[meteorite-list] Repost: PLANETS, PART THREE, Sort of...

From: Sterling K. Webb <kelly_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed Aug 3 05:19:31 2005
Message-ID: <42F08BF5.2E66B719_at_bhil.com>

Hi, Everybody!

    I said:

    Notice the logical completeness of this three-fold definition. It
is, when stripped bare, essentially this:
    1) ALL rock,
    2) ALL volatiles, and
    3) significant admixtures of rock AND volatiles (half and half or
whatever it happens to be).

    Of course, the volatiles in Plutonian planets are almost entirely in
the form of solids. More than solids, minerals. Most is water ice.

    Water ice we think we know, but we don't. We only know Ice I, weak
pitiful stuff, quite ephemeral. There is Ice II through Ice IX.

    Each Ice has radically different properties from Ice I and from each
other, different densities, melting and boiling points, atomic
structure. Each is a remarkable substance, unlike anything ever seen on
Earth.

    Many of the Ice states are very hard to create in the laboratory and
then only under extreme conditions. Not all of them have been created
successfully. In theory, metallic Ice is possible, but has never been
observed.

    The interior dynamics of Plutonian planets, especially large ones,
are probably dominated by the unknown mechanisms and properties of the
various physical states of Ice. A complete phase diagram of Ice, in all
is forms, is not even fully known, but what portions of one that we do
have is suggestive of tremendously complicated internals for a Plutonian
planet.

    And of course, Plutonian planets are only possible where they do in
fact exist, in the coldest parts of the solar system where large-body
Ice dynamics is possible.


Sterling K. Webb
--------------------------------------

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Received on Wed 03 Aug 2005 05:18:45 AM PDT