How much of +Jupiter's moon +Europa is made of water? A lot, actually. Based on the Galileo probe data acquired during its exploration of the Jovian system from 1995 to 2003, Europa posses a deep, global ocean of liquid water beneath a layer of surface ice. The subsurface ocean plus ice layer could range from 80 to 170 kilometers in average depth. Adopting an estimate of 100 kilometers depth, if all the water on Europa were gathered into a ball it would have a radius of 877 kilometers. To scale, this intriguing illustration compares that hypothetical ball of all the water on Europa to the size of Europa itself (left) - and similarly to all the water on planet Earth.

With a volume 2-3 times the volume of water in Earth's oceans, the global ocean on Europa holds out a tantalizing destination in the search for extraterrestrial life in our +Solar System.

Illustration Credit & Copyright: Kevin Hand (JPL/Caltech),
Jack Cook (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), Howard Perlman (USGS)
Explanation of the image from: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120524.html

Milankovitch Cycles

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Milankovitch_cycles

Scotsman James Croll combined the eccentricity of the orbit and the precession and in the 1860s and 1870s presented his ideas on the effects of the cycles and how they might influence climate, especially the colder winters when they correspond with the aphelion. In fact, what are typically called ‘Milankovitch Cycles’ are sometimes referred to as ‘Croll-Milankovitch Cycles.’

ScienceCasts: The Great Lakes of Europa

QOTD

Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight. When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another. -- Helen Keller

Planet-Like Object Found Circling a Brown Dwarf

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100409144354.htm

Kamen Todorov of Penn State University and co-investigators used the keen eyesight of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Observatory to directly image the companion of the brown dwarf, which was uncovered in a survey of 32 young brown dwarfs in the Taurus star-forming region. Brown dwarfs are objects that typically are tens of times the mass of Jupiter and are too small to sustain nuclear fusion to shine as stars do.

'This Planet Tastes Funny,' According to Spitzer

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer20100421.html

"It's a big puzzle," said Kevin Stevenson, a planetary sciences graduate student at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, lead author of a study appearing tomorrow, April 22 in the journal Nature. "Models tell us that the carbon in this planet should be in the form of methane. Theorists are going to be quite busy trying to figure this one out."

Deepest Part of the Ocean

http://frozenly.com/2010/02/deepest-part-of-the-ocean/

The Mariana Trench is 11,033 meters (36,201 feet), (6033.5) fathoms deep. The Pressure at the deepest part of the Mariana Trench is over 8 tons per square inch. The Mariana Trench is 2, 542 km (1,580 miles) long and 69 km (43 miles) wide.

Amazing Creatures: