WHERE THE REAL SCIENCE FICTION IS BORN

After yesterday’s rant of wolves, (or wolfs if you prefer the Doc40 creative spelling) I turn the forum over to kaymo, for a short saga of rock and ice and sulphur eating bacteria by the black smoker taking advantage – and doesn’t that sound like a perfect weekend in Las Vegas.

Okay, here's something to lighten our darkness, or just for a moment dispel that disturbing vision of the plush monkey on Chuckie Demon batteries that's running for reelection.

So yesterday we all heard the news about Sedna. We now have a 10th planet in the solar system, albeit a frozen mini-world out there on the fringes of the Oort Cloud. What's to say about Sedna that hasn't been said about Pluto? Not much. It's even further away and probably a tad colder. However, it may be just the first of a plethora of similar ice balls yet to be found that are out there on the distant fringes of the system. But a report last month concerning the planetary systems that are being detected around nearby stars was much more fun.

Everyone has now picked up on the grim thought of inward migrating Super-Jovians, that is-- great big gas giants that suck up stuff in youngish solar systems laden with asteroids and suchlike and thereby lose orbital momentum and thereby spin inward to take up orbits close to their stars. On the way they either absorb any Earths or Marses, or knock them out into interstellar space to freeze and die. Super-Jovians have been detected orbiting a number of nearby Sun-like stars now.
Definitely not good for the chances of life evolving in such solar systems.Except that, just as in our system we have a Jupiter, we also have a Saturn parked out there beyond it, and beyond that we have Uranus and Neptune. In a system with a migrating Super-Jovian the possibility exists that as it moves inward it will tug the outer planets in behind it.

An outer planet like Uranus or Neptune pulled into the inner reaches of a solar system would then undergo some interesting changes. The hydrogen in the atmosphere would boil off, the ice would melt, so would the methane and ammonia. A lot of the atmosphere would bleed off as it
heated up. And down at the bottom, above the rocky core, there would form an ocean of water, anywhere from 20 to 50 miles deep.

Of course the atmosphere would start out like Earth's did, heavy on ammonia and methane, without oxygen. But life on Earth probably started around "black smokers" on the ocean bottom where sulphur eating bacteria evolved to take advantage of a ton of their favorite food being spewed out of volcanic vent. Those kind of bacteria are still doing their thing down at the bottom of our oceans today. The geology that leads to black smoker type vents spewing sulphur rich gas into the bottom of the ocean is likely to be the same on all planets that are warm enough to have liquid water and an active mantle.And once you have halogen feeding bacteria it's only a matter of time, quite a lot of it, before you have all sorts of other kinds of bacteria and eventually other things too.

Since we're finding a lot of systems with these huge Super-Jovians parked close to their stars, it's quite possible that in some of them there will be warmed up Neptunes covered in vast oceans fifty miles deep, in which life can begin and evolve.

Okay, fun's over, back to the plush monkey

CRYPTIQUE – The roof is on fire.