A still image from the WAVELIGHT timelapse by Gavin Heffernan (SunchaserPictures.com) and Harun Mehmedinovic (Bloodhoney.com).
Created in association with BBC Earth. Used by permission.
Sandstone formations can be amazing, and if you’ve ever seen or heard about the legendary and hard-to-get-to “Wave” formation in Arizona, you’ll agree it would be a stunning location for a night sky photography shoot. Our friend and timelapse guru Gavin Heffernan was commissioned by the BBC to shoot a timelapse video from this location, and it is absolutely stunning.
“As far as I know, this is the first astrophotography timelapse ever filmed at this amazing location,” Gavin told us via email. “We had seen many beautiful night pictures taken there but no actual timelapses, so we went for it!”
Enjoy the video above, as well a some imagery, below:
This is a video where star trails and rock trails collide! It was assembled from over 10,000 stills snagged on two grueling trips. Check out more of Gavin’s work at his Sunchaser Pictures website.
Another still image from the WAVELIGHT timelapse (vimeo.com/112008512) by Gavin Heffernan (SunchaserPictures.com) and Harun Mehmedinovic (Bloodhoney.com). Created in association with BBC Earth. Used by permission.
This image shows a star-forming region in interstellar space. A new study used AI and radiotelescope data to find 140,000 regions in the Milky Way that will eventually form stars like this region. Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration
Some of science’s most pressing questions involve the origins of life on Earth. How did the first lifeforms emerge from the seemingly hostile conditions that plagued our planet for much of its history? What enabled the leap from simple, unicellular organisms to more complex organisms consisting of many cells working together to metabolize, respire, and reproduce? In such an unfamiliar environment, how does one even separate “life” from non-life in the first place?
Now, scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa believe that they may have an answer to at least one of those questions. According to the team, a vital cellular building block called glycerol may have first originated via chemical reactions deep in interstellar space.
Glycerol is an organic molecule that is present in the cell membranes of all living things. In animal cells this membrane takes the form of a phospholipid bilayer, a dual-layer membrane that sandwiches water-repelling fatty acids between outer and inner sheets of water-soluble molecules. This type of membrane allows the cell’s inner aqueous environment to remain separate and protected from its external, similarly watery world. Glycerol is a vital component of each phospholipid because it forms the backbone between the molecule’s two characteristic parts: a polar, water-soluble head, and a non-polar, fatty tail.
Many scientists believe that cell membranes such as these were a necessary prerequisite to the evolution of multicellular life on Earth; however, their complex structure requires a very specific environment – namely, one low in calcium and magnesium salts with a fairly neutral pH and stable temperature. These carefully balanced conditions would have been hard to come by on the prehistoric Earth.
Icy bodies born in interstellar space offer an alternative scenario. Scientists have already discovered organic molecules such as amino acids and lipid precursors in the Murchison meteorite that landed in Australia in 1969. Although the idea remains controversial, it is possible that glycerol could have been brought to Earth in a similar manner.
The Murchison Meteorite. Image credit: James St. John
Meteors typically form from tiny crumbs of material in cold molecular clouds, regions of gaseous hydrogen and interstellar dust that serve as the birthplace of stars and planetary systems. As they move through the cloud, these grains accumulate layers of frozen water, methanol, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. Over time, high-energy ultraviolet radiation and cosmic rays bombard the icy fragments and cause chemical reactions that enrich their frozen cores with organic compounds. Later, as stars form and ambient material falls into orbit around them, the ices and the organic molecules they contain are incorporated into larger rocky bodies such as meteors. The meteors can then crash into planets like ours, potentially seeding them with building blocks of life.
In order to test whether or not glycerol could be created by the high-energy radiation that typically bombards interstellar ice grains, the team at the University of Hawaii designed their own meteorites: small bits of icy methanol cooled to 5 degrees Kelvin. After blasting their model ices with energetic electrons meant to mimic the effects of cosmic rays, the scientists found that some molecules of methanol within the ices did, in fact, transform into glycerol.
While this experiment appears to be a success, scientists realize that their laboratory models do not exactly replicate conditions in interstellar space. For instance, methanol traditionally makes up only about 30% of the ice in space rocks. Future work will investigate the effects of high-energy radiation on model ices made primarily of water. High-energy electrons fired in a lab are also not a perfect substitute for true cosmic rays and do not represent effects on ice that may result from ultraviolet radiation in interstellar space.
More research is necessary before scientists can draw any global conclusions; however, this study and its predecessors do provide compelling evidence that life as we know it truly could have come from above.
Artist's conception of asteroid Bennu from the NASA film "Bennu's Journey." Credit: NASA/YouTube (screenshot)
We’ve been super-excited about the Philae landing recently, the first soft landing on a comet. But imagine if the spacecraft was equipped to bring a sample of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko back to Earth. What sort of secrets could we learn from examining the materials of the comet up close?
That dream will remain a dream for 67P, but guess what — if all goes to plan, that idea will execute for asteroid Bennu. Check out the new video above for more details on the audacious mission; below the jump is a brief mission description.
There is a mission expected to launch in 2016 called OSIRIS-REx that will spend two years flying to the asteroid to nab a sample, then will come back to Earth in 2023 to deliver it to scientists. This is exciting because asteroids are a sort of time capsule showing how the Solar System used to be in the early days, before gravity pulled rocks and ice together to gradually form the planets and moons that we have today.
“Scientists tell us that asteroid Bennu has been a silent witness to titanic events in the solar system’s 4.6 billion year history,” NASA wrote on a website commemorating the new video. “When it returns in 2023 with its precious cargo, OSIRIS-REx will help to break that silence and retrace Bennu’s journey.”
For more information on OSIRIS-REx, check out the mission’s website.
Artist’s impression of a baby star still surrounded by a protoplanetary disc in which planets are forming. Credit: ESO
It may seem all but impossible to determine how the Solar System formed, given that it happened roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Luckily, much of the debris that was left over from the formation process is still available today for study, circling our Solar System in the form of rocks and debris that sometimes make their way to Earth.
Among the most useful pieces of debris are the oldest and least altered type of meteorites, which are known as chondrites. They are built mostly of small stony grains, called chondrules, that are barely a millimeter in diameter.
And now, scientists are being provided with important clues as to how the early Solar System evolved, thanks to new research based on the the most accurate laboratory measurements ever made of the magnetic fields trapped within these tiny grains.
To break it down, chondrite meteorites are pieces of asteroids — broken off by collisions — that have remained relatively unmodified since they formed during the birth of the Solar System. The chondrules they contain were formed when patches of solar nebula – dust clouds that surround young suns – was heated above the melting point of rock for hours or even days.
The dust caught in these “melting events” was melted down into droplets of molten rock, which then cooled and crystallized into chondrules. As chondrules cooled, iron-bearing minerals within them became magnetized by the local magnetic field in the gas cloud. These magnetic fields are preserved in the chondrules right on up to the present day.
A slice of the NWA 5205 meteorite from the Sahara Desert displays wall-to-wall chondrules. Credit: Bob King
The chondrule grains whose magnetic fields were mapped in the new study came from a meteorite named Semarkona – named after the town in India where it fell in 1940.
Roger Fu of MIT – working under Benjamin Weiss – was the chief author of the study; with Steve Desch of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration attached as co-author.
According to the study, which was published this week in Science, the measurements they collected point to shock waves traveling through the cloud of dusty gas around the newborn sun as a major factor in solar system formation.
“The measurements made by Fu and Weiss are astounding and unprecedented,” says Steve Desch. “Not only have they measured tiny magnetic fields thousands of times weaker than a compass feels, they have mapped the magnetic fields’ variation recorded by the meteorite, millimeter by millimeter.”
The scientists focused specifically on the embedded magnetic fields captured by “dusty” olivine grains that contain abundant iron-bearing minerals. These had a magnetic field of about 54 microtesla, similar to the magnetic field at Earth’s surface (which ranges from 25 to 65 microtesla).
Coincidentally, many previous measurements of meteorites also implied similar field strengths. But it is now understood that those measurements detected magnetic minerals that were contaminated by the Earth’s own magnetic field, or even from the hand magnets used by the meteorite collectors.
Artist depiction of a protoplanetary disk permeated by magnetic fields. Objects in the foregrounds are millimeter-sized rock pellets known as chondrules. Credit: Hernán Cañellas
“The new experiments,” Desch says, “probe magnetic minerals in chondrules never measured before. They also show that each chondrule is magnetized like a little bar magnet, but with ‘north’ pointing in random directions.”
This shows, he says, that they became magnetized before they were built into the meteorite, and not while sitting on Earth’s surface. This observation, combined with the presence of shock waves during early solar formation, paints an interesting picture of the early history of our Solar System.
“My modeling for the heating events shows that shock waves passing through the solar nebula is what melted most chondrules,” Desch explains. Depending on the strength and size of the shock wave, the background magnetic field could be amplified by up to 30 times. “Given the measured magnetic field strength of about 54 microtesla,” he added, “this shows the background field in the nebula was probably in the range of 5 to 50 microtesla.”
There are other ideas for how chondrules might have formed, some involving magnetic flares above the solar nebula, or passage through the sun’s magnetic field. But those mechanisms require stronger magnetic fields than what has been measured in the Semarkona samples.
This reinforces the idea that shocks melted the chondrules in the solar nebula at about the location of today’s asteroid belt, which lies some two to four times farther from the sun than the Earth’s orbits.
Desch says, “This is the first really accurate and reliable measurement of the magnetic field in the gas from which our planets formed.”
Artist's conception of a future lunar rover gathering regolith to construct a moon base using 3-D printing. Credit: Foster+Partners/European Space Agency/YouTube (screenshot)
The Moon is so close to us, and yet so far. Just last year the Chang’e-3 spacecraft and Yutu rover made the first soft landing on the surface in more than a generation. Humans haven’t walked in the regolith since 1972. But that hasn’t decreased the desire of some to bring people back there — with an armful of new technologies to make life easier.
Take the European Space Agency’s desire to do 3-D printing on the lunar surface. Rovers with big scoopers would pick up the moon dust and use that as raw materials to make a habitat that humans would then enjoy. Far out? Perhaps, but it is something the agency is seriously examining in consultation with Foster+Partners. See the video above.
Universe Today recently explored the value of being on the Moon or a nearby asteroid. In a nutshell, the lower gravity would make it easier to loft things from the base, making it potentially cheaper to explore the Solar System. That said, there are considerable startup costs. One thing that could be considered is the value of investing in smart robots that could build simple structures on the moon or even (gasp) build other prototypes to replace or supplement them.
As ESA explained in a 2013 blog post, the agency envisions using robots to use more “local” resources on the moon and to reduce the need to ship stuff in from planet Earth. “As a practice, we are used to designing for extreme climates on Earth and exploiting the environmental benefits of using local, sustainable materials,” stated Xavier De Kestelier of Foster + Partners specialist modelling group. “Our lunar habitation follows a similar logic.”
The new video takes that concept a bit further and specifies a location: Shackleton Crater, which receives near-constant sunlight in certain areas, next to spots that are in permanent shadow. As ESA explains, being in this crater allows the best of two scenarios: constant energy available for solar panels, but areas to build structures that would be more sensitive to extreme heat.
ESA plans to push forward its research from 2013 to look at “harnessing concentrated sunlight to melt regolith rather than using a binding liquid,” as the agency explains on its YouTube page. Moon dust structures glued together with more moon dust? Sounds like the ultimate snow fort.
ISS-RapidScat data on a North Atlantic extratropical cyclone, as seen by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System used by weather forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Ocean Prediction Center.
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/NOAA
Barely two months after being launched to the International Space Station (ISS), NASA’s first science payload aimed at conducting Earth science from the station’s exterior has started its ocean wind monitoring operations two months ahead of schedule.
Data from the ISS Rapid Scatterometer, or ISS-RapidScat, payload is now available to the world’s weather and marine forecasting agencies following the successful completion of check out and calibration activities by the mission team.
Indeed it was already producing high quality, usable data following its power-on and activation at the station in late September and has monitored recent tropical cyclones in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans prior to the end of the current hurricane season.
RapidScat is designed to monitor ocean winds for climate research, weather predictions, and hurricane monitoring for a minimum mission duration of two years.
“RapidScat is a short mission by NASA standards,” said RapidScat Project Scientist Ernesto Rodriguez of JPL.
“Its data will be ready to help support U.S. weather forecasting needs during the tail end of the 2014 hurricane season. The dissemination of these data to the international operational weather and marine forecasting communities ensures that RapidScat’s benefits will be felt throughout the world.”
ISS-RapidScat instrument, shown in this artist’s rendering, was launched to the International Space Station aboard the SpaceX CRS-4 mission on Sept. 21, 2014, and attached at ESA’s Columbus module. It will measure ocean surface wind speed and direction and help improve weather forecasts, including hurricane monitoring. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Johnson Space Center.
The 1280 pound (580kilogram) experimental instrument was developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It’s a cost-effective replacement to NASA’s former QuikScat satellite.
The $26 million remote sensing instrument uses radar pulses reflected from the ocean’s surface at different angles to calculate the speed and direction of winds over the ocean for the improvement of weather and marine forecasting and hurricane monitoring.
The RapidScat, payload was hauled up to the station as part of the science cargo launched aboard the commercial SpaceX Dragon CRS-4 cargo resupply mission that thundered to space on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sept. 21.
ISS-RapidScat is NASA’s first research payload aimed at conducting near global Earth science from the station’s exterior and will be augmented with others in coming years.
ISS-RapidScat viewed the winds within post-tropical cyclone Nuri as it moved parallel to Japan on Nov. 6, 2014, 05:30 UTC. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
It was robotically assembled and attached to the exterior of the station’s Columbus module using the station’s robotic arm and DEXTRE manipulator over a two day period on Sept 29 and 30.
Ground controllers at Johnson Space Center intricately maneuvered DEXTRE to pluck RapidScat and its nadir adapter from the unpressurized trunk section of the Dragon cargo ship and attached it to a vacant external mounting platform on the Columbus module holding mechanical and electrical connections.
The nadir adapter orients the instrument to point its antennae at Earth.
The couch sized instrument and adapter together measure about 49 x 46 x 83 inches (124 x 117 x 211 centimeters).
“The initial quality of the RapidScat wind data and the timely availability of products so soon after launch are remarkable,” said Paul Chang, ocean vector winds science team lead at NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS)/Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR), Silver Spring, Maryland.
“NOAA is looking forward to using RapidScat data to help support marine wind and wave forecasting and warning, and to exploring the unique sampling of the ocean wind fields provided by the space station’s orbit.”
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon cargo capsule packed with science experiments and station supplies blasts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, at 1:52 a.m. EDT on Sept. 21, 2014, bound for the ISS. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com
This has been a banner year for NASA’s Earth science missions. At least five missions will be launched to space within a 12 month period, the most new Earth-observing mission launches in one year in more than a decade.
ISS-RapidScat is the third of five NASA Earth science missions scheduled to launch over a year.
NASA has already launched the of the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory, a joint mission with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, in February and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) carbon observatory in July 2014.
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Earth and Planetary science and human spaceflight news.
Our focus on female astronomers continues with Sandra Faber, and Professor of Astronomy at UC Santa Cruz. Faber was part of the team that turned up the Great Attractor, a mysterious mass hidden by the disk of the Milky Way. Continue reading “Astronomy Cast Ep. 358: Modern Women: Sandra Faber”
This diagram maps data gathered from 1994-2013 on small asteroids impacting Earth's atmosphere to create very bright meteors (bolides). The location of impacts from objects ranging from 1 meter (3 feet) to nearly 20 meters (60 feet) in size such as Chelyabinsk asteroid are shown globally. (Credit: Planetary Science, NASA)
How hazardous are the thousands and millions of asteroids that surround the third rock from the Sun – Earth? Since an asteroid impact represents a real risk to life and property, this is a question that has been begging for answers for decades. But now, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have received data from a variety of US Department of Defense assets and plotted a startling set of data spanning 20 years.
This latest compilation of data underscores how frequent some of these larger fireballs are, with the largest being the Chelyabinsk event on February 15, 2013 which injured thousands in Russia. The new data will improve our understanding of the frequency and presence of small and large asteroids that are hazards to populated areas anywhere on Earth.
On Feb. 28, 2009, Peter Jenniskens (SETI/NASA), finds his first 2008TC3 meteorite after an 18-mile long journey. “It was an incredible feeling,” Jenniskens said. The meteorite which impacted in the Nubian Desert of Africa on Oct 7, 2008 was the first asteroid whose impact with Earth was predicted while still in space approaching Earth. Meteorite 2008TC3 and Chelyabinsk’s are part of the released data set. (Credit: NASA/SETI/P.Jenniskens)
The data from “government sensors” – meaning “early warning” satellites to monitor missile launches (from potential enemies) as well as infrasound ground monitors – shows the distribution of bolide (fireball) events. The data first shows how uniformly distributed the events are around the world. This data is now released to the public and researchers for more detailed analysis.
The newest data released by the US government shows both how frequent bolides are and also how effectively the Earth’s atmosphere protects the surface. A subset of this data had been analyzed and reported by Dr. Peter Brown from the University of Western Ontario, Canada and his team in 2013 but included only 58 events. This new data set holds 556 events.
The newly released data also shows how the Earth’s atmosphere is a superior barrier that prevents small asteroids’ penetration and impact onto the Earth’s surface. Even the 20 meter (65 ft) Chelyabinsk asteroid exploded mid-air, dissipating the power of a nuclear blast 29.7 km (18.4 miles, 97,400 feet) above the surface. Otherwise, this asteroid could have obliterated much of a modern city; Chelyabinsk was also saved due to sheer luck – the asteroid entered at a shallow angle leading to its demise; more steeply, and it would have exploded much closer to the surface. While many do explode in the upper atmosphere, a broad strewn field of small fragments often occurs. In historical times, towns and villages have reported being pelted by such sprays of stones from the sky.
NASA and JPL emphasized that investment in early detection of asteroids has increased 10 fold in the last 5 years. Researchers such as Dr. Jenniskens at the SETI Institute has developed a network of all-sky cameras that have determined the orbits of over 175,000 meteors that burned up in the atmosphere. And the B612 Foundation has been the strongest advocate of discovering of all hazardous asteroids. B612, led by former astronauts Ed Lu and Rusty Schweikert has designed a space telescope called Sentinel which would find hazardous asteroids and help safeguard Earth for centuries into the future.
Speed is everything. While Chelyabinsk had just 1/10th the mass of Nimitz-class super carrier, it traveled 1000 times faster. Its kinetic energy on account of its speed was 20 to 30 times that released by the nuclear weapons used to end the war against Japan – about 320 to 480 kilotons of TNT. Briefly, asteroids are considered to be any space rock larger than 1 meter and those smaller are called meteoroids.
Two earlier surveys can be compared to this new data. One by Eugene Shoemaker in the 1960s and another by Dr. Brown. The initial work by Shoemaker using lunar crater counts and the more recent work of Dr. Brown’s group, utilizing sensors of the Department of Defense, determined estimates of the frequency of asteroid impacts (bolide) rates versus the size of the small bodies. Those two surveys differ by a factor of ten, that is, where Shoemaker’s shows frequencies on the order of 10s or 100s years, Brown’s is on the order of 100s and 1000s of years. The most recent data, which has adjusted Brown’s earlier work is now raising the frequency of hazardous events to that of the work of Shoemaker.
The work of Dr. Brown and co-investigators led to the following graph showing the frequency of collisions with the Earth of asteroids of various sizes. This plot from a Letter to Nature by P. Brown et al. used 58 bolides from data accumulated from 1994 to 2014 from government sensors. Brown and others will improve their analysis with this more detailed dataset. The plot shows that a Chelyabinsk type event can be expected approximately every 30 years though the uncertainty is high. The new data may reduce this uncertainty. Tungunska events which could destroy a metropolitan area the size of Washington DC occur less frequently – about once a century.
The estimated cumulative flux of impactors at the Earth. The bolide impactor flux at Earth (Bolide flux 1994-2013 – black circles) based on ~20 years of global observations from US Government sensors and infrasound airwave data. Global coverage averages 80% among a total of 58 observed bolides with E > 1 kt and includes the Chelyabinsk Chelyabinsk bolide (far right black circle). This coverage correction is approximate and the bolide flux curve is likely a lower limit. The full caption is at bottom. (Credit: P. Brown, Letter to Nature, 2013, Figure 3)
Asteroids come in all sizes. Smaller asteroids are much more common, larger ones less so. A common distribution seen in nature is represented by a bell curve or “normal” distribution. Fortunately the bigger asteroids number in the hundreds while the small “city busters” count in the 100s of thousands, if not millions. And fortunately, the Earth is small in proportion to the volume of space even just the space occupied by our Solar System. Additionally, 69% of the Earth’s surface is covered by Oceans. Humans huddle on only about 10% of the surface area of the Earth. This reduces the chances of any asteroid impact effecting a populated area by a factor of ten.
Altogether the risk from asteroids is very real as the Chelyabinsk event underscored. Since the time of Tugunska impact in Siberia in 1908, the human population has quadrupled. The number of cities of over 1 million has increased from 12 to 400. Realizing how many and how frequent these asteroid impacts occur plus the growth of the human population in the last one hundred years raises the urgency for a near-Earth asteroid discovery telescope such as B612’s Sentinel which could find all hazardous objects in less than 10 years whereas ground-based observations will take 100 years or more.
The estimated cumulative flux of impactors at the Earth. The bolide impactor flux at Earth (Bolide flux 1994-2013 – black circles) based on ~20 years of global observations from US Government sensors and infrasound airwave data. Global coverage averages 80% among a total of 58 observed bolides with E > 1 kt and includes the Chelyabinsk Chelyabinsk bolide (far right black circle). This coverage correction is approximate and the bolide flux curve is likely a lower limit. The brown-coloured line represents an earlier powerlaw fit from a smaller dataset for bolides between 1 – 8 m in diameter15. Error bars represent counting statistics only. For comparison, we plot de-biased estimates of the near-Earth asteroid impact frequency based on all asteroid survey telescopic search data through mid- 2012 (green squares)8 and other earlier independently analysed telescopic datasets including NEAT discoveries (pink squares) and finally from the Spacewatch (blue squares) survey, where diameters are determined assuming an albedo of 0.1. Energy for telescopic data is computed assuming a mean bulk density of 3000 kgm-3 and average impact velocity of 20.3 kms-1. The intrinsic impact frequency for these telescopic data was found using an average probability of impact for NEAs as 2×10-9 per year for the entire population. Lunar crater counts converted to equivalent impactor flux and assuming a geometric albedo of 0.25 (grey solid line) are shown for comparison9, though we note that contamination by secondary craters and modern estimates of the NEA population which suggest lower albedos will tend to shift this curve to the right and down. Finally, we show estimated influx from global airwave measurements conducted from 1960-1974 which detected larger (5-20m) bolide impactors (upward red triangles) using an improved method for energy estimation compared to earlier interpretations of these same data.
Darth Vader, a major character from 'Star Wars', imagined as a Renaissance gentleman. Credit: Sacha Goldberger
You underestimate the power of Dark Side fashion. Imagine for a moment that Darth Vader was around during the same time as say, the ostentatious Louis XIV (the “Sun King” who had a fancy court at Versailles palace in France). If Vader was a high-society gentleman, or at least masking (ha!) as one, what could he have looked like?
Photographer Sacha Goldberger recently put several ‘Star Wars’ characters in this historic time period as part of an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. As this Facebook gallery shows, the results are amusing and potentially frightening (most prevalently with Chewbacca.)
Goldberger doesn’t stop with these characters, either. You’ll see others from the Batman franchise, Alice in Wonderland and even that famous caped hero, Superman. The credits just above the images hint that even more characters were on display in the gallery than what are available on the website.
It’s too bad this cosplay came just after Hallowe’en, as this presents some potentially awesome ideas for future costumes. For those who couldn’t make the fair where Goldberger exhibited, you can take a virtual tour here and also learn more about it on the official website.
Protons, neutrons, electrons - particles in an atom.
One of the biggest mysteries in the Universe is the fact there there’s matter, and not antimatter. Where did it all go?
When we look around, everything we can see is made of matter. For every type of matter from electrons, protons and quarks there is a similar type of matter known as antimatter. So why aren’t there piles of antimatter rocks, cars and chocolate bars just lying around? Why does Scotty always have a little extra kicking around in his liquor cabinet? And where do I get mine?
The primary difference between matter and antimatter is that they have opposite electric charge. Which seems pretty mundane. The negatively charged electron has an antiparticle known as the positron, which has a positive electric charge.
Anti-protons have a negative charge, and are just flat out grumpy. We’ve been able to create these particles in the lab, and have even been able to create small amounts of anti-hydrogen consisting of a positron bound to an antiproton, when examined closely there’s were shown to have a goatee and a little colorful sash or dagger.
When we create particles in accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, we seem to get equal amounts of matter and antimatter. This suggests that when particles were formed soon after the big bang, there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter.
Large Hadron Collider (CERN/LHC/GridPP)
But the universe we observe is only made of matter, and… here’s the best part… we have no idea why. Why didn’t the matter and antimatter completely annihilate each other? How come we ended up with a little more matter? This delightful mystery is known as baryon asymmetry.
We do have a few ideas, and by we, I mean some giant brained crackerjacks have come up with a few plausible options. The most popular is that somehow antimatter behaves a little differently than matter. This could cause an imbalance between matter and antimatter. After particles collided in the early universe, there would still be matter left over, hence the matter we observe.
Another idea is that the observable universe just happens to be in a region dominated by matter. Other parts of the multiverse could have observable universes dominated by antimatter. Baryon asymmetry is one of the big mysteries of modern cosmology.
Stephen Hawking, weightless (courtesy Zero Gravity Corporation)
There is an even crazier idea. Antimatter might have anti-gravity. In other words, an atom of anti-hydrogen would fall up instead of down. If that is the case, then matter and antimatter would repel each other, and you might have matter universes and antimatter universes that are forever separate.There have been some initial experiments to test this idea, but so far there have been no conclusive results.
What do you think? Where’s all our antimatter and how do we track it down? I’d sure love to bring some home and show my friends…
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