Month: June 2021

Galaxies Fluffy And Faint

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Stellar Science, Cosmology, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Cathleen’s at the coffee shop’s baked goods counter. “A lemon scone, please, Al.”

I’m next in line. “Lemon sounds good to me, too. It’s a warm day.”

The Pinwheel Galaxy, NGC 5457
Credit: ESA/Hubble

“Sure thing, Sy. Hey, got a question for you, Cathleen, you bein’ an Astronomer and all. I just saw an Astronomy news item about a fluffy galaxy and they mentioned a faint galaxy. Are they the same and why the excitement?”

“Not the same, Al. It’ll be easier to show you in pictures. Sy, may I borrow Old Reliable?”

“Sure, here.”

“Thanks. OK, Al, here’s a classic ‘grand design‘ spiral galaxy, NGC 5457, also known as The Pinwheel. Gorgeous, isn’t it?”

“Sure is. Hey, I’ve wondered — what does ‘NGC‘ stand for, National Galaxy Collection or something?”

“Nope. The ‘G‘ doesn’t even stand for ‘Galaxy‘. It’s ‘New General Catalog‘. Anyway, here’s NGC 2775, one of our prettiest fluffies. Doesn’t look much like the Pinwheel or Andromeda, does it?”

NGC 2775
Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / J. Lee / PHANGS-HST Team / Judy Schmidt

“Nah, those guys got nice spiral arms that sort of grow out of the center. This one looks like there’s an inside edge to all the complicated stuff. And it’s got what, a hundred baby arms.”

“The blue dots in those ‘baby arms’ are young blue stars. They’re separated by dark lanes of dust just like the dark lanes in classic spirals. The difference is that these lanes are much closer together. The grand design spirals are popular photography subjects in your astronomy magazines, Al, but they’re only about 10% of all spirals. I’ll bet your news item was about 2775 because we’re just coming to see how mysterious this one is.”

“What’s mysterious about it?”

“That central region. It’s huge and smooth, barely any visible dust lanes and no blue dots. It’s bright in the infra‑red, which is what you’d expect from a population of old red stars. In the ultra‑violet, though, it’s practically empty — just a small dot at the center. UV is high‑energy light. It generally comes from a young star or a recent nova or a black hole’s accretion disk. The dot is probably a super-massive back hole. but its image is just a tiny fraction of the smooth region’s width. With a billion red stars in the way it’s hard to see how the black hole’s gravity field could have cleaned up all the dust that should be in there. Li’l Fluffy here is just begging for some Astrophysics PhD candidates to burn computer time trying to explain it.”

NGC 1052-DF2
Credit: NASA, ESA, and P. van Dokkum (Yale University)

“What about Li’l Faint?”

“That’s probably this one, NGC 1052-DF2. Looks a bit different, doesn’t it?

“I’ll say. It’s practically transparent. Is it a thing at all or just a smudge on the lens?”

“Not a smudge. We’ve got multiple images in different wavelength ranges from multiple observatories, and there’s another similar object, NGC 1052-DF4, in the same galaxy group. We even have measurements from individual stars and clusters in there. The discovery paper claimed that DF2 is so spread out because it lacks the dark matter whose gravity compacts most galaxies. That led to controversy, of course.”

“Is there anything in Science that doesn’t? What’s this argument?”

“It hinges on distance, Sy. The object is about as wide as the Milky Way but we see only 1% as many stars. Does their mass exert enough gravitational force to hold the structure together? There’s a fairly good relationship between a galaxy’s mass and its intrinsic brightness — more stars means more emitting surface and more mass. We know how quickly apparent brightness drops with distance. From other data the authors estimated DF2 is 65 lightyears away and from its apparent brightness they back‑calculated its mass to be just about what you’d expect from its stars alone. No dark matter required to prevent fly‑aways. Another group using a different technique estimated 42 lightyears. That suggested a correspondingly smaller luminous mass and therefore a significant amount of dark matter in the picture. Sort of. They’re still arguing.”

“But why does it exist at all?”

“That’s another question.”

~~ Rich Olcott

  • Thanks to Oriole for suggesting this topic.

Space Potatoes

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Physics: Newton and Gravity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Uncle Sy, what’s the name of the Moon face that’s just a sliver?”

“It’s called a crescent, Teena, and it’s ‘phase,’ not ‘face’. Hear the z-sound?”

“Ah-hah, one of those spelling things, huh?”

“I’m afraid so. What brought that question up?”

“I was telling Bratty Brian about the Moon shadows and he said he saw a cartoon about something that punched a hole in the Moon and left just the sliver.”

“Not going to happen, Sweetie. Anything as big as the Moon, Mr Newton’s Law of Gravity says that it’ll be round, mostly, except for mountains and things.”

“Cause there’s something really heavy in the center?”

“No, and that’s probably what shocked people the most back in those days. They had Kings and Emperors, remember, and a Pope who led all the Christians in Europe. People expected everything to have some central figure in charge. That’s why they argued about whether the center of the Universe was the Earth or the Sun. Mr Newton showed that you don’t need anything at all at the center of things.”

“But then what pulls the things together?”

“The things themselves and the rules they follow. Remember the bird murmuration rules?”

“That was a long time ago, Uncle Sy. Umm… wasn’t one rule that each bird in the flock tries to stay about the same distance from all its neighbors?”

“Good memory. That was one of the rules. The others were to fly in the same general direction as everybody else and to try stay near the middle of the flock. Those three rules pretty much kept the whole flock together and protected most of the birds from predators. Mr Newton had simpler rules for rocks and things floating in space. His first rule was. ‘Keep going in the direction you’ve been going unless something pulls you in another direction.’ We call that inertia. The second rule explained why rocks fly differently than birds do.”

“Rocks don’t fly, Uncle Sy, they fall down.”

“Better to think of it as flying towards other things. Instead of the safe‑distance rule, Mr Newton said, ‘The closer two things are, the harder they pull together.’ Simple, huh?”

“Oh, like my magnet doggies.”

“Yes, exactly like that, except gravity always attracts. There’s no pushing away like magnets do when you turn one around. Suppose that back when the Solar System was being formed, two big rocks got close. What would happen?”

“They’d bang together.”

“And then?”

“They’d attract other rocks and more and more. Bangbangbangbang!”

“Right. What do you suppose happens to the energy from those bangs? Remember, we’re out in space so there’s no air to carry the sound waves away.”

“It’d break the rocks into smaller rocks. But the energy’s still there, just in smaller pieces, right?”

“The most broken-up energy is heat. What does that tell you?”

“The rock jumble must get … does it get hot enough to melt?”

“It can So now suppose there’s a blob of melted rock floating in space, and every atom in the melted rock is attracted to every other atom. Pretend you’re an atom out at one end of the blob.”

“I see as many atoms to one side as to the other so I’m gonna pull in towards the middle.”

“And so will all the other atoms. What shape is that going to make the blob?”

“Ooooh. Round like a planet. Or the Sun. Or the Moon!”

“So now tell me what would happen if someone punched a hole in the Moon?”

“All the crumbles at the crescent points would get pulled in towards the middle. It wouldn’t be a crescent any more!”

“Exactly. Mind you, if it doesn’t melt it may not be spherical. Melted stuff can only get round because molten atoms are free to move.”

“Are there not-round things in space?”

“Lots and lots. Small blobs couldn’t pull themselves spherical before freezing solid. They could be potato‑shaped, like the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos. Some rocks came together so gently that they didn’t melt. They just stuck together, like Asteroid Bennu where our OSIRIS-REx spacecraft sampled.”

“Space has surprising shapes, huh?”

“Space always surprises.”

~~ Rich Olcott

  • Thanks to Xander and Alex who asked the question.

Shadow Play

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Uncle Sy! Uncle Sy! You’re back! Didja see the red moon?”

“Hi, Teena. Good to be home. No, I didn’t get to see the red moon. Where I was it didn’t even get red.”

“I saw it! I saw it! Mommie put me to bed early so I could wake up to see it earrrly in the morning. I saw the red part but the Moon looked smaller than it does coming up from behind the houses and they said it was going to be sooo big but it wasn’t. Anyway, I didn’t stay awake. Why was it red?”

“Was it really red red like your favorite crayon?”

“Mm-no, more like orange-y red.”

“Sunset color, right?”

“Uh-huh. Was it sunset on the Moon?”

“Sort of. The sunsets we see on Earth are red mostly because our air absorbs the Sun’s blue light when we’re looking across the atmosphere. Only the red light gets through to our eyes. Remember the solar eclipse we saw, when the Moon came exactly between us and the Sun? Moon eclipses are inside out from that. We come between the Moon and the Sun. The only light getting past us has gone across our atmosphere just like sunset light does so it’s orange‑y red like a sunset.”

“Oooh … does the Sun ever get between us and the Moon?”

“Don’t worry, Sweetie. We’re far, far from the Sun. Mr Newton’s Laws of Motion say that we and the Moon will be waltzing out here for a long, long time.”

“Whee, we’re dancing around the Sun! MOMmie, Uncle Sy’s here!”

“Hi, Sis. You saw the eclipse, then.”

“Mm-hm. I realized while I was watching it that lunar phase shadows work differently from eclipses.”

“Oh? How so?”

“The shadow shapes are different, for one. The edge of the lunar phase shadow always passes through both poles. In a solar eclipse the shadow only reaches the poles at totality, and in a lunar eclipse there’s this almost straight shadow arc that marches across the whole face.”

“Interesting. You said ‘for one,’ so what else?”

“Eclipse shadows move in the wrong direction. Starting from a full moon, the shadow comes in from the right until you get to new moon, then it falls away to the left until you get back to full moon. Agreed?”

“I always get confused. I’ll take your word for it.”

“I looked it up. In two places. Anyhow, in both kinds of eclipse the shadow creeps from left to right. Just backwards from the lunar phases. I wonder if that has anything to do with ancient societies thinking that an eclipse is somehow evil.”

“Mommie, you know you’re not supposed to use words I don’t know unless you’re keeping secrets. What’s lunar faces?”

“Sorry, Teena, not secret. Lunar means Moon. Sy, can you show her phases on Old Reliable?”

“Sure. Here’s a quick sketch, Teena. Pretend that the little ball is the Moon going around the Earth. The Sun is off to the right. You know the Moon goes around the Earth and it always keeps the same side towards us, right?”

“That’s the Man In The Moon except it’s really mountains and stuff pointing at us.”

“That’s what the little triangle shows, like it’s his nose. See how sometimes it’s in the light and sometimes it’s in shadow? The big ball is what we see when the Moon is in each position. When the Man is facing straight towards the Sun we call that the Full Moon phase. When he’s completely in shadow that’s the New Moon phase. There’s names for other special positions, and all of the special positions are phases, OK?”

“I suppose you have a logical explanation for the shadows?”

“Sure, Sis. It’s all about where the shadow’s being cast and how the shadow caster is moving at the time. This diagram tells the story. Nearly everything in the Solar System runs counterclockwise—”

“Widdershins.”

“… Right. Every orbit runs left‑to‑right half the time, right‑to‑left the other half. The two kinds of eclipse happen in opposite halves. The geometry works out that we see both eclipse shadows move left‑to‑right. See?”

“Cool.”

~~ Rich Olcott

  • Thanks to Alex for the question, and to Lori for the shadow observation, which I hadn’t seen discussed before.

Listen to The Rock Music

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Kareem, how did we learn this stuff about the Earth’s insides? I mean, clouds and winds hundreds of miles down?”

“Fair question, Eddie. Jules Verne’s Voyage to The Center of The Earth couldn’t happen, because hollow volcanic tubes don’t go near far enough down. Drilling’s not useful for exploring the mantle — we’ve only gotten about six miles through the seafloor crust and that’s still probably a dozen miles up from where the mantle starts. Forget what you’ve seen in the comics or a movie, we won’t in our lifetimes have a sub‑like vehicle that can melt through rock, withstand million‑atmosphere pressures and swim through superheated lava. So what we do is oscillate, triangulate and calulate.”

“I’ll bite. Oscillate? Triangulate?”

“How we do earthquake chasing, Sy. For thousands of years, humanity experienced a quake as a local jolt. It wasn’t until the 1850s that we realized each quake incident has multiple components: a sudden rupture somewhere, the resulting shock that travels through the Earth to other locations, and maybe aftershocks from follow‑on ruptures. The shock is a whole train of waves. We used to record them on those big cylindrical seismograph drums with oscillating pens, but most stations have gone digital since the early 90s. More accurate data, easier to handle but less picturesque.”

“True. The TV weather guys love pics of the big cylinder with all the wiggly lines. How about the triangulations?”

“Suppose you feel an earthquake shock. How do you find out where the rupture occurred and how big it was?”

“Hard to do from one location. A really big one far away would give you the same blip as a small one close by. And you probably wouldn’t know how deep it was or what direction it came from. I guess you’d need to compare notes with some far‑away observers. The one closest to the rupture would have received the strongest signal.”

“Yeah, Sy, and if everybody kept track of when they felt the jolt then you could draw a map with the different times and that’d zero in on it. Uhh … three places and you’ve got it.”

The IRIS Global Seismic Network as of 2021.

“Three points makes a triangle, Eddie, you’ve just described triangulation. It’s a general principle — the more points of view you have to work with, the better the image. Seismic tomography is all about merging well‑characterized data from lots of stations. That’s why we built an international Global Seismic Network, 152 identically‑equipped stations. Here’s a map.”

“How ’bout that, Sy? Lotsa triangles, all over the world.”

“Reminds me of Feynman’s insight that an electron doesn’t take just one path from A to B, it takes all possible paths. Earthquake shocks must go around the Earth and through the Earth, so each of those stations could hear multiple wave trains from a strong‑enough earthquake. These days it’s all digital, I suppose, and tied together with high‑precision time‑ticks. Kareem, they must be able to localize within a millimeter.”

“Not really, Sy. There’s a complication the early seismologists discovered even with primitive timing and recording equipment. The waves don’t all travel at the same speed. Depending on what’s in the way some of them even stop.”

“Wait, these shocks are basically sound waves. Does sound go fast or slow or stop depending on where it is in the Earth?”

“Sonic physics, Sy. The stiffer the material the faster sound travels. About 1½ kilometer/second in water, 3 in stone and 6 in metals but those numbers vary with composition, temperature and pressure. Especially pressure, like millions of atmospheres near the center. In the early 1900s Mohorovičić saw two signals from the same quake. One P‑wave/S‑wave pair came direct through the crust, the second followed a bent path through some different material. That was our first clue that crust and mantle are distinct but they’re both solid.”

“P‑wave? S‑wave?”

“Like Push‑wave and Shake‑wave, Eddie. S‑waves shake side‑to‑side but fluids don’t shake so they block S‑waves. P‑waves pass right through. S‑waves traversing the LLSVP ‘clouds’ mean the regions are probably solid, but the waves don’t go as fast as a solid should carry them. It’s a strange world down there.”

~~ Rich Olcott