Category: Space

THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER (2017), PART 5: Voyager 1 Aces Another Test

Voyager 1: (almost) never say die

As you read this, the first human-made artifact to enter interstellar space is receding from us at a speed of 10.6 miles per second (50 times the speed of sound at sea-level on Earth). It is currently (the morning of March 16, 2018) about 141 times farther from the Sun than the (average) distance of Earth from the Sun. Impeded only by clouds of gas that are tenuous in our region of the galaxy, it should keep up this rate of speed for millennia. That sounds fast, but at astronomical scales it’s barely crawling—17,500 years to cover one light-year. Since it will probably not completely escape the Sun’s gravity until two light-years out, it won’t “really” exit the Solar System for another 35,000 years or so. For the finer points of what constitutes “interstellar space” check out: https://scitechdaily.com/new-data-confirms-voyager-1-interstellar-space/

(You may not be too surprised, if you went to that link, that the determination of Voyager 1’s official interstellar status depended partly on the readings of the “tsunami waves” that have smacked Voyager three times as a result of Coronal Mass Ejections from the Sun.  CMEs are those random ejections of solar plasma that pose a serious threat to our increasingly electrified way of life here on Earth, as discussed in my earlier post  https://www.markheinickewrites.com/2017/11/04/uncertainty-part-two-when-comes-the-big-shock/ . )

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER (2017), PART 4: Discovery of Oldest Spiral Galaxy

The fascination of origins—the very long view.

Curiosity about personal ancestry has made Ancestry DNA and 23andMe booming businesses.   Marketing has grown this kind of curiosity into a lucrative appetite.  Indications are that the customer base is doubling annually.

Curiosity about cosmic origins might be growing more slowly, but the explosion of new information about the early universe thrills a lot of folks, without much money changing hands.  To consider where we come from on the largest time scales has a calming effect in  this tempestuous, maddening, frightening, and tragic moment in human history. Launching one’s imagination into the vastness of space leaves behind much of the craziness of our political, social, and cultural (melo)dramas.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

This is a very long post, perhaps of little interest to those who don’t share my fascination with cosmic origins. I present a table of contents of the sections below as a guide to what’s in store.

  • Not just another pretty face: ancient spiral galaxy.
  • The unmiraculous miracle of gravitational lensing
  • Implications of the age of the earliest spiral galaxy
  • Galactic structure, supermassive black holes, and a question of timing
  • Primordial black holes to the rescue!
  • An aside on supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies
  • More on spirals
  • A Family Tree of galaxies
  • THE END
Not just another pretty face: ancient spiral galaxy
The Pinwheel Spiral Galaxy, shown for aesthetic effect- not the “oldest”

Don’t we just love our spiral galaxies?!?  It’s not so much love, it’s more like being awestruck by ineffable beauty, combined with the knowledge that each typically contains hundreds of billions of stars spread out across distances up to hundreds of thousands of light years.  (Another plus is that we actually live in one.) I’ve cheated a bit here by picking a particularly gorgeous example, the Pinwheel Galaxy—a kind of canonical form of which all spirals are variations on a starry theme. (For a spectacular collection of spiral galaxy images, follow the link: glorious spirals in abundance .)

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER , PART 3: When Neutron Stars Collide

On August 17th, 2017, the collision of two neutron stars 300 million light years away was observed, initially detected by the arrival of gravity waves. It was a watershed moment in both observational astronomy and astrophysics.

By last fall, you may have become somewhat blasé about gravitational waves: four occurrences had been reported to the public beginning in 2015, all of them involving the merging of black holes in enormously distant galaxies, to little effect on Earth—any tremor you might possibly have felt could equally have been produced by a FedEx van five blocks away going over a speed bump.

Ah—but what occurred last August,* and released publicly to mainstream media on October 16, was an extra special  event, arguably more interesting than any of the black hole stories. Not in the magnitude of gravity waves (again, something we animals would never have felt). . . but in the practice of astronomy, what came out of it was a game-changer, heralded by many as the advent of “multi-messenger astronomy.”

It was an astonishing event in (at least) three important respects:

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE EVER, Part 2: Exoplanet Binge

Stunning Revelations from Kepler Space Telescope Exoplanet Survey: MANY small planets

On June 19, 2017, NASA announced the release of the eighth Kepler catalog of exoplanet candidates—now totaling 4,034, of which 2,335 have already been verified as planets.  Here’s a link to the press briefing materials on the NASA website, that includes some absolutely cool visuals.

Kepler survey announcement June 2017

The news in June was that another 219 candidates had been added since the last announcement, 10 of which had characteristics of size, distance from host star, and sun-like nature of the host star,  that suggest conditions hospitable to life as we know it.  Rocky planets with diameters between 0.7 and 2 Earth diameters are the most promising if they fall within the “Goldilocks Zone” where liquid water could exist on their surfaces.

Turns out, contrary to what I had been expecting from the news about huge exoplanets dribbling out over the last decade, now we hear that “small planets are common”  according to NASA. Note that “small” is in the eye of the beholder. NASA qualifies a planet as “small” if it is less than four Earth diameters.  The trend toward the discovery of “gas giants” exoplanets early on was due to the difficulties, with less sensitive instruments and less sophisticated methodology, of detecting the smaller objects.

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER, Part 1B: Eclipse, Sun, & Earth

 

In Part 1A of the eclipse drama, we talked about the Moon. Now for the Sun and Earth.

First The Sun.

The gigantic sphere of plasma* (2.7 million miles in circumference, weighing 330,000 Earth masses) that is our Sun is orbiting the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at about 514,200 miles per hour, a speed which takes it once around the galactic center every 230 million years. (Since the extinction of the dinosaurs, it’s made it a little more than a quarter of the way around.) It helpfully drags us around with it, enabling us to observe intergalactic space in many directions over time. Physically, it’s about as normal a star as you can find in the local neighborhood (less than 1,000 light years away). Its relative “normality” is nice for astrophysicists, who can learn a lot about other stars from observing this one close at hand. Despite being sort-of normal, the Sun has a lot of electromagnetic storms and bursts of plasma that can do monstrously scary stuff to us (discussed in another of my posts here). Yet, it is tame relative to many other stars, whose volatility may make the evolution of life around them a crapshoot.

We’ll talk about the speed of the galaxy itself relative to other galaxies in a later post (promise: before we’ve completely orbited the galactic center).

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE EVER, Part 1A: Eclipse and the Moon

For solace, look to the heavens.

While one terrible thing after another was happening on Earth in 2017, the news from outer space was chock-full of amazingness to a degree rivaled in my lifetime only by the Apollo moon missions. Those of us fortunate to live in the relative calm and prosperity of the First World have the opportunity, in rare moments of serenity, to bask in a new era of cosmic discovery made possible by extraordinary technology in the service of science’s ceaseless voyage toward truth.

The moon landings were amazing, all right, and especially heartening for Americans at a time when the country was in a state of turmoil and division unique to the 20th Century. It prompted me to buy my first TV, a small black and white device, not that color mattered for a moon landing. But for sheer scale, the exploits of puny humans on our nearest heavenly body 50 years ago can be compared with the significance of 2017’s Year in Space as a Home Depot compared with the One World Trade Center.

Do I exaggerate?  Let’s go down a list, in order of least amazing to the most spectacularly profoundly spine-tinglingly amazing:

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Uncertainty Part Two: When Comes the Big Shock?

Another scary crapshoot: Coronal Mass Ejection

The dice are loaded against Earth from the activity of that warm and friendly object that bestows most of the energy we use, our Sun. The worst effect of the Sun will be its roasting to death all life on earth a billion or so years hence. But that warming is nothing to worry about for the next few million years (this warming has virtually nothing to do with climate change on a scale of centuries, such as 2,000-10,000 A.D).

Short-term, the biggest wallop the Sun has in store for us is a Coronal Mass Ejection.

Just do a web search on Coronal Mass Ejection and you’ll get, along with a fascinating description and analysis, an eyeful of bad news about what CME’s could do to Earth–and what they have already done, the most dramatic recent manifestation being the 1859 “Carrington Event” (named after the astronomer who witnessed the flare accompanying the CME). In 1859, telegraph wires were jolted to a degree that knocked wireless operators off their chairs, ignited fires, and took down the entire telegraph network.

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Uncertainty Part One: Climate and Loaded Dice

Here’s a little different slant on the old subjects of climate change and coronal mass ejections.
Climate: the Known Unknowns

Will the Earth be hotter in 2050 than today?  What does the science say?

The simplest answer is, probably.  A more complicated answer is, we don’t know.

We do know it is almost certain, that absent a 50% drop in carbon emissions within the next ten years, and a still steeper drop afterwards, Earth’s temperature will continue to rise dangerously fast on account of the enormous quantities of carbon dioxide we have already pumped into the atmosphere. But a 50% drop in ten years would be ruinous to the global economy and is, if not technically impossible, then politically so—even more the case now that the leaders of the world’s second worst carbon polluter have turned their backs on mitigation, and even adaptation. Furthermore, even a 50% drop leaves 50% still going, with the promise of (net) zero emissions still decades away.

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The Consolation of Big Numbers: The Long View

[Let’s back away a few trillion steps from our world’s tragedies, comedies, inspirations, follies, triumphs, losses, meaningless accidents and meaningful enterprises, to muse upon the otherworldly. It gives me some tranquility at a time when tranquility is hard to come by. To do so, I will have to venture far into Nerdland.  If big numbers leave you cold, stop right here.]

Zillions of Planets Akin to Ours?

While here on our own planet things are lurching from bad to worse, I was comforted to hear the news of nonzero odds for the habitability of  several planets in the “nearby” solar system TRAPPIST-1.  Located a mere 40 light years from us, these planets are rocky, not too big and not too small, not too heavy, not too light, and at a distance from their sun that liquid water could exist on them, and harbor Earthlike life forms. Their distance from their sun is smaller than the orbit of Mercury around ours, but the star is so cool—an “ultra cool dwarf”—that three of them are evidently situated in the “Goldilocks Zone” amenable, with the presence of water, to life as we know it.

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