Smashed Icy Moons Cool Too Rapidly to Retain Oceans

Diagram depicting Saturn's moon, Enceladus, and its subsurface ocean. (Credit: Southwest Research Institute)

There are more than 450 confirmed moons orbiting the eight major planets, but only a handful of them provide unique scientific value to pique the interests of the scientific community, specifically their potential for hosting life as we know it. This is due to the subsurface oceans that exist beneath icy crusts, including Jupiter’s Europa and Ganymede, and Saturn’s Enceladus. But what processes are responsible for producing these subsurface oceans, or potentially preventing them from forming in the first place?

from Universe Today https://ift.tt/7Ic3ogA
via IFTTT

Comments

A Magnetohydrodynamic Drive Could Lead to Fuel Stations on Mars

Within the next fifteen years, NASA, China, and SpaceX plan to send the first crewed missions to Mars. In all three cases, these missions are meant to culminate in the creation of surface habitats that will allow for many returns and – quite possibly – permanent human settlements. This presents numerous challenges, one of the greatest of which is the need for plenty of breathable air and propellant. Both can be manufactured through electrolysis, where electromagnetic fields are applied to water (H 2 O) to create oxygen gas (O 2 ) and liquid hydrogen (LH 2 ). While Mars has ample deposits of water ice on its surface that make this feasible, existing technological solutions fall short of the reliability and efficiency levels required for space exploration. Fortunately, a team of researchers from Georgia Tech has proposed a “ Magnetohydrodynamic Drive for Hydrogen and Oxygen Production in Mars Transfer ” that combines multiple functionalities into a system with no moving parts. This syst...

SETI Researchers Double-Checked 1 Million Objects for Signs of Alien Signals

We can’t help ourselves but wonder about life elsewhere in the Universe. Any hint of a biosignature or even a faint, technosignature-like event wrests our attention away from our tumultuous daily affairs. In 1984, our wistful quest took concrete form as SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence . Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, SETI has turned up nothing. Recently, scientists used a powerful new data system to re-examine data from one million cosmic objects and still came up empty-handed. Did they learn anything from this attempt? This effort used COSMIC , which stands for Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster . It’s a signal-processing and algorithm system attached to the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio astronomy observatory. According to SETI, it’s designed to “search for signals throughout the Galaxy consistent with our understanding of artificial radio emissions. “ Modern astronomy generates vast volumes of data and al...

We Might Be Able to Measure Dark Energy Through the Milky Way's Collision With Andromeda

The Universe is expanding, and it’s doing so at an ever-increasing pace. Whether due to a dark energy field throughout the cosmos or due to a fundamental of spacetime itself , the cosmos is stretching the space between distant galaxies. But nearby galaxies, those part of our local group, are moving closer together. And how they are falling toward each other could tell us about the nature of cosmic expansion. One of the things we do know about dark energy is that it isn’t a force. Galaxies aren’t pushing away from each other. Even the most distant galaxies are gravitationally attracted to each other, it’s just that cosmic expansion increases their separation faster than they can fall toward each other. But the amount of cosmic expansion between galaxies depends on their distance. When galaxies are within a few million light-years of each other, then they can fall toward each other faster than expansion. It’s why galaxies huddle into superclusters over time. Local groups of galaxies m...

INFORMATION

Search This Blog