Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2023 April 8

= April 8 =

mega-Earth
Why can't there be mega-earths as massive as brown dwarfs? If any that massive actually existed, what would they be like? Rich (talk) 04:26, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
 * well objects that big made from stone would be able to attract and hang onto hydrogen and helium, which is many times more abundant than oxygen and silicon. So it would likely turn into a star, or if it started smaller, turn into a brown dwarf. However there are some stars with almost no hydrogen and helium, so if they exploded their output is more likely to yield something more like a super earth. If oxygen or neon is in super abundance, though it may have such a thick atmosphere that a surface is undetectable, and it would be more like a gas giant, though as there is no deuterium, there may be no fusion to heat it. And if the hydrogen were matching the oxygen, perhaps you would get a water world with oceans with an ice floor. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:34, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Reference: nebular hypothesis. So a good way to think about this is to flip the question around and ask, why and how do non-rocky planets form? Once an object reaches a point somewhere within 5-10 Earth masses, its gravitation becomes strong enough that it can hold on to hydrogen and helium, the lightest elements, in its atmosphere. Smaller objects can't—this is why Earth's atmosphere has no appreciable amounts of them. All He and H that humans use is "mined" or produced. He is dug up from underground deposits where it has been produced by alpha decay; there are various hydrogen production methods, currently dominated by steam reforming fossil fuel.
 * H and He are the dominant elements, making up most of the universe's "ordinary matter". Thus they make up most of the gas in a protoplanetary nebula. So once a planetesimal reaches that point, it will start hoovering all that gas up. : Check out the table. In abundance, the first element that's solid at room temperature is carbon. Carbon however will react with other elements at elevated temperature to form volatiles like methane. Next is iron and then silicon, and take note of how the abundances drop off logarithmically. This is why "rocky" planets are mainly Fe and Si-O (silicates), since that's the most abundant "stuff" that takes really high temperatures to volatilize, and hence can still "clump up" and accumulate into protoplanetesimals at high temperatures inside the frost line.
 * But the abundance of the refractory elements is much lower. There's less of them. So it's impossible for such planets to get up to brown dwarf territory. There just isn't enough stuff. (To reiterate, outside the frost line, planetesimals can grow more easily, and then they hit that point and start accreting H and He, as well as other volatiles, which is easily done outside the frost line. And then we get giant planets.) --47.155.46.15 (talk) 01:51, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
 * You haven't convinced me that many mega earths couldn't collide and form a rocky planet more massive than Jupiter, and then accrete asteroids if its orbit were at some time within an asteroid belt. Rich (talk) 11:44, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
 * But i wish i had just asked if a rocky planet could be much larger than Jupiter, and what would it be like.Rich (talk) 11:51, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
 * there's something called a sub-brown dwarf. Rich (talk) 11:57, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The asteroid belt in our solar system combined has only about 3% of the mass of the Earth's Moon. So it would not add much to your proto-mega-earth. The Sun is a Population I star, and as such has a high metallicity - but "high" means it has a bit over 1% of mass that is not Hydrogen or Helium. It makes up 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system. Jupiter makes up about 0.1% of the mass of the solar system. So the solar system in total has at best enough (astronomical) "metals" for about 10 Jupiter-mass rocky planets - and nearly all of that is in the Sun. So it may theoretically be possible to get a really large rocky planet (if e.g. many rocky planets are expelled from their original systems and end up crashing into each other), but the chances are really really lousy. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 23:11, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The many exoplanets that have been observed have surprised planetary scientists. There are a wild range of different solar systems, and it seems possible that asteroid belts could be much bigger and different than in our own solar system. If a solar system is a double star solar system, it could make heavy bombardment eras more intense due to gravitational effects.Rich (talk) 14:13, 14 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The Kuiper Belt has around 2% of the mass of the Earth. Even the Oort Cloud has only about 5 Earth masses. Yes, we have found surprising planetary configurations, but I don't think we have found one where the total mass is that much bigger. The Late Heavy Bombardment was "heavy" compared to normal times (if it was), but the total amount of mass involved was not that big - and it all comes out of the same reservoirs (the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt, which have little mass compared to Earth). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:38, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Oxygen generator
Do the chemicals in an oxygen generator spontaneously ignite on contact with water (or specifically with seawater)? If they do, do they consume oxygen from the environment while doing so? 2601:646:9882:46E0:F5BA:5B19:D124:B6A1 (talk) 07:50, 8 April 2023 (UTC)


 * No, because they are only one component of the fire triangle. Sodium chlorate is a typical chemical used as an oxygen generator and it would just dissolve in the seawater. For it to ignite, there would need to be a fuel which it could oxidise and sufficient heat to get the reaction started. If there were some fuel, no additional oxygen would be required since that's exactly what the chlorate provides, leading in some cases to "oxygenless combustion". Mike Turnbull (talk) 13:31, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Facial feature
I've noticed that some notable people (Yuri Gagarin, Sergey Ilyushin, his son Vladimir Ilyushin - which suggests it's hereditary) have what appears to be a permanently raised left brow ridge or eyebrow. How this feature is called? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 08:58, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Googling "Sergey Ilyushin" eyebrow and "Yuri Gagarin" eyebrow suggests both had accidents that resulted in scars just above their eyebrows. The article Yuri Gagarin mentions the incident; Yuri was a bit of a naughty boy there. 85.76.64.137 (talk) 09:18, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I thought it's more related to anatomy/biology, but turns out it's rather for humanities refdesk. 212.180.235.46 (talk) 22:14, 8 April 2023 (UTC)