Posted on by Jerry Coffey

What Is Water Made Of

Water
Water

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The answer to ‘what is water made of’ is as easy as you want it to be. Do you want to just do some superficial research or do you want to look a little deeper? Superficially, pure, distilled water is composed of 2 hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom. If the sample of water is not ‘pure’, the composition of the sample can be different.

Salt water obviously contains salt, but it can contain many other trace elements. Fresh water from different sources will contain different elements and minerals. These come from the rocks the water washes over and the pollutants from farms and industry. The water that you drink will contain several additives used for purification plus the fluoride that is added for our health. Rain water will have any number of pollutants that have accumulated in the atmosphere.

At high temperatures and pressures, like those in the interior of giant planets, scientists think that water exists as ionic water in which the molecules break down into a soup of hydrogen and oxygen ions, and at even higher pressures as superionic water in which the oxygen crystallizes but the hydrogen ions float around freely within the oxygen lattice.

There are many interesting facts about water. Water is a tasteless, odorless liquid. The natural color of water and ice is slightly blue, although water appears colorless in small quantities. Ice also appears colorless, and water vapor is essentially invisible as a gas. Since the water molecule is not linear and the oxygen atom has a higher electronegativity than hydrogen atoms, water carries a slight negative charge. As a result, water has a electrical dipole moment. Water can form a large number of intermolecular hydrogen bonds(four). These factors lead to to water’s high surface tension and capillary forces. Water is often referred to as the universal solvent. All major cellular components are dissolved in water. Water is at its maximum density at 3.98°C. Oddly, it becomes less dense when it is cooled down to its solid form, ice. It expands to occupy 9% greater volume in this solid state, which accounts for the fact of ice floating on liquid water.

Water covers the majority of our planet and can be found in one form or another throughout the known universe. No matter where you are on Earth, water affects you in some way each day.

We have written many articles about water for Universe Today. Here’s an article about the density of water, and here’s an article about the water on Earth.

If you’d like more info on Water, check out NASA’s Water, Water, Everywhere!. And here’s a link to NASA’s Earth Observatory.

We’ve also recorded an episode of Astronomy Cast all about planet Earth. Listen here, Episode 51: Earth.

Source: Wikipedia

Posted on by Ryan Anderson

Herschel Finds Water Around a Carbon Star

Herschel image of the carbon star CW Leonis. The arc visible to the left of the star is a bow showck, where the stellar wind encounters the interstellar medium. ESA/PACS/SPIRE/MESS Consortia

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There’s something strange going on around the red giant star CW Leonis (a.k.a. IRC+10216). Deep within the star’s carbon-rich veil, astronomers have detected water vapor where no water should be.

CW Leonis is similar in mass to the sun, but much older and much larger. It is the nearest red giant to the sun, and in its death throes it has hidden itself in a sooty, expanding cloud of carbon-rich dust. This shroud makes CW Leonis almost invisible to the naked eye, but at some infrared wavelengths it is the brightest object in the sky.

Water was originally discovered around CW Leonis in 2001 when the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS) found the signature of water in the chilly outer reaches of the star’s dusty envelope at a temperature of only 61 K. This water was assumed to be evidence for vaporizing comets and other icy objects around the expanding star. New observations with the SPIRE and PACS spectrometers on the Herschel Space Observatory reveal that there’s something much more surprising going on.

“Thanks to Herschel’s superb sensitivity and spectral resolution, we were able to identify more than 60 lines of water, corresponding to a whole series of energetic levels of the molecule,” explains Leen Decin from the University of Leuven and leader of the study. The newly-detected spectral lines indicate that the water vapor is not all in the cold outer envelope of the star. Some of it is much closer to the star, where temperatures reach 1000 K.

No icy fragments could exist that close to the star, so Decin and colleagues had to come up with a new explanation for the presence of the hot water vapor. Hydrogen is abundant in the envelope of gas and dust surrounding carbon stars like  CW Leonis, but the other building block of water, oxygen, is typically bound up in molecules like carbon monoxide (CO) and silicon monoxide (SiO). Ultraviolet light can split these molecules, releasing their stored oxygen, but red giant stars don’t make much UV light so it has to come from somewhere else.

An illustration of the chemical reactions caused by interstellar UV light interacting with molecules surrounding CW Leonis. ESA. Adapted from L. Decin et al. (2010)

The dusty envelopes around carbon stars are known to be clumpy, and that turns out to be the key to explaining the mysterious water vapor. The patchy structure of the shroud around CW Leonis lets UV light from interstellar space into the depths of the star’s envelope. “Well within the envelope, UV photons trigger a set of reactions that can produce the observed distribution of water, as well as other, very interesting molecules, such as ammonia (NH3),” says Decin. “This is the only mechanism that explains the full range of the water’s temperature.”

In the coming months, astronomers will test this hypothesis by using Herschel to search for evidence of water near other carbon stars.