The Milky Way is teeming with billions of planets, including many that are similar to our own. But how many of these alien worlds have water, and do any host extraterrestrial life?
No answers to those questions just yet. But astronomers using a new infrared technique say they've discovered water vapor in the atmosphere of a nearby gas giant planet called "tau Boötis b."
The finding suggests that the technique may play an important role in identifying which exoplanets might be hospitable for life.
Surface tension creates a glassy, smooth layer of water over U.S. swimmer Tyler Clary the instant before he surfaces as he competes in the backstroke. Surface tension arises from intermolecular forces between water molecules.
What's significant about the latest find is that the rocks are the "first ever" discovered on the Red Planet to contain streambed gravels. The rocks were found by Curiosity last fall. Examining them over time, researchers actually were able to determine how deep and fast the water flowed at that location.
"At a minimum, the stream was flowing at a speed equivalent to a walking pace -- a meter, or three feet, per second -- and it was ankle-deep to hip-deep," Rebecca Williams of the P
In 2007, the Department of Water Protection in Los Angeles detected high levels of bromate, a carcinogen that forms when bromide and chlorine react with sunlight, in Los Angeles's Ivanhoe Reservoir. Bromide is naturally present in groundwater and chlorine is used to kill bacteria, but sunlight is the final ingredient in the potentially harmful mix
The water that supports life on Earth may have been on the planet much earlier than scientists previously thought, new research suggests.
While the environmental conditions in Earth's early years made it impossible for water to remain on the planet's surface, scientists have found evidence that the ingredients for water were protectively stored inside rocky bodies near our planet — and maybe inside Earth itself. The new findings suggest that there was water in the inner solar system 135 million years earlier than previous evidence had shown.
