How Water Forms in Interstellar Space at 10K 270
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)."
Are you serious ? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:All water? (Score:2, Interesting)
And is it really "almost all"? Water is a product of many common metabolic chemical reactions (e.g. the catabolism of glucose produces 6 water molecules per glucose molecule catabolized). Similarly, water is destroyed in photosynthesis to produce glucose.
I'd imagine a sizable proportion of the world water supply has taken part in these processes at some point or other.
Re:To be correct.. (Score:2, Interesting)
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).
Re:To be correct.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:If that is true (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
atheist? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 think you're wrong. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sure looks that way (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, hydrogen released at sea level will rise to the outer surface of the atmosphere. But that's only because it's the least dense gas in existence, and all the other heavier gases push it up due their own higher gravity. Eventually, the hydrogen would reach a point where the pull of gravity and the "push" of the rest of the atmosphere would even out.
Some hydrogen will get away due to thermal escape (an individual molecule moving fast enough to have escape velocity), but the earth will also collect some hydrogen due to the solar wind and its ordinary passage through space.
I wager that the 1ppm we have of atmospheric hydrogen is a few orders of magnitude greater than the atomic hydrogen present in the vacuum of space -- even if we disregard the amount of hydrogen that has bonded with oxygen in our little dust-ball.
Re:How water forms (Score:4, Interesting)
"And the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters."
That's before light exists.
Re:If that is true (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:So if you can't take it literally... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.