"[T]he Moon contains as much water as the Earth"
...and a little later...
"The Moon’s internal composition is exactly the same as Earth’s"
...both of which statements might be described as balderdash, poppycock, or codswallop, take your pick.
Bara extends his already laughable misunderstanding to the utterly hilarious point of claiming that this study supports Tom Van Flandern's solar fission hypothesis, according to which the Sun formed first then flung the planets off into orbit, as opposed to the story which is confirmed by thousands of observations—a shrinking and fragmenting proto-planetary disk, most of which slowly accreted into planets.
IF what Mike wrote were true—that "the Moon contains as much water as the Earth"—it would indeed be a stunner, but not because it would support solar fission. It would be unexplainable because all the water should have boiled away during the WHAM-O that broke the proto-moon out of the Pacific basin.
Of course, it is emphatically NOT the case that there are subterranean oceans on the Moon. May I explain one more time for the benefit of the slower members of the class (that's you, Hoagland & Bara):
MICROSCOPIC INCLUSIONS IN LUNAR MAGMA CONTAIN WATER THAT WAS SEALED IN, AND PREVENTED FROM EVAPORATING DURING THE BIG WHAMMY. THE WATER CONCENTRATION IS LIKE THAT IN EARTH'S UPPER MANTLE -- 1000 TIMES LESS THAN TYPICAL POTTING SOIL.
SEE THAT WORD MICROSCOPIC?? IT MEANS THAT ALTHOUGH THE CONCENTRATION CAN BE MEASURED (WITH GREAT DIFFICULTY, I MIGHT ADD) WE STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE TOTAL QUANTITY OF WATER IS. The LARGEST of these inclusions is 30 microns across—about half the thickness of a human hair.
Writing that the Moon’s internal composition is exactly the same as Earth’s is like taking a sample of the Sahara Desert from a cup of mint tea on a café table in Timbuktu.
Minor point — Bara writes that 615 to 1,410 ppm is "about 100 times higher than previous studies of lunar magma had suggested." It's actually more like ten or twenty times.
I have nothing against Tom Van Flandern. He had an inventive mind, and at least (unlike Hoagland & Bara) his eccentric ideas had some connection to actual observation. He also had a Ph.D. in astronomy, whereas Hoagland & Bara are entirely untrained in the subject. However, as attentive readers of this blog already know, the other piece of astronomy news that turned up last month was a severe setback to Van Flandern's picture of the evolution of Mars by massive bombardment.
Bara ends his blog scoring as follows: Van Flandern 1, Mainstream NASA types 0. The true score is Van Flandern 0, Modern science 2. Hoagland & Bara aren't even in the game.
9 comments:
I would like to point out that Modern Science "holy writ" cannot be disproved. Everything happened BILLIONS of years ago - OR - it cannot be confirmed because Black holes are invisible. Astrophysicists should not assume that exotic objects create radiation that could be exploding Plasma double layers.
Mars formed in two million years?
What two million?
Who gives a fuck Concannon, dipshit bastards
Anon: I really prefer comments that are relevant to the topic of the thread, but UNLIKE Mike Bara I don't ban people I disagree with.
The European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory
The telescope has been giving astronomers an unprecedented look inside the cosmic womb of stars, known as molecular clouds, to find (surprise, surprise) that stars are formed in “an incredible network of filamentary structures, and features indicating a chain of near-simultaneous star-formation events, glittering like strings of pearls deep in our Galaxy.” Although described as "incredible" by astronomers, this description precisely matches the decades-old expectations of plasma cosmologists!
NOT the Mike Bara, the RCH, the Concannon, or the Expat ... just rubbing it in ...
Alfvén didn't go so far as to consider a star as an electrical discharge phenomenon. But if stars are electrically powered from a galactic circuit then the consequences of this fact alone for science and society are profound. We have been following a mirage of knowledge that leads into a desert of ignorance. Our story of the Sun is a myth. The holy grail of nuclear fusion energy "like the Sun" is a false trail. In fact our entire cosmology of the big bang, galaxy formation, the formation of the Sun and its family of planets, and the history of the Earth is fiction. It ignores the most powerful organizing electric force in favour of the feeblest force— gravity. Most of our 'big' science, like the costly fusion experiments and space missions, has been misdirected and wasteful. All sciences must be re-examined from a fresh interdisciplinary perspective based on an interconnected Electric Universe.
you´re just kiddin´aren´t you BU?
Esteban
I don't have this attraction to Mainstream Planetary and Cosmological Science that "working" Scientists do.
I'm sick of "billions" of years and "we were surprised to find".
You can't be surprised over and over again, surely you must know your models are shit.
Much evidence exists for pairs of objects with similar high redshifts located on opposite sides of low-redshift active galaxies along their spin axes.
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