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Water on Enceladus!

#21
mike_v_s said:
Never? I'm not sure you can say that with any certainty. The space program may have dictated when they were developed...but being items with uses outside of the space program, i think there's a decent chance they would have seen the light of day without it.

Mike
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Alright alright, you have me on a technicality. But we would still need a space program of sorts to send all those cool things into outer space. I'm about as selfish and anti-taxation as they come, but I still believe that spending money on the space program is a worthwhile endeavor. It's short sighted people like ummm I dunno I can't think of anyone I don't like right now but yeah, **** 'em.
 
#23
karrot-x said:
Quote:
They ruled out the idea that the particles are produced by or blown off the moon's surface by vapor created when warm water ice converts to a gas.

.
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That doesn't prove it's liquid water though.

Vorago said:
The water would stay liquid under the pressure of all the ice.
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A lot of chemicals would stay liquid under the pressure of all the ice.


I'm not trying to argue with scientists or say they're wrong, I'm just asking what they're basing their discovery on. How can they tell all of that from just a picture?
 
#25
Eric Cameron said:
But why would there be water ice anyway? At those low temperatures, ice has a tendancy to sublimate out into gas and go ppffftttt into space.

Rock on
Eric
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This all depends on pressure conditions though. I don't really know anything about the pressures and temperatures on Enceladus, or most planets and moons for that matter. Under conditions of extremely low temperature and pressure a solid would likely sublimate. For those who are down with chemistry, a phase diagram describes the transfer of a substance between the solid, liquid, gas and supercritical fluid states. What we need now is a physical chemist.

phase.gif


Issues of solvents and other uncool factors aside, charts like the above (found via google search: phase diagram water) will help us in our quest. The backward slope on between solid and liquid is a little wack, and by that I mean vertical, but otherwise the above is a pretty cool chart. Yeah?
 
#26
Sonorous said:
How do they know it's water and not any other liquid? How do they even know it's liquid, and not just tiny pieces of solid particles?
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Missions to Enceladus would get funding if there were a chance of water there.
Remember all the publicity of possible evidence life on Mars (found on an alleged meteorite from Mars) just before the latest series of Mars missions got mega-buck funding?
 

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