You are not logged in.
Robert;
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfurous_acid
Sulfurous acid (or sulphurous acid in British spelling) is a name given to aqueous solutions of sulfur dioxide. There is no evidence that the sulfurous acid molecule, H2SO3, exists in these solutions. They cannot be isolated as a pure substance, because boiling the sulfurous acid will drive away sulfur dioxide, leaving water. They react with alkalis to form bisulfite (or hydrogensulfite) and sulfite salts.
Part of the sulphur cycle on Venus -- the high clouds rain down their acid rain and it turns to steam in the lower cloud layer....
[color=darkred][b]~~Bryan[/b][/color]
Offline
I am wondering if there might be some unrecognised process at work in the protoplanetary nebula of a solar system which directs elements in different directions. It is the polar ion jets of a young star which begins the work of flattening the disk. the north pole and south pole of the star magentically balance each other at the plane of the ecliptic and this is where the dust and gas get compressed next. It is friction and static electricity in the cloud which begins the process of clumping and leads to larger objects which collide and clump some more until protoplanets form and the big game of billiards begins.
Let's think about static electricity in the gas cloud. Would this have the effect of "shepherding" elements into bands or tracks, just like on a vinyl LP record? Do planets attract the elements needed to stay in ionic balance internally?? I can see charged ions repelling one another along the gaps in the rings around the Sun, akin to the gaps we see in planetary rings today around Saturn or the other Jovians. This would result in an assortation of the ions (one for you, one for me, one for you, one for me) and neighbouring planets attracting oppositely charged element balances. One would pull in the sulphur and the chlorine and the fluorine and then the neighbour would pull in the sodium and the calcium and the silicon.
[color=darkred][b]~~Bryan[/b][/color]
Offline
RobS,
We can guess at when the turmoil of the early solar system was settling down.
About the time our moon was formed, maybe another 100 million years beyond that things were pretty hectic for the sun.
If we also guess that for every collision that was like that one the sun had 50 - 100 such impacts, then we are pretty safe to assume the sun was having birth pains for a pretty long period of time, my guess about 250 - 500 million years in duration.
I also agree with the planet formation locations, anyones guess as to where they started.
Some probably formed pretty much in the location we see them and some pretty far from the location they are now.
Science facts are only as good as knowledge.
Knowledge is only as good as the facts.
New knowledge is only as good as the ones that don't respect the first two.
Offline
I am wondering if there might be some unrecognised process at work in the protoplanetary nebula of a solar system which directs elements in different directions.
Interesting idea. It's also known that the solar system is a reverse centrefuge: planets closer to the sun have greater density. However, it's not a perfect pattern. The bottom of this web page has a list of planetary density, the highest is Mercury and the lowest is Saturn, but Uranus is higher than Saturn and Neptune is higher than Uranus. In fact Neptune is the most dense of the gas giants. Why? Pluto is a dwarf planet and Kuiper Belt object. It's way to small to hold an atmosphere so you can't compare it to a gas giant. Why do the 8 major planets follow this pattern?
http://www.solarviews.org/eng/solarsys.htm
The key feature may be concentration of some specific elements, and how they're released. The impact of a major planet with proto-Earth may have released a lot of material from the core, material that wouldn't reach the surface otherwise. Earth has a lot of sulphur as well, but did Venus release more fluorine into it's atmosphere than Earth?
Offline
RobertDyck,
I hope they have the detection equipment.
That would be very cool if they do and you get an answer back.
Don't get to excited though, i sent a mail to the Pluto team to take tiny measurements of gravitational differences on the trip.
It was to pin down the exact speed of gravity from real time positional differences at multiple time lines on the trip.
I thought a definitive answer to the speed of gravity might be a great task on such a long venture with little to do.
They have the equipment on board with lots of time to kill on a long mission.
That was over a year ago and nothing back from the team, lots back from people not on the team though.
Science facts are only as good as knowledge.
Knowledge is only as good as the facts.
New knowledge is only as good as the ones that don't respect the first two.
Offline
StarDreamer,
I picture the early solar system as more chaos than order.
Lots of things probably formed then were promptly blow apart.
huge things hurdling around the solar system with no practical order, worlds trying to form, worlds being gobbled by the sun, giant ice asteroids being thrown inwards, lots of planet collisions, a chaotic sun with all that activity etc.
What a mess LOL
Making any sense of what we see today from that chaos is like arriving at a bad traffic accident a year after it happened with no car parts left to study, just a bit of ground glass and a few small metal pieces they forgot to clean up.
Then guess at what happened.
Science facts are only as good as knowledge.
Knowledge is only as good as the facts.
New knowledge is only as good as the ones that don't respect the first two.
Offline
StarDreamer,
I picture the early solar system as more chaos than order.
Lots of things probably formed then were promptly blow apart.
huge things hurdling around the solar system with no practical order, worlds trying to form, worlds being gobbled by the sun, giant ice asteroids being thrown inwards, lots of planet collisions, a chaotic sun with all that activity etc.What a mess LOL.
Yes, up to a point. Nothing major appears to have ever invaded our heliosphere space, however, to disrupt the formation of our system. The orbits have low eccentricity and everything is pretty orderly. Which is why life was able to evolve here. I am sure there is life throughout the galaxy, but, even where there is life, on perhaps one or maybe two planets per system, 33% of it will be bacterial or viral and 80% of it will be unicellular and only 5% will be interesting to us (ie: useful). I am basing these guesses on the same principle of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" (Haeckel). Earth spent 8/10ths of its history supporting unicellular life and only got interesting with the precambrian explosion and then life did not venture out of oceans onto the land for many millions of years after that. So we may discover planets with life on them, but only 1 in 20 will have a terrestrial biosphere waiting for us. And then, of course, we won't want that life to be TOO advanced, now will we?? :shock: So, yes, there was chaos, but overall, the solar system we find ourselves in evolved in pristine conditions, by a natural progression. And that can teach us a lot about what we might find elsewhere to be also true.
[color=darkred][b]~~Bryan[/b][/color]
Offline
I am wondering if there might be some unrecognised process at work in the protoplanetary nebula of a solar system which directs elements in different directions.
Interesting idea. It's also known that the solar system is a reverse centrefuge: planets closer to the sun have greater density. However, it's not a perfect pattern. The bottom of this web page has a list of planetary density, the highest is Mercury and the lowest is Saturn, but Uranus is higher than Saturn and Neptune is higher than Uranus. In fact Neptune is the most dense of the gas giants. Why do the 8 major planets follow this pattern?
Interesting. Just for the fun of it, I did some calculations to figure out the mean density of the Earth-Luna binary and got 5.472 g/cm3. The combined mass of Earth and Luna is 6.0494e24kg. The density of Earth is 5.515g/cm3 which is 5515kg/m3 for a total volume therefore of 1.0835e21 cubic metres. Doing the same math for Luna gives it a total volume of 2.2002e19m3. You add the two volumes together and divide into the total mass and get an average density. I wondered if this might drop the denisty below the figure for Venus (5250kg/m3) but no such luck.
My guess would be that Jupiter is coveval with the Sun itself and therefore was able to accumulate hydrogen before the Sun's own furnace kicked in and dominated. Within the orbit of Jupiter, the Sun absorbed lighter elements and this is truer the closer to the Sun we get. So Mercury got stripped of anything lighter than sulphur or calcium or silicon or thereabouts, but Mercury may have a surpisingly robust core full of iron and lead and uranium (and, yes, it does have a magnetic field). Venus may have lots of light true metals, like tin and aluminum, but be hydrogen poor (yup!). Earth was able to gather light elements and keep them. Mars may have more than we think, but Mars faced a different problem -- it accreted slowly and so got a late start, perhaps, or had to fend off Jupiter as well.
Neptune may be denser because it picked up infalling material from the KB. I am curious about Saturn. Which is older --- Saturn or Jupiter? Saturn must have a very small core and be truly a big ball of gas, but it must also be very old, because it was able to hold on to its gas and not lose out to Jupiter. An early start is important for planetary growth, because the big will get bigger. Saturn may predate Jupiter, but then failed to grow further once Jupiter overtook it. It got so far and then stopped.
But between Venus and Earth, I wonder if ionisation in the protoplanetary nebula encouraged pairing off in some way, to make one planet acidic and another alkaline.
[color=darkred][b]~~Bryan[/b][/color]
Offline
Interesting. Just for the fun of it, I did some calculations to figure out the mean density of the Earth-Luna binary and got 5.472 g/cm3. The combined mass of Earth and Luna is 6.0494e24kg. The density of Earth is 5.515g/cm3 which is 5515kg/m3 for a total volume therefore of 1.0835e21 cubic metres. Doing the same math for Luna gives it a total volume of 2.2002e19m3. You add the two volumes together and divide into the total mass and get an average density. I wondered if this might drop the denisty below the figure for Venus (5250kg/m3) but no such luck.
Mercury is only more dense than Earth if you account for gravitational compression. Earth has much more mass, so its gravity increases its density, despite being made of lighter materials. The same applies to Venus, so you would actually get gradually decreasing density in order from Mercury to Mars.
Note that the outer planets are much further apart than their inner counterparts. These giants probably experienced rapid inward migration during their formations, so predicting their densities by their positions shouldn't be very possible. What we have is a situation where more material is located further out, but denser material is located further in. Planets close to the sun don't have enough material in their orbits to form giants, and planets far away accrete rapidly, and move inward.
Mars, for instance, probably would be more massive if Jupiter hadn't cleared a lot of material from its own orbit.
Hot Jupiters are just an extreme effect of this process. A planet forms fast enough to move right up next to its star.
Offline
Spatula,
I bet if we reverse engineered that idea we could figure out where each planet started, or at least pretty close.
All we have to do is calculate the size of each body vs the orbital loss of the mass it collected to get a start point of each one.
80% of the mass a forming planet collects will be dust, so about 80% of the mass will include orbital loss.
Only about 20% is large impactors with little impact on orbital positions.
Don't try to calculate Neptune and Uranus though, they are believed to form between Jupiter and Saturn and migrate to the current locations.
If we take into account that those two outward migrated planets then the density pattern is correct.
No need to include Pluto, as it's simply one of the large kb objects not part of planet formation, probably a different set of rules apply for kb object formation.
Science facts are only as good as knowledge.
Knowledge is only as good as the facts.
New knowledge is only as good as the ones that don't respect the first two.
Offline
Spatula,
Yeah it's pretty tough to match up free oxygen exactly with sulphur as a contributor if we try to match the quantity of c02 from h20.
Even adding other possible oxygen gobblers we should still have quite a bit of free oxygen left.A pretty good reason exists why Venus wouldn't have anywhere near as much water to begin with anyway.
In the early solar system as you pointed out the sun was about 25% hotter,
Most of the water/ice comets that could make it to earth at this period could not make it to Venus as ice balls.
Only the very big ones would have made it all the way to Venus, loosing most of the mass on the way.
The smaller ones just don't make it at all.Even in todays cooler solar system comets start out gassing long before the earth orbital area.
Just working on that one point we could expect maybe 25% or less of the water earth has to make it to Venus.
This also works well to calculate the water content of Mars, mars gets 1/4 of Earths water quantity because it's 1/4 the mass of Earth and moon.
A hot Mars with little magnetic field and weak gravity looses most of its water until it freezes the remaining, free oxygen is turned into iron oxide and peroxide on the surface.Venus is never a cool place due to lost retrograde moons and head on collisions, its water deliveries are turned into steam and contribute to the c02 content of the atmosphere.
At 25% of earth water quantity the h20 matches the carbon counts and we get no free oxygen, the continual release of sulphur gobbles up any excess oxygen.
The high c02 quantity of Venus we see today is caused mainly from combining 3 or 4 atmospheres from different bodies Venus has collided with and extreme volcanic activity when these events occurred.Earth is 25% hotter but retains most of it's water because of its magnetic field strong gravity and temperatures below boiling water.
When we get the first pools of water to form on the surface life takes over to start eating up co2.Works for all 3 places.
Wrong.Read something about runaway greenhouse.
And Sun was cooler when it was young.
Offline
Wrong.Read something about runaway greenhouse.
And Sun was cooler when it was young.
When the Sun formed, over the first few million years, it was substantially hotter than it is now. When it reached the main sequence it cooled off, but by then we had the planets close to their current configuration.
Offline