hydrogen tagged posts

On present-day Europa, the researchers expect water could reach as deep as 25 kilometers (15 miles) into the rocky interior, driving key chemical reactions throughout a deeper fraction of Europa’s seafloor. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa could have the necessary balance of chemical energy for life, even if the moon lacks volcanic hydrothermal activity, finds a new study. Europa is strongly believed to hide a deep ocean of salty liquid water beneath its icy shell. The answer may hinge on whether Europa has environments where chemicals are matched in the right proportions to power biological processes. Life on Earth exploits such niches.

JPL scientists compared Europa’s potential for producing hydrogen and oxygen with that of Earth, through processe...

Two-dimensional metastructured film with Titanium Oxide is fabricated as a photo-catalytic photoanode with exceptional visible light absorption. Credit: Copyright UNIST

A new multilayered (Au NPs/TiO2/Au) photoelectrode boosts ability of solar water-splitting to produce hydrogen. According to the research team, this special photoelectrode, inspired by the way plants convert sunlight into energy is capable of absorbing visible light from the sun, and then using it to split water molecules (H2O) into H2, O2.

This multilayered photoelectrode takes the form of 2D hybrid metal-dielectric structure, which mainly consists of 3 layers of gold (Au) film, ultrathin TiO2 layer (20 nm), and gold nanoparticles (Au NPs)...

A computer simulation of the formation of complex organic molecules in space. The spherical molecular structures forming on the graphene surface at 3000 K are similar in shape to fullerenes. The red atoms originated in the gas phase and the white atoms are from the surface. Credit: Marshall and Sadeghpour

The space between stars is not empty, but contains an abundance of diffuse material, about 5-10% of the total mass of our galaxy (excluding dark matter). Most of the material is gas, predominantly hydrogen, but with a small and important component in complex carbon-bearing molecules including ethene, benzene, propynal, methanol and other alcohols, cyanides, simple amino acids, and even larger molecules (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and buckyballs) with 50 or more carbon atoms...

Coincidence spectrometer employed in the present work. The HPGe crystal (yellow) is located in close geometry to the target. Both the target and the HPGe detector are surrounded by a 16-segment NaI(Tl) annulus (green). The five-sided plastic scintillators used to reject cosmic-ray muons are not shown.

Stars shine because nuclear reactions in their interiors convert mass to energy at a rate of many million tons/ s. At the same time, these nuclear reactions change the composition of the matter in the stellar interior. Thermonuclear fusion takes place quiescently in stars that are much older than the Sun, and also explosively in novae and supernovae. To explain how stars work, we need to measure the rates of the important nuclear reactions...