{"id":47584,"date":"2020-04-22T07:56:02","date_gmt":"2020-04-22T14:56:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thunderbolts.info\/wp\/?p=47584"},"modified":"2020-04-22T12:15:48","modified_gmt":"2020-04-22T19:15:48","slug":"how-cold-is-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thunderbolts.info\/wp\/2020\/04\/22\/how-cold-is-it\/","title":{"rendered":"How Cold Is It?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Artist rendering of Europa’s putative lakes. (Britney Schmidt\/Dead Pixel FX\/Univ. of Texas at Austin).<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

April 22, 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“So cold that if the thermometer had been an inch longer we\u2019d all have frozen to death.”<\/strong>
— Samuel Clemens<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Galileo spacecraft was launched on October 18, 1989 from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, entering orbit around Jupiter on December 7, 1995. After eight years in orbit, Galileo was deliberately incinerated by sending into the atmosphere of Jupiter on September 21, 2003. This was done to prevent any materials from its body accidentally contaminating Jupiter\u2019s moons, especially Europa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Europa is extremely cold, with a mean temperature of \u2212160 Celsius at the equator and \u2212220 Celsius in its polar latitudes. At that temperature, water ice has a tensile strength equivalent to tempered steel on Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Planetary scientists speculate<\/a> that Europa might harbor some kind of life, even though it is so cold. They believe that beneath the ice-rock crust, the moon could have a “warm ocean”. Why would there be warmth in one of the coldest places in the Solar System?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conventional interpretations suggest that Europa\u2019s heat comes from \u201ctidal kneading\u201d: Jupiter\u2019s gravity is supposed to stretch and compress the moon, creating so much internal friction that small pockets of liquid water form beneath the surface. It is in that \u201cwarm\u201d ocean that life is thought to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is \u201clife\u201d? Life is said to move, grow, consume, require oxygen, give off waste and die. With this definition, fire can be thought of as life. In a stricter sense, life requires liquid water and a temperature range in which complex organic chemistry can take place. In order for life to exist on Europa, it must be able to fulfill those conditions, and more. Life is considered to be an emergent process, rather than a state of being, so its definition will never be clear cut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As written previously, Europa\u2019s surface is a multi-kilometer deep shell of water ice floating on a salty sea. The \u201cdecoupled\u201d surface undergoes periodic deformation, because ice movement creates stress cracks, allowing gigantic rafts to form. However, Galileo\u2019s high resolution camera revealed smoothly cut channels that do not look like fractures. Their orientation disregards prior channels, sometimes with five or six of them stacked on top of each other at every angle. As electrical experiments in Dr. C. J. Ransom\u2019s Vemasat Laboratories reveal, this should come as no surprise. Electric currents flowing across a conductive surface are \u201cpinched\u201d into thin filaments by their associated magnetic fields and draw other filaments into parallel alignment. The trackways often overlap each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When electric arcs strike a sphere, smaller, perpendicular side channels are created by corona discharges. Darkened, scorched areas, pits, curving channels that appear to be centered on Europa\u2019s poles, and a lack of craters are all duplicated in Vemasat experiments. NASA\u2019s surprises are expected by Electric Universe advocates because plasma behavior scales by many orders of magnitude. From the laboratory to the Solar System\u2019s planets and moons, plasma is the primary ingredient that shapes worlds, not kinetic squeezing and stretching. There is most likely no subsurface ocean on Europa, and the chaotic terrain does not result from interior processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stephen Smith<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Thunderbolts Picture of the Day is generously supported by the Mainwaring Archive Foundation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

April 22, 2020 “So cold that if the thermometer had been an inch longer we\u2019d all have frozen to death.”— Samuel Clemens The Galileo spacecraft was launched on October 18, 1989 from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, entering orbit around Jupiter on December 7, 1995. After eight years in orbit, Galileo…<\/p>\n

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