There are no words to describe the universe (not even the one next door)

They attribute to Richard Feynman, a famous and laureate professor of physics at CalTech, the phrase that says that if you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it.

One of the great things about teaching is that, explaining scientific concepts and breaking them down into basic entities that are easily transmitted and understandable by people who have not yet delved into that subject.

And that requires having studied long before to understand them.

Now, sometimes teaching concepts in astrophysics (in other sciences too, but this is my thing) becomes quite difficult because there are not even words that describe reality or because the ones that do exist are used with a meaning that is quite far from the entity. physics we want to refer to.

Today we put a simple example of a cosmic phenomenon, even if it seems incredible to use that adjective, for which the words of our lexicon fall short.

Today's issue has worried us in Spain in recent months and it could get worse, I am not optimistic, in the coming years and decades: the climate change that threatens us in countries like ours, among many others.

And within this topic, in the article I want to talk about rain, which the RAE defines as the "action of raining, water falling from the clouds".

Similarly, we can speak of snow, which is defined as "frozen water".

If we say that we have discovered that it rains not only on Earth, but also on Venus, on Saturn, on its moon Titan or on the exoplanet WASP-76b, or that it snows on Mars, something far from reality.

The words we normally use are very limited by our earthly (and contemporary) experience.

And it is that on Venus it does rain, but, at least at certain heights, the drops are not water, they are sulfuric acid, because the atmosphere is very different from that of Earth.

The planet is very hot and its atmosphere is under great pressure (almost 100 times what we have on our planet).

Its sulfur dioxide content and lower temperatures, about 0 ºC, allow this compound to combine with the water that also exists at about 50 kilometers from the ground to form a tremendously corrosive rain.

Now, that rain doesn't even reach the ground because surface temperatures reach nearly 500 degrees, the typical temperature of a closed chimney, so the "rain" evaporates before it hits the ground.

If on Venus, with a very hot and dense atmosphere, clouds of sulfuric acid form and it can rain, on Saturn what it rains is laughing gas, helium.

This is a phenomenon not directly observed, but it seems the most plausible explanation to interpret a curious effect: the planet Saturn emits more energy than it receives from the Sun. As the existence of a perpetual motion is considered impossible, the energy emitted by Saturn must come out of somewhere, and the explanation is that the giant planet with the precious rings is still, in a sense, contracting, a process in which energy (gravitational, it is said) is released.

This process would be governed by the formation of helium drops at depths that are not insignificant, because Saturn also does not have a rocky surface as we imagine a "normal" planet!

The planet would only have a rocky and/or icy core with a mass about 10-20 times that of the Earth and twice the size, but "buried" under other liquid (hydrogen) and gaseous layers 5 times wider.

The helium droplets would "fall" into the planet in a shower increasing mass to smaller radii, which would release gravitational energy.

Something similar to what was explained for rain occurs with ice and snow.

Many times we will have read, at least those of us who like astronomy, that the polar caps of Mars are frozen.

We will even have seen photographs with a white blanket over those areas of the Martian planet.

They look like photographs of our own planet and its poles, but the white mantle that forms the caps of Mars isn't water, it's carbon dioxide.

A compound that is gaseous on Earth except in fire extinguishers, on Mars, given that the temperature and pressure of the atmosphere are much lower, it can precipitate in the form of... "snow", "carbonic snow", yes We've heard it around here thanks to the fire extinguishers.

In fact, on Mars there is a carbon dioxide cycle to some extent similar to that of water on Earth:

If there is a carbon dioxide cycle on Mars similar to the water cycle on Earth, on Titan, a moon of Saturn, which is now about 1.4 billion kilometers away (that's 1 hour 17 light minutes away), where! we have been, in fact we have landed!, there is a cycle of something that now also worries us a lot because the price does not stop rising, they cut it off, they destroy the ducts through which it circulates and what else am I going to tell you.

Yes, I'm talking about methane!

There are lakes on Titan, but that's another word that falls short.

They are lakes of methane and ethane (the latter being more abundant).

The origin of these compounds is quite different from those on Earth, where they are fossil fuels.

And there must also be storms and rain that feeds those lakes.

We don't have time or space for more, so we'll leave a rain of iron for another article.

And we will also look for other words that fall short to say everything we feel, that there is nothing more beautiful than the firmament, paraphrasing Social Security (also a fashionable topic in our times, we do not appreciate or care enough, nor to her nor to the doctors who partially support it).

Cosmic Void

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