Posted on 10/20/2011 4:06:51 PM PDT by decimon
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—For the first time, astronomers have detected around a burgeoning solar system a sprawling cloud of water vapor that’s cold enough to form comets, which could eventually deliver oceans to dry planets.
Water is an essential ingredient for life. Scientists have found thousands of Earth-oceans’ worth of it within the planet-forming disk surrounding the star TW Hydrae. TW Hydrae is 176 light years away in the constellation Hydra and is the closest solar-system-to-be.
University of Michigan astronomy professor Ted Bergin is a co-author of a paper on the findings published in the Oct. 21 edition of Science.
The researchers used the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared (HIFI) on the orbiting Hershel Space Observatory to detect the chemical signature of water.
(Excerpt) Read more at ns.umich.edu ...
Getting wet ping.
Catch that.”Nearby Planet”Its only 196 light years away.Wow I’ll jump right in my car and make a quick visit.Sarcasm.
..if it doesn’t get there in a half hour, it’s free.
There you go exaggerating. It's just 176 light years away. ;-)
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It’s an “extra, extra” ping to the APoD list members.
I have such a hard time buying the theory that we got our water from comet impacts. That would be a BUNCH of comets I would think. Then again, maybe we were hit by A LOT of comets.... lol
Look at the lunar surface, it’s completely covered with evidence of massive impacts ....We too have been hit many times in the past by large objects, but since our surface changes, it hides or covers up many of these impacts.
Unless the water is manufactured by the Earth itself, there’s no alternative.
They’re also small enough that most of them don’t make a crater on the land. :’)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/1250694/posts
But it’s not unheard of, either:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1216757/posts?page=3#3
Please freepmail me if you wish to be added or dropped from the mitten ping.
Hard science as opposed to the usual social "science" coming from U of M--sign of a coming apocolypse?
Interesting!
More nonsense ...
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Oxygen is much rarer, but more reactive.
Do these two elements simply mate out there in space?
I have no idea. But every compound requires a joining somewhere at some time.
This sounds like a thread from a few days ago. Water (like hydrocarbons) seems to be ubiquitous in the universe. Don’t know why that should surprise me, but I always tended to think of the universe as a debris field of mostly rocks.
It could be that as we pass through space on our way around the sun, that water is being continually added from ice dust in our path.
That’s basically what happens, but these are not just specks of dust, they’re 20 to 30 feet in diameter, and arrive in the millions each year.
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