Ganymede: The Strangeness of Jupiter "Dagwood sandwich" Moon
GamingGanymede is the largest moon in our Solar System. In fact, its impressive diameter of almost 3,280 miles makes it almost as large as Mars. Astronomers have known since the 1990s that this freezing cold moon, circling the gas giant planet Jupiter, contains a hidden salty underground ocean of liquid water, splashing deep beneath its secret layer of ice. However, in May 2014, planetary scientists announced that the situation could be somewhat more complicated: Ganymede’s ocean could be organized as a multi-tiered sandwich, with ice and oceans stacked in several layers, according to new research funded by NASA modeling this. huge composition of the moon
“The Ganymede Ocean could be arranged like a Dagwood sandwich,” commented Dr. Steve Vance in a statement dated May 1, 2014. Dr. Vance of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, went on to explain the resemblance of the strange moon to the blond famous cartoon character multi-layered sandwiches. The study, led by Dr. Vance, provides new theoretical indications for the team’s “club sandwich” model, originally proposed in 2013. The research appears in the journal Planetary and space sciences.
Jupiter is surrounded by a bewitching duo of moons that are potentially capable of nurturing delicate fragments of life as we know it. Like its more famous sister moon Europa, Ganymede could host a subterranean ocean of life-loving liquid water in contact with a rocky seafloor. This special arrangement would make possible a bubbling cauldron of fascinating chemical reactions, and these reactions could potentially include the same type that allowed life to evolve on our own planet!
Therefore, the results of the new study support the idea that early life could potentially have evolved on Ganymede. This is because the places where water and rocks interact are important for the development of life. For example, some theories suggest that life arose on our planet within hot, bubbling vents on the seafloor. Before the new study, Ganymede’s rocky seabed was believed to be covered in ice.not liquid. This would have presented a problem for the evolution of living treats. The “Dagwood sandwich” findings, however, indicate something else entirely: The first layer on top of Ganymede’s rocky core could be made up of precious, life-sustaining salt water.
“This is good news for Ganymede. Its ocean is huge, with enormous pressures, so it was thought that dense ice had to form on the ocean floor. When we added salts to our models, we got liquids dense enough to sink to the bottom of the sea, “said Dr. Vance in his statement of May 1, 2014.
Galilean moons of Jupiter
One dark and clear night in January 1610, Galileo Galilei climbed onto the roof of his home in Padua. He looked up at the sky that was dotted with the flickering fires of a multitude of starry objects, and then pointed his primitive little “spyglass”, which was actually one of the first telescopes, at that starry sky above his home. . Over the course of several clear starlit winter nights, Galileo discovered the four great Galilean moons that circle around the largest planet in our Sun’s family, the huge gaseous world, Jupiter. This intriguing quartet of moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, was named after four of the many mythical lovers of the King of the Roman gods.
Since its discovery centuries ago, Ganymede has received much and deserved attention from the planetary scientific community. Ground-based telescopes have looked at Ganymede’s puzzling, icy surface, and in subsequent decades, spaceflight missions and spacecraft circling Jupiter have scrutinized Ganymede, trying to solve its many mysteries. These observations eventually revealed a complicated and icy lunar world, the strange surface of which showed a strange and disconcerting contrast between its two main types of terrain: the dark, extremely ancient, and cratered terrain, and the much younger, but still ancient, terrain. lighter showing a wide range of mysterious ridges and ridges.
Ganymede is larger than Mercury, which is the innermost and smallest major planet in our Solar System. Ganymede’s surface area is more than half the land area of Earth and provides scientists with a wealth of data on a wide variety of surface features.
Jupiter is the fifth planet from our star, the Sun, and has more than twice the mass of the other seven major planets combined! Its immense mass weighs 318 times that of the Earth.
This gigantic “King of the planets” is considered by some astronomers as a “failed star”. It’s as big as a gas giant planet can be, and it’s still a planet. It is composed of approximately 90% hydrogen and 10% helium, with small amounts of water, methane, ammonia and rocky grains mixed in the infusion. If more material were added to this immense planet, gravity would hug it tightly, while its entire radius would barely increase. A baby star can become much larger than Jupiter. However, a true star harbors its own bright internal heat source, and Jupiter would have to grow at least 80 times as massive for its furnace to catch fire.
Jupiter, along with its beautiful ringed sister planet Saturn, are the duo of gas giants from the family of eight major planets of our Sun. The other two giant planets, which inhabit the outer limits of our Solar System, are Uranus and Neptune. . Uranus and Neptune are classified as ice giants because they carry larger cores than Jupiter and Saturn, as well as thinner gaseous envelopes. Jupiter and Saturn may (or may not) contain small, hidden nuclei, which are heavily veiled by extremely massive and dense gaseous envelopes.
When Jupiter was born along with the rest of our Solar System, approximately 4.56 billion years ago, it twinkled like a star. The energy it emitted, as a result of the surrounding material falling, heated the interior of Jupiter. In fact, the bigger Jupiter grew, the hotter it got. At last, when the material he had extracted from the surrounding whirlwind protoplanetary accretion disk– made up of nutritious dust and gas – was depleted, Jupiter may well have reached the enormous diameter of more than 10 times what it is today. It may also have reached a truly warm core temperature of about 50,000 Kelvin. During that long-ago era, Jupiter twinkled, glittered, and glittered like a small star, glowing fiercely with a fire that was about 1% that of our Sun, much brighter today.
Had Jupiter continued to gain weight, it would have gotten hotter and hotter, and ultimately, it is possible that raging, self-sustaining fires of nuclear fusion would have ignited in its heart. This would have sent Jupiter down that long, bright stellar path to full-blown stardom. Had this happened, Jupiter and our Sun would have been binary stellar sisters, and we probably wouldn’t be here now to tell the story. Our planet and its seven beautiful sisters, as well as all the moons and smaller objects that dance around our Star, could not have formed. However, Jupiter failed to achieve stardom. After his bright and gleaming birth, he began to shrink. Today, Jupiter emits just 0.00001 as much radiation as our Sun, and its luminosity is only 0.0000001 that of our Star.
The moon “Dagwood Sandwich”
Previous models of the Ganymedean oceans were based on the assumption that the existence of salt did not change the nature of the liquid much with pressure. However, Dr. Vance and his colleagues found, through laboratory experiments, that salt increases the density of liquids under the extreme conditions hidden deep within Ganymede and similar icy moons with subterranean bodies of water. Imagine adding table salt to a glass of water. Instead of increasing in volume, the liquid will shrink and become denser. The reason for this is that salt ions attract water molecules.
However, the models become somewhat more complicated when different forms of ice are taken into account. The ice that floats in a glass of water is called Ice me. Ithis I it is the form of ice that is less dense and lighter than water. But nevertheless, at high pressures, such as those found in crushing-depth subterranean oceans like Ganymede’s, ice crystal structures evolve into something considerably more compact. “It’s like finding a better arrangement for your shoes in your luggage: the ice molecules pack closer together,” Dr. Vance said in his May 1, 2014 statement. In fact, ice can become so extremely dense that it is actually heavier than water and therefore somersaults to the bottom of the sea. The heaviest and densest ice of all is believed to exist within Ganymede, and is called Ice VI.
Using computer models, the team of scientists devised a complex interior structure for Ganymede, composed of an ocean sandwiched between up to three ice sheets, in addition to the very important rocky seafloor. The lighter ice, of course, would be on top, and the saltier liquid would be heavy enough to sink to the bottom. Furthermore, the results suggest the existence of a truly strange phenomenon that would cause the oceans to “snow” upward. This strange “snow” could develop because, as the oceans swirl and churn, and the icy columns coil and rotate, the ice in the upper layer of the ocean, called Ice III, can form in seawater. When ice forms, the salts precipitate. The heavier salts would then fall and the lighter ice, or “snow,” would flutter upward. The “snow” would melt them again before reaching the top of the ocean, and this would possibly leave sleet lurking in the middle of the strange moon sandwich!
“We do not know how long the Dagwood sandwich structure would exist. This structure represents a stable state, but several factors could mean that the moon does not reach this stable state,” said Dr. Christophe Sotin in a May 1, 2014 statement. Dr. Sotin is from JPL.
Dr. Sotin and Dr. Vance are members of the Frozen worlds team in JPL, which is part of the multi-institutional NASA Astrobiology institute based on Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.
The team’s findings can also be applied to exoplanets, which are planets that surround stars beyond our own Sun. Some super-terrestrial exoplanets, which are rocky planets more massive than our own, have been proposed as “water worlds” covered in oceans. agitated. Could they have life? Maybe. The potential would certainly be there. Dr. Vance and his team believe that laboratory experiments and the most sophisticated modeling of exotic oceans could help find answers to these profound questions.
Ganymede, and four other moons that inhabit our Sun’s family, have liquid water underneath their icy crusts of ice. The others are the moons of Saturn, Titan, and Enceladus, and two others. Galilean moons of Jupiter – Europa and Callisto. Planetary scientists believe that the oceans of Europa and Enceladus are in contact with the rock, making these two moons high-priority targets for future astrobiology missions.
This article is dedicated to the memory of my father, Dr. William Braffman.