Month: January 2024

Astronomy News for January 2024: Astronomers are finally beginning to learn something about Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

We all know that the cosmic zoo has many weird and wild inhabitants. In addition to the familiar stars, planets, moons, asteroids and comets there are quasars, black holes, neutron stars and brown dwarfs to name just a few. One of the least understood types of objects are known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) which were first discovered in 2007. FRBs are exactly what their name implies, extremely powerful radio emissions that only last for a few thousandths of a second.

Galaxies are just one kind of animal in the Cosmic zoo, but still there are many different types of them! Add in the black holes, supernova, pulsars and etc. and you get quite a plethora of different kinds of objects. (Credit: Futurism)

The fact that FRBs only last around a millisecond makes them very hard to study. Think about it; let’s say a radio astronomer is studying the Andromeda galaxy when out of nowhere, bam there’s a burst of radio energy that’s gone before he can react to it. Hopefully the scientist’s instruments have recorded something but there certainly wasn’t time to make any detailed measurements of the FRB.

A Fast Radio Burst (FRB) is exactly what it sounds like, a short but powerful emission of radio waves from somewhere across the Universe. Like a brief flash of light you see out of the corner of your eyes such things are obviously not easy to study. (Credit: Space.com)

For several years it was thought that FRBs were one offs, that is to say whatever object had generated an FRB would never generate another. Just a couple of years ago however the first repeating FRBs were identified and now it is thought that astronomers have identified about 50 repeating FRBs. The question then is whether all FRB sources are actually repeaters, although with different time scales.

Actual measured data from an FRB. (Credit: Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing)

Recognizing some FRBs as periodic has allowed radio astronomers to train their instruments on a known repeater and then just wait to catch the full event. Recently this technique has enabled astronomers to catch the furthest ever seen FRB at a distance of about 8 billion light years away. To be able to be heard from such an enormous distance the FRB, which has been given the designation FRB 20220610A, had to pack as much energy as our Sun emits in 30 years into a pulse less that one thousandth of a second.

Hubble Space Telescope image of the host galaxy of FRB 20220610A. Most of the other objects in this image are galaxies as well, each one a home to billions of stars. Makes ya feel kinda small! (Credit: Hubblesite.org)

Although there is a great deal that is still unknown about FRBs a consensus of opinion is growing that FRBs are generated by neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields known as magnetic-stars or magnetars. (See my post of 21November 2020 concerning neutron stars) Neutron stars are the remnants of big stars, at least 10 times the mass of our Sun, that have exploded as supernovas., Whatever is left, about the mass of our Sun, is crushed down to a size about 20-40km in diameter, becoming in a sense a big atomic nucleus made almost exclusively of neutrons. Even though astronomers have begun to agree on the source of FRBs however there was still a debate over how magnetars stars generated the radio outbursts, the two leading candidates being either something like a solar flare or some kind of starquake in the magnetar’s surface.

One theory for how FRBs are generated proposes that flares released by highly magnetic neutron stars (Magnetars) collide with matter released from previous flares. Some of the energy of that collision is emitted as intense radio waves. (Credit: CivilsDaily)

Recently a new study by Tomonori Totani and Yuya Tsuzuki at the University of Tokyo’s Department of Astronomy has compared the time and energy distribution of some 7,000 FRBs from those 50 repeating sources to seismic measurements of nearly 6,000 Earthquakes from Japan. What the two found was several similarities between the two sets of data, especially when it came to aftershocks. In summary the similarities were:

1. The probability for an aftershock occurring was 10-50%

2. The probability for an aftershock decreased with time as a power of time.

3. The probability for an aftershock remains constant even as the mean rate of the original FRB changes.

4. There is no correlation between the energies of the main FRB and any aftershocks.

We’re all aware of the power of an Earthquake. Just imagine such a thing happening on a neutron star! (Credit: New Straights Times)

On the other hand the astronomers found no relationship between FRBs and solar flares. This analysis strongly suggests that FRBs are generated by starquakes on the surface of magnetars. If that is true then we may be able to use the data from FRBs to help us better understand these ultra-dense onjects.

Almost beyond imagination is the idea of a quake on an object as massive as our Sun yet as small as a city. (Credit: Scienceline)

Doctors Totani and Tsuzuki intend to continue their analysis, hoping that further measurements from more FRBs may tell us more about FRBs and the weird cosmic wonders that generate them.

Paleontology News for January 2024

Two discoveries from the age of the dinosaurs along with a more recent one that straddles the borderline between paleontology and anthropology headline this post. As usual I begin with the oldest and work forward in time.

In a very real sense the science of paleontology began on England’s south coast, the famous Jurassic Coast. (Credit: Pinterest)

England’s southern coast is one of the most famous and important fossil areas in the world, in many ways that is where the very science of paleontology got it’s start. At the eastern end the ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ are made of chalk from the cretaceous period, indeed the whole cretaceous period is named for the Latin word for chalk because of those cliffs. The west end of England’s south coast is also well know for it’s fossils from the Triassic period, the dawn of the age of the dinosaurs.

The ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ are actually the shells of untold billions of microscopic plankton. In other words one big fossil bed. (Credit: Enjoy Travel)

It’s the middle of the southern shore, the co-called Jurassic coast that includes the Isle of Wight that is most famous for its fossils however. It’s here that during a walk along the water’s edge that fossil enthusiast Phil Jacobs noticed the tip of a snout lying on the ground beneath a cliff. Realizing that the snout must have just eroded out of the cliff face Jacobs secured the bones and quickly got his friend Steve Etches to help him see if there were more of the animal’s bones still in the cliff. Thus they began a difficult and dangerous excavation that took several months but by the end the two fossil hunters had succeeded in finding a 2 meter long skull of a Pliosaur, the apex predator of the Jurassic oceans some 150 million years ago.

The killer whales of the Jurassic seas even in a drawing the Pliosaur is a fearsome beast. (Credit: Oceans of Kansas Paleontology)

Although the fossil still has to be thoroughly studied in detail it appears that the skull is the most complete ever found of a Pliosaur and based upon the size of the skull in life the animal would have been 10-12 meters in length. The jaws contained 130 teeth, long and razor sharp and the muscle attachment points on the skull indicate that the creature could have had a biting force of 33,000 Newtons, twice that of a saltwater crocodile, the strongest bite in the world today, all in all a real sea monster.

The 2 meter long skull removed from a Dorset cliff side . The fossil hunters who removed it are certain that the rest of the animal is still buried in that cliff. (Credit: Daily Mail)

And that skull will be revealed to the world in a BBC special, hosted by David Attenborough no less. The special is scheduled for New Year’s day in the UK and hopefully will be seen soon thereafter in the rest of the world. Best of all, Jacobs and Etches are certain that the rest of the animal is still in that cliff awaiting excavation. Maybe the money and notoriety generated by the special will enable them to dig out the rest of this extraordinary beast.

Still hanging in there at age 97, and still curious about life here on Earth Sir Davis Attenborough will host a BBC special about the Pliosaur find. (Credit: The Times)

And speaking of apex predators paleontologists at the University of Calgary and the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology have announced the discovery of a juvenile specimen of Gorgosaurus libratus, a relative of the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, with the contents of its stomach, its last meals intact. The specimen itself is about 75 million years old and is thought to have been between 5 and 7 years old at its death. In life the animal would have weighed some 350 kg, stood as tall as a tall man while measuring more than four meters from its nose to the tip of its tail.

Perhaps not a large as it’s cousin T rex, Gorgosaurus libratus was probably equally as deadly. (Credit: Carnivora)

What makes this specimen so interesting however are the bones found inside the animal’s stomach, four drumsticks from another type of birdlike dinosaur called Citipes, each of whom would have been about the size of a modern turkey. The bones were articulated, in other words they hadn’t been broken up by chewing, and one pair appears to have been more digested than the other so they may be the animal’s last two meals. Also, there is no evidence for the rest of the bodies of the Citipes but it’s unlikely that a meat eater like G libratus wouldn’t have eaten the rest of its prey if it could.

The fossil bones of a young G libratus including it’s last meal, red inset. (Credit: Sci.news)

Previous finds of young Tyrannosaurids have indicated that they were actually more slender, more agile and quick-footed than the bone crushing monsterous adults and the G libratus specimen fits in that picture. The animal’s last meal (s) also contributes to that idea because Citipes were rather small and fast animals themselves, so the young G libratus would have had to be a fast predator to catch them. A very different creature from the heavily muscled giants they grew up to be.

An ugly chicken the size of a turkey, the dinosaur Citipes was the last meal of a young Gorgosaur. (Credit: The Wall Street Journal)

Finally today I like to discuss a new study from the Aarhus University in Denmark that lies on the border between paleontology and anthropology. The study considers again the question of what caused the extinction of the large ice-age mammals like mammoths, mastodons, cave bears, Irish elk and etc. As a group these animals are known as the mega-fauna which is defined as any species that weighs more than 44 kg when fully grown. For decades now the debate has raged over whether these species died out because of climate change, the ice ages, or were they hunted to extinction by our ancestors.

Nearly as large and impressive as the dinosaurs they replaced the Mega-Fauna of the ice ages disappeared at just about the time that we humans began spreading around the World. Coincidence????? (Credit: Pinterest)

The study examined DNA from 139 large species still alive today such as elephants, rhinos, oxen, cattle, deer, kangaroos and even our cousins the great apes. What the researchers found was that over the last 800,000 years the populations of large animals had remained fairly stable even while the polar ice caps grew and then receded about every 100,000 years. Then, just about 50,000 years ago the populations of even those species that still survive showed a marked decline, at just the time when mammoths and the others went extinct. If the populations had stayed steady for over 700,000 years of climate change it is very unlikely that climate caused the sudden population loss.

Perhaps the three best known remaining mega-fauna Elephants, Hippos and Rhinos are all in danger of being driven to extinction by human beings. (Credit: Quora)

More than that, the precise timing of the population drop always coincided with the period when archaeology indicates that the first humans entered the area. If correct it seems more likely than not that our species destruction of the environment isn’t a recent development but rather has been a part of our nature from the start.

Book Review: ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ by Ray Nayler 

One subject that appears quite often in Science Fiction novels and stories is the difficulty of trying to establish communication with an alien intelligent lifeform. In H. G. Wells’ ‘The First Men in the Moon’ Doctor Cavour tries to communicate with the Selenites by starting with geometric shapes, all intelligent creatures would recognize them after all. The same technique was used in the novel ‘Planet of the Apes’ (Of course in the movie they skipped that whole problem by having the apes speak perfect English!).

In the novel ‘The First Men in the Moon’ by H. G. Wells the Moon People, Selenites, are depicted as being somewhat like social insects. Dr. Cavour tries to communicate with them by starting with geometry, which he thinks is universal. Problem with that is social insects, at least here on Earth, mostly communicate by scents not speech or pictures. (Credit: Deviant Art)

Some SF stories use a shortcut to get past this difficulty. In ‘The Day the Earth stood Still’ the alien Klaatu speaks perfect English because his people have been monitoring our radio and TV broadcasts while in the old ‘Star Trek’ series the crew of the Enterprise had a “Universal Translator” that allowed conversation with all kinds of alien lifeforms. The main plot of the recent movie ‘Arrival’ (2016) was actually about the problem of learning how to communicate with aliens.

In ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ the alien Klaatu spoke English the moment he stepped out of his saucer because his people had been monitoring out radio and TV broadcasts. (Credit: IMDb)

The new novel ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ by Ray Nayler is also concerned with learning to communicate with an alien intelligence but this one is not extraterrestrial, and if you’re thinking chimpanzees or dolphins you’re wrong. The aliens in ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ are our planet’s most intelligent invertebrates, octopuses.

Cover art for ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ by Ray Nayler. (Credit: Amazon)
Author Ray Nayler looking rather dapper. (Credit: Poets and Writers)

Set in the near future Doctor Ha Nguyen has been studying octopuses and other cephalopods her entire career. She has been sent to the island of Con Dao by a multi-billion dollar, International Corporation named DIANIMA to study the local octopus population in an effort to determine if they are beginning to develop the basics of a primitive culture. DIANIMA has turned the island into a into a nature preserve in order to protect the intelligent octopuses in a world on the brink of environmental collapse due to climate change, overfishing etc, etc. The only two other inhabitants of Con Dao are Altantseseg who is in charge of security for the preserve and Evrim, the world’s first, and by law only, android.

Much of the action in ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ takes place on the Island of Con Dao off the coast of Vietnam. Looks like a nice place to me!!! (Credit: Travopo)

Of course the octopuses have developed not just the beginnings of culture but have a well developed language consisting of symbols that they cause to appear on their skin. Remember octopuses, along with other cephalopods, use chromatophores in their skin for camouflage. At the same time they can alter the very texture of their skin making it smooth like a stone or rough like sand or even bumpy like a piece of coral. In addition to a sophisticated language the octopuses in ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ have also mastered the making of primitive tools from sea shells and coral entering what Dr. Nguyen christens their ‘Sea Shell Age’.

Octopuses are well documented for their ability to figure out how to solve puzzles such as opening containers to get at the food we put inside. They are considered to be the most intelligent of all invertebrates but it is also recognized to be a form of intelligence quite different from our own! (Credit: The Universe of Discourse)

It’s the work of Dr. Nguyen that is the central portion of ‘The Mountain in the Sea. Her discussions with the Android Evrim about the difficulty of understanding a creature with such different senses than we have are the crux of the story. Despite evolving on the same planet as us octopuses are true aliens with no real hard parts for structure, with eight tentacles, each of which has a rudimentary brain of its own and can behave semi-independently. In many ways they are creatures whose ‘umwelt’ see my post about the book ‘Immense World’ by Ed Yong, whose mental view of the world is so much different from our own. At the same time I have a feeling that the character of the android Evrim was added into the novel in order to show how difficult it could be to understand and communicate with a creature of our own making.

The book ‘Immense World’ by Ed Yong is a wonderful exploration of the different type of senses that exist in the animal kingdom, many very different from ours. (Credit: X.com)

This subject of other animals here on Earth having the beginnings of culture is actually a hot topic right now. Over the last several decades considerable evidence has been discovered indicating different speech patterns, let’s not quite call it language, among different populations of dolphins, those in the Atlantic ocean as opposed to those in the Pacific or Indian oceans. The same appears to be true between Orcas who live close to the shorelines of the continents versus those who live in the deep ocean. And most interesting of all may be the fact that different populations of Chimpanzees in different areas of Africa not only differ in their vocal calls but even differ in their use of tools! (See my post of 16 March 2019).

It was Jane Goodall who first documented the use of tools by Chimpanzees. Now we recognize that our cousins not only have the beginnings of culture but they actually have several distinct cultures in different parts of Africa. (Credit: BBC Wildlife)

There are subplots in ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ as well. The island is closely guarded by Altantseseg using a variety of lethal drones because of poachers who try to invade the reserve in order to plunder its resources, mainly fish. There is also another entity, corporation or nation state, which is trying to perform a hostile takeover of DIANIMA for unknown reasons. In fact some parts of ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ are almost written like a spy novel or conspiracy theory.

In the news nowadays we often hear about drones being used as weapons in Ukraine or Gaza. Such military use of drones is a large part of the action sequences in ‘The Mountain in the Sea’. (Credit: Drone Elevations)

For the most part however ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ is a story about what it means to be an intelligent creature, to have a culture, a civilization. Because of that ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ is not an exciting book, not a novel for those who are looking for a lot of action. It’s a thought provoking book and when it sticks to that aspect of its story it does a good job. The spy stuff or the poacher part falls kind of flat however. Really ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ could have used one more edit to try to tighten up what are supposed to the action sections.

In ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ an old Octopus is telling stories to a group of young octopuses just as Homer must have told his tales to his audience. Such is the beginnings of culture. (Credit: The Imaginative Conservative)

Nevertheless ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ is worth reading, both for its viewpoint on the harm we’re doing to our fellow creatures here on Earth as for its thoughts on communication.

The Experimental Physics Community here in the United States has issued its Christmas Wish List of experiments to be funded over the next decade.

Every decade or so physicists here in the US submit their wish lists of the experiments they would like to see funded by the Federal Government through the Department of Energy via that department’s High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP). Gone are the days when all Galileo had to do to advance science was to drop a couple of balls from the leaning tower of Pisa or all Ben Franklin had to do was go fly a kite. Today Big Science takes Big Money and much of that comes from the approximately one billion dollars that Washington spends on High Energy Physics (HEP).

One of the most famous experiments of all time, Galileo’s dropping two balls of different weights from the leaning tower of Pisa only required the two balls to perform. Those days are long gone as experimental physics gets more expensive every day. (Credit: SlidePlayer)

Taking input from hundreds of physicists a panel convened by the American Physical Society’s Division of Particle’s and Fields (DPF) drew up a wish list of experiments that, in their opinion, should be funded in order to provide the most science for the dollar. This panel, known as the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5), was chaired by the distinguished physicist Hitoshi Murayama of the University of California at Berkeley. On December the eighth the panel released its report to both the Department of Energy and the public.

How would you like the job of listening to what a couple of thousand people want and then trying to figure out what’s the most they’re all likely to get. That’s what Hitoshi Murayama here got to do for the P5 Wish list. (Credit: Kavli IPMU)

In the report the P5 panel called for the continued funding of projects now under construction or undergoing upgrades. These experiments include the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), see my post of 30 July 2017, which it is hoped will finally give us an accurate measurement of the neutrino’s mass. Another neutrino experiment is the ICE CUBE neutrino telescope at the South Pole which just this year gave us our first image of what the Milky Way galaxy looks like, in neutrinos, see my post of 19 August 2023 Physicists hope that the planned expansion of ICE CUBE will reveal even more secrets of what the Universe looks like when you see it using neutrinos rather than light.

IN the DUNE experiment Fermi-Lab outside of Chicago will fire subatomic neutrinos, underground at a detector in South Dakota. By analyzing how many and what type of neutrinos get detected physicists hope to get a better measurement of the rest mass of these ‘ghost particles’. (Credit: www.dunescience.org)

Finally the US should continue its contribution to the major upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland. This upgrade is intended to increase the ‘luminosity’, that is the number of particles in the collider beam in order to obtain more events. This upgrade will increase the precision of the LHC’s measurements, hopefully pointing the way to new physics.

Although CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is located in Europe the US does contribute to the operation and upgrade of this, the world’s largest and most expensive scientific instrument. (Credit: Forbes)

Of course the exciting part of the P5 report is the new experiments that are being proposed for funding. These include a small project entitled DarkSide-20K that is hoped to reveal some of the secrets of Dark Matter. Another such project is Belle II that will examine more closely the decay paths of the particles created in particle colliders.

Front Cover of the P5 Report, Physics’ wish list for the next ten years. (Credit: US Particle Physics)

But perhaps the most exciting long term project will be the initial design concept of a new American particle collider that will surpass the LHC in energy. You see one of the problems with the LHC that it uses protons in its collisions. Protons however are themselves made up of three smaller particles called quarks so when you smash two protons what actually happens is that a quark from each of the protons collide. Because of that you only get one third the available energy that gets turned into new particles. The other four quarks don’t get involved in the collision so two-thirds of the energy is kind of wasted.

A Feynman diagram of what happens in a Proton-Proton collision. You’ll notice that only one quark in each of the protons actually takes part in the reaction so really two-thirds of the energy is simply wasted. (Credit: Physics Forums)

One way of getting all the energy is to use a true elementary particle like the electron. Because of their small mass however an electron collider with the same energy as LHC would have to be thousands of kilometers in diameter, a project that would simply cost too much. One option that is being proposed is to use the electron’s heavier cousin the muon. Muons don’t survive very long however so there’s a lot of work to be done deciding exactly which way to go.

The Lepton family of elementary particles. The electron is the easiest particle to work with, all of electronics is based upon it, but they are so light that they are not best suited for a particle accelerator. The Muon would be a better choice because it is 200 times as massive as an electron but they decay into electrons in about one millionth of a second. (Credit: YouTube)

Another exciting possibility is the use of a new technology in particle acceleration, the Wakefield accelerator in which charged particles are propelled by an ionized plasma like a surfboard by a wave. The advantage of the Wakefield accelerator is that it requires much less distance to achieve the same amount of acceleration. Ever since the first atom-smasher was built particle accelerators have gotten bigger and bigger, and more expensive with each increase in size. The construction and operation of the LHC costs as much as fighting a small war, which is why dozens of countries share the expense. It is hoped that the use of Wakefield accelerators could reverse this trend but as with any new technology there is still much to be learned about them in order to both make the maximum use of their advantages while overcoming their shortfalls. The P5 report requests about $10 million dollars to fund a preliminary design for the new particle accelerator that will address these issues.

It’s hoped that the new, Wakefield type of accelerator mechanism will reduce the size, and hence cost of particle accelerators but a great deal of research still needs to be carried out to really understand the technique. (Credit: American Physical Society)

Now, all of that is dependent upon the amount of funding that comes from the Federal Government through the Department of Energy. It is expected that Congress will give HEPAP a 3% increase over last year’s funding which would basically offset inflation. That’s assuming of course that Congress gets its act together and actually manages to pass a budget. With all the fighting going on in Washington it’s hard to see that coming to pass any time soon.

All spending for science, not just physics, accounts for only 2% of the federal budget. Is it any wonder that we’ve lost ground compared to countries like China that are investing in the future? (Credit: YouTube)

It used to be that the US led the world in Big Science. We always had the biggest particle accelerator, the biggest telescopes, and the biggest plasma reactor, none of that is true anymore, see my post of 28 June 2017. The technology we enjoy today came from that Big Science we conducted back in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. We simply need to invest more in the future if we expect to have any.