Water Fountain
Happy Thanksgiving in the US! I've been shopping for a water fountain to put in the new home, so today's news is aprropriate.
This blog has made many reports on Enceladus, Saturn's mysterious moon with its South polar hot spot. In today's issue of NATURE, a team led by Candice Hansen of JPL reports that particles ejected from the hot spot reach speeds of 2100 km/hr, twice the speed of sound. Hansen's team concludes that the fountain is liquid. As seeen in the video, Earth geysers are also made of water. This is another indicator that Enceladus is home to liquid and possibly life.
Back in December 007, Jennifer Meyer's AGU talk asserted that Enceladus' 6.0 GW internal heat can not be accounted for by tidal forces. The conventional estimate from tidal heating is only 0.12 GW. The old hypothesis or "radioactive decay" does not work for these icy moons. Why is Enceladus warm enough for life, and why is the heat concentrated at the pole? The little moon's interior is an excellent place to find a Black Hole.
Humans fear Black Holes as they once feared cats and dogs, yet a tiny Hole within Enceladus may have created conditions for life. Our planet and even the Sun may not have formed without the influence of Black Holes. One could still be with us today, warming Earth's core and generating the magnetic field that protects us from Space radiation. On future Thanksgiving days, perhaps we should be thankful for Black Holes.
Labels: black holes, cassini, enceladus
posted by L. Riofrio at 4:47 AM
6 Comments:
Hello! I have only recently met your blog about your theory on variable light speed. It sounds interesting but it seems to me that it could still be a "special" case of something that we cannot yet fully appreciate in its entirety. Have you ever heard for example, the "polarizable vacuum interpretation of GR"? Have we performed any experiments to verify that vacuum per se is always a "linear medium" at all possible energy scales (and thus at all frequencies)? What is the biggest frequency you can imagine?
How about 10^100 Hz!? What would happen to a photon of such a frequency propagating in free space? Would it still be a "massless" photon? Would it still have the same "velocity"?
I hope you will find these questions entertaining. Hope to hearing your answers.
rtheo@dat.demokritos.gr
I have recently discovered the Oxford University science blog! See their recent post on planetary cores.
this is a great article. thank youf or the great information.
Hi Louise
Just a quibble, but we're actually protected from high-energy cosmic rays and solar-flare x-rays by the air-mass above our heads - all 10 tons per square metre. The magnetic field just deflects the solar-wind around the Earth, but neither Mars or Venus have such protection, yet Venus doesn't have a radiation issue at the 1 bar pressure level, and Mars's bit of air reduces the surface dose somewhat. Furthermore both have ionospheres that deflect the solar wind quite a bit - charged up by the cosmic-rays.
Sorry for the vent. I'm just sick of bad science Press repeating a supposed fact like it was true. Don't make the mistake of just taking their word for it.
A rebel like you following the herd? Never! ;-)
Your blog is very interesting!It correlates with science and the reality. It gives additional information.
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