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)."
And the next question will be.... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
(note: generally since nuclear reactions also take place outside of stars)
Re:And the next question will be.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And the next question will be.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Must it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why must it? Could you justify that statement?
Gravity alone tends to cause interstellar clouds to collapse into stellar accretion disks, and then into stars and planets.
Although the Hydrogen and Oxygen in the original cloud may have had almost zero chance of getting together, once the cloud collapsed into relatively dense planetary atmospheres, why couldn't water have formed then?
Re: (Score:2)
It wouldn't be far fetched to think that only minute amounts of the current water on earth was formed this way.
Sure looks that way (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that the Earth doesn't have sufficient gravity to hold free hydrogen. Free hydrogen on earth goes by by into space. So that almost automatically rules out any free hydrogen / oxygen hypothesis... or at least renders it less likely.
Now, so, maybe there is some sort of hydrogen compound and some sort of oxygen compound that could react on earth to form water. Well, then, you'd have to ask, where's the traces of those reactions occuring, and, are there any minerals out there today that support those conclusions. Right now, you can find oxygen in just about any good old mineral, but hydrogen, I think that's an entirely different mater. I'm not a geologist, but I'm pretty sure that the only hydrogens we find on earth are from organic compounds, and they get it from a reaction that ultimately originates with water as one of the reagents.
Now, that is of course based on a geological understanding that goes maybe at most a mile or two into the earth's crust. There could be some sort of something in the mantle where, ahah, there is a ton of hydrogen... you know, like water is formed from some hydrogen bearing rock mixing with some oxygen bearing rock inside the earth and shoots up out of a volcano. IF you could somehow find a set of candidate rocks and then make a good case for it, inside the earth, consistent with what we already know from the geological record about how the earth was formed, then yeah, you'd probably refute the underlying assumption of these japanese scientists and be some kind of a hero.
But you'd be a bigger hero than that... because, if you actually could find a non-organic source of hydrogen on the earth you'd be a huge hero, because you would have discovered a fairly green non-fossil fuel. Good luck with that!
Re: (Score:2)
Even with your understanding of hydrogen, the possibility of it coming from a rock or a reaction with a rock could simply mean that asteroids or meteors impacting the earth in the past could release enough Hydrogen to produce the amount of water on earth. The hydrogen release could be extinguished by now or buried at the bottom of an ocean somewhere where the pressure of the water above it retards the production or release of h
Re: (Score:2)
If that were the case, then, human global warming wouldn't even matter, because, if you have a planet producing new water, then, there's going to be new water vapor, and water vapor does way more greenhouse effects than does CO2.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry but you are repeating the half-truths and misinformation of psuedo-skeptics. The total amount of water vapour in the Earth's atmospere is dependent on temprature and pressure alone. Yes the amount of water vapour present adds ~30 degrees C to the global average but the total amount does not change over time.
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Water is broken down all the time in hydrolysis [wikipedia.org] reactions.
Re: (Score:2)
Some biology class!
Photosynthesis:
6H2O + 6CO2 ----------> C6H12O6+ 6O2
http://www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/farabee/BIOBK/BioBookPS.html [maricopa.edu]
If all of these were true, the
Re: (Score:2)
But photosynthesis doesn't really count because that process doesn't so that the OP described, break the hydrogen off to use the oxygen. It does the opposite, it breaks the oxygen to create the organic compound, which is fine, because that keeps the hydrogen in the organic cycle.
What biological process breaks water apart to release hydrogen?
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
Although the Hydrogen and Oxygen in the original cloud may have had almost zero chance of getting together, once the cloud collapsed into relatively dense planetary atmospheres, why couldn't water have formed then?
The problem with that is where we find water. We see a lot of water in the form of comets that couldn't have come from something as big as a planetary body. So the conclusion is water must have formed before planetary bodies. I believe the thinking is most of the water on earth came from comets
Re: (Score:2)
both scenarios are true (Score:5, Funny)
it is a facet of scientific theory formation known as michael bayification: the more dramatic and trippy the theory, the more likely it is to spread in the popular press, and therefore to gain more traction in the minds of the average joe
"5 billion interstellar dustcloud water" is just so cool sounding man. while your point of view is full of zzz
so c'mon, get with the program, your ideas are just so drab. perhaps if you redescribed your theory as it would appear being mumbled by a secret military organization figurehead in a big budget disaster movie. make believe you are a 23 year old hollywood script writer perusing wikipedia in forming your scientific mumbo jumbo
repeat after me: "hyperplanetary accretion disc catalysis"
or "gravity well coupled reverse electrolysis"
there you go, now we are playing in the big leagues of science-theory-by-public-relations-ad-copy-writer
Re: (Score:2)
I'd always assumed it was from ions. (Score:2)
- Oxygen atom collects a lose electron or two to form a negatively-charged oxygen ion.
- Oxygen ion collects a lose proton or hydrogen atom to form a hydroxyl ion (or "atom")
- Hydroxyl ion collects a lose proton, or
- Hydroxyl "atom" collects first an electron then a proton.
No surface necessary: The captures can start out very tenuous (say, due to interactions with additional particles or magnetic fields in a gas cloud) and then
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (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 cre
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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...
far out, man (Score:2)
in the immortal words of Keanu Reeves: "Whoaaa"
also forming in that dustcloud 5 billion years ago were minute traces of lysergic acid diethylamide. slight traces of which may also enable you to appreciate the far-out implications of you being a 5 billion year old dustcloud waterchild
duuude
Re: (Score:2)
caught in the devil's bargain
billion year old carbon...
That explains it (Score:5, Funny)
How water forms (Score:5, Funny)
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: (Score:2)
Maybe they'll all drink Gatorade instead...
Which is nothing more than sugar water with flavoring added (and a few electrolytes). Sooo, one could basically say Gatorade would be the devil's kool-aid in that case.
InnerWeb
All water? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (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.
That's the easy part (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
solid solid baby (Score:2)
Water forming is space at 10K (Score:2)
Uh, yeah, like cause 10K is -441.4 degrees Fahrenheit or -263 degrees Celsius.
Re:Am I the only person? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Am I the only person? (Score:5, Funny)
We all replied with the same thing within seconds of one another.
The parent of your post knew the answer, and knew we'd all correct him at the same time!
Re:Am I the only person? (Score:5, Informative)
I see where you're going (Score:2)
That's almost as bad. What you meant to say was, "-263.15 degrees Celsius."
Re: (Score:2)
"10 degrees Celsius above absolute zero" is exactly the same as "10 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero."
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Am I the only person? (Score:4, Informative)
10K is not vague. It is 10 Kelvin
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Close, but not quite correct (Score:3, Informative)
The unit is 'kelvins' not 'degrees kelvin.' A degree means an increment between one extreme to another, which made sense for the Fahrenheit system (100 increments between the likely lowest and highest temperatures generally experienced in the environment the system was made in) and it made sense for the Centigrade system (100 increments between the freezing point and the boiling point of water at standard pressure.)
That's why degrees are also used in angles. 360 increm
Re: (Score:2)
Um, that wasn't what Fahrenheit was about at all. Or are you saying that 0 degrees F is the lowest temperature generally experienced in the UK? Or that they get to 100F on a regular basis, surpassing it about as often as they get below 0? I don't think so.
Fahrenheit was actually somewhat scientifically created, though I like to think the endpoints of Celsius make more sense. Fahrenheit's end-points are: at 0, the melting/freezing point of salt water (think: Atlantic ocean), and at 100, the temperature
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
B-b-b-b-b-but I thought SI was always base-10, that clearly says 7.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Does a postfixed "K" represent something different within the scientific community that I simply didn't know about?
Google is your friend.
Re:5 billion years ago ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Its not unlikely that life is common, but as far as we can tell is that intelligent life may be very rare or at least it tends to die out before or after some planet ending disaster like meteor impacts, super volcanoes, and cosmic r
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There is a Great Filter somewhere before a species reaches interstellar intelligence. If we are lucky, th
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
there is no evidence of Von Nueman probes
We can't even say that for sure - we've investigated a vanishingly small percentage of our own system. All we can really say is "if there are Von Nueman probes here now, they must be low-energy". Of course, sending out self-replicating probes whould be massively irresponsible in the first place, so it's just as well.
The universe could be teeming with life and we wouldn't know it - we have such a limited idea of what to look for, and such a limited ability to look.
Where is it then? (Score:2)
then, uh, where is it? That's the Fermi problem. If life would have erupted under all sorts of conditions in the universe, somebody smart should have evolved besides us by now. After all, the earth is only a 1/3 the age of the un
Re:5 billion years ago ? (Score:5, Funny)
While we have theorized that not all of those are needed, the truth is that we haven't found so much as a single primitive cell anywhere else. And we haven't found one single location in the entire universe with all five save for our home planet.
I really feel for you.
The kind of a claim you're making is even more of a hyperbole than claiming that there are no mexicans working in the kitchens of New York City restaurants, because you haven't seen one in Dubai.
Re: (Score:2)
Clearly this makes life extremely rare and unlikely to be observed elsewhere.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:5 billion years ago ? (Score:5, Insightful)
So if you can't take it literally... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not going to comment on whether the bible is true or fiction, certainly some of it is true but Hollywood has shown us that even with elements of the truth, it can still be fiction. But the nature of a Story doesn't make anything Fiction or fictit
Re: (Score:2)
You see then, this is why people have to argue so strongly that every word in the Bible is literal. Because as soon as we say that one story or another is an allegory, then the rest of the world immediately claims that the entire work must therefore be fiction. Apparently, it is not possible for a book to contain allegories and illustrations without becoming a complete work of fiction.
I guess all my science books are fic
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You see then, this is why people have to argue so strongly that every word in the Bible is literal. Because as soon as we say that one story or another is an allegory, then the rest of the world immediately claims that the entire work must therefore be fiction. Apparently, it is not possible for a book to contain allegories and illustrations without becoming a complete work of fiction.
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.
There's actually a much better way to rationalize how a book like "The Bible" is able to contain fact & fiction at the same time...
.... Book of John, Book of Matthew, Book of -- HOLY SHIT!!! The Bible is a collection of books too!!
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 "encaps
Re: (Score:2)
It's just a bit of evidence towards how people who live by faith instead of reality like to shut out and keep others from seeing views that oppose theirs. On the other hand, people who don't bind themselves to faith aren't worried about folks with objecting views and just enjoy the conversation.
Re: (Score:2)
God obviously exerted effort in creating the universe. Effort is a relative concept, however... when I exert effort to do something, it's not necessarily the same amount of effort somebody else uses to perform the same task. For example, I can replace the brake pads on my car within a few hours. If I took it to a garage, the mechanic could probably do it in half an hour. Same job, different amount of exertion.
Say God wants to give us an idea of how much effort
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I would argue that it can't be a literal day, because the literal day was shorter 6,000 years ago than it is today, if only by 80 milliseconds. The Earth's rotation slows down very slightly every year due to tidal friction.
Furthermore, the 24 hour period is not exactly 24 hours. Depending on where you measure it, and depending on whether you are measuring high noon, or whatever, the actual amount of time only averages to approximately 24 hours, it is not the sa
Genesis is a MORAL tale (Score:2)
That's ridiculous. You are talking about a rhetorical point in Psalms that has absolutely nothing to do with setting up a scale of time in Genesis.
The book of Genesis is a good story with a moral point. The idea wasn't to say how the earth was made, it was to paint a backstory which illustrates that sin and temptation are as old as the earth itself, which is undeniably true.
Do you really think God would go to someone who barely
Then the universe is really only two seconds old (Score:2)
We actually did not exist two seconds ago. Everything you believe in, even the continuity of your life, is a morality play created by God every two seconds. The en
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Then fuck God. Fuck Him right in the ear. Because he's a sick fuck who won't allow his creations to perceive the truth about their origins, who deliberately set out to deceive us, and I will NEVER worship a sick son of a bitch like that.
?
You, ah, DO realize that God told us all of this, far before we could understand it, right?
Complaining about apparent nuance in the deity's creation is kind of like complaining that your stoner parents are straight-laced professionals now, even though they tell you they were stoners whenever you ask.
I could tell you how easy it is to reconcile the six-day creation with the universe's apparent age without the introduction of deception, but you've obviously made a religious choice to be atheist, and nothing
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But even if free will were real, God could still allow us free will without allowing the possibility of sin. As an example, you can not will yourself to fleem, because fleem is not something you know about. Just as (in your world view) you can have free will and not will yourse
Re:If that is true (Score:4, Insightful)
If man were created without the possibility of sin, he wouldn't be truly free. He wouldn't have the choice of living within or without God's presence. Again, not very interesting for God.
Why would God's sense of right and wrong be any more artificial than yours? And where does your sense of right and wrong come from? And how does your sense of right and wrong differ from the Biblical sense of right and wrong?
Re: (Score:2)
The real difficulty I have with it is the idea that your will is an uncaused cause. That no matter what your experience, you could decide to do something or not based on nothing more than an internal will.
If free will is as you describe, your will can never learn anything be
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.
--
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And no, I didn't realize that god wrote Genesis. Was he a Sumerian folklorist?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
God is an all powerful bastard that doesn't care about what you think. That's the beauty of being all powerful. He just doesn't have to care. Makes up the rules, and that's that.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If that is true (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Enough is enough, it's time to ta
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree. Were it not for christianity, we could have stronger, Roman values, and could merely justify the extermination of our enemies because they were weaker.
Just where exactly did you learn about those Roman values that justify the extermination of our enemies? It seems to me that you don't know much - perhaps nothing - about Romans. If there was ever a civilization that was fair with the people it conquered, it was Roma. In fact, I'd rather have my culture and nation exterminated by Romans a thousand times than a single one by Christians... I think you should take a look on a few History books that don't have "Holy Bible" written in the cover.
Probably not the way you think (Score:2)
I think it would be more accurate though to state that MOST water was probably created via the mechanism described in the article. I'm pretty sure there was some fraction of water that was created through other mechanisms.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)