March 2018 – Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler

Book Review: ‘Apes and Angels’ by Ben Bova

‘Apes and Angels’ is the third novel in a series by the well known Science Fiction author Ben Bova. Beginning with ‘New Earth’ the saga continued with ‘Death Wave’ (Which I reviewed in my post of 31May2017) and will continue after ‘Apes and Angels’ with a fourth novel ‘Survival’.

Apes and Angels Cover (Credit: Goodreads)

Let me give you a bit of the background leading up to ‘Apes and Angels’. In ‘New Earth’ a starship voyages to the star Sirius where the crew discovers a planet inhabited by both super-Intelligent machines called Predecessors and human beings whom the machines had brought to Sirius. The machines inform the crew that the black hole at the center of our galaxy has erupted in a powerful burst of gamma rays that will kill all unprotected life in the galaxy. The machines give the starship’s crew the technology necessary to protect Earth in exchange for a promise that humanity will travel to other star systems in our section of the galaxy in order to protect the more primitive civilizations inhabiting those stars.

In “Death Wave’ the starship crew has returned to Earth and informed the government of the approaching gamma radiation. However, since the deadly radiation won’t reach our solar system for another two thousand years the politicians ruling Earth are in no hurry to protect the planet and as far as saving alien cultures is concerned, well let’s just say they’re not interested at all. The spacefarers have to directly convince the people of Earth in order to force the politicians to begin the massive effort to build starships to journey to the other stars threatened by the gamma radiation.

‘Apes and Angels’ then begins with the starship Odysseus arriving at the star Mithra, named for the ancient Persian man-god. Mithra possesses two planets that contain life. Mithra-alpha, closest to the star, has octopus like creatures that make noises to each other and who may be intelligent. Planet gamma has two-armed, two-legged creatures that live in primitive villages who definitely are intelligent.

The expedition to Mithra is led by Adrian Kosoff, a scientist turned bureaucrat who wants to run the mission like a military unit, everybody knowing and doing their job and following, if not orders at least instructions. Kosoff is ambitious and by being the man in charge hopes to get credit for the mission’s success and discoveries.

Kosoff’s nemesis is Brad MacDaniels, a young anthropologist who follows his intuition and likes to break the rules. Much of the plot of ‘Apes and Angels’ revolves around the conflict; non-violent I hasten to add, between these two men.

Of course this is a setup of the usual conflict between generations, between the methodical plodder and the hunch taker, between the tried and true and the new and novel. In my opinion Ben Bova leans a little to heavy on the side of MacDaniels. The younger man’s intuition is always right and he always gets the better of Kosoff.

Better handled is the mystery of the Mithra solar system. As soon as the Odysseus arrives it is quickly realized that the alignment of the planets is not stable. The planet alpha is so close to its sun that it is boiling away while gamma comes so close to beta every 60 years that they will collide within the next million years. The astrophysicists in the Odysseus’ crew determine that something, or someone has disrupted this solar system within the last 100,000 years.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot details so I think I’ll leave it there. The story will continue in the next installment, ‘Survival’ so don’t expect all of the answers. Like all of Ben Bova’s novels ‘Apes and Angles’ was both enjoyable and a quick read but it is just an installment in a larger work. When I finish reading ‘Survival’ I’ll let you know how everything works out.

Stephen Hawking Final Paper and Final Resting Place.

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking passed away on the 14th of March at the age of 76 after more than 50 years of suffering from the dehabilitating effects of the motor neural disease ALS. Professor Hawking’s ashes are to be interred in Westminster Cathedral not far from the remains of Sir Isaac Newton.

I do not intend to attempt a biography of Professor Hawking or a review of his work. See links below for a few websites that do a better job than I ever could. Instead I’ll just try to describe a bit of Stephen Hawking’s last paper, which I downloaded from the web a couple of days ago.

http://www.hawking.org.uk/about-stephen.html

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43499024

The paper is called ‘A Smooth Exit from External Inflation” and Hawking co-wrote the paper with Thomas Hertog of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Leuven in Leuven Belgium. To even understand the title I’m going to have to talk a little bit about the history of the ‘Big Bang Theory’ going back to 1965 and the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

Prior to 1965 the observations by Carl Hubble that the Universe was expanding led several physicists to suggest that in the distant past the entire Universe had exploded outward from an incredibly dense initial condition, and I do mean incredibly dense. One physicist named George Gamow then calculated that the leftover heat of that initial Big Bang should still be observable as a uniform background of microwave radiation. This CMB was discovered in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson at Bell Labs in Holmdel New Jersey. Penzias and Wilson were a pair of radio engineers who were actually trying to measure the amount of interference that cosmic radio sources would cause the new communications satellites and instead discovered the birth cries of our Universe. The image below shows the CMB as observed by the Planck satellite.

The Cosmic Microwave Background as seen by the Planck Satellite (Credit: ESA)

With the discovery of the CMB physicists began to take a really detailed look at what the conditions in the early Universe, just a tiny fraction of a second after the Big bang, must have been like. It was quickly realized that most of the possible initial conditions would lead to a Universe vastly different than the one we see.

Half of all of these possible Universes would be so dense that gravity would make them immediately collapse back upon themselves, these were Universes that never really get started. The other half of the possible Universes would be just the opposite, they would fly apart so fast that no structure could form, a great big empty Universe. Our Universe, that has survived for billions of years but has billions of galaxies, existed on a knife’s edge between the two. Physicists regarded that as too precise to occur naturally and wanted to find some reason for such fine tuning.

It was a physicist named Alan Guth who would in the 1970s would provide a solution to the problem, although it’s a solution that has caused many problems of its own. Guth proposed that a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang (10^-30 seconds or thereabout) the Universe underwent a period of inflation, it expanded at many times the speed of light smoothing itself out and leaving virtually all possible Universes looking just like ours.

Before long observations from satellites studying the CMB confirmed many of the predictions of Guth’s inflationary model and today nearly every cosmologist accepts the need for some sort of inflation in the early Universe.

Now at first Guth did not proposed a mechanism of what caused his inflation, he would later work on several alternatives, he simply pointed out that inflation whatever caused it would generate a Universe like the one we see. Back when I was taking Cosmology the energy needed to cause inflation was assumed to come from the symmetry breakdown of a Unified Force Field into the four Forces we’re familiar with, Gravity, Electro-Magnetism and the Strong and Weak Nuclear Forces.

Today however Unified Field Theories are having a hard time of it and it has been suggested, based on clues from quantum field theory, that inflating space might be the norm and a Universe like ours is really nothing but a bubble in sitting inside an ever inflating reality. In that case there are undoubtedly infinitely many other bubbles making a Multiverse of infinite Universes.

Is there a Multiverse? (Credit: Smithsonian)

Is your brain hurting yet, because I’m just getting to Hawking’s last paper. What Hawking and his former student have done is to develop a mathematical model of an inflating Universe where inflation comes to a soft end, a smooth exit as Hawking and Hertog put it. This generates a single Universe not an infinite number of Universes in a Multiverse.

Now all of this is just a mathematical model, the only observable prediction that the paper makes is that there should have been gravity waves produced during the inflation period, an observation that may soon be tested. However many other theories of the early Universe make the same prediction so the discovery of such gravity waves will only be weak support for Hawking’s model.

Progress in cosmology is slow but I have seen quite a bit in my time, I can barely remember when the Big Bang was still just a hypothesis. I do hope that in the next few years we get a better understanding of what triggered inflation as well as what brought it to a halt. If and when we do I’m certain that the answer will be something that Stephen Hawking would have found fascinating!

Space News for March 2018.

It’s been a quiet month as far as space exploration is concerned. The most interesting news items are actually updates of earlier stories but are rather important in the long term.

The first item I’d like to discuss concerns astronaut Scott Kelly and the continuing research into the medical effects of his yearlong mission to the International Space Station (ISS). You may have heard reports that because of his time in space Scott Kelly and his twin brother Mark Kelly were no longer identical that being in space had actually changed Scott’s DNA!! The image below shows Scott and Mark together, Mark is the one with the mustache.

Scott Kelly (left) with his Brother Mark (Credit: Space.com)

Well that’s not quite true. In fact a very important phrase ‘the expression of’ was left out of some news stories. Now what exactly does that mean? Well, our DNA can ‘express itself’ differently under different environmental conditions.

For example, if you eat a huge amount of food and drink a lot of beer your DNA will express itself by producing a lot of fat cells to store all those calories and you will become obese. On the other hand, if you eat right and exercise you DNA will express itself by producing muscle cells and you will stay trim and fit. Same DNA, it just expresses itself differently depending on what environmental conditions its exposed to.

What the latest medical tests have revealed is that the change in the expression of Scott’s DNA has amounted to about 7%. That’s quite a lot actually but about the same as the results that had been published earlier and within the range of normal variance for DNA expression. Click on the link below to be taken to NASA’s official announcement of the results of Scot Kelly’s medical tests.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-twins-study-confirms-preliminary-findings

Before I go on to another subject, Scott Kelly also made some news this week by giving an interview in which he voiced his opinions of America’s space program and its future. The big takeaway from the interview was Scott’s criticism of NASA’s continued low budgets and the increased competition from China. Scott’s warns; “I think that China will overtake the US in the space business–If we allow them to.”

Scott is also concerned about the Trump administration’s recent plans to cut all funding to the ISS starting in 2025 despite the fact that the station’s expected working life takes it to 2028. Kelly is more hopeful when it comes to the scheduled test launches later this year of both Space X’s and Boeing’s space capsules. The first tests this year will be unmanned but hopefully starting next year NASA will no longer be dependent on the Russian’s in order to get our astronauts into space.

And speaking of NASA and the Trump administration the other news this month is that the space agency has continued with its plans to design, build and launch into deep space a Lunar Orbiter Platform called Gateway. The idea behind Gateway is to establish a small space station either in lunar orbit or an orbit around both the Earth and Moon. This station will give NASA experience in operating in deep space as well as a place to carry out solar and astrophysical experiments. The image below shows an image of the planned Gateway station.

Design Illustration of Lunar Gateway Station (Credit: Space.com)

The problem is, take a guess, money! Since Trump has directed NASA to a goal of returning astronauts to the surface of the Moon and then on to Mars where’s the money for Gateway. Once again it seems that NASA just can’t seem to set a clear goal for itself and get the funding necessary to achieve it.

NASA has been without a permanent Chief Administrator since Trump took office and just last week the agency’s interim administrator retired leaving NASA without any real boss. Without leadership from congress and the white house America’s space program will continue to founder without direction.

On a somewhat brighter note, NASA is at least making plans for the outside chance that the Earth will be struck by the asteroid Bennu on 21Sept in the year 2135. According to the best estimate the 500-meter in diameter space rock has a 1 in 2,700 chance of colliding with our planet on that day.

Right now the NASA probe Osiris-REx is on its way to Bennu on a mission that includes taking a sample of the asteroid and returning it to Earth. As a part of this mission NASA should get a better idea of Bennu’s orbit and therefore a better idea of whether Bennu is a future danger to Earth.

Should that prove to be the case NASA is developing a concept it calls the ‘Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response’ or HAMMER. Depending on just how big Bennu is HAMMER will impact on the asteroid to nudge it into a safe orbit or carry a nuclear bomb to destroy it. The image below shows the asteroid Bennu compared to a couple of more familiar objects.

Now where have I heard all that before? In a sense NASA is simply using Bennu as an example of a potentially dangerous asteroid to design a mission around. Based on the first part of this post I wonder whether or not by 2135 it will be a Chinese spacecraft that ends up protecting us from Bennu?

National Geographic Documentary: ‘Jane’, a biography of Jane Goodall.

A week ago, 12 Mar 2018, the National Geographic Channel broadcast a documentary that it had produced about the life and work of the World renowned naturalist Jane Goodall. Directed by Brett Morgen the film consists of an interview of Jane Goodall as a voice over for footage of her throughout the career. Much of the film used was derived from more than 100 hours of previously unreleased footage taken by Hugo van Lawick, Jane’s longtime collaborator and husband. The image below shows Goodall and van Lawick together with their son Hugo, nicknamed Grub.

Jane Goodall with Hugo van Lawick and son Hugo (Credit: The Times)

Now everybody knows that Jane Goodall has revolutionized our views of mankind’s closest relations in the natural world the chimpanzees by her intimate and long term observations of a group of chimps who resided in Gombe national forest in Tanzania. What few people know however is that Jane was initially sent to Gombe by the noted paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey as a part of his study of early human evolution. You see Leakey believed that the closest we could come to being able to study the behavior of our ancestors of two or three million years ago would be to study our closest surviving relatives the chimpanzees. The image below shows Louis and Mary Leakey with their most famous find the skull of the early hominid Zinjanthropus.

Louis and Mark Leakey with Zinjanthropus (Credit: History Channel)

Leakey distrusted the prevailing theories about human evolution, indeed even in the 1960s there were still anthropologists who believed that humans had originated not in Africa but in central Asia despite there being absolutely no evidence to support this hypothesis. So for the job of observing chimpanzees Leakey choose his young English secretary, a woman with no university degree but who did love animals. He choose Jane Goodall.

The best part of the documentary was in fact Jane talking about her first months in Gombe. Leakey had been able to secure only enough money for Goodall to spend six months studying the chimpanzees there and any more money, and time for further study would depend on what, if anything she could discover about chimp behavior.

Upon arriving in Gombe Jane was immediately in her element. She genuinely did love animals and the outdoors and she was very happy spending her days walking around and observing the Tanzanian forests. Trouble was that she may have loved being with the chimps but they certainly didn’t return that love, not at first.

For the first five months Jane could only study her subjects from afar, the chimps ran off any time she tried to get close. By binoculars and telescope she was learning some interesting details of chimp behavior but nothing Earth shattering. Jane was quite concerned that her money would run out before she could get a real close-up look in the private lives of chimpanzees. (How many scientific discoveries do you think have been lost because of a lack of money???)

Then one day an older male chimp whom Jane had named David Graybeard did not flee as she came closer. In a breakthrough that lasted several hours she watched David Graybeard from a distance of only a few meters. Within days the entire troop had ceased to be afraid of her and Jane was able observe her subjects as close up as she desired.

It was also the male David Graybeard who gave Jane her first major discovery. One day she watched in astonishment as the chimp took a thin reed and, licking it first, he shoved it down a hole into a termite mound and when he pulled it out he gobbled up the termites that clung to it. The image below shows a chimpanzee using a reed as a tool.

Young Chimpanzee ‘Fishing’ for termites (Credit: BBC)

At that time no one thought chimps used tools but there he was, using that reed as a tool to obtain some necessary protein for his diet. A few days later Jane watched as several of the chimps not only used reeds and twigs to pull out some termites but were actually altering their twigs, stripping off the leaves in order to make them thinner and pointier. They were modifying if not making tools. This was the discovery Jane needed and when she announced her find the National Geographic Society, which had supported Leakey for many years, gave her all the money she required to continue her work.

There was one catch, the Geographic wanted a professional nature photographer to come and document her work. The man they sent was Hugo van Lawick who would become Goodall’s husband as well as chronicler.

In the years that followed Jane made other important discoveries. She watched as the male chimps hunted small monkeys for food, they actually succeed a higher percentage of the time than lions do. She also observed our relatives as they committed murder, even fights between groups that can only be described as wars.

In all Jane Goodall discovered that chimpanzees are very much like us. They can be tender and nurturing, Jane says she learned a lot about being a mother from a female chimp named Flo. Yet at the same time they can be viscous and brutal. All in all their behavior is not very different from our own.

No one can doubt that Louis Leakey made a terrific choice in selecting Jane Goodall to carry out a study of our relatives the chimpanzees. And you’ll be making a terrific choice if you take some time to watch The National Geographic Channel’s documentary ‘Jane’!

Tiangong-1 is falling, Tiangong-1 is falling, but don’t worry, it won’t hit you on the head.

Over the last several weeks it’s been next to impossible to avoid all of the news stories telling you about how China’s first space station the Tiangong-1 is out of control and will come crashing back to Earth any day now. The headlines grab you by announcing the crash is bold letters while the small print inside reveals that there’s a one in ten billion, or less, chance that anything will actually hit you.

The Tiangong-1 station, Tiangong means ‘Heavenly Palace’ in Chinese, was launched by China in 2011 as both a target for practicing rendezvous maneuvers in space as well as some extra living space for the crews of their Shenzhou manned spacecraft. The design of the Tiangong-1 station is based upon the design of the Shenzhou but with a slightly larger habitable section giving it a slightly greater mass (8500kg versus 7840kg for the Shenzhou). The image below compares the Tiangong and Shenzhou.

Tiangong-1 space station and the Shenzhou-8 spacecraft. (Credit: The Daily Mirror)

Like the United States’ Skylab and Russia’s Salyut early space stations the Tiangong-1 was launched into space unmanned and in one piece and then visited several times by manned spacecraft. The Shenzhou-9 mission rendezvoused with the Tiangong-1 in June of 2012 with a crew of three and stayed for ten days while the Shenzhou-10 mission, also with a crew of three, visited the Tiangong in June of 2013.

In both of these missions China’s growing space program demonstrated the ability to carryout the routine operations necessary for more complicated space missions in the future whether that be building a modular space station or even missions to deep space. The image below shows the launch of the Shenzhou-9 mission on its Long March 2F rocket.

Launch of Shenzhou-9 on a Long March 2F rocket (Credit: CCTV)

After the two successful missions to Tiangong-1 China launched the Tiangong-2 station as a replacement for Tiangong-1 and the first station was then placed into a sleep mode. The plan was to maintain Tiangong-1 in orbit as a test platform for the longevity of both components and systems in a space environment before the station was brought back to Earth in a controlled reentry into an ocean.

Apparently that test didn’t go so well because on 21Mar2016 China’s Space Engineering Office announced that they had lost their radio telemetry link with the station. Amateur satellite watchers soon confirmed that the Tiangong station was tumbling out of control. Notice how China never actually admitted that the station was out of control.

It wasn’t long before scientists were calculating that the Tiangong-1 would be making an uncontrolled reentry back to Earth sometime in either March or April of 2018. That estimate has since been fine-tuned down to between 29Mar and 9April of this year.

So here we are, all of the news stories loudly telling us that Tiangong-1 is falling out of control, is there any real danger? Well first of all let me tell you that most of the station will burn up during reentry, only a few hundred kilograms of material are expected to survive to reach the ground. Also remember that the Earth’s surface is 70% ocean so Tiangong will probably sink without a trace.

Then, even if Tiangong does hit dry land there are literally millions of square kilometers of emptiness out there so the odds of anyone being hurt are less than ten billion to one. In fact when the much larger and heavier US Skylab station also fell to Earth in an uncontrolled reentry back in 1979 pieces of it fell near the city of Perth Australia but no one was injured in any way. A few people did get some really neat pieces of space debris however as souvenirs.

Finally, the orbit of Tiangong is tilted at an angle of 42.8º to the equator. That means that Tiangong never goes further north than 42.8º of Latitude nor further south than 42.8º. If you live outside of that band you have absolutely nothing to fear. See the image below to know if you should be worried. I live in Philadelphia at a latitude of 40º but I ain’t gonna fret!

Tiangong-1 will fall somewhere between 40N and 40S (between the Lines) (Credit: Mail Online)

Ball Lightning: The Mysterious Phenomenon that has produced more Theories than detailed Observations.

Descriptions of the strange, almost unearthly phenomenon known today as Ball Lightning date back as far as Aristotle. However the recorded incidents of ball lightning have been so infrequent, and the behavior of the phenomenon so varied, even contradictory that up until the mid-twentieth century many if not most scientists regarded ball lightning to be an imaginary rather than a real physical event. The image below shows an illustration of a nineteenth century occurrence of ball lightning.

19th Century Illustration of Ball Lightning (Credit: Public Domain)

It is true that ball lightning can range in size from less than a centimeter to as much as a meter in diameter. The colour of ball lightning can also vary tremendously although red, orange and yellow predominate. The movement of ball lightning is generally horizontal but they have been known to move up or down or even remain motionless. They can even appear right out of walls or other solid objects.

Perhaps the greatest variance in the different observations of ball lightning however is in the way they dissipate. Sometimes they can just disappear like a light bulb that’s turned off while sometimes they disappear by passing into walls or other solid objects. And then sometimes they can explode doing considerable damage and even death. The image below shows of modern photograph of ball lightning.

Photograph of Ball Lightning (Credit: Miyuki Ishikawa)

About the only things that all the different reported incidents agree upon is that ball lightning usually occurs during a thunderstorm and normally right after ordinary cloud to ground lightning bolt has struck nearby. Over the last century however reports of ball lightning have also been connected with heavy electrical equipment like generators and there are even reports of ball lightning occurring in submarines during World War II went the sub was switching from its diesel engines to battery power.

Theories about the nature of ball lightning abound and over the last 50 years scientists have even succeeded in produced ball lightning-like objects in the labouratory. Despite these successes there are arguments as to whether those labouratory creations are the ‘real’ ball lightning. The image below shows one of the labouratory attempts to create ball lightning.

Ball Lightning in the Lab (Credit: Narod.ru)

The best data concerning natural ball lightning comes from a group of scientists from Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou China who in July of 2012 were studying ordinary cloud to ground lightning on the Tibetan plateau. While they were making their observations they spotting ball lightning and were able to record 1.6 seconds of video of the event. Because the cameras that the scientists were using in their cloud to ground lightning observations were equipped with slitless spectrographs the researchers also succeeded in obtaining the first ever optical spectra of ball lightning.

The spectra obtained by the scientists showed strong emission lines for the elements of silicon, calcium, iron, nitrogen and oxygen. The spectra also showed that the ball lightning had a temperature of less than 14,000K. See spectra below.

Spectra of Ball Lightning (Credit: Wikipedia)

This remarkable data has bolstered one of the leading theories about the origin of ball lightning, the ‘Vapourized Silicon Hypothesis’. In this model ordinary lightning strikes the ground vapourizing and ionizing the silicon-dioxide in the soil. As the vapour cools the silicon becomes an aerosol that is bound together by the charges on the ions. The glow of the ball lightning is produced as the silicon recombines with the oxygen.

There are rival hypotheses however, some rooted in solid science, some a little bit kooky. The Microwave Cavity Hypothesis considers ball lightning to be generated by microwave radiation that ionizes the air with the discharge of that ionization causing the glow. The problem with this idea is that while ordinary cloud to ground lightning does produce a lot of radio energy most of it is in the AM and short wave bands rather than microwaves.

Then there’s the Electrically Charged Solid Core hypothesis where a solid object acquires a positive electric charge and becomes surrounded by a layer of electrons. A microwave field keeps the positive and negative charges apart and the high voltage generated between the charges is what we see as the ball lightning. In addition to requiring microwaves again this hypothesis also requires a solid object inside the ball lightning, something not seen in any observations, as well as being something that would have difficulty in passing through solid walls!

Among the more outlandish suggestions there is the mini-black hole model where an atom sized, primordial black hole is passing through our atmosphere and we see it as ball lightning. However there is no reason for a mini-black hole to be as closely associated with ordinary lightning or large electric generators as ball lightning certainly is. Also a mini-black hole would not simply blink out of existence as ball lightning is known to often do.

The mystery of ball lightning will probably continue for some time into the future. However, with so many people nowadays carrying cell phone cameras with them we are likely to get more and better observations of the phenomenon. At the same time scientists will continue working in their labouratories to discover more ways of creating ball lightning-like objects. Considering only 50 years ago some scientists even doubted the existence of ball lightning we’ve made a lot of progress. Clink on the link below to be taken to a youtube video of ball lightning taken outside New Orleans in 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9SrGOma5YE

Volcanic ‘Hotspot’ that formed the Hawaiian Islands moved about 50 Million Years Ago.

Geologists have learned a great deal in the last fifty years about the mechanics of how volcanoes are created and operate. According to the modern theory of ‘Plate Tectonics’ the surface of the Earth consists of a number of hard plates that ride over our planet’s softer, more fluid mantel. These plates move around the surface of the earth very slowly with time. As the plates move they can either pull apart from or collide into each other and those are the areas of the Earth where seismic activity like earthquakes or volcanoes normally occurs.

Normally, but not always, the volcanoes that have formed the Hawaiian Islands are a major exception to this model. Geologists have recognized the existence of a stationary ‘Hotspot’ in the Pacific Ocean that is presently feeding the active volcano of Kilauea on Hawaii’s big Island.

The Kilauea volcano is only about half a million years old however and before then the hotspot generated the now extinct volcanoes of Mauna Kea, Diamond Head and all of the other volcanoes of the Hawaiian chain. The images below show Kilauea and Diamond Head.

Diamond Head extinct Volcano (Credit: lexpress.fir)

In fact, as the Pacific Tectonic Plate has moved northwestward over the last 70 million years the hotspot has generated a long series of now extinct volcanoes known as the Hawaiian-Emperor chain. Most of these volcanic peaks have now dropped back below the surface of the ocean but the entire chain stretches in a straight line from Kilauea almost to the Aleutian Islands. The illustration below shows what the Hawaiian-Emperor chain would look like if the water of the Pacific Ocean were removed.

Hawaiian Emperor Volcano Chain (Credit: Earth Science)

Recently more accurate underwater mapping of the Hawaiian-Emperor chain has led researchers at the GFZ Research Center for Geosciences in Germany to conclude that the Hawaiian-Emperor chain may not be as straight as was thought. According to the scientists at GFZ about 47 million years ago the chain took a temporary bend to the left, as seen from Hawaii, an indication that the hotspot had moved several dozen miles to the south over the course of around a million years. The image below shows the bend identified by the geologists.

Bend in the Hawaiian-Emperor Hotspot (Credit: T. Torsvik, GFZ)

“If you try to explain this bend with just a sudden change in the movement of the Pacific Plate.” Says Bernhard Steinberger a researcher at GFZ. “You would expect a significantly different direction of motion at that time relative to adjacent tectonic plates. But we have not found any evidence for that.”

The scientists also checked the position of the Hawaiian hot spot against two other hot spots, the Rurutu volcanic chain in the western Pacific and the Louisville chain in the southern Pacific. The results indicate that it was the Hawaiian hotpot that moved some 50 million years ago.

The geologists at GFZ will continue to study the movement of the Hawaiian hotspot. “With more field data and information about the processes deep in the mantel, we hope to explain in more detail how the bend in the Hawaiian-Emperor chain has evolved.” Steinberger said.

The more we learn about volcanoes the better we will be able to understand how the Earth itself works. I look forward to hearing more from the GFZ Research Center for Geosciences about their work on the Hawaiian hotspot.

Movie Review: Annihilation. H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour out of Space’ updated with a lot of Unnecessary Emotional Baggage.

Annihilation (Credit: Paramount Pictures)

At the beginning of Paramount Pictures new Movie ‘Annihilation’ we witness a meteor streaking through the atmosphere to wind up crashing into a small lighthouse. A little while later we learn that the lighthouse has become the center of an unearthly ‘shimmer’ that is slowly growing and that anyone who enters the shimmer never returns.

After several failed expeditions a team of five women enter the shimmer to discover that the plants and animals are all mutating. It was at this point, not quite halfway into the film that I said to myself: ‘this is the Colour out of Space by H. P. Lovecraft’. Actually ‘Annihilation’ would have been better if it had just stuck to being an update of Lovecraft’s story.

For those who haven’t read Lovecraft, in the ‘Colour out of Space’ a meteor lands on a New England farm and a strange unearthly colour (Lovecraft was thinking of something like Ultraviolet or Infrared light but somehow alive) begins to spread. The colour proceeds to suck the life out of every living thing on the farm.

O’k so in ‘Annihilation’ the meteor lands in a lighthouse instead of a farm, it generates a shimmer rather than a colour and causes mutations instead of sucking the lifeforce but those are just details. It’s really the same story plot.

Some of the Mutations in Annihilation (Credit: Paramount Pictures)

The only part of ‘Annihilation’ that is different is an idea that gets mentioned along the way that anyone who volunteers for a suicide mission must have something terribly wrong with their life. The main character Lena, played by Natalie Portman certainly does. Her husband joined an earlier mission into the shimmer because he found out she was having an affair and now she feels guilty about him so she volunteers for the next mission. Much too much of the movie is taken up with this pointless subplot.

Oh, I know. Nowadays when you tell a story you simply have to have well-developed characters that your readers or viewers can care about. You can take it from me however, there’s no one in this movie to care about. Also you can add the fact that the ‘surprise ending’ simply wasn’t.

Now Annihilation wasn’t all bad, the special effects were good and the basic idea of something really alien coming to our world on a meteor is intriguing. In fact it is revealed later in the movie that the shimmer isn’t causing mutations so much as mixing the DNA of different creatures.

Then when Lena finally reaches the lighthouse we see things like glass trees along the beach. Since glass is made out of sand I started to wonder if the shimmer is now mixing life and non-life! That would have been cool but nothing is done with the concept!

Glass Trees that nothing is done with! (Credit: Paramount Pictures)

Really, eliminating the trite infidelity subplot and putting a lot more thought into the Science Fiction elements would have made Annihilation a much better film. As it is we never learn anything about why this ‘Shimmer’ came to Earth or where it came from or what it is trying to do.

Annihilation is based on a novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer (who also wrote the screenplay with director Alex Garland) and is the first part of a trilogy. Maybe in the other novels we get some of the answers but frankly I don’t know if I’m interested. I think I’ll reread ‘The Colour out of Space’ instead.

The Colour out of Space by H. P. Lovecraft (Credit: Classics Illustrated)

Amateur Astronomer trying out his new camera accidentally photographs the first instant of a Supernova explosion.

Supernovas are among the most energetic events in the entire universe. A star, at least five times the mass of our Sun ends it’s life in a tremendous explosion that for a few weeks can be as bright as an entire galaxy of 100 billion stars. Supernovas are so bright in fact that they are usually observed and studied in other galaxies sometimes billions of light years away. Supernovas are also one of the most keenly studied class of objects in the Universe with astronomers and astro-physicists searching tirelessly for any new scrap of information, any new observation.

Now supernovas might be very bright, but usually they’re also very far away and since they occur randomly anywhere in the sky, they can often be hard to spot. The way that astronomers find a supernova is to compare a picture of a far off galaxy with a picture of the same galaxy taken a month or more ago. If a new star appears in the latest picture, you’ve got a supernova.

The problem with that technique is that astronomers have only ever seen a supernova several days or more after the explosion has taken place. They’ve never actually seen the first moments of the supernova explosion itself.

Until now, in September of 2016 an amateur astronomer named Victor Buso of Argentina was testing out a new camera with his 16-inch telescope when a supernova happened right in his field of view. Buso was taking one exposure every thirty seconds of a galaxy designated NGC 613 for a period of twenty-five minutes and managed to capture the rapid increase in brightness, what astrophysicists call the ‘Shock Breakout’ of the supernova. The image below shows an image of NCG 613 with the supernova bracketed by the red lines.

Supernova SN2017 gkg (bracketed by red lines) Credit: Carnegie Institute of Science, Las Campanas Observatory)

Four of the images captured by Mister Buso are shown below with the supernova, which has been designated SN 2016 gkg, inside the red circle.

Four of the Images Captured by Victor Buso of SN 2017 gkg (Credit: Victor Buso)

In the first image, labeled 1:44 AM, the supernova is not visible but in each of the succeeding three images it grows brighter. According to astronomer Alex Filippenko of the University of California at Berkeley, “Professional astronomers have long been searching for such an event.” Adding. “Buso’s data are exceptional. This is an outstanding example of a partnership between amateur and professional astronomers.” The image below shows Mister Buso proudly standing by his telescope, and he has a great deal to be proud about.

Victor Buso and his 16″ Telescope (Credit: Nature)

Once Mister Buso realized what he’d discovered he quickly contacted the Instituto de Astrofisica de La Plata in Argentina and within hours astronomers around the world were hard at work learning everything they could about Buso’s supernova.

Examining the spectra of the SN 2016 gkg enabled an international team of astronomers to determine that the supernova is a type IIb. The spectra of this type of supernova is rich in hydrogen and is the violent death of a star calculated to be five times the mass of our sun.

There are several well-known stars in our night sky that could be headed toward the same end as SN 2016 gkg. Betelgeuse and Antares are large, very massive stars that are approaching the end of their nuclear fuel and it is believed that they will both become supernovas ‘sometime in the next million years’.

Right now however scientists do not know how to predict exactly when a star will go nova but a lot of progress has been made in the last twenty years. (See my post of 11January 2017) Hopefully Victor Buso’s discovery of SN 2016 gkg will provide more data for astro-physicists to check their current theories against, and to help them generate newer, more accurate models of supernovas.