Tag: Inertial frame

Memories: The Corners of Your Mind

On By rolcottIn Computer science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Vinnie doesn’t let go of a question. “OK, Robert, I got that a computer’s internal network is sorta like a horse’s sinews, tying muscle and bone together. An’ I got that a computer’s processors of whichever kind are like a horse’s muscles. But what does for a computer what bones do for a horse?”

“The ‘bones’ are a bit of a stretch, Vinnie. Data’s one possibility, memory or storage is the other one.”

Vinnie takes the bait. “Horse muscles move horse bones. The processors move data, so data’s got to be the bones.”

For the sake of argument, I come back. “But when the electricity turns off, the data goes away, right? Memory’s still there, so memory must be the bones. Or is it storage? What’s the difference between memory and storage?”

“You’ve put your finger on it, Sy — persistence. If the data’s retained when the power’s off, like on a hard drive, it’s in storage. Otherwise it’s in memory. Setting aside power glitches, of course — a bad glitch can even kill some kinds of storage and the data it’s holding, which is one reason for doing backups. As a general rule, memory is smaller, more expensive and much faster than storage so there’s a trade-off. If you want a lot of speed, load up on fast memory but it’ll cost you cash and resilience.”

“I’ll bet that’s where your special skills come in handy, right, Robert?”

“Pretty much, Vinnie. The trick is to get the right data into the right kind of memory at the right time.”

“The right kind…?”

“Ohhhyeah, there’s a whole hierarchy out there — on-chip memory essentially inside the processor, on-board memory on separate chips, off-board memory and storage…. It goes on all the way out to The Cloud if you’re set up that way. There’s even special memory for keeping track of which data is where in the other memories. The internal network plays into it, too — the data bus to a given memory could be just a byte wide or many times fatter, which makes a big difference in access speed. The hardware takes care of some data placement automatically, but a lot of it we can affect with the software. That’s mostly where I come in.”

Horse skeleton from Wikimedia Commons by CC license

“Doin’ what? The hardware’s pretty much what your boss already bought, not much you can tinker with there. The bits are zoomin’ around inside at electronic speeds, you can’t pick and choose where to put ’em.”

“Yes, we can, if we’re smart and careful. You know Michael Corleone’s line, ‘Keep your friends close but your enemies closer‘? With us it’s ‘Keep your next data byte close but your next program instruction closer.'”

The Memory Pyramid

“Whuzzat mean?”

“What you want to do is have bytes ready for the processor as soon as it’s ready to work with them. That means predicting which bytes it’ll want next and getting those to the top of the memory pyramid. Programs do a lot of short loops, enough that standard architectures have separate instruction memories just for that.”

“So how do you do that predicting? Like Vinnie said, things move fast in there.”

“You design for patterns. My favorite is sequential-and-discard. When you’re watching a movie you look at frames in series and you rarely go back. In the computer we deliver sequential bytes in an orderly manner to fast memory but we don’t have to worry about storing them back out again. Easy-peasy. Sequential-and-store is also highly predictable but then you have to down-copy, too.”

“Yeah, either way the data just flows through. What others?”

“Periodic is useful if you can arrange your program and data to exploit it. If you know a just-used series of bytes are going to be relevant again soon, you try to reserve enough close-in memory to hold onto them. Data references tend to spread out but sometimes you can tilt the odds by clumping together related bytes that are likely to be used together — like all weather data for one location.”

“What if you don’t have any of those patterns?”

“Worst case scenario. You guess periodic, buy lots of memory and cross your fingers.”

~~ Rich Olcott

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 Jet and The Plane

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

“OK, Sy, I get your point about a black hole being more than a mystical event horizon hiding whatever’s inside it. I’ll give you it’s a structure with a trapped-light shell and a pumpkin-donut belt around that –“

“… if it’s rotating, Vinnie…”

“– if it’s rotating, but what does all that have to do with those huge jets coming out of the poles instead of the equator where they belong?”

Suddenly Newt Barnes, astrophysicist in training, is standing by our table. “You guys are talking my research topic, just the hottest thing in astrophysics these days. Those jets were the subject of over a thousand papers last year. Mind if I sit in?”

“Of course not.” “We’re all ears.”

“Well, there’s a couple more layers to peel before we can make a maybe connection. Vinnie, what’s the weirdest thing about those jets?”

“Like I said, they’re huge — millions of lightyears long.”

“True, but other structures are huge, too — galaxy superclusters, for instance. The real weirdness is how narrow the jets are — less than a degree wide, and they’ve maintained that tight geometry while they’ve grown for millions of years. We still don’t know what’s in a jet. If it’s a beam of charged particles you’d think they’d repel each other and spread out almost immediately. If the particles are uncharged they’d bang into each other and into the prevailing interstellar medium. Random collisions would spread the beam out maybe a little slower than a charged-particle beam but still. A photon beam would be more stable but you’d need a really good collimating mechanism at the jet’s base to get the waves all marching so precisely.”

“What’s left, dark matter?”

“Almost certainly not. Many jets emit huge quantities of electromagnetic radiation at all frequencies from radio up through X-rays and beyond. Dark matter doesn’t do electromagnetism. No, jets are somehow created from normal stuff. The question is, how is it kept under such tight control?”

“The other question is, where’s all that stuff coming from if nothing can escape outta the event horizon?”

“Ah, that has to do with yet another part of the structure — the accretion disk.”

“What they got that orange picture of, right? Big ring like Saturn’s.”

“Well, similar shape, but different origin, different composition and very different dynamics. Saturn’s rings are mostly water-ice, built up from the debris of ice-moons that collided or were pulled apart by tidal forces. A black hole’s accretion disk is made up of planets, dust particles, atoms, whatever junk was unfortunate enough to be too close when the black hole passed by. Pick any incoming object and call it Freddie. Unless Freddie and the event horizon’s core are on an exact collision course, Freddie gets swept up by the disk.”

“Then what happens?”

“Freddie collides with something already in the disk. Lots of somethings. Each collision does two things. One, Freddie and the something break into smaller pieces. Two, some of Freddie’s gravitational potential energy relative to the core is converted to heat, making the collision debris package hotter than Freddie and the something were to begin with. After a while, Freddie gets ground down to atoms or smaller and they’re all really hot, radiating intensely just like Planck and Einstein said they would.”

“So we got a ring like Saturn’s, like I said.”

“Only sort of. Saturn has half-a-dozen distinct rings. They shine by reflected sunlight, the middle ring is brightest and broadest, and the innermost ring is dark and skinny. Our only direct accretion disk image so far is a one blurry view, but the object shines with its own light and in theory the disk isn’t segmented. There should be just one ring and it’d be brightest at a sharp inner edge.”

“Why’s that?”

“The light’s produced by hot particles. Heat generation’s most intense where the gravity well is steepest. That’s nearest the core. For a non-spinning black hole the threshold is one-sixth of the horizon’s diameter. If Freddie gets knocked the slightest bit closer than that it’s doomed to fall the rest of the way in. The edge is closer-in if the hole’s rotating but then Freddie has an interesting time. Relatively.”

“Gonna be frames again, right?”

“Yeah.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Beyond The Shadow of A…?

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

“Alright, Vinnie, what’s the rest of it?”

“The rest of what, Sy?”

“You wouldn’t have hauled that kid’s toy into Al’s shop here just to play spitballs with it. You’re building up to something and what is it?”

“My black hole hobby, Sy. The things’re just a few miles wide but pack more mass than the Sun. A couple of my magazines say they give off jets top and bottom because of how they spin. That just don’t fit. The stuff ought to come straight out to the sides like the paper wads did.”

“Well, umm… Ah. You know the planet Saturn.”

“Sure.”

“Are its rings part of the planet?”

“No, of course not, they go around it. I even seen an article about how the rings probably came from a couple of collided moons and how water from the Enceladus moon may be part of the outside ring. Only thing Saturn does for the rings is supply gravity to keep ’em there.”

“But our eyes see planet and rings together as a single dot of light in the sky. As far as the rest of the Solar System cares, Saturn consists of that big cloudy ball of hydrogen and the rings and all 82 of its moons, so far. Once you get a few light-seconds away, the whole collection acts as a simple point-source of gravitational attraction.”

“I see where you’re going. You’re gonna say a black hole’s more than just its event horizon and whatever it’s hiding inside there.”

“Yup. That ‘few miles wide’ — I could make a case that you’re off by trillions. A black hole’s a complicated beast when we look at it close up.”

“How can you look at a thing like that close up?”

“Math, mostly, but the observations are getting better. Have you seen the Event Horizon Telescope’s orange ring picture?”

“You mean the one that Al messed with and posted for Hallowe’en? It’s over there behind his cash register. What’s it about, anyway?”

“It’s an image of M87*, the super-massive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy. Not the event horizon itself, of course, that’s black. The orange portion actually represents millimeter-radio waves that escape from the accretion disk circling the event horizon. The innermost part of the disk is rotating around the hole at near-lightspeed. The arc at the bottom is brighter because that’s the part coming toward us. The photons get a little extra boost from Special Relativity.”

“Frames again?”

“With black holes it’s always frames. You’ll love this. From the shell’s perspective, it spits out the same number of photons per second in every direction. From our perspective, time is stretched on the side rotating away from us so there’s fewer photons per one of our seconds and it’s dimmer. In the same amount of our time the side coming toward us emits more photons so it’s brighter. Neat demonstration, eh?”

“Cute. So the inner black part’s the hole ’cause it can’t give off light, right?”

“Not quite. That’s a shadow. Not a shadow of the event horizon itself, mind you, but of the photon sphere. That’s a shell about 1½ times the width of the event horizon. Any photon that passes exactly tangent to the sphere is doomed to orbit there forever. If the photon’s path is the slightest bit inward from that, the poor particle heads inward towards whatever’s in the center. The remaining photons travel paths that look bent to a distant observer, but the point is that they keep going and eventually someone like us could see them.”

“The shadow and the accretion disk, that’s what the EHT saw?”

“Not exactly.”

“There’s more?”

“Yeah. M87* is a spinning black hole, which is more complicated than one that’s sitting still. Wrapped around the photon sphere there’s an ergosphere, as much as three times wider than the event horizon except it’s pumpkin-shaped. The ergosphere’s widest at the rotational equator, but it closes in to meet the event horizon at the two poles. Anything bigger than a photon that crosses its boundary is condemned to join the spin parade, forever rotating in sync with the object’s spin.”

“When are you gonna get to the jets, Sy?”

~~ 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.

Fly High, Silver Bird

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

“TANSTAAFL!” Vinnie’s still unhappy with spacecraft that aren’t rocket-powered. “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!”

“Ah, good, you’ve read Heinlein. So what’s your problem with Lightsail 2?”

“It can’t work, Sy. Mostly it can’t work. Sails operate fine where there’s air and wind, but there’s none of that in space, just solar wind which if I remember right is just barely not a vacuum.”

Astronomer-in-training Jim speaks up. “You’re right about that, Vinnie. The solar wind’s fast, on the order of a million miles per hour, but it’s only about 10-14 atmospheres. That thin, it’s probably not a significant power source for your sailcraft, Al.”

“I keep telling you folks, it’s not wind-powered, it’s light-powered. There’s oodles of sunlight photons out there!”

“Sure, Al, but photons got zero mass. No mass, no momentum, right?”

Plane-polarized electromagnetic wave in motion
Plane-polarized electromagnetic wave
Electric (E) field is red
Magnetic (B) field is blue
(Image by Loo Kang Wee and Fu-Kwun Hwang from Wikimedia Commons)

My cue to enter. “Not right, Vinnie. Experimental demonstrations going back more than a century show light exerting pressure. That implies non-zero momentum. On the theory side … you remember when we talked about light waves and the right-hand rule?”

“That was a long time ago, Sy. Remind me.”

“… Ah, I still have the diagram on Old Reliable. See here? The light wave is coming out of the screen and its electric field moves electrons vertically. Meanwhile, the magnetic field perpendicular to the electric field twists moving charges to scoot them along a helical path. So there’s your momentum, in the interaction between the two fields. The wave’s combined action delivers force to whatever it hits, giving it momentum in the wave’s direction of travel. No photons in this picture.”

Astrophysicist-in-training Newt Barnes dives in. “When you think photons and electrons, Vinnie, think Einstein. His Nobel prize was for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Think about some really high-speed particle flying through space. I’m watching it from Earth and you’re watching it from a spaceship moving along with it so we’ve each got our own frame of reference.”

“Frames, awright! Sy and me, we’ve talked about them a lot. When you say ‘high-speed’ you’re talking near light-speed, right?”

“Of course, because that’s when relativity gets significant. If we each measure the particle’s speed, do we get the same answer?”

“Nope, because you on Earth would see me and the particle moving through compressed space and dilated time so the speed I’d measure would be more than the speed you’d measure.”

“Mm-hm. And using ENewton=mv² you’d assign it a larger energy than I would. We need a relativistic version of Newton’s formula. Einstein said that rest mass is what it is, independent of the observer’s frame, and we should calculate energy from EEinstein²=(pc)²+(mc²)², where p is the momentum. If the momentum is zero because the velocity is zero, we get the familiar EEinstein=mc² equation.”

“I see where you’re going, Newt. If you got no mass OR energy then you got nothing at all. But if something’s got zero mass but non-zero energy like a photon does, then it’s got to have momentum from p=EEinstein/c.”

“You got it, Vinnie. So either way you look at it, wave or particle, light carries momentum and can power Lightsail 2.”

Lightsail 2 flying over Earth, against a yellow background
Adapted from image by Josh Spradling / The Planetary Society

“Question is, can sunlight give it enough momentum to get anywhere?”

“Now you’re getting quantitative. Sy, start up Old Reliable again.”

“OK, Newt, now what?”

“How much power can Lightsail 2 harvest from the Sun? That’ll be the solar constant in joules per second per square meter, times the sail’s area, 32 square meters, times a 90% efficiency factor.”

“Got it — 39.2 kilojoules per second.”

“That’s the supply, now for the demand. Lightsail 2 masses 5 kilograms and starts at 720 kilometers up. Ask Old Reliable to use the standard circular orbit equations to see how long it would take to harvest enough energy to raise the craft to another orbit 200 kilometers higher.”

“Combining potential and kinetic energies, I get 3.85 megajoules between orbits. That’s only 98 seconds-worth. I’m ignoring atmospheric drag and such, but net-net, Lightsail 2‘s got joules to burn.”

“Case closed, Vinnie.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Dark Shadows

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

Change-me Charlie’s still badgering Astronomer-in-training Jim and Physicist-in-training Newt about “Dark Stuff,” though he’s switched his target from dark matter to dark energy. “OK, the expansion of the Universe is speeding up. How does dark energy do that?”

Jim steps up to bat. “At this point dark energy’s just a name. We frankly have no idea what the name represents, although it seems appropriate.”

“Why’s that?”

“Gravity pulls things together, right, and we have evidence that galaxies are flying away from each other. When you pick something up your muscles give it gravitational potential energy that becomes kinetic energy when you let go and it drops. In space, a galaxy moving away from its neighbors gains gravitational potential energy relative to them. If the Energy Conservation Law holds, that energy has to come from somewhere. ‘Dark energy’ is what we call the somewhere, but naming something and understanding it are two different things.”

Newt chips in. “Einstein came at it from a different direction. His General Relativity field equations contained two numbers for observation to fill in — G, Newton’s gravitational constant, and lambda (Λ), which we now call the Cosmological Constant. Lambda measures the energy density of empty space. The equations say the balance between lambda and gravity controls whether the Universe expands, contracts or stays static. Lambda‘s just a little bit positive so the universe is expanding.”

“Same conclusion, different name. Neither one says where the energy comes from.”

That’s my cue. “True, but Einstein’s work goes deeper. Newtonian physics maps the Universe onto a stable grid of straight lines. In General Relativity those lines are deformed and twisted under the influence of massive objects. Vinnie and I talked about how gravity’s a fictitious force arising from that deformation. Like John Wheeler said, ‘Mass tells space-time how to curve, and space-time tells mass how to move.’ Anyway, when you throw dark energy’s lambda into the mix, the grid lines themselves go into motion. Dark energy torques the spacetime fabric that pulls galaxies together.”

“So dark energy pulls things apart by spreading out the grid they’re built on? If that’s so how come I’m still in one piece?”

“Nothing personal, but you’re too small and dense to notice. So am I, so is the Earth.”

“Why should that make a difference?”

“Time for a thought experiment. Think of the Sun. The atoms inside its surface are trying to get out, right? What’s holding them in?”

“The Sun’s gravity.”

“Just like pressure on the skin of a balloon. In either case, as long as things are stable the pressure on an enclosing real or mathematical surface rises and falls with the amount of enclosed energy density and it doesn’t matter which we talk about. Energy density’s easier to think about. With me so far?”

“I guess.”

“Let’s run a few horseback numbers on Old Reliable here. Start with protons and neutrons trying to leave an atomic nucleus. Here’s the total binding energy of an iron-56 nucleus divided by its volume…”

“… so the nuclear particles would fly apart except for the inward pressure exerted by the nuclear forces. Now we’ll go up a level and consider electrons trying to leave a helium atom. They’re held in by the electromagnetic force…”

“Still a lot of inward pressure but less than nuclear by fifty-five powers of ten. Gravity next. That’s what keeps us from flying off into space. I’ll use Earth’s escape velocity to cheat-quantify it…”

“Ten billion times weaker than the electromagnetism that holds our atoms and molecules together. Dark energy’s mass density is estimated to be about 10-27 kilograms per cubic meter. I’ll use that and Einstein’s E=mc2to calculate its pull-us-apart pressure.”

“A quintillion times weaker still.”

“So what you’re saying is, dark energy tries to pull everything apart by stretching out that spacetime grid, but it’s too weak to actually do anything to stuff that’s held together by gravity, electromagnetism or the two nuclear forces.”

“Mostly. Nuclear forces are short-range so distance doesn’t matter. Gravity and electromagnetism get weaker with the square of the distance. Dark energy only gets competitive working on objects that are separated much further than even neighboring galaxies. You’re not gonna get pulled apart.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Dancing in The Dark

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Multi-messenger, Astronomy: Techniques, Cosmology, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment
Change-me Charlie at his argument table

The impromptu seminar at Change-me Charlie’s “Change My Mind” table is still going strong, but it looks like Physicist-in-training Newt and Astronomer-in-training Jim have met his challenge. He’s switched from arguing that dark matter doesn’t exist to asking how it worked in the Bullet Cluster’s massive collision between two collections of galaxies with their clouds of plasma and dark matter. “OK, the individual galaxies are so spread out they slide past each other without slowing down but the plasma clouds obstruct each other by friction. Wouldn’t friction in the dark matter hold things back, too?”

Jim’s still standing in front of the table. “Now that’s an interesting question, so interesting that research groups have burned a bazillion computer cycles trying to answer it.”

“Interesting, yes, but that interesting?”

“For sure. What we know about dark matter is mostly what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t give off light, it doesn’t absorb light, it doesn’t seem to participate in the strong or weak nuclear forces or interact with normal matter by any means other than gravity, and no identifiable dark matter particles have been detected by bleeding-edge experiments like IceCube and the Large Hadron Collider. So people wonder, does dark matter even interact with itself? If we could answer that question one way or the other, that ought to tell us something about what dark matter is.”

“How’re we gonna do that?”

Newt’s still perched on Charlie’s oppo chair. “By using computers and every theory tool on the shelf to run what-if? simulations. From what we can tell, nearly everywhere in the Universe normal matter is embedded in a shell of dark matter. The Bullet Cluster and a few other objects out there appear to break that rule and give us a wonderful check on the theory work.”

The Bullet Cluster, 1E 0657-56 (NASA image)

“Like for instance.”

“Simple case. What would the collision would looked like if dark matter wasn’t involved? Some researchers built a simulation program and loaded it with a million pretend plasma particles in two cluster-sized regions moving towards each other from 13 million pretend lightyears apart. They also loaded in position and momentum data for the other stars and galaxies shown in the NASA image. The simulation tracked them all as pretend-time marched along stepwise. At each time-step the program applied known or assumed laws of physics to compute every object’s new pretend position and momentum since the prior step. Whenever two pretend-particles entered the same small region of pretend-space, the program calculated a pretend probability for their collision. The program’s output video marked each successful collision with a pink pixel so pinkness means proton-electron plasma. Here’s the video for this simulation.”

“Doesn’t look much like the NASA picture. The gas just spreads out, no arc or cone to the sides.”

“Sure not, which rules out virtually all models that don’t include dark matter. So now the team went to a more complicated model. They added a million dark matter particles that they positioned to match the observed excess gravity distribution. Those’re marked with blue pixels in the videos. Dark matter particles in the model were allowed to scatter each other, too, under control of a self-interaction parameter. The researchers ran the simulations with a whole range of parameter values, from no-friction zero up to about twice what other studies have estimated. Here’s the too-much case.”

“Things hold together better with all that additional gravity, but it’s not a good match either.”

“Right, and here’s the other end of the range — no friction between dark matter particles. Robertson, the video’s author/director, paused the simulation in the middle to insert NASA’s original image so we could compare.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“It’s not a perfect match. Here’s an image I created by subtracting a just-after-impact simulation frame from the NASA image, then amplifying the red. There’s too much left-over plasma at the outskirts, suggesting that maybe no-friction overstates the case and maybe dark matter particles interact, very slightly, beyond what a pure-gravity theory predicts.”

“Wait, if the particles don’t use gravity, electromagnetism or the nuclear forces on each other, maybe there’s a fifth force!”

“New Physics!”

A roar from Cap’n Mike — “Or they’re not particles!”

~~ Rich Olcott

The Pretty-good Twenty-nine

On By rolcottIn Physics: Foundations of Measurement, Physics: Fundamentals, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Time for coffee and a scone. As I step into Al’s coffee shop he’s taking his Jupiter poster down from behind the cash register.

“Hey, Al, I liked that poster. You decide you prefer plain wall?”

“Nah, Sy, I got a new one here. Help me get it up over the hook.”

A voice from behind us. “Ya got it two degrees outta plumb, clockwise.” Vinnie, of course. Al taps the frame to true it up.

Teachers, click here to download a large-format printable copy.

“Hey, Sy, in the middle, that’s the same seven units we just finished talking about — amps for electric current, kelvins for temperature, meters for length, kilograms for mass, seconds for time, moles for counting atoms and such, and that candela one you don’t like. What’s all the other bubbles about? For that matter, what’s the poster about, Al?”

“What it’s about, Vinnie, is on May 20 the whole world goes to a new set of measurement standards, thanks to some international bureau.”

“Le Bureau International des Poids et Mesures.” It’s Newt Barnes in from the Physics building. “The bubbles in that central ring are the BIPM’s selections for fundamental standards. Each one’s fixed by precisely defined values of one or more universal physical constants. For instance, a ruler calibrated on Earth will match up perfectly with one calibrated on Mars because both calibrations depend on the wavelength of radiation from a cesium-based laser and that’s the same everywhere.”

“How about the other bubbles and the rings around them?”

“They’re all derived quantities, simple combinations of the fundamental standards.”

“Hey, I see one I recognize. That °C has gotta be degrees centigrade ’cause it’s right next to kelvins. Centigrade’s the same as kelvins plus , uh, 273?”

“There you go, Al. What’s ‘rad’ and ‘sr’, Newt?”

“Symbols for radian and steradian, Vinnie. They both measure angles like degrees do, but they fit the BIPM model because they’re ratios of lengths and length is one of the fundamentals. Divide a circle’s circumference by its radius and what do you get?”

“Twice pi.”

“Right, call it 2π radians and that’s a full circle. Half a circle is π radians, a right angle is π/2 radians and so on. Works for any size circle, right? Anyone remember the formula for the area of a sphere?”

“4πr2, right?”

“Exactly. If you divide any sphere’s area by the square of its radius you get 4π steradians. Any hemisphere is 2π steradians and so on. Steradians are handy for figuring things like light and gravity that decrease as the square of the distance.”

Something occurs to me. “I’m looking at those bigger bubbles that enclose the derived quantities. Seems to me that each one covers a major area of physical science. The green one with newtons for force, pascals for pressure, joules for energy and watts for power — that’d be Newtonian physics. The red circle with volts plus coulombs for charge, ohms for resistance, farads for capacitance, siemens for electrical conductance — all that’s electronics. Add in henries for inductance, webers for magnetic flux and teslas for flux density and you’ve got Maxwellian electromagnetism.”

“You’re on to something, Sy. Chemistry’s there with moles and katals, also known as moles per second, for catalytic activity. How does your idea fit the cluster attached to seconds?”

“They’re all per-second rates, Newt. The hertz is waves per second for periodic things like sound or light-as-a-wave. The other three are about radioactivity — bequerels is fissions per second; grays and sieverts are measures of radiation exposure per kilogram.”

“Vinnie says you don’t like candelas, so you probably don’t like lumens or luxes either. What’s your gripe with them?”

“All three are supposed to quantify visible light from a source, as opposed to the total emission at all wavelengths. But the definition of ‘visible’ zeros in on one wavelength in the green because that’s where most people are most sensitive. Candelas aren’t valid for a person who’s color-blind in the green, nor for something like a red laser that has no green lightwaves. I call bogosity, and lumens and luxes are both candela-based.”

“These 29 standards are as good on Mars as they are here on Earth?”

“That’s the plan.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Terzetto for Rubber Ruler

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

ruler and sodium lines“So you’re telling me, Cathleen, that you can tell how hot a star is by looking at its color?”

“That’s right, Vinnie.  For most stars their continuous spectrum is pretty close to the blackbody equation tying peak wavelength to temperature.”

“But you can’t do that with far-away stars, right, because the further they are, the more stretched-out their lightwaves get.  Won’t that mess up the peak wavelength?”

“The key is Kirchhoff’s other kinds of spectrum.”

“You’re talking the bright-line and dark-line kinds.”

“Exactly.  Each kind of spectrum comes from a different process — each is affected differently by the object in question and the environment it’s embedded in.  A continuous spectrum is all about charged particles moving randomly in response to the heat energy they’re surrounded by.  It doesn’t matter what kind of particles they are or even whether they’re positive or negative.  Whenever a particle changes direction, it twitches the electromagnetic field and gives off a wave.”

“Right — the higher the temperature the less time between twitches; the wave can’t move as far before things change so the wavelength’s shorter; any speed’s possible so you can turn that dial wherever; I got all that.  So what’s different with the bright-line and dark-line spectrums?”

Cathleen and I both blurt out, “Spectra!” at the same time and give each other a look.  We’re grown-ups now.  We don’t say, “Jinx!” to each other any more.

“Alright, spectra.  But how’re they different?”

I pick up the story.  “Like Cathleen said, continuous spectra from same–temperature stuff look identical no matter what kind of stuff’s involved because heat is motion and each particle moves as a unit  The other kinds of spectrum are about transitions within particles so they’re all about which kind of stuff.  A given kind of atom can only absorb certain wavelengths of light and it can only relax by giving off exactly the same wavelengths.  There’s no in-betweens.”

She cuts in.  “Sodium, for instance.  It has two strong lines in the yellow, at 588.995 and 589.592 nanometers.  Whether in a star or a meteor or fireworks, sodium gives off exactly those colors.  Conversely, in an interstellar cloud or in a star’s outermost layers sodium absorbs exactly those colors from any continuous-spectrum light passing through.”

I’m back in.  “And there’s the key to your unmixing question, Vinnie.  We’ve talked about frames, remember?  Your far-away star’s light-generating layers emit a continuous spectrum that describes its temperature.  If we were right next to it, that’s the spectrum we’d see.  But as you say, we’re a long way away and in our frame the light’s been stretched.  It still looks like the black-body curve but it’s red-shifted because of our relative motion.”

Cathleen’s turn.  “But if there are sodium atoms in the star’s upper layers, their absorptions will cut a pair of notches in that emitted spectrum.  It won’t be a smooth curve, there’ll be two sharp dips in it, close together, with the blue-side one twice as strong as the other one.  Easy to recognize and measure the redshift.  The blackbody peak is redshifted by exactly the same amount so with some arithmetic you’ve got the peak’s original wavelength and the star’s temperature.”

Mine.  “See, because we know what the sodium wavelengths were in the star’s frame, we can divide the dip wavelengths we measure by the rest-frame numbers we know about.  The ratios give us the star’s redshift.”

Spectrum with only blackbody and sodium Cathleen turns to her laptop and starts tapping keys.  “Let’s do an example.  Suppose we’re looking at a star’s broadband spectrogram.  The blackbody curve peaks at 720 picometers.  There’s an absorption doublet with just the right relative intensity profile in the near infra-red at 1,060,190 and 1,061,265 picometers.  They’re 1,075 picometers apart.  In the lab, the sodium doublet’s split by 597 picometers.  If the star’s absorption peaks are indeed the sodium doublet then the spectrum has been stretched by a factor of 1075/597=1.80.  Working backward, in the star’s frame its blackbody peak must be at 720/1.80=400 picometers, which corresponds to a temperature of about 6,500 K.”

“Old Reliable calculates from that stretch factor and the Hubble Constant the star’s about ten billion lightyears away and fleeing at 240,000 km/s.”

“All that from three peaks.  Spectroscopy’s pretty powerful, huh?”

Cathleen and me: “For sure!    Jinx!”

~~ Rich Olcott