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> In fact, the planet, known as WASP-39b, has three times as much water as Saturn does. Is that a lot?
by elihu 9y ago
> In fact, the planet, known as WASP-39b, has three times as much water as Saturn does.
Is that a lot?
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoThat's exactly what I was wondering! It's such an odd choice to compare it to as I'm having trouble finding an exact number. This article mentions that it's a small amount of ice but not exactly helpful for a scale: https://www.universetoday.com/15374/is-there-water-on-saturn/ https://www.universetoday.com/15374/is-there-water-on-saturn...
- ASalazarMX 9y agoSo there's little water on Saturn! but wait, since Saturn is about 300 times the size of earth, and Earth's mass is just 1/4000th water, I'm still utterly confused as how much it is compared to us. Odd choice, indeed.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoSaturn is big! And it looks blue! Must be a lot!
- dclowd9901 9y agoSaturn looks blue? https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA00400 https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA00400
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoOops, I was thinking of Uranus! What hope!
- lostmsu 9y agoMaybe Neptune? Would make more sense.
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoProbably thinking Earth
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoYes, that’s the one! I don’t know, Outer Planets all look the same to me.
- lostmsu 9y agoOh, c'mon, they are named after specific Gods after all.
- sidcool 9y agoSilly, but this always cracks me up.
- pluma 9y agoWhat blows my mind is that Saturn in that image looks almost exactly like it does in the intro to Star Trek The Next Generation, which I always chalked up as bad CGI.
- dclowd9901 9y agoTry seeing it through a powerful eyepiece telescope. It’s absolutely one of the most astonishing experiences I’ve ever had.
- rbanffy 9y agoConsider this image is from Voyager. Cassini captured much higher resolution ones.
- pluma 9y agoHigher res maybe, but it still looks amazingly fake: https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/7549/?category=amateur-images https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/7549/?category=amateur... I guess what's messing with me is that it just looks so smooth, which life-long exposure to CGI has taught me to mean that it's fake. This reminds me of what Elon Musk said about his Tesla in space: you can tell it's real because it looks so fake.
- _emacsomancer_ 9y agoWell, it's a lot more than on Mercury.
- tintor 9y agoHm, Saturn is a gas giant with average density less than water.
- rangibaby 9y agoI distinctly remember learning that Saturn would float in a bathtub at gradeschool!
- thaumasiotes 9y agoThat sounds... less than accurate. Will a sponge float in water? It's less dense... I'm trying to imagine how the result of a close encounter between Saturn and a Saturn-sized bathtub full of water could be anything other than a single merged sphere with a lot of water content.
- saagarjha 9y agoA sponge is less dense because it’s full of air holes. But yes, any such encounter would likely tear both “masses” apart and form a new planet.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoRight, and Saturn is less dense than water because it is mostly composed of air. It's like a sponge with the spongy lattice removed. It's not a solid. (At least, the vast majority of it by volume is not a solid.) That's why it's called a "gas giant".
- tnli 9y agoI was going to say that it would be a star, but apparently (making an assumption about the mass of the saturn-sized bathtub full of water here) it would still be orders of magnitude from ignition. An Olympic swimming pool scaled for a Saturn-sized swimmer on the other hand... Ignition!
- 9y ago
- simulate 9y agoThere are three regions in Saturn's troposphere and the lowest region, about 130 kilometers (80 miles) down, is largely clouds made of water and ice. https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cassini-Huygens/Saturn_s_atmosphere https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cassini-Huy...
- m3kw9 9y agoIt’s relative, a lot compare to earth but otherwise, it doesn’t mean much to ask that
- semaphoreP 9y agoIt's hard to measure absolute water abundances (it requires a lot of assumptions and extrapolating). This is a relative comparison of atmospheric water. We don't have relative water abundances for a lot of planets, so it's on the higher end, but we don't really know (maybe some other planets' water are hidden behind clouds).
- ianai 9y agoThat makes me think it’s a pretty substantive amount of water. If we’re getting 3x the spike we see for a planet in our own solar system in a planet lys away then actual content should be much more (due to signal/noise? Just guessing though)
- semaphoreP 9y agoIt's not the absolute value of the signal. What they're measuring the amount of water compared to hydrogen.
- aaron_m04 9y agoHard to say, without being converted into units of jumbo jets or football fields.