Posted on 05/03/2016 6:21:48 PM PDT by MtnClimber
This morning I woke to the sound of rain on the roof. Is there any music more beautiful? It's the perfect reminder of nature's grounding cycles from which we also emerge and disappear.
But being an astrophysicist, I was suddenly struck by the realization that Earth is not the only world that knows rain. There is rain falling in many other places in the cosmos. Lying there, listening to the drops falling on the roof, that fact suddenly seemed to carry a lot of weight.
Titan, the haze-shrouded moon of Saturn, hosts rainfall. Given its great distance from the sun, however, what falls from the sky on Titan is not water but liquid methane at the distinctly chilly temperature of minus 180 degrees Celsius. Over the past decade, NASA's Cassini probe has sent back images showing Titan's surface darken as cold rains fall and replenish the moon's methane seas.
Venus also has rain. Sulfuric acid condenses into droplets that fall through its hellish atmosphere only to evaporate before they reach the ground. And deep within Saturn, scientists believe, helium may condense as drops and fall through a vast sea of liquid hydrogen. Mars' atmosphere is too thin to allow rain, but the Phoenix Lander saw a frost of "diamond dust" falling in the mornings. Mars is also no stranger to fog, which has been seen collecting in canyons and craters.
And beyond our solar system, we now know the Milky Way galaxy hosts some 10 billion planets. Among that multitude will be many worlds enshrouded in the thin layer of gases we call an atmosphere. And with atmospheres, there surely will come cycles of evaporation and condensation.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Ok it’s NPR. Maybe Adam did not know who would publish his article.
Being an astrophysicist you probably don't have to fight a lot of traffic into the urban core on rainy weekday mornings. Unlike the millions of commuters who wake up to sound of rain, and dread what they are in for just to get to the office.
I side with the astrophysicist against the millions of commuters. They should shed their dread and grok the beauty of their own existence. Amen.
This is Trump’s fault!
Well, maybe not. Just getting warmed up for attacks by the press.
Don’t want to visit a world where it rains liquid farts.
NPR can relax about the weather. Obama made a campaign promise about the seas rising, and by inference about global warming.
Therefore the problem is fixed; nothing to worry about. Obama has it in his plans, grand as they are!
I want leftists to visit a planet where it rains sulphuric acid.
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