Nitzan Acsaf - a window to physics
Image courtesy of the European Space Agency ESA
Direct link to this page: https://www.hayadan.org.il/watershavit.html
Was Kadaha created with water trapped inside its rocks, and gradually they leaked out over millions of years? Or did comets, which occasionally hit Earth, create the oceans? The Ptolemy experiment on the Rosetta spacecraft can solve the mystery.
Earth needed a supply of water for its oceans, and the comets are giant celestial glaciers - frozen reservoirs of water that move in orbit around the sun. Did the impact of several comets, billions of years ago, create these water stocks? Finding unequivocal scientific findings is surprisingly difficult.
The Ptolemaic experiment can provide the information - what is the source of the water in Kada'a? It is a miniature laboratory designed to analyze the exact types of atoms that make up familiar molecules such as water. Atoms can be of slightly different types, known as isotopes. Chemically, each isotope behaves almost identically, but has a slightly different mass due to a few extra neutrons in its nucleus. The goal is to check whether water in a comet is similar to water in the oceans of Earth. First results from observations made over Kada'a reality that the answer is apparently - yes.
If this is true, scientists have solved another mystery. But if this is not true, and the experiment finds that the isotopes in the comet are completely different, this means that they were not formed in our solar system at all. Instead, they can be interstellar 'wanderers', captured by the Sun's gravity.
For information on the website 'Hikom Hayom'
Earth scientist - planet
A window site for physics
https://www.hayadan.org.il/BuildaGate4/general2/data_card.php?Cat=~~~890912945~~~138&SiteName=hayadan
