The Curiousity Has Landed on Mars

[Aiel Heart]

[Elgee]

LMAO! Brilliant, AH *grins*

[Aiel Heart]

New evidence of water on Mars

[Elgee]

I saw an article about that in our local newspaper. It didn't show the sizes like these pictures to, so that's really neat. I really dislike it when you can't figure out if those are tiny little pebbles or huge rocks.

 

Now this of course makes me wonder - did the water get lost outside of Mars' atmosphere, or is it still available somewhere? Hmmm ... does Mars have an atmosphere? I'm a bit clueless with these things. Is that the thing that would keep water / water molecules "inside"?

[lolguy26]

wel mars doess have an atmosphere but its thinner than the one of earth, and were as ours is made of ozone , mar's atmosphere is mostly Co₂

[Aiel Heart]

There's a theory that Mars still has water in the form of ice underground somewhere. We don't know that for certain yet however.

[Aiel Heart]

Oh and Mars does have an atmosphere, but it's not as strong as ours. It's between ours and the moon's if memory serves.

 

 

In other space related news, an exoplanet the size of earth has been discovered

[Elgee]

Well then ... that's a step in the right direction, I suppose. It makes it more likely that they'll find a planet that's close enough to earth-like as to make it habitable by humans, right?

[Aiel Heart]

Well, detecting exoplanets is actually quite difficult.

Our telescopes are only powerful enough to find huge ones like Jupiter (or maaaaaaybe smallish ones that are far enough away from their star that we can see them separately--not as small as pluto, but Mercuryish). We can sometimes detect that a star has a planet because it wobbles, (as described in the article) and we can guess at the size based off of this, but that gets complicated when the planet might have multiple stars.

Alpha centuri is by far our closest neighboring solar system so detecting its planet(s?) will be easier than most

 

So... Short answer: yes, it is a step in the right direction, but we need technology to get better before we find "other earths" out there

[Davrick]

I miss Pluto.

[Aiel Heart]

Pluto didn't go away, it's just one of five dwarf planets in our solar system :P

[Davrick]

One of five?

[Aiel Heart]

Indeed. One of them is actually bigger than Pluto!!! Four of them are out beyond Neptune (Pluto is one of these) and one of them is in the Asteroid Belt.

[Davrick]

Ah I was wondering if they were counting one of them as pluto's moon. I knew they found another planet just outside of pluto as well.

[Aiel Heart]

Charon? Not one of them (biggest of pluto's moons though. I want to say there's three we know of...)

 

I'm feeling lazy so I redirect you to wikipedia to learn about Dwarf planets :P

[Rekinu Alasayaar]

I STILL say it is a bucketful of crap to say that Pluto is not a planet... but they didnt ask my opinion on it...

[Aiel Heart]

Well.... Considering the MOON is bigger than Pluto....

[Rekinu Alasayaar]

humph...

[Davrick]

Just think about it. There are kids out there who have never known Pluto to be considered a planet.

[Aiel Heart]

It's a dwarf planet. That just sounds cool. Kids and I be chill with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

......Did I really just say that? I can tell I spent the weekend with a particular couple of friends...