Universe Today

November 20, 2014December 23, 2015 by David Dickinson

A Thousand Days ‘Til Totality: Anticipating the 2017 Solar Eclipse

The total solar eclipse of November 2012 as seen from

Where will YOU be on August 21^st, 2017?

Astronomy is all about humility and thinking big in terms of space and time. It’s routine for astronomers to talk of comets on thousand year orbits, or stars with life spans measured in billions of years…

Yup, the lifespan of your average humanoid is indeed fleeting, and pales in comparison to the universe, that’s for sure. But one astronomical series that you can hope to live through is the cycle of eclipses.

I remember reading about the total solar eclipse of February 26^th, 1979 as a kid. Carter was in the White House, KISS was mounting yet another comeback, and Voyager 1 was wowing us with images of Jupiter. That was also the last total solar eclipse to grace mainland United States in the 20^th century.

But the ongoing “eclipse-drought” is about to be broken.

The path of totality across the United States on August 21st, 2017. Credit: Great American Eclipse.com.

One thousand days from this coming Monday, November 24^th on August 21^st 2017, the shadow of the Moon will touch down off of the Oregon coast and sweep eastward across the U.S. heartland before heading out to the Atlantic off of the coast of South Carolina. Millions live within a days’ drive of the 115 kilometre wide path, and the eclipse has the added plus of occurring at the tail end of summer vacation season. This also means that lots of folks will be camping and otherwise mobile with their RVs and able to journey to the event.

The Great American Eclipse of 2017 from Michael Zeiler on Vimeo.

This is also the last total solar eclipse to pass over any of the 50 United States since July 11^th, 1991, and the first eclipse to cross the contiguous United States from “sea to shining sea” since way back on June 8^th, 1918.

Think it’s too early to prepare? Towns across the path, including Hopkinsville, Kentucky and towns in Kansas and Nebraska are already laying plans for eclipse day. Other major U.S. cities, such as Nashville, Idaho Falls, and Columbia, South Carolina also lie along the path of totality, and the spectacle promises to spawn a whole new generation of “umbraphiles” or eclipse chasers.

A total solar eclipse is an unforgettable sight. But unlike a total lunar eclipse, which can be viewed from the moonward-facing hemisphere of the Earth, one generally has to journey to the narrow path of totality to see a total solar eclipse. Totality rarely comes to you.

Viewing — The Zeilers view the November 2013 eclipse from Africa. Credit: Michael Zeiler.

And don’t settle for a 99% partial eclipse just outside the path. “There’s no comparison between partial and total solar eclipses when it comes to sheer grandeur and beauty,” Michael Zeiler, longtime eclipse chaser and creator of the Great American Eclipse website told Universe Today. We witnessed the 1994 annular solar eclipse of the Sun from the shores of Lake Erie, and can attest that a 99% partial eclipse is still pretty darned bright!

There are two total solar eclipses remaining worldwide up until 2017: One on March 20^th, 2015 crossing the high Arctic, and another on March 9th 2016 over Southeast Asia. The 2017 eclipse offers a maximum of 2 minutes and 41 seconds of totality, and weather prospects for the eclipse in late August favors viewers along the northwestern portion of the track.

And though an armada of cameras will be prepared to capture the eclipse along its trek across the U.S., many veteran eclipse chasers suggest that first time viewers merely sit back and take in the moment. The onset of totality sees a bizarre sort of twilight fall across the landscape, as shadow bands skip across the countryside, temperatures drop, and wildlife is fooled into thinking that nightfall has come early.

And then, all too soon, the second set of blinding diamond rings burst through the lunar valleys, the eclipse glasses go back on, and totality is over. Which always raises the question heard throughout the crowd post-eclipse:

When’s the next one?

Well, the good news is, the United States will host a second total solar eclipse on April 8^th, 2024, just seven years later! This path will run from the U.S. Southwest to New England, and crisscross the 2017 path right around Carbondale, Illinois.

Will the woo that surfaced around the approach of Comet ISON and the lunar tetrad of “blood Moon eclipses” rear its head in 2017? Ah, eclipses and comets seem to bring ‘em out of the woodwork, and 2017 will likely see a spike in the talking-head gloom and doom videos ala YouTube. Some will no doubt cite the “perfection” seen during total solar eclipses as proof of divine inspiration, though this is actually just a product of our vantage point in time and space. In fact, annular eclipses are slightly more common than total solars in our current epoch, and will become more so as the Moon slowly recedes from the Earth. And we recently noted in our post on the mutual phenomena of Jupiter’s moons that solar eclipses very similar to those seen from the Earth can also be spied from Callisto.

Heads up to any future interplanetary eclipse resort developer: Callisto is prime real estate.

Forget Mars... "Get your ass to totality!" — Forget Mars… “Get your ass to totality!” Credit: Great American Eclipse.

The 2017 total solar eclipse across America will be one for the history books, that’s for sure.

So get those eclipse safety glasses now, and be sure to keep ‘em handy through 2017 and onward to 2024!

-Read Dave Dickinson’s eclipse-fueled science fiction tales Shadowfall and Exeligmos.

November 20, 2014December 23, 2015 by Tim Reyes

BICEP2 All Over Again? Researchers Place Higgs Boson Discovery in Doubt

This is the signature of one of 100s of trillions of particle collisions detected at the Large Hadron Collider. The combined analysis lead to the discovery of the Higgs Boson. This article describes one team in dissension with the results. (Photo Credit: CERN)

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, faster is better. Faster means more powerful particle collisions and looking deeper into the makeup of matter. However, other researchers are proclaiming not so fast. LHC may not have discovered the Higgs Boson, the boson that imparts mass to everything, the god particle as some have called it. While the Higgs Boson discovery in 2012 culminated with the awarding in December 2013 of the Nobel Prize to Peter Higgs and François Englert, a team of researchers has raised these doubts about the Higgs Boson in their paper published in the journal Physical Review D.

The discourse is similar to what unfolded in the last year with the detection of light from the beginning of time that signified the Inflation epoch of the Universe. Researchers looking into the depths of the Universe and the inner depths of subatomic particles are searching for signals at the edge of detectability, just above the noise level and in proximity to the signals from other sources. For the BICEP2 telescope observations (previous U.T. articles), its pretty much back to the drawing board but the Higgs Boson (previous U.T. articles) doubts are definitely challenging but needing more solid evidence. In human affairs, if the Higgs Boson was not detected by the LHC, what does one do with an awarded Nobel Prize?

Cross-section of the Large Hadron Collider where its detectors are placed and collisions occur. LHC is as much as 175 meters (574 ft) below ground on the Frence-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. The accelerator ring is 27 km (17 miles) in circumference. (Photo Credit: CERN) — Cross-section of the Large Hadron Collider where its detectors are placed and collisions occur. LHC is as much as 175 meters (574 ft) below ground on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. The accelerator ring is 27 km (17 miles) in circumference. (Photo Credit: CERN)

The present challenge to the Higgs Boson is not new and is not just a problem of detectability and acuity of the sensors as is the case with BICEP2 data. The Planck space telescope revealed that light radiated from dust combined with the magnetic field in our Milky Way galaxy could explain the signal detected by BICEP2 that researchers proclaimed as the primordial signature of the Inflation period. The Higgs Boson particle is actually a prediction of the theory proposed by Peter Higgs and several others beginning in the early 1960s. It is a predicted particle from gauge theory developed by Higgs, Englert and others, at the heart of the Standard Model.

This recent paper is from a team of researchers from Denmark, Belgium and the United Kingdom led by Dr. Mads Toudal Frandsen. Their study entitled, “Technicolor Higgs boson in the light of LHC data” discusses how their supported theory predicts Technicolor quarks through a range of energies detectable at LHC and that one in particular is within the uncertainty level of the data point declared to be the Higgs Boson. There are variants of Technicolor Theory (TC) and the research paper compares in detail the field theory behind the Standard Model Higgs and the TC Higgs (their version of the Higgs boson). Their conclusion is that a TC Higgs is predicted by Technicolor Theory that is consistent with expected physical properties, is low mass and has an energy level – 125 GeV – indistinguishable from the resonance now considered to be the Standard Model Higgs. Theirs is a composite particle and it does not impart mass upon everything.

So you say – hold on! What is a Technicolor in jargon of particle physics? To answer this you would want to talk to a plumber from South Bronx, New York – Dr. Leonard Susskind. Though no longer a plumber, Susskind first proposed Technicolor to describe the breaking of symmetry in gauge theories that are part of the Standard Model. Susskind and other physicists from the 1970s considered it unsatisfactory that many arbitrary parameters were needed to complete the Gauge theory used in the Standard Model (involving the Higgs Scalar and Higgs Field). The parameters consequently defined the mass of elementary particles and other properties. These parameters were being assigned and not calculated and that was not acceptable to Susskind, ‘t Hooft, Veltmann and others. The solution involved the concept of Technicolor which provided a “natural” means of describing the breakdown of symmetry in the gauge theories that makeup the Standard Model.

Technicolor in particle physics shares one simple thing in common with Technicolor that dominated the early color film industry – the term composite in creating color or particles.

Dr. Leonard Susskind, a leading developer of the Theory of Technicolor (left) and Nobel Prize winner Dr. Peter Higgs who proposed the existence of a particle that imparts mass to all matter - the Higgs Boson (right). (Photo Credit: University of Stanford, CERN) — Dr. Leonard Susskind, a leading developer of the Theory of Technicolor (left) and Nobel Prize winner Dr. Peter Higgs who proposed the existence of a particle that imparts mass to all matter – the Higgs Boson (right). (Photo Credit: University of Stanford, CERN)

If the theory surrounding Technicolor is correct, then there should be many techni-quark and techni-Higgs particles to be found with the LHC or a more powerful next generation accelerator; a veritable zoo of particles besides just the Higgs Boson. The theory also means that these ‘elementary’ particles are composites of smaller particles and that another force of nature would be needed to bind them. And this new paper by Belyaev, Brown, Froadi and Frandsen claims that one specific techni-quark particle has a resonance (detection point) that is within the uncertainty of measurements for the Higgs Boson. In other words, the Higgs Boson might not be “the god particle” but rather a Technicolor Quark particle comprised of smaller more fundamental particles and another force binding them.

This paper by Belyaev, Brown, Froadi and Frandsen is a clear reminder that the Standard Model is unsettled and that even the discovery of the Higgs Boson is not 100% certain. In the last year, more sensitive sensors have been integrated into CERN’s LHC which will help refute this challenge to Higgs theory – Higgs Scalar and Field, the Higgs Boson or may reveal the signatures of Technicolor particles. Better detectors may resolve the difference between the energy level of the Technicolor quark and the Higgs Boson. LHC researchers were quick to state that their work moves on beyond discovery of the Higgs Boson. Also, their work could actually disprove that they found the Higgs Boson.

Contacting the co-investigator Dr. Alexander Belyaev, the question was raised – will the recent upgrades to CERN accelerator provide the precision needed to differentiate a technie-Quark from the Higg’s particle?

“There is no guarantee of course” Dr. Belyaev responded to Universe Today, “but upgrade of LHC will definitely provide much better potential to discover other particles associated with theory of Technicolor, such as heavy Techni-mesons or Techni-baryons.”

Resolving the doubts and choosing the right additions to the Standard Model does depend on better detectors, more observations and collisions at higher energies. Presently, the LHC is down to increase collision energies from 8 TeV to 13 TeV. Among the observations at the LHC, Super-symmetry has not fared well and the observations including the Higgs Boson discovery has supported the Standard Model. The weakness of the Standard Model of particle physics is that it does not explain the gravitational force of nature whereas Super-symmetry can. The theory of Technicolor maintains strong supporters as this latest paper shows and it leaves some doubt that the Higgs Boson was actually detected. Ultimately another more powerful next-generation particle accelerator may be needed.

In a previous Universe Today story, the question was raised - is the Standard Model a Rube Goldberg Device? Most theorists would say 'no' but it is unlikely to reach the status of the 'theory of everything' (Illustration Credit: R.Goldberg- the toothpaste dispenser, variant T.Reyes) — In a previous Universe Today story, the question was raised – is the Standard Model a Rube Goldberg Device? Most theorists would say ‘no’ but it is unlikely to reach the status of the ‘theory of everything’ (Illustration Credit: R.Goldberg- the toothpaste dispenser, variant T.Reyes)

For Higgs and Englert, the reversal of the discovery is by no means the ruination of a life’s work or would be the dismissal of a Nobel Prize. The theoretical work of the physicists have long been recognized by previous awards. The Standard Model as, at least, a partial solution of the theory of everything is like a jig-saw puzzle. Piece by piece is how it is being developed but not without missteps. Furthermore, the pieces added to the Standard Model can be like a house of cards and require replacing a larger solution with a wholly other one. This could be the case of Higgs and Technicolor.

At times like children somewhat determined, physicists thrust a solution into the unfolding puzzle that seems to fit but ultimately has to be retracted. The present discourse does not yet warrant a retraction. Elegance and simplicity is the ultimate characteristics sought in theoretical solutions. Particle physicists also use the term Naturalness when describing the concerns with gauge theory parameters. The solutions – the pieces – of the puzzle created by Peter Higgs and François Englert have spearheaded and encouraged further work which will achieve a sounder Standard Model but few if any claim that it will emerge as the theory of everything.

References:

Pre-print of Technicolor Higgs boson in the light of LHC data

An Introduction to Technicolor, P. Sikivie, CERN, October 1980

Technicolour, Farhi & Susskind, March 1981

November 20, 2014December 23, 2015 by Elizabeth Howell

First Orion Flight Will Assess Radiation Risk As NASA Thinks About Human Mars Missions

The Mars Society prototype habitat in Utah conducts studies on what it would be like to live on Mars. Credit: Mars Society MRDS

If you wanna get humans to Mars, there are so many technical hurdles in the way that it will take a lot of hard work. How to help people survive for months on a hostile surface, especially one that is bathed on radiation? And how will we keep those people safe on the long journey there and back?

NASA is greatly concerned about the radiation risk, and is asking the public for help in a new challenge as the agency measures radiation with the forthcoming uncrewed Orion test flight in December. There’s $12,000 up for grabs across at least a few awards, providing you get your ideas into the agency by Dec. 12.

“One of the major human health issues facing future space travelers venturing beyond low-Earth orbit is the hazardous effects of galactic cosmic rays (GCRs),” NASA wrote in a press release.

“Exposure to GCRs, immensely high-energy radiation that mainly originates outside the solar system, now limits mission duration to about 150 days while a mission to Mars would take approximately 500 days. These charged particles permeate the universe, and exposure to them is inevitable during space exploration.”

Orion in orbit in this artists concept. Credit: NASA

Here’s an interesting twist, too — more data will come through the Orion test flight as the next-generation spacecraft aims for a flight 3,600 miles (5,800 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. That’s so high that the vehicle will go inside a high-radiation environment called the Van Allen Belts, which only the Apollo astronauts passed through in the 1960s and 1970s en route to the Moon.

While a flight to Mars will also just graze this area briefly, scientists say the high-radiation environment will give them a sense of how Orion (and future spacecraft) perform in this kind of a zone. So the spacecraft will carry sensors on board to measure overall radiation levels as well as “hot spots” within the vehicle.

You can find out more information about the challenge, and participation details, at this link.

Source: NASA

November 20, 2014December 23, 2015 by Paul Patton

Communicating Across the Cosmos, Part 1: Shouting into the Darkness

The 70 meter Evpatoria Planetary Radar radio telescope in the Crimea was used to transmit 4 interstellar messages in 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2008

Over the last 20 years, astronomers have discovered several thousand planets orbiting other stars. We now know that potentially habitable Earth-like planets are abundant in the cosmos. Such findings lend a new plausibility to the idea that intelligent life might exist on other worlds. Suppose that SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers succeed in their quest to find a message from a distant exoplanet. How much information can we hope to receive or send? Can we hope to decipher its meaning? Can humans compose interstellar messages that are comprehensible to alien minds?

Such concerns were the topic of a two day academic conference on interstellar messages held at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California; ‘Communicating across the Cosmos’. The conference drew 17 speakers from a wide variety of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, archeology, mathematics, cognitive science, philosophy, radio astronomy, and art. This article is the first of a series of installments about the conference. Today, we’ll explore the ways in which our society is already sending messages to extraterrestrial civilizations, both accidentally and on purpose.

Sending radio messages over sizable interstellar distances is feasible with present day technology. According to SETI Institute radio astronomer Seth Shostak, who presented at the conference, we are already — by accident — constantly signaling our presence to any extraterrestrial astronomers that might exist in our neighborhood of the galaxy. Some radio signals intended for domestic uses leak into space. The most powerful come from radars used for military purposes, air traffic control, and weather forecasting. Because these radars sweep across broad swaths of the sky, their signals travel out into space in many directions.

With radio telescopes no more sensitive than those astronomers on Earth use today, extraterrestrials out to distances of tens of light years could detect them and figure out that they were artificial. The Arecibo radar telescope in Puerto Rico is designed specifically to send a narrow beam of radio waves into space, usually to bounce them off celestial bodies and learn about their surfaces. For a receiver within its beam, it could be detected hundreds of light-years away.

FM radio and television broadcasts also leak out into space, but they are weaker and couldn’t be detected more than about one tenth of a light year away with present day human technology. This is quite a bit less than the distance to the nearest star. The size and sensitivity of radio telescopes is progressing rapidly. An alien civilization just a few centuries more advanced than us in radio technology could detect even these weak signals over vast distances in the galaxy. As our signals spread outward at the speed of light, they will reach progressively larger numbers of stars and planets, any one of which might be home to ETI. If they really are out there, they are likely to find us eventually.

Humans have been fascinated with formulating messages for extraterrestrials for a surprisingly long time. Eighteenth and nineteenth century scientists drew up proposals to make huge fire pits or plantings in the shapes of geometric figures that they hoped would be visible in the telescopes of the inhabitants of neighboring worlds. In the early days of radio, attempts were made to contact Mars and Venus.

As prospects for intelligent life within the solar system dimmed, attention turned to the stars. In the early 1970’s the first two spacecraft to escape the sun’s gravitational pull, Pioneer 10 and 11, each carried an engraved plaque designed to tell aliens where Earth is, and what human beings look like. Voyager 1 and 2 carried a more ambitious message of images and sounds encoded on a phonograph record. Both the Pioneer plaques and the Voyager records were devised by teams led by astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, both SETI pioneers. In 1974, the powerful Arecibo radio telescope beamed a brief 3 minute message towards a star cluster 21,000 light years away as part of a dedication ceremony for a major upgrade. The binary coded message was an image, including a stick figure of a human, our solar system, and some chemicals important to earthly life. The distant target was chosen simply because it was overhead at the time of the ceremony.

The plaque affixed to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, the first spacecraft to leave our solar system. In the upper left corner is a diagram depicting the hydrogen atom, the most abundant element in the universe. The diagram symbolizes the transition of the electron from a spin-up to a spin-down state. This transition is responsible for radio emissions at the wavelength of 21 cm by clouds of hydrogen in interstellar space. This phenomenon is familiar to radio astronomers and provides a distance standard for indicating the size of the humans. In the middle left is a representation of position of the sun with respect to the center of the galaxy and 14 pulsars. At the bottom is a map of the solar system indicating the origin of the spacecraft at the sun's third planet. The planets relative distances from the sun are given as binary numbers with the unit being one tenth of Mercury's distance from the sun. At the right is a depiction of a human couple with the man's arm raised in gesture of friendly greeting and the pioneer spacecraft drawn in outline as a backdrop. — The plaque affixed to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, the first spacecraft to leave our solar system. In the upper left corner is a diagram depicting the hydrogen atom, the most abundant element in the universe. The diagram symbolizes the transition of the electron from a spin-up to a spin-down state. This transition is responsible for radio emissions at the wavelength of 21 cm by clouds of hydrogen gas in interstellar space. This phenomenon is very familiar to radio astronomers and provides a distance standard used to indicate the sizes of the human beings. In the middle left is a representation of position of the sun with respect to the center of the galaxy and 14 pulsars. At the bottom is a map of the solar system indicating the origin of the spacecraft as the sun’s third planet. The relative distances of the planets from the sun are indicated as binary numbers with a unit one tenth the distance of Mercury from the sun. At the right is a depiction of a human couple with the man’s arm raised in a gesture of friendly greeting and the pioneer spacecraft drawn in outline as a backdrop NASA Ames Research Center.

Cultural anthropologist and conference speaker Klara Anna Capova said that in recent years, messaging to extraterrestrials has moved beyond science and become a commercial enterprise. In 1999 and 2003, a private company solicited content from the general public and transmitted these ‘Cosmic Call’ messages to several nearby sun-like stars from the 70 meter radio telescope of the Evpatoria Deep Space Center in Crimea, Ukraine.

In 2009, another private company transmitted 25,000 messages, collected via a website, towards the red dwarf star Gliese 581, 20 light years away. In 2008, a Dorito’s commercial was beamed to a sun-like star 42 light years away, and in 2009 Penguin books transmitted 1000 messages as part of a book promotion. In 2010, a greeting, spoken in the fictional Klingon language, was beamed towards the star Arcturus, 37 light years away. The message was sent to promote the opening of what was billed as the first authentic Klingon opera on Earth. As one conference speaker noted, there are no regulations on the transmission or content of such messages.

Actively messaging extraterrestrials is a controversial practice, and the director of the Evpatoria Center, Alexander Zaitsev, has faced criticism from some members of the scientific community for his actions. Traditionally, SETI researchers have simply listened for alien messages. A received message might allow humans to learn something about the nature and motives of its extraterrestrial senders. That might give us a basis for deciding whether or not it was wise and prudent to reply.

Drake’s Arecibo message, by intent, was beamed at a star cluster tens of thousands of light years away and was meant simply to demonstrate the capacity for interstellar messaging. The Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft likewise will not reach the stars for tens of thousands of years. On the other hand, the recent transmissions were directed at nearby stars, from which we might receive a reply in less than a century. At the conference, Seth Shostak advanced what he confessed was a provocative position. He said we shouldn’t worry too much about the recent transmissions, because the much weaker signals that constantly emanate from Earth would be detectable by extraterrestrial civilizations with more advanced radio technology anyway. “That horse”, he said “has already left the barn”.

In the next installment, we will explore the SETI Institute’s current and planned efforts to conduct our human search for extraterrestrial signals. We will consider the limits of our own signaling capacity, and learn that the amount of information we could send the aliens is truly vast.

References and Further Reading:

Communicating across the Cosmos: How can we make ourselves understood by other civilizations in the galaxy (2014), SETI Institute Conference Website

N. Atkinson (2008), Message from Earth beamed to alien world, Universe Today.

F. Cain (2013), How could we find aliens? The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), Universe Today.

M. J. Crowe (1986) The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750-1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds From Kant to Lowell, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

C. Sagan, F. Drake, A. Druyan, T. Ferris, J. Lomberg, L. S. Sagan (1978), Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, Random House, New York, NY.

W. T. Sullivan III; S. Brown, and C. Wetherill, (1978) Eavesdropping: The radio signature of Earth, Science 199(4327): 377-388.

November 20, 2014March 1, 2017 by Fraser Cain

How Quickly Do Black Holes Form?

A star can burn its hydrogen for millions or even billions of years. But when the party’s over, black holes form in an instant. How long does it all take to happen.

Uh-oh! You’re right next to a black hole that’s starting to form.

In the J.J. Abrams Star Trek Universe, this ended up being a huge inconvenience for Spock as he tried to evade a ticked off lumpy forehead Romulan who’d made plenty of questionable life choices, drunk on Romulan ale and living above a tattoo parlor.

So, if you were piloting Spock’s ship towards the singularity, do you have any hope of escaping before it gets to full power? Think quickly now. This not only has implications for science, but most importantly, for the entire Star Trek reboot! Or you know, we can just create a brand new timeline. Everybody’s doing it. Retcon, ftw.

Most black holes come to be after a huge star explodes into a supernova. Usually, the force of gravity in a huge star is balanced by its radiation – the engine inside that sends out energy into space. But when the star runs out of fuel to burn, gravity quickly takes over and the star collapses. But how quickly? Ready your warp engines and hope for the best.

Here’s the bad news – there’s not much hope for Spock or his ship. A star’s collapse happens in an instant, and the star’s volume gets smaller and smaller. Your escape velocity – the energy you need to escape the star – will quickly exceed the speed of light.

You could argue there’s a moment in time where you could escape. This isn’t quite the spot to argue about Vulcan physiology, but I assume their reaction time is close to humans. It would happen faster than you could react, and you’d be boned.

But look at the bright side – maybe you’d get to discover a whole new universe. Unless of course Black holes just kill you, and aren’t sweet magical portals for you and your space dragon which you can name Spock, in honor of your Vulcan friend who couldn’t outrun a black hole.

Artist’s impression of the supergiant star Betelgeuse as it was revealed with ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Credit: ESO/L.Calçada

Here we’ve been talking about what happens if a black hole suddenly appears beside you. The good news is, supernovae can be predicted. Not very precisely, but astronomers can say which stars are nearing the end of their lives.

Here’s an example. In the constellation Orion, Betelgeuse the bright star on the right shoulder, is expected to go supernova sometime in the next few hundred thousand years.

That’s plenty of time to get out of the way.

So: black holes are dangerous for your health, but at least there’s lots of time to move out of the way if one looks threatening. Just don’t go exploring too close!

If you were to fall through a black hole, what do you think would happen? Naw, just kidding, we all know you’d die. Why don’t you tell us what your favorite black hole sci fi story is in the comments below!

And if you like what you see, come check out our Patreon page and find out how you can get these videos early while helping us bring you more great content!

November 20, 2014December 23, 2015 by Matt Williams

Two New Subatomic Particles Found

Particle Collider — Today, CERN announced that the LHCb experiment had revealed the existence of two new baryon subatomic particles. Credit: CERN/LHC/GridPP

With its first runs of colliding protons in 2008-2013, the Large Hadron Collider has now been providing a stream of experimental data that scientists rely on to test predictions arising out of particle and high-energy physics. In fact, today CERN made public the first data produced by LHC experiments. And with each passing day, new information is released that is helping to shed light on some of the deeper mysteries of the universe.

This week, for example, CERN announced the discovery two new subatomic particles that are part of the baryon family. The particles, known as the Xi_b’^– and Xi_b*^–, were discovered thanks to the efforts of the LHCb experiment – an international collaboration involving roughly 750 scientists from around the world.

The existence of these particles was predicted by the quark model, but had never been seen before. What’s more, their discovery could help scientists to further confirm the Standard Model of particle physics, which is considered virtually unassailable now thanks to the discovery of the Higgs Boson.

Like the well-known protons that the LHC accelerates, the new particles are baryons made from three quarks bound together by the strong force. The types of quarks are different, though: the new X_ib particles both contain one beauty (b), one strange (s), and one down (d) quark. Thanks to the heavyweight b quarks, they are more than six times as massive as the proton.

However, their mass also depends on how they are configured. Each of the quarks has an attribute called “spin”; and in the Xi_b’^– state, the spins of the two lighter quarks point in the opposite direction to the b quark, whereas in the Xi_b*^– state they are aligned. This difference makes the Xi_b*^– a little heavier.

“Nature was kind and gave us two particles for the price of one,” said Matthew Charles of the CNRS’s LPNHE laboratory at Paris VI University. “The Xi_b’^– is very close in mass to the sum of its decay products: if it had been just a little lighter, we wouldn’t have seen it at all using the decay signature that we were looking for.”

“This is a very exciting result,” said Steven Blusk from Syracuse University in New York. “Thanks to LHCb’s excellent hadron identification, which is unique among the LHC experiments, we were able to separate a very clean and strong signal from the background,” “It demonstrates once again the sensitivity and how precise the LHCb detector is.”

Blusk and Charles jointly analyzed the data that led to this discovery. The existence of the two new baryons had been predicted in 2009 by Canadian particle physicists Randy Lewis of York University and Richard Woloshyn of the TRIUMF, Canada’s national particle physics lab in Vancouver.

The bare masses of all 6 flavors of quarks, proton and electron, shown in proportional volume. Credit: Wikipedia/Incnis Mrsi

As well as the masses of these particles, the research team studied their relative production rates, their widths – a measure of how unstable they are – and other details of their decays. The results match up with predictions based on the theory of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD).

QCD is part of the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that describes the fundamental particles of matter, how they interact, and the forces between them. Testing QCD at high precision is a key to refining our understanding of quark dynamics, models of which are tremendously difficult to calculate.

“If we want to find new physics beyond the Standard Model, we need first to have a sharp picture,” said LHCb’s physics coordinator Patrick Koppenburg from Nikhef Institute in Amsterdam. “Such high precision studies will help us to differentiate between Standard Model effects and anything new or unexpected in the future.”

The measurements were made with the data taken at the LHC during 2011-2012. The LHC is currently being prepared – after its first long shutdown – to operate at higher energies and with more intense beams. It is scheduled to restart by spring 2015.

The research was published online yesterday on the physics preprint server arXiv and have been submitted to the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

Thud! Sound Of Philae’s Comet Landing Shows Signs Of Possible Ice

Our last panorama from Philae? This image was taken with the CIVA camera; at center Philae has been added to show its orientation on the surface. Credit: ESA

And we have touchdown! This is what the feet of the Philae lander experienced as the spacecraft touched down on its cometary destination last week. You can hear the brief sound from the Cometary Acoustic Surface Sounding Experiment (CASSE) above. What’s even cooler is the scientific data that short noise reveals.

CASSE is embedded in the three legs of Philae and recorded the first of three landings for the spacecraft, which bounced for about two hours before coming to rest somewhere on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (where is still being determined).

About that first touchdown: “The Philae lander came into contact with a soft layer several centimetres thick. Then, just milliseconds later, the feet encountered a hard, perhaps icy layer on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko,” stated German Space Agency (DLR) researcher Klaus Seidensticker. He is the lead for the Surface Electric Sounding and Acoustic Monitoring Experiment (SESAME), which includes CASSE.

CASSE also recorded information from the lander’s feet from Philae’s final resting spot, and transmitted information about the MUlti PUrpose Sensor (MUPUS) as the latter instrument drilled into the surface. Other instruments on SESAME found no dust particles nearby the lander (which scientists say means the landing site is quiescent) and also sensed water ice beneath the lander.

Philae is now in hibernation as its final resting spot does not include a lot of sunlight to recharge the solar panels, but the researchers are hoping that more energy might be available as 67P draws closer to the Sun in 2015. The orbiting Rosetta spacecraft is continuing to collect data on the comet.

Source: DLR

November 20, 2014December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Yuri Gagarin Memorialized in a Funky Music Video

Let's hope NASA designs its next suits with dancing in mind!

On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin entered the “realm of myth and legend” when he became the first human in space and the first person to orbit the Earth. Now, over 53 years later, Gagarin is memorialized with (among many things) a superhero-esque statue in Moscow, yearly Yuri’s Night celebrations held around the world, a launch pad at Baikonur Cosmodrome…and this music video for a hip new tune titled “Gagarin.”

Oh kids these days.

Created by the two-person London-based band PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING “Gagarin” is the first single released off their new album “The Race for Space.” The music and video, which uses newly-available footage from the Soviet space program, is a “brassy, funk-heavy superhero theme song for the most famous man in the world at the time” and “reveals a new side to the band – not least their considerable dancing skills.”

PSB creator J. Willgoose, Esq. explains the rationale behind the song:
“We didn’t want to be too literal in our interpretation of the material we were given – material that was full of heroic language and a sense of exuberance, with lines like ‘the hero who blazed the trail to the stars’, and ‘the whole world knew him and loved him’. It seemed more appropriate to try and re-create some of that triumphant air with a similarly upbeat song – and when it came to creating the video, the best way we could think of to communicate that sense of joy was to get our dancing shoes on.”

As a fan of Yuri, spaceflight, and brass-band breakdancers in astronaut suits, I give this video two Vostoks up.

You can pre-order PSB’s newest album here, and follow them on Twitter and Facebook, and YouTube.

November 19, 2014December 23, 2015 by Matt Williams

Elusive Dark Matter Could Be Detected with GPS Satellites

You know the old saying: “if you want to hide something, put it in plain sight?” Well, according to a new proposal by two professors of physics, this logic may be the reason why scientists have struggled for so long to find the mysterious mass that is believed to comprise 27% of the matter in the universe.

In short, these two physicists believe that dark matter can be found the same way the you can find the fastest route to work: by consulting the Global Positioning System.

Andrei Derevianko, of the University of Nevada, Reno, and Maxim Pospelov, of the University of Victoria and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, proposed this method earlier this year at a series of renowned scientific conferences, where it met with general approval.

Their idea calls for the use of GPS satellites and other atomic clock networks and comparing their times to look for discrepancies. Derevianko and Pospelov suggest that dark matter could have a disruptive affect on atomic clocks, and that by looking at existing networks of atomic clocks it might be possible to spot pockets of dark matter by their distinctive signature.

The two are starting to test this theory by analyzing clock data from the 30 GPS satellites, which use atomic clocks for everyday navigation. Correlated networks of atomic clocks, such as the GPS and some ground networks already in existence, can be used as a powerful tool to search for the topological defect dark matter where initially synchronized clocks will become desynchronized.

The HST WFPC2 image of gravitational lensing in the galaxy cluster Abell 2218, indicating the presence of large amount of dark matter (credit Andrew Fruchter at STScI). — *The Hubble Space Telescope image of gravitational lensing in the galaxy cluster Abell 2218 indicating the presence of large amount of dark matter. Credit: NASA/Andrew Fruchter/STScI*

“Despite solid observational evidence for the existence of dark matter, its nature remains a mystery,” Derevianko, a professor in the College of Science at the University, said. “Some research programs in particle physics assume that dark matter is composed of heavy-particle-like matter. This assumption may not hold true, and significant interest exists for alternatives.”

Their proposal builds on the idea that dark matter could come from cracks in the universe’s quantum fields that could disturb such fundamental properties as the mass of an electron, and have an effect on the way we measure time. This represents a break from the more conventional view that dark matter consists of subatomic particles such as WIMPs and axions.

“Our research pursues the idea that dark matter may be organized as a large gas-like collection of topological defects, or energy cracks,” Derevianko said. “We propose to detect the defects, the dark matter, as they sweep through us with a network of sensitive atomic clocks. The idea is, where the clocks go out of synchronization, we would know that dark matter, the topological defect, has passed by. In fact, we envision using the GPS constellation as the largest human-built dark-matter detector.”

Derevianko is collaborating on analyzing GPS data with Geoff Blewitt, director of the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory, also in the College of Science at the University of Nevada, Reno. The Geodetic Lab developed and maintains the largest GPS data processing center in the world, able to process information from about 12,000 stations around the globe continuously, 24/7.

Artist's rendering of a vacuum tube, one of the main components of an atomic clock. Credit: NASA — *Artist’s rendering of a vacuum tube, one of the main components of an atomic clock. Credit: NASA*

Blewitt, also a physicist, explained how an array of atomic clocks could possibly detect dark matter.

“We know the dark matter must be there, for example, because it is seen to bend light around galaxies, but we have no evidence as to what it might be made of,” he said. “If the dark matter were not there, the normal matter that we know about would not be sufficient to bend the light as much as it does. That’s just one of the ways scientists know there is a massive amount of dark matter somewhere out there in the galaxy. One possibility is that the dark matter in this gas might not be made out of particles like normal matter, but of macroscopic imperfections in the fabric of space-time.

“The Earth sweeps through this gas as it orbits the galaxy. So to us, the gas would appear to be like a galactic wind of dark matter blowing through the Earth system and its satellites. As the dark matter blows by, it would occasionally cause clocks of the GPS system to go out of sync with a tell-tale pattern over a period of about 3 minutes. If the dark matter causes the clocks to go out of sync by more than a billionth of a second we should easily be able to detect such events.”

“This type of work can be transformative in science and could completely change how we think about our universe,” Jeff Thompson, a physicist and dean of the University’s College of Science, said. “Andrei is a world class physicist and he has already made seminal contributions to physics. It’s a wonder to watch the amazing work that comes from him and his group.”

Derevianko teaches quantum physics and related subjects at the University of Nevada, Reno. He has authored more than 100 refereed publications in theoretical physics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a Simons fellow in theoretical physics and a Fulbright scholar. Among a variety of research topics, he has contributed to the development of several novel classes of atomic clocks and precision tests of fundamental symmetries with atoms and molecules.

Their research appeared earlier this week in the online version of the scientific journal Nature Physics, ahead of the print version.

Did a Galactic Smashup Kick Out a Supermassive Black Hole?

Near-infrared image of the dwarf galaxy Markarian 177 and what appears to be an ejected SMBH. Credit: W. M. Keck Observatory/M. Koss (ETH Zurich) et al.

Crazy things can happen when galaxies collide, as they sometimes do. Although individual stars rarely impact each other, the gravitational interactions between galaxies can pull enormous amounts of gas and dust into long streamers, spark the formation of new stars, and even kick objects out into intergalactic space altogether. This is what very well may have happened to SDSS1133, a suspected supermassive black hole found thousands of light-years away from its original home.

The two Keck 10-meter domes atop Mauna Kea. (Rick Peterson/WMKO)

Seen above in a near-infrared image acquired with the Keck II telescope in Hawaii, SDSS1133 is the 40-light-year-wide bright source observed 2,300 light-years out from the dwarf galaxy Markarian 177, located 90 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (or, to use the more familiar asterism, inside the bowl of the Big Dipper.)

The two bright spots at the disturbed core of Markarian 177 are thought to indicate recent star formation, which could have occurred in the wake of a previous collision.

“We suspect we’re seeing the aftermath of a merger of two small galaxies and their central black holes,” said Laura Blecha, an Einstein Fellow in the University of Maryland’s Department of Astronomy and a co-author of an international study of SDSS1133. “Astronomers searching for recoiling black holes have been unable to confirm a detection, so finding even one of these sources would be a major discovery.”

Interactions between supermassive black holes during a galactic collision would also result in gravitational waves, elusive phenomena predicted by Einstein that are high on astronomers’ most-wanted list of confirmed detections.

Watch an animation of how the suspected collision and subsequent eviction may have happened:

But besides how it got to where it is, the true nature of SDSS1133 is a mystery as well.

The persistently bright near-infrared source has been detected in observations going back at least 60 years. Whether or not SDSS1133 is indeed a supermassive black hole has yet to be determined, but if it isn’t then it’s a very unusual type of extremely massive star known as an LBV, or Luminous Blue Variable. If that is the case though, it’s peculiar even for an LBV; SDSS1133 would have had to have been continuously pouring out energy in a for over half a century until it exploded as a supernova in 2001.

To help determine exactly what SDSS1133 is, continued observations with Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph instrument are planned for Oct. 2015.

“We found in the Pan-STARRS1 imaging that SDSS1133 has been getting significantly brighter at visible wavelengths over the last six months and that bolstered the black hole interpretation and our case to study SDSS1133 now with HST,” said Yanxia Li, a UH Manoa graduate student involved in the research.

And, based on data from NASA’s Swift mission the UV emission of SDSS1133 hasn’t changed in ten years, “not something typically seen in a young supernova remnant” according to Michael Koss, who led the study and is now an astronomer at ETH Zurich.

Regardless of what SDSS1133 turns out to be, the idea of such a massive and energetic object soaring through intergalactic space is intriguing, to say the least.

The study will be published in the Nov. 21 edition of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Source: Keck Observatory