Questions tagged [water]

Questions about the water molecule (composed of two atoms of hydrodgen and one atom of oxygen) and its detection in celestial objects.

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Is Venus in our sun's habitable zone?

I know that Venus is closer to the sun than Earth and if an article I read is to be believed, Venus is hotter than Mercury even though the latter is closer to the Sun. The explanation for this odd ...
Agent Smith's user avatar
2 votes
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29 views

Could rogue planets with cold nucleus have winds or water currents/waves due to the planet's rotation?

Are there any types of wind or waves caused and produced only and exclusively by a planet's rotation? Not influenced by the planet's rotation, but produced solely by it? In the case of waves, are ...
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Are we searching for supercriticality of exoplanet water via passive spectral analysis?

Much spectrum analysis on many chemical compounds are mapped and categorized at Earth atmosphere (1000 millibar) or thereabouts. But many celestial objects are of greater ranges of surface pressure. ...
John Greene's user avatar
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What would happen if all water on earth including the oceans was placed evenly over the atmosphere of Earth? [closed]

Would that massive water body sit on top of the atmospheric bubble or would it fall to the ground? Would it rain water or fire instead? Would we see the skyes red instead of blue? What would be the ...
Lerian Acosenossa's user avatar
0 votes
2 answers
278 views

How long would 1 liter of water need to evaporate next to the Sun? [closed]

Assume that 1 liter of water in room temperature (20 °C) would suddenly appear next to the Sun (or maybe 1 kilometer next to it). How long would it need to evaporate?
cherouvim's user avatar
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Where can I find datasets for all confirmed exoplanets, terrestrial exoplanets, and Super-Earth exoplanets?

The NASA Exoplanet Archive has a Planetary Systems dataset offers celestial mechanical data for 5,197 confirmed exoplanets. The Exoplanets Catalog classifies these exoplanets as terrestrial, super-...
Tom Lever's user avatar
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9 votes
2 answers
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How would ocean tides work on a tidally-locked planet?

Since the tidal bulge is always in the same place, how would that affect ocean tides? Would they change throughout an elliptical orbit, due to changing distance from the star? How exactly would they ...
Elhammo's user avatar
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34 votes
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Why do Jupiter’s moons have so much water?

Why do Jupiter’s moons have so much water by mass? Did all the bodies in the solar system start out with this much water and the planets closer to the Sun simply lost it to space?
Elhammo's user avatar
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10 votes
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Salinity of Martian water 3.5 Billion years ago

Was Mars' ocean 3.5 billion years ago salt water or fresh water? On a related note: would we be able to drink the water that is on Europa?
Peter U's user avatar
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When did the first liquid water settle on planets? [closed]

PRELIMINARY Water is necessary for supporting "life", at least the particular form of life as we know. The origin of Earth's water is still debated, but there are clues that most of it was ...
Jay's user avatar
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Is it safe to look at an annular eclipse during sunrise using a medium?

Will looking at an annular eclipse reflection through a bowl of water damage your sight? I already tried viewing its reflection through a bowl of water.
marksmile's user avatar
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1 answer
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Could a heavy exoplanet squeeze water into being liquid and 4° warm?

Let's say there is an exoplanet orbiting its host star well outside its habitable zone. Suppose further that it has a lot of water, being perhaps comparable to earth when it comes to the volume ratio ...
AlgebraicsAnonymous's user avatar
8 votes
2 answers
224 views

Could there be liquid water on Uranus? Are there any indications that there might be?

Like most planets, Uranus has a very cold outer atmosphere and a very hot core. What we see is a very thick primary atmosphere with plenty of hydrogen. Deeper in, we might suppose that water ...
Mike Serfas's user avatar
3 votes
0 answers
65 views

What happens to Europa's (or another ice moon's) water if we drilled a hole through the ice crust down to the ocean?

Suppose we drilled a 1 ft (30 cm) diameter hole through Europa's ice crust. As Europa doesn't have an atmosphere, the water would obviously either sublime (turn to vapor) or instantly freeze once a ...
Giovanni's user avatar
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How much more mass would Mars need to currently have enough pressure for liquid water and oxygen?

My question is whether Mars just about failed to meet the threshold or missed it by a lot. It's been dry for 3 billion years. How much bigger would it have needed to be to buy it that extra time? Let'...
Axion's user avatar
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Could liquid water have existed in open space 15 million years after the Big Bang?

Around 15 million years after the Big Bang, the ambient temperatures was about $24^\circ {\rm C}$, which is in a range where water could be liquid. Could liquid blobs of water be existent then? PS: I ...
Cerelic's user avatar
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Can a habitable planet be smaller than 0.58 Earth radii?

According to the below image, the lowest escape velocity a planet can have in order to still be able to retain water on its surface and have a temperature above freezing is 6.5 km/s minimum. With ...
Xi-K's user avatar
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3 votes
1 answer
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Is there any "scale" for measuring salinity of extraterrestrial water?

Continuation of Is the water underneath Europa's ice cap potable? The referenced question discussed if water from Europa's ice caps is potable or not and from the answers, it was gathered that ...
Nilay Ghosh's user avatar
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Is the water underneath Europa's ice cap potable?

I read this question on Worldbuilding.SE, and figured that the astronomy site would have answers too, particularly for the specific example of Europa. The idea is that Earth's oceans are salty because ...
KeizerHarm's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
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Are ocean water planets at Mars' atmospheric pressure possible?

Can water planets exist whose atmospheric pressure at sea level is just above the triple point of water, say at about 690 Pa (0.1 psi)? If no, why not? Just curious. How thick or thin can atmospheres ...
John's user avatar
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An influx of water on Venus

What if a moon like triton or a frozen extraterrestrial body containing lots of frozen ice were set on a collision course with Venus. Would an inlfux of huge amounts of H2O precipitate a possible ...
David Leduc's user avatar
6 votes
1 answer
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If water vapor is always blown away into space, how is it able to create chemical compounds on Venus?

This is the follow-up of this chem.SE question. According to Wikipedia, water vapor on Venus is present in trace amount (20 ppm). There are multiple reasons why Venus has very low water content: The ...
Nilay Ghosh's user avatar
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What are the most recent minerals modified by water found to date on Mars?

There likely was quite a bit of liquid water on the surface of Mars less than 4 billion years ago. We know this because we found rocks that old that have been modified by the presence of water. For ...
usernumber's user avatar
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How old are the Martian blueberries?

The martian blueberries (only blue in false color) found by the Opportunity rover in Meridium Planis are formed by slow evaporation in mineral-rich liquid water. They obviously formed early in the ...
usernumber's user avatar
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Why wouldn't massive torrents freeze on Mars?

I am currently reading the Cambridge Guide to the Solar System. In chapter 8, section 8.7, they explain that massive torrents of water created outflow channels on the surface of Mars in the past. The ...
usernumber's user avatar
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Ice filled craters on Mars

How many craters on Mars have ice in them and which ones have permanent ice? I could only find Korolev and the unnamed one - strange for such a remarkable crater. http://www.esa.int/...
Joe Jobs's user avatar
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1 answer
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Would Europa be an ocean planet if it were in the habitable zone?

If a Europa-like body were in the Sun's habitable zone, let's say in an orbit between Earth and Mars, would the body become and remain a water ocean planet? In the habitable zone, the Sun would warm ...
Ioannes's user avatar
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13 votes
6 answers
4k views

Why there are no terrestrial planets with a subsurface ocean?

Subsurface oceans in satellites are pretty common: Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede, Callisto, maybe Pluto... This is due to tidal heating of their host planet, Jupiter and Saturn, which heats up the inner ...
Carlos Vázquez Monzón's user avatar
6 votes
1 answer
279 views

How do we know that comets definitely mase and not just fluoresce? What is it about 18-cm lines that indicates that is really masing per se?

Wikipedia's Astrophysical_maser#comets mentions some anecdotes of notable masers associated with comets, and Maser emissions from comets begins: The 18-cm lines of the OH radical are the only well-...
uhoh's user avatar
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Underground sea in Titan(Saturn's moon), water or hydrocarbons?

Is the underground sea on Titan formed of water or hydrocarbons. Is anyone certain? I have read a lot of various documents from NASA and Cassini missions and Huygens missions, and I have become ...
Valentino Zaffrani's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
151 views

How long could an ocean last in space?

If all of Earth's oceans were suddenly moved into outer space, how long would it take for them to evaporate? My understanding is that water evaporates straight away in space... but what about when it'...
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1 vote
2 answers
3k views

Can fish and other sea creatures survive in watery planets like Neptune or any other planets that has water?

I'm a bit curious since Neptune does not have a land surface and it is covered with water, I mean water has oxygen right? What will happen if we put some sea creatures in these watery planets? Can ...
draw134's user avatar
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9 votes
1 answer
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How would water-ammonia oceans behave?

Scientists strongly suspect that several moons in our solar system have frozen-over oceans of water-ammonia mixture. I've also read speculations on the possibility of surface water-ammonia oceans on ...
n_bandit's user avatar
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10 votes
0 answers
179 views

Water vapour in space

This question is inspired by, but different from, What happens if an ice cube is left in space? Mark's accepted answer says "…if you stick your ice cube out in the Oort Cloud, it'll grow: the mean ...
Martin Kochanski's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
183 views

What constraints are there on solid material in the ice giants?

Recently there has been experimental verification of superionic water ice (suggested to be called ice XVIII, not sure if this nomenclature is official yet), which turns out to be a solid (or at ...
user avatar
3 votes
0 answers
133 views

How did Arecibo make radar images of ice on Mercury's poles?

update: I still haven't been able to get my hands on the Icarus paper linked below (I'll try other libraries) but these are newer and quite interesting!: Constraining the thickness of polar ice ...
uhoh's user avatar
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4 votes
1 answer
148 views

How to calculate the thickness of the ice crust on a frozen ocean planet/moon?

How do I calculate the thickness of the upper ice layer on cold ocean worlds like Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede, ...? I'm asking this for a programm I'm currently writing. Given/Known is: mass, radius, ...
TheDyingOfLight's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
201 views

Does Mars' "Northern ocean" have another name? What about the "Inland Sea"?

The March 15, 2019 Phys.org article A NASA spacecraft may have explored the edges of an early Mars sea in 1997 shows a stylized map of an area on Mars where the Mars Pathfinder landed and uses colors ...
uhoh's user avatar
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1 vote
0 answers
109 views

Is the water on Mars drinkable? [closed]

Could water from Mars be fresh enough to drink? Could one run the water through a home water filter? I understand when water is frozen the salt is ejected as brine so would newly formed snow or ice be ...
Muze's user avatar
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3 votes
1 answer
239 views

Any information on the salt content of Mars' atmospheric dust?

Answers to and comments on How to drink water on Mars? suggest that one would not want to drink melted water ice obtained from exposed surface deposits near the poles because it may contain various ...
Muze's user avatar
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3 votes
1 answer
823 views

Would drinking melted ice water from Mars taste like sparkling water?

Does water on Mars form from the atmosphere as ice free from salt? Does water desalinize through the evaporation and transpiration? When the fresh top ice is placed in a container then pressurized to ...
Muze's user avatar
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2 votes
1 answer
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Help understanding the false MRO observations of hydrated minerals on Mars

The Science News article An orbiter glitch may mean some signs of liquid water on Mars aren’t real begins: Some signs of water on Mars may have just dried up. Thanks to the way data from NASA’s Mars ...
uhoh's user avatar
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-2 votes
1 answer
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How long will a ball of ice stay in orbit around Earth? [closed]

How big would a ball of frozen water need to be to last one orbit? How would atmospheric drag effect the ball of water? https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/32188/what-is-the-darkest-orbit-...
Muze's user avatar
  • 1
4 votes
2 answers
153 views

Water Content of Space Bodies

In general, are carbonaceous chondrites (CC) or comets more water rich? I know that evidence has suggested that both CC and comets are partly composed of water, but which body is generally more water ...
Bell's user avatar
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3 votes
2 answers
277 views

Water Ice on Meteorites

I was reading an article by David O'Brien et al. where it stated "in meteorites only the water bound to the silicates can be found, all the water ice having been lost, whereas on asteroids water ...
Bell's user avatar
  • 195
3 votes
1 answer
988 views

What would happen if we released water into deep space?

If we went to deep space by a spacecraft and released water into space, what would happen? Would the water freeze to ice or would it remain as a liquid?
RANSARA009's user avatar
11 votes
2 answers
2k views

Can Liquid Water exist on Mars?

Outside of a specially crafts environment, could liquid water exist on Mars? Not some time in the distant past, but within the last few years. Mars' atmosphere is too thin for water to exist, right? ...
Johnny's user avatar
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4 votes
2 answers
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How was water formed?

We know that a planet is formed from the nebula of gas and dust. Gravity pulls the particles together in a core. So we all know that the gas cloud is a cloud of hydrogen. But how did water form? ...
avito009's user avatar
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0 votes
1 answer
426 views

How can artificial gravity hold the water in swimming pool? [closed]

I was watching Passengers (2016). In this movie, a swimming pool exists in the space station. In middle of the movie, Artificial Gravity is turned off and the water rises, with the swimmer suffocating ...
Sophia Peters's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
410 views

Enceladus; why use the words "geysers", "jets", and "plumes" interchangeably?

Background, Europa: In an earlier question How can “Geysers” on Europa reach heights of 100km? I brought up the use of the word "geyser" in association with the reported confirming observations of ...
uhoh's user avatar
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