Tag: science

My Favorite Fact About Saturn

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 3 Comments

Hello, friends!  I’ve been going through some stuff recently, which limits my time for writing.  But since writing is so important to me, I’ve been making time to write these short and simple blog posts on my #1 favorite facts about each planet of the Solar System.  Today, it’s time for my #1 favorite fact about Saturn.

This may surprise you, but my favorite fact about Saturn has nothing to do with Saturn’s rings.  It has to do with Saturn’s moons.  When astrobiologists (scientists who search for and study potential signs of alien life) talk about the Solar System, not one but two Saturnian moons get mentioned over and over again.  Their names are Enceladus and Titan.

Let’s talk about Titan first.  Titan is covered with this weird sludge of organic chemicals.  It’s important to note that in chemistry, the word organic does not necessarily have anything to do with organisms.  Organic simply means carbon-based.  However, when you find a world like Titan that’s just drenched in this organic chemical sludge, one can’t help but wonder….

Meanwhile, Enceladus has an ocean of liquid water hidden beneath its surface.  What’s happening in that subsurface ocean?  Are the conditions right for life down there?  We don’t know.  However, rather conveniently, there are cryovolcanoes clustered around Enceladus’s south pole.  These cryovolcanoes spew water, salt, and traces of organic chemicals up from the ocean and out into space.  Again, the presence of organic chemicals does not necessarily mean organisms are also present.  And yet, given everything we know about Enceladus so far, one can’t help but wonder….

The search for alien life is hard, in large part because we’re not 100% sure what we’re looking for.  Alien life could be wildly different from any sort of life we know here on Earth.  Still, we know enough to have strong suspicions about both Titan and Enceladus, which means that exploring Saturn is a rare two-for-one deal in our ongoing search for alien life.

Thank you, friends, for reading.  Next time, I’ll share my #1 favorite fact about the planet Uranus.

My Favorite Fact About Jupiter

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 4 Comments

Hello, friends!  My life is complicated at the moment, leaving me precious little time for writing.  And yet, because I am the person I am that I am, I must write something!  So this month, I’ve just been writing these quick, easy posts sharing my favorite facts about each planet of the Solar System.  Today, we’re talking about my #1 favorite fact about Jupiter.

Jupiter is actually my favorite planet to look at in a telescope.  Even with a small, relatively cheap telescope, you can see the major moons, and if you check up on Jupiter from night to night you’ll see how much those moons move.  You can also see the texture of Jupiter’s clouds: the light and dark stripes contrasting against each other.  And if you’re lucky, you might even be able to see Jupiter’s Great Red Spot—but that is getting harder and harder to do.

Astronomers first started tracking the Great Red Spot in the 1830’s.  Based on notes and drawings from that time, it seems the Spot was roughly 40,000 km wide back then.  By the time NASA’s Voyager probes arrived in the 1970’s, though, the Great Red Spot was much smaller.  23,000 km wide.  And it continues to shrink to this day.  Currently, it’s about 16,000 km wide.

The ultimate fate of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot remains unknown, but there’s a real possibility that it will disappear entirely within the next few decades.  So if you ever have the chance to see Jupiter with a decently powerful telescope, do it!  Your opportunity to see the Great Red Spot for yourself may be running out.

Thank you, friends, for reading.  Stay tuned.  My #1 favorite fact about Saturn is coming soon.

My Favorite Fact About Mars

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 4 Comments

Hello, friends!  Right now, I’m going through some big changes in my life, which leaves me very little time for writing.  And yet, because I am the person I am, I must write something!  So during this time, I’ve been writing these quick and easy posts sharing my #1 favorite facts about each planet of the Solar System.  Today, it’s time for my #1 favorite fact about Mars.

This one’s tough.  Mars is the most thoroughly explored planet in the Solar System (besides Earth, of course), which means there are tons of Mars facts to choose from.  And brand new Mars facts keep coming in all the time, thanks to the fleet of robotic spacecraft that have been continuously exploring the Red Planet for decades now.  But if I must pick just one Mars fact to share today, it would be this: Mars’s beautiful orangey-red color is only skin deep.

A little over a decade ago, the Curiosity Rover did something that had never been done before.  It drilled a tiny hole into the surface of Mars.  This hole was only two inches deep, but that was enough.  Just beneath Mars’s very red surface, the rock changed to a dull grey color.

You’ve probably heard that Mars’s red color is associated with iron oxide (a.k.a., rust).  So it may be that the grey stuff is some other iron-rich mineral, something that didn’t get oxidized (rusted) like the stuff on top of it.  Since drilling that first tiny hole, Curiosity has drilled over forty similar holes in different locations on Mars.  Sometimes, Curiosity finds grey rock, sometimes not.  That probably just means the red top layer is thin in some places and thicker in others.

What does all this tell us about the history of Mars or the modern geology of Mars?  I’m not sure.  But I do think this is a super fun fact to share at parties: beneath a relatively thin layer of red, Mars—the famously red planet—is mostly grey.

Thanks for reading, friends!  Next time I’ll be sharing my #1 favorite fact about Jupiter, which also involves the color red.

My Favorite Fact About Earth

~ J.S. Pailly ~ Leave a comment

Hello, friends!  I’m going through some life changes right now, which leaves me precious little time for writing.  But I still want to write something, so during this time I’m just writing this series on my #1 favorite facts about each planet of the Solar System.  Today, I’d like to share my #1 favorite fact about Earth.

I love bringing this fact out at parties.  It’s a great conversation starter.  In 1990, NASA discovered life on Earth.

Okay, so here’s the story.  Prior to 1990, NASA sent all these missions out into space, hoping to find life.  Finding life should be easy, right?  And yet, they found nothing.  It was enough to make some scientists ask: “Are… are we doing something wrong?”  So at the suggestion of one of those scientists (Carl Sagan), NASA turned all the instruments of one of their space probes toward Earth, just to check and make sure those instruments could detect life on a planet where life was already known to exist.

And it worked!  Based solely on the data from that one space probe, NASA confirmed that there is life on Earth.  There were several compelling lines of evidence.  Here’s just one example.  NASA detected traces of methane in Earth’s atmosphere.  That, by itself, proves absolutely nothing.  NASA also detected oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere.  Atmospheric oxygen, by itself, also doesn’t mean much.  But the combination of oxygen and methane in the same planet’s atmosphere?  That’s odd.  That’s very, very strange.  It’s hard to explain how a planet ends up with an atmosphere like that, unless it’s due to biological activity.

Someday, astronomers may discover life on a distant exoplanet (a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun).  If/when that happens, one of the first signs of alien life will probably be a weird mix of chemicals in the exoplanet’s atmosphere.  It doesn’t have to be oxygen and methane.  It doesn’t have to be any of the chemicals found in Earth’s atmosphere, necessarily.  It just has to be a mix of chemicals that don’t make chemical sense together.  Searching for weird mixtures of atmospheric chemicals is one of the easiest ways to detect life on a planet.  We know, because that was one of the ways NASA detected life on Earth in 1990.

Thank you, friends, for reading.  We’ll continue this series later this week with my #1 favorite fact about Mars.

My Favorite Fact About Venus

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Hello, friends!  I’m going through some major life changes right now, which leaves me very little time for writing.  And yet, because I am the person I am, I must write something!  So for the next few weeks, I’m just going to write some quick, easy posts sharing my favorite facts about each planet of the Solar System.  Today, let’s talk about my #1 favorite fact about Venus.

Venus hates you.  More than any other planet, Venus wants you dead.  If you ever try to land on Venus, she’ll kill you a dozen times over before you even touch the ground.

First, there’s the sulfuric acid.  It rains pure sulfuric acid on Venus.  Then there’s the heat.  You know how small amounts of carbon dioxide are slowly warming our planet?  With a 96% CO2 atmosphere, Venus is way beyond Earth-like global warming.  That 96% CO2 atmosphere traps enough heat to make Venus the hottest planet in the Solar System (hotter even than Mercury, despite Mercury being so much closer to the Sun).  And now let’s talk about pressure.  Venus’s atmospheric pressure is so extreme that it makes more sense to compare it to the pressure at the deepest depths of Earth’s oceans.  Remember that submarine full of billionaires that imploded near the wreckage of the Titanic?  That’s what Venus will do to your spacecraft if you try to land there.

Anyone who knows anything about space will tell you Venus is an absolute hellhole.  But that’s not my #1 favorite fact about Venus.  My #1 favorite fact is that there is a way to survive a trip to Venus.  Just don’t land.  Stay at an altitude of 55 kilometers (34 miles) above the surface.  That’ll put you safely above the sulfuric acid rainclouds.  The temperature and pressure are almost Earth-like at that altitude, too.  Conditions are surprisingly nice.  So someday, if we could build a floating city on Venus—something like Cloud City from Star Wars—Venus could end up being one of the nicest places for humans to live in the entire Solar System.

Thanks for reading, friends!  Stay tuned.  We’ll continue this next week with my #1 favorite fact about Earth, followed by my #1 favorite fact about Mars.

My Favorite Fact About Mercury

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 5 Comments

Hello, friends!  I’m going through some major life changes right now, which leaves me precious little time for writing.  And yet, me being the person that I am, I must write something!  So for the next few weeks, I’m just going to write some quick and easy posts sharing my #1 favorite facts about each planet of the Solar System.  Today, we’re starting with my #1 favorite fact about Mercury.

Finding water in space isn’t actually a big deal.  Water molecules are the simplest possible combination of hydrogen and oxygen, the first and third most common elements in the universe, respectively.  So we should expect to find water (in ice form, at least) all over the place.  And we do find it all over the place!  Many moons of the outer Solar System are covered in ice.  The rings of Saturn are mostly made of ice, and comets are famously described as “dirty snowballs” due to how much ice they contain.

That being said, it’s still wild that we found water on Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun.  You’d think all that heat from the Sun would have vaporized any water on Mercury a long, long time ago.  But it turns out there are some very deep craters clustered around Mercury’s north and south poles.  The crater walls are tall.  The bottoms of these craters are perpetually shielded from the Sun.  And what did we find at the bottoms of these craters?  You guessed it.  Ice.  Gigantic sheets of H2O ice.

How did all that ice end up on Mercury?  Best guess is that at some point, a very large comet slammed into Mercury.  The impact scattered icy material all over the planet.  Most of this ice was then vaporized by the heat of the Sun, but any ice that happened to fall into those deep, dark craters near Mercury’s poles was protected.  And there it remains to this day.

Thanks for reading, friends!  I hope you’ll come back for my next post, when I’ll share my #1 favorite fact about Venus.

How Old Are Saturn’s Rings?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 4 Comments

Hello, friends!

I love Saturn’s rings, you love Saturn’s rings, everybody loves Saturn’s rings!  And as you can see in the 100% real, totally legit J.W.S.T. image below, even Saturn is a little obsessed with her own rings.

Those rings are iconic!  They’re also mysterious.  Did Saturn always have rings like that, or were they created more recently (perhaps by the destruction of a Saturnian moon)?  The answer depends on which scientists you ask.

Saturn’s rings are mostly made of ice, the frozen water kind of ice (as opposed to methane ice, ammonia ice, nitrogen ice… lots of things turn into ice in space).  But the rings aren’t a pure, icy white color.  Like a pile of snow near the curb of a highway, Saturn’s rings get dirtier and dirtier over time.  Based on how dirty the rings look today, some scientists believe they can calculate how old the rings must be.  And according to those calculations, Saturn’s rings must have formed between 100 million and 400 million years ago.  That may sound like a long time ago, but in cosmic terms that makes the rings surprisingly new.

However, there’s also research suggesting that Saturn has self-cleaning rings.  Basically, here’s how that would work: when dirt and dust particles from space enter Saturn’s ring system, those particles are moving at extremely high speeds.  High speed collisions vaporize the dust particles.  The vaporized dust undergoes gaseous expansion. Most of the expanding gas then leaves the ring system due to a combination of its own momentum plus Saturn’s gravity plus Saturn’s magnetic field.  If this is true, the rings still get dirtier and dirtier over time, but at a much slower rate.  This means the rings could be up to 4.5 billion (with a b) years old.  In other words, the rings could be as old as Saturn herself.

When new scientific research comes out, I think people get the wrong idea about what that means.  I blame Hollywood, and I blame the media.  Whenever a new scientific paper is published, it’s often portrayed as the final, definitive word of science.  Until another paper comes out, contradicting the first.  Then that’s portrayed as the final, definitive word of science.  Until another paper comes out.

But science is more like an ongoing, back-and-forth conversation.  One paper comes out, making a point.  Another paper follows, making a counterpoint.  Then there’s a counterpoint to the counterpoint, and then a counterpoint to the counterpoint of that counterpoint… and so on and so forth, until eventually (hopefully) the scientific community reaches some sort of consensus.

So how old are Saturn’s rings?  Well, while researching this blog post, the most recently published paper I saw said 4.5 billion years; however, I think this is still an ongoing conversation.  New points are still being made.  New counterpoints are still being offered.  Maybe the rings are super ancient, or maybe they’re relatively young.  Science has figured out a lot of things, but on this question about Saturn’s rings, I think we’re still waiting for the scientific community to reach a consensus.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Maybe Saturn’s rings relatively young.  Click here to read more about that, or click here to see an actual research paper on that hypothesis.

Or maybe Saturn’s rings are super old.  Click here for an article on that, or click here to see the actual research.

Okay, I lied.  That wasn’t really a J.W.S.T. image of Saturn.  I drew that myself.  If you like my drawings, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble.  Even if you don’t buy anything, just visiting and maybe clicking the like button on my art helps me a lot. Thank you, friends!

The Other Moon Race: Jupiter vs. Saturn

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Hello, friends!

As you know, there’s a new moon race going on, a new race to return humans to the Moon!  But that’s not the moon race we’re talking about today.  No, today we’re talking about the race between Jupiter and Saturn to be the planet with the most moons in the Solar System.

You might expect Jupiter to win this easily.  Jupiter’s the biggest planet, and Jupiter has the most gravity.  Shouldn’t Jupiter end up with the most moons?  Well, Saturn has one not-so-obvious advantage over Jupiter: Saturn is farther away from the Sun.  That means a moon orbiting Saturn is less likely to be yanked away by the Sun’s gravity than a moon orbiting Jupiter.

This has to do with a concept in astrophysics called the Hill sphere, named after American astronomer/mathematician George William Hill.  This can get a bit technical, so if you want to learn more please check out the “What to Learn More?” section below.  This gist is this: a Hill sphere is the area around a planet where the planet’s gravity is more important than the gravity of the Sun.  The size of a Hill sphere is determined by two factors: how massive is the planet, and how far away is the Sun?

Saturn may be smaller than Jupiter, and she may have less gravity than Jupiter, but she’s so much farther away from the Sun that she ends up having the larger Hill sphere.  So which planet has the most moons?  Well, over the past few decades, as astronomers have discovered more and more moons orbiting each planet, it’s been a bit of a horserace.  Sometimes Saturn’s ahead by a couple moons, then Jupiter will catch up and take the lead, then Saturn will take the lead again for a while, and so on.

But in the last year or so, that’s changed.  Saturn has surged way ahead in the “moon race.”  At the time of this writing, Jupiter is known to have 115 moons.  Saturn, meanwhile, has 292.  We can safely assume that more moons will be discovered orbiting both planets, so the race isn’t over; however, I’m going to make a prediction now.  I don’t think Jupiter’s going to win this.

I don’t think Saturn will win, either.  There are (at least) two more planets farther away from the Sun than Saturn.  If having the biggest Hill sphere is the key to winning this moon race, Neptune’s Hill sphere is larger than Jupiter and Saturn’s Hill spheres combined (and if the Planet Nine hypothesis turns out to be correct, God only knows how large Planet Nine’s Hill sphere must be).

At the moment, Neptune is only known to have 16 moons.  I’m predicting today that as our telescopes continue to advance and as our observing techniques continue to improve, Neptune’s moon count will go up.  By a lot.  Ultimately, I’m predicting that Neptune’s total moon count will exceed Jupiter’s and Saturn’s by far.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Here’s an article from CosmoBC on Hill spheres, including a chart listing the radius of the Hill spheres of each planet of the Solar System (plus a few of the dwarf planets).

Here’s an article by Phil Plait on how the Moon stays in orbit by staying inside Earth’s Hill sphere.  It’s an older article, but it’s still very much worth a read if you want to understand how Hill spheres work.

Here’s an article from Earth Sky on the current totals for Jupiter’s  and Saturn’s moons.

And here’s another article from Earth Sky on the total number of moons for Uranus and Neptune, with a little information about why discovering moons orbiting Uranus and Neptune is still so difficult for us.

Lastly, I mentioned the Planet Nine hypothesis.  If you don’t know what that is, click here.

The art in today’s post is my own original work.  I don’t use A.I. for anything, ever.  If you like my art, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble.  Even if you don’t buy anything, just visiting my store and clicking the like button on a few things helps me a lot.  Thank you, friends!

Mercury in the Sky with Diamonds

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

Hello, friends!  Today’s post is mainly intended for Sci-Fi writers, but I’m hoping others will find it interesting, too.

Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun, perhaps the most overlooked and under-appreciated planet in the Solar System, may possess a precious and beautiful secret: diamonds.  So many diamonds!  Tiny diamonds may be scattered all across Mercury’s surface, with even more diamond buried deep, deep, deep underground.

Superficially, Mercury looks a lot like Earth’s moon.  They’re both rocky, airless worlds peppered with impact craters.  They’re both kind of grey, except Mercury is a darker shade of grey than the Moon.  That darker color is caused by graphite (the same graphite found in pencil lead).

For whatever reason, when Mercury first formed, it ended up with an overabundance of carbon (and an underabundance of stuff that would normally react with carbon).  As a result, carbon atoms combined with other carbon atoms to produce plain, simple graphite.

But as I said, Mercury (like the Moon) is covered with impact craters.  A whole lot of impact craters.  In fact, Mercury is the #1 most heavily cratered planet in the Solar System.  And so, whenever an asteroid or comet rammed full speed into Mercury, the force of that impact would have put Mercury’s graphite under sudden and extreme pressure—enough pressure to compress ordinary graphite into diamond.

According to one source I read (see the “want to learn more?” section below), there’s an estimated 16 quadrillion tons of diamond on Mercury’s surface.  That’s about 16 times more diamond than the estimated total amount of diamond we have here on Earth.  But wait, there’s more!  According to another source I read (again, see the “want to learn more?” section below), Mercury may also have a layer of pure diamond buried deep underground.  This diamond layer would be roughly 10 miles thick, and it would lie roughly 300 miles down.

Given that synthetic diamonds already exist, would Mercury’s superabundance of diamonds be worth anything in the distant future?  I don’t know, but I feel like there’s potential here for a Sci-Fi story.  Whenever I learn a weird and quirky science fact like this, I treat it like a writing prompt and see if any good Sci-Fi ideas come out of it.

But I don’t have any plans to write a story about diamond mining on Mercury, which is why I’m sharing this weird and quirky science fact here on the blog, so other Sci-Fi writers can read this and ponder over it.  The planet Mercury is brimming with diamonds—way, way more diamonds than we have here on Earth.  How would you use that science fact for science fiction?

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Here’s an article from Science News explaining how impact events on Mercury create diamonds on Mercury’s surface.

And here’s an article from Live Science explaining how a 10 mile thick layer of diamond might have formed deep beneath Mercury’s surface.

Also, I did another post on Mercury just a couple of weeks ago.  If you want to learn a few more fast facts about Mercury, click here.

The art featured in today’s post is my own original work.  If you like my art and want to support what I do on this blog, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble.  Even if you don’t buy anything, just visiting and clicking the like button on some of my work would help me a lot (and obviously, if you do end up buying something, that would help me even more!).

Thank you, friends!

Mercury’s #1

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 9 Comments

Hello, friends!

I love Mercury.  He’s the planet closest to the Sun, which makes him the first planet of our Solar System.  Sadly, that seems to be the limit of what the average person knows about Mercury, so today I’d like to share just a few other ways Mercury wins first place.

First off, if there were a footrace among all the planets of the Solar System, Mercury would win.  Easily.  Mercury is the #1 fastest moving planet in the Solar System.  This has a lot to do with Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and Netwon’s law of universal gravitation, but I think I can explain this without digging into Kepler or Newton’s math.  Imagine you’re a planet and you don’t want to fall into the Sun.  You’ll need to keep moving to maintain your orbit.  The closer you are to the Sun, the more you’ll have to fight the Sun’s gravity, and thus the faster you’ll have to move.  Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun; ergo, he’s the fastest.  (If you’d like to learn more about the math behind planetary motion, click here.)

Since Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun, you might assume Mercury is also the hottest planet.  But no, Venus is hotter than Mercury (how that happened is a story for another time).  However, Mercury does have the #1 most extreme difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures.  Daytime temperatures climb as high as 430 degrees Celsius (800 degrees Fahrenheit).  At night, the temperature rapidly drops as low as -180 degrees Celsius (-290 degrees Fahrenheit).  Why?  Because Mercury has virtually no atmosphere.  Atmospheres are like insulating blankets for planets.  Without an atmosphere, Mercury can’t retain heat at all, so all the extreme heat Mercury gets during the day is immediately lost to the vacuum of space at night.  (To learn more about Mercury’s daytime vs. nighttime temperatures, click here.)

There are plenty more ways Mercury is #1, but I’m only going to share one more with you today.  Mercury is the #1 most heavily cratered planet in the Solar System.  How did that happen?  Well, once again, Mercury has no atmosphere, which means all the smaller meteoroids that would burn up in the atmospheres of other planets make it straight through to the ground on Mercury.  Additionally, there’s very little geological activity on Mercury.  No volcanic eruptions, no major earthquakes (mercuryquakes?)… at least not in the last 3.5 billion years.  On other worlds, geologic activity helps erode and erase old impact craters, but that’s not happening on Mercury.  So Mercury gets hit more easily and has a harder time erasing old impact craters.  Those two facts add up to Mercury having more impact craters today than any other planet in our Solar System.  (To learn more about Mercury’s overabundance of craters, click here.)

In my humble opinion, Mercury doesn’t get as much love as he deserves.  I don’t know why that is, but I hope this post has piqued your curiosity and helped you appreciate Mercury a little bit more.  At the time of this writing, the BepiColombo space probe (a joint venture by the European and Japanese space agencies) has completed several flybys of Mercury.  If all goes according to plan, BepiColombo should settle into orbit around Mercury in November of this year (2026).  Here’s hoping BepiColombo will discover even more reasons to love the first planet from the Sun.

The art is today’s post is my own original work.  If you like my art, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble.  Even if you don’t buy anything, just visiting and clicking the “like” button on my work helps me a lot (and obviously, if you do decide to buy something, that helps me even more).  Thank you, friends!