New Horizons at Europa |
New Horizons at Europa |
Guest_AlexBlackwell_* |
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#1
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Time to start a thread about a far more interesting jovian moon
![]() Passing probe to study 'crop circles' on Europa 17:38 27 February 2007 NewScientist.com news service Kelly Young |
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#2
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![]() Dublin Correspondent ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Admin Posts: 1799 Joined: 28-March 05 From: Celbridge, Ireland Member No.: 220 ![]() |
Well they seem pretty certain that Jovian environmental radiation is sufficient to explain what has been detected.
QUOTE Stretching millions of miles around Jupiter, the donut-shaped cloud, known as a "torus," is believed to result from the uncommonly severe bombardment of ion radiation that Jupiter sends toward Europa. That radiation damages Europa's surface, kicking up and pulling apart water-ice molecules and dispersing them along Europa's orbit into a neutral-gas torus with a mass of about 60,000 tons. A significant percentage of such atoms will (eventually) escape from Europa even with its fairly low surface temperatures - H2 would have an rms molecular speed of around 1400m/sec and O2 around 350m/sec in that environment - that definitely puts H2 firmly in the escaping from the moon (eventually) camp, not so sure about the Oxygen molecule. Non molecular H and O atoms both fall into the escaping set too. |
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