# What if there was a planet made out of 100% water



## Whimsica (Sep 21, 2013)

Or an invisible planet that still has gravity, only it can't be seen, and detail of it is very unknown to people

I was just wondering if this seems um... possible.

Just saying, my stories are anything but serious so don't take my ideas seriously. I still have the brain of a child and I pretty much write for myself, for now.
I'm creating my own solar system because I'm fascinated by the possibilities in space...


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## Outiboros (Sep 21, 2013)

An invisible planet is impossible. 'Invisible' matter is non-existent. As for the water-world... http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2012/13/full/

It won't be a planet made solely of water, nor will it be a planet that will have Earth-like oceans. It would very likely have either no liquid water at all and be a ball of ice, or have a thick atmosphere of water vapour. In any case it would be unsuitable for life.

Good luck with your solar system. If you're really interested of the physics of it all, there's a popular science book/novel written by Terry Pratchett called the Science of Discworld that attempts to work through the basics of it.


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## qwertyman (Sep 22, 2013)

[h=2]What if there was a planet made out of 100% water[/h]The planet would be called IJKLMN

Who gets the cake?


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## MrPizzle (Sep 22, 2013)

qwertyman said:


> *What if there was a planet made out of 100% water*
> 
> The planet would be called IJKLMN
> 
> Who gets the cake?



I just killed Lenny Marriott's nan?


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## qwertyman (Sep 22, 2013)

MrPizzle said:


> I just killed Lenny Marriott's nan?



No cake, not even a marzipan one.


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## Terry D (Sep 22, 2013)

Outiboros said:


> An invisible planet is impossible. 'Invisible' matter is non-existent. As for the water-world... http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2012/13/full/
> 
> It won't be a planet made solely of water, nor will it be a planet that will have Earth-like oceans. It would very likely have either no liquid water at all and be a ball of ice, or have a thick atmosphere of water vapour. In any case it would be unsuitable for life.
> 
> Good luck with your solar system. If you're really interested of the physics of it all, there's a popular science book/novel written by Terry Pratchett called the Science of Discworld that attempts to work through the basics of it.



It depends on what you mean by "invisible". Most of the matter in the universe is 'dark' matter not directly 'visible' and its presence can only be inferred by the reaction of visible matter to it. We don't yet know enough about dark matter to say a dark matter planet is impossible. It doesn't violate any known laws of physics.


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## Outiboros (Sep 23, 2013)

Terry D said:


> It depends on what you mean by "invisible". Most of the matter in the universe is 'dark' matter not directly 'visible' and its presence can only be inferred by the reaction of visible matter to it. We don't yet know enough about dark matter to say a dark matter planet is impossible. It doesn't violate any known laws of physics.


It doesn't, no. I could argue that we've never seen an invisible planet, but that doesn't prove much, does it? But 'cold dark matter' would still be visible, in a way, even though it hypothetically interacts extremely weakly with electromagnetic radiation.

Wait, now I'm mixing things up - does cold dark matter simply not reflect light, or does it not interfere with it at all? It's the second, isn't it? Then that _would _make it invisible.


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## qwertyman (Sep 23, 2013)

qwertyman said:


> *What if there was a planet made out of 100% water*
> 
> The planet would be called IJKLMN
> 
> Who gets the cake?



Times up, nobody gets the cake..... IJKLMN = h2o

Snigger.


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## The Tourist (Sep 23, 2013)

Being from Wisconsin, I was wondering what if there was a planet made out of old motorcycle parts and bratwurst.  Duh, it was so obvious, it would look like Milwaukee's Juneau Avenue headed south.

I must admit, this is an excellent thread, and I think writers need to fantasize about such things.  Our stories create a different reality.  That then translates to oddball social mores, a differing form of government, even the currency and coins in the lead's pocket.

In my story, "aeroplanes" have been outlawed due to the vast carnage of the preceding war to end all wars.  But the vehicles of the present conflict are made from the discarded fuselages.  After all, think of all the T-6 aircraft aluminum, wiring and hydraulic lines that are just laying around.

So I had to ask myself, what would a world look like if it was recycled from the age of flight?  I decided that they would stuff huge, turbo charged Kenworth truck engines into lightweight multi-wheeled attack platforms bristling with anything that spit lead.  Chuck Yeager meets Mad Max meets Tim The Toolman.

Oh, everything leaks, parts break, and the computer has just been invented...


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## dale (Sep 24, 2013)

oh!!!!! oh!!!!! i know!!!!! i know!!!!! it would be inhabited by pretty much 100% aquatic life-forms.


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## Morkonan (Sep 26, 2013)

Whimsica said:


> [h=2]What if there was a planet made out of 100% water 				...


[/h]
Well, that's pretty doubtful. But, let's say it could happen. What you'd find is a water planet with a core made of a sort of super-water in an exotic "frozen-hot" state, since water doesn't compress. Your "atmosphere" would be water, to varying degrees of density, until it wasn't, anymore. (Much like our own planet in which "water" is just another type of atmosphere hosted here.)



> Or an invisible planet that still has gravity, only it can't be seen, and detail of it is very unknown to people



Not impossible, but highly unlikely. By "invisible", you have to take into consideration what methods are being used to "observe" it. Visible light? Maybe it's in some sort of gravitational shadow relative to an observer? (Gravitational lensing sort of effect) The entire EM-Spectrum? Maybe there's some sort of device that masks its presence?

For a completely "invisible" planet, at least to an outside observer, locating one inside a very large black hole is possible. If it was orbiting the singularity within the black hole, it could not, necessarily, be inferred from the outside except as a component of the total mass of the black hole as expressed outside of the black hole.


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## Greimour (Sep 27, 2013)

Skipping the science behind it, there is nothing wrong with an invisible planet. The question is, how does it relate to your story... You can ignore the science by simply not explaining the reason for its apparent invisible attributes. Not explaining is the best method of gaining plausability. You can't argue that something does not exist on the principle that it has not been discovered. 

I read a science mag once that stated life cannot live without sunlight, water and oxygen... making earth such a rare occruence in nature it actually makes one wonder if it was in fact created. The chances of a rock entering oribit at the exact distance required from the sun.. etc.. etc.. blah.. blah.. blah... ... in the same magazine, it listed creatures that had "appeared from nowhere" in an underground (without light) isolation bunker housing extremely harmful radiation (i dont remember the specifics but) it basically told how a low (to no) oxygen room lacking sunlight and natural water (there was liquid, completely polluted by radiation, i have no idea what that liquid substance was) had somehow found/become home to organisms that didn't appear to be there in the beginning. I wish I could find reference to this for you... 

Point is...

You're writing a story...

Red Riding Hood spoke to a wolf... ignoring the brothers grim original version, where the wolf was actually a predatory man... how many of you asked why the wolf could talk?
"My what big eyes you have..."
"All the better to see you with, my dear..."

Three Little Pigs...
Since when do pigs build houses? They roll around in their own excretion...

The Navigator (Film)
One of my fave films of all time... from a scientific standpoint, didn't really have any basis of truth...

Cell by Stephen King.
Every phone (or at least cell phone) in the world rings at the same time and everyone who answers goes crazy... where is the scientific explanation of that? An impossibly plausible sentence such as "a frequency sent down the line made you crazy" was all it would take for people to go with the flow of the story...


A world of complete water?
Waterworld - Film
Sure it did in fact have land, but the truth is what you believe it to be, and many believed that there was no land at all... all you should do is explain how the hell they had oxygen when there was no land above water to house things like trees. Perhaps plants growing in tropical shllow waters actually had stems that stretched out beyond the surface and gave the planet enough oxygen for life - (if life was actually on the planet - along with oxygen)



--

I would happily believ in invisible planets and planets made of water in a fictional story that contained absolutely no explanation of why they are that way. Only when it had a direct need to be adressed would I be at all bothered by any lack of explanation. 

For the planet of water, did you mean water purely on the surface, or right down to a liquid core? That kind of thing would just make me think of an entirely too large sphere of water in space, not a planet that orbits a sun... too close it evaporates, too far it freezes and at the perfect point of distance... how does it hold shape or form? It would need a gravitational centre... but as a piece of fiction... you could simply have a single line saying: "Scientists are still studying how this impossibility came to be" and no more questions about it would be asked...
However, I still would not call it a planet... a riding theme in the story could be a scientific debate classifying the sphere of water as "a planet, or not a planet, that is the question"

---

Ignore the science... fiction has no use for it.


~Kev


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## Outiboros (Sep 27, 2013)

Ramble mode engaged. Not trying to be hostile: just going to note some things that jumped into mind.




Greimour said:


> Skipping the science behind it, there is nothing wrong with an invisible planet. The question is, how does it relate to your story... You can ignore the science by simply not explaining the reason for its apparent invisible attributes. Not explaining is the best method of gaining plausability. You can't argue that something does not exist on the principle that it has not been discovered.
> 
> I read a science mag once that stated life cannot live without sunlight, water and oxygen... making earth such a rare occruence in nature it actually makes one wonder if it was in fact created. The chances of a rock entering oribit at the exact distance required from the sun.. etc.. etc.. blah.. blah.. blah... ...


The Earth didn't enter orbit around the Sun - both formed from the same dust cloud, which is where we got our composition, orbit and spin. Sol and Earth are sisters, not mother and daughter, adopted or not.

Also, sunlight, water and oxygen are probably only few of the parameters they mentioned. Goldilocks zone is probably a word they used. In any case, one can make up an infinite amount of parameters needed for terrestrial life to function, but using them in such an argument - to state that the Earth is unique, and that the existence of life is statistically enormously unlikely - is a bit broken. Sure, terrestrial life needs those parameters, but only because it adapted to survive in that environment. Indeed, oxygen is a highly dangerous and corrosive element - and yet we've adapted not only to survive in it, but to thrive in it. We breathe toxins and kick behinds doin' it.



> in the same magazine, it listed creatures that had "appeared from nowhere" in an underground (without light) isolation bunker housing extremely harmful radiation (i dont remember the specifics but) it basically told how a low (to no) oxygen room lacking sunlight and natural water (there was liquid, completely polluted by radiation, i have no idea what that liquid substance was) had somehow found/become home to organisms that didn't appear to be there in the beginning. I wish I could find reference to this for you...


 That's generatio spontanea, an idea that was big in classical and medieval biology - the idea that animals just kind of came into being. Rats were generated by garbage, maggots by rotting meat, worms by earth, birds by forests, etc. I didn't think you'd find that in a modern magazine...



> A world of complete water?
> Waterworld - Film
> Sure it did in fact have land, but the truth is what you believe it to be, and many believed that there was no land at all... all you should do is explain how the hell they had oxygen when there was no land above water to house things like trees. Perhaps plants growing in tropical shllow waters actually had stems that stretched out beyond the surface and gave the planet enough oxygen for life - (if life was actually on the planet - along with oxygen)


Waterworld was a world of oceans, not a world of water. There was still an ocean floor. The water was just a very, very thin layer over the rock. A world composed completely of water would be drastically different: there would be no shallow water, only hundreds of kilometres of abyss.



> Ignore the science... fiction has no use for it.
> ~Kev


 I don't agree. I don't agree at all. Sure, in fantasy stories science is often ignored, and I'm not saying it shouldn't be, but in science fiction stories the entire theme and plot can turn and revolve around science. It definitely has its place.


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## Terry D (Sep 28, 2013)

> Sure it did in fact have land, but the truth is what you believe it to be, and many believed that there was no land at all... all you should do is explain how the hell they had oxygen when there was no land above water to house things like trees. Perhaps plants growing in tropical shllow waters actually had stems that stretched out beyond the surface and gave the planet enough oxygen for life - (if life was actually on the planet - along with oxygen)



Actually most of Earth's oxygen is generated by oceanic diatoms, not land based plants. Finding living organisms in a sequestered, high radiation, low oxygen environment isn't surprising. There are a number of bacteria and extremophiles which could tolerate that. Heck, even cockroaches would stand a chance.

Ignoring the science depends on the type of story being written. If it is a science fiction tale then ignoring the science to the degree suggested would be foolhardy. Readers would shut down without some sort of plausible explanation. In fantasy it might fly, but it would still be risky.


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## Cran (Sep 28, 2013)

A planet composed of 100% water would be boring; devoid of life (which requires other compounds to be present) and almost entirely devoid of chemical activity (apart from the possibility of photolysis at or above the defined surface). Thankfully, that ideal is not likely in our universe; although water is common enough, it is not known to exist in complete isolation. Galaxies are dirty places; very dusty.

If we can move away from the scientifically scorned concept of the absolute (ie, drop the 100% idea), then planet-like bodies exist within our own solar system (and presumably many others) which are composed of "mostly water", and these have much more interesting possibilities under the right conditions. Of these, the closest to our sun (and to us) is Europa, which is thought to be a small solid core of silicates, carbonates, hydrocompounds, and minor metals, inside a chemically rich (salty) outer layer of water of around 100 km (60 mi) average depth. With the necessary chemical ingredients, and plenty of internal energy from tidal forcing, Europa is a potential habitat for macroscopic, and more likely for microscopic, life as we know it.

The two largest Galilean moons also fall into the "mostly water" category, but without the amount of internal energy needed to allow for the physical and chemical actions that accompany water in one of its fluid forms. Their collected non-aqueous materials therefore have not progressed beyond the initial differentiation process and tend to litter the surfaces, giving them their much darker dustier appearances. 

Although its surface chemistry is dominated by hydrocarbons, water is still a major component of Saturn's largest satellite, Titan. For surface water dominance, Enceladus, Saturn's sixth largest moon, rivals Europa, and exhibits the internal energy required for water to exist in a fluid form below the solid surface and therefore provide the physical and chemical environment for life as we know it. 

But, for "mostly water" planet-like objects that approach the original ideal of "virtually all water", we need to look beyond the realm of the gas giants at objects that were briefly called planets until the traditionalists kicked up a ruckus about how hard it would be to teach the children that the number of planets in our solar system is not yet fully known. So we now call Pluto-Charon and the rest of the newly-discovered trans-Neptunian planets "dwarf planets" and don't worry so much about memorising their names (like Sedna and Quaoar). These, and the unknown but potentially thousands of Kuiper Belt Objects, are the most water-rich naturally-occurring objects that could loosely be called planets in any sense. Unfortunately, they do not seem to have a sufficient ready supply of energy to provide a life-supporting environment. 

For natural objects with even higher water fractions, we are no longer looking at planet-like bodies; we are looking at various agglomerations of chunks of ice, most of which are located in a region called the Oort Cloud, and some of which like to play tourist and visit the more happening parts of the system - we call them comets. Even these are not pure water; more like dusty snowballs with pockets of trapped gases. Although many comets (and therefore also Oort Cloud objects) seem to contain organic (or chondtritic) compounds, harbouring microscopic extremophiles is less likely as active water chemistry would appear to be limited at best. 

For something like a Hollywood Waterworld*, with a gaseous atmosphere and liquid surface water, we need a Goldilocks zone (the just right distance range from the star) and a magnetic field (to deflect most of the ionised solar wind particles around the planet). To generate a strong magnetic field, the planet needs an electrically-charged (ionised) fluid rotating core; ours is mostly high pressure hot fluid iron, Jupiter's is high pressure fluid hydrogen. Although a liquid salt core is not likely, a sufficiently hypersaline (ion-rich) deep fluid layer around a rotating hot ice core might generate enough charge to provide a magnetic field of sufficient strength to allow for the retention of a viable atmosphere. Whilst volumetrically compressed forms of high pressure ice remain electrically neutral, ionic exchange can occur across the phase boundary with the surrounding hypersaline solution; still, the largest fraction of electrical flow would be due to the contained ions in the hypersaline layer.

_*or Kamino (from Star Wars)_


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## Robert_S (Sep 29, 2013)

purged


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## Kevin (Sep 30, 2013)

Robert_S said:


> And beer oceans.


."..and ale where there's air." - _Starz_

So what if wasn't just water, but was liquid(s),dissolved compounds, maybe with a solid core, ice at the poles, seasons...


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## tabasco5 (Oct 1, 2013)

Anything is possible in the world of fiction.


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