Category: Astronomy

Water, Water Everywhere — How Come?

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Stellar Science, Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Lunch time, so I elbow my way past Feder and head for the elevator.  He keeps peppering me with questions.

“Was Einstein ever wrong?”

“Sure. His equations pointed the way to black holes but he thought the Universe couldn’t pack that much mass into that small a space.  It could.  There are other cases.”

We’re on the elevator and I punch 2.  “Where you going?  I ain’t done yet.”

“Down to Eddie’s Pizza.  You’re buying.”

“Awright, long as I get my answers.  Next one — if the force pulling an electron toward a nucleus goes as 1/r², when it gets to where r=0 won’t it get stuck there by the infinite force?”

“No, because at very short distances you can’t use that simple force law.  The electron’s quantum wave properties dominate and the charge is a spread-out blur.”

The elevator stops at 7.  Cathleen and a couple of her Astronomy students get on, but Feder just peppers on.  “So I read that everywhere we look in the Solar System there’s water.  How come?”

I look over at Cathleen.  “This is Mr Richard Feder of Fort Lee, NJ.  He’s got questions.  Care to take this one?  He’s buying the pizza.”

“Well, in that case.  It all starts with alpha particles, Mr Feder.”

The elevator door opens on 2, we march into Eddie’s, order and find a table.  “What’s an alpha particle and what’s that got to do with water?”

Alpha particle
Two protons and two neutrons, assembled as an alpha particle

“An alpha particle’s a fragment of nuclear material that contains two protons and two neutrons.  99.999% of all helium atoms have an alpha particle for a nucleus, but alphas are so stable relative to other possible combinations that when heavy atoms get indigestion they usually burp alpha particles.”

“And the water part?”

“That goes back to where our atoms come from — all our atoms, but in particular our hydrogen and oxygen.  Hydrogen’s the simplest atom, just a proton in its nucleus.  That was virtually the only kind of nucleus right after the Big Bang, and it’s still the most common kind.  The first generation of stars got their energy by fusing hydrogen nuclei to make helium.  Even now, that’s true for stars about the size of the Sun or smaller.  More massive stars support hotter processes that can make heavier elements.  Umm, Maria, do you have your class notes from last Tuesday?”

“Yes, Professor.”

“Please show Mr Feder that chart of the most abundant elements in the Universe.  Do you see any patterns in the second and fourth columns, Mr Feder?”

Element Atomic number Mass % *103 Atomic weight Atom % *103
Hydrogen 1 73,900 1 92,351
Helium 2 24,000 4 7,500
Oxygen 8 1,040 16 81
Carbon 6 460 12 48
Neon 10 134 20 8
Iron 26 109 56 2
Nitrogen 7 96 14 <1
Silicon 14 65 32 <1

“Hmm…  I’m gonna skip hydrogen, OK?  All the rest except nitrogen have an even atomic number, and all of ’em except nitrogen the atomic weight is a multiple of four.”

“Bravo, Mr Feder.  You’ve distinguished between two of the primary reaction paths that larger stars use to generate energy.  The alpha ladder starts with carbon-12 and adds one alpha particle after another to go from oxygen-16 on up to iron-56.  The CNO cycle starts with carbon-12 and builds alphas from hydrogens but a slow step in the cycle creates nitrogen-14.”

“Where’s the carbon-12 come from?”

“That’s the third process, triple alpha.  If three alphas with enough kinetic energy meet up within a ridiculously short time interval, you get a carbon-12.  That mostly happens only while a star’s going nova, simultaneously collapsing its interior and spraying most of its hydrogen, helium, carbon and whatever out into space where it can be picked up by neighboring stars.”

“Where’s the water?”

“Part of the whatever is oxygen-16 atoms.  What would a lonely oxygen atom do, floating around out there?  Look at Maria’s table.  Odds are the first couple of atoms it runs across will be hydrogens to link up with.  Presto!  H2O, water in astronomical quantities.  The carbon atoms can make methane, CH4; the nitrogens can make ammonia, NH3; and then photons from Momma star or somewhere can help drive chemical reactions  between those molecules.”

“You’re saying that the water astronomers find on the planets and moons and comets comes from alpha particles inside stars?”

“We’re star dust, Mr Feder.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Shopping The Old Curiosity

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Techniques, Physics: Light and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Still got questions, Moire.”

“This’ll be your last shot this year, Mr Feder.  What’s the question?”

“They say a black hole absorbs all the light that falls on it. But the theory of blackbody radiation says a perfect absorber is also a perfect radiator. Emission should be an exact opposite flow to the incoming flow in every direction. Wouldn’t a black hole be shiny like a ball bearing?”Black hole as ball bearing 1
“A perfectly good question, but with crucial imperfections. Let’s start with the definition of a perfect absorber — it’s an object that doesn’t transmit or reflect any light. Super-black, in other words. So by definition it can’t be a mirror.”

“OK, maybe not a mirror, but the black hole has to send out some kind of exact opposite light to balance the arriving light.”

“Yes, but not in the way you think. Blackbody theory does include the assumption that the object is in equilibrium, your ‘exact opposite flow.’ The object must indeed send out as much energy as it receives, otherwise it’d heat up or cool down. But the outbound light doesn’t necessarily have to be at the same frequencies as the inbound light had. In fact, it almost never will.”

“How come not?”

“Because absorption and emission are two different processes and they play by different rules. If we’re including black holes in the discussion there are four different processes. No, five.  Maybe six.”

“I’m listening.”

“Good. Blackbody first. When a photon is absorbed by regular matter, it affects the behavior of some electron in there. Maybe it starts spending more time in a different part of the molecule, maybe it moves faster — one way or another, the electron configuration changes and that pulls the atomic nuclei away from where they were and the object’s atoms wobble differently. So the photon raises the object’s internal kinetic energy, which means raising its temperature, and we’ve got energy absorption, OK?”

“Yeah, and…?”

“At some later time, to keep things in equilibrium that additional energy has to be gotten rid of. But you can’t just paint one bit of energy red, say it’s special and follow it until it’s emitted. The whole molecule or crystal or whatever has excess energy as the result of all the incoming photons. When the total gets high enough, something has to give.  The object emits some photons to get rid of some of the excess. The only thing you can say about the outbound photons is that they generally have a lower energy than the incoming ones.”

“Why’s that?”

“Think of a bucket that’s brim-full and you’re dumping in cupfuls of water. Unless you’re pouring slowly and carefully, the dribbles escaping over the bucket’s rim will generally be many small amounts sloshing out more often than those cupfuls come in.  For light that’s fluorescence.”

“I suppose. What about the black hole?”

“The problem with a black hole is the mystery of what’s inside its event horizon. It probably doesn’t contain matter in the form of electrons and nuclei but we don’t know. There are fundamental reasons why information about what’s inside can’t leak out to us. All we can say is that when a light wave encounters a black hole, it’s trapped by the intense gravity field and its energy increments the black hole’s mass.  The mechanism … who knows?”

“Like I said, it gets absorbed. And gets emitted as Hawking radiation.”

“Sorry, that’s exactly what doesn’t happen. Hawking radiation arises from a different pair of processes. Process 1 generates pairs of virtual particles, which could be photons, electrons or something heavier. That happens at a chaotic but steady rate throughout the Universe.  Usually the particle pairs get back together and annihilate.  However, right next to the black hole’s event horizon there’s Process 2, in which one member of a virtual pair flies inward and the other member flies outward as a piece of Hawking radiation. Neither process even notices incoming photons. That’s not mirroring or even fluorescence.”

“Phooey, it was a neat idea.”

“That it was, but facts.”

~~ Rich Olcott

  • Thanks to lifeisthermal for inspiring this post.
  • Thus endeth a full year of Sy Moire stories.  I hope you enjoyed them.  Here’s to a new year and new ideas for all.
Lighting and a diagram of a linac

Curiosity in The Internet Market

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Physics: Electromagnetism, Physics: Fundamentals, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“I got another question, Moire.”

“Of course you do, Mr Feder.  Let’s hear it.”

“I read on the Internet that there’s every kind of radioactivity coming out of lightning bolts.  So is that true, how’s it happen and how come we’re not all glowing in the dark?”

“Well, now, like much else you read on the Internet there’s a bit of truth in there, and a bit of not-truth, all wrapped up in hype.  The ‘every kind of radioactivity’ part, for instance, that’s false.”

“Oh yeah?  What’s false about that?”

“Kinds like heavy-atom fission and alpha-particle ejection.  Neither have been reported near lightning strikes and they’re not likely to be.  Lightning travels through air.  Air is 98% nitrogen and oxygen with a sprinkling of light atoms.  Atoms like that don’t do those kinds of radioactivity.”

“So what’s left?”

“There’s only two kinds worth worrying about — beta decay, where the nucleus spits out an electron or positron, and some processes that generate gamma-rays.  Gamma’s a high-energy photon, higher even than X-rays.  Gamma photons are strong enough to ionize atoms and molecules.”

“You said ‘worth worrying about.’  I like worrying.  What’s in the not-worth-it bucket?”

“Neutrinos.  They’re so light and interact so little with matter that many physicists think of them as just an accounting device.  Trillions go through you every second and you don’t notice and neither do they.  Really, don’t worry about them.”

“Easy for you to say.  Awright, so how does lightning make the … I guess the beta and gamma radioactivity?”

“We know the general outlines, although a lot of details have yet to be filled in.  What do you know about linear accelerators?”

“Not a clue.  What is one?”

Lighting and a diagram of a linac
Linac diagram adapted from
Sgbeer – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

“It’s a technology for making high-energy electrons and other charged particles.  Picture a straight evacuated pipe equipped with ring electrodes at various distances from the source end.  The source could be an electron gun or maybe a rig that spits out ions of some sort.  Voltages between adjacent electrodes downstream of a particle will give it a kick when it passes en route to the target end.  By using the right voltages at the right times you can boost an electron’s kinetic energy into the hundred-million-eV range.  That’s a lot of kinetic energy.  Got that picture?”

“Suppose that I do.  Then what?”

“Lightning is the same thing but without the pipe and it’s not straight.  The electrons have an evacuated path, because plasma formation drives most of the molecules out of there.  Activity inside the clouds gives them high voltages, up to a couple hundred megavolts.  But on top of that there’s bremsstrahlung.”

“Brem…?”

“Bremsstrahlung — German for braking radiation.  You know how your car’s tires squeal when you make a turn at speed?”

“One of my favorite sounds, ‘specially when … never mind.  What about it?”

“That’s your tires converting your forward momentum into sound waves.  Electrons do that, too, but with electromagnetism.  The lightning path zigs and zags.  An electron’s path has to follow suit.  At each swerve, the electron throws off some of its kinetic energy as an electromagnetic wave, otherwise known as a photon.  Those can be very high-energy photons, X-rays or even gamma-rays.”

“So that’s where the gammas come from.”

“Yup.  But there’s more.  Remember those nitrogen atoms?  Ninety-nine-plus percent of them are nitrogen-14, a nice, stable isotope with seven protons and seven neutrons.  If a sufficiently energetic gamma strikes a nitrogen-14, the atom’s nucleus can kick out a neutron and turn into unstable nitrogen-13.  That nucleus emits a positron to become stable carbon-13.  So you’ve got free neutrons and positrons to add to the radiation list.”

“With all that going on, how come I’m not glowing in the dark?”

“‘Because the radiation goes away quickly and isn’t contagious.  Most of the neutrons are soaked up by  hydrogen atoms in passing water molecules (it’s raining, remember?).  Nitrogen-13 has a 10-minute half-life and it’s gone.  The remaining neutrons, positrons and gammas can ionize stuff, but that happens on the outsides of molecules, not in the nuclei.  Turning things radioactive is a lot harder to do.  Don’t worry about it.”

“Maybe I want to.”

“Your choice, Mr Feder.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Schrödinger’s Elephant

On By rolcottIn Gravitational astronomy, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, Physics: Entropy and Thermodynamics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Al’s coffee shop sits right between the Astronomy and Physics buildings, which is good because he’s a big Science fan.  He and Jeremy are in an excited discussion when Anne and I walk in.  “Two croissants, Al, and two coffees, black.”

“Comin’ up, Sy.  Hey, you see the news?  Big days for gravitational astronomy.”

Jeremy breaks in.  “There’s a Nobel Prize been announced —”

“Kip Thorne the theorist and Barry Barish the management guy —”

“and Rainer Weiss the instrumentation wizard —”

“shared the Physics prize for getting LIGO to work —”

“and it saw the first signal of a black hole collision in 2015 —”

“and two more since —”

“and confirmed more predictions from relativity theory —”

“and Italy’s got their Virgo gravitational wave detector up and running —”

“And Virgo and our two LIGOs, —”

“Well, they’re both aLIGOs now, being upgraded and all —”

“all three saw the same new wave —”

“and it’s another collision between black holes with weird masses that we can’t account for.  Who’s the lady?”

“Al, this is Anne.  Jeremy, close your mouth, you’ll catch a fly.”  (Jeremy blushes, Anne twinkles.)  “Anne and I are chasing an elephant.”

“Pleased to meetcha, Anne.  But no livestock in here, Sy, the Health Department would throw a fit!”

I grin.  “That’s exactly what Eddie said.  It’s an abstract elephant, Al.  We’ve been discussing entropy. Which is an elephant because it’s got so many aspects no-one can agree on what it is.  It’s got something to do with heat capacity, something to do with possibilities you can’t rule out, something to do with signals and information.  And Hawking showed that entropy also has something to do with black holes.”

“Which I don’t know much about, fellows, so someone will have to explain.”

Jeremy leaps in.  “I can help with that, Miss Anne, I just wrote a paper on them.”

“Just give us the short version, son, she can ask questions if she wants a detail.”

“Yessir.  OK, suppose you took all the Sun’s mass and squeezed it into a ball just a few miles across.  Its density would be so high that escape velocity is faster than the speed of light so an outbound photon just falls back inward and that’s why it’s black.  Is that a good summary, Mr Moire?”

“Well, it might be good enough for an Internet blog but it wouldn’t pass inspection for a respectable science journal.  Photons don’t have mass so the whole notion of escape velocity doesn’t apply.  You do have some essential elements right, though.  Black holes are regions of extreme mass density, we think more dense than anywhere else in the Universe.  A black hole’s mass bends space so tightly around itself that nearby light waves are forced to orbit its region or even spiral inward.  The orbiting happens right at the black hole’s event horizon, its thin shell that encloses the space where things get really weird.  And Anne, the elephant stands on that shell.”white satin and black hole“Wait, Mr Moire, we said that the event horizon’s just a mathematical construct, not something I could stand on.”

“And that’s true, Jeremy.  But the elephant’s an abstract construct, too.  So abstract we’re still trying to figure out what’s under the abstraction.”

“I’m trying to figure out why you said the elephant’s standing there.”

“Anne, it goes back to the event horizon’s being a mathematical object, not a real one.  Its spherical surface marks the boundary of the ultimate terra incognita.  Lightwaves can’t pass outward from it, nor can anything material, not even any kind of a signal.  For at least some kinds of black hole, physicists have proven that the only things we can know about one are its mass, spin and charge.  From those we can calculate some other things like its temperature, but black holes are actually pretty simple.”

“So?”

“So there’s a collision with Quantum Theory.  One of QT’s fundamental assumptions is that in principle we can use a particle’s current wave function to predict probabilities for its future.  But the wave function information disappears if the particle encounters an event horizon.  Things are even worse if the particle’s entangled with another one.”

“Information, entropy, elephant … it’s starting to come together.”

“That’s what he said.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Planetary Pastry, Third Course

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Uncategorized2 Comments

The Al’s Coffee Shop Astronomy gang is still discussing Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.  Cathleen‘s holding court, which is natural because she’s the only for-real Astronomer in the group…  “So here’s what we’ve got.  The rim of the Great Red Spot goes hundreds of miles an hour in the wrong direction compared to hurricanes on Earth.  An Earth hurricane’s eye is calm but the Jupiter Spot’s rim encloses a complex pattern of high winds.  Heat transport and cloud formation on Earth are dominated by water, but Jupiter’s atmospheric dynamic has two active players — water and ammonia.”

“Here’s your pastries, Cathleen.  I brought you a whole selection.  Don’t nobody sneeze on ’em, OK?”

“Oh, they’re perfect, Al.  Thanks.  Let’s start with this bear claw.  We’ll pretend it’s the base of the weather column.  On Earth that’d be mostly ocean, some land surface and some ice.  They’re all rough-ish and steer air currents, which is why there’s a rain shadow inland of coastal mountain ranges.”pastries 2

“Jupiter doesn’t have mountains?”

“We’re virtually certain it doesn’t, Sy.  The planet’s density is so low that it can’t have much heavy material.  It’s essentially an 88,000-mile-wide ball of helium-diluted liquid hydrogen topped by a 30-mile-high weather column.  Anything rocky sank to the core long ago.  The liquid doesn’t even have a real surface.”

<Al and Sy> “Huh?”

“Jovian temps are so low that even at moderate pressures there’s no boundary between gaseous and liquid phases.  Going downward you dive through clear ‘air,’ then progress through an increasingly opalescent haze until you realize you’re swimming.  Physicists just define the ‘surface’ to be the height where the pressure is one atmosphere.  That level’s far enough down that water and ammonia freeze to form overlying cloud layers but hydrogen and helium are still gases.  It could conceivably look like home there except the sky would be weird colors and you don’t see a floor.”

“If the boundary is that blurry, it’s probably pretty much frictionless — weather passes over it without slowing down or losing energy, right?”

“Yup.”

“So there’s way too much slivered almonds and stuff on that bear claw. On this scale it ought to have a mirror finish.”

“Good point.  But now we can start stacking weather onto it.  Here’s my doughnut, to represent the Great Red Spot or any of the other long-lived anticyclones.”

“Auntie who?”

“A-n-t-i-cyclone, Al.  Technical term for a storm that disobeys the Coriolis theory.”

“Uh-HUH. So why’s it do that?”

“Well, at this point we can only go up one level in the cause-and-effect chain.  <pulling out smartphone>  NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft sent back data for this this wonderful video

790106-0203_Voyager_58M_to_31M_reduced
Jupiter seen by Voyager 1 probe with blue filter in 1979. One image was taken every Jupiter day (approximately 10 hours).  Credit: NASA

“Basically, the Spot is trapped between two jet streams, one going westward at 135 mph and the other going eastward at 110 mph.  I’ll use these biscotti to represent them.pastries with arrows

“Hey, that’s like a rack-and-pinion gear setup, with two racks and an idler, except the idler gear’s four times as wide as the Earth.”

“A bit less than that these days, Sy.  The Spot’s been shrinking and getting rounder.  Every year since 1980 it’s lost about 300 miles east-west and about 60 miles north-south.  As of 2014 it was about 2.8 Earth-widths across.  And no, we don’t know why.  Theories abound, though.”

“What’s one of them?”

“Believe it or not, climate change.  On Jupiter, not Earth.  One group of scientists at Berkeley tackled a couple of observations

  • Unlike Earth, which is much hotter near the Equator than near the poles, Jupiter’s Equator is only a few degrees warmer than its poles.
  • Three persistent White Ovals near the Great Red Spot merged to form a single White Oval that recently turned red but only around the edges.

Their argument is long, technical and still controversial.  However, their proposal is that merging the three ovals disrupted the primary heat transport mechanism that had been evening out Jupiter’s temperature.  IF that’s true, and if it’s the case that Jupiter’s jet streams are powered by heat transport, then maybe disrupted heat patterns are interfering with  the Great Red Spot’s rack-and-pinion machine.  And maybe more.”

“Big changes ahead for the Big Planet.”

“Maybe.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Teena Meets The Eclipses

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

“Don’t look up until it suddenly gets really dark, Teena.  I’ll tell you when it’s time.”

“OK, Uncle Sy.  Oooo, look at the house where our tree makes a shadow!  It’s all over crescents!”

“Yep, wherever leaves overlap to make a pinhole, it’s like the one we made in our cardboard.  See, those crescents are just like the one our pinhole beams onto the sidewalk.”

“Yeah.  ‘Cause it’s the same Sun, right?”

“Sure is.”

“Are other little kids seeing the eclipse all over the world?  They’ve got the same Sun, too.”

“No, just the ones who happen to be on the shadow stripe that the Moon paints on the Earth.”

“How many kids is that?”

“Hard to tell.  Some families live where the shadow passes through, some families travel to be there, lots of other families just stay where they are.  No-one knows how many of each.  But we can make some not-very-good guesses.”

“The crescent’s going so slow.  Let’s make guesses while we’re waiting.”

“OK.  Let’s start by imagining that all the world’s people are spread evenly over the land and sea.”

“Even on the ocean?  Like everyone has a little boat?”

“Yep, and sleds or whatever on polar ice, people everywhere.  In our city there are eight blocks to a mile, so if we spread out the people there’d be one person every other block.”

“Every other block.  Like just on the black squares on our checker board.”

“Uh-huh.  The Moon’s shadow today will be a circle about 80 miles across and it’ll travel about 2500 miles across the whole country.  The stripe it paints would cover about 6½ million spread-out people.  Maybe 10 million if you count the people in little boats, ’cause the eclipse starts and ends over the ocean.”Local eclipses

“Lots of people.”

“Yes, but only about one person out of every thousand people in the world.”

“We’re pretty lucky then, huh?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Are there eclipses on other planets?”

“Of a sort, but only for planets that have a moon.  Poor Mercury and Venus don’t have moons so they never see an eclipse.”

“Aww. … Wait — you said ‘of a sort.’  Are there different kinds of eclipses?”

“You’re very alert this morning.  And yes, there are.  Two that get the publicity and two that we never see on Earth.  It has to do with perspective.”

“Per … perspec…?”

“Perspective.  The word originally meant very careful looking but it’s come to be about how things look from a particular point of view.  See that tree across the street?”

“Yeah.”

“Think your hand is bigger than the tree?”

“Of course not.  I climb that tree.”

“OK, put your hand between your eyes and the tree.”

“Oh!  My hand covers the whole tree!”

“Yup.  Nearer things look big and farther things look small.  That’s perspective.  Eclipses are all about perspective.”How big is the Sun

“How come?”

“The perspective principle works in the Solar System, too.  If you were to travel from Earth to Mars to Jupiter and so on, the Sun would look smaller at each planet.”

“Like the far-away trees look smaller than the close trees.  But what does that have to do with eclipses?”

“A planet gets an eclipse when one of its moons comes between it and the Sun.  That’s what’s happening right now here.  Our Moon is moving between us and the Sun and blocking its light.”

“But I don’t see the Moon, just the carved-out piece.”

“That’s because we’re looking at the unlit side of the Moon.  It’s so dim compared to the rest of the sky.  Anyway, the Moon’s width we see is just about the same as the Sun’s width.  The moons on the other planets don’t match up that well.  On Mars, for instance, its moon Phobos appears less than half the width of the Sun even though the Sun appears only 2/3 as wide as we see it.  Phobos can never cover the Sun entirely, so no true eclipse, just a transit.”

“Can the planet’s moon be bigger?”

“Sure.  On Jupiter, Europa’s width completely blocks out the Sun.  That’s called an occultation.  You can look up now.  Jupiter people can never see that corona.”

“Oooooo, so pretty.  We’re lucky, aren’t we?”

“In more ways than you know, sweetie.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Planetary Pastry, Second Course

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

We’re still sitting in Al’s coffee shop.  “OK, Cathleen, so Jupiter’s Great Red Spot acts like a hurricane turned inside-out.  Where’s the problem?”

“Just that it goes completely against all the computer models we’ve built to understand and predict hurricane activity.  It’ll take a whole new generation of even more complicated models for Jupiter-like planets.”

“Here’s the doughnuts you asked for, Cathleen.”

“Thanks, Al.  Perfect timing. <drawing on a paper napkin>  Let’s look at hurricanes first, OK, Sy?”

“Sure.”

“We’ll start with this doughnut that I’ve just taken a bite out of.  First thing that happens is that warm ocean water heats up the overlying air.  Warmed air rises, so we’ve got an updraft.”

“And then?”

“The rising air is humid (ocean air, remember?).  As it rises it cools and forces moisture to condense out.  Upward flow stops when the warmed air hits the top of the troposphere.  But there’s still more warm air pushing up the plume.  The cooled air has to go somewhere so it spreads out.  That’s where these red arrows on my paper napkin go horizontal.  The cooled air, loaded with water droplets, is heavy so it starts sinking which is why the red arrows turn downward.  They move back across that ocean water again ’cause they’re caught in the inflow.  Full cycle and that’s number 1 here, got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, Cathleen,  are you gonna need more paper napkins?”Donuts 1
“A couple should be enough, Al, thanks.  Now we get to number 2, the Coriolis thing. That’s always tough to talk students through but let’s try.  The Earth rotates once every 24 hours, right, and its circumference at the Equator is 25,000 miles, so relative to the Sun anything at the Equator is flying eastward at about 1,000 miles per hour.  Any place north of the Equator has to be going slower than that, and further north, even slower.  With me, Sy?”

“Gimme a minute … OK, I suppose.”

“Good.  Now suppose a balloon is floating in the breeze somewhere south of that rising plume.  Relative to the plume, it’ll have eastward momentum.  Now the balloon’s caught in the plume’s inflow but it doesn’t go straight in because of that eastward momentum.  Instead it’s going to arc around the plume.  See how I’ve got it coming in off-center?  Al, would that be clockwise or counterclockwise if you’re looking down from a satellite or something?”

“Umm … counterclockwise, yeah?”

“Mm-hm.  What about a balloon that starts out north of the plume?”

“Uhh … It’ll be going slower than the plume, so the plume gets ahead of it and it’ll arc … hey, counterclockwise again!”

“How ’bout that?  Anywhere in the northern hemisphere, air flowing into a low-pressure region will turn it counterclockwise.  As the inflow draws from greater distances, there’s a greater speed difference to drive the counterclockwise spin.  So that’s number 2 here.  Add those two cycles together and you’ve got number 3, which spirals all around the doughnut.  And there’s your hurricane.”

“Cool.  So how does that model not account for the Great Red Spot?”

“To begin with, the Spot’s in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere so it ought to be going clockwise which it definitely is not.  And there’s no broad band of surrounding clouds — just a lot of structure inside the ring, not outside.  There’s something else going on that swamps Coriolis.”

“So how’s Jupiter different from Earth?  Besides being bigger, of course.”

“Lots of ways, Sy.  You know how labels on healthcare products divide the contents into active ingredients and inert ingredients?  The inert ones just carry or modify the effects of the active ones.  Atmospheres work the same way.  On Earth the inert ingredients are nitrogen and oxygen…”

“Hey, oxygen’s important!”

“Sure, Al, but not when you’re modeling air movement.  The important active ingredient is water — it transports a lot of heat when it evaporates from one place and condenses somewhere else.  The biggest outstanding problem in Earth meteorology is accounting for clouds.”

“You’re gonna tell us that Jupiter’s inactive ingredients are hydrogen and helium, I suppose.”

“Precisely, Sy.  Jupiter has two active ingredients, water and ammonia, plus smaller amounts of sulfur and phosphorus compounds.  Makes for a crazy complicated modeling problem.  I’m going to need more pastries.”

“Comin’ up.”

 

~~ Rich Olcott

Planetary Pastry, First Course

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Astronomy: Techniques, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Morning, Al.  What’s the scone of the day?”

“No scones today, Sy.  Cathleen and one of her Astronomy students used my oven to do a whole batch of these orange-and-apricot Danishes.  Something to do with Jupiter.  Try one.”Great Apricot Spot 1
Cathleen was standing behind me.  “They’re in honor of NASA’s Juno spacecraft.  She just completed a close-up survey of Jupiter’s famous cloud formation, the Great Red Spot.  Whaddaya think?”

“Not bad.  Nice bright color and a good balance of sweetness from the apricot against tartness from the orange.”

“You noticed that, hey?  We had to do a lot of balancing — flavors, colors, the right amount of liquid.  Too juicy and the pastry part comes out gummy, too dry and you break a tooth.  Notice something else?”

“The structure, right?  Like the Spot’s collar around a mushed-up center.”

“Close, but Juno showed us that center’s anything but mushed-up.  <pulls out her smartphone>  Here’s what she sent back.”

GRS 1 @400
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Jason Major

“See, it’s swirls within swirls. We tried stirring the filling to look like that but it mostly smoothed out in the baking.”

“Hey, is it true what I heard that the Great Red Spot has been there for 400 years?”

“We think so, Al, but nobody knows for sure.  When Galileo published his telescopic observations of Jupiter in 1610 he didn’t mention a spot.  But that could be because he’d already caught flak from the Church by describing mountains and craters on the supposedly perfect face of the Moon.   Besides, the Jovian moons he saw were much more exciting for the science of the time.  A planet with satellites was a direct contradiction to Aristotle’s Earth-centered Solar System.”

“OK, but what about after Galileo?”

“There are records of a spot between 1665 and 1713 but then no reports of a spot for more than a century.  Maybe it was there and nobody was looking for it, maybe it had disappeared.  But Jupiter’s got one now and it’s been growing and shrinking for the past 185 years.”

“So what is it, what’s it made of and why’s it been there so long?”

“Three questions, one of them easy.”

“Which is easy, Sy?”

“The middle one.  The answer is, no-one knows what it’s made of.  That’s part of Juno‘s mission, to do close-up spectroscopy and help us wheedle what kinds of molecules are in there.  We know that Jupiter’s mostly hydrogen and helium, just like the Sun, but both of those are colorless.  Why some of the planet’s clouds are blue and some are pink — that’s a puzzle, right, Cathleen?”

“Well, we know a little more than that, especially since the Galileo probe dove 100 miles into the clouds in 1995.  The white clouds are colder and made of ammonia ice particles.  The pink clouds are warmer and … ok, we’re still working on that.”

“What about my other two questions, Cathleen?”

“People often call it a hurricane, but that’s a misnomer.  On Earth, a typical hurricane is a broad, complex ring of rainstorms with wind speeds from 75 to 200 mph.  Inside the ring wall people say it’s eerily calm.  The whole thing goes counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere, clockwise in the southern one.”

“So how’s the Great Red Spot different?”

“Size, speed, complexity, even direction.  East-to-west, the Spot is eight times wider than the biggest hurricanes.  Its collar winds run about 350 mph and it rotates counterclockwise even though it’s in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere.  It’s like a hurricane inside-out.”

“It’s not calm inside?”

“Nope, take another look at that Juno image.  There’s at least three very busy bands wrapped around a central structure that looks like it holds three distinct swirls.  That’s the part that’s easiest to understand.” GRS core

“Why so?”

“Geometry.  Adjacent segments of separate swirls have to be moving in the same direction or they’ll cancel each other out.  <scribbles diagram on a paper napkin>  Suppose I’ve got just one inside another one.  If they go in the same direction the faster one speeds up the slower one and they merge.  If they go in opposite directions, one of them disappears.  If there’s more than one inner swirl, there has to be an odd number, see?”

“So if it’s not a hurricane, what is it?”

“Got any donuts, Al?”

~~ Rich Olcott

Twinkle, Twinkle, Tabby’s Star

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Astronomy: Stellar Science, Astronomy: Techniques, Uncategorized2 Comments

Al was carrying his coffee pot past our table.  “Refills?  Hey, I heard you guys talking about Tabby’s Star.  Have you seen the latest?”

“Ohmigawd, there’s more?”

“Yeah, Cathleen.  They’ve finally found something that’s periodic.”

“Catch us up, Al.  Cathleen said that the dimmings are irregular.”

“They’ve been, Sy.  But remember Cathleen’s chart that showed big dips in 2011 and 2013, about 750 days apart?  Well, guess what?”

“They’ve seen more dips at 750-day intervals, in 2015 and 2017.”

“Well, not quite.  Nobody was looking in 2015.  But Kickstarter funding let the team buy observing time in 2017.  A dip came in right on schedule.  Here’s the picture. [shows smartphone around]”

WTF 2017 peak after day 5
Visible-light photometry of Tabby’s Star
14-28 May 2017
Image from Dr Boyajian’s blog

Cathleen snorted.  “Damn shame we need crowd-funding to support Science these days.”

“True,” I agreed, “but the good news is that the support is there.  Suddenly you’re scribbling on the back of that envelope.  So what does this chart tell us?”

“I’m sure every astronomer out there will tell you, ‘It’s too soon to say anything for sure.‘  This is raw data, which means it’s hasn’t gone through the usual clean-up process to account for instrumental issues, long-term trending, things like that.  The timing is great, though.  The bottom of this dip is at 18May2017.  The first dip bottomed out 2267 days earlier on 4March2011.  Counting the 2015 case that no-one saw, there’d be three intervals from first to most recent.  2267÷3 makes the average 756 days.  Add 756 to the first date and we’re at 28Mar2013, right in the midst of that year’s complex mess.  It does fit together.”

“So whatever’s causing it has a 756-day orbit?”

“Could be.  I know your next question.  If the eclipsing material were in our Solar System, it’d be a bit outside the 687-day orbit of Mars.  But we’ve already ruled out causes near our solar system.  Tabby’s Star is about 1½ times our Sun’s mass.  That 756-day orbit around Tabby, if it is one, is maybe 30% wider than the orbit of Mars.  But.”

[both] “But?”

“But the dip profiles don’t match up from one cycle to the next.  This dip’s only 2% or so, a tenth of the ones in 2011 and 2013.  Of course, the 2013 event spanned multiple dips so Heaven knows which one we should match to.  Even 2011 and 2017 don’t look the same.  The usual quick-and-dirty way to compare dips is to pair up widths at half depth.  That statistic for 2011 is about a day.  This one is twice that or more.  If the absorber is orbiting the star, it’s changing shape and can’t be a planet.”Tabby in orbit
“So what do we got, Sy?”

“Damifino, Al.  Everything Cathleen just told us points to something like an enormous comet loaded with loose rocks that go flying along random paths away from the star.”

“Sorry, Sy, the infrared data rules out the comet dust that would have to be spewed out along with the rocks.  Besides, someone calculated just how much rocky material would be required to reproduce the dimming we’ve seen already.  You’d need a ‘comet’ somewhere between Earth-size and Jupiter-size, and maybe more than one, and with that much mass the rocks wouldn’t fly apart very well.  Oh, and there’s that long-term fading, which the comet idea doesn’t account for.”

“So we’re down to…”

[sigh] “The explanation of last resort, which astronomers are very reluctant to talk about because journalists tend to go overboard.  Maybe, just maybe, we’re witnessing an advanced civilization at work, constructing a Dyson sphere around a star 1500 light years away.  People have talked about such things for decades.  Think about it — the Sun sends out light in all directions.  Earth intercepts only a billionth of that.  If we could completely surround the Sun with solar panels we’d have access to a billion times more energy than if we covered our own planet with panels.  Better yet, it’s all renewable and producing 24 hours a day.  But even with advanced technology, panels around Tabby’s Star would still radiate in the infrared and we don’t see that.”

My smartphone chirped that same odd ringtone and it was that same odd number, 710-555-1701. “Hello, Ms Baird.”

“The Universe is not only stranger than you imagine, Mr Moire, it’s stranger than you can imagine.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Tabby’s Star — Weird Or Really Weird?

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Astronomy: Stellar Science, Astronomy: Techniques, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I needed some time to mull over what Cathleen had told me about Tabby’s Star, so I went to the counter to replenish our coffee and scones. When I returned I said, “OK, let’s recap.  Dr Boyajian’s Planet Hunters citizen scientists found a star that dims oddly.  But I understand there’s lots of variable stars out there.  What’s so special about this one that the SETI project got interested?”

“There’s variable stars and variable stars, but this one shouldn’t vary.  Look, one of the triumphs of 20th-century science is that we pretty much understand how stars work.  You tell me a handful of a star’s properties, things like radius, surface temperature, iron/hydrogen ratio, a couple more, and I can give you its whole life story from light-up to nova.  We’ve catalogued about 70,000 variable stars.  Virtually all of them do episodic brightening — pulsating or flaring up.  There’s about a hundred that dim more or less regularly, but they’re supergiants with cool, sooty atmospheres.  Tabby’s Star is a flat-out normal F-type main sequence star, about 1½ times the Sun’s mass and a little bit warmer.  Like the clean-cut kid next door — no reason to expect trouble from it.”

“So if it’s not the star itself that’s dimming, then something must be getting between it and us.”

“Well, yeah.  The question is what.  There’s so many theories that one pair of authors wrote a 15-page paper just classifying and rating them.”

“Gimme a few.”
Multi-Tabby Star

“Clouds of interstellar dust, for starters.  Sodium’s sparse in stars and the interstellar medium, but it’s got two easily recognized strong absorption lines in the yellow part of the visible spectrum.  Tabby’s sodium lines are broad and weak like you’d expect in a star’s atmosphere, but in the data they’re overlain by sharp, intense absorption peaks that can only come from sodium-bearing gas or dust in the nine-quadrillion-mile journey from there to here.  So there’s dispersed matter in the line of sight, but it can account for at most 35% of the dimming.  Furthermore, an interstellar cloud would have a hard time maintaining structures small enough to produce the sharp dim-and-recover pattern Boyajian found.  Loosely-bound stuff like dust clouds and gas tends to smear out in space.”

“How about comets, or rings, or clumps of asteroids orbiting the star?”

“There’s evidence against all those, but I guess I haven’t mentioned it yet.  You’ve seen the heat lamps over Eddie’s pizza bar?”

“Sure.  Infrared radiation heats things up.”

“And warm things give off infrared radiation.  ‘Warm’ meaning anything above absolute zero.  Better yet, there’s a well-known relation between an object’s temperature and its infrared spectrum.  Rocks or dust anywhere near the star would absorb energy from whatever kind of light and re-radiate it as heat infrared we could see.  The spectrum would show more infrared than you’d expect from the star itself.  And there isn’t any extra infrared.”

“None?”

“Not so’s our technology can detect.  If there’s any there, it’s less than 0.2% of the total coming from the star, nowhere near enough to account for those 8%, 16% and 22% dips.  So no, no comets or rings or asteroid clumps orbiting Tabby’s Star.”

“How about something orbiting our Sun, way far out where we’ve not found it yet?”

“Any light-blocking object near us, like maybe in the Oort Cloud that sends us long-term comets, should produce the same sort of weirdness from Tabby’s near neighbors.  We don’t see that.  One astronomer studied a star only 25 arc-seconds away — steady as a rock.  So whatever’s causing the dimming is probably close to Tabby’s star.  Oh, wait, here’s one more weirdness.  I just saw a report…” [twiddles on tablet] “Yeah, here it is.  Check out this chart.”Dimming montage“You’ll have to unravel that for me.”

“Sure.  The Planet Hunter team was looking for transits, which generally take at most a few days, so the Kepler science team filtered out slow variations before passing the data along.  After Boyajian’s report came out, two Keplerians looked back at the raw data.  I told you about the 3-6% dimming (estimates vary) since 1890.  The raw Kepler data show a 3% drop in four years!”

“I’m starting to think about Dyson Spheres and Larry Niven’s Ringworld.”

“Now you know why SETI got excited.”

~~ Rich Olcott