What a run-around that was! At least they could have claimed they were doing their own heavy-water extraction. Or just, you know, asked for water. It isn’t like a couple of city-diameter ships are going to be able to carry away that much, not in comparison with the size of Earth’s oceans!

To the folks at NASA making the spectra, something I always tell my students. Label your axes! There are no units on the x-axis. I’m guessing it’s in km/s, to adjust for the Doppler shift, but it’d be nice to put something on there.

Actually, since this is an IR spectrum, the x-axis might well be in per centimetres (cm^-1).

Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

Ah, yes, from early in Part the Third. Funnily enough, Phil’s title reminded me of the beginning of Part the Fourth:

(After the mariner assures the wedding guest that he did not die along with the rest of his crew-mates, and therefore isn’t some undead thing, he resumes the narrative: )

Alone, alone; all, all alone. Alone on a wide, wide sea;
And never a saint took pity on my soul in agony.
The many men so beautiful, and they all dead did lie,
And a thousand, thousand slimy things lived on; and so did I.

So the aliens in V (first version) were REALLY wasting their time here.

No, the water was a cover story. They actually came here to harvest people for food.

But, to be frank, the cover story was so flimsy that everyone should have seen through it from day one. Why go so deep into a star’s gravity well to get water that is abundantly available in the Kuiper Belt (and perhaps even more so in the Oort Cloud)?

If they were really after water, they could have made off with a few dozen KBOs and we would never even have noticed (unless they took Pluto).

My suspicion is the same in both cases: it doesn’t exist in scientifically provable form.

I’m an atheist, so I’m not asking this as some religious nut-case, but rather as an interested, educated person.

Liquid water – oceans – may exist beneath the icy crust of Europa and some other Jovian moons and maybe also true for Saturnean, and other outer planetary moons even including possibly Pluto & Charon.

Click on the link in my name for this comment or search space-dot-com for the ‘Pluto’s Moon is an Ice Machine’ article for one source on that. There was a good article about a possible sub-Charonian sea in New Scientist – or was it an astronomy magazine about that possibility as well.

Much of the water in our solar system is mixed with other compounds – such as I gather on our own Moon.

Mars may have huge aquifers of permafrost and even liquid water beneath its sands of rust and basalt surface as Kim Stanley Robinson speculates in his Mars trilogy.

Venus could well have had an immense ocean or three early in its planetary history when our Sun was much cooler before our daytime star grew too luminous and boiled those Cytherean seas away.

When our solar system was young there could well have been three planets with oceans, seas and lakes of liquid water before Venus suffered a runaway greenhouse effect due to its proximity to the Sun and Mars, lacking sufficient mass, lost its magnetic field and early denser atmosphere preventing liquid water from being stable on its surface. Chance could well have deprived us of having three (unprotected human~)habitable worlds in our solar system had Mars been a little more massive and located where Venus orbits or just outside that and Venus be orbiting where Mars is today. Maybe?

As it is there may still be life on a number of worlds with watery ecologies in our solar system not just obvously present on Earth but as well below the Europan ice, underground Martian microbes, even Charonean cave dwelling waterbugs near its still warm core and possibly more. But then also maybe not.

So much we still have to discover. So many unanswered questions and speculations that may or may not have factual equivalents.

When talking about cold water in space, what is the temperature range? I am curious if it is still in liquid state or does it actually mean ice when referred to cold water?

Ice usually & generally amorphous ice which is a formof ice not usually found on Earth. (Click on my name here for relevant wikipedia entry for that info & source.)

Although it depends exactly where that water is and what pressures its under.

Liquid water is very rare requiring a specific temperature and pressure range. It’s found only on Earth at the surface although soem may temproarily be present on Mars whereas elsewhere frozen water will sublimate or go straight into vapour – gaseous – phase state.

Liquid water – oceans – may exist beneath the icy crust of Europa and some other Jovian moons and maybe also true for Saturnean, and other outer planetary moons even including possibly Pluto & Charon. Pus comets and some asteroids.

Ice also forms a variety of types – not just our familiar “ice I” – some of which can endure high temperatures and pressures. Hence many “SuperEarths”or “gas dwarfs” as MIT exoplanet hunter Sara Seager more perhaps accurately describes them (eg. Gliese 436 b, Gliese 581 d, HD 181433 b) are sometimes dubbed “Hot Ice” planets because they may have layers of these high-pressure ices beneath steamy dense atmospheres and no solid surface.

I’m not sure how many Earth-masses of ice exist in our solar system but most of the water in our solar system is NOT found on Earth. Which is kind of a good thing because if it was, its doubtful we’d have any solid land at all!

*****

Once thought to be rocky, we now believe Ceres may contain 200 million cubic kilometres of water in its mantle. This is more than the amount of fresh water on the Earth.
- Page 10, “Ceres may be a failed miniplanet” by Jeff Foust in Astronomy Now magazine, November, 2005.

I expect the same will apply for TW Hydrae too with most of the thousand masses of water going into objects that are NOT Earth-like planets.

(For clarity : ) Although, hopefully, there *is* one or two or three earth-masses of water going into forming oceans on one or two or three earth-like planets and/or moons in the TW Hydrae system still!

Wonder how long before planets finish forming there and what sort of worlds there’ll be and evolve into?

Thank you. I was thinking about what was the most abundant compound (two different elements) that wasn’t a diatomic molecule like H2.

@15. Relativity : “So will this system make a ‘thousand” Earth-like planets? Hmmmm…”

Not likely. Because water doesn’t just turn into earth-like planets.

FWIW there’s (almost certainly) an awful lot of water inside Jupiter ..and Neptune .. and Pluto and other planets in our solar system.

The gas giants and ice dwarfs probably contain many tens if not hundreds of earth masses of water. Pluto, Eris, Ceres and the other ice dwarfs are mostly frozen water mixed withrock – ditto comets and some asteroids. pOh plus many of the outer planet’s moons are primarily ice (eg. Mimas, Enceladus, Miranda) or ice-rock mixtures (Europa, Ganymede, Charon) too.

We also think that Venus and Mars had oceans once but Venus grew too hot and Mars was too small to retain much atmosphere and thus cooled down too much. Mercury and the Moon have traces of water in polar comets although they likely didn’t form with much.

So of all the water in the solar system only a tiny percentage ended up on Earth.

I expect the same will apply for TW Hydrae too with most of the thousand masses of water going into objects that are NOT Earth-like planets.

On BBC’s QI they also discussed methane lakes and rain on Titan. One of the guests was Prof. Brian Cox, who named Titan as the moon most likely to be inhabited by Ewoks. The conversation then moved on to the particulars of tossing an Ewok into a lake of fart. lol

“It is believed that Europa has an outer layer of water around 100 km (62 mi) thick; some as frozen-ice upper crust, some as liquid ocean underneath the ice. Recent magnetic field data from the Galileo orbiter showed that Europa has an induced magnetic field through interaction with Jupiter’s, which suggests the presence of a subsurface conductive layer. The layer is likely a salty liquid water ocean. The crust is estimated to have undergone a shift of 80°, nearly flipping over (see true polar wander), which would be unlikely if the ice were solidly attached to the mantle. Europa probably contains a metallic iron core.”

Presumably entirely water was meant for effect, not the actual composition. It is a lot of water though.

Liquid is needed to facilitate chemical reactions – but all you scientists know this. The little satellite that landed in the Utah desert a few years back was full of comet stuff and the amino acid that starts with “g” so they’re pretty sure life is all over the universe and want to find some PDQ.

I’m pretty sure Europa and Enceledas have rocky cores.

Rest assured, the fully-labeled version is available in the paper:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6054/338