Category: Astronomy

Life and energy on Titan, maybe

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Chemistry, Uncategorized2 Comments

Say you’re an astrobiologist tasked with designing a world that would be able to support life we’d be able to recognize as such.  What absolute essentials would you need to include?

Abundant liquid water?  Biologists have found algae thriving inside desert rocks, moistened only by dew seeping in through microscopic pores.  A comfortable temperature?  We’ve found bacteria living in environments as cold as 5ºF and as warm as 250ºF.  A solid surface to grow on?  Arthur C Clarke (A Meeting with Medusa) wrote about complex life-forms floating in the 3,000-mile-deep atmosphere of Jupiter.  OK, that’s science fiction, but Clarke’s the guy who invented geostationary satellites for telecommunications and GPS.gibbs-energies

Many scientists would say that the obvious essential is a source of chemical energy.  I’d add, “and an efficient mechanism to convert the source energy to a form that can be transported within an organism.”  To my knowledge, all life-forms now on Earth have met the second prerequisite by using the ATP molecule for intra-cellular energy transport.  But life has been amazingly creative in finding ways to build those ATPs.  The tall diagram lists some biologic energy sources in decreasing order of how much energy is released.

All the Biology textbooks tell us that Earth’s energy cycle starts with the Sun.  Solar photons energize plant photosynthesis which creates loads of ATP molecules.  Some of them power a multistep process which combines CO2 and H2O to release O2 and create carbohydrates (CH2O)x.  (Glucose, for instance, is (CH2O)6.  Guess where the term “carbohydrate” came from.)  Earth’s biologic carbon cycle completes when other life “burns” carbohydrates to exploit the energy stored therein.  On this chart, “burn” means “combine with O2” and usually doesn’t involve fire.

Notice that “Make (CH2O)x” is at the bottom of the chart — that process absorbs a lot of energy per carbon atom.  Conversely, “Burn (CH2O)x” releases energy which is why we like sugar too much.

In the past couple of decades we’ve learned that’s not the only way, or maybe even the dominant way, that Earth-life makes its ATPs.  Microbes have evolved a surprising number of “front ends” to the energy machinery.  Here in Colorado we’ve got problems in old mines where microbes build ATPs by oxidizing iron pyrite (FeS) to sludgy rust (Fe2O3) and sulfuric acid (H2SO4).  Works great for them, not so good for downstream organisms.

Iron compounds are such a good energy source that many scientists believe (it’s still controversial) that Earth’s hematite and magnetite deposits were laid down half-a-billion years ago by archaea, microorganisms that preceded bacteria.

Way down on the energy-source scale are the methanogens, archaea that use molecular hydrogen to convert CO2 to methane (CH4).  They only live in zero-oxygen environments — peat bogs, ocean-bottom hydrothermal vents and subsurface veins that are perilous to mine.

Earthly biology participates in many cyclic processes.  The bi-level diagram below highlights two — oxygen cycling between O2 and oxygen compounds, and carbon cycling between CO2 and living tissues (which contain carbohydrates).

If it weren’t for light-driven photosynthesis ( ~~ is a photon), pretty soon all our O2 would be locked up in the ground where it came from.  In a sense, Earth uses life and carbon to get oxygen back up into the atmosphere.  Astronomers look for O2 in a planetary atmosphere as a sign of life.titan-cycles-2

Maybe Titan does something similar.  Titan’s atmosphere contains methane (CH4) and H2 but the quantities aren’t right.  The purple “Lyman α” and blue “Balmer α” lines on the energy chart denote particularly strong solar photons that can break up C-H bonds and generate H2 in Titan’s upper atmosphere.  We understand the relevant processes pretty well and can calculate how much methane, acetylene (C2H2) and H2 should be up there.

The calculated quantities pretty much match what astronomers found in Titan’s upper atmosphere.  But they’re not what Cassini-Huygens found on the ground.  Acetylene just isn’t there, and a (somewhat precarious) computer simulation indicates that there’s much less ground-side H2 than you’d expect from simple diffusion.  Dr Chris McKay has put those clues and the energy stack together to suggest that something on Titan inhales acetylene and hydrogen and exhales methane.

Something alive, maybe?

~~ Rich Olcott

A Brief History of Atmospheres

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

miller-ureyLong ago in a far-away career, I taught a short-course about then-current theories on the origin of life.  The lab portion of the course centered on the 1952 Miller-Urey experiment the first demonstration that amino acids could be produced abiotically.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that Miller’s original lab apparatus is on exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where I volunteer now.

The diagram’s notes describe the basic experiment.  Load up the system with whatever gases you think might have been in the primeval atmosphere.  Start cooling water running through the condenser (double-wall tubing below the upper sphere) and gently heat the water sample you’ve put in the bottom sphere.  Vapors travel up the tube into the top sphere where there’s a spark arcing between two electrodes (the black lines at 45º).  Water vapor passing by sweeps any gas-spark reaction products back down to the bottom sphere.

Let the whole thing stew for a while (Miller ran his for a week, we let ours go for two), then draw off and analyze a sample of the solution in the bottom sphere.  In Stanley’s day his analytical techniques found 5 amino acids.  In 1971 (I think) we found (I think) 8 or 9.  More recent work-ups of Miller’s sealed original samples found 25, including all 20 considered essential to life.  So yeah, if you supply enough energy to a methane-ammonia-water system (Miller added hydrogen to that; we didn’t, for safety reasons) you can make the building blocks for proteins.

The experiment has been repeated probably thousands of times by different researchers in the last half-century.  Some replications were duplicates of Miller’s, some started with recipes derived from other theories about what Earth’s early atmosphere looked like.

And there’s the problem.  In Miller’s day we thought that Earth’s atmosphere was basically comet-tail concentrate.  That’d be mostly water vapor along with a couple of volatiles like methane and ammonia.  Later on we realized that much of our atmosphere is volcano belch — a hodgepodge of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, hydrogen, sulfur gases, nitrogen, argon, helium, various acids, multiple kinds of rock dust….  Some of that is left-overs from Earth’s initial stages; some has been generated by subsequent geological processes like serpentinization, which can generate both methane and hydrogen.

If you’re running a Miller experiment you’re free to load the apparatus with whatever mixture you think other scientists might think is reasonable for an Earth on the verge of Biology.  No oxygen, though — the chemistry of ancient rocks rules out significant atmospheric O2 before about 3½ billion years ago.

Now the researchers are playing variations on the theme, asking whether conditions on (or within) Titan could also generate complex compounds that given a billion years could self-organize into anything we’d recognize as life.  So what did Titan’s atmosphere look like a few billion years ago?

That’s a toughie, because we don’t have on-the-ground (or out-of-the-ground) data like we have for Earth.  We’ll have to make do with theory, which starts with this chart.

solar_system_escape_velocity_vs_surface_temperature-svg
Molecular escape velocities

At any given temperature you can calculate the average energy per gas molecule (any kind of gas).  Combine that with the known mass of a specific kind of molecule and you can compute its speed.

On any given world you can calculate the minimum speed (the escape velocity) that an object (rocket, rock or gas molecule) needs to have in order to overcome the world’s gravitational pull.

The chart combines both calculations for some important molecules for worlds in the Solar System that have atmospheres.  For instance, Earth’s average temperature (give or take a few dozen degrees) is  300ºK=27ºC≈80ºF.  From the chart, hydrogen and helium should be able to (and do) leave our atmosphere quickly.  However, Earth’s gravity is sufficient to hold onto its original dowry of the heavier species.  By contrast, the four massive planets would have to warm up by hundreds of degrees before they lose even the light gases.

Sure enough, Titan’s atmosphere is mostly nitrogen.  The astronomers measure its methane and hydrogen content in parts per thousand but those concentrations aren’t the same going from top to bottom of Titan’s atmosphere.  Therein lies an intriguing tale, but it’ll have to wait for the next post.

~~ Rich Olcott

Fifty Shades of Ice

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

earth-vs-titan-sea

This week we dip a little deeper into Titan’s weirdness trove.  Check the diagram.  Two kinds of ice??!?  What’s that about?

diamond-and-ice
Carbon allotropes
and water polymorphs

As everyone knows, diamonds and pencil lead (graphite, and I loved learning that graphite is an actual dug-from-the-ground mineral whose name came from the Greek verb “to write”) are both pure carbon, mostly.  Same atoms, just arranged differently.

Graphite‘s carbon atoms are laid out in sheets of hexagons.  Adjacent sheets are bonded together but not as strongly as are the atoms within each sheet.  Sheets can slide past each other, which is why we use graphite as a lubricant and why pencils can write and erasers can unwrite.

Diamond‘s atoms are also laid out in sheets of (rumpled) hexagons, but now the bonds between sheets are identical to the bonds within a sheet.  Turn your head sideways and you’ll see that sheets run vertical, too.  In fact, each carbon atom participates in four sheets, three vertical and one horizontal.  All that symmetrical bonding makes diamond one of the hardest substances we know of.

Neighboring carbon atoms form bonds by sharing electrons between their positive nuclei.  Neighboring water molecules (H2O) don’t share electrons but they do tend to line up with their somewhat positive hydrogen atoms pointing towards nearby somewhat negative oxygens.  That’s a loose rule in liquid water but it dominates when the molecules freeze into ice.

Most of the ice on Earth has an Ice-Ih structure, where the oxygen atoms are arranged in the same pattern as the carbons are in graphite.  Water’s hexagonal sheets aren’t quite flat, but the 6-fold symmetry gives us snowflakes.  There’s a hydrogen atom between each pair of oxygens, but it’s not half-way between.  Instead, each oxygen tightly holds its own two hydrogens while it pulls at further-away hydrogens owned by two neighboring oxygens.

But water molecules have other ways to arrange themselves.  A small fraction of Earth’s ice has a diamond-like Ice-Ic structure with each oxygen participating in four hexagon sheets.  Again, hydrogens are on the lines between them.

Water’s such a versatile molecule that it doesn’t stop with two polymorphs.  Ice scientists recognize seventeen distinct crystalline varieties, plus three where the molecules don’t line up neatly.  (None of them is Vonnegut’s “Ice-nine.”)  Each polymorph exists in a  unique temperature and pressure range; each has its own set of properties.  As you might expect, ices formed at high pressure are denser than liquid water.  Fortunately, Ice-Ih is lighter than water and so ice cubes and icebergs float.

As cold as Titan is and as high as the pressure must be under 180 miles of Ice-Ih and watery ammonia sea (even at 10% of Earth’s gravity), it’s quite likely* that there’s a thick layer of Ice-something around Titan’s rocky core.

clathratesThe primary reason we think Titan is so wet is that Titan’s density is about halfway between rock and water.  We know there are other light molecules on Titan — ammonia, methane, etc.  We don’t know how much of each.  Those compounds don’t have water’s complex phase behavior but many can dissolve in it.  That’s why that hypothetical “Ammonia sea” is in the top diagram.

But wait, there’s more.  Both graphite and water ice are known to form complex polymorphs, clathrates, that host other molecules.  This diagram gives a hint of how that can happen.  Frozen water under pressure forms a large number of more-or-less ordered cage clathrate structures that can host  Titan’s molecular multitude.

At Titan’s temperatures ice rocks would be about as hard as granite.  Undoubtedly they’ll have surprising chemistry and interesting histories.  We can expect clathrate geology on Titan to be as complex as silicate geology is on Earth.

Geochemist heaven, except for the space suits.

~~ Rich Olcott

* – A caveat: we know a great deal about Earth’s structure because we live here and have been studying it scientifically for centuries. On the other hand, most of what we think we know about Titan’s interior comes from mathematical models based on gravitational observations from the Cassini mission, plus 350 photos relayed back from the Huygens lander, plus experiments in Earth-bound chemistry labs. Expect revisions on some of this stuff as we learn more.

The Titanic Winds of Titan (And Venus)

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Uncategorized2 Comments

Last week we saw that the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan wasn’t quite as weird as we thought.  But there another way it’s really weird, completely unlike Earth but yet very much like Venus.  Titan’s a superrotater, a world whose atmosphere circles the planet much faster than its surface does.

Let’s start with a relatively simple Earthside phenomenon, a hurricane.  Warm air rises, right?  When the warmth comes from bathtub-temperature sea-water, it’s wet warm air.  As the air rises it cools and releases the moisture as rain.  But the air can’t just keep rising forever or we’d squirt out all our atmosphere. So where does it go?

From a physicist’s perspective, that’s the key question.   If we can track/predict the path of a small parcel of air molecules through a weather system, then we’ve got at least a rough understanding of how that system works.

For the past half-century, atmosphere physicists have been engaged on a project grandly entitled the General Circulation Model (GCM), a software mash-up of the Ideal Gas Law, Newton’s Laws of motion, thermodynamic data for solid/liquid/gas transformations, the notoriously difficult Navier-Stokes equations for viscous fluids, and careful data management for input streams from thousands of disparate sources.  Oh, and it’s important that the Earth is a rotating spheroid rather than a flat plane.

hurricane-en-svg
How a tropical cyclone works
Illustration by Kevin Song, from Wikimedia Commons

Kevin Song’s diagram summarizes much of what we know about hurricanes.  An air packet rises until it hits the tropopause (the top edge of the troposphere), then expands horizontally.  While the packet’s spreading out, the planet’s rotation generates Coriolis “forces” that bend straight-line radial paths into the spirals we’ve seen so often in satellite photos.

A hurricane may look big on your weathercaster’s screen, but it’s less than 0.1% of Earth’s surface area.  Nonetheless, many of the same principles that drive a hurricane underlie global weather patterns.

wind-cells-and-jets-2Air warmed by the equatorial Sun rises, only to sink as it heads poleward.  Our packet loops between the Equator and about 30ºN (see the diagram).

Actually that loop is a slice through a big doughnut that stretches all the way around the Earth.  Another doughnut lies southward just below the Equator.  Two more pairs of doughnuts reside polewards of those as indicated by the other arrows in the diagram.  The doughnuts act like a set of interlocking gears, each reinforcing and moderating the motion of its neighbors.

Thanks to the same geometric phenomenon that spins a hurricane, air packets in these doughnuts don’t loop back to the points they started from.  The Earth turns under the packets as they journey, so each packet takes a spiraling tour around the planet.

Because of all those doughnuts, on average Earth wears a set of cloud-top necklaces.  Regions within 15º of the Equator are rain-forested, as are the Canadian and Siberian forested belts near 60ºN.  The world’s most prominent deserts cluster beneath the dry downdrafts near the 30º latitudes.  Jupiter, “the Easter egg planet,” gets its pink and blue bands from similar doughnuts except that Jupiter has room for many more of them.

Those green circles in the diagram are important, too.  They also represent Earth-circling doughnuts, but ones whose winds flow parallel to Earth’s surface rather than perpendicular to it.  The ones close to the surface give rise to the trade winds.  The high-altitude ones are the jet streams that steer storm systems and give the weathercasters something to talk about, especially in the wintertime.

Jet streams flow briskly — 60 to 200 mph, on a par with a middling hurricane.  Here’s a benchmark: Earth’s equatorial circumference is 25,000 miles, so Ecuadorian palm trees circle the planet at (25000 miles/24 hours)=1041 mph.  Our jet streams go about 15% of that.  Theory and GCM agree that the jets are powered by the Coriolis effect — spiraling air packets in the primary donuts cooperate to push jet stream air packets like oars on a galley ship.  That adds up.

Titan and Venus can’t possibly work that way.  Both of them rotate much more slowly than Earth (Titan about 30 mph, Venus only 4), so Coriolis forces are negligible.  But Titan’s jet streams do 75 mph and Venus’ race at 185.  What powers them?  The physicists are still arguing.

~~ Rich Olcott

Titan’s Atmosphere Is A Gas

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

One year ago I kicked off these weekly posts with some speculations about how Life might exist on Saturn’s moon Titan. My surmises were based on reports from NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission, plus some Physical Chemistry expectations for Titan’s frigid non-polar mix of liquid ethane and methane. Titan offers way more fun than that.

The environment on Titan is different from everything we’re used to on Earth. For instance, the atmosphere’s weird.earth-vx-titanTitan’s atmosphere is heavy-duty compared with Earth’s — 6 times deeper and about 1½ times the surface pressure. When I read those numbers I thought, “Huh? But Titan’s diameter is only 40% as big as Earth’s and its surface gravity is only 10% of ours. How come it’s got such a heavy atmosphere?”

Wait, what’s gravity got to do with air pressure? (I’m gonna use “air pressure” instead of “surface atmospheric pressure” because typing.) Earth-standard sea level air pressure is 14.7 pounds of force per square inch. That 14.7 pounds is the total weight of the air molecules above each square inch of surface, all the way out to space.

(Fortunately, air’s a hydraulic fluid so its pressure acts on sides as well as tops. Otherwise, a football’s shape would be even stranger than it is.)

Newton showed us that weight (force) is mass times the the acceleration of gravity. Gravity on Titan is 1/10 as strong as Earth’s, so an Earth-height column of air on Titan should weigh about 1½ pounds.

But Titan’s atmosphere (measured to the top of each stratosphere) goes out 6 times further than Earth’s. If we built out that square-inch column 6 times taller, it’d weigh only 9 pounds on Titan, well shy of the 22 pounds the Huygens lander measured. Where does the extra weight come from?

My first guess was, heavy molecules. If gas A has molecules that are twice as heavy as gas B’s, then a given volume of A would weigh twice as much as the same volume of B. An atmosphere composed of A will press down on a planet’s surface twice as hard as an atmosphere composed of B.

Good guess, but doesn’t apply. Earth’s atmosphere is 78% N2 (molecular weight 28) and 21% O2 (molecular weight 32) plus a teeny bit of a few other things. Their average molecular weight is about 29. Titan’s atmosphere is 98% N2 so its average molecular weight (28) is virtually equal to Earth’s. So no, those tarry brown molecules that block our view of Titan’s surface aren’t numerous enough to account for the high pressure.

My second guess is closer to the mark, I think. I remembered the Ideal Gas Law, the one that says, “pressure times volume equals the number of molecules times a constant times the absolute temperature.” In symbols, P·V=n·R·T.

Visualize one gas molecule, Fred, bouncing around in a cube sized to match the average volume per molecule, V/n=R·T/P. If Fred goes outside his cube in any direction he’s likely to bang into an adjacent molecule. If Fred has too much contact with his neighbors they’ll all stick together and become a liquid or solid.

The equation tells us that if the pressure doesn’t change, the size of Fred’s cube rises with the temperature. Just for grins I calculated the cube’s size for standard Earth conditions: (22.4 liters/mole)×(1 cubic meter/1000 liters)×(1 mole/6.02×1023 molecules)=37.2×10-27 cubic meter/molecule. The cube root of that is the length of the cube’s edge — 3.3 nanometers, about 8.3 times Fred’s 0.40-nanometer diameter.∗

titan-boxes
Fred and neighbors

Earth-standard surface temperature is about 300°K (absolute temperatures are measured in Kelvins). Titan’s surface temperature is only 94°K. On Titan that cube-edge would be 8.3*(94/300)=2.6 times Fred’s diameter — if air pressure were Earth-standard.

But really Titan’s air pressure is 1.5 times higher because its column is so tall and contains so much gas. The additional pressure squeezes Fred’s cube-edge down to 2.6*(1/1.5)=1.8 times his diameter. Still room enough for Fred to feel well-separated from his neighbors and continue acting like a proper gas.

The primary reason Titan’s atmosphere is so dense is that it’s chilly up there. Also, there’s a lot of Freds.

~~ Rich Olcott

∗ – For the technorati… The cube-root of the Van der Waals volume for N2. And yeah, I know I’m almost writing about Mean Free Path but I think the development’s simpler this way.

Michelson, Morley and LIGO

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

Two teams of scientists, 128 years apart.  The first team, two men, got a negative result that shattered a long-standing theory.  The second team, a thousand strong, got a positive result that provided final confirmation of another long-standing theory.  Both teams used instruments based on the same physical phenomenon.  Each team’s innovations created whole new fields of science and technology.

Interferometer 1Their common experimental strategy sounds simple enough — compare two beams of light that had traveled along different paths

Light (preferably nice pure laser light, but Albert Michelson didn’t have a laser when he invented interferometry in 1887) comes in from the source at left and strikes the “beam splitter” — typically, a partially-silvered mirror that reflects half the light and lets the rest through.  One beam goes up the y-arm to a mirror that reflects it back down through the half-silvered mirror to the detector.  The other beam goes on its own round-trip journey in the x-direction.  The detector (Michelson’s eye or a photocell or a fancy-dancy research-quality CCD) registers activity if the waves in the two beams are in step when they hit it.  On the other hand, if the waves cancel then there’s only darkness.

Getting the two waves in step requires careful adjustment of the x- and y-mirrors, because the waves are small.  The yellow sodium light Michelson used has a peak-to-peak wavelength of 589 nanometers.  If he twitched one mirror 0.0003 millimeter away from optimal position the valleys of one wave would cancel the peaks of the other.

So much for principles.  The specifics of each team’s device relate to the theory being tested.  Michelson was confronting the æther theory, the proposition that if light is a wave then there must be some substance, the æther, that vibrates to carry the wave.  We see sunlight and starlight, so  the æther must pervade the transparent Universe.  The Earth must be plowing through the æther as it circles the Sun.  Furthermore, we must move either with or across or against the æther as we and the Earth rotate about its axis.  If we’re moving against the æther then lightwave peaks must appear closer together (shorter wavelengths) than if we’re moving with it.Michelson-Moreley device

Michelson designed his device to test that chain of logic. His optical apparatus was all firmly bolted to a 4′-square block of stone resting on a wooden ring floating on a pool of mercury.  The whole thing could be put into slow rotation to enable comparison of the x– and y-arms at each point of the compass.

Interferometer 3
Suppose the æther theory is correct. Michelson should see lightwaves cancel at some orientations.

According to the æther theory, Michelson and his co-worker Edward Morley should have seen alternating light and dark as he rotated his device.  But that’s not what happened.  Instead, he saw no significant variation in the optical behavior around the full 360o rotation, whether at noon or at 6:00 PM.

Cross off the æther theory.

Michelson’s strategy depended on light waves getting out of step if something happened to the beams as they traveled through the apparatus.  Alternatively, the beams could charge along just fine but something could happen to the apparatus itself.  That’s how the LIGO team rolled.

Interferometer 2
Suppose Einstein’s GR theory is correct. Gravitational wave stretching and compression should change the relative lengths of the two arms.

Einstein’s theory of General Relativity predicts that space itself is squeezed and stretched by mass.  Miles get shorter near a black hole.  Furthermore, if the mass configuration changes, waves of compressive and expansive forces will travel outward at the speed of light.  If such a wave were to encounter a suitable interferometer in the right orientation (near-parallel to one arm, near-perpendicular to the other), that would alter the phase relationship between the two beams.

The trick was in the word “suitable.”  The expected percentage-wise length change was so small that eLIGO needed 4-kilometer arms to see movement a tiny fraction of a proton’s width.  Furthermore, the LIGO designers flipped the classical detection logic.  Instead of looking for a darkened beam, they set the beams to cancel at the detector and looked for even a trace of light.

eLIGO saw the light, and confirmed Einstein’s theory.

~~ Rich Olcott

Gravitational Waves Are Something Else

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

gravitational-gif.0

If you’re reading this post, you’ve undoubtedly seen at least one diagram like the above — a black hole or a planet or a bowling ball makes a dent in a rubber sheet and that’s supposed to explain Gravity.  But it doesn’t, and neither does this spirally screen-grab from Brian Greene’s presentation on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show:rubber-sheet waves_post

<Blush> I have to admit that the graphic I used a couple of weeks ago is just as bad.

Gravitational waves don’t make things go up and down like ocean waves, and they’re definitely not like that planet on a trampoline — after all, there’s nothing “below” to pull things downward so there can’t be a dent.  And gravitational waves don’t do spirals, much.

soundwaveOf all the wave varieties we’re familiar with, gravitational waves are most similar to (NOT identical with!!) sound waves.  A sound wave consists of cycles of compression and expansion like you see in this graphic.  Those dots could be particles in a gas (classic “sound waves”) or in a liquid (sonar) or neighboring atoms in a solid (a xylophone or marimba).

Contrary to rumor, there can be sound in space, sort of.  Any sizable volume of “empty” space contains at least a few atoms and dust particles.  A nova or similar sudden event can sweep particles together and give rise to successive waves that spread as those local collections bang into particles further away.  That kind of activity is invoked in some theories of spiral galaxy structure and the fine details of Saturn’s rings.

In a gravitational wave, space itself is compressed and stretched.  A particle caught in a gravitational wave doesn’t get pushed back and forth.  Instead, it shrinks and expands in place.  If you encounter a gravitational wave, you and all your calibrated measurement gear (yardsticks, digital rangers, that slide rule you’re so proud of) shrink and expand together.  You’d only notice the experience if you happened to be comparing two extremely precise laser rangers set perpendicular to each other (LIGO!).  One would briefly register a slight change compared to the other one.

Light always travels at 186,000 miles per second but in a compressed region of space those miles are shorter.  bent lightEinstein noticed that implication of his Theory of General Relativity and in 1916 predicted that the path of starlight would be bent when it passed close to a heavy object like the Sun.  The graphic shows a wave front passing through a static gravitational structure.  Two points on the front each progress at one graph-paper increment per step.  But the increments don’t match so the front as a whole changes direction.  Sure enough, three years after Einstein’s prediction, Eddington observed just that effect while watching a total solar eclipse in the South Atlantic.

Unlike the Sun’s steady field, a gravitational wave is dynamic. Gravitational waves are generated by changes in a mass configuration.  The wave’s compression and stretching forces spread out through space.

Here’s a simulation of the gravitational forces generated by two black holes orbiting into a collision.  The contours show the net force felt at each point in the region around the pair.
2 black holesWe’re being dynamic here, so the simulation has to include the fact that changes in the mass configuration aren’t felt everywhere instantaneously.  Einstein showed that space transmits gravitational waves at the speed of light, so I used a scaled “speed of light” in the calculation.  You can see how each of the new features expands outward at a steady rate.

Even near the violent end, the massive objects move much more slowly than light speed.  The variation in their nearby field quickly smooths out to an oval and then a circle about the central point, which is why the calculated gravity field generates no spiral like the ones in the pretty pictures.

Oh, and those “gravity well” pictures?  They’re not showing gravitational fields, they’re really gravitational potential energy diagrams, showing how hard it’d be to get away from somewhere.  In the top video, for example, the satellite orbits the planet because it doesn’t have enough kinetic energy to get out of the well.  The more massive the attractor, the tighter it curves space around itself and the deeper the well.

~~ Rich Olcott

Three LIGOs make a Banana Slicer

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

Ponder for a moment what Space throws at you.  Photons of all sizes, of course —  infra-red ones that warm your skin, visible ones that show you the beach, ultra-violet ones that give you tan and sunburn.  Neutrinos and maybe dark matter particles that pass right through you without even pausing.  All of those act upon you in little bits at little places — gravity pervades you.  You can put up a parasol or step into a cave, but there’s no shielding yourself from gravity.

Gravity’s special character has implications for LIGOs.  A word first about words.  LIGO as a generic noun unwinds to Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, a class of astronomical instruments. LIGO as a proper noun denotes a project that culminated in the construction of a specific pair of devices that went live in 2002.

That hardware wasn’t sensitive enough to detect the gravitational waves it was created to seek.  To improve the initial LIGO’s power and sensitivity, the LIGO infrastructure and organization morphed into the Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) project.  Concurrently, the LIGO instrument was upgraded and renamed.  No surprise, the instrument’s new name is aLIGO.  An early phase of aLIGO bore uncannily fortunate fruit with the Sept 14 gravitational wave detection.

Four other LIGOs are proposed, under construction or in operation around the world — KARGA in Japan, INDIGO in India, GEO600 in Germany and VIRGO in Italy.  Why so many, and why even consider space-borne LIGOs like LISA Pathfinder and eLISA?

Astronomers ask a series of questions of the Universe:

  • What objects are out there?
  • Where are they?
  • What are they doing?
  • Why are they doing that?

September’s aLIGO incident gave us a gratifyingly unexpected answer to the first question.  To the surprise of theoreticians, the detected event was the collision of two black holes, each of which was in a size range that current theory says shouldn’t be populated.  Even more surprising, such objects are apparently common enough to meet up, form binary pairs and eventually merge.

1 LIGO localizationThe second question is harder.  The best the aLIGO team could do was point to a “banana-shaped region” (their words, not mine) that covers about 1% of the sky.  The team marshaled a world-wide collaboration of observatories to scan that area (a huge search field by astronomical standards), looking for electromagnetic activities concurrent with  the event they’d seen.  Nobody saw any.  That was part of the evidence that this collision involved two black holes.  (If one or both of the objects had been something other than a black hole, the collision would have given off all kinds of photons.)

Why such poor localization?  Blame gravity’s pervasive character and Geometry.  With a telescope, any kind of telescope, you know which direction you’re looking.  Telescopes work only with photons that enter through the front; photons aimed at the back of the instrument stop there.

2 LIGO localizationIn contrast, a LIGO facility is (roughly speaking) omni-directional.  When a LIGO installation senses a gravitational pulse, it could be coming down from the visible sky or up through the Earth from the other hemisphere — one signal doesn’t carry the “which way?” information.  The diagram above shows that situation.  (The “chevron” is an image of the LIGO in Hanford WA.)  Models based on the signal from that pair of 4-km arms can narrow the source field to a “banana-shaped region,” but there’s still that 180o ambiguity.

The good news is that the LIGO project built not one but two installations, 2500 miles apart.  With two LIGOs (the second diagram) there’s enough information to resolve the ambiguity.  The two also serve as checks on each other — if one sees a signal that doesn’t show up at the other that’s probably a red herring that can be discarded.

3 LIGO localizationThe great “if only” is that the VIRGO installation in Italy was not recording data when the Hanford WA and Livingston LA saw that September signal.  With three recordings to reconcile, the aLIGO+VIRGO combination would have had enough information to slice that banana and localize the event precisely.

When the European Space Agency puts Evolved LISA (eLISA) in orbit (watch the animation, it’s cool) in 2034, there’ll be a million-kilometer triangle of spacecraft up there, slicing bananas all over the sky.

~~ Rich Olcott

aLIGO and eLISA: Tuning The Instrument

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

Oh, it’s good to see Big News in hard science get big attention in Big Media.  The LIGO story and Columbia’s Dr Brian Greene even made it to the Stephen Colbert Late Show.  Everyone chuckled at the final “boowee-POP” audio recording (simulation at 7:30 into this clip; get for-real traces and audio from this one).

There’s some serious science in those chirps, not to mention serious trouble for any alien civilization that happened to be too close to the astronomical event giving rise to them.

LIGO trace 3
Adapted from the announcement paper by Abbot et al

The peaks and valleys in the top LIGO traces represent successive spatial compression cycles generated by two massive bodies orbiting each other.  There’s one trace for each of the two LIGO installations.  The spectrograms beneath show relative intensity at each frequency.  Peaks arrived more rapidly in the last 100 milliseconds and the simulated sound rose in pitch because the orbits grew smaller and faster.  The audio’s final POP is what you get from a brief but big disturbance, like the one you hear when you plug a speaker into a live sound system.  This POP announced two black holes merging into one, converting the mass-energy of three suns into a gravitational jolt to the Universe.

Scientists have mentioned in interviews that LIGO has given us “an ear to the Universe.”  That’s true in several different <ahem> senses.  First, we’ve seen in earlier posts that gravitational physics is completely different from the electromagnetism that illuminates every kind of telescope that astronomers have ever used.  Second, black hole collisions generate signals in frequencies that are within our auditory range.  Finally, LIGO was purposely constructed to have peak sensitivity in just that frequency range.

Virtually every kind of phenomenon that physicists study has a characteristic size range and a characteristic frequency/duration range.  Sound waves, for instance, are in the audiophile’s beloved “20 to 20,000” cycles per second (Hz).  Put another way, one cycle of a sound wave will last something between 1/20 and 1/20,000 second (0.05-0.000 05 second).  The speed of sound is roughly 340 meters per second which puts sound’s characteristic wavelength range between 17 meters and 17 millimeters.

No physicist would be surprised to learn that humans evolved to be sensitive to sound-making things in that size range.  We can locate an oncoming predator by its roar or by the snapping twig it stepped on but we have to look around to spot a pesky but tiny mosquito.

So the greenish box in the chart below is all about sound waves.  The yellowish box gathers together the classes of phenomena scientists study using the electromagnetic spectrum.  For instance, we use infra-red light (characteristic time range 10-15-10-12 second) to look at (or cause) molecular vibrations.

RegimesWe can investigate things that take longer than an instrument’s characteristic time by making repeated measurements, but we can’t use the instrument to resolve successive events that happen more quickly than that.  We also can’t resolve events that take place much closer together than the instrument’s characteristic length.

The electromagnetic spectrum serves us well, but it has its limitations.  The most important is that there are classes of objects out there that neither emit nor absorb light in any of its forms.  Black holes, for one.  They’re potentially crucial to the birth and development of galaxies.  However, we have little hard data on them against which to test the plethora of ideas the theoreticians have come up with.

Dark matter is another.  We know it’s subject to gravity, but to our knowledge the only way it interacts with light is by gravitational lensing.  Most scientists working on dark matter wield Occam’s Razor to conclude it’s pretty simple stuff.  Harvard cosmologist Dr Lisa Randall has suggested that there may be two kinds, one of which collects in disks that clothe themselves in galaxies.

That’s where LIGO and its successors in the gray box will help.  Their sensitivity to gravitational effects will be crucial to our understanding of dark objects.  Characteristic times in tens and thousands of seconds are no problem nor are event sizes measured in kilometers, because astronomical bodies are big.

GrWave Detectors
Gravitational instrumentation, from Christopher Berry’s blog and Web page

This is only the beginning, folks, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

~~ Rich Olcott

LIGO: Gravity Waves Ain’t Gravitational Waves

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Techniques, Gravitational astronomy, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, Physics: Foundations of Measurement, Physics: Newton and Gravity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Sometimes the media get sloppy.  OK, a lot of times, especially when the reporters don’t know what they’re writing about.  Despite many headlines that “LIGO detected gravity waves,” that’s just not so.  In fact, the LIGO team went to a great deal of trouble to ensure that gravity waves didn’t muck up their search for gravitational waves.

Spring2A wave happens in a system when a driving force and a restoring force take turns overshooting an equilibrium point AND the away-from-equilibrium-ness gets communicated around the system.  The system could be a bunch of springs tied together in a squeaky old bedframe, or labor and capital in an economic system, or the network of water molecules forming the ocean surface, or the fibers in the fabric of space (whatever those turn out to be).

If you  were to build a mathematical model of some wavery system you’d have to include those two forces plus quantitative descriptions of the thingies that do the moving and communicating.  If you don’t add anything else, the model will predict motion that cycles forever.  In reality, of course, there’s always something else that lets the system relax into equilibrium.

The something else could be a third force, maybe someone sitting on the bed, or government regulation in an economy, or reactant depletion for a chemical process.  But usually it’s friction of one sort or another — friction drains away energy of motion and converts it to heat.  Inside a spring, for instance, adjacent crystallites of metal rub against each other.  There appears to be very little friction in space — we can see starlight waves that have traveled for billions of years.

Physicists pay attention to waves because there are some general properties that apply to all of them.  For instance, in 1743 Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert proved there’s a strict relationship between a wave’s peakiness and its time behavior.  Furthermore, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (pre-Revolutionary France must have been hip-deep in physicist-mathematicians) showed that a wide variety of more-or-less periodic phenomena could be modeled as the sum of waves of differing frequency and amplitude.

Monsieur Fourier’s insight has had an immeasurable impact on our daily lives.  You can thank him any time you hear the word “frequency.”  From broadcast radio and digitally recorded music to time-series-based business forecasting to the mode-locked lasers in a LIGO device — none would exist without Fourier’s reasoning.

Gravity waves happen when a fluid is disturbed and the restoring force is gravity.  We’re talking physicist fluid here, which could be sea water or the atmosphere or solar plasma, anything where the constituent particles aren’t locked in place. Winds or mountain slopes or nuclear explosions push the fluid upwards, gravity pulls it back, and things wobble until friction dissipates that energy.

Gravitational waves are wobbles in gravity itself, or rather, wobbles in the shape of space.  According to General Relativity, mass exerts a tension-like force that squeezes together the spacetime immediately around it.  The more mass, the greater the tension.

Binary BH with AENAn isolated black hole is surrounded by an intense gravitational field and a corresponding compression of spacetime.  A pair of black holes orbiting each other sends out an alternating series of tensions, first high, then extremely high, then high…

Along any given direction from the pair you’d feel a pulsing gravitational field that varied above and below the average force attracting you to the pair.  From a distance and looking down at the orbital plane, if you could see the shape of space you’d see it was distorted by four interlocking spirals of high and low compression, all steadily expanding at the speed of light.

The LIGO team was very aware that the signal of a gravitational wave could be covered up by interfering signals from gravity waves — ocean tides, Earth tides, atmospheric disturbances, janitorial footsteps, you name it.  The design team arrayed each LIGO site with hundreds of “seismometers, accelerometers, microphones, magnetometers, radio receivers, power monitors and a cosmic ray detector.”  As the team processed the LIGO trace they accounted for artifacts that could have come from those sources.

So no, the LIGO team didn’t discover gravity waves, we’ve known about them for a century.  But they did detect the really interesting other kind.

~~ Rich Olcott