http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... uDnmSH8JHsThe dwarf planet Ceres has been caught spouting water vapour, perhaps from a layer of buried ice or even from slushy volcanoes.
"This is the first clear-cut detection of water in the asteroid belt," says Michael Küppers of the European Space Agency. It backs up indirect signs of water on other asteroids – good news for would-be space miners hoping to use that water as fuel.
Mainstream astronomy or EU: who do you think will win the World Ceres when Dawn gets there in 2015?A 10-hour observation in March 2013 then helped the team tie the vapour to dark spots on its surface.
I do not even know if that process could take place at the distance of the asteroid belt, being quite far from the Sun. The EU model has an alternative explanation for the presence of hydroxyl in comet comas. I suspect this applies to Ceres too.The presence of water vapour around Ceres was suggested by a marginal detection of the photodissociation product of water, hydroxyl (ref. 12), but could not be confirmed by later, more sensitive observations13. Here we report the detection of water vapour around Ceres, with at least 1026 molecules being produced per second, originating from localized sources that seem to be linked to mid-latitude regions on the surface14, 15. The water evaporation could be due to comet-like sublimation or to cryo-volcanism, in which volcanoes erupt volatiles such as water instead of molten rocks.
Plasma events are scalable. What occurs in the plasma laboratory can occur on a vastly larger scale in space plasma. Hence, observations of plasma behavior in the laboratory are a logical reference when considering the mysteries of cometary comas—and that includes the many enigmas that surround the identification of “water” in the comas. According to the electric theorists, electricity can accomplish the very things that have baffled the cometologists.
In their analysis of the coma, astronomers begin with the assumption that water is evaporating in the heat of the Sun, off the surface ices of the nucleus. They do not “see” the water, but call upon the effects of solar radiation (photolysis) on assumed “water” to account for the abundant hydroxyl radical OH (oxygen-hydrogen molecules) in the coma.
In our previous Picture of the Day we noted another possibility. Astronomers have not considered the energetic ionic chemical reactions that would accompany plasma discharge “sputtering” of a cathode or negatively charged object in space. Production of OH would be virtually certain if proton streams sputtered material from the surface in the fashion that the electric theorists have claimed
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You sound like SparkyMetryq wrote:I heard about this through a NASA science news mailing. I wonder if it's the same scenario as the dry comets we've been seeing—sputtered surface material mixing with the Solar "wind." While not "cometary," Ceres' orbit may be elliptical enough to build up a charge.
Mainstream astronomy or EU: who do you think will win the World Ceres when Dawn gets there in 2015?A 10-hour observation in March 2013 then helped the team tie the vapour to dark spots on its surface.
That's debatable. Life tends not to thrive in cryogenically frozen temperatures.Frantic wrote:Something about hydroxyl, metal halides, and sulfur hydrides and I get excited, sounds like life to me, then ...read further down the article on Enceladus considered most likely habitable body in solar system... guess I'm not exactly hot on the trail ...
Seems to be
I guess this proves that asteroids aren't made out of neutronium, like pulsars!Their guess is that it "is undergoing a rotationally triggered disruption". How does the asteroid spin up?
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