dyson Wall around them
Yeah! And we're going to get those fucking aliens to pay for it!