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To: Swordmaker
Try this on for size. The water is FORMED by the high-energy plasma-discharge interacting with the solar wind, which is made up of stripped protons.

Interestingly enough, that thought occurred to me but having ZERO background in science; in particular chemistry, I didn't even know where or how to begin a search to see if it was even possible. Gratifying to know that my thought processes still function properly -- more or less.

I did some scouting around to see what I could find out generally about Tempel1. Ran across several articles stating water ice or water ice patches were discovered on the comet. Conflicting and contradictory information is everywhere apparently. I discovered one article in my wandering in particular that gave me severe indigestion. If you have time, see what you can make of this item from HERE:

How hot is it on Tempel 1? Researchers made a temperature map of the sunlit side and found the hottest point nearly directly under the sun. It's 329 degrees Kelvin under the sun and 260 in the shade.

The coldest temperature is important because the temperature at which ices such as water, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide turn directly into gas is below 200 degrees Kelvin.
The problem I have is reconciling the fact that from this same article it states 72°F is roughly 295°K. Nowhere near hot enough to cook off anything. Confusing for the layman.
41 posted on 11/23/2014 8:28:22 PM PST by ForGod'sSake (What part of "Fundamentally transforming the United States of America" don't the LIV understand?)
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To: ForGod'sSake
The problem I have is reconciling the fact that from this same article it states 72°F is roughly 295°K. Nowhere near hot enough to cook off anything. Confusing for the layman.

Well, first of all the Kelvin scale would be not reported in degrees. Just Kelvin. The Kelvin scale starts at absolute zero, no molecular motion at all. You also have to consider the factor of pressure. For example, the boiling point of water drops as the pressure drops. At a certain pressure, the boiling point could certainly be 72º F or 295.372 K. That pressure point for water is approximately 1/10 of an atmosphere, or about 1.5 lbs per square inch of pressure. So the reported 329 K would be enough to do the job IF the supposed ice were on the surface.

However, every comet we've visited has never shown an iota of surface ice, and the ice does not "sublimate" off in gentle clouds as proposed but, rather, in highly energetic jets from distinct geyser like points, implying they come from extremely high pressure inside the comet. These not only come from these geyser like jets, they do it from the same locations on the comet for days without seeming to erode the "nozzles" of the jets. If they were constructed of ice, they'd quickly ablate and widen, losing the ability to spew far. . . but they don't.

For the pressure to be built up inside the comet, the solar heating must heat the entire mass of the area surrounding the mass of ice supplying pressure to the jets. . . All the while spinning under the sun, alternating cold and hot sides. Keep in mind also that comets frequently begin their show out beyond the orbit of Jupiter where the temperatures are far lower than the temperatures at which ice is at the triple point in a vacuum.


Triple Point of H2O on Pressure and Temperature
Note the temperature scale at the bottom of this graph at 1 Pascal, which is as close as this graph
gets to a hard vacuum. The temperatures we are discussing out beyond Jupiter are approximately
-175 C (98 K) to -145º C (128 K) and are WAY below the point show here for ice to turn to vapor.

That vacuum pump we saw on the PBS special could pump the air out of their chamber down below maybe 1 kiloPascal . . . 10 millibars, Maybe she hit 100 Pascals, but I doubt it.

Then she did her magic trick with the infra-red heat lamp from less than a meter away. Think of how much heat she added to that petri dish of not-very-cold ice and dirt (say -5º to -10º C— she was compacting it with her hands, after all). Then look at the chart above. It is no wonder she got what any first semester physics student could get exploring the triple point could get. Gosh. I'm shocked. NOT! I did it in high school back in the mid sixties!

And, then we get back to the question of how does a infinitessimally small chunk of ice, rock, or rocky-road ice-cream with a gravity well of 1-3mm per second per second somehow have a granitic sway over a cloud of particles or whatever 15,000,000 kilometers in diameter (second only in size to the solar heliosphere itself!) and how did that cloud grow to that immense size in a few short months (merely by Boyle's law)? One coma and tail, Comet McNaught, in 2007 stretched an astonishing 1.5 AU, 222 million kilometers! And what causes the comae of comets to glow? The individual particles are not large enough to reflect enough sunlight to Earth. Next, why do comets emit X-ray radiation and radio waves, both of which are electro-magnetic phenomena and findings which repeatedly shock orthodox cosmologists greatly every time they find them at every comet we visit? One would think that after finding the same phenomena at one comet, and then at another, and another, they'd begin to get a clue that comets MIGHT be electrical phenomena.

42 posted on 11/24/2014 1:52:09 AM PST by Swordmaker (This tag line is a Microsoft insult free zone... but if the insults to Mac users contnue...)
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