lajoswinkler

Yay, let's ruin a perfectly fine thread by trolling with nutter antivax propaganda!

For paraffin to cause the water to flash into steam, you need paraffin at high temperature. Way higher than 100 °C. A cup candle dissipates heat well enough so I don't see how the temperature of it can reach enormous values just by the flame on its wick. It's ridiculous to even think that could happen. No, there was something wrong with the "wax". It was probably something else in question.

That's weird. "Water glass" is a thing all hardware stores always have. It's for making fireclay dough, which is applied as a binder for firebricks in fireplaces. Well, then. Hm. Get some slaked lime. It will not bind the mixture very well, so you'll have to be careful, but it will work. Calcium oxide, which is the product of calcium hydroxide calcination, is a refractory material. Make a dough out of slaked lime, firebrick powder, add some sand. Get bentonite clay. It's sold in the winemaking stores or garden related parts in large stores and is used for wine clearing (sticks to proteins that make the wine hazy). Let the dominant component be firebrick powder, then bentonite, then sand. Slaked lime is mainly for binding. BTW you're gonna gave a lousy time trying to make aluminium Kerbals. Aluminium is notoriously difficult for casting. It high surface tension combined with tiny oxide skin layer makes casting small stuff very problematic. You'll probably get a blob. No need for that. Class D is for large containers of powdered reactive metals on fire. Very expensive fire extinguishers. Not only there is zero possibility he could cause a metal fire of such proportion, but he can deal with small metal fires (overheated zinc smouldering in a crucible) just by covering it with a tin can. Let's not make this endeavour sound like we're dealing with plutonium, shall we?

It is possible for a dwarf planet or an asteroid to have "rings" - crude, uneven, faint ones. Remnants of the crap actual central objects has evolved from. But to have rings like Saturn, that's absolutely impossible, as such rings are made possible by enormous tidal forces huge planets excert on any larger body that comes close.

Ah, yes. It's indeed charcoal, my mistake. I was shaping a piece of steel today with a hammer. Orange hot large thick nail. Now it's a flat hook.

It still doesn't explain how the hell did it heat itself that much. When such experiments with wax/oil is done, you actually heat the container with flame until it starts smoking.

No, I'm just hot. Also, Pluto.

That can't happen with usual paraffin wax candles. You need to heat their container close to the smoke point. What you had there was one of those weird low smoke point "waxes" that shouldn't be available because they are a fire hazard. My bet something made in China. What wonders me is why the hell would you want to extinguish a candle like that. Candles can be extinguished by pinching the wick with fingers wet from saliva.

I did this just now. I had the foundry for quite a while and never put it to a real test with coal. It successfully melted a copper nail. My foundry is way too small for any serious metal casting. It's more suitable for high temperature reactions with small amounts of materials in crucibles.

You can use cement only, but it will get ruined pretty fast. Cement experiences surface cracking and flaking. It's also very heat conductive, has lots of heat capacity and isn't very porous. All that means more time and more coal to get things done. That mix seems ok, but mind that it's not designed to withstand temperatures of the flame you will create. If you have old, cracked firebricks, and turn them into powder. Then use the powder as an additive for your mixture. I did that and it came out nicely.Cubic oven is less efficient because of the turbulent flow, but it would work. Don't extinguish anything using water. Just put lid on it, cover with aluminium foil and leave it like that. Spilling water in a hot foundry might end up with a more than a squirt of boiling water, and will also crack the lining because of the enormous thermal shock.

Last night I remembered something from years ago and yes, someone already beat me to it. Pluto, homeworld of the Care Bears.

Those "winds" would not be detectable by a human. It's a slow horizontal transfer in several microbar of pressure. Technically, it is a wind, but to a person standing on Pluto, the situation is good as being in vacuum chamber. No flags would flutter, no feathers tossed sideways. Indeed a fascinating atmosphere. No, we're getting several times better resolution when noncompressed images start pouring from the probe over the next months. So far we're getting just compressed stuff. Don't expect miracles, it will still be crappy, but better than this. These satellites are very tiny.

Them and the people who say it's glowing in the dark, and the army of people who have not zero, but negative knowledge on photography. NASA-s Facebook page is a place where the nutters cavort all the time. ._.

Liquid would not help to conserve the heat. It would transfer it to the surface by convection. Perturbation you're describing would be very weak as the mass of the material is very small. Question is if it's enough, and we can't know that at this point. That is indeed a very plausible speculation, good work.

Every chemical reaction is very complex and only by breaking it down to the simplest parts enables us to understand it when we fit the puzzle back again. As with all in science. Electrolyzing sea water is different from electrolyzing aqueous solution of sodium chloride because sea water is a heterogeneous mixture. The solution itself contains alkali and earth alkali metal cations, as well as various anions, chloride being the dominant one, followed by bromide. Before anything, sea water needs to be filtered and treated chemically to remove certain ions which would clog up the system when their precipitates form. For example, magnesium cation would react with hydroxide anions formed in the electrolysis to form poorly soluble magnesium hydroxide, eventually coating the electrodes and pipes. I'm interested to see where's chlorine going. It's a decently valuable resource and if it's released into the environment, very poisonous, although short lived pollutant. I know this is just a simple graphic, but the central thing here is high pressure electrolyzer which seems to be doing stuff very wrong.

Nope. Cathodes are electrodes where reduction occurs. (consonants) Anodes are electrodes where oxidation occurs. (vowels) Hydronium cations are reduced (given an electron), forming gaseous hydrogen. Chloride anions would be oxidized (stripped from electron), forming gaseous chlorine. Sodium cations are spectators, and they are joined by hydroxide anions forming at the cathode. It's a chloralkali process. You get hydrogen, chlorine and sodium hydroxide solution.

Speculation 1. Conductive heat transfer. As the mountain is made out of material more heat conductive than the cryogenic fluff that caught everywhere during the last winter (water ice mountain), interior heat crawls through the mountain and causes the nearby fluff to sublimate away, creating a moat. Compare with a warm spoon pressing against dry ice block. Speculation 2. Convective heat transfer. Heated* cryogenic volatiles occasionally seep out through half buried mountain which is actually an ancient cryovolcanic caldera. At the spot where side vents are, sublimation of the surrounding fluff occurs. Moat is formed. *temperatures are VERY low; heat and temperature are two different things!

There's much more energy in two Europas colliding at some 40 km/s than there is in chemical explosives ever fired and currently stockpiled. Hell, even everything nuclear fired and stockpiled is puny compared to it. As you can see, there's a decent flash with TNT. The camera has a filter, otherwise the flash would look like a white, washed out ball.

Gypsum will break down, making the lining brittle and corroding everything the gas touches. Sulfur(VI) oxide turns into sulfuric acid in contact with water vapor in air so you get sulfuric acid fog. As you probably understand, that's not a nice thing. Bentonite, fireclay, perlite, sand, slaked lime, cement. Easy on the sand because of its lower melting point and easy with cement because you want it to bind, not dominate, as it cracks at high temperature. You want silicates and oxides. In essence, the simplest thing you could do it just use fireclay and water glass as a superb binder, unless you mind the bright yellow coloration it will give to the flame swirling in the foundry. There are water glass preparations which use potassium silicate instead of sodium one, but as sodium is tough to remove and its ionization spectrum is very dominant, it's very hard to get rid of the yellow glow completely. There are lots of recipes for refractory mixtures out there. Each is special in its own right and suits a purpose. Be sure to wrap your foundry (I assume it will be refractory-lined steel can with a hole for pushing propane-butane or whatever) in rock/glass wool and cover it with shiny aluminium foil (shiny side outwards, matte side inwards) to minimize heat losses. You can go "dirty" and push air in a foundry filled with charcoal. Or coke, if you can find it.

I think it's exactly that. Pluto was always weird and astronomers and astrophysicists always suspected there's more to it. Kuiper belt was proven in early nineties so after like a quarter of century it's time to acknowledge it. Pluto is a remnant, along with an ever growing number of similar bodies. There are probably thousands or more such bodies. Is it useful to have a system with thousands of planets? Of course not. The name "planet" would lose its meaning and function. Therefore a new class of bodies has been proposed and accepted. Idea is very old but is now official. No room for romanticism and nationalism in science. Pluto is fascinating no matter what its official designation is.

Wow, still beating the dead horse? Grow up, folks...

I hope you won't use plaster of Paris (gypsum) for the foundry. At those temperatures, gypsum not only loses crystal water, it also loses sulphur(VI) oxide, SO3 in gaseous phase. That's not only extremely corrosive for our mucosa, but it also messes up with aluminium. You need to use a refractory material like firebrick. You can make your own mixture out of perlite, clay, slaked lime, even some graphite dust will help. Gypsum can be used for molds for aluminium casting, but it always needs to be dried on maximum temperature in a regular oven. That means over 250 °C. Then it loses a great deal of crystal water (also getting fragile in process), and gets porous, very lightweight and perfect for casting of aluminium and metals with lower melting points.

Breakup would occur and would be homogeneous, not leading to parts with one gas dominance, but explosive recombining would be highly unlikely as we're talking about an open thermodynamic system. The event is happening in vacuum where gases behave as gases actually behave - like a bunch of tiny balls flying around. Gases don't creep, cavort or linger unless under pressure. You'd simply have massive amount of gaseous mixture of water, hydrogen and oxygen (dominantly water) being in various stages of chemical equilibrium in the depths of the ejecta chaos. As the heat is transfered into space, equilibrium is shifted towards water. In outer parts of the catastrophe, equilibrium could not occur because pressures are too low and particle collisions are scarce. We actually witnessed something close to this. Icy dirtball impacting a mixture of hydrogen and helium. Close enough. Fireball larger than Earth.

At first I thought they were two images a bit different because of the flyby, but then I've realized it's the same one. Took a few burned out neurons while trying to stitch them together. But it's beautiful. Pluto shrinking in the past actually was mentioned as a hypothesis during one of the press conferences. The mechanism you propose is a possibility. Well done, have some rep. There is of course no pure water on Pluto. Water in nature is always a solution because it's such a good solvent. On icy worlds it's bound to have ammonia in it because ammonia is a polar molecule and dissolves easily, although it's not very good at hydrolysis so the resulting solution is not very basic no matter how much of it is inside. I'm very well aware there is a possibility of liquid briny solutions deep inside, and it is possible to have a transient occurence on the surface in a case of some object impacting the surface and dislodging water ice crust, or as you mention, heat, latent or due to radioactive decay, causing tectonic tensions and spilling some of the "juice" out only to boil and freeze fast. However, for ices to melt at the surface because of reasons, that's a no. Simply won't happen because of the very low pressure. It's either solid or gas.

There would be one heck of a flash. Any matter glows if heated above a certain point, and there's enough energy in collisions of planetary objects to cause blinding light. A piece of ice at a reentry will flash. Now imagine objects with orders of magnitude more surface colliding directly, lithosphere to lithosphere. Regardless of the composition, it would be an abominable blinding light. Images like these are hilariously incorrect. Absolutely downgraded in every way, with fancy stuff flying around. In reality, if two Europas would collide at several tens of kilometres per second at the distance of our Moon, it could very well look like this. It would be some time before the material cools down by radiation, which you'd feel on your skin. Also, remember that planetary objects would behave like liquids, rocky or icy, doesn't matter. They would both turn into blinding ejecta, swirling very slowly in the sky.