See amazing NASA photo...
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050401.html
Unbelievable!!!
Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Accelerating Expansion of the Known Universe
For about the last 15 years, astronomers, who have long known about the expanding of the Universe, have been aware that that rate of expansion seems to be accelerating.
The phenomenon is sometimes attributed to "Phantom Energy," which is a concept like "dark matter" -- like "luminiferous ether," it was a concept that was thought of not because the thing named was detected, but rather because scientists observing the behavior of matter concluded, "Look, it simply HAS to be there!" In the case of "luminiferous ether" -- stuff which, when waves are in it, they are perceived by us as light -- it appears that scientists have been wrong.
I have a very simple explanation for the appearance that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate -- accelerating expansion is what being sucked inside a black hole looks like as one rushes faster and faster toward the center after entering the event horizon and experiencing time reversal.
The phenomenon is sometimes attributed to "Phantom Energy," which is a concept like "dark matter" -- like "luminiferous ether," it was a concept that was thought of not because the thing named was detected, but rather because scientists observing the behavior of matter concluded, "Look, it simply HAS to be there!" In the case of "luminiferous ether" -- stuff which, when waves are in it, they are perceived by us as light -- it appears that scientists have been wrong.
I have a very simple explanation for the appearance that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate -- accelerating expansion is what being sucked inside a black hole looks like as one rushes faster and faster toward the center after entering the event horizon and experiencing time reversal.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Mysterious Globular Clusters
Globular clusters -- huge, ball-shaped clusters of stars -- are some of the most beautiful objects in the astronomers' telescopes.
There are about 200 of them positioned around the core of our galaxy.
But, after that, they don't make much sense.
Astronomers maintain that our galaxy is a gravitational thing -- that the gravity generated by the whole of the galaxy upon the stars within it keeps the stars in place, here, where our galaxy is, in space.
Yet, astronomers say that the evidence within the globular clusters is that the stars they are by-and-large made-of are very, very, old, suggesting that the clusters have an age of around 12 billion years. If they are that old and have been hanging around our galaxy for that long a time, why haven't they been pulled into the galaxy? Why hasn't gravity pulled each cluster and the galaxy together?
And if each globular cluster is itself a gravitational object, why hasn't gravity caused each globular cluster to collapse in upon itself, at the point of its own core?
Our astronomers answer, "Orbiting. Within each globular cluster, the stars orbit around a common center, perhaps around a black hole. And each globular cluster, as a unit, doesn't fall into the core of our galaxy, because each orbits around the core of our galaxy, in-and-out of the plate of our galaxy."
But each of those answers generates questions of its own.
If each globular cluster is orbiting the center of our galaxy, how come the globulat clusters are each so wonderfully organized? They are balls of stars, for heaven's sake. If one spiral galaxy passes through another, mutual gravitational attraction causes them to self-destruct. It's a mess!
There are about 200 of them positioned around the core of our galaxy.
But, after that, they don't make much sense.
Astronomers maintain that our galaxy is a gravitational thing -- that the gravity generated by the whole of the galaxy upon the stars within it keeps the stars in place, here, where our galaxy is, in space.
Yet, astronomers say that the evidence within the globular clusters is that the stars they are by-and-large made-of are very, very, old, suggesting that the clusters have an age of around 12 billion years. If they are that old and have been hanging around our galaxy for that long a time, why haven't they been pulled into the galaxy? Why hasn't gravity pulled each cluster and the galaxy together?
And if each globular cluster is itself a gravitational object, why hasn't gravity caused each globular cluster to collapse in upon itself, at the point of its own core?
Our astronomers answer, "Orbiting. Within each globular cluster, the stars orbit around a common center, perhaps around a black hole. And each globular cluster, as a unit, doesn't fall into the core of our galaxy, because each orbits around the core of our galaxy, in-and-out of the plate of our galaxy."
But each of those answers generates questions of its own.
If each globular cluster is orbiting the center of our galaxy, how come the globulat clusters are each so wonderfully organized? They are balls of stars, for heaven's sake. If one spiral galaxy passes through another, mutual gravitational attraction causes them to self-destruct. It's a mess!
Globular clusters in cluster/spiral galaxy collisions are subject to the exact same gravitational forces. If each globular cluster splashes through the galactic plate about once every 125 million years -- that's about 100 "splashes" altogether since each cluster came into existence -- shouldn't each cluster give some evidence of this, in the telescope -- at least a few of them should have been visibly elongated by the encounter!
But, no, there are no misshapen globular clusters -- not even among the ones a short distance from the galactic plate.
And if each globular cluster does not collapse in upon itself, because each cluster's stars are all orbiting around each cluster's own core, then why haven't the clusters each formed itself into a mini-spiral galaxy. Billions of years of close passes between member stars within each cluster quickly "shakes out" any wonderful ball shape and organizes the batch of stars into a happy spiral shape, reflecting the plane accidentally having the "predominating" mass, rotating around the core.
Yet there is not any organization of the internal motion at all!
Each cluster is perfect!
And, if any of the clusters have a black hole at its core, then shouldn't there be reports of high-speed stars visibly orbiting the black hole core at fantastic rates of speed.
When astronomers aimed their telescopes at the incipient black hole at our galaxy's center, they were astonished when they realized that they could actually see stars in the act of orbiting at absurdly high rates of speed.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Impact Craters on Earth
Most people think that that meteor crater in Arizona, Barringer Crater, is a "one time thing," though that is not ay all the case.
In a sense, the answer to the question, "Has the Earth been hit with meteors frequently?" is in the sky, above your head, on the surface of the Moon.
Essentially, the Earth would have been bombarded with the same array of "cosmic cannon fire" -- meteorites, asteroids, and comets -- as the Moon.
There would be some difference because of the atmosphere. Meteorites smaller than a certain size frequently don't make it down to ground level, in Earth's case, because unlike the Moon the Earth has an atmosphere, and friction, when they slam into the atmosphere, heats them, melts them and vaporizes them.
But there would also be a difference arising from the fact that the Earth is much larger than the Moon. Our gravity, about 6 times that of the Moon, attracts a lot more naturally-occurring "space junk," and therefore many more impacts.
The main reason why the Earth does not look like the Moon is because our atmosphere and the life forms it supports quickly fills in craters with deposits which masks their existence. Earth would look like the Moon were it not for our atmosphere.
Despite the healing effects of Earth's atmosphere, many impact craters are still visible all over the Earth.
Before Barringer Crater was formed by a 20 megaton impact about 49,000 years ago, a meterorite slammed into Wolf Creek, Australia, around 300,000 B.C.
A large piece of rock slammed into Bosumtwi, Ghana, around 1,000,000 years ago with an enormous impact of 7,000 megatons.
The Manicougan, Quebec crater, generated by an impact about 214,ooo,ooo years ago, has a substantial deposit of rebound material in the center of it, after the meteorite slammed into the Earth and buried itself there.
The Brent, Ontaria crater was genetated by a 250 megaton impact about 400,000,000 years ago.
Many other impact craters on Earth have been photographed from space.
In a sense, the answer to the question, "Has the Earth been hit with meteors frequently?" is in the sky, above your head, on the surface of the Moon.
Essentially, the Earth would have been bombarded with the same array of "cosmic cannon fire" -- meteorites, asteroids, and comets -- as the Moon.
There would be some difference because of the atmosphere. Meteorites smaller than a certain size frequently don't make it down to ground level, in Earth's case, because unlike the Moon the Earth has an atmosphere, and friction, when they slam into the atmosphere, heats them, melts them and vaporizes them.
But there would also be a difference arising from the fact that the Earth is much larger than the Moon. Our gravity, about 6 times that of the Moon, attracts a lot more naturally-occurring "space junk," and therefore many more impacts.
The main reason why the Earth does not look like the Moon is because our atmosphere and the life forms it supports quickly fills in craters with deposits which masks their existence. Earth would look like the Moon were it not for our atmosphere.
Despite the healing effects of Earth's atmosphere, many impact craters are still visible all over the Earth.
Before Barringer Crater was formed by a 20 megaton impact about 49,000 years ago, a meterorite slammed into Wolf Creek, Australia, around 300,000 B.C.
A large piece of rock slammed into Bosumtwi, Ghana, around 1,000,000 years ago with an enormous impact of 7,000 megatons.
The Manicougan, Quebec crater, generated by an impact about 214,ooo,ooo years ago, has a substantial deposit of rebound material in the center of it, after the meteorite slammed into the Earth and buried itself there.
The Brent, Ontaria crater was genetated by a 250 megaton impact about 400,000,000 years ago.
Many other impact craters on Earth have been photographed from space.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
The Nemesis Theory
The Nemesis Theory is one of the great ideas in the history of the world. It really is.
It's like this...
A paleontologist sifting through layers of fossil beds noticed that every so often the layers of fossils were topped-off by a bizarre layer of a substance called Iridium.
Iridium is one of the rarest elements on Earth. Yet here it was, in layers, topping off strata, or layers, in fossil beds all over the world.
Careful measurement of the age of the amount of time passing between the Iridium layers yield a modal average of about 62,000,000 years.
So, there was an appearance that once every 62,000,000 years, something was causing a layer of one of the world's rarest element to be spread like icing on a cake all over the world.
While it is very rare on Earth (except between fossil layers), Iridium is a common component in asteroids. So, the researchers thought, "Assuming asteroids pulverizing themselves into dust by smashing into the Earth once every 62,000,000 years is the reason for the Iridium and the regular mass extinctions generating so many fossils, what mechanism would cause asteroids to target Earth once every 62,000,000 years?"
And then somebody had a wonderful idea, again maybe the best idea anyone in science has ever had.
If we look skyward through our telescopes, we see that, surprisingly, most stars in our galaxy are binary or triplex star systems -- 1 of 2 or 3 stars orbiting one another.
Frequently, orbits of anything around something else in space are extremely elongated -- much longer than wider. If the Earth is part of a binary star system, and if the Earth's partner in that binary star system is a relatively small, almost invisible brown star companion, then that brown star companion might have one of those elongated orbits, 62,000,000 years in length, so that, once every 62,000,000 years, the brown star companion punches through the cloud of ice and rock around the Sun, beyond Pluto's orbit, called the Oort Cloud, and drags millions of asteroids and comets in with it by its own gravity.
These asteroids and comets become bullets in a shooting gallery, smashing into the planets for tens of thousands of years, until the supply of bullets is exhausted, and the planets thereafter enjoy millions of years of relative peace until the brown star companion punches its next hole through the Oort Cloud. Before that period of peace, Earth endures a mass extinction as it is bombarded with the brown star's asteroid and comet “artillery,” and is once again powdered with Iridium dust.
Scientists named the theoretical brown star companion of Earth "Nemesis" -- enemy.
Currently, some astronomers are engaged in a search for Nemesis, through the Oort Cloud, a difficult endeavor. Nemesis, if it exists, is believer to be about 1 to 1.5 light years away right now, racing for the highpoint of its orbit.
No, we don't expect another visit soon.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Giant Cue Balls in Space Acting Like Lighthouses
NEUTRON STAR FORMATION
Billiard enthusiasts, you should like this piece.
Space is apparently filled with something like giant cue balls, about 8 miles across, rotating and emitting a beam of particles, sort of like a lighthouse on America's shores emitting a rotating beam of light.
They are called "neutron stars" which have become "pulsars."
That's nice. What does that mean?
Well, it's like this: A star starts out as a great big ball of hydrogen gas which begins to accumulate as gravity generated by all of the hydrogen particles together begins to pull each of the hydrogen particles in toward a common center.
The hydrogen particles, individually, "don't like" this arrangement one little bit. Like people jammed into a subway car on a hot Friday evening during rush hour, the hydrogen particles start angrily pushing and shoving against each other, getting hotter and hotter, until they start ramming each other hard enough for each of their centers, a proton, to start sticking together like Siamese quadruplets -- 4 hydrogen particles smash together and form a "4-ball unit" made of 2 protons and 2 other protons which have been forced by the smashing together to become neutrons.
When that flip occurs, from protons to neutrons, 2 electrons are fired out, as well as a whole bunch of other hot, dangerous stuff which in a sense used to be the ingredients which made those to neutrons be protons.
Get it?
That stuff flying out of the particles when they turn from 4 protons into one "Siamese quadruplet" particle comprised of 2 attached protons attached to 2 attached neutrons actually -- a helium nucleus -- is what makes hydrogen bombs destructive.
So, stars are great big balls of hot hydrogen gas being squeezed into hot helium gas, and giving-off a whole lot of heat in the process.
As time passes, as more and more hydrogen gets turned into helium in the star, the larger number of helium particles jumping around means that other kinds of substances will be made as the "rush hour crowd" of particles angrily bang into and squeeze each other.
But these other substances are all hotter.
The increasing heat makes the star get bigger.
As the star gets bigger, it begins to cool -- the "rush hour crowd" of particles get less angry because they feel less jammed-into the "subway car," so to speak.
And the star reaches maximum heat and size.
Our Sun will do this someday, swallowing up all of the planets out to Jupiter as it does so.
But when the star is big and hot like this, it burns up fuel like crazy.
Finally, the star runs out of fuel to burn, like a car running out of gas. (Once I was able to role up to the pump empty after momentum carried it the last one-quarter mile down the highway after the engine stopped! I just wanted to brag about that!)
At the moment this occurs, all of the particles comprising the star suddenly have no violent star heat holding them up, and the gravity of all of them starts pulling each of them toward one mathematical point, the center.
And not only that, because gravity is strongest at the surface of any planet or star, gravity is pulling the hardest on the portions of the star farthest from the center, so that everything tends to arrive at the mathematical center point at exactly the same moment.
Scientists are waiting for that to happen to the huge star in the constellation Orion, Betelgeuse, right now.
When that happens, it's like two hands smashing together so hard they explode.
There is a tremendous outpouring and inpouring of energy from the point in the mass at a distance above the center where the energy of the smacking-together is hottest and greatest.
That inpouring shrinks and crushes the inside of that star like God's mightiest punch. Foom! At that moment, if the insides of the star being mashed together have just the right weight, they get smashed into a perfectly smooth ball of neutrons 8 mile wide. The conversion of protons back into neutrons releases gigantic quantities of energy, adding to the overall explosion to the point where, for a short time, it is as bright as an entire galaxy. This is called a "supernova."
As the remaining tiny 8 mile wide ball of neutrons cools and settles down, it is doing something funny.
If the star was rotating on its axis before the falling inwards, then the falling inwards was like a pirouetting ice skater pulling-in her spread arms. The collapsed-inward mass spins even faster.
Our wonderful nerdy astronomers tell us that the numbers suggest that 1,000 times per second is the greatest rate of rotation possible for a neutron star. (I guess after that their own centrifugal force starts throwing them apart.)
So, if we were in a space ship, and if we came upon a neutron star, and if we could see it -- and there's room for doubt about that last "if" for a few reasons -- then it might look like a ridiculous perfectly smooth cue ball rotating hundreds of times per second.
A CLOSER LOOK AT THE FINAL PRODUCT
First, it is beginning to appear that every neutron star spins. Why? Because it is almost impossible that its parent star was a perfect non-spinner. For the neutron star to be a non-spinner, the parent star would have to be an absolutely, positively perfect non-spinner, because when that big ol` parent-star "ice skater" draws in her "arms" during the supernova, the shrinkage from 400,000,000 miles across at greatest extent down to 8 miles across as a neutron star multiplies rotation speed gigantically. To put it another way, "50 million times even almost nothing = something impressive."
So, again, odds are that every single neutron star spins.
Next, as all of my friends will stampede this Blog to tell you, no one, not even yours truly, is perfect pure.
Well, neutron stars have the same problem.
Just about all neutron stars have impurities in them, being squeezed and releasing a constant stream of energy.
From where, on the neutron star?
Apparently, through a crack.
The excess energy is fired out of the crack like a beam of light from a lighthouse. And it goes out a very, very, very long distance.
As the beams sweep past the Earth, they make our radio telescopes go "click." Radio telescopes are like the Arecibo telescope and the Very Large Array...
...which you can see in the movie Contact (which I recommend to all who don't mind the mild sex scene in it). Several of the radio telescopes have recorded the clicks of various spinning neutron stars, called "pulsars." You can hear them here...
http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pulsar/Education/Sounds/sounds.html
There's something I haven't fully worked out to my own satisfaction, yet -- the effect of what is called "relativistic time dilation" on the whole thing.
In fact, time is slowed down by gravity. The more powerful the gravity, the more time slows down. This effect is called "relativistic time dilation."
So, if a neutron star happens to pass by earth close enough for a magnified view through a telescope, scientists watching the spaceship going to the neutron star through a telescope on Earth would see the spaceship travelling toward the neutron star at normal speed, then they would see a space-walking astronaut start being sucked-into the neutron star by its gravity.
Even though, at the neutron star, the space walker is being pulled-in faster and faster, back on Earth, because at the neutron star time is slower, the scientists, in their normal gravity looking through their telescopes, see the astronaut falling into the neutron star going slower and slooooooower and sloooooooooooooooooooower.
That's the strange effect of relativistic time dilation.
Well, what effect does this same phenomenon have on the beam of particles coming out of the neutron stare's time dilation?
How can more beam flashes be on the outside of the time dilation field than rotations in the time dilation field?
In any event, above I asked the question, Could neutron stars be seen by the eye, if a neutron star were to pass close by Earth?
Well, first, aside from the particle beam being squeezed out of the crack, pulsars don't have a light-emitting mechanism.
Normally, when we see something, light from an external source strikes the molecules of the object. Electrons orbiting the object jump into a more excited state momentarily, but then they extremely quickly lose their excitement, and fall back into a more stable electron orbit or "shell," emitting a new light particle or photon or quantum (whatever you want to call it), at a the same moment. When that newly emitted light particle strikes our eye, we "see" the object. (Light particles don't actually "bounce off" like rubber balls.)
Neutron stars are neutron stars because they have no electrons.
But electrons in their shells around the middle of their home atom, or nucleus, are the light-absorbing-and-emitting mechanism.
So, it appears that neutron stars may neither absorb light nor emit light.
How can our eyes "see" one?
Second, Even if they had a light-emitting mechanism, the relativistic time dilation will cause the wavelength of the light to become enormously different, making it the kind of light we can't see. The wavelength of visible light would become the wavelength of invisible light.
Finally -- and this is the coolest, most intriguing question of all, in this article, as far as I am concerned -- is the 8-mile-wide neutron star "below the quantum limit."
Here is what I mean.
Something magical happens all around us, but very few people know about it.
The tinier something is, the more powerful our microscope has to be to look at it.
However, this only works so much. It is not because our tools aren't good enough. Rather it's because of something called "the quantum limit."
Individual subatomic particles can't be looked at, because below a certain size they are always "quantum probability clouds." About such particles it's best to say, "They are 'there,' but not quite exactly there." Instead, the particle's "there-ness" is best described as a "probability cloud" -- "at time W, more likely than anything else at that point with coordinates X, W and Z."
When scientists began looking for the place where "probability-cloud-ness" ended and visibility began, they found even that all lone atoms and even some packages of multiple atoms -- "molecules" -- lacked "there-ness" and instead were invisible probability clouds.
Now here's my at-first-seemingly-ridiculous question: Since a neutron star is like a giant nucleus of a single atom, despite its 8 mile diameter is it "below the quantum limit" -- is it visible?
I don't know.
Billiard enthusiasts, you should like this piece.
Space is apparently filled with something like giant cue balls, about 8 miles across, rotating and emitting a beam of particles, sort of like a lighthouse on America's shores emitting a rotating beam of light.
They are called "neutron stars" which have become "pulsars."
That's nice. What does that mean?
Well, it's like this: A star starts out as a great big ball of hydrogen gas which begins to accumulate as gravity generated by all of the hydrogen particles together begins to pull each of the hydrogen particles in toward a common center.
The hydrogen particles, individually, "don't like" this arrangement one little bit. Like people jammed into a subway car on a hot Friday evening during rush hour, the hydrogen particles start angrily pushing and shoving against each other, getting hotter and hotter, until they start ramming each other hard enough for each of their centers, a proton, to start sticking together like Siamese quadruplets -- 4 hydrogen particles smash together and form a "4-ball unit" made of 2 protons and 2 other protons which have been forced by the smashing together to become neutrons.
When that flip occurs, from protons to neutrons, 2 electrons are fired out, as well as a whole bunch of other hot, dangerous stuff which in a sense used to be the ingredients which made those to neutrons be protons.
Get it?
That stuff flying out of the particles when they turn from 4 protons into one "Siamese quadruplet" particle comprised of 2 attached protons attached to 2 attached neutrons actually -- a helium nucleus -- is what makes hydrogen bombs destructive.
So, stars are great big balls of hot hydrogen gas being squeezed into hot helium gas, and giving-off a whole lot of heat in the process.
As time passes, as more and more hydrogen gets turned into helium in the star, the larger number of helium particles jumping around means that other kinds of substances will be made as the "rush hour crowd" of particles angrily bang into and squeeze each other.
But these other substances are all hotter.
The increasing heat makes the star get bigger.
As the star gets bigger, it begins to cool -- the "rush hour crowd" of particles get less angry because they feel less jammed-into the "subway car," so to speak.
And the star reaches maximum heat and size.
Our Sun will do this someday, swallowing up all of the planets out to Jupiter as it does so.
But when the star is big and hot like this, it burns up fuel like crazy.
Finally, the star runs out of fuel to burn, like a car running out of gas. (Once I was able to role up to the pump empty after momentum carried it the last one-quarter mile down the highway after the engine stopped! I just wanted to brag about that!)
At the moment this occurs, all of the particles comprising the star suddenly have no violent star heat holding them up, and the gravity of all of them starts pulling each of them toward one mathematical point, the center.
And not only that, because gravity is strongest at the surface of any planet or star, gravity is pulling the hardest on the portions of the star farthest from the center, so that everything tends to arrive at the mathematical center point at exactly the same moment.
Scientists are waiting for that to happen to the huge star in the constellation Orion, Betelgeuse, right now.
When that happens, it's like two hands smashing together so hard they explode.
There is a tremendous outpouring and inpouring of energy from the point in the mass at a distance above the center where the energy of the smacking-together is hottest and greatest.
That inpouring shrinks and crushes the inside of that star like God's mightiest punch. Foom! At that moment, if the insides of the star being mashed together have just the right weight, they get smashed into a perfectly smooth ball of neutrons 8 mile wide. The conversion of protons back into neutrons releases gigantic quantities of energy, adding to the overall explosion to the point where, for a short time, it is as bright as an entire galaxy. This is called a "supernova."
As the remaining tiny 8 mile wide ball of neutrons cools and settles down, it is doing something funny.
If the star was rotating on its axis before the falling inwards, then the falling inwards was like a pirouetting ice skater pulling-in her spread arms. The collapsed-inward mass spins even faster.
Our wonderful nerdy astronomers tell us that the numbers suggest that 1,000 times per second is the greatest rate of rotation possible for a neutron star. (I guess after that their own centrifugal force starts throwing them apart.)
So, if we were in a space ship, and if we came upon a neutron star, and if we could see it -- and there's room for doubt about that last "if" for a few reasons -- then it might look like a ridiculous perfectly smooth cue ball rotating hundreds of times per second.
A CLOSER LOOK AT THE FINAL PRODUCT
First, it is beginning to appear that every neutron star spins. Why? Because it is almost impossible that its parent star was a perfect non-spinner. For the neutron star to be a non-spinner, the parent star would have to be an absolutely, positively perfect non-spinner, because when that big ol` parent-star "ice skater" draws in her "arms" during the supernova, the shrinkage from 400,000,000 miles across at greatest extent down to 8 miles across as a neutron star multiplies rotation speed gigantically. To put it another way, "50 million times even almost nothing = something impressive."
So, again, odds are that every single neutron star spins.
Next, as all of my friends will stampede this Blog to tell you, no one, not even yours truly, is perfect pure.
Well, neutron stars have the same problem.
Just about all neutron stars have impurities in them, being squeezed and releasing a constant stream of energy.
From where, on the neutron star?
Apparently, through a crack.
The excess energy is fired out of the crack like a beam of light from a lighthouse. And it goes out a very, very, very long distance.
As the beams sweep past the Earth, they make our radio telescopes go "click." Radio telescopes are like the Arecibo telescope and the Very Large Array...
...which you can see in the movie Contact (which I recommend to all who don't mind the mild sex scene in it). Several of the radio telescopes have recorded the clicks of various spinning neutron stars, called "pulsars." You can hear them here...
http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pulsar/Education/Sounds/sounds.html
There's something I haven't fully worked out to my own satisfaction, yet -- the effect of what is called "relativistic time dilation" on the whole thing.
In fact, time is slowed down by gravity. The more powerful the gravity, the more time slows down. This effect is called "relativistic time dilation."
So, if a neutron star happens to pass by earth close enough for a magnified view through a telescope, scientists watching the spaceship going to the neutron star through a telescope on Earth would see the spaceship travelling toward the neutron star at normal speed, then they would see a space-walking astronaut start being sucked-into the neutron star by its gravity.
Even though, at the neutron star, the space walker is being pulled-in faster and faster, back on Earth, because at the neutron star time is slower, the scientists, in their normal gravity looking through their telescopes, see the astronaut falling into the neutron star going slower and slooooooower and sloooooooooooooooooooower.
That's the strange effect of relativistic time dilation.
Well, what effect does this same phenomenon have on the beam of particles coming out of the neutron stare's time dilation?
How can more beam flashes be on the outside of the time dilation field than rotations in the time dilation field?
In any event, above I asked the question, Could neutron stars be seen by the eye, if a neutron star were to pass close by Earth?
Well, first, aside from the particle beam being squeezed out of the crack, pulsars don't have a light-emitting mechanism.
Normally, when we see something, light from an external source strikes the molecules of the object. Electrons orbiting the object jump into a more excited state momentarily, but then they extremely quickly lose their excitement, and fall back into a more stable electron orbit or "shell," emitting a new light particle or photon or quantum (whatever you want to call it), at a the same moment. When that newly emitted light particle strikes our eye, we "see" the object. (Light particles don't actually "bounce off" like rubber balls.)
Neutron stars are neutron stars because they have no electrons.
But electrons in their shells around the middle of their home atom, or nucleus, are the light-absorbing-and-emitting mechanism.
So, it appears that neutron stars may neither absorb light nor emit light.
How can our eyes "see" one?
Second, Even if they had a light-emitting mechanism, the relativistic time dilation will cause the wavelength of the light to become enormously different, making it the kind of light we can't see. The wavelength of visible light would become the wavelength of invisible light.
Finally -- and this is the coolest, most intriguing question of all, in this article, as far as I am concerned -- is the 8-mile-wide neutron star "below the quantum limit."
Here is what I mean.
Something magical happens all around us, but very few people know about it.
The tinier something is, the more powerful our microscope has to be to look at it.
However, this only works so much. It is not because our tools aren't good enough. Rather it's because of something called "the quantum limit."
Individual subatomic particles can't be looked at, because below a certain size they are always "quantum probability clouds." About such particles it's best to say, "They are 'there,' but not quite exactly there." Instead, the particle's "there-ness" is best described as a "probability cloud" -- "at time W, more likely than anything else at that point with coordinates X, W and Z."
When scientists began looking for the place where "probability-cloud-ness" ended and visibility began, they found even that all lone atoms and even some packages of multiple atoms -- "molecules" -- lacked "there-ness" and instead were invisible probability clouds.
Now here's my at-first-seemingly-ridiculous question: Since a neutron star is like a giant nucleus of a single atom, despite its 8 mile diameter is it "below the quantum limit" -- is it visible?
I don't know.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Will Earth Be Swallowed-Up by an IMBH Soon?
Hi, friends. My first post, here, will be about the thing in Switzerland which everybody seems to have forgotten -- the Large Hadron Collider.
I had some exposure to particle physics in college. (I was interested in nuclear weapon design and construction, believe it or not. The "man on the street" really has no idea how clever nuclear weapons are, in their design. Thank God nuclear weapon design and maintenance is complex, by the way.) In part because of that exposure, I was very interested when, in the course of construction of the Large Hadron Collider experiment in Switzerland, two LHC employees filed a lawsuit in Hawaii to stop the thing from operating. They said that there is a chance that the experiment could destroy the world. The employees lost -- the judge went with the vast majority of the scientists on the project, who say, "No danger."
But, the two employees were on to something, and the federal judge was wrong. Here's why...
The LHC is really akin to a giant Reagan Administration Star Wars weapon. It is two particle beams, each firing at the other extraordinarily-high-energy protons, travelling at extremely close to the speed of light.
These invisible beams are so much like beams envisioned in the Star Wars space weapon program that if you were to try to walk through the beams during operation, they would probably cut you in half.
When these two beams of protons are aimed at each other, so that they crash head-on, particles in the beams will smack together with such intensity that there is a risk, according to the people who filed the Hawaiian lawsuit, that they will form what is referred to as a "mini black hole." The mini black hole will smack into the side of the LHC, absorb molecules there, lose its momentum, be attracted by Earth's gravity, and drill down to the center of the Earth, where the Earth's gravity will force-feed the Earth to the mini black hole, until we are all sucked-in and destroyed.
Scientists responding to the lawsuit to prevent a federal shutdown responded, "Not so! Not so! We believe that something called 'Hawking Radiation' will be emitted by such mini black holes, even if they do form, causing them to evaporate in a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. We can prove that that is the case -- high energy protons left over from supernovas in space smash into Earth's atmosphere all of the time -- and we're still here, right? Where are the mini black holes? Clearly, any mini black holes that were formed in the process evaporated!"
At this point I have to comment on a fundamental error in the scientists' discussions.
Black holes are everywhere in Western literature, now. "Black hole" this and "black hole" that. The media talk about black holes the same way the media talked about dinosaurs as our culture became aware of them, decades ago.
Ironically, in a critical technical sense -- and I swear that this is so -- BLACK HOLES DON'T EXIST. THEY NEVER HAVE EXISTED. THEY NEVER WILL EXIST.
A few of the amateur astronomers reading this are saying, with lip-quivering anger, "B-b-b-b-but how can you say that???!!! Th-th-th-there are NASA photos on-line showing jets of particles in space being emitted from b-b-b-b-black h-h-h-h-holes."
But any well-thought-out particle physicists reading this already know what my response will be.
Relativistic time dilation.
As gravity at a particular point in space and time gets bigger, time itself slows down.
As a black hole begins to form, an invisible shell of slowed-down time begins to form around it called the "event horizon." (This is where the name of that really bad sci-fi movie that my kids love so much came from.) The forming black hole's forming event horizon, itself, slows-down the formation of the black hole, itself! The black hole begins to form slower and slo-o-o-o-ower and slo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ower.
The effect of the event horizon is "asymptotic." Like a kid in the school yard 40 inches from the wall of the school, who always walks exactly, precisely half of the remaining distance to the wall with each step, the black hole never, ever -- in the history of the Universe -- quite finishes forming, just as the kid never quite reaches the school wall.
So, those things which NASA calls "black holes" emitting jets in their space photos...
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080110.html
...are not really "black holes," because black holes slow down time at their own location as they form, always asymptotically interrupting their own formation!
That's good news, right?
Wrong. It's very, very, very bad news.
What it means is that black holes in formation -- what I call "incipient black holes" -- can never evaporate from "Hawking Radiation" because "Hawking Radiation," even if it occurs at all before a black hole achieves "black hole-ness," will, having been slowed down asymptotically by the black hole's own event horizon, take literally forever to evaporate the object.
So, if the Large Hadron Collider accidentally creates an 'Incipient Mini Black Hole," or IMBH for short, it will never evaporate.
Now, "Incipient Black Holes" or IBH's, and "Incipient Mini Black Holes," or IMBH's, are just as dangerous as the theoretical-but-really-non-existent black holes.
Again, look at the power and destruction being wrought by that thing in the NASA photo...
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080110.html
It's not a black hole, but an IBH.
Why? What happens?
As the IBH or IMBH gets close to matter to absorb with its giant gravity, it smashes the matter and begins to pull the smashed bits into an orbit around itself called an "accretion disk"...
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090419.html
As the ripping-apart occurs, the object, including its accretion disk, gets heavier and heavier and heavier. As it absorbs greater and greater quantities of ripped-up matter towards itself, more and more energy, with extreme power able to escape the giant gravitational field just above the event horizon, begins to be fired-off at the north and south poles of the accretion disk.
Voila...IBH's and IMBH's absorbing matter into their accretion disks all shoot out their own extremely high energy, extremely destructive particle beams.
An IMBH, if one forms in the LHC, will give rise to the following effects...
As the two particle beams collide, two protons, out of hundreds of billions, happen to collide so perfectly head-on that they begin forming an IMBH. Since the particle collision wasn't "perfectly perfect," the IMBH flies up at, say, 50% of the speed of light, and slams into the ceiling of the LHC tunnel.
Foom! The IMBH instantly begins absorbing LHC tunnel ceiling molecules, and ripping them apart. A powerful explosion results, blowing a hole through in the ceiling.
Unfortunately, increased mass in the IMBH structure from absorption of thousands of protons and neutrons from the LHC ceiling, and something called the net vector of the Brownian motion imparted to the IMBH by absorbed molecules, has slowed its escape to a mere 5,000 mph -- insufficient escape velocity to let the thing escape Earth's gravity.
So, it flies up to, say, 400 miles up, and then it begins to fall back toward the Earth.
The trajectory of the flight-up-and-flight-down sends the IMBH crashing into the Pacific, where, ironically, the intense thermonuclear fire of a hydrogen bomb begins erupting like a volcano out of the water of the Pacific Ocean, as the IMBH drills downward, deeper, deeper, deeper into the water, and then into the Earth's crust beneath the water, faster and faster toward the center of the Earth, 4,000 miles below.
The world watches with trembling as televisions follow-up reports of a fearful explosion at the LHC in Cern, Switzerland with reports on a "super volcano" near no known islands on the surface of the Pacific.
Then, suddenly, fo-o-o-o-o-o-op-p-p-p! -- the volcano stops.
And the entire world sighs with relief.
Except a few scientists at Cern, who have a suspicion...
Is an IMBH so deep under the ocean and under the Earth's crust now that the explosive power in the object's still-tiny accretion disk can't make it to the surface?
Yep!
So, as the weeks pass, seismographs around the world begin recording a new, completely unprecedented variety of rumbling.
The IMBH is no longer as "mini" as it used to be. The object is now in the gravitational center of the Earth. The Earth's own gravity is force-feeding the Earth itself to the accretion disk. As the gravity of the IMBH structure grows, the "particle beam" coming out of the IMBH's north and south poles blasts with a mightier and mightier blast, cutting a cavern in the center of the Earth made of super-heavy plasma which is quickly sucked-into the accretion disk. As the new rumbling begins to be detected on the surface, the cavern is 100 miles wide.
A few weeks later, the plasmic inferno breaks through the Earth's crust. Two days later, the Earth collapses into the accretion disk, and the end of our time on Earth has come.
As Hawaii begins falling toward the accretion disk, the federal judge who decided the case things, "Shucks! I guessed wrong!"
So, I vote, "Shut down the Collider. It's not worth the risk."
I had some exposure to particle physics in college. (I was interested in nuclear weapon design and construction, believe it or not. The "man on the street" really has no idea how clever nuclear weapons are, in their design. Thank God nuclear weapon design and maintenance is complex, by the way.) In part because of that exposure, I was very interested when, in the course of construction of the Large Hadron Collider experiment in Switzerland, two LHC employees filed a lawsuit in Hawaii to stop the thing from operating. They said that there is a chance that the experiment could destroy the world. The employees lost -- the judge went with the vast majority of the scientists on the project, who say, "No danger."
But, the two employees were on to something, and the federal judge was wrong. Here's why...
The LHC is really akin to a giant Reagan Administration Star Wars weapon. It is two particle beams, each firing at the other extraordinarily-high-energy protons, travelling at extremely close to the speed of light.
These invisible beams are so much like beams envisioned in the Star Wars space weapon program that if you were to try to walk through the beams during operation, they would probably cut you in half.
When these two beams of protons are aimed at each other, so that they crash head-on, particles in the beams will smack together with such intensity that there is a risk, according to the people who filed the Hawaiian lawsuit, that they will form what is referred to as a "mini black hole." The mini black hole will smack into the side of the LHC, absorb molecules there, lose its momentum, be attracted by Earth's gravity, and drill down to the center of the Earth, where the Earth's gravity will force-feed the Earth to the mini black hole, until we are all sucked-in and destroyed.
Scientists responding to the lawsuit to prevent a federal shutdown responded, "Not so! Not so! We believe that something called 'Hawking Radiation' will be emitted by such mini black holes, even if they do form, causing them to evaporate in a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. We can prove that that is the case -- high energy protons left over from supernovas in space smash into Earth's atmosphere all of the time -- and we're still here, right? Where are the mini black holes? Clearly, any mini black holes that were formed in the process evaporated!"
At this point I have to comment on a fundamental error in the scientists' discussions.
Black holes are everywhere in Western literature, now. "Black hole" this and "black hole" that. The media talk about black holes the same way the media talked about dinosaurs as our culture became aware of them, decades ago.
Ironically, in a critical technical sense -- and I swear that this is so -- BLACK HOLES DON'T EXIST. THEY NEVER HAVE EXISTED. THEY NEVER WILL EXIST.
A few of the amateur astronomers reading this are saying, with lip-quivering anger, "B-b-b-b-but how can you say that???!!! Th-th-th-there are NASA photos on-line showing jets of particles in space being emitted from b-b-b-b-black h-h-h-h-holes."
But any well-thought-out particle physicists reading this already know what my response will be.
Relativistic time dilation.
As gravity at a particular point in space and time gets bigger, time itself slows down.
As a black hole begins to form, an invisible shell of slowed-down time begins to form around it called the "event horizon." (This is where the name of that really bad sci-fi movie that my kids love so much came from.) The forming black hole's forming event horizon, itself, slows-down the formation of the black hole, itself! The black hole begins to form slower and slo-o-o-o-ower and slo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ower.
The effect of the event horizon is "asymptotic." Like a kid in the school yard 40 inches from the wall of the school, who always walks exactly, precisely half of the remaining distance to the wall with each step, the black hole never, ever -- in the history of the Universe -- quite finishes forming, just as the kid never quite reaches the school wall.
So, those things which NASA calls "black holes" emitting jets in their space photos...
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080110.html
...are not really "black holes," because black holes slow down time at their own location as they form, always asymptotically interrupting their own formation!
That's good news, right?
Wrong. It's very, very, very bad news.
What it means is that black holes in formation -- what I call "incipient black holes" -- can never evaporate from "Hawking Radiation" because "Hawking Radiation," even if it occurs at all before a black hole achieves "black hole-ness," will, having been slowed down asymptotically by the black hole's own event horizon, take literally forever to evaporate the object.
So, if the Large Hadron Collider accidentally creates an 'Incipient Mini Black Hole," or IMBH for short, it will never evaporate.
Now, "Incipient Black Holes" or IBH's, and "Incipient Mini Black Holes," or IMBH's, are just as dangerous as the theoretical-but-really-non-existent black holes.
Again, look at the power and destruction being wrought by that thing in the NASA photo...
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080110.html
It's not a black hole, but an IBH.
Why? What happens?
As the IBH or IMBH gets close to matter to absorb with its giant gravity, it smashes the matter and begins to pull the smashed bits into an orbit around itself called an "accretion disk"...
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090419.html
As the ripping-apart occurs, the object, including its accretion disk, gets heavier and heavier and heavier. As it absorbs greater and greater quantities of ripped-up matter towards itself, more and more energy, with extreme power able to escape the giant gravitational field just above the event horizon, begins to be fired-off at the north and south poles of the accretion disk.
Voila...IBH's and IMBH's absorbing matter into their accretion disks all shoot out their own extremely high energy, extremely destructive particle beams.
An IMBH, if one forms in the LHC, will give rise to the following effects...
As the two particle beams collide, two protons, out of hundreds of billions, happen to collide so perfectly head-on that they begin forming an IMBH. Since the particle collision wasn't "perfectly perfect," the IMBH flies up at, say, 50% of the speed of light, and slams into the ceiling of the LHC tunnel.
Foom! The IMBH instantly begins absorbing LHC tunnel ceiling molecules, and ripping them apart. A powerful explosion results, blowing a hole through in the ceiling.
Unfortunately, increased mass in the IMBH structure from absorption of thousands of protons and neutrons from the LHC ceiling, and something called the net vector of the Brownian motion imparted to the IMBH by absorbed molecules, has slowed its escape to a mere 5,000 mph -- insufficient escape velocity to let the thing escape Earth's gravity.
So, it flies up to, say, 400 miles up, and then it begins to fall back toward the Earth.
The trajectory of the flight-up-and-flight-down sends the IMBH crashing into the Pacific, where, ironically, the intense thermonuclear fire of a hydrogen bomb begins erupting like a volcano out of the water of the Pacific Ocean, as the IMBH drills downward, deeper, deeper, deeper into the water, and then into the Earth's crust beneath the water, faster and faster toward the center of the Earth, 4,000 miles below.
The world watches with trembling as televisions follow-up reports of a fearful explosion at the LHC in Cern, Switzerland with reports on a "super volcano" near no known islands on the surface of the Pacific.
Then, suddenly, fo-o-o-o-o-o-op-p-p-p! -- the volcano stops.
And the entire world sighs with relief.
Except a few scientists at Cern, who have a suspicion...
Is an IMBH so deep under the ocean and under the Earth's crust now that the explosive power in the object's still-tiny accretion disk can't make it to the surface?
Yep!
So, as the weeks pass, seismographs around the world begin recording a new, completely unprecedented variety of rumbling.
The IMBH is no longer as "mini" as it used to be. The object is now in the gravitational center of the Earth. The Earth's own gravity is force-feeding the Earth itself to the accretion disk. As the gravity of the IMBH structure grows, the "particle beam" coming out of the IMBH's north and south poles blasts with a mightier and mightier blast, cutting a cavern in the center of the Earth made of super-heavy plasma which is quickly sucked-into the accretion disk. As the new rumbling begins to be detected on the surface, the cavern is 100 miles wide.
A few weeks later, the plasmic inferno breaks through the Earth's crust. Two days later, the Earth collapses into the accretion disk, and the end of our time on Earth has come.
As Hawaii begins falling toward the accretion disk, the federal judge who decided the case things, "Shucks! I guessed wrong!"
So, I vote, "Shut down the Collider. It's not worth the risk."
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