Earth’s Water Is Older Than the Sun
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Earth’s Water Is Older Than the Sun
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Re: Earth’s Water Is Older Than the Sun
#2This greatly increases my expectations of life on other planets if true.
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#5Re: Earth’s Water Is Older Than the Sun
#6This greatly increases my expectations of life on other planets if true.
Particularly when paired with recent detection of water in the atmosphere of an extra-solar planet: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/24/water-small-w...
Water, water, everywhere...
There are people who don't understand what a big deal this is. They think that because this small blue dot happens to have a lot of water, and there is evidence of water elsewhere in the solar system, that water must be common. That is a huge unjustified leap, comparable to "everything I see falls toward the centre of the Earth so everything in the universe must be falling toward the centre of the Earth or moving around it in a perfect circle". That kind of leap rarely works out especially well.
These sorts of observations that demonstrate that water actually is relatively common in the universe, and that is extremely exciting insofar as the prospects of life-as-we-know-it are concerned.
Re: Earth’s Water Is Older Than the Sun
#7Here is a fun fact: only elements up to iron are produced as a result of fission. The rest, including elements essential to human life, elements in your body, are only produced through fusion. Fusion is known to only occur in stars. You are stars.
Re: Earth’s Water Is Older Than the Sun
#8Here is a fun fact: only elements up to iron are produced as a result of fission. The rest, including elements essential to human life, elements in your body, are only produced through fusion. Fusion is known to only occur in stars. You are stars.
Reminds me of Carl Sagan's description of everything made out of star stuff- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE9dEAx5Sgw
Re: Earth’s Water Is Older Than the Sun
#9Here is a fun fact: only elements up to iron are produced as a result of fission. The rest, including elements essential to human life, elements in your body, are only produced through fusion. Fusion is known to only occur in stars. You are stars.
Yes,except it's the other way round. Fusion in normal stars makes elements up to iron. Only supernovae create the rest of the elements.
Re: Earth’s Water Is Older Than the Sun
#10Here is a fun fact: only elements up to iron are produced as a result of fission. The rest, including elements essential to human life, elements in your body, are only produced through fusion. Fusion is known to only occur in stars. You are stars.
After the big bang and the expansion, and the condensation of energy into matter, the universe was almost entirely hydrogen and helium (i.e. extremely boring).
The heavier elements were fused together in the solar furnances (stars). The early stars were enormous, burnt through their fuel (walking up the Periodic Table to Iron) and then collapsed under the gravity pressure when the fuel ran out and exploded in a Supernovae. During these explosions a smattering of the heavier (than Iron) elements are fused together.
Our sun is a ~third generation star, made from the remains of other exploded stars.
So it's more that we are all star stuff; everything heavier than Iron (all the Lead, Tin, Iodine, radioactive elements, rare Earths etc.) are exploding star stuff.