Antigravics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_ ... e_Universe


Solar Outgassing
Note the relative abundance of Hydrogen and Oxygen. Plasma to molecular level must favour the OH radical
and certainly there is astrological evidence of massive interstellar clouds of hydroxyl molecules
other notable stable gases: HCN, Ne

Condensation of OH produces hydrogen peroxide rather than water.

Outer planets/debris is magnetically pushed out, and then get covered with H2O2 ice and that causes an orbital change...destined to crash back to the centre... as comets do [with not only with impact energy but also with massive de-compositional energy].

so comets can be "snowballs" as described... they even could be snowball planets
[a new diamagnetic body coat but in a magnetic orbit, so orbital change is automatic, eg Sedna]

Magnetic Universe where rotating lines of force push other [magnetic] matter in orbits, the motion induces charge/electricity, phased so more motion

Why does the Earth spin ?

Half the planet shows a diamagnetic water face to the Sun, the other half is magnetic landmass, these unequal forces make the planet spin.

http://www.physorg.com/news185811275.html


Saturn's potato-shaped moon Prometheus is rendered in three dimensions in this close-up from Cassini. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

>> Like the battered white whale Moby Dick taunting Captain Ahab, Saturn's moon Prometheus surges toward the viewer in a 3-D image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

The image exposes the irregular shape and circular surface scars on Prometheus, pointing to a violent history. These craters are probably the remnants from impacts long ago.

Prometheus is one of Saturn's innermost moons. It orbits the gas-giant at a distance of about 140,000 kilometers (86,000 miles) and is 86 kilometers (53 miles) across at its widest point. The porous, icy world was originally discovered in images taken by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft back in 1980.

Cassini's narrow-angle camera captured two black-and-white images of the moon on Dec. 26, 2009, and the imaging team combined the images to make this new stereo view. It looks different from the "egg-cellent" raw image of Prometheus obtained on Jan. 27 because that view shows one of the short ends of the oddly shaped moon. In this 3-D image, the sun illuminates Prometheus at a different angle, making the moon's elongated body visible. >>>

http://nineplanets.org/pandora.html
>> Prometheus ("pra MEE thee us") is the third of Saturn's known satellites:

orbit: 139,350 km from Saturn
diameter: 91 km (145 x 85 x 62)
mass: 2.7e17 kg

Prometheus was a Titan who stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humankind, for which Zeus punished him horribly; son of Iapetus; brother of Atlas and Epimetheus. "Prometheus" is Greek for "foresight".

Discovered by S. Collins and others in 1980 from Voyager photos. Prometheus is the inner shepherd satellite of the F ring.

Prometheus has a number of ridges and valleys and several craters about 20 km in diameter but appears to be less cratered than the neighboring moons Pandora, Janus and Epimetheus.

From their very low densities and relatively high albedos, it seems likely that Prometheus, Pandora, Janus and Epimetheus are very porous icy bodies. (Note, however, that there is a lot of uncertainty in these values.)

The 1995/6 Saturn Ring Plane Crossing observations found that Prometheus was lagging by 20 degrees from where it should have been based on Voyager 1981 data. This is much more than can be explained by observational error. It is possible that Prometheus's orbit was changed by a recent encounter with the F ring, or it may have a small companion moon sharing its orbit. >>>>

Comment
An unstable orbit of an iced Moon/body is expected... after all ice is diamagnetic...
If a cosmic rock/planet is not large enough, the accumulating layers of ice on the surface, if they get thick enough, will cause the Sun's electric/magnetic force to push the body into a new orbit.... and out of the ecliptic plane.... ultimately perpendicular... but before that extreme the body may crash into the Sun as a comet

http://www.physorg.com/news186165121.html


In this unique mosaic image combining high-resolution data from the imaging science subsystem and composite infrared spectrometer aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft, pockets of heat appear along one of the mysterious fractures in the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Image credit: NASA/JPL/GSFC/SWRI/SSI

>> Newly released images from last November's swoop over Saturn's icy moon Enceladus by NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal a forest of new jets spraying from prominent fractures crossing the south polar region and yield the most detailed temperature map to date of one fracture.

The new images from the imaging science subsystem and the composite infrared spectrometer teams also include the best 3-D image ever obtained of a "tiger stripe," a fissure that sprays icy particles, water vapor and organic compounds. There are also views of regions not well-mapped previously on Enceladus, including a southern area with crudely circular tectonic patterns.

"Enceladus continues to astound," said Bob Pappalardo, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "With each Cassini flyby, we learn more about its extreme activity and what makes this strange moon tick."

For Cassini's visible-light cameras, the Nov. 21, 2009 flyby provided the last look at Enceladus' south polar surface before that region of the moon goes into 15 years of darkness, and includes the most detailed look yet at the jets.

Scientists planned to use this flyby to look for new or smaller jets not visible in previous images. In one mosaic, scientists count more than 30 individual geysers, including more than 20 that had not been seen before. At least one jet spouting prominently in previous images now appears less powerful.

"This last flyby confirms what we suspected," said Carolyn Porco, imaging team lead based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "The vigor of individual jets can vary with time, and many jets, large and small, erupt all along the tiger stripes."

A new map that combines heat data with visible-light images shows a 40-kilometer (25-mile) segment of the longest tiger stripe, known as Baghdad Sulcus. The map illustrates the correlation, at the highest resolution yet seen, between the geologically youthful surface fractures and the anomalously warm temperatures that have been recorded in the south polar region. The broad swaths of heat previously detected by the infrared spectrometer appear to be confined to a narrow, intense region no more than a kilometer (half a mile) wide along the fracture.

In these measurements, peak temperatures along Baghdad Sulcus exceed 180 Kelvin (minus 135 degrees Fahrenheit), and may be higher than 200 Kelvin (minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit). These warm temperatures probably result from heating of the fracture flanks by the warm, upwelling water vapor that propels the ice-particle jets seen by Cassini's cameras. Cassini scientists will be testing this idea by investigating how well the hot spots correspond with the jet sources.

"The fractures are chilly by Earth standards, but they're a cozy oasis compared to the numbing 50 Kelvin (-370 Fahrenheit) of their surroundings," said John Spencer, a composite infrared spectrometer team member based at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "The huge amount of heat pouring out of the tiger stripe fractures may be enough to melt the ice underground. Results like this make Enceladus one of the most exciting places we've found in the solar system."

Some of Cassini's scientists infer that the warmer the temperatures are at the surface, the greater the likelihood that jets erupt from liquid. "And if true, this makes Enceladus' organic-rich, liquid sub-surface environment the most accessible extraterrestrial watery zone known in the solar system," Porco said.

The Nov. 21 flyby was the eighth targeted encounter with Enceladus. It took the spacecraft to within about 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) of the moon's surface, at around 82 degrees south latitude.>>>

http://www.physorg.com/news188149607.html

>> That's because we thought, until recently, that the Moon was just about the driest place in the solar system. Then reports of moonwater started "pouring" in - starting with estimates of scant amounts on the lunar surface, then gallons in a single crater, and now 600 million metric tons distributed among 40 craters near the lunar north pole.

"We thought we understood the Moon, but we don't," says Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. "It's clear now that water exists up there in a variety of concentrations and geologic settings. And who'd have thought that today we'd be pondering the Moon's hydrosphere?"

Spudis is principal investigator of NASA's Mini-SAR team - the group with the latest and greatest moonwater "strike." Their instrument, a radar probe on India's Chandrayaan-1, found 40 craters each containing water ice at least 2 meters deep.

"If you converted those craters' water into rocket fuel, you'd have enough fuel to launch the equivalent of one space shuttle per day for more than 2000 years. But our observations are just a part of an even more tantalizing story about what's going on up on the Moon."

It's the story of a lunar water cycle, and it's based on the seemingly disparate - but perhaps connectable - results from Mini-SAR and NASA's recent LCROSS mission and Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3 or "M-cubed") instrument also on Chandrayaan-1.

"So far we've found three types of moonwater," says Spudis. "We have Mini-SAR's thick lenses of nearly pure crater ice, LCROSS's fluffy mix of ice crystals and dirt, and M-cube's thin layer that comes and goes all across the surface of the Moon."
On October 9, 2009, LCROSS, short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, struck water in a cold, permanently dark crater at the lunar south pole. Since then, the science team has been thoroughly mining their data.

"It looks as though at least two different layers of our crater soil contain water, and they represent two different time epochs," explains Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS principal investigator. "The first layer, ejected in the first 2 seconds from the crater after impact, contains water and hydroxyl bound up in the minerals, and even tiny pieces of pure ice mixed in. This layer is a thin film and may be relatively 'fresh,' perhaps recently replenished."


Shown in false-color blue, a thin layer of water-rich minerals cover an expanse of terrain around a young lunar crater. Credit: Chandrayaan-1/Moon Mineralogy Mapper.
press esc to close

According to Colaprete, this brand of moonwater resembles the moonwater M3 discovered last year in scant but widespread amounts, bound to the rocks and dust in the very top millimeters of lunar soil.

The second layer is different. "It contains even more water ice plus a treasure chest of other compounds we weren't even looking for," he says. "So far the tally includes sulfur dioxide (SO2), methanol (CH3OH), and the curious organic molecule diacetylene (H2C4). This layer seems to extend below at least 0.5 meters and is probably older than the ice we’re finding on the surface.”

They don't know why some craters contain loads of pure ice while others are dominated by an ice-soil mixture. It's probably a sign that the moonwater comes from more than one source.

"Some of the water may be made right there on the Moon," says Spudis. "Protons in the solar wind can make small amounts of water continuously on the lunar surface by interacting with metal oxides in the rocks. But some of the water is probably deposited on the Moon from other places in the solar system."

The Moon is constantly bombarded by impactors that add to the lunar water budget. Asteroids contain hydrated minerals, and comet cores are nearly pure ice.

The researchers also think that much of the crater water migrates to the poles from the Moon's warmer, lower latitudes. "All our findings are telling us there's an active water cycle on the Moon," marvels Colaprete.

Think about it. The "driest place in the solar system" has a water cycle.

"It's a different world up there," says Spudis, "and we've barely scratched the surface. Who knows what discoveries lie ahead?" >>>

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010 ... 850978.htm

>> Scientists now say the serene and majestic rings of Saturn are actually a rough and violent mix of frozen particles.

Authors of a study published in the journal Science describe the Saturnian system's rings as an analogy for what the early solar system may have been like.

The study is the result of six years' worth of data gathered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which arrived at Saturn in 2004. The paper's lead author, Dr Jeff Cuzzi of NASA's Ames Research Centre in California, says the rings are an elegant mess of activity.

"Cassini has shown us that collisions are routine and that chunks of ice leave trails of debris in their wake," he said.

"It's also shown how small moons play tug-of-war with ring material, and how bits of rubble that would otherwise join together to become moons are ultimately ripped apart by Saturn's gravity.

"During equinox, when sunlight hits the rings exactly edge on, Cassini saw normally flat rings, just tens of metres thick, being flipped up by thousands of metres." Data taken by Cassini also reveal dramatic variability in Saturn's rings on scales as short as decades, years and even weeks.

Through Cassini, scientists have also learnt that the rings are mostly water ice with a mysterious reddish contaminant.

Dr Cuzzi says it could be rust or small organic molecules similar to those found in red vegetables.

All the solar system's outer planets have rings, but Saturn's are special because of their greater mass and the purity of their ice particles.

Since the Voyager spacecraft passed Saturn in the 1980s, scientists have believed the planet's rings are continuously regenerated, unlike the dusty rings of Uranus, Jupiter and Neptune, which were probably the result of a small moon being destroyed by an impact.

This suggests Saturn's rings may only be a tenth of the age of the solar system - quite a challenge given their large mass.

While the results cannot confirm or deny the theory, researchers believe the turbulent nature of the rings leaves the possibility open.

"Explanations for the origin of Saturn's rings will remain unconvincing until we have understood the powerful dynamical processes that have formed, and continue to shape, these elegant structures on time scales reaching from yesterday to billions of years," the researchers wrote.

Planetary scientist Dr Andrew Prentice at Monash University in Melbourne says Cassini has dramatically changed scientists' understanding of the Saturnian rings.

"Instead of clearing up the mysteries of the rings, we're now even more baffled than before," he said.

"The fact that the rings are mostly water ice remains the number one mystery."

Dr Prentice says Cassini's cameras are proving to be "amazing".

"They've shown us complicated wave and spoke structures in the rings, opening up a real Pandora's box of questions," he said.

Having completed its primary mission, Cassini's operation was recently extended for another seven years.

"That's seven more years of science and so much more data," Dr Prentice said. "There are just so many things that remain unexplained." >>>

Hydrogen peroxide

This is a look at the comet Tempel 1 through a telescope. The active regions are responsible for the bright jets (left). With the help of their computer simulation the MPS-scientists can reconstruct the image seen from Earth (right). Credit: Image: Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (Luisa Maria Lara)/Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research

>> Tiny particles of dust emitted into space from the so-called active regions on a comet's surface can damage space probes.

A comet's nucleus is much more than an unvarying chunk of ice and dust. Under the Sun's influence, volatile substances such as water, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide are emitted from certain regions on its surface - the so-called active regions - carrying dust particles with a diameter of up to a few centimetres into space. Seen from Earth, these fountains of dust can be discerned as jets or spiral arms that surround the comet (see figure 1). These structures are embedded in a sheath of gas and dust called the coma that is produced by the more uniform activity of the overall surface.

"Pictures taken from Earth show the comet and its jets as a two-dimensional projection", explains Hermann Böhnhardt from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS). Where exactly the dust particles and gases originate from can not therefore be well identified.

The researchers intend to calculate the active regions of the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the rendezvous target for ESA's Rosetta mission on which the Rosetta lander Philae will touch down in late 2014. The mission, to which MPS contributed many scientific instruments, has been on route to its destination beyond the orbit of Mars and the asteroid belt since 2004. In the crucial phase of the mission, the new method could help to determine a safe route for Rosetta through the cometary coma and maybe even find a suitable landing site.

http://www.physorg.com/news191502867.html

>> Scientists have detected water-ice on the surface of an asteroid.

The first-time observation was made on 24 Themis, a huge rock that orbits almost 480 million km out from the Sun.

The researchers say that [WATER] ice is not stable in such circumstances

and has to be being replenished by some means - perhaps from inside the object.

They tell Nature magazine the finding plays into the theory that much of the water in Earth's oceans was delivered from space.

"It's interesting that we have detected ice on an asteroid because there have been suggestions that water on Earth came from impacts with many asteroids in Earth's early history," said Professor Humberto Campins, from the University of Central Florida, Orlando, US.

"This detection of water-ice on the surface of an asteroid supports that idea," he told BBC News.

24 Themis is about 200km is diameter, making it one of the biggest rocks in the main asteroid belt. It orbits at more than one-and-a-half-times the Sun-Mars distance.

The observation that its surface is frosted was confirmed by two independent teams - one led by Professor Campins - who examined how light was reflected off the body using the US space agency's (Nasa) Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

The teams also found a signature for complex organic, or carbon-rich, compounds.
Coming up

Scientists have long since detected hydrated, or water-containing, minerals on the surfaces of asteroids - but this is a first in terms of an observation of exposed water-ice.

The researchers were drawn to make the study because smaller fragments of the rock broken off during an ancient collision look rather like comets when viewed through telescopes, and this suggested they and the larger body might harbour significant quantities of ice.

But to find it covering the surface is unexpected, say the researchers. In sunlight, and with no pressure from an atmosphere, the ice would be expected to vaporise rapidly.

This indicates the ice disappearing at the surface is constantly being replaced.

One scenario thought highly unlikely is that Themis has had a recent collision with an icy comet.

More probable explanations are that frequent impacts with smaller rocks are turning over the surface to release hidden reserves of ice, or that vapour from ice held deeper inside the asteroid is continually out-gassing and condensing briefly on the surface.
Fashionable rocks

Theorists have been concerned for some time that the Earth may have formed at too high a temperature to have started with much water, and it has become a popular theory that much of the water we see today must have come in from elsewhere.

Comets contain a lot of water and impacts could have delivered large volumes. But perhaps not enough, says Dr Andy Rivkin, from Johns Hopkins University, Laurel, US, who led the other research team.

Also, the type of atoms (isotopes) seen in Earth water do not match well a comet-only source.

"Finding ice in Themis and the Themis family opens up the possibility that you might have brought in water from asteroids as well as comets; and that potentially allows a lot more water to be brought in and it also allows the isotopic compositions to work out the way we need them to, to match the Earth," Dr Rivkin told BBC News.

A Japanese capsule is due to return to Earth in a few weeks with a sample picked up off the surface of a space rock; the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe will flyby an asteroid later this year; and a Nasa spacecraft will go into orbit around one of these bodies in 2011.

President Barack Obama has also directed the US space agency to send astronauts to an asteroid in the mid-2020s.

"For a while we thought we knew everything there was worth knowing about asteroids, and we looked farther and farther out into the Solar System, to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and to the Kuiper Belt," observed Dr Henry Hsieh from Queen's University Belfast, UK.

"Now there seems to be a lot going in the asteroid belt that we don't actually understand, so again these bodies are exciting." >>

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_ ... 090128.stm

Comment
More than obvious that earth scientists can not differentiate between water ice and hydrogen peroxide ice.

Water ice, if ever it formed, is not stable in space.

Morphology of the north polar region of Mars. Spiral troughs are seen throughout the ice-rich polar cap (quasi-circular dome at center), and Chasma Boreale is the large canyon dividing the polar cap into two lobes. Chasma Boreale is the size of the Grand Canyon in the US and up to 2 kilometers deep. Shaded-relief image based on Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter data. Credit: NASA/GSFC

>> On Earth, large ice sheets are shaped mainly by ice flow. But on Mars, according to this latest research, other forces have shaped, and continue to shape, the polar ice caps.

The northern ice cap is a stack of ice and dust layers up to two miles (three kilometers) deep covering an area slightly larger than Texas. Analyzing radar data on a computer, scientists can peel back the layers like an onion to reveal how the ice cap evolved over time.

One of the most distinctive features of the northern ice cap is Chasma Boreale, a canyon about as long as the Grand Canyon but deeper and wider. Some scientists have suggested Chasma Boreale was created when volcanic heat melted the bottom of the ice sheet and triggered a catastrophic flood. Others have suggested strong polar winds, called katabatics, carved the canyon out of a dome of ice.

Other enigmatic features are troughs that spiral outward from the center of the ice cap like a gigantic pinwheel. Since they were discovered in 1972, scientists have proposed several hypotheses for how they formed. One suggested that as the planet spins, ice closer to the poles moves slower than ice farther from the poles, causing the semi-fluid ice to crack. Another used an elaborate mathematical model to suggest how increased solar heating in certain areas and lateral heat conduction could cause the troughs to self assemble.

It turns out both the spiral troughs and Chasma Boreale were created and shaped primarily by wind. But rather than being cut into existing ice very recently, the features formed over millions of years as the ice sheet itself grew. By influencing wind patterns, the topography of underlying, older ice controlled where and how the features grew. Topography is the three-dimensional shape of a surface, including peaks, valleys, slopes and plains.

Before this research, conventional wisdom held that the northern ice cap of Mars was made of many relatively flat layers like a layered cake. It was assumed some climate information would be recorded in the layers, limited to what could be gained from layer thickness and dust content. This research, however, reveals many complex features—including layers that change in thickness and orientation, or abruptly disappear in some places—making it a virtual gold mine of climate information.

"Nobody realized that there would be such complex structures in the layers," says Holt, lead author of the paper focusing on Chasma Boreale. "The layers record a history of ice accumulation, erosion and wind transport. From that, we can recover a history of climate that's much more detailed than anybody expected."

The spiral trough results vindicate an early explanation that had fallen out of favor in parts of the Mars scientific community. Alan Howard, a researcher at the University of Virginia, proposed just such a process in 1982 based solely on images of the surface from the Viking mission.

"He only had Viking images with relatively low resolution," says Isaac Smith, doctoral student and lead author on the spiral trough paper. Holt is second author on the trough paper. "Many people proposed other hypotheses suggesting he was wrong. But when you look at a hypothetical cross section from his paper, it looks almost exactly like what we see in the radar data."

Why are the troughs spiral shaped? First, katabatic winds are caused by relatively cold, dense air that rolls down from the poles and out over the ice cap. Second, as they blow down, they are deflected by the Coriolis force, which is caused by the planet's spinning in space. On Earth, this is what causes hurricanes to spin opposite directions in opposite hemispheres. This force twists the winds—and the troughs they create—into spiral shapes.

These breakthroughs were made possible by a new instrument called Shallow Radar (SHARAD). Similar instruments have been used on aircraft in Antarctica and Greenland, but before its use at Mars, some scientists were skeptical it would be able to collect useful data from orbit. Holt is a Co-Investigator on SHARAD.

"These anomalous features have gone unexplained for 40 years because we have not been able to see what lies beneath the surface," said Roberto Seu, team leader for the SHARAD instrument. "It is gratifying to me that with this new instrument we can finally explain them."

http://www.physorg.com/news194096912.html

>> Last fall, researchers, including Larry Taylor, a distinguished professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, discovered "lunar dew" on the moon's surface -- absorbed "water" in the uppermost layers of lunar soil. This discovery of water debunked beliefs held since the return of the first Apollo rocks that the moon was bone-dry.

Unlike lunar dew which is believed to come from an outside source such as solar wind which brings hydrogen into contact with the Moon's oxygen, the water discovered by Taylor and Liu is internal, arising from an entirely different origin. How it got there is not yet known. The water may have been added by impacting comets, which contain ice, during or after the formation of the moon and Earth.

"If water in the Moon was residue water kept during the giant impact, it is surprising that water survived the impact at all because less volatile elements, such as sodium and potassium, are strongly depleted. The details of the impact theory need to be re-examined," Liu said.

http://www.physorg.com/news198934028.html

>> Europe's Herschel space telescope has looked on as an old giant star wallows in a "steam bath".

CW Leonis, sited some 500 light-years from Earth, has long been known to be surrounded by a shroud of water.

But Herschel's exquisite ability to track the molecule in space means it can show the water lies close in to the star and reaches a sweltering 700C.

Scientists tell the journal Nature that ultraviolet light from nearby stars is driving the production of water vapour.

"Herschel really is the most amazing water detector," lead researcher Dr Leen Decin from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, told BBC News.

The presence of a gigantic cloud of water around CW Leonis was originally detected in 2001 by the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (Swas).

At first, scientists thought the water could have come from comets, or even planets, that had been obliterated by this puffed up star.

The idea that the water could be being produced around the star itself did not seem plausible because CW Leonis had reached a stage in its life when its ageing nuclear core was churning out colossal quantities of carbon.

This "sooty exhaust" would have been expected to take up any free oxygen in the vicinity of the star to make carbon monoxide - a very stable molecule.

The Herschel space telescope (Esa)

* The flagship European telescope is sited over a million km from Earth
* Its instruments sense long wavelength radiation - from the far-infrared to the sub-millimetre
* Its 3.5m diameter, silicon-carbide mirror is the largest mirror ever flown in space
* Herschel is designed to probe clouds of gas and dust to see stars being born
* The observatory will investigate how galaxies have evolved through time
* The mission will end when the Herschel detectors' helium refrigerant boils off

But Herschel's PACS and SPIRE instruments have a remarkable sensitivity to water, seeing it in many different states of excitement. These spectrometers were able to confirm that CW Leonis' water was present very close in to the star, all the way down to near its surface - far too close to have come from comets.

"The abundances are high in all the excitation lines," explained co-author Professor Mike Barlow of University College London, UK.

"You can call it water vapour and it's everything from cool, to warm, to hot - right up to levels where you need temperatures of 1,000 kelvin or so (725C)."

The scientists working on Herschel propose that a previously unsuspected chemical process is at work, one in which ultraviolet light from nearby bright, hot stars is breaking up the carbon monoxide and releasing its oxygen atoms to join up with hydrogen and form water molecules.

In an aged star like CW Leonis, which is also throwing off a large envelope of gas and dust, such a chemical process ought normally to be blocked - the UV light should be prevented from getting through to the carbon monoxide to work on it.

But Herschel and other telescopes have shown the stellar wind billowing away from CW Leonis to be extremely clumpy, allowing the UV light to penetrate deep in towards the star and trigger the production of water.

"This is really exciting, since it is the first time that we have seen a lot of carbon and water molecules co-existing close to a very luminous, but dying, star," said Dr Decin.

"Carbon and water are two of the major the building blocks for life as we know it on Earth. The same mechanisms triggered by ultraviolet light might have played a crucial role in prebiotic processes on the early Earth."

The European Space Agency's (Esa) Herschel observatory was launched in 2009.

Its quest is to study how stars and galaxies form, and how they evolve through cosmic time.

Herschel carries the largest mirror (3.5m) ever sent into space. Its instruments are sensitive to light at long wavelengths - in the far-infrared and sub-millimetre range.

By getting above the Earth's water-filled atmosphere, the telescope is able to study the molecule's prominence elsewhere in the Universe.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11153086

>> Professor Matt Griffin of Cardiff University, Principal Investigator for Herschel's SPIRE instrument, said, “This is the kind of result that the people who built SPIRE love to see - a real surprise, and one that makes us re-think our ideas about how stars evolve. The discovery of water where it shouldn't really exist shows the power of Herschel to reveal new aspects of the Universe.

“What this result and others are telling us is that there is water everywhere in the Universe - we are seeing it in comets, planets, all over the place in our galaxy and in other galaxies.

With Herschel we are going to be able to understand how it helps shape the development and evolution of stars and planets.”

http://www.physorg.com/news202577650.html