Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Astronomy Cast- Ice in Space

Threre is not a lot of ice stored in outer space because simply there isnt a whole lot of mass in comparison to the size of our galaxy. it’s also scattered into what’s called the Scattered Disk, and beyond the Kuiper Belt. the water line is midway through the Asteroid Belt, and then the freeze line is out there pretty much between Jupiter and Saturn, and these are basically the places where you go from completely blasted dry to  things of varying mixtures of rock and ice, and then the, in general, pure ice stuff in the outer solar system, and what you’re seeing is, essentially, the thermal gradient of when our Solar System formed. early Solar System was this mix of molecules and atoms.  For the most part, the nice, happy, solid icy bodies we see — these are the Centaurs, the Kuiper Belt objects, the Scattered Disk objects — while they have variation in composition, we think, we’re still figuring this out.While they may have differences in composition on differences in albedo, they all formed in basically the same area and then got scattered around by gravitational interactions. if you pull together all the mass in the Kuiper Belt, it’s kind of a large rocky planet’s worth of materials. Some of the objects in these groups of celestial bodies are just one kind of a small family of icy material. However there are still many places in our galaxy that could potential be a gold mine of ice that we just havent identified yet.

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