Tag: Cal’s Coffee

A Far And Dusty Traveler

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

Cathleen takes the mic. “Quick coffee and scone break, folks, then Jim will continue our ‘IR, Spitzer And The Universe‘ symposium.” <pause> “OK, we’re back in business. Jim?”

“Thanks, Cathleen. Well, we’ve discussed finding astronomical molecules with infra-red. Now for a couple of other IR applications. First up — looking at things that are really far away. Everyone here knows that the Universe is expanding, right?”

<general murmur of assent, although the probably-an-Art-major looks startled>

“Great. Because of the expansion, light from a far-away object gets stretched out to longer wavelengths on its way to us. Say a sodium atom shot a brilliant yellow-gold 590-nanometer photon at us, but at the time the atom was 12.5 million lightyears away. By the time that wave reaches us it’s been broadened to 3540 nanometers, comfortably into the infra-red. Distant things are redder, sometimes too red to see with an optical telescope. The Spitzer Space Telescope‘s infra-red optics let us see those reddened photons. And then there’s dust.”

<voice from the crowd> “Dust?”

“Cosmic dust, pretty much all the normal matter that’s not clumped into stars and planets. Some of it is leftovers from early times in the Universe, but much of it is stellar wind. Stars continuously spew particles in their normal day-to-day operation. There’s a lot more of that when one explodes as a nova or supernova. Dust particles come in all sizes but most are smaller than the ones in tobacco smoke.”

<same voice> “If they’re so small, why do we care about them?”

“Two reasons. First, there’s a lot of them. Maybe only a thousand particles per cubic kilometer of space, but there’s a huge number of cubic kilometers in space and they add up. More important is what the dust particles are made of and where we found them. Close inspection of the dust is like doing astronomical archaeology, giving us clues about how stars and galaxies evolved.”

<Vinnie, skeptical as always> “So what’s infra-red got to do with dust?”

“Depends on what kind of astronomy you’re interested in. Dust reflects and emits IR light. Frequency patterns in the light can tell us what that dust made of. On the other hand there’s the way that dust doesn’t interact with infra-red.”

<several voices> “Wait, what?”

The Milky Way from Black Rock Desert NV
By Steve Jurvetson via Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

“If Al’s gotten his video system working … ah, he has and it does. Look at this gorgeous shot of the Milky Way Galaxy. See all the dark areas? That’s dust blocking the visible light. The scattered stars in those areas are simply nearer to us than the clouds. We’d like to study what’s back beyond the clouds, especially near the galaxy’s core. That’s a really interesting region but the clouds block its visible light. Here’s the neat part — the clouds don’t block its infra-red light.”

<other voices> “Huh?” “Why wouldn’t they?”

“It’s the size of the waves versus the size of the particles. Take an extreme case — what’s the wavelength of Earth’s ocean tides?”

<Silence, so I speak up.> “Two high tides a day, so the wavelength is half the Earth’s circumference or about 12’500 miles.”

“Right. Now say you’re at the beach and you’re out there wading and the water’s calm. Would you notice the tide?”

“No, rise or fall would be too gentle to affect me.”

“Now let’s add a swell whose peak-to-peak wavelength is about human-height scale.”

“Whoa, I’d be dragged back and forth as each wave passes.”

“Just for grins, let’s replace that swell with waves the same height but only a millimeter apart. Oh, and you’re wearing SCUBA equipment.”

“Have mercy! Well, I should be able to stand in place because I wouldn’t even feel the peaks and troughs as separate waves, just a foamy massage. Thanks for the breathing assistance, though.”

“You’re welcome, and thanks for helping with the thought experiment. Most cosmic dust particles are less than 100 nanometers across. Infra-red wavelengths run 100 to 1000 times longer than that. Infra-red light from those cloud-hidden stars just curves around particles that can stop visible lightwaves cold. Spitzer Space Telescope and its IR-sensitive kin provide deeper and further views than visible light allows.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Above The Air, Below The Red

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

Vinnie and I walk into Al’s coffee shop just as he sets out a tray of scones. “Odd-looking topping on those, Al. What is it?”

“Dark cherry and dark chocolate, Sy. Something about looking infra-red. Cathleen special-ordered them for some Astronomy event she’s hosting in the back room. Carry this tray in there for me?”

Vinne grabs the tray and a scone. “Sure, Al. … Mmm, tasty. … Hi, Cathleen. Here’s your scones. What’s the event?”

“It’s a memorial symposium for the Spitzer Space Telescope, Vinnie. Spitzer‘s been an infra-red workhorse for almost 17 years and NASA formally retired it at the end of January.”

“What’s so special about infra-red? It’s just light, right? We got the Hubble for that.”

“A perfect cue for Jim’s talk. <to crowd> Grab a scone and settle down, everyone. Welcome to our symposium, ‘IR , Spitzer And The Universe.’ Our first presentation today is entitled ‘What’s So Special About Infra-red?‘ Jim, you’re on.”

“Thanks, Cathleen. This is an introductory talk, so I’ll keep it mostly non-technical. So, question for everybody — when you see ‘IR‘, what do you think of first?”

<shouts from the crowd> “Pizza warmer!” “Invisible light!” “Night-vision goggles!”

“Pretty much what I expected. All relevant, but IR’s much more than that. To begin with, many more colors than visible light. We can distinguish colors in the rainbow because each color’s lightwave has a different frequency. Everybody OK with that?”

<general mutter of assent>

“OK. Well, the frequency at the violet end of the visible spectrum is a bit less than double the frequency at the red end. In music when you double the frequency you go up an octave. The range of colors we see from red to violet is less than an octave, about like going from A-natural to F-sharp on the piano. The infra-red spectrum covers almost nine octaves. An 88-key piano doesn’t even do eight.”

<voice from the crowd, maybe an Art major> “Wow, if we could see infra-red think of all the colors there’d be!”

“But you’d need a whole collection of specialized eyes to see them. With light, every time you go down an octave you reduce the photon’s energy capacity by half. Visible light is visible because its photons have just enough energy to cause an electronic change in our retinas’ photoreceptor molecules. Five octaves higher than that, the photons have enough energy to knock electrons right out of a molecule like DNA. An octave lower than visible, almost nothing electronic.”

<Vinnie’s always-skeptical voice> “If there’s no connecting with electrons, how does electronic infra-red detection work?”

“Two ways. A few semiconductor configurations are sensitive to near- and mid-infra-red photons. The Spitzer‘s sensors are grids of those configurations. To handle really low-frequency IR you have to sense heat directly with bolometer techniques that track expansion and contraction.”

<another skeptical voice> “OK then, how does infra-red heating work?”

“Looks like a paradox, doesn’t it? Infra-red photons are too low-energy to make a quantum change in a molecule’s electronic arrangement, but we know that the only way photons can have an effect is by making quantum changes. So how come we feel infra-red’s heat? The key is, photons can interact with any kind of charged structure, not just electrons. If a molecule’s charges aren’t perfectly balanced a photon can vibrate or rotate part of a molecule or even the whole thing. That changes its kinetic energy because molecular motion is heat, right? Fortunately for the astronomers, gas vibrations and rotations are quantized, too. An isolated water molecule can only do stepwise changes in vibration and rotation.”

“Why’s that fortunate?”

“Because that’s how I do my research. Every kind of molecule has its own set of steps, its own set of frequencies where it can absorb light. The infra-red range lets us do for molecules what the visual range lets us do for atoms. By charting specific absorption bands we’ve located and identified interstellar clouds of water, formaldehyde and a host of other chemicals. I just recently saw a report of ‘helonium‘, a molecular ion containing helium and hydrogen, left over from when the Universe began. Infra-red is so cool.”

“No, it’s warm.”

Image suggested by Alex

~~ Rich Olcott

Solving Sleipnir’s Problem

On By rolcottIn Computer science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Vinnie leans back in his chair, hands behind his head. “Lessee if I got this straight. The computer’s muscles are its processors. It can have a bunch of them, different kinds for different jobs like a horse has different muscles for different moves. Computers got internal networks to connect the processors like a horse has tendons and ligaments. Me and Sy got a beef going about the bones, whether it’s data or memory ’cause nothing happens without both of ’em. That a good summary?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“So what was that crack about some eight-legged horse being the most interesting case?”

Sleipnir image adapted from the Tjängvide runestone
from Wikimedia Commons under CC 4.0 license

Robert grabs a paper napkin. Coffee shop proprietor Al winces. “Consider the kangaroo. It has two legs and it uses both at the same time when it hops around. I’ll diagram its feet with 1 and 2 and color them both red, OK?”

“Kangaroo hopped through some red paint, gotcha.”

“A human has two feet and we alternate between them when we walk. Like this second pattern — red foot, blue foot, over and over. Then there’s your standard horse with four legs — many more possibilities, right? For one, the front pair and the back pair each can act like a simple walk but independently, like the third row here.”

Meanwhile, I’m fiddling with Old Reliable and find this video. “That’s a good description of the basic gait that the horsemen call the walk, no surprise.”

Vinnie’s looking at the video over my shoulder. “Huh! Look here at the trot. The front and rear legs on opposite sides work together but in-between the beat of the other pair. I suppose you’d draw it like this fourth sketch, right?”

“That’s the idea. I’m only keeping track of which feet get used at the same time or opposite times. I’m sure there are other combinations that don’t fit the two-color model.”

Vinnie’s still watching the video. “Say this one. The gallop is like it’s walking with its front feet and kangarooing off that beat with its back ones.”

“Well, there you go. On to my point. Sy, what’s a horse’s most important decision if it’s not going to trip up?”

“Which foot it’s going to move next, I suppose. Oh, I see where you’re going. Odin’s eight-legged horse would have a serious coordination problem — which legs to pair together and what order they’d work in.”

“Exactly. No surprise, a computer has the same coordination problem unless it’s extremely specialized. As soon as you have multiple tasks demanding service, yet another task has to direct traffic. That’s basically where operating systems come into play. An OS has low-level code that stands between the application programs and the hardware resources.”

“What’s it doing there besides getting in the way?”

“Simplifying things, Vinnie. You don’t want to recode your program or buy a new version of your spreadsheet software when you plug in a new hard drive. When your application issues a call to transfer some data to or from your hard drive, the OS translates that into bit-level instructions the hard drive understands. A different device from a different manufacturer probably uses different command bits. No problem, your OS satisfies your next I/O call with whatever instructions that device understands. But an OS does more than that.”

“Like what else?”

“Lots of things. Security, for one — it makes sure you’re authorized to logon and touch certain data. Network interfacing for another. But for system performance the critical OS functions involve choosing who gets how much resource to work with.”

“Like disk space? I keep hitting my limit in the Cloud.”

“The Cloud’s a whole ‘nother level of complicated, but yeah, like that. The OS addresses performance by managing CPU time, throttling back low-priority tasks to give more time to high-priority work.”

“How’s it know the difference?”

“Depends on the OS. Generally it boils down to a list of privileged program names and user-ids versus everyone else.”

“How’s it do the throttling?”

“That also depends on the OS. Some of them meter out time slices, others fiddle with dispatch priority. Tricky business.”

“Tricky as running an eight-legged horse.”

~~ Rich Olcott

The Lengths We Go To

On By rolcottIn Computer science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A new face in the scone line at Al’s coffee shop. “Morning. I’m Sy Moire, free-lance physicist and Al’s steadiest customer. And you’re…?”

“Robert Tobanu, newest Computer Science post-doc on Dr Hanneken’s team. He needed some help improving the performance of their program suite.”

“Can’t he just buy a faster computer?”

“He could if there is a faster computer, if his grant could afford its price tag, and if it’s faster in the way he needs to solve our problems. My job is to squeeze the most out of what we’ve got on the floor.”

“I didn’t realize that different kinds of problem need different kinds of computer. I just see ratings in terms of mega-somethings per second and that’s it.”

“Horse racing.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Horse speed-ratings come from which horse wins the race. Do you bet on the one with the strongest muscles? The one with the fastest out-of-the-box time? The best endurance? How about Odin’s fabulous eight-legged horse?”

“Any of the above, I suppose, except for the eight-legged one. What’s this got to do with computers?”

“Actually, eight-legged Sleipnir is the most interesting example. But my point is, just saying ‘This is a 38-mph horse‘ leaves a lot of variables up for discussion. It doesn’t tell you how much better the horse would do with a more-skilled jockey. It doesn’t say how much worse the horse would do pulling a racing sulky or a fully-loaded Conestoga. And then there’s the dash-versus-marathon aspect.”

“I’m thinking about Odin’s horse — power from doubled-up legs would be a big positive in a pulling contest, but you’d think they’d just get in the jockey’s way during a quarter-mile dash.”

“Absolutely. All of that’s why I think computer speed ratings belong in marketing brochures, not in engineering papers. ‘MIPS‘ is supposed to mean ‘Millions of Instructions Per Second‘ but it’s actually closer to ‘Misleading Indication of Processor Speed.'”

“How do they get those ratings in the first place? Surely no-one sat there and actually counted instructions as the thing was running.”

“Of course not. Well, mostly not. Everything’s in comparison to an ancient base-case system that everyone agreed to rate at 1.0 MIPS. There’s a collection of benchmark programs you’re supposed to run under ‘standard‘ conditions. A system that runs that benchmark in one-tenth the base-case time is rated at 10 MIPS and so on.”

“I heard voice-quotes around ‘standard.’ Conditions aren’t standard?”

“No more than racing conditions are ever standard. Sunny or wet weather, short-track, long-track, steeplechase, turf, dirt, plastic, full-card or two-horse pair-up — for every condition there are horses well-suited to it and many that aren’t. Same thing for benchmarks and computer systems.”

“That many different kinds of computers? I thought ‘CPU‘ was it.”

Horse photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

“Hardly. With horses it’s ‘muscle, bone and sinew.’ With computers it’s ‘processor, storage and network.’ In many cases network makes or breaks the numbers.”

“Network? Yeah, I got a lot faster internet response when I switched from phone-line to cable, but that didn’t make any difference to things like sorting or computation that run just within my system.”

“Sure, the external network impacts your upload and download performance, but I’m talking about the internal network that transports data between your memories and your processors. If transport’s not fast enough you’re wasting cycles. Four decades ago when the Cray-1’s 12.5-nanosecond cycle time was the fastest thing afloat, the company bragged that it had no wire more than a meter long, Guess why.”

“Does speed-of-light play into it?”

“Well hit. Lightspeed in vacuum is 0.3 meters per nanosecond. Along a copper wire it’s about 2/3 of that, so a signal takes about 5 nanoseconds each way to traverse a meter-long wire. Meanwhile, the machine’s working away at 12.5 nanoseconds per cycle. If it’s lucky and there’s no delay at the other end, the processor burns a whole cycle between making a memory request and getting the bits it asked for. Designers have invented all sorts of tricks to get those channels as short as possible.”

“OK, I get that the internal network’s important. Now, about that eight-legged horse…”

~~ Rich Olcott

  • Thanks to Richard Meeks for asking an instigating question.

A Wheel in A Wheel

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

The conversation’s gotten a little dry so I carry our mugs over to Al’s coffee tap for refills. Vinnie’s closest so he gets the first one. “Thanks, Sy. So you say that a black hole has all these other things on the outside — the photon sphere and that weird belt if it’s rotating and the accretion disk and the jets which is what I asked about in the first place.”

Astrophysicist-in-training Newt Barnes gets the second mug. “My point, Vinnie, is they all act together. You can’t look at just one thing. Thanks, Sy. You know, you should’ve paid more attention to the ergosphere.”

“Ergosphere?”

“Yeah, Vinnie, that pumpkin-shaped layer Sy described — actually, more a pumpkin shell. The event horizon and photon sphere take up space inside of it and the accretion disk’s inner edge grazes its equator. The pumpkin is fatter for a more rapidly rotating black hole, but its boundary still dips down to meet the event horizon at the rotational poles. Diagrams usually show it just sitting there but that’s not quite true.”

“It wobbles?”

“No, the shape stays in place, locked to the event horizon just like the diagrams show. What’s inside it, though, is moving like mad. That’s what we’d see from a far-away frame, anyhow.”

“Frames again, I knew it. The pumpkin’s got frames?”

“With extreme-gravity situations it’s always frames, Vinnie. The core’s gravity pulls in particles from the accumulation disk. They think they’re going straight. From an outsider’s perspective everything swerves spinwise at the ergosphere’s boundary. Even if a high-speed particle had been aimed in the other direction, it’s going spinwise once it’s inside the ergosphere.”

“Who’s making it do that?”

“Frame-dragging on steroids. We’ve known for a century that gravity from any massive body compresses the local space. ‘Kilometers are shorter near a black hole,’ as the saying goes. If the body is rotating, that counts too, at least locally — space itself joins the spin. NASA’s Gravity B probe detected micromicrodegree-level frame rotation around Earth. The ergosphere, though, has space is twisted so far that the direction of time points spinwise in the same way that it points inwards within the event horizon. Everything has to travel along time’s arrow, no argument.”

“You said ‘local‘ twice there. How far does this spread?”

“Ah, that’s an important question. The answer’s ‘Not as far as you think.’ Everything scales with the event horizon’s diameter and that scales with the mass. If the Sun were a non-rotating black hole, for instance, its event horizon would be only about 6 kilometers across, less than 4 miles. Its photon sphere would be 4.5 kilometers out from the center and the inner edge of its accretion disk would be a bit beyond that. Space compression dies out pretty quick on the astronomical scale — only a millionth of the way out to the orbit of Mercury the effect’s down to just 3% of its strength at the photosphere.”

“How about if it’s rotating?”

“The frame-dragging effect dies out even faster, with the cube of the distance. At the same one-millionth of Mercury’s orbit, the twist-in-space factor is 0.03% of what it is at the photosphere. At planet-orbit distances spin’s a non-player. However, in the theory I’m researching, spin’s influence may go much further.”

“Why’s that?”

“Seen from an outside frame, what’s inside the ergosphere rotates really fast. Remember that stuff coming in from the accretion disk’s particle grinder? It ought to be pretty thoroughly ionized, just a plasma of negative electrons and positive particles like protons and atomic nuclei. The electrons are thousands of times lighter than the positive stuff. Maybe the electrons settle into a different orbit from the positive particles.”

“Further in or further out?”

“Dunno, I’m still calculating. Either way, from the outside it’d look like two oppositely-charged disks, spinning in the same direction. We’ve known since Ørsted that magnetism comes from a rotating charge. Seems to me the ergosphere’s contents would generate two layers of magnetism with opposite polarities. I think what keeps the jets confined so tightly is a pair of concentric cylindrical magnetic fields extruded from the ergosphere. But it’s going to take a lot of math to see if the idea holds water.”

“Or jets.”

~~ Rich Olcott

The Top Choice

On By rolcottIn Physics: Fundamentals, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Al grabs me as I step into his coffee shop. “Sy, ya gotta stop Vinnie, he’s using up paper napkins again, and he’s making a mess!”

Sure enough, there’s Vinnie at his usual table by the door. He’s got a kid’s top, a big one, spinning on a little stand. He’s methodically dropping crumpled-up paper wads onto it and watching them fly off onto the floor. “Hey, Vinnie, what’s the project?”

“Hi, Sy. I’m trying to figure how come these paper balls are doing a circle but when they fly off they always go in a straight line, at least at first. They got going-around momentum, right, so how come they don’t make a spiral like stars in a galaxy?”

Astronomy professor Cathleen’s standing in the scone line. She never misses an opportunity to correct a misconception. “Galaxy stars don’t spray out of the center in a spiral, Vinnie. Like planets going around a star, stars generally follow elliptical orbits around the galactic center. A star that’s between spiral arms now could be buried in one ten million years from now. The spiral arms appear because of how the orbits work. One theory is that the innermost star orbits rotate their ellipse axes more quickly than the outer ones and the spirals form where the ellipses pile up. Other theories have to do with increased star formation or increased gravitational attraction within the pile-up regions. Probably all three contribute to the structures. Anyhow, spirals don’t form from the center outward.”

My cue for some physics. “What happens in a galaxy is controlled by gravity, Vinnie, and gravity doesn’t enter into what you’re doing. Except for all that paper falling onto Al’s floor. There’s no in-plane gravitational or electromagnetic attraction in play when your paper wads leave the toy. Newton would say there’s no force acting to make them follow anything other than straight lines once they break free.”

“What about momentum? They’ve got going-around momentum, right, shouldn’t that keep them moving spirally?”

I haul out Old Reliable for a diagram. “Thing is, your ‘going-around momentum,’ also known as ‘angular momentum,’ doesn’t exist. Calm down, Vinnie, I mean it’s a ‘fictitious force‘ that depends on how you look at it.”

“Is this gonna be frames again?”

“Yup. Frames are one of our most important analytical tools in Physics. Here’s your toy and just for grins I’ve got it going around counterclockwise. That little white circle is one of your paper wads. In the room’s frame that wad in its path is constantly converting linear momentum between the x-direction and the y-direction, right?”

“East-West to North-South and back, yeah, I get that.”

“Such a mess to calculate. Let’s make it easier. Switch to the perspective of a frame locked to the toy. In that frame the wad can move in two directions. It can fly away along the radial direction I’ve called r, or it can ride along sideways in the s-direction.”

“So why hasn’t it flown away?”

“Because you put some spit on it to make it stick — don’t deny it, I saw you. While it’s stuck, does it travel in the r direction?”

“Nope, only in the s direction. Which should make it spiral like I said.”

“I’m not done yet. One of Newton’s major innovations was the idea of infinitesimal changes, also known as little-bits. The s-direction is straight, not curved, but it shifts around little-bit by little-bit as the top rotates. Newton’s Laws say force is required to alter momentum. What force influences the wad’s s-momentum?”

“Umm … that line you’ve marked c.”

“Which is the your spit’s adhesive force between the paper and the top. The wad stays stuck until the spit dries out and no more adhesion so no more c-force. Then what happens?”

“It flies off.”

“In which direction?”

“Huh! In the r-direction.”

“And in a straight line, just like Newton said. What you called ‘going-around momentum’ becomes ‘radial momentum’ and there’s no spiraling, right?”

“I guess you’re right, but I miss spirals.”

Al comes over with a broom. “Now that’s settled, Vinnie, clean up!”

~~ Rich Olcott

  • Thanks for the question, Jen Keeler. Stay tuned.

Traces of Disparity

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

Cathleen’s an experienced teacher — she knows when off-topic class discussion is a good thing, and when to get back to the lesson plan. “My challenge question remains — why isn’t Earth’s atmosphere some average of the Mars and Venus ones? Thanks to Jeremy and Newt and Lenore we have reason to expect the planets to resemble each other, but in fact their atmospheres don’t. Maria, tell us what you’ve found about how Earth compares with the others.”

“Yes, Profesora. I found numbers for many of the gasses on each planet and put them into this chart. One thing Earth is right in the middle, most things not.”

“That’s a complicated chart. Read it out to us.”

“Of course. I had to make the vertical scales logarithmic to get the big numbers and small numbers on the same chart. First is the pressure which is the black dotted line. Venus pressure at the surface is nearly 100 times ours but Mars pressure is a bit less than 1/100th of ours. Does that count as Earth being in the middle?”

“That’d be a geometric average. It could be significant, we’ll see. Go on.”

“The gas that is almost the same everywhere is helium, the grey diamonds. That surprised me, because I thought the giant planets got all of that.”

Al’s been listening in. Nothing else going on in his coffee shop, I guess. “I’ll bet most of that helium came from radioactive rocks, not from space. Alpha particles, right, Cathleen?”

Cathleen takes unexpected interruptions in stride. “Bad bet, Al. Uranium and other heavy elements do emit alphas which pick up electrons to become helium atoms. You probably remembered Cleve and Langlet, who first isolated helium from uranium ore. However, the major source of atmospheric alphas is the solar wind. Solar wind interception and atmosphere mass are both proportional to planetary surface area so a constant concentration like this is reasonable. Continue, Maria.”

“The major gasses follow a pattern — about the same fractions on Venus and Mars but much higher or lower than on Earth. Look at carbon dioxide, nitrogen, even oxygen.”

Astronomer-in-training Jim has been doing some mental arithmetic. “Our atmosphere is 100 times denser than on Mars, and Venus is another factor of 100 beyond that. That’s a factor of 104 between them — for every molecule of CO2 on Mars there’s 10,000 on Venus. Oh, but Venus has four times Mars’ surface area so make that 40,000.”

“Good points, both of you. Jim’s approximation leads into something we can learn from Maria’s trace gas numbers. Why do you suppose the concentration of SO2 is about the same for Earth and Mars but 100 times higher on Venus, but the reverse is true for argon? Where do they each come from?”

Jeremy finally has something he can contribute. “Volcanoes! They told us in Geology class that most of our SO2 comes from volcanoes. Before the Industrial Revolution, I mean, when we started burning high-sulfur coal and fuel oils and made things worse. Venus has to be the same. Except for the industry, of course.”

“Probably correct, Jeremy. From radar mapping of Venus we know that it has over 150 large volcanoes. We don’t know how many of them are active, but the Venus Express spacecraft sent back evidence of active vulcanism. In fact, Venus’ SO2 score would probably be even higher if much of its production didn’t oxidize to SO3. That combines with water to form the clouds of sulfuric acid that hide the planet’s surface and reflect sunlight so brightly.”

Maria’s hand is up again. “I don’t understand argon’s purple diamonds, profesora. I know it’s one of the inert gasses so it doesn’t have much chemistry and can’t react into a mineral like CO2 and SO2 can. Shouldn’t argon be about the same on all three planets, like helium?”

“Mm-hm, argon does have a simple chemistry, but its radiochemistry isn’t so simple. Nearly 100% of natural argon is the argon-40 isotope created by radioactive decay of potassium-40. Potassium is tied up in the rocks, so the atmospheric load of argon-40 depends on rocky surface erosion. Not much erosion, not much argon.”

Al’s on tenterhooks. “All this is nice, but you still haven’t said why Earth’s atmosphere is so different.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Should These Three Be Alike?

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“What’s all the hubbub in the back room, Al? I’m a little early for my afternoon coffee break and your shop’s usually pretty quiet about now.”

“It’s Cathleen’s Astronomy class, Sy. The department double-booked their seminar room so she asked to use my space until it’s straightened out.”

“Think I’ll eavesdrop.” I slide in just as she’s getting started.

“OK, folks, settle. Last class I challenged you with a question. Venus and Mars both have atmospheres that are dominated by carbon dioxide with a little bit of nitrogen. Earth is right in between them. How come its atmosphere is so different? I gave each of you a piece of that to research. Jeremy, you had the null question. Should we expect Earth’s atmosphere to be about the same as the other two?”

Venus coudtops image by Damia Bouic
JAXA / ISAS / DARTS / Damia Bouic

“I think so, ma’am, on the basis of the protosolar nebula hypothesis. The –“

“Wait a minute, Jeremy. Sy, I saw you sneak in. Jeremy, explain that term to him.”

“Yes’m. Uh, a nebula is a cloud of gas and dust out in space. It could be what got shot out of an exploding star or it could be just a twist in a stream of stuff drifting through the Galaxy. If the twist kinks up, gravity pulls the material on either side of the kink towards the middle and you get a rotating disk. Most of what’s in the disk falls towards its center. The accumulated mass at the center lights up to be a star. Meanwhile, what’s left in the disk keeps most of the original angular momentum but it doesn’t whirl smoothly. There’s going to be local vortices and they attract more stuff and grow up to be planets. That’s what we think happens, anyway.”

“Good summary. So what does that mean for Mars, Venus and the Earth?”

“Their orbits are pretty close together, relative to the disk’s radius, so they ought to have encountered about the same mixture of heavy particles and light ones while they were getting up to size. The light ones would be gas atoms, mostly hydrogen and helium. Half the other atoms are oxygen and they’d react to produce oxides — water, carbon monoxide, grains of silica and iron oxide. And oxygen and nitrogen molecules, of course.”

“Of course. Was gravity the only actor in play there?”

“No-o-o, once the star lit up its photons and solar wind would have pushed against gravity.”

“So three actors. Would photons and solar wind have the same effect? Anybody?”

Silence, until astrophysicist-in-training Newt Barnes speaks up. “No, they’d have different effects. The solar wind is heavy artillery — electrons, protons, alpha particles. They’ll transfer momentum to anything they hit, but they’re more likely to hit a large particle like a dust grain than a small one like an atom. On average, the big particles would be pushed away more.”

“And the photons?”

“A photon is selective — it can only transfer momentum to an atom or molecule that can absorb exactly the photon’s energy. But each kind of atom has its own set of emission and absorption energies. Most light emitted by transitions within hydrogen atoms won’t be absorbed by anything but another hydrogen atom. Same thing for helium. The Sun’s virtually all hydrogen and helium. The photons they emit would move just those disk atoms and leave the heavier stuff in place.”

“That’s only part of the photon story.”

“Oh? Oh, yeah. The Sun’s continuous spectrum. The Sun is hot. Heat jiggles whole ions. Those moving charges produce electromagnetic waves just like charge moving within an atom, but heat-generated waves can have any wavelength and interact with anything. They can bake dust particles and decompose compounds that contain volatile atoms. Then those atoms get swept away in the general rush.”

“Which has the greater effect, solar wind or photons?”

“Hard to say without doing the numbers, but I’d bet on the photons. The metal-and-silicate terrestrial planets are close to the Sun, but the mostly-hydrogen giants are further out.”

“All that said, Jeremy, what’s your conclusion?”

“It sure looks like Earth’s atmosphere should be intermediate between Mars and Venus. How come it’s not?”

~~ Rich Olcott

Sail On, Silver Bird

On By rolcottIn Physics: Light and Relativity, Space Travel, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Big excitement in Al’s coffee shop. “What’s the fuss, Al?”

“Lightsail 2, Sy. The Planetary Society’s Sun-powered spacecraft. Ten years of work and some luck and it’s up there, way above Hubble and the ISS, boosting itself higher every day and using no fuel to do it. Is that cool or what?”

“Sun-powered? Like with a huge set of solar panels and an electric engine?”

“No, that’s the thing. It’s got a couple of little panels to power its electronics and all, but propulsion is all direct from the Sun and that doesn’t stop. Steady as she goes, Skipper, Earth to Mars in weeks, not months. Woo-hoo!”

Image by Josh Spradling / The Planetary Society

Never the rah-rah type, Big Vinnie throws shade from his usual table by the door. “It didn’t get there by itself, Al. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket did the hard work, getting Lightsail 2 and about 20 other thingies up to orbit. Takes a lot of thrust to get out of Earth’s gravity well. Chemical rockets can do that, puny little ion drives and lightsails can’t.”

“Yeah, Vinnie, but those ‘puny’ guys could lead us to a totally different travel strategy.” A voice from the crowd, astrophysicist-in-training Newt Barnes. “Your big brawny rocket has to burn a lot of delta-v just to boost its own fuel. That’s a problem.”

Al looks puzzled. “Delta-v?”

“It’s how you figure rocket propellant, Al. With a car you think about miles per gallon because if you take your foot off the gas you eventually stop. In space you just keep going with whatever momentum you’ve got. What’s important is how much you can change momentum — speed up, slow down, change direction — and that depends on the propellant you’re using and the engine you’re putting it through. All you’ve got is what’s in the tanks.”

Al still looks puzzled. I fill in the connection. “Delta means difference, Al, and v is velocity which covers both speed and direction so delta-v means — “

“Got it, Sy. So Vinnie likes big hardware but bigger makes for harder to get off the ground and Newt’s suggesting there’s a limit somewhere.”

“Yup, it’s gotten to the point that the SpaceX people chase an extra few percent performance by chilling their propellants so they can cram more into the size tanks they use. I don’t know what the limit is but we may be getting close.”

Newt’s back in. “Which is where strategy comes in, Vinnie. Up to now we’re mostly using a ballistic strategy to get to off-Earth destinations, treating the vehicle like a projectile that gets all its momentum at the beginning of the trip. But there’s really three phases to the trip, right? You climb out of a gravity well, you travel to your target, and maybe you make a controlled landing you hope. With the ballistic strategy you burn your fuel in phase one while you’re getting yourself into a transfer orbit. Then you coast on momentum through phase two.”

“You got a better strategy?”

“In some ways, yeah. How about applying continuous acceleration throughout phase two instead of just coasting? The Dawn spacecraft, for example, was rocket-launched out of Earth’s gravity well but used a xenon-ion engine in continuous-burn mode to get to Mars and then on to Vesta and Ceres. Worked just fine.”

“But they’re such low-thrust –“

“Hey, Vinnie, taking a long time to build up speed’s no problem when you’re on a long trip anyway. Dawn‘s motor averaged 1.8 kilometer per second of delta-v — that works out to … about 4,000 miles per hour of increased speed for every hour you keep the motor running. Adds up.”

“OK, I’ll give you the ion motor’s more efficient than a chemical system, but still, you need that xenon reaction mass to get your delta-v. You still gotta boost it up out of the well. All you’re doing with that strategy is extend the limit.”

Al dives back in. “That’s the beauty of Lightsail, guys. No delta-v at all. Just put it up there and light-pressure from the Sun provides the energy. Look, I got this slick video that shows how it works.”

Video courtesy of The Planetary Society.

~~ Rich Olcott

Lemon, Vanilla, Cinnamon

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Al claims that lemon’s a Summertime flavor, which is why his coffee shop’s Scone Flavor of the Month in July is lemon even though it doesn’t go well with his coffee. “Give me one of those lemon scones, Al, and an iced tea. It’s a little warm out there this morning.”

“Sure thing, Sy. Say, what’s the latest science-y thing up in the sky?”

“Oh, there’s a bunch, Al. The Japanese Hayabusa-2 spacecraft collected another sample from asteroid Ryugu. NASA’s gravity-sniffer GRAIL lunar orbiter found evidence for a huge hunk of metallic material five times larger than the Big Island of Hawai’i buried deep under the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin. The Insight Mars lander’s seismometer heard its first Marsquake —“

“Quit yanking my chain, Sy. Anything about Jupiter?”

“Gotcha, Al. I know Jupiter’s your favorite planet. As it happens I do have some Jupiter news for you.”

“The Juno orbiter’s still working, I hope.”

“Sure, sure, far as I know. It’s about to make its 13th close flyby of Jupiter, and NASA administrators have green-lighted the mission to continue until July 2021. Lots of data for the researchers to work on for years. Here’s a clue — what’re the top three things that everyone knows about Jupiter?”

“It’s the biggest planet, of course, and it’s got those stripes and the Great Red Spot. Has the planet gotten smaller somehow?”

“No, but the stripes and the Red Spot are acting weird. Had you heard about that?”

“No, just that the Spot’s huge and red and been there for 400 years.”

“Mmm, we’re not sure about the 400 years. But yes, it’s huge.”

“Four times wider than Earth, right?”

“Hasn’t been that big for a long time. Back in the 1870s telescope technology gave the astronomers that ‘four Earths wide‘ estimate. But the Spot’s shrunk in the last 150 years.”

“A whole lot?”

“Last measurement I saw, it’s just barely over one Earth wide. Seems to have gotten a bit taller, though, and maybe deeper.”

“Taller and deeper? Huh, that’s a new one. I always thought of the Spot as just this big oval ring on Jupiter’s surface.”

“Everyone has that bogus idea of Jupiter as a big smooth sphere with stripes and ovals and swirls painted on it. Don’t forget, we’re looking down at cloud tops, like those satellite pictures we get looking down at a storm system on Earth. From space, one of our hurricanes looks like a spirally disk centered on a dark spot. That dark spot isn’t in the clouds, it’s actually the top of the ocean, miles below the clouds. If you were a Martian working with photos from a telescope on Phobos, you’d be hard-put to figure that out. You need 3-D perspective to get planets right.”

Jupiter image courtesy ESA/Hubble

“Those stripes and stuff aren’t Jupiter’s surface?”

“As far as we can tell, Jupiter doesn’t have a surface. The hydrogen-helium atmosphere just gets denser and denser until it acts like a liquid. There’s a lot of pressure down there. Juno recently gave us evidence for a core that’s a fuzzy mix of stony material and maybe-metallic maybe-solid hydrogen but if that mush is real it’s only 3% of the planet’s mass. Whatever, it’s thousands of miles below what we see. Jupiter’s anything but smooth.”

“Lumps and bumps like this bubbly scone, huh?”

“More organized than that, more like corduroy or a coiled garden hose. The white stripes are hundreds of miles higher-up than the brown stripes so north-to-south it’s like a series of extreme mountain ranges and valleys. The Great Red Spot reaches up maybe 500 miles further.”

“Does that have to do with what they’re made of?”

“It has everything to do with that, we think. You know Earth’s atmosphere has layers, right?”

“Yeah, the stratosphere’s on top, then you got the weather layer where the clouds are.”

“Close enough. Jupiter has all that and more. Thanks to the Galileo probe we know that Jupiter’s ‘weather layer’ has a topmost blue-white cloud layer of ammonia ice particles, a middle red-to-brown layer containing compounds of ammonia and sulfur, and a bottommost white-ish layer of water clouds. The colors we see depend on which layer is exposed where.”

“But why’re they stripey?”

~~ Rich Olcott