It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
originally posted by: audubon
Science was a paradigm shift, requiring us to set aside our common sense for a moment and let the rigidity of experiment and observation speak for itself.
"Common sense" and "rigidity of experiment" are not mutually exclusive!
Members of Cassini's ultraviolet imaging spectrograph (UVIS) team analyzed data collected by their instrument during the brief time it observed Europa in 2001, as Cassini sped through the Jupiter system en route to Saturn. The observations show that most of the hot, excited gas, or plasma, around Europa originates not from the moon itself, but from volcanoes on the nearby moon Io. In fact, from their data, the researchers calculated that Europa contributes 40 times less oxygen than previously thought to its surrounding environment.
"It is certainly still possible that plume activity occurs, but that it is infrequent or the plumes are smaller than we see at Enceladus," said Amanda Hendrix, a Cassini UVIS team member with the Planetary Science Institute in Pasadena, who co-authored the new study. "If eruptive activity was occurring at the time of Cassini's flyby, it was at a level too low to be detectable by UVIS."
originally posted by: audubon
This is, frankly, such patent balderdash that it is difficult to accept that any scientist honestly believes it. Some might well have arrived via comet, but all 1.5bn cubic kms of it? Really?
originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
a reply to: audubon
They actually found free floating water in another galaxy! So, no, water is not some magical item that only exists on earth. The thinking now is that water came to earth and may not even be sourced from our own planet!
The deposits on Ceres (the bright spots) can only form in water. There is 3 mile high ice volcano there! So, it is not super rare out there in space. It just seems we were looking at things wrong.
There is caution and there is holding back information. If it is NASA funded it is our discovery but I know the need for being cautious, so I wait.
originally posted by: Soylent Green Is People
originally posted by: audubon
This is, frankly, such patent balderdash that it is difficult to accept that any scientist honestly believes it. Some might well have arrived via comet, but all 1.5bn cubic kms of it? Really?
The comet theory is not really the going theory anymore, because the water in many comets (discerned through spectrographic analysis) seems to be of the wrong type of water -- i.e., cometary water seems to have a deuterium-to-hydrogen (D/H) ratio that is three times that of the water on Earth.
The cometary theory is being supplanted by the idea that most of Earth's water came via asteroids -- the asteroids that helped build the earth in the first place. So some of it came from asteroids when the earth was being formed, some came when it was half formed, and some came when it was almost fully formed. The water found in asteroids seems to have a deuterium-to-hydrogen (D/H) ratio that matches most of the water on Earth.
The water would have been locked away in the rocks that made up the proto-Earth as it grew, with some of that water eventually making its way to the surface through geologic activity, forming the surface water that we see in oceans, lakes, rivers, groundwater, ice caps, and the atmosphere.
New discoveries suggest that there is more water locked in the rocks BENEATH the surface of the Earth (deep crust and mantle) than there is ON the surface of the Earth -- and this could be an indicator that water locked away in the asteroids and other material that Built the earth might be the process that brought most of Earth's water.