Tag: Cal’s Coffee

The New System’s in Tune

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Stellar Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

<We interrupt our running story line to bring you this important development…>

“Morning, Sy.  What can I get you?”

“My usual mugfull of black, Al.  What’s the Scone-of-The-Day?”

“I’m calling this The Trappist.  It’s got raspberry jam!”

“Why that name?”

“In honor of TRAPPIST-1, you know, that star they just found a bunch of planets around.”

“Your coffee shop being right next to the Astronomy building, I guess you’ve heard a lot about it.”

“Sy, you couldn’t believe.  The planetologists are going nuts of course, even though no-one’s actually seen the planets, and the astrometrics folks are lining up for telescope time ’cause they’ve got a whole new class of stars to monitor and of course the astrophysicists get to figure out how the system even works.”

“Astrometrics folks?  New class of stars?”

“Yeah, the high-precision star-measurers.  They didn’t used to pay attention to the small, dim stars because why bother.  But now … woo-hoo, whole new ballgame.”

“Nobody’s seen those planets?  How do they know they’re there?”

“Process of elimination, Sy.  The TRAPPIST telescopes picked up repetitive dark blips in the light coming from that star.  It’s a close, fast-moving star so there’s no sense supposing it’s like going behind or in front of a regular array of rocks or stars or something.  It’s not wobbling side-to-side like it would if it was a binary so it’s not traveling along with another star.  If the blips were sunspots going around as the star rotates there’d be only one rhythm, but these blips come in too complicated for that.  Besides, the star’s low-activity, too cool for lotsa sunspots.  Gotta be planets eclipsing it.”

trappist-1-system-450
NASA’s artistic (and cute) rendition
of the TRAPPIST-1 system
Note the close-in steam and the frost further out

“Sounds pretty good, but…”

“Hey Sy, there was something else, maybe you could explain it.  One astrophysics guy was real impressed that the planets had residences.  I didn’t understand that.”

“Residences?  That’s a new one on me.”

“Had something to do with the blip periods.  Yeah, here’s the paper napkin he wrote ’em all down on.”

Object
TRAPPIST-1x
Period, days
Resonance
Actual /
Expected
b
1.51
c
2.42
5c:8b
1.002
d
4.05
3d:5c
1.004
e
6.10
2e:3d
1.004
f
9.20
2f:3e
1.006
g
12.35
3g:4f
1.007
h
20?
5h:8g
1.012?

“Oh, resonances! That I recognize, and yeah, those numbers are much more convincing.  Remember my post about gear logic?”

“Sorry, Sy, that must’ve been a long time ago and who has time to read?”

“I understand.  OK, that post explained how planets that survive the early chaos of a forming solar system tend to wind up in orbits whose relative year-lengths form ratios of small whole numbers.  In our system, for instance, the length of Pluto’s year is exactly 3/2 of Neptune’s, Neptune’s year is twice that of Uranus, and so on.  If a planet doesn’t synch up with its neighbors, it’ll collide with someone or be flung out of the system.  Put another way, a system’s not stable if its planetary orbit periods are just any old numbers.  Make sense?”

“I suppose, so…?”

“So look at this guy’s table.  The periods of each pair of adjacent objects follow that rule almost exactly.  Five times c‘s period is less than 0.25% away from eight times b‘s, and so on all the way out to h, which I take it has an uncertain period because the guy put in that question mark.  In fact, I think this system follows the rule more tightly than our Solar System does.  As far as I’m concerned that regularity in the periods makes the case for TRAPPIST-1 having planets.  You hear anything else?”

“Yeah, there was a lot of excitement about the middle three planets being in some kind of Goldilocks zone.  What’s that about?”

“Hah, I’d be excited, too.  If a planet’s too close to the star, like Mercury is to ours, it’ll be too hot for liquid water.  If the planet’s too far, any water it has would be frozen stiff.  Either way, not good for life to grow there.  In the Goldilocks zone, it’s…”

“Just right, huh, Sy?”

“On the nose, Al.  I’m going to have to read up on TRAPPIST-1.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Three Body Problems

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Stellar Science, Gravitational astronomy, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

The local science museum had a showing of the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar so of course I went to see it again.  Awesome visuals and (mostly) good science because Nolan had tapped the expertise of Dr Kip Thorne, one of the primary creators of LIGO.  On the way out, Vinnie collared me.

“Hey, Sy, ‘splain something to me.”

“I can try, but first let’s get out of the weather.  Al’s coffee OK with you?”

“Yeah, sure, if his scones are fresh-baked.”

Al saw me walking in.  “Hey, Sy, you’re in luck, I just pulled a tray of cinnamon scones out of the oven.”  Then he saw Vinnie.  “Aw, geez, there go my paper napkins again.”

Vinnie was ready.  “Nah, we’ll use the backs of some ad flyers I grabbed at the museum.  And gimme, uh, two of the cinnamons and a large coffee, black.”

“Here you go.”

At our table I said, “So what’s the problem with the movie?”

“Nobody shrank.  All this time we been talking about how things get smaller in a strong gravity field.  That black hole, Gargantua, was huge.  The museum lecture guy said it was like 100 million times as heavy as the Sun.  When the people landed on its planet they should have been teeny but everything was just regular-size.  And what’s up with that ‘one hour on the planet is seven years back home’ stuff?”

“OK, one thing at a time.  When the people were on the planet, where was the movie camera?”

“On the planet, I suppose.”

“Was the camera influenced by the same gravitational effects that the people were?”

“Ah, it’s the frames thing again, ain’t it?  I guess in the on-planet inertial frame everything stays the relative size they’re used to, even though when we look at the planet from our far-away frame we see things squeezed together.”

(I’ve told you that Vinnie’s smart.)  “You got it.  OK, now for the time thing.  By the way, it’s formally known as ‘time dilation.’  Remember the potential energy/kinetic energy distinction?”

“Yeah.  Potential energy depends on where you are, kinetic energy depends on how you’re moving.”

“Got it in one.  It turns out that energy and time are deeply intertwined all through physics.  Would you be surprised if I told you that there are two kinds of time dilation, one related to gravitational potential and the other to velocity?”

“Nothing would surprise me these days.  Go on.”

“The gravity one dropped out of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity.  The velocity one arose from his General Relativity work.”  I grabbed one of those flyers.  “Ready for a little algebra?”

“Geez.  OK, I asked for it.”gargantua-3
“You certainly did.  I’ll just give you the results, and mind you these apply only near a non-rotating sphere with no electric charge.  Things get complicated otherwise.  Suppose the sphere has mass M and you’re circling around it at a distance r from its geometric center.  You’ve got a metronome ticking away at n beats per your second and you’re perfectly happy with that.  We good?”

“So far.”

“I’m watching you from way far away.  I see your metronome running slow, at only n√[1-(2 G·M/r·c²)] beats per my second.  G is Newton’s gravity constant, c is the speed of light.  See how the square root has to be less than 1?”

“Your speed of light or my speed of light?”

“Good question, considering we’re talking about time and space getting all contorted, but Einstein guarantees that both of us measure exactly the same speed.  So anyway, in the movie both the Miller’s Planet landing team and that poor guy left on good ship  Endurance are circling Gargantua.  Earth observers would see both their clocks running slow.  But Endurance is much further out (larger r, smaller fraction) from Gargantua than Miller’s Planet is.  Endurance’s distance gave its clock more beats per Earth second than the planet gets, which is why the poor guy aged so much waiting for the team to return.”

“I wondered about that.”

Then we heard Ramona’s husky contralto.  “Hi, guys.  Al said you were back here talking physics.  Who wants to take me dancing?”

We both stood up, quickly.

“Whee, this’ll be fun.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Gravity’s Real Rainbow

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Multi-messenger, Astronomy: Stellar Science, Gravitational astronomy, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Some people are born to scones, some have scones thrust upon them.  As I stepped into his coffee shop this morning, Al was loading a fresh batch onto the rack.  “Hey, Sy, try one of these.”

“Uhh … not really my taste.  You got any cinnamon ones ready?”

“Not much for cheddar-habañero, huh?  I’m doing them for the hipster trade,” waving towards all the fedoras on the room.  “Here ya go.  Oh, Vinnie’s waiting for you.”

I navigated to the table bearing a pile of crumpled yellow paper, pulled up a chair.  “Morning, Vinnie, how’s the yellow writing tablet working out for you?”

“Better’n the paper napkins, but it’s nearly used up.”

“What problem are you working on now?”

“OK, I’m still on LIGO and still on that energy question I posed way back — how do I figure the energy of a photon when a gravitational wave hits it in a LIGO?  You had me flying that space shuttle to explain frames and such, but kept putting off photons.”

“Can’t argue with that, Vinnie, but there’s a reason.  Photons are different from atoms and such because they’ve got zero mass.  Not just nearly massless like neutrinos, but exactly zero.  So — do you remember Newton’s formula for momentum?”

“Yeah, momentum is mass times the velocity.”

“Right, so what’s the momentum of a photon?”

“Uhh, zero times speed-of-light.  But that’s still zero.”

“Yup.  But there’s lots of experimental data to show that photons do carry non-zero momentum.  Among other things, light shining on an an electrode in a vacuum tube knocks electrons out of it and lets an electric current flow through the tube.  Compton got his Nobel prize for that 1923 demonstration of the photoelectric effect, and Einstein got his for explaining it.”

“So then where’s the momentum come from and how do you figure it?”

“Where it comes from is a long heavy-math story, but calculating it is simple.  Remember those Greek letters for calculating waves?”

(starts a fresh sheet of note paper) “Uhh… this (writes λ) is lambda is wavelength and this (writes ν) is nu is cycles per second.”

“Vinnie, you never cease to impress.  OK, a photon’s momentum is proportional to its frequency.  Here’s the formula: p=h·ν/c.  If we plug in the E=h·ν equation we played with last week we get another equation for momentum, this one with no Greek in it:  p=E/c.  Would you suppose that E represents total energy, kinetic energy or potential energy?”

“Momentum’s all about movement, right, so I vote for kinetic energy.”

“Bingo.  How about gravity?”

“That’s potential energy ’cause it depends on where you’re comparing it to.”

light-in-a-gravity-well“OK, back when we started this whole conversation you began by telling me how you trade off gravitational potential energy for increased kinetic energy when you dive your airplane.  Walk us through how that’d work for a photon, OK?  Start with the photon’s inertial frame.”

“That’s easy.  The photon’s feeling no forces, not even gravitational, ’cause it’s just following the curves in space, right, so there’s no change in momentum so its kinetic energy is constant.  Your equation there says that it won’t see a change in frequency.  Wavelength, either, from the λ=c/ν equation ’cause in its frame there’s no space compression so the speed of light’s always the same.”

“Bravo!  Now, for our Earth-bound inertial frame…?”

“Lessee… OK, we see the photon dropping into a gravity well so it’s got to be losing gravitational potential energy.  That means its kinetic energy has to increase ’cause it’s not giving up energy to anything else.  Only way it can do that is to increase its momentum.  Your equation there says that means its frequency will increase.  Umm, or the local speed of light gets squinched which means the wavelength gets shorter.  Or both.  Anyway, that means we see the light get bluer?”

“Vinnie, we’ll make a physicist of you yet.  You’re absolutely right — looking from the outside at that beam of photons encountering a more intense gravity field we’d see a gravitational blue-shift.  When they leave the field, it’s a red-shift.”

“Keeping track of frames does make a difference.”

Al yelled over, “Like using tablet paper instead of paper napkins.”

~~ Rich Olcott

LIGO and lambda and photons, oh my!

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

I was walking my daily constitutional when Al waved me into his coffee shop.  “Sy, he’s at it again with the paper napkins.  Do something!”

I looked over.  There was Vinnie at his table, barricaded behind a pile of crumpled-up paper.  I grabbed a chair.

“Morning, Vinnie.  Having fun?”

“Greek letters.  Why’d they have to use Greek letters?”

The question was both rhetorical and derivative so I ignored it.  There were opened books under the barricade — upper-level physics texts.  “How come you’re chasing through those books?”

“I wanted to follow up on how LIGO operates with photons after we talked about all that space shuttle stuff.  But geez, Sy!”

“You’re a brave man, Vinnie.  So,  which letters are giving you trouble?”

“These two, that look kinda like each other upside down.” He pointed to one equation, λ=c/ν.

“Ah, wavelength equals the speed of light divided by the frequency.”

“How do you do that?”

“Some of those symbols go way back.  You just get used to them.  Most of them make sense when you learn the names for the letters — lambda (λ) is the peak-to-peak length of a lightwave, and nu (ν) is the number of peaks per second.  If it makes you feel any better, I’ve yet to meet a physicist who can write a zeta (ζ) — they generally just draw a squiggle and move on.”

“And there’s this other equation,” pointing to E=h·ν.  “What’s that about?”

“Good eye.  You just picked two equations that are fundamental to LIGO’s operation.  If a lightwave has frequency ν, the equations tell us two things about it — its energy is h·ν (h is Planck’s constant, 6.6×10-34 Joule-seconds), and its wavelength is c/ν (c is the speed of light).  For instance, yellow light has a frequency near 520×1012/sec.  One photon carries 3.8×10-40 Joules of energy.  Not much, but it adds up when a light beam contains lots of photons.  The same photon has a wavelength near 580×10-9 meters traveling through free space.”

“So what happens when one of those photons is in a LIGO beam?  Won’t a gravitational wave’s stretch-and-squeeze action mess up its wave?”

paper-napkin-waveI smoothed out one of Vinnie’s crumpled napkins. As I folded it into pleats and scooted it along the table I said, “Doesn’t mess up the wave so much as change the way we think about it.  We’re used to graphing out a spatial wave as an up-and-down pattern like this that moves through time, right?”

“That’s a lousy-looking wave.”

time-and-space-and-napkin
As the napkin moves through space,
the upper graph shows the height of its edge
above the observation point.

“It’s a paper napkin, f’pitysake, and I’m making a point here. Watch close.  If you monitor a particular point along the wave’s path in space and track how that point moves in time, you get the same profile except we draw it along the t-axis instead of along a space-axis.  See?”

“Hey, the time profile is the space profile going backwards.  Oh, right, it’s goin’ into the past ’cause it’s a memory.”

“That’s one of those things that people miss.  If you only draw sine waves, they’re the same in either direction.  The important point is that although timewaves and spacewaves have the same shape, they’ve got different meanings.  The timewave is directly connected to the wave’s energy by that E equation.  The spacewave is indirectly connected, because your other equation there scales it by the local speed of light.”

“Come again?  Local speed of light?  I thought it was 186,000 miles per second everywhere.”

“It is, but some of those miles are shorter than others.  Near a heavy mass, for instance, or in the compression phase of a gravitational wave, or inside a transparent material.  If you’re traveling in the lightwave’s inertial frame, you see no variation.  But if you’re watching from an independent inertial frame, you see the lightwave hit a slow patch.  Distance per cycle gets shorter.  Like that lambda-nu equation says, when c gets smaller the wavelength decreases.”

Al walked over.  “Gotcha a present, Vinnie.  Here’s a pad of yellow writing paper.  No more napkins, OK?”

“Uhh, thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Scone but not forgotten

On By rolcottIn Gravitational astronomy, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, Uncategorized3 Comments

Al grabbed me as I stepped into his coffee shop.  “Sy, you gotta help me!”

“What’s the trouble, Al?”

“It’s Vinnie.  He’s over there, been scribbling on paper napkins all morning.  I’m running out of napkins, Sy!”

I grabbed a cinnamon scone from the rack and a chair at Vinnie’s table.  “What’s keeping you so busy, Vinnie?”  As if I didn’t know.

“LIGO, of course.  Every time I think I understand how the machine works something else occurs to me and it slips outa my hands.”

“How about you explain it to me.  Sometimes the best way to find an answer is to describe the problem to someone else.”

Interferometer 1
Vinnie’s paper napkin #1

(grabbing a napkin near the bottom of one stack) “All right, Sy, I sketched the layout here.  You got these two big L-shaped machines out in the middle of two nowheres 2500 miles apart.  Each L is a pair of steel pipes 2½ miles long.  At the far end of each arm there’s a high-tech stabilized mirror.  Where the two arms meet there’s a laser rigged up to shoot beams down both arms.  There’s also a detector located where the reflected beams join up and cancel each other out unless there’s a gravity wave going past.  Am I good so far?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much the diagram you see in the books, except it’s gravitational wave.  Gravity waves are something else.”

interferometer-4
Paper napkin #2

“Whatever.  So, here’s a sketch of where I was at when I asked you that first question.  See, I copied my original sketch onto another napkin and stretched it a little where the black circle is to show what a gravitational wave would do in stretch phase.  Ignore the little rips.”

“What rips?”

“Uh, thanks.  Anyway, I was thinking the gravitational wave that stretches the x-beam would also stretch the x-pipe so they couldn’t use the light wave to measure the pipe it’s in.  But LIGO works so that’s wrong thinkin’.

“OK, next is for after we talked about inertial frames.  Took me a few tries to get it like I want it and I wound up having to do two sketches, one for each frame.”  He grabbed a couple more napkins from different stacks.

interferometer-5lp
Paper napkins #37 and #59

“I didn’t do the yellow wiggles ’cause that got confusing and besides I don’t do wiggly lines so good.  Point is, the space-stretch only shows up in the laboratory inertial frame.  The light waves move with space so they don’t notice the difference, right?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to put it that way in court, Vinnie, but it’s a pretty good description.”

“So the light waves bop along at 186,000 miles per second in their frame, but from the machine’s perspective those are stretched miles so the guy running the machine thinks those photons are faster than the ones in the other pipe.  And that difference in speed gets the yellow lines out of phase with the blue ones and the detector rings a bell or something, right?”

“It’s even better than that.” I reached for another napkin, caught Al’s eye on me and grabbed an envelope from my coat pocket instead. “Remember how a gravitational wave works in two directions perpendicular to the wave’s line of travel?”

interferometer-5d
On the back of an envelope

“Yeah, so?”

“So at the same moment that the wave is stretching space in the x-direction, it’s squeezing space in the y-direction.  LIGO’s detection scheme monitors the difference between the two returning beams.  As I’ve drawn it here using the detector’s inertial frame, the x-beam is going fast AND the y-beam is going slow so the detector sees twice the phase difference. A few milliseconds later they’ll switch because the x-direction will get squeezed while the y-direction gets stretched.  And yeah, a bell does ring but only after some computers munch on the data and subtract out environmental stuff like temperature swings and earthquakes and the janitor’s footsteps.”

“Uh-huh, I think I got it.” Turning in his chair, “Hey, Al, bring Sy here another scone, on me.  And put the one he’s got on my tab, too.”

“Thanks, Vinnie.”

“Don’t mention it.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Here we LIGO again…

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

I suddenly smelled mink musk, vintage port, and warm honey on fresh-baked strawberry scones.

“C’mon in, Ramona, the door’s open.”

She oscillated in with a multi-dimensional sinusoidal motion that took my breath away and a smile that brought it back.

“Hi, Sy.  I came right over as soon as I got the news.”

“What news is that, Sugar Lumps?”

“LEGO, Sy, they’ve switched LEGO to science mode!”

“That’s LIGO, sweetheart, Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory.”  She means well, but she’s Ramona.  “LEGOs are designed to hurt your feet, LIGO’s designed to look at the Universe.”

“Whatever.  I knew you wrote a . whole . series . of . posts . about . it so I thought you’d want to know.”

“It’s worth chasin’ down, doll-face.  Thanks.”symoire

So I headed over to the campus coffee shop.  It just happens to be located between the Astronomy building and the Physics building so I figured it as a good source.  Al was in his usual place at the cash register.

“Hi, Sy.  Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Been busy, Al.  Lotsa science going on these days.”

“Good, good.   Say, have you heard about LEGO goin’ live?”

“That’s LIGO, Al.  Yeah, Ramona told me.  So what’s the word?”

“OK, you know all about how when they first turned it on for engineering tests back in September, it blew everyone’s mind that they caught a signal almost immediately?”

“Yeah, that’s when I started writing about it.  Two 30-solar-mass black holes collided and jolted the gravitational field of the Universe.  When the twin LIGOs detected that jolt, it confirmed three predictions that came out of Einstein’s General Relativity theory.”

“Had you heard about the second signal they caught the day after Christmas, from a couple of smaller black holes?”

“I bet you sold a lot of coffee that week.”

“You couldn’t believe.  Those guys had so much caffeine in ’em they didn’t even notice New Years.”

“So what came out of that?”

“Like I said, these were smaller black holes, about 10 solar masses each instead of 30, and that’s really got the star-modelers scratching their heads.”

“How so?”

“Well, we pretty much know how to make a black hole that’s just a bit heavier than the Sun.  Say a star’s between 1.3 and 3 solar masses.  When it burns enough of its fuel that its heat energy can’t keep it puffed up against gravity the whole thing collapses down to a black hole.”

“What happens if it’s bigger than that?  Wouldn’t you just get a bigger black hole?”

“That’s the thing.  If it’s above that threshold, the outermost infalling matter meets the outgoing explosion and makes an even bigger explosion, a supernova.  So much matter gets blown away that what’s left is too small to be a black hole.  You just get a white dwarf star or a neutron star, depending.”

“But these signals came from black holes 3-10 times that upper limit.  Where did they come from?”

“That’s why the head-scratching, Sy.  I mean, no-one knows how to make even one and yet they seem to be so common that two pairs of ’em found each other and collided less than four months apart.  The whole theory is up for grabs now.”

“So we got all that just from the engineering test phase, eh?  What’ve they done since that?”

“Oh, the usual tinkering and tweaking.  The unit down in Livingston LA is about 25% more sensitive now, especially in the lower-frequency range.  That’s mostly because they found and plugged some light-leaks and light-scattering hot-spots here and there along its five miles of steel pipe.  LIGO doesn’t look at incoming light, but it does use laser light to detect the gravitational variation.  The Hanford WA unit boosted the power going to its laser and they’ve improved stability in its detectors, made ’em more robust against wind and low-frequency seismic activity.  You know, engineer stuff.  So now they say they’re ready to do science.”

“I can’t write that the tweaks’ll let us look deeper into the Universe, ’cause LIGO doesn’t pick up light waves.  How about I say we get a better feel for things?”

“Sounds ’bout right, Sy.”

“Oh, and give me one of those strawberry scones.  For some reason they look really good today.”

~~ Rich Olcott