Saturn's outer, irregular moons are likely captured. However, the only medium or large moon in the solar system that I know of which is thought to be captured is Neptune's Triton. Most medium to large moons are believed to have formed in situ, as well as a fair number of the smaller guys. The fact that most of the inner and/or large moons have co-planar, low-eccentricity orbits is very suggestive of co-formation. This includes Saturn's moons nearest the rings.
Except that even in the very quote where Torrence makes the comet analogy, *he* calls them geysers and then proceeds to point out why this very much is not a comet.
I don't often hear "geyser" used for Enceladus, by the way. (I think it was tossed around early after the discovery, and then shot down for technical reasons.) "Plume" refers to the whole eruption and "jet" to the individual sources that merge to form the plume. That's certain the nomenclature used in the imaging team and, from what I've heard, around the Cassini project.
You don't need collisions for such viscous spreading (and most stuff wants to move inward anyway). Also, the A ring is somewhat held in check by the larger moons, so spreading is very slow.
I'm not sure that this is really news. I can vaguely recall people talking about exactly this sort of thing happening in papers from years ago. I'm not 100% certain that the topic was E ring particles, but I rather thing that it is. Sure, before we found the plume on Enceladus, that moon's connection wasn't apparent, but the issue of contamination of the A ring has come up before. I even remember discussion as to how far into the A ring you'd have to go before the contamination stopped. (Which probably played back into older photometric and spectroscopic measurements of the outer A ring, which has a a rather distinct character.)
It's a bit difficult to tell from the article what the point of the new research is, but I will say that even confirming this with new, perhaps more telling, measurements is still useful result, even if I'm remembering correctly and this isn't a new idea.
Tides are a big problem for forming a moon within, roughly, the A ring. A bigger problem is that Enceladus produces "dust" (very small particles, the size of particles in cigarette smoke, approximately), albeit made mostly of ice. It takes a long time to form this stuff into macroscopic bodies when the conditions are friendly (which they aren't). Worse still, Enceladus isn't really putting out that much mass per time. It'd take a very long time to put out enough to make another decent-sized moon, even at 100% efficiency.
To put it more exactly, tidal forces will tear apart anything within, roughly, the A ring. (Cavaets: this applies to bodies with no internal cohesion and cases where there's a large size differential move the limit inward, a la Porco et al. 2006.)
Phylogenetic data does indeed point that way. The root of the "Tree of Life" seems to sit closest to where the thermophiles are than to, say, us. This implies that life either started out there or was bottle-necked through there at some point.
There's a delicate political game that is played with legislation. I'm not saying I approve of the vote, because I don't. But when the screaming in some quarters shows a profound lack of understanding of what is actually going on, it pretty well guarantees that the protests will be ignored from the get-go.
It must also be borne in mind that they were told that the bill would be dead on arrival if it did *not* grant telecoms immunity. (The president has made it very, very clear that he'll veto it.) As a politician, one has to weigh that into the decision. I'm not saying that I agree with the outcome, but this wasn't a simple vote about a single issue. (Would that there were an easy way to make it so every congressional bill covered a single item so each could be voted up or down separately without this kind of crap.)
I understand the shuttle program, now: it was a massive plan to set the Chinese space agency back 20 years and billions of dollars by copying a crappy piece of technology! And only for the cost of, shit, billions of dollars and about 30 years. Well, it's a good try anyway.
Now we need to do something about the telemarketing firms calling "on behalf" of non-profit organizations. This is still legal under the law (it seemed like a good idea: who doesn't love non-profits?), but it's being abused. The telemarketing companies keep an extraordinary fraction of the donations (over 50%, from what a local newspaper investigation found) so little of your money goes to the organization you're trying to help.
One obvious solution is to only allow the non-profit exemption if more than, say, 90% of the donation goes right to the actual non-profit. That'll probably shut up the telemarketers because profit would no longer cover costs.
I think that once again Monty Python said it best:
Presenter (Cleese): Penguins, yes, penguins. What relevance do penguins have to the furtherance of medical science? Well, strangely enough quite a lot, a major breakthrough, maybe. It was from such an unlikely beginning as an unwanted fungus accidentally growing on a sterile plate that Sir Alexander Fleming gave the world penicillin. James Watt watched an ordinary household kettle boiling and conceived the potentiality of steam power. Would Albert Einstein ever have hit upon the theory of relativity if he hadn't been clever? All these tremendous leaps forward have been taken in the dark. Would Rutherford ever have split the atom if he hadn't tried? Could Marconi have invented the radio if he hadn't by pure chance spent years working at the problem? Are these amazing breakthroughs ever achieved except by years and years of unremitting study? Of course not. What I said earlier about accidental discoveries must have been wrong...
I love this rant because it's both funny and very, very true.
Yes, but if you get much outside the very center of the Sun, gravity kicks back in again. More massive stars than the Sun have convection zones that go deep into the interior. It's a question of where the thermal gradient exceeds the adiabatic lapse rate.
First of all, convection only works in the outer 30% of the Sun (measured radially). Interior to that, photons carry the energy out.
Second, convection only works if the exterior is cooler than the interior. Thermodynamically, heat doesn't move "uphill". So the fact that the corona is hotter than the photosphere (and hotter than most of the solar interior as well) isn't explained by convection at all.
Neither of your links says that the solar wind is accelerating as it passes Earth. Both say that it accelerates near the Sun (within a few solar radii), which *is* non-controversial and even predicted by Parker's original work. What Parker doesn't explain is the magnitude of the acceleration (see Kivelson and Russel's book, for example), but you're denying that, aren't you?
Can you please bother to read your own links closely enough to verify their relevance? Simply posting a random link and saying, "here's my evidence" may look good at first glance, but it's really a very poor way to make a case.
I didn't see the show, but there have been a number of theories as to the cause of the high temperature in the corona over the years. Alfven waves is a perennial favorite that has generally lacked data-support and/or a strong model to show how it happens. They're not actually sounds waves, but are a magneto-sonic -- generalized forms of sound waves in plasmas.
The waves are called "Alfven waves", with good reason. The fact that this then results in his name being attached to the theory is amusing, perhaps ironic, and arguably unfortunate, but hardly criminal. Shit happens when names are attached to things in math and science, it's something one has to just get used to.
(The name name "big bang" was meant be disparaging, and yet here we are. Look up "Fuchsian groups" sometime, too.)
And while you're at it, give astrophysicists a little credit. We do know physics, including E&M, pretty damn well. What's you're qualification to arm-chair quarterback on this?
I'm sure Amazon does have a lot of unusual titles, I don't mean to suggest otherwise. I've merely found that I'm *better* able to find them using the small booksellers' networks. And that, unlike Amazon, they don't lie about what they actually have in stock. I really find this last point key because lying about inventory pisses me off. Seriously, give abebooks.com a try. (I'm in no way rewarded by them to stump for the site, incidentally. I just have found it really useful.) Several times I've even found titles at stores near enough to me to pick up myself, but it saved me running around and checking the various small stores.
Actually, that is counter to my experience. I've had much better luck going through my local independent bookstore (which is part of a nation-wide network of small bookstores) than going through Amazon for unusual books. There are a lot of book on the shelves of the small sellers, books that the big retailers won't touch. Any specific one of them may be statistically unlikely to have a rare book you want, but if you tap all of them at once, you're bound to get it. (If you don't want to go through your local bookstore, try www.abebooks.com.)
And don't forget that just because Amazon claims to have an item, it doesn't mean that they do. (I've been strung along with claims that they're about to get a book in for weeks on several occasions. I've never been lied to by my local bookstore.)
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Saturn's outer, irregular moons are likely captured. However, the only medium or large moon in the solar system that I know of which is thought to be captured is Neptune's Triton. Most medium to large moons are believed to have formed in situ, as well as a fair number of the smaller guys. The fact that most of the inner and/or large moons have co-planar, low-eccentricity orbits is very suggestive of co-formation. This includes Saturn's moons nearest the rings.
Except that even in the very quote where Torrence makes the comet analogy, *he* calls them geysers and then proceeds to point out why this very much is not a comet.
I don't often hear "geyser" used for Enceladus, by the way. (I think it was tossed around early after the discovery, and then shot down for technical reasons.) "Plume" refers to the whole eruption and "jet" to the individual sources that merge to form the plume. That's certain the nomenclature used in the imaging team and, from what I've heard, around the Cassini project.
You don't need collisions for such viscous spreading (and most stuff wants to move inward anyway). Also, the A ring is somewhat held in check by the larger moons, so spreading is very slow.
I'm not sure that this is really news. I can vaguely recall people talking about exactly this sort of thing happening in papers from years ago. I'm not 100% certain that the topic was E ring particles, but I rather thing that it is. Sure, before we found the plume on Enceladus, that moon's connection wasn't apparent, but the issue of contamination of the A ring has come up before. I even remember discussion as to how far into the A ring you'd have to go before the contamination stopped. (Which probably played back into older photometric and spectroscopic measurements of the outer A ring, which has a a rather distinct character.)
It's a bit difficult to tell from the article what the point of the new research is, but I will say that even confirming this with new, perhaps more telling, measurements is still useful result, even if I'm remembering correctly and this isn't a new idea.
Don't make us come over there: http://xkcd.com/307/
Tides are a big problem for forming a moon within, roughly, the A ring. A bigger problem is that Enceladus produces "dust" (very small particles, the size of particles in cigarette smoke, approximately), albeit made mostly of ice. It takes a long time to form this stuff into macroscopic bodies when the conditions are friendly (which they aren't). Worse still, Enceladus isn't really putting out that much mass per time. It'd take a very long time to put out enough to make another decent-sized moon, even at 100% efficiency.
To put it more exactly, tidal forces will tear apart anything within, roughly, the A ring. (Cavaets: this applies to bodies with no internal cohesion and cases where there's a large size differential move the limit inward, a la Porco et al. 2006.)
In the words of JMS, Rush is a "Leading American proctologist. Trust me."
You don't even need water. Silicate rocks have more oxygen in them than silicon.
Phylogenetic data does indeed point that way. The root of the "Tree of Life" seems to sit closest to where the thermophiles are than to, say, us. This implies that life either started out there or was bottle-necked through there at some point.
They didn't have the votes to override the veto.
There's a delicate political game that is played with legislation. I'm not saying I approve of the vote, because I don't. But when the screaming in some quarters shows a profound lack of understanding of what is actually going on, it pretty well guarantees that the protests will be ignored from the get-go.
It must also be borne in mind that they were told that the bill would be dead on arrival if it did *not* grant telecoms immunity. (The president has made it very, very clear that he'll veto it.) As a politician, one has to weigh that into the decision. I'm not saying that I agree with the outcome, but this wasn't a simple vote about a single issue. (Would that there were an easy way to make it so every congressional bill covered a single item so each could be voted up or down separately without this kind of crap.)
I understand the shuttle program, now: it was a massive plan to set the Chinese space agency back 20 years and billions of dollars by copying a crappy piece of technology! And only for the cost of, shit, billions of dollars and about 30 years. Well, it's a good try anyway.
Greed and, oddly, chocolate.
Now we need to do something about the telemarketing firms calling "on behalf" of non-profit organizations. This is still legal under the law (it seemed like a good idea: who doesn't love non-profits?), but it's being abused. The telemarketing companies keep an extraordinary fraction of the donations (over 50%, from what a local newspaper investigation found) so little of your money goes to the organization you're trying to help.
One obvious solution is to only allow the non-profit exemption if more than, say, 90% of the donation goes right to the actual non-profit. That'll probably shut up the telemarketers because profit would no longer cover costs.
I think that once again Monty Python said it best:
I love this rant because it's both funny and very, very true.
Yes, but if you get much outside the very center of the Sun, gravity kicks back in again. More massive stars than the Sun have convection zones that go deep into the interior. It's a question of where the thermal gradient exceeds the adiabatic lapse rate.
First of all, convection only works in the outer 30% of the Sun (measured radially). Interior to that, photons carry the energy out.
Second, convection only works if the exterior is cooler than the interior. Thermodynamically, heat doesn't move "uphill". So the fact that the corona is hotter than the photosphere (and hotter than most of the solar interior as well) isn't explained by convection at all.
Neither of your links says that the solar wind is accelerating as it passes Earth. Both say that it accelerates near the Sun (within a few solar radii), which *is* non-controversial and even predicted by Parker's original work. What Parker doesn't explain is the magnitude of the acceleration (see Kivelson and Russel's book, for example), but you're denying that, aren't you?
Can you please bother to read your own links closely enough to verify their relevance? Simply posting a random link and saying, "here's my evidence" may look good at first glance, but it's really a very poor way to make a case.
What, exactly, is your point there? Are you suggesting that because you're being laughed it, you're right?
I didn't see the show, but there have been a number of theories as to the cause of the high temperature in the corona over the years. Alfven waves is a perennial favorite that has generally lacked data-support and/or a strong model to show how it happens. They're not actually sounds waves, but are a magneto-sonic -- generalized forms of sound waves in plasmas.
The waves are called "Alfven waves", with good reason. The fact that this then results in his name being attached to the theory is amusing, perhaps ironic, and arguably unfortunate, but hardly criminal. Shit happens when names are attached to things in math and science, it's something one has to just get used to.
(The name name "big bang" was meant be disparaging, and yet here we are. Look up "Fuchsian groups" sometime, too.)
And while you're at it, give astrophysicists a little credit. We do know physics, including E&M, pretty damn well. What's you're qualification to arm-chair quarterback on this?
I'm sure Amazon does have a lot of unusual titles, I don't mean to suggest otherwise. I've merely found that I'm *better* able to find them using the small booksellers' networks. And that, unlike Amazon, they don't lie about what they actually have in stock. I really find this last point key because lying about inventory pisses me off. Seriously, give abebooks.com a try. (I'm in no way rewarded by them to stump for the site, incidentally. I just have found it really useful.) Several times I've even found titles at stores near enough to me to pick up myself, but it saved me running around and checking the various small stores.
Actually, that is counter to my experience. I've had much better luck going through my local independent bookstore (which is part of a nation-wide network of small bookstores) than going through Amazon for unusual books. There are a lot of book on the shelves of the small sellers, books that the big retailers won't touch. Any specific one of them may be statistically unlikely to have a rare book you want, but if you tap all of them at once, you're bound to get it. (If you don't want to go through your local bookstore, try www.abebooks.com.)
And don't forget that just because Amazon claims to have an item, it doesn't mean that they do. (I've been strung along with claims that they're about to get a book in for weeks on several occasions. I've never been lied to by my local bookstore.)
So you're saying that inserting objects never meant for the drive is bad?
How do they handle hot soup?