Cassini Discovers First River On Another World 230
AbsoluteXyro writes "NASA's Cassini orbiter, which has been dutifully exploring the Saturn system since 2004, has captured images of the first river ever observed on another world — and it's a biggun. 200 miles of flowing hydrocarbons meandering down a valley in the north polar region of Saturn's moon Titan, emptying into the awesomely named Kraken Mare — itself a body of liquid roughly the size of the Mediterranean Sea back on Earth. But don't think of going for an extraterrestrial skinny dip quite yet, temperatures on Titan average a brutally cold 290 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit)."
No running. (Score:5, Funny)
Diving permitted at deep end only.
NO SMOKING.
Re:No running. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Though I wonder if there could be fossil oxidisers frozen under ground on Titan. If they could be found and dug up, there could be a chemical energy industry on Titan.
Re:No running. (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, it's perfectly safe from fire. See, a hydrocarbon world like that is a chemical Bizarro World. It's the oxidizers that you have to keep under control.
Indeed.
I've occasionally wondered whether anyone at NASA has ever designed a UAV with oxygen or fluorine tanks instead of fuel tanks, for use on worlds with hydrogen/hydrocarbon atmospheres.
Conspiracy can begin (Score:5, Insightful)
Let the conspiracy theorists begin making up stuff.
Surely they will claim something about extra-terrestrial cities and FBI secrets.
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Flood regions, differing elevations, geological compositions, and sediment deposits (maybe phosphorous ones, that'd be cool)..
or street lamps, apartment buildings, and neon lights.
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With your help, we are going to give more credit to the conspiracy.
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something radar-reflective.
Rough surfaces. Perhaps piles of rocks/ice.
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How do you personally define karma whoring ???
A literal sea of hydrocarbons? (Score:5, Funny)
Next up on Fox News - Terrorists on Saturn's moon are out to destroy America! Support out troops! Praise the lord and pass the ammunition!
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Next up on CNN: Are the Tea-Partiers responsible for the erosion damage on Saturn's largest moon?
Re:A literal sea of hydrocarbons? (Score:4, Funny)
Rivers & methane seas already known (Score:5, Informative)
I don't get how this is new. Cassini has been detecting branching river systems and large lakes (Great Lakes size) filled with liquid methane since early in the mission. This latest release is adding to the mapped area, but isn't particularly new in that regard. However, if you read the original NASA press release on the Cassini web site [nasa.gov], it makes more sense. This is not the first, but the longest river system that has been observed so far on Titan, at about 400km long.
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Welcome to Slashdot. You must be new here.
Oil may not be a fossil fuel then? (Score:2)
Hmm, hydrocarbons and not a plant in sight? I'm thinking we might want to stop calling oil and natural gas fossil fuels.
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Actually, just after posting that, I looked it up. Wikipedia says:
And, it turns out, natural gas is generally considered a fossil fuel. So, I was pretty much wrong.
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We've been meaning to talk to you about that.
Re:Oil may not be a fossil fuel then? (Score:5, Informative)
Where to begin....
"Fossil fuels' are mostly compressed algae and diatoms although the carbon sources doesn't really make any difference - it's just hydrogenated carbon chains squished under a lot of pressure, heat and time that flow into relatively impermeable areas and collect. It is NOT mostly bits of T. rex and friends. Coal is an early form of this process - less time and heat and pressure - so you can occasionally see the original (mostly plant) source material.
Natural gas refers to the various blends of short chain hydrocarbons that are created in the process and that tend to migrate to different places (but not always). "Oil" tends to be longer chains. Oil sands (oil rock) has long chains imbedded in an annoying matrix of one composition or another. Natural gas is a 'fossil fuel' although the term is not a very apt description of how the stuff was produced. All of those descriptions are arbitrary and the material is produced along a spectrum.
Hopefully, you are not trying to be an abiotic oil nutcase.
Re:Oil may not be a fossil fuel then? (Score:5, Funny)
That's not what my Bible says. Where are you getting your information?
Re:Oil may not be a fossil fuel then? (Score:5, Interesting)
They're called fossil fuels because that's how they were formed on Earth.
Correction: They're called fossil fuels because that's how we think they were formed on Earth. There is not much evidence for abiogenic hydrocarbons [wikipedia.org], but their isn't enough evidence to rule them out either. Coal clearly came from fossils, but for oil and gas it is still an open question.
It's not so cold. (Score:5, Informative)
It's only -179 C. Not exactly shorts weather, mind you.
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Depends on what you're used to.
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No kidding - I've experienced -52 C (it was closer to -60 C with the wind chill.) That's pretty cold. To think that this is three times colder is unfathomable. But still, -300 F sounds a lot colder than it really is. The only thing I see that still uses the Fahrenheit scale on a daily basis is the stove. Everything else is in Celsius, as it should be.
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What you are saying doesn't make any sense.
You have no better sense of how cold "really cold" is beyond "colder than ice," and you obviously would have got that from Fahrenheit, as well.
Let's go the other direction. What difference would it make if I told you that the temperature in an oven was 300 C or 600 F? They're both "really hot" and "hotter than boiling water." Neither one gives you a better sense of how hot, because your body certainly wouldn't know the difference between 200, 300, or 400 C. The
Black water rafting (Score:3)
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I went on a Blackwater rafting trip once. All I remember was the other rafters all had guns and hydrocarbons were involved.
No one blaming BP? (Score:5, Funny)
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Hold on now! BP isn't getting out of this one that quickly mister! I'm sure they or one of their contractors were involved somehow.
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River of hydrocarbons and no one is blaming BP for the spill?
No, but they are planning a mission...
94 Kalvin (Score:2)
That is 94 Kalvin, really the only scale that make any sense for numbers this low.
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Are you sure that wasn't Kalvin and Hobbes. That kid can think up some whacky stuff!
Slashdot.txt (Score:2, Insightful)
Awesome science stuff happens, queue 300 posts of retards bitching about the unit of measurement a writer chose to use so the public he writes to can relate easier.
If you have an issue with the measurement don't bitch and moan, do the conversion and move on. That's what those of us raised on the imperial scales do when we see metric stuff posted (unless we were those fortunate to have grown up learning both)
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I drink your short chain hydrocarbons like a milk shake!
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I agree that it would have been preferable to use kelvin, but the point still stands that the submitter was trying to relate to the common reader, so he opted for the imperial scale.
It wasn't a scientific paper, it wasn't a scientific press release. It wasn't even in TFA. It was strictly in TFS.
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Not really. There are people on here who have worked on ICBM's, there are people here who work at CERN, there are people here who are experts in nuclear physics with regards to power generation. All you can talk about in any detail is how to run your PC or be a good sys admin. There are many diverse forms of the nerd community. I know I cross a few different spots of it, some I can talk about, some that I wont.
There are many highly intelligent individuals on here though, and I know a few people who work for
My god, it's a fractal! (Score:2)
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Re:How could water be flowing (Score:5, Informative)
I get that no one on Slashdot RTFA, but this time even the description says "200 miles of flowing hydrocarbons."
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Try reading the summary to find out that it's hydrocarbons.
Re:How could water be flowing (Score:5, Informative)
It's hydrocarbons, not water.
Titan's surface pressure is 1.5 bars, 50% higher than Earth.
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Re:How could water be flowing (Score:5, Insightful)
So, instead of reading the article, you decided to search wikipedia instead? That's so messed up....
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More combustible fuel than all the Middle East combined! Good thing we didn't elect Romney, or we'd be drafted to fight for the liberation of Titan from whatever God-forsaken lifeform that would allow such a resource to be so underultilized.
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You missed the word "hydrocarbons" in the summary?
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Or is the river a river of oil?
More like natural gas.
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This is one of the few times that I'd rather see the temperature in the Rankine scale over Fahrenheit!
Essentially, they had 4 systems to choose from (Kelvin would be ideal), and they picked the very worst choice!
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Essentially, they had 4 systems to choose from (Kelvin would be ideal), and they picked the very worst choice!
Not to mention Kelvin is SI base unit. Kinda the norm when you are talking about scientific news to a bunch of nerds. Remember the whole "News for nerds, stuff that matters" motto? Or did the spirit of that die when CmdrTaco left?
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Ummm.... nope? Celsius is much more useful than Fahrenheit in virtually every application, and as far as I know only you USians still use it.
Re:Fahrenheit? (Score:4, Insightful)
It'll be hard to pry away from us, too. There's more integers between 32 and 212 than between 0 and 100. So if you don't use decimal points, Fahrenheit is of a higher precision. Even still, when you're talking about temperatures never seen on earth, Kelvin or Celsius still make far more sense.
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Fahrenheit is of a higher precision.
I have never personally needed to know that the temperature is 38.2 degrees C outside.
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No - you may not need a tenfold increase in precision, but Fahrenheit does have double. The difference between 39 and 40 degrees Celsius is almost 2 degrees in fahrenheit.
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Even so I have never wanted to know that the temperature is 39.5 or 40 degrees for general "walking outside" purposes. Two or three degree precision is fine for me and thats about the accuracy you get from weather reports and cheap instruments anyway.
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And? The difference between 71F and 73F is not exactly something a human is tuned to. Depending on where you live and what you acclimated to, that temperature range might represent a hot day, or a cold day, but it would be the rare person who says 71 is comfortable but 73 is suffocatingly hot. For most people, a weather report broken down by Low, Mid, High and the tens place is good enough, i.e., "expect temperatures in the high 50s tomorrow" is a common way to express a weather report and good enough fo
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I guess I've been thinking in terms of measuring a fever where 1 degree makes a huge difference even in Fahrenheit and not so much the weather.
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Having a home with poor air circulation and a thermostat which runs warm as a consequence, I have to disagree: in the winter, a few degrees Fahrenheit in the 66-72 range are definitely noticeable.
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No - just that we prefer integers. It doesn't take much inertia to prevent a switchover. As the world can see.
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No - just that we prefer integers.
Except when you can use fractions - 3/8 inch for instance.
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Dividing inches into halves and then into halves again is easy to measure visually. I personally don't like using mm all that often for measuring things just because the lines are too close together. I realize that rulers with inches shows a line every 1/16th of an inch, but the lines are usually different lengths. I don't know why that's not done for even numbers of mm on the metric side. It's a much easier spatial math to me.
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I've ruler I've ever owned does exactly that.
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Fahrenheit give you more precision before needing to resort to decimal points or fractions. Fahrenheit neatly boxes what humans regularly experience between the values 0 and 100 while managing to have the freezing point of water at 2^5.
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FTFY:
Ummm.... nope? Celsius is much more useful than Fahrenheit in virtually every application where the other people you're communicating with know Celcius but not Fahrenheit, and as far as I know only you Americans still use it.
(AFIK there is no such places as Usia.)
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Well Celsius is easier than Fahrenheit to convert to Kelvin.
Re:Fahrenheit? (Score:5, Funny)
How is Celsius worse than Fahrenheit in this situation?
I imagine it would be because Celsius is harder to determine due to the wooshing sound going on.
94 Kelvin (Score:2)
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In the Celsius world, people also have an intuitive feeling for the temperature ;D
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In the Celsius world, people also have an intuitive feeling for the temperature ;D
That might be true, but in this case these temperatures are not found on Earth, so none of us have anything to really compare it to.
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Yeah, but my parent (any many americans repeat that claim all the time about temperature and lengths) was of the opinion that Fahrenheit is particular well suited to develop an intuitive feeling for temperature (or in case of feet and inches for distances). My point is, you always develop an intuitive feeling for the typical units used in your society. That is something humans are good at ;D Does not matter if it is a foot or chakku or meter.
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Re:Fahrenheit? (Score:4, Funny)
No no, c'mon, don't be rude, he meant Kelvins, the rather underused temperature scale of lower Kyrgyzstan, first coined in 1552 by scientist and British transpat Sir Howie Rudestash Kelvins. 0 degrees Kelvins is defined as the freezing point of that congestion you get from too many fish and chips cooked in tallow, and 100 degrees is defined as the point where spotted dick catches fire.
Really, this should be well known. Personally, I blame public schools.
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... are you stupid? Of course they use proper units.
This is a press release intended for the general public.
Re:Metric system, please (Score:5, Funny)
... are you stupid? Of course they use proper units.
This is a press release intended for the general public.
You'd think so, but tell that to the Mars Climate Orbiter which was expecting SI units but instead was given horses per submarine per twatwaffle or some other such ancient unit and took a steep dive into the atmosphere and burned up.
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Horses per Submarine!
You have made my day. If I only had mod points this evening!
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Yes. An error made by the contractor, who used His Majesty's standard, while NASA specs all of their requirements in metric.
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This is a press release intended for the general public.
Ordinarily I would agree with you. Fahrenheit was intended to relate to the physical realm that humans experience: 0 is about the temperature of freezing seawater and 100 is about the temperature of the human body. In this case though, the temperature is well below what the general public has direct knowledge of. It should have been listed in K first, with F in parentheses just so the US general public reader would get that it's way colder than anything ever measured on Earth.
Re:Metric system, please (Score:5, Informative)
0C is the freezing temperature of fresh water, which is far more relevant a point than anything to do with seawater (and Fahrenheit didn't use real seawater anyway, it was ammonium chloride). 0C is the point your drinking water freezes, which is a lot more relevant to most humans. If immersed in freezing seawater or freezing freshwater you'll be dead before you have much time to think about the difference in human perception between 0F and 0C. They're both deadly without special protection. 10C is cool but easy to handle with a light coat, 20C is comfortable room temperature. Anything over 30C is freaking hot. Divide between those points accordingly. 100C is the temperature of boiling water (at STP) that you shouldn't be sticking your hands into.
I don't buy the "human experience" aspect at all for the silliness that is Fahrenheit. The freezing point of fresh water is THE most important point on a temperature scale relating to human effects, and Celsius puts that at a logical 0 rather than weird 32. I always thought it was dumb that you had to do a bit of albeit simple math to figure out how many degrees you were above or below the freezing point using the Fahrenheit scale. With Celsius, it's the + or -. Much simpler.
It's just what you're used to, and I see no downside to Celsius at all. Furthermore, Celsius degrees are a little bigger than Fahrenheit degrees. Less precise, you say? Human perception can't reliably tell the difference between 1 degree F anyway, and struggles to consistently perceive Celsius degrees (I can usually estimate +-2 or 3 Celsius at best).
At -179C, it doesn't really matter if it is in F or C. It's far outside normal human experience unless you have a habit of dipping body parts in liquified gases.
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10C is cool but easy to handle with a light coat, 20C is comfortable room temperature. Anything over 30C is freaking hot.
This is a good example of why we like Fahrenheit. We can easily talk about more than three temperature ranges. In the 30s you need a warm but not superwarm coat. In the 40s you need similar coat but you'll feel more comfortable wearing it. In the 50s you have light jacket weather. In the 60s the light jacket is optional. The 70s are perfect. The 80s are hot enough for swimming but not uncomfortably hot. The 90s are uncomfortably hot. Over 100 and you pretty much stay indoors.
If you want to be mor
Re:Metric system, please (Score:5, Insightful)
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Bzzt. Kelvin [wikipedia.org] is an SI unit.
He could have said SI then. Or is it that in the US, these two things are synonymous? Where I live, temperatures sort of aren't a part of the definition of "metric system" (although naturally, they're a part of the SI extensions).
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Re:Metric system, please (Score:5, Funny)
I couldn't even tell you how high the temperature is right now, as my thermometer is laying on its side. I can only give you its length.
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I'm Canadian, you insensitive clod, and I'm not impressed by your 4.5 cm.
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Well it does tend to shrink when it gets colder, doesn't it?
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Well it does tend to shrink when it gets colder, doesn't it?
At those temperatures, it's propabably an innie.
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They sometimes do metric conversions ;)
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For some reason the writer didn't feel bound to use the government mandated system and therefore chose the more convenient Fahrenheit system.
Re:I'm lost (Score:5, Informative)
I'm quite ignorant of organic chemistry, but I thought hydrocarbons were fossils. How can there be hydrocarbons without life?
Or am I WAY off in my ASSumptions?
There are plenty of organic molecules out in space. All organic means is "contains carbon".
Organic compounds form anywhere there is carbon, which is made in stars and spread around by supernovae. Given that hydrogen makes up 99.8% of the stuff out there most of the carbon compounds you find in space are simple hydrocarbons, either aliphatic stuff like methane and ethane or aromatics like naphthalene and other poly-aromatic systems.
Re:I'm lost (Score:5, Informative)
I'm quite ignorant of organic chemistry, but I thought hydrocarbons were fossils. How can there be hydrocarbons without life?
Or am I WAY off in my ASSumptions?
Organic chemistry is a misnomer. Most of the hydrocarbon molecules formed in the universe have been created without life. Just a byproduct of carbon, oxygen (mostly as Carbon Monoxide), hydrogen and a few other random chemicals along with a bit of fusion and a lot of time.
It would still burn OK (if there was any oxygen around). You could still make hydrogen and power fusion reactions (if we knew how). Lots of potential energy in the universe, more than we could ever use. Just hard to get to.
If you think drilling on the northern end of Siberia is hard, try a Jovian moon. Makes for nice science fiction reading, but as far as it being an instructional video, we have a ways to go.
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But who needs to drill when there are seas of the stuff flowing right on the surface!
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Jesus fucking Christ. Over the last ten years there have been numerous articles all over the place reporting amino acids, sugars, alcohols and other organic compounds even in deep fucking space. Christ, pal, Titan is packed full of hydrocarbons.
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Or maybe it's a road system, and what we pick up as hydrocarbons is just the exhaust emissions from their congested traffic.
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Obviously there would be waves in a liquid.
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Yeah, those are artifacts of the scanning device. A common remote sensing issue.
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Its a radar image. At that scale I would expect 1% precision or better.
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