Category: Astronomy

Why So Big?

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Uncategorized1 Comment

“How come so big, kid?”

“Beg pardon, Mr Feder?”

“Mars has the biggest volcanoes and all, like that canyon you can’t even see across.  Earth’s bigger than Mars, right?  How come we don’t have stuff like that?”

“Maybe we do but we’ve not found it yet.  Earth’s land area is only 4% greater than the surface area of Mars.  Our ocean floor and what’s beneath the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are like a whole second planet twice as big as the land we’ve explored so far.  Some people refer to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge as a 10000-mile-long volcano.  No-one knows for sure what-all else is down there.  Even on land we’ve probably had enormous landforms like Alba Mons but on the geologic timescale they don’t last long here.”

“So like I said, how come?”

“Because of what we have that Mars doesn’t.  Massive forces of erosion — wind, water, Goldilocks temperatures — that grind down landforms something fierce.”

Watney_s route 420
Mark Watney’s travel route in The Martian.
Image by ESA/DLR/FU Berlin
under Creative Commons license

“Wait, Mars has winds.  What about those dust storms, and that windstorm that damn near destroyed Watney’s spaceship?”

“Um, Watney’s a fictional character.  The dust storms do exist, though —  one of them created a blackout that may have killed the Opportunity rover’s solar power.  But Martian dust grains are about the size of smoke particles.  Doesn’t take much of a wind to get those grains into the air and keep them there even in Martian atmosphere that’s only 1% as thick as Earth’s.  A 120-mph wind on Earth would blow you over, but one on Mars would just give you a gentle push.  Martian winds can barely roll a sand grain along the ground.  They definitely can’t sandblast a volcano like Earth winds can.  Which, by the way is why planetologists panned that storm scene in your The Martian movie.  Couldn’t happen.  The film production team admitted that.  The rest of the science was pretty good, though.”

“OK then, water.  You talking like dripping water can wear a hole in a rock?”

“More like water in quantity — glaciers carving off mountaintops and rivers digging canyons and ocean waves smashing shorelines to sandy powder.  Dripping water works, too — water’s corrosive enough even at low temperatures that it can dissolve most kinds of rock if you give it enough time.  But Mars has no glaciers or rivers or oceans.  Probably no dripping water, either”

“You were kidding about Goldilocks, right?  Talk about fictional characters!”

“Not in this case.  To planetologists, ‘Goldilocks’ is a technical term.  You know, ‘not too cold, not too warm…”

“‘Just right,’ yeah, yeah.  But just right for what?  What’s Mars got that’s Goldilocks-ish?”

“Sorry, it’s Earth that has the Goldilocks magic, not Mars, and what’s just right is that we’re in the right temperature range for water to exist in gas and liquid and solid forms.  Mars’ surface is way too cold for liquid water.”

“Wait, I read that they’d found liquid water there.”

“Not on the surface.  The radar experiment aboard European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft found an indication of liquid water, but it’s a kilometer below the surface.  Twenty kilometers wide, maybe a meter thick — more of a pond than the ‘lake’ the media were talking about.”

“Why should it make a difference that Earth’s Goldilocks-ish?  I mean, we’re comfortable but we’re not rocks.  What’s that got to do with the volcanoes?”

“Recycling, Mr Feder, recycling.  On Mars, if enough gaseous water molecules could get together to make rain, which they can’t, they’d freeze to the ground and stay there for a long, long time.  On Earth, though, most rain stays liquid and you get ground water or run-off which eventually evaporates and rains down again.  The same molecules get many, many chances to grind down a mountain.”

“But Earth water can freeze, too.”

“Remember we’re Goldilocks-ish.  Liquid water soaks into a cracked rock where it freezes, expands to pry off a chip or two, and thaws to freeze again.  Water’s freeze-thaw cycle can do a lot of damage if it gets to repeat often enough.”

“So Mars has big stuff because…”

“The planet’s too cold to wear it away.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Raindrops landing in a red-brown puddle
Adapted image from Clipart-library.com

The Big Splash? Maybe.

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“You’ve not seen half of it, Mr Feder.  Mars has the Solar System’s tallest volcano, most massive volcano, biggest planetary meteor strike, deepest and longest  canyon…”

“Wait, kid, I’ve been to the Grand Canyon.  Thing is … BIG!  What’d they say?  A mile deep, 18 miles wide, 250 miles long.  No way Mars can beat that.”

“Valles Marineris is 4½ miles deep, 120 miles wide and 2500 miles long.  The Grand Canyon meanders, packing its length into only 150 miles of bee-line distance.  Marineris stretches straight as a string.  No river carved that formation, but the planetologists can’t agree on what did.”

Labeled Mars map 2 420
Mars map from NASA/JPL/GSFC

“They got evidence, don’t they?”

“Not enough.  Different facts point in different directions and no overall theory has won yet.  Most of it has to do with the landforms.  Start with the Tharsis Bulge, big as a continent and rising kilometers above Mars’ average altitude.  Near the Bulge’s highest point, except for the volcanoes, is a fractured-looking region called Noctis Labyrinthus.  Starting just west of  the Labyrinth a whole range of wrinkly highlands and mountains arcs around south and then east to point towards the eastern end of Marineris.  Marineris completes the arc by meeting the Labyrinth to its west.  Everything inside that arc is higher than everything else around it.  Except for the volcanoes, of course.”

“Looks like something came up from underneath to push all that stuff up.”

“Mm-hm, but we don’t know what, or what drove it, or even how fast everything happened.  There are theories all over the place”

“Like what?”

“Well, maybe it’s upwellng from a magma hotspot, like the one under the Pacific that’s been creating Hawaiian Islands one at a time for the past 80 million years.  Some people think the upwelling mostly lifted the existing crust like expanding gas bubbles push up the crust of baking bread.  Other people think that the upwelling’s magma broke through the crust to form enormous lava flows that covered up whatever had been there before.”

“You said ‘maybe.'”

“Yeah.  Another group of theories sees a connection between Tharsis and Hellas Basin, which is almost exactly on the other side of the planet.  Hellas is the rock-record of a mega-sized meteorite strike, the third largest confirmed one in the Solar System.  Before you ask, the other two are on the Moon.  Like I said, it’s a group of theories.  The gentlest one, if you can call it that, is that energy from the impact rippled all around the planet to focus on the point opposite the impact.  That would have disrupted the local equilibrium between crustal weight and magma’s upward pressure.  An imbalance like that would encourage uplift, crustal cracking and, ultimately, Valles Marineris.”

“Doesn’t sound very gentle.”

“It wouldn’t have been but it might even have been nastier.  Another possibility is that the meteorite may not have stopped at the crust.  It could have hit hard enough, and maybe with enough spin, to drill who knows how far through the fluid-ish body of the planet, raising the Bulge just by momentum and internal slosh.  Worst case, some of Tharsis’ rock might even have come from the intruder.”

Realistic Orange-red Liquid Splash Vector
Adapted from an image by Vecteezy

“Wow, that would have been a sight to see!”

“Yeah, from a distance.  Any spacecraft flying a Mars orbit would be in jeopardy from rock splatter.  We’ve found meteors on Earth that we know originated on Mars because they have bubbles holding trapped gas that matches the isotope signature of Martian atmosphere.  A collision as violent as the one I just described could certainly have driven rocky material past escape velocity and on its way to us.  Oh, by the way and speaking of sights — you’d be disappointed if you actually visited Valles Marineris.”

“How could anything that ginormous be a disappointment?”

“You could look down into it but you probably couldn’t see the far side.  Mars is smaller than Earth and its surface curves downward more rapidly.  Suppose you stood on one side of the valley’s floor where it’s 4 miles deep.  The opposite wall, maybe 100 miles away, would be beyond your 92-mile horizon limit for an object that tall.”

“Aw, phooey!”

~~ Rich Olcott

Holes in The Ground — Big Ones

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Al’s stacking chairs on tables, trying to close his coffee shop, but Mr Richard Feder (of Fort Lee, NJ) doesn’t let up on Jim.  “What’s all this about Gale Crater or Mount Sharp that Curiosity‘s running around?  Is it a crater or a mountain?  How about it’s a volcano?  How do you even tell the difference?”

That’s a lot of questions but Jim’s got game.  “Gale is an impact crater, about three and a half billion years old.  The impacting meteorite must have hit hard, because Mount Sharp’s in the middle of Gale.”

Mud drop
Adapted from a photo
by Davide Restivo, Aarau, Switzerland
[CC BY-SA 2.0] via Wikimedia Commons
“How’s that follow?”

“Have you ever watched a rain drop hit a puddle?  It forces the puddle water downward and then the water springs back up again to form a peak.  The same general process  happens when a meteorite hits a rocky surface except the solid peak doesn’t flatten out like water does.  We know that’s the way many meteor craters on the Moon and here on Earth were formed.  We’re pretty sure it’s what happened at Gale — the core of Mount Sharp (formal astronomers call it Aeolis Mons) is probably that kind of peak.”

“Only the core?  What about the rest of it?”

“That’s what Curiosity has been digging into.”  <I have to smile — Jim’s not one to do puns on purpose.>  “The rover’s found evidence that the core’s wrapped up in lots of sedimentary clays, sulfates, hematites and other water-derived minerals of a sort that wouldn’t be there unless Gale had once been a lake like Oregon’s Crater Lake.  That in turn says that Mars once had liquid water on its surface.  That’s why everyone got so excited when those results came in.”

“Oregon’s Crater Lake was from a meteorite?”

“Oops, bad example.  No, that one’s a water-filled volcanic caldera.”

“How do you know?  Any chance its volcano will blow?”

“The best evidence, of course, is the mineralogy.  Volcanoes are made of igneous rocks — lava, tefra and everything in between.  Impact craters are made of whatever was there when the meteorite hit, although the heat and the pressure spike transform a lot of it into some metamorphic form.”

“But you can’t check for that on Mars or the Moon.”

“Mostly not, you’re right, so we have to depend on other clues.  Most volcanoes, for instance, are above the local landscape; most impact structures are below-level.  There are other subtler tests, like the pattern and distance that ejecta were thrown away from the event.  In general we can be 95-plus percent sure whether we’re looking at a volcano or an impact crater.  And no, it won’t any time soon.”

“What won’t do what?”

“You asked whether Crater Lake’s volcano will erupt.  Mount Mazama blew up 7700 years ago and it’s essentially been dormant ever since.”

“There’s some weasel-wording back there — most volcanoes do this, most impacts do that.  What about the exceptions?”

“Those generally have to do with size.  The really enormous features are often hard to even recognize, much less classify.  On Mars, for instance the Northern Lowlands region is significantly smoother than most of the rest of the planet.  Some people think that’s because it’s a huge lava flow that obliterated older impact structures.  Other people think the Lowlands is old sea bottom, smooth because meteorites would have splashed water instead of raising rocky craters.”

Labeled Mars map 420
Mars map from NASA/JPL/GSFC

“I’ll bet ocean.”

“There’s more.  You’ve heard about Olympus Mons on Mars being the Solar System’s biggest volcano, but that’s really only by height.  Alba Mons lies northeast of Olympus and is far huger by volume — 600 million cubic miles of rock but it’s only 4 miles high.  Average slope is half a degree — you’d never notice the upward grade if you walked it.  Astronomers thought Alba was just a humungous plain until they got detailed height data from satellite measurements.”

“The other one’s more than 4 miles high?”

“Oh, yeah.  Olympus Mons rises about 13.5 miles from the base of its surrounding cliffs.  That’s more than the jump from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the top of Mount Everest.”

“Things on Mars are big, alright.”

~~ Rich Olcott

 

Why Is Mars Red But Earth Is Blue?

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

The grad students’ Crazy Theory Contest event at Al’s coffee shop is breaking up.  Amanda’s flaunting the Ceremonial Broom she won with her ‘Spock and the horseshoe crabs‘ theory.  Suddenly a voice from behind me outroars the uproar.  “Hey, Mars guy, I got questions.”

Jim looks up and I look around.  Sure enough, it’s Mr Richard Feder.  I start with the introductions but he barrels right along.  “People call Mars the Red Planet, but I seen NASA pictures and it’s brown, right?  All different kinds of brown, with splotches.  There’s even one picture with every color in the rainbow.  What’s with that and what color is Mars really?”

Jim’s a newly-fledged grad student so I step in to give him a chance to think.  “That rainbow picture, Mr Feder, did it have a circular purple spot about a third of the way up from the bottom and was it mostly blue along the top?”

“Yeah, sounds about right.”

“That’s a NASA topographic map, color-coded for relative elevations, purple for low areas to red high-up.  The blue area is the Northern Lowlands surrounding the North Pole, and that purple spot is Hellas Basin, a huge meteor crater billions of years old.  It’s about 5 miles deep which is why they did it in purple.  The map colors have nothing to do with the color of the planet.”

“About your question, Mr …. Feder is it?”

“Yeah, kid, Richard Feder, Fort Lee, New Jersey.”

“Good to meet you, sir.  The answer to your question is, ‘It depends.’  Are you looking down from space or looking around on the surface?  And where are you looking?  Come to think of it, when are you looking?”

“All I’m asking is, is it red or not?  Why make it so complicated?”

“Because it is complicated.  A few months ago Mars had a huge dust storm that covered the whole planet.  At the surface it was far darker than a cloudy moonless night on Earth.  From space it was a uniform butterscotch color, no markings at all.”

“OK, say there’s no dust in the air.”

“Take away all the floating dust and it almost wouldn’t be Mars any more.  The atmosphere’s only 1% of Earth’s and most of that is CO2 — clear and colorless.”

“So what would we see looking down at the surface?”

“Uh … you’re from New Jersey, right?  What color is New Jersey’s surface?”

<a little defensively> “We got a lot of trees and farms, once you get away from all the buildings along the coast and the Interstates, so it’s green.”

“Mars doesn’t have trees, farms, buildings or roads.  What color is New Jersey underneath all that?”

“The farmland soil’s black of course, and the Palisades cliffs near me are, too.  Down-state to the south we got sand-colored sand on the beaches and clay-colored clay.”

“Mars has clay, the Curiosity rover confirmed that, and it’s got basalt like your cliffs, but it has no soil.”

“Huh? How could it not have soil?  That’s just ground-up rocks, right, and Mars has rocks.”

“Soil’s way more then that, Mr Feder.  If all you have is ground-up rocks, it’s regolith.  The difference is the organic material that soil has and regolith doesn’t — rotted vegetable matter, old roots, fungus, microorganisms.  All that makes the soil black and helps it hold moisture and generally be hospitable to growing things.  So far as we know, Mars has none of that.  We’ve found igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks just like on Earth; we’ve found clays, hematites and gypsum that had to have been formed in a watery environment.  But so far no limestone — no fossilized shelly material like that would indicate life.”

“What you’re saying is that Mars colors look like Earth colors except no plants.  So why do astronomers call Earth a ‘pale blue marble’ but Mars is ‘the red planet’?”

“Earth looks pale blue from space.  The blue is the dominant color reflected from the 70% of Earth’s surface that’s ocean-covered.  It’s pale because of white light reflected from our clouds of water vapor.  Mars lacks both.  What Mars does have is finely-divided iron oxide dust, always afloat above the surface.”

“Mars looks red ’cause it’s atmosphere is rusty?”

“Yessir.”Earth and Mars

~~ Rich Olcott

Atoms are solar systems? Um, no…

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Cosmology, Crazy Theories, Physics: Electromagnetism, Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Suddenly there’s a hubbub of girlish voices to one side of the crowd.  “Go on, Jeremy, get up there.”  “Yeah, Jeremy, your theory’s no crazier than theirs.”  “Do it, Jeremy.”

Sure enough, the kid’s here with some of his groupies.  Don’t know how he does it.  He’s a lot younger than the grad students who generally present at these contests, but he’s got guts and he grabs the mic.

“OK, here’s my Crazy Theory.  The Solar System has eight planets going around the Sun, and an oxygen atom has eight electrons going around the nucleus.  Maybe we’re living in an oxygen atom in some humongous Universe, and maybe there are people living on the electrons in our oxygen atoms or whatever.  Maybe the Galaxy is like some huge molecule.  Think about living on an electron in a uranium atom with 91 other planets in the same solar system and what happens when the nucleus fissions.  Would that be like a nova?”

There’s a hush because no-one knows where to start, then Cathleen’s voice comes from the back of the room.  Of course she’s here — some of the Crazy Theory contest ring-leaders are her Astronomy students.  “Congratulations, Jeremy, you’ve joined the Honorable Legion of Planetary Atom Theorists.  Is there anyone in the room who hasn’t played with the idea at some time?”

No-one raises a hand except a couple of Jeremy’s groupies.

“See, Jeremy, you’re in good company.  But there are a few problems with the idea.  I’ll start off with some astronomical issues and then the physicists can throw in some more.  First, stars going nova collapse, they don’t fission.  Second, compared to the outermost planet in the Solar System, how far is it from the Sun to the nearest star?”

A different groupie raises her hand and a calculator.  “Neptune’s about 4 light-hours from the Sun and Alpha Centauri’s a little over 4 light-years, so that would be … the 4’s cancel, 24 hours times 365 … about 8760 times further away than Neptune.”

“Nicely done.  That’s a typical star-to-star distance within the disk and away from the central bulge.  Now, how far apart are the atoms in a molecule?”

“Aren’t they pretty much touching?  That’s a lot closer than 8760 times the distance.”

“Yes, indeed, Jeremy.  Anyone else with an objection?  Ah, Maria.  Go ahead.”

“Yes, ma’am.  All electrons have exactly the same properties, ¿yes? but different planets, they have different properties.  Jupiter is much, much heavier than Earth or Mercury.”

Astrophysicist-in-training Jim speaks up.  “Different force laws.  Solar systems are held together by gravity but at this level atoms are held together by electromagnetic forces.”

“Carry that a step further, Jim.  What does that say about the geometry?”

“Gravity’s always attractive.  The planets are attracted to the Sun but they’re also attracted to each other.  That’ll tend to pull them all into the same plane and you’ll get a flat disk, mostly.  In an atom, though, the electrons or at least the charge centers repel each other — four starting at the corners of a square would push two out of the plane to form a tetrahedron, and so forth.  That’s leaving aside electron spin.  Anyhow, the electronic charge will be three-dimensional around the nucleus, not planar.  Do you want me to go into what a magnetic field would do?”

“No, I think the point’s been made.  Would someone from the Physics side care to chime in?”

“Synchrotron radiation.”

“Good one.  And you are …?”

“Newt Barnes.  I’m one of Dr Hanneken’s students.”

“Care to explain?”

“Sure.  Assume a hydrogen atom is a little solar system with one electron in orbit around the nucleus.  Any time a charge moves it radiates waves into the electromagnetic field.  The waves carry forces that can compel other charged objects to move.  The distance an object moves, times the force exerted, equals the amount of energy expended by the wave.  Therefore the wave must carry energy and that energy must have come from the electron’s motion.  After a while the electron runs out of kinetic energy and falls into the nucleus.  That doesn’t actually happen, so the atom’s not a solar system.”

Jeremy gets general applause when he waves submission, then the crowd’s chant resumes…

.——<“Amanda! Amanda! Amanda!”>Bohr and Bohr atom

~~ Rich Olcott

Helios versus Mars, Planetary Version

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Chemistry, Crazy Theories, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Al waves me over the moment I step through the door of his coffee shop.  “Sy, ya gotta squeeze into the back room.  The grad students are holding another Crazy Theory contest and they’re having a blast.  I don’t know enough science to keep up with ’em but you’d love it.  Here’s your coffee.”

“Thanks, Al.  I’ll see what’s going on.”

The Crazy Theory contest is a hallowed Al’s Coffee Shop tradition — a “seminar” where grad students present their weirdest ideas in competition.  Another tradition (Al is strong on this one) is that the night’s winner has to sweep up the thrown spitballs and crumpled paper napkins at the end of the presentations.  I weave my way in just as the girl at the mic finishes her pitch with, “… and that’s why Spock and horseshoe crabs both have green blood!”

Some in the crowd start chanting “Amanda!  Amanda!  Amanda!”  She’s already reaching for the Ceremonial Broom when Jim steps up to the mic and waves for quiet.  “Wanna hear how the Sun oxidized Mars and poisoned it for us?”

Helios and Mars
Helios and Mars
Mars image adopted from photo by Mark Cartwright
Creative Commons license
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

Voice from the crowd — <“The Sun did what?”>

“You remember titration from school chem lab?”

.——<“Yeah, you put acid in a beaker and you drip in a base until the solution starts to turn red.”>

“What color is Mars?”

.——<“Red!”>

“Well, there you are.”

.——<“Horse-hockey!  What’s that got to do with the Sun or what you said about poison?”>

“Look at what our rovers and orbiters found on Mars — atmosphere only 1% of Earth’s but even that’s mostly CO2, no liquid water at the surface, rust-dust everywhere, soil’s loaded with perchlorate salts.  My Crazy Theory can explain all of that.”

.——<“Awright, let’s hear it!”>

“Titration’s all about counting out chemical species.  Your acid-base indicator pinked when you’d neutralized your sample’s H+ ions by adding exactly the right number of OH– ions to turn them all into H2O, right?  So think about Mars back in the day when it had liquid water on the ground and water vapor in the atmosphere.  Along comes solar radiation, especially the hard ultra-violet that blows apart stratospheric H2O molecules.  ZOT!  Suddenly you’ve got two free hydrogen atoms and an oxygen floating around.  Then what happens?”

It’s a tough crowd.  <“We’re dying to hear!  Get on with it!”>

“The hydrogens tie up as an H2 molecule.  The escape velocity on Mars is well below the speed of H2 molecules at any temperature above 40K, so those guys abandon Mars for the freedom of Space.  Which leaves the oxygen atom behind, hungry for electrons and ready to oxidize anything it can get close to.”

They’re starting to come along.  <“Wouldn’t the oxygen form O2 and fly away too?”>

“Nowhere near as quickly.  An O2 molecule is 16 times heavier than an H2 molecule.  At a given temperature it moves 1/4 as fast and mostly stays on-planet where it can chew up the landscape.”

.——<“How could an atom do that?”>

“It’s a chain process.  First step for the O is to react with something else in the atmosphere — make an oxidizing molecule like ozone or hydrogen peroxide.  That diffuses down to ground level where it can eat rocks.”

.——<“Wait, ‘eat rocks’!!?!  How does that happen?”>

“Look, most rocks are basically lattices of double-negative oxide ions with positive metal ions tucked in between to balance the charge.  Surface oxide ions can’t be oxidized by an ozone molecule, but they can transmit electron demand down to the metal ions immediately underneath.  An iron2+ ion gets oxidized to iron3+, one big step towards rust-dust.  The charge change disrupts the existing oxide lattice pattern and that piece of the rock erodes a little.”

.——<“What about the poison?”>

“Back when Mars had oceans, they had to have lots of chloride ions floating around to be left behind when the ocean dried up.  Ozone converts chloride to perchlorate, ClO4–, which is also a pretty good oxidizer.  Worse, it’s the right size and charge to sneak into your thyroid gland and mess it up.  Poison for sure.  Chemically, solar radiation raised the oxidation state of the whole planet.”

One lonely voice — “Nice try, Jim” — but then the chant returns…

.——<“Amanda!  Amanda!  Amanda!”>

~~ Rich Olcott

A Three-dog Night Would Be So Cool

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Multi-messenger, Astronomy: Techniques, Gravitational astronomy, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, Physics: Light and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“So we’ve got three fundamentally different messengers from the stars, Mr Feder.  The past couple of years have given us several encouraging instances of receiving two messengers from the same event.  If we ever receive all three messengers from the same event, that might give us what we need to solve the biggest problem in modern physics.”

“That’s a pretty deep statement, Moire.  Care to unpack it?  The geese here would love to hear about it.”

“Lakeside is a good place for thoughts like this.  The first messenger was photons.  We’ve been observing starlight photons for tens of thousand of years.  Tycho Brahe and Galileo took it to a new level a few centuries ago with their careful observation, precision measurements and Galileo’s telescope.”

“That’s done us pretty good, huh?”

“Oh sure, we’ve charted the heavens and how things move, what we can see of them.  But our charts imply there’s much we can’t see.  Photons only interact with electric charge.  Except for flat-out getting absorbed if the wavelength is right, photons don’t care about electrically neutral material and especially they don’t care about dark matter.”

“So that’s why we’re interested in the other messengers.”

“Exactly.  Even electrically neutral things have mass and interact with the gravitational field.  You remember the big news a few years ago, when our brand-new LIGO instruments caught a gravitational wave signal from a couple of black holes in collision.  Black holes don’t give off photons, so the gravitational wave messenger was our only way of learning about that event.”

“No lightwave signal at all?”

“Well, there was a report of a possible gamma-ray flare in that patch of sky, but it was borderline-detectable.  No observatory using lower-energy light saw anything there.  So, no.”

“You’re gonna tell me and the geese about some two-messenger event now, right?”

“That’s where I’m going, Mr Feder.  Photons first.  Astronomers have been wondering for decades about where short, high-energy gamma-ray bursts come from.  They seem to happen randomly in time and space.  About a year ago the Fermi satellite’s gamma-ray telescope detected one of those bursts and sent out an automated ‘Look HERE’ alert to other observatories.  Unfortunately, Fermi‘s resolution isn’t wonderful so its email pointed to a pretty large patch of sky.  Meanwhile back on Earth and within a couple of seconds of Fermi‘s moment, the LIGO instruments caught an unusual gravitational wave signal that ran about a hundred times slower than the black-hole signals they’d seen.  Another automated ‘Look HERE’ alert went out.  This one pointed to a small portion of that same patch of sky.  Two messengers.”

“Did anyone find anything?”

“Seventy other observatories scrutinized the overlap region at every wavelength known to Man.  They found a kilonova, an explosion of light and matter a thousand times brighter than typical novae.  The gravitational wave evidence indicated a collision between two neutron stars, something that had never before been recorded.  Photon evidence from the spewed-out cloud identified a dozen heavy elements theoreticians hadn’t been able to track to an origin.  Timing details in the signals gave cosmologists an independent path to resolving a problem with the Hubble Constant.  And now we know where those short gamma-ray bursts come from.”

“Pretty good for a two-messenger event.  Got another story like that?”

“A good one.  This one’s neutrinos and photons, and the neutrinos came in first.  One neutrino.”

“One neutrino?”

“Yup, but it was a special one, a super-high-powered neutrino whose incoming path our IceCube observatory could get a good fix on.  IceCube sent out its own automated ‘Look HERE’ alert.  The Fermi team picked up the alert and got real excited because the alert’s coordinates matched the location of a known and studied gamma-ray source.  Not a short-burster, but a flaring blazar.  That neutrino’s extreme energy is evidence for blazars being one of the long-sought sources of cosmic rays.”

“Puzzle solved, maybe.  Now what you said about a three-messenger signal?”grebe messenger pairs“Gravitational waves are relativity effects and neutrinos are quantum mechanical.  Physicists have been struggling for a century to bridge those two domains.  Evidence from a three-messenger event could provide the final clues.”

“I’ll bet the geese enjoyed hearing all that.”

“They’re grebes, Mr Feder.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Heavenly Messengers

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Multi-messenger, Astronomy: Techniques, Gravitational astronomy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A gorgeous Fall day, a little bit cool-ish, perfect for a brisk walk in the park.  I’m striding along the lake-bound path when there’s a breathless shout behind me.  “Hey, Moire, wait up!  I got questions!”

“Hello, Mr Feder.  What’s the topic this time?  And keep up, please, I’ve got geese to watch.”

“I been reading in the business pages <puff, puff> about all the money different countries are putting into ‘multi-messenger astronomy.’  <puff>  What’s that about, anyway?  Who’s sending messages and ain’t the Internet good enough?”

“It’s not who, Mr Feder, it’s what — stars, galaxies, black holes, the Universe.  And the messages are generally either ‘Here I am‘ or ‘Something interesting just happened‘.  The Internet just doesn’t reach that far and besides, no kitten pictures.”

“Pretty simple-sounding messages, so why the big bucks for extra message-catchers?”

“Fair question.  It has to do with what kind of information each messenger carries.  Photons, for instance.”

“Yeah, light-waves, the rainbow.”

“Way more than the rainbow.  Equating light-waves to just the colors we see is like equating sound-waves to just the range from A4 through F4# on a piano.”

“Hey, that’s less than an octave.”

“Yup, and electromagnetism’s scale is hugely broader than that.  Most of the notes, or colors, are way out of our range.  A big tuba makes a deep, low-frequency note but a tiny piccolo makes a high note.  Photon characteristics also scale with the size of where they came from.  Roughly speaking, the shorter the light’s wave-length, the smaller the process it came out of and the smaller its target will be.  Visible light, for instance, is sent and received by loosely-held charge sloshing inside an atom or molecule.  Charge held tight to a nucleus gives rise to higher-energy photons, in the ultra-violet range or beyond.”

“Like how beyond?”

“X-rays can rip electrons right out of a molecule.  Gamma rays are even nastier and involve charge activity inside a nucleus, like during a nuclear reaction.”

“How about in the other direction?  Nothing?”

“Hardly.  Going that way is going to bigger scales.  Infra-red is about parts of molecules vibrating against each other, microwave is about whole molecules rotating.  When your size range gets out to feet-to-miles you’re looking at radio waves that probably originated from free electrons or ions slammed back and forth by electric or magnetic fields.”

“So these light ranges are like messengers that clue us in on what’s going on out there?  Different messengers, different kindsa clues?”

“You got the idea.  Add in that what happens to the light on the way here is also important.  Radio and microwave photons with their long wavelengths swerve around dust particles that block out shorter-wavelength ones.  Light that traversed Einstein-bent space lets us measure the masses of galaxies.  Absorption and polarization at specific wavelengths tell us what species are out there and what they’re doing.  Blue-shifts and red-shifts tell us how fast things are moving towards and away from us.  And of course, atmospheric distortions tell us we’ve got to put satellite observatories above the atmosphere to see better.”

“One messenger, lots of effects.”

“Indeed, but in the past few years we’ve added two more, really important messengers.  Photons are good, but they’re limited to just one of the four fundamental forces.”

“Hey, there’s gotta be more than that.  This is a complicated world.”

“True, but physicists can account for pretty much everything at the physical and chemical level with only four — electromagnetism, gravity, the strong force that holds nuclei together and the weak force that’s active in nuclear transformation processes.  Photons do electromagnetism and that’s all.”

“So you’re saying we’ve got a line on two of the others?”

“Exactly.  IceCube and its kin record the arrival of high-energy neutrinos.  In a sense they are to the weak force what photons are to electromagnetism.  We don’t know whether gravitation works through particles, but LIGO and company are sensitive to changes in the gravitational field that’s always with us.  Each gives us a new perspective on what’s happening out there.”

“So if you get a signal from one of the new messengers at the same time you get a photon signal…”

“Oh, look, the geese are coming in.”

Heavenly messengers

~~ Rich Olcott

“Hot Jets, Captain Neutrino!”

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Multi-messenger, Astronomy: Techniques, Cosmology, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, Physics: Light and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Hey, Cathleen, while we’re talking IceCube, could you ‘splain one other thing from that TV program?”

“Depends on the program, Al.”

“Oh, yeah, you weren’t here when we started on this.  So I was watching this program and they were talking about neutrinos and how there’s trillions of them going through like my thumbnail every second and then IceCube saw this one neutrino that they’re real excited about so what I’m wondering is, what’s so special about just that neutrino? How do they even tell it apart from all the others?”

“How about the direction it came from, Cathleen?  We get lotsa neutrinos from the Sun and this one shot in from somewhere else?”

SMBH jet and IceCube
Images from NASA and JPL-Caltech

“An interesting question, Vinnie.  The publicity did concern its direction, but the neutrino was already special.  It registered 290 tera-electron-volts.”

“Ter-what?”

“Sorry, scientific shorthand — tera is ten-to-the-twelfth.  A million electrons poised on a million-volt gap would constitute a Tera-eV of potential energy.  Our Big Guy had 290 times that much kinetic energy all by himself.”

“How’s that stack up against other neutrinos?”

“Depends on where they came from.  Neutrinos from a nuclear reactor’s uranium or plutonium fission carry only about 10 Mega-eV, wimpier by a factor of 30 million.  The Sun’s primary fusion process generates neutrinos peaking out at 0.4 MeV, 25 times weaker still.”

“How about from super-accelerators like the LHC?”

“Mmm, the LHC makes TeV-range protons but it’s not designed for neutrino production.  We’ve got others that have been pressed into service as neutrino-beamers. It’s a complicated process — you send protons crashing into a target.  It spews a splatter of pions and K-ons.  Those guys decay to produce neutrinos that mostly go in the direction you want.  You lose a lot of energy.  Last I looked the zippiest neutrinos we’ve gotten from accelerators are still a thousand times weaker than the Big Guy.”

I can see the question in Vinnie’s eyes so I fire up Old Reliable again.  Here it comes… “What’s the most eV’s it can possibly be?”  Good ol’ Vinnie, always goes for the extremes.

“You remember the equation for kinetic energy?”

“Sure, it’s E=½ m·v², learned that in high school.”

“And it stayed with you.  OK, and what’s the highest possible speed?”

“Speed o’ light, 186,000 miles per second.”

“Or 300 million meters per second, ’cause that’s Old Reliable’s default setting.  Suppose we’ve got a neutrino that’s going a gnat’s whisker slower than light.  Let’s apply that formula to the neutrino’s rest mass which is something less than 1.67×10-36 kilograms…”Speedy neutrino simple calculation“Half an eV?  That’s all?  So how come the Big Guy’s got gazillions of eV’s?”

“But the Big Guy’s not resting.  It’s going near lightspeed so we need to apply that relativistic correction to its mass…Speedy neutrino relativistic calculation“That infinity sign at the bottom means ‘as big as you want.’  So to answer your first question, there isn’t a maximum neutrino energy.  To make a more energetic neutrino, just goose it to go even closer to the speed of light.”

“Musta been one huge accelerator that spewed the Big Guy.”

“One of the biggest, Al.”  Cathleen again.  “That’s the exciting thing about what direction the particle came from.”

“Like the North Pole or something?”

“Much further away, much bigger and way more interesting.  As soon as IceCube caught that neutrino signal, it automatically sent out a “Look in THIS direction!” alert to conventional observatories all over the world.  And there it was — a blazar, 5.7 billion lightyears away!”

“Wait, Cathleen, what’s a blazar?”

“An incredibly brilliant but highly variable photon source, from radio frequencies all the way up to gamma rays and maybe cosmic rays.  We think the thousands we’ve catalogued are just a fraction of the ones within range.  We’re pretty sure that each of them depends on a super-massive black hole in the center of a galaxy.  The current theory is that those photons come from an astronomy-sized accelerator, a massive swirling jet that shoots out from the central source.  When the jet happens to point straight at us, flash-o!”

“Duck!”

“I wouldn’t worry about a neutrino flood.  The good news is IceCube’s signal alerted astronomers to check TXS 0506+056, a known blazar, early in a new flare cycle.”

“An astrophysical fire alarm!”

~~ Rich Olcott

Cube Roots

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Multi-messenger, Astronomy: Stellar Science, Astronomy: Techniques, Cosmology, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Cathleen steps into at Al’s for her morning coffee-and-scone.  “Heard you guys talking neutrinos so I’ll bet Al got you started with something about IceCube.  Isn’t it an awesome project?  Imagine instrumenting a cubic kilometer of ice, and at the South Pole!”

“Ya got me, Cathleen.  It knocked me out that anyone would even think of building it.  Where did the idea come from, anyhow?”

“I don’t know specifically, but it’s got a lot of ancestors, going back to the Wilson Cloud Chamber in the 1920s.”

“Oh, the cloud chamber!  Me and my brother did one for the Science Fair — used dry ice and some kind of alcohol in a plastic-covered lab dish if I remember right, and we set it next to one of my Mom’s orange dinner plates.  Spooky little ghost trails all over the place.”

“That’s basically what the first ones were.  An incoming particle knocks electrons out of vapor molecules all along its path.  The path is visible because the whole thing is so cold that other vapor molecules condense to form micro-droplets around the ions.  Anderson’s cloud chambers were good enough to get him a Nobel Prize for discovering the positron and muon.  But table-top devices only let you study low-energy particles — high-energy ones just shoot through the chamber and exit before they do anything interesting.”

“So the experimenters went big?”

“Indeed, Sy, massive new technologies, like bubble chambers holding thousands of gallons of liquid hydrogen or something else that reacts with neutrinos.  But even those experiments had a problem.”

“And that was…?”

FirstNeutrinoEventAnnotated 2
Adapted from public domain image
courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory

“They all depended on photography to record the traces.  Neutrino-hunting grad students had to measure everything in the photos, because neutrinos don’t make traces — you only find them by finding bigger particles that were disturbed just so.  The work got really intense when the astrophysicists got into the act, trying to understand why the Sun seemed to be giving off only a third of the neutrinos it’s supposed to.  Was the Sun going out?”

“Wait, Cathleen, how’d they know how many neutrinos it’s supposed to make?”

“Wow, Vinnie, you sure know how to break up a narrative, but it’s a fair question.  OK, quick answer.  We know the Sun’s mostly made of hydrogen and we know how much energy it gives off per second.  We’ve figured out the nuclear reactions it must be using to generate that energy.  The primary process combines four hydrogen nuclei  to make a helium nucleus.  Each time that happens you get a certain amount of energy, which we know, plus two neutrinos.  Do the energy arithmetic, multiply the number of heliums per second by two and you’ve got the expected neutrino output.”

“So is the Sun going out?”

“As usual, Al cuts to the chase.  No, Al, it’s still got 5 billion years of middle age ahead of it.  The flaw in the argument was that we assumed that our detectors were picking up all the neutrinos.”

“My mutations!”

“Yes, Vinnie.  Our detector technology at the time only saw electron neutrinos.  The Sun’s reactions emit electron neutrinos.  But the 93-million mile trip to Earth gave those guys plenty of time to oscillate through muon neutrino to tau neutrino and back again.  All we picked up were the ones that had gone through an integer number of cycles.”

“We changed technology, I take it?”

“Right again, Sy.  Instead of relying on nuclear reactions initiated by electron neutrinos, we went so spark chambers — crossed grids of very fine electrified wire in a box of argon gas.  Wherever a passing neutrino initiated an ionization, zap! between the two wires closest to that point.  Researchers could computerize the data reduction.  Turns out that all three neutrino flavors are pretty good at causing ionizations so the new tech cleared up the Solar Paradox, but only after we solved a different problem — the new data was point-by-point.  Working back from those points to the traces took some clever computer programming.”

“Ah, I see the connection with IceCube.  It doesn’t register traces, either, just the points where those sensors see the Cherenkov flashes.  It’s like a spark chamber grown big.”

“Cubic-kilometer big.”

~~ Rich Olcott