Every individual from nearly every species of animal must from time to time interact with other members of its own species. The most important reason for such contacts is surely procreation but there are countless others such as safety in numbers, hunting in packs or even just agreeing upon separate territories so as to minimize the number of interactions. In all of these contacts there must be some form of communication in order to facilitate the outcome of the meeting.
The annual Red Crab migration on Christmas Island. Even usually solitary animals like these still have to interact with their fellows on occasion. (Credit: Parks Australia)
We humans of course have the best, most versatile form of communication, language but we know that the howling of monkeys, the songs of birds and the barking of dogs are simpler, courser forms of language. At the same time we wonder if some of nature’s other most intelligent species, dolphins or chimpanzees for example, may have languages approaching ours in complexity. Over the past fifty years or so there have been numerous studies to try to ‘talk with the animals’ as Doctor Doolittle would say.
Rex Harrison as the original, and still the best Doctor Dolittle. He taught the parrot to speak English and the parrot taught him to speak animal. (Credit: DiscDish)
Recently an experiment in communicating with humpback whales has been carried out by a group of researchers from the University of California at Davis, the Alaska Whale Foundation along with the SETI Institute. Humpbacks are well known to communicate with each other using long songs that seem to repeat themselves with slight variations and that can travel for thousands of kilometers in the ocean.
Researchers with UC Davis, the Alaska Whale Foundation and SETI succeeded in carrying on a ‘conversation’ with a wild Humpback Whale for 20 minutes. We’re not quite certain what the conversation was about but the whale seemed to enjoy it. (Credit: YouTube)
What the team did was to take a boat out to an area of the ocean where humpbacks were known to be and played a recording of a humpback song that was well established as a form of greeting. The humans then waited for a response from one of the whales. They didn’t have to wait for long as a humpback who had been given the name of Twain not only replied to the call but approached the boat and began circling it.
No, we haven’t gotten there just yet, but it sounds like an interesting book! (Credit: Amazon.com)
The researchers then began playing other recorded whale calls and each time Twain replied with a different call of his own. Now the scientists had only the vaguest idea of what their calls actually meant in the humpback language, let alone what Twain’s replies meant but they still managed to continue the ‘conversation’ for about twenty minutes.
Considering all the problems we have communicating with other humans it’s gonna take a while before we’re really talking to animals. (Credit: English Tips)
While a twenty-minute exchange of only half understood messages can hardly be considered a ‘communications breakthrough’ it is nevertheless data that can be analyzed by the mathematical principles known as information theory. And with each additional such encounter scientists will learn a little bit more about how to communicate with the other intelligent creatures that share our world with us.
The gorilla Koko became famous for being able to speak in sign language. Just how well she understood language is still controversial but she certainly represented a major step forward in animal communication. (Credit: The Franklin Institute)
Another interesting point about the study is the inclusion of the SETI or Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence Institute, an organization dedicated to seeking out intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, not here on Earth. However the people at SETI recognize that learning how to communicate, or even just being able to recognize an attempt at communication with non-human life here on Earth will help them to better find and contact alien intelligences. Slowly we humans are coming to understand the other intelligences here on Earth and one day soon we’ll be having real conversations with them.
The SETI institute is usually concerned with communicating with Extra-Terrestrials but they are also interested in communicating with non-human life forms here on Earth. (Credit: The Indian Express)
However, as I said above the most important reason living creatures have for interacting with members of their own species is mating, producing offspring to keep the species going, sex! Now we all know that the many different species here on Earth have quite a variety of different ways to have sex. Some species of fish for example gather in large numbers of both genders and then just release both their eggs and sperm into the water knowing that most of the eggs will get fertilized by somebody’s sperm. Many plants actually use an intermediary like a bee to carry their pollen from one flower to another so that fertilization can occur. The only set rule of mating is that, if it works it works.
When coral spawn they simply release their eggs and sperm into the water. Some of the eggs get fertilized, many don’t. It works for them however, they’ve been here at least half a billion years. (Credit: CoralGardening)
It was thought that all mammals basically had sex the same way we humans do. The male’s penis penetrates the female’s vagina where it releases the male’s sperm in order to fertilize the female’s egg. Certainly dogs, horses, whales and even egg laying mammals like the platypus do it that way.
It was thought that all mammals, even dolphins and whales, mated pretty much the same way that we humans do. The male penetrates the female leaving his sperm inside her to fertilize her eggs. (Credit: YouTube)
Now however a new study from the journal Current Biology has called that assumption into question for one large group of mammals, the bats, based upon videos taken in a church steeple in the Netherlands. The species of bat in the study is known as serotine bats who are native to a wide area of both Europe and Asia. Since bats are nocturnal and often live in hard to access places not a great deal is known about their mating habits in general and the serotine bats in particular were considered mysterious. You see the penis of the male serotine bat was simply too large to fit inside the female’s vagina!
Unlike mammals, when most species of birds mate there is no penetration by the male. Instead he simply spits his sperm at her vagina and enough of it gets in to cause fertilization. (Credit: Shutterstock)
So researchers, led by Dr. Nicholas Fasel filmed hundreds of hours of the bats in the steeple of an Old Dutch church where they succeeded in catching several instances of the bats mating. What they found was that serotine bats mate by simply touching their genitals together in a manner similar to the way most species of birds mate, not mammals. This finding raises the question of whether other bats have sex the same way, quite a few species are known to have oddly shaped if not oversized penises.
In Serotine bats the male’s penis is fully seven times larger than the female’s vagina making what we consider normal copulation difficult if not impossible. The recent study has concluded that Serotine bats copulate in the same fashion as bird’s do. (Credit: Daily Mail)
So if serotine bats mate by just touching their genitals then why do the males have such large penises? Well, Dr. Fasel points out that the female serotine bat has evolved a flap of their leathery wing as a covering for their vagina in order to prevent an unwanted male from being able to mate with them. He theorizes that perhaps the male has evolved his large penis as a means of pushing that flap out of the way. In other words we may be witnessing a literal battle of the sexes in evolution.
The Battle of the sexes is even a standard problem in Game Theory. The best solution is to do something together. (Credit: Springer Link)
All of which shows that when it comes to interactions between members of the same species nature keeps coming up with odd and interesting ways of doing things.
Most people I suppose have never heard of Arno A. Penzias, but everyone has heard of the Big Bang Theory, the idea that about 14 billion years ago, give or take a couple hundred million, the entire Universe underwent an unimaginable explosion and the expansion caused by that explosion continues today. Well it was Doctor Penzias, along with his colleague Robert W. Wilson who provided the first actual evidence that the Big Bang really happened.
Robert W. Wilson, left, and Arno Penzias, Bell Lab employees who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics, are shown standing in front of their microwave antenna at Bell Labs in Holmdel, N.J., Oct. 17, 1978. (AP Photo)
The story of Doctor Penzias contains within it several of the themes that often occur in both science and human history at large. Arno Penzias was born in 1933 in Munich, Germany to Jewish parents. If you can imagine a worse place and time for a Jewish boy to enter the world, well I can’t. Arno was lucky however for he and his brother were part of a British program that brought 10,000 Jewish children out of Nazi Germany just before World War 2 began. Later Arno’s parents also succeeded in escaping Germany and the whole family arrived in America in 1940. Arno was therefore one of the very large number of talented scientists who came to America and who made their discoveries here after fleeing Nazi tyranny.
From Left, Neils Bohr, James Franck, Albert Einstein and Isidor Rabi. Four Nobel Physicists who came to America to escape persecution in Europe. Actually Rabi’s parents fled to America, he was born here but you get the idea! (Credit: Arkiv.org)
Interested in science from an early age Arno first intended to become a chemist but switched majors to Physics while attending the City College of New York. Arno would eventually receive his Ph.D. in 1962. Even before becoming a Doctor however, in 1961 Arno accepted a job on the project that would lead to his greatest discovery.
After WW2 the GI Bill and a booming economy allowed a huge increase in the number of young Americans who attended college. (Credit: Old Magazine Articles)
In the early 1960s Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey was one of the centers for ‘space age’ technology. The transistor had been invented there, as had the Laser. Communications satellites were the next big thing and indeed Telstar; the first communications satellite was built at Bell Labs. The engineers who were designing Telstar needed to know, once their satellite was up in orbit, what kind of radio sources there were in the Universe at large that could cause static interference with Telstar.
Bell Labs in Holmdel N.J. circa 1060 when Arno Penzias would have started working there. (Credit: Reddit)
That was the job that Arno Penzias and his colleague Robert Wilson were assigned, survey the entire sky at microwave frequencies and catalogue all of the radio sources that could cause problems for communications satellites. To accomplish their task Penzias and Wilson used the brand new Holmdel Horn antenna, especially designed for communicating with satellites and at the time one of the largest radio antennas on Earth. With such a powerful instrument in their hands the two physicists were determined to not just survey and catalogue radio sources, but to study them as well.
In the early days of Radio Astronomy measurements were used to develop contour maps of radio sources like this one of the center of the Milky Way. (Credit: ResearchGate)
As the two men carried out their survey they quickly ran up against an annoying, so they thought, little problem. No matter where they pointed their antenna, no matter when, there was always a persistent background hiss that they couldn’t get rid of. The hiss didn’t come from any source, it was everywhere, so they initially thought it had to be man made noise from something nearby. Working methodically the two men eliminated radar from nearby airports as the cause, noise from many sources coming from nearby New York City even the possibility of radiation from nuclear tests. One of their efforts to eliminate the noise has become something of a anecdote in physics departments. Noticing that several pigeons were nesting inside the big horn antenna they wondered if the bird’s droppings could be the cause of the hiss so they gave the entire horn a through clean out. No good, the noise remained.
In our modern world there are all sorts of things, both natural and man-made, that can generate radio noise that will interfere with communications. (Credit: IQS Directory)
Looking through the literature for some idea as to what could be going on they came across a paper written by physicists George Gamow and Ralph Alpher about how the Big Bang, if it had actually happened, should have left behind a measurable amount of heat, the way a frying pan on your stove stays warm for a while after you turn off the burner. After billions of years Gamow and Alpher calculated that residual heat would now be observable in the microwave region, just where Penzias and Wilson’s hiss was. (For more information on George Gamow and the prediction of the CMB see my post of 30 October 2021.)
The first prediction of a Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in the November 1948 issue of the journal Nature. (Credit: TheCuriousAstronomer)
Since Gamow and Alpher were teaching in Colorado and Texas respectively Penzias and Wilson decided to contact physicist Robert Dicke at nearby Princeton University. In another of those coincidences that no one could ever imagine Dicke and his students were actually planning on looking for the CMB and were gathering up the equipment they’d need to look for it. As remembered by Nobel Prize winner James Peebles, a graduate student of Dicke’s at that time he was in his mentor’s office when the call came from Wilson. “We’ve been scooped!” Dicke said as he put down the phone.
From right, Robert Dicke, Jim Peebles along with physicist David Wilkinson in their lab at Princeton University. (Credit: Nobel Prize)
That was in 1964 and the news of the discovery of the CMB spread quickly turning the subject of cosmology from a few people working on a few ideas to a major study on which thousands of researchers around the world are working. Penzias and Wilson were awarded with the 1978 Nobel Prize for their discovery. The moral of this story is to keep alert, if some unknown factor is effecting your measurements don’t just ignore it, find out what it is. Like Rontgen and the discovery of X-rays, sometimes that unknown factor is more important than the thing you started out trying to study. In both cases the scientists became famous for discovering something they never even planned on looking for.
Penzias and Wilson saw the CMB as a constant everywhere they looked but today’s measurements, from the Planck satellite, show a very small variation in the temperature. These variations form the seeds out of which today’s galaxies and stars would form. (Credit: New Scientist)
Arno A. Penzias died on the 22nd of January at an assisted living facility in San Francisco. His death was due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease. There were a huge number of major scientific discoveries made during the 20th Century; Arno A. Penzias’ discovery that ‘the Universe began, not with a whimper but with Bang’ may have been the biggest.
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.
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.
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.
Many creatures in the natural world build structures, Bees build their hives, many birds build nests and Beavers build their lodges. Human beings however have rebuilt the world with all of our structures. It’s not surprising therefore that much of the work of archaeologists concerns human structures, how and why they were built.
Bower Bird males build some of the most incredible nests and then they decorate the entrances with basically whatever they can find. All to attract a female for mating. (Credit: Alamy)
The first structure I’ll discuss today is a very well known one, perhaps the best known of all the prehistoric structures, Stonehenge in England. Much has already been written about this most famous of stone circles so I’ll just mention a few points of importance for today’s story.
We’ve learned a lot about Stonehenge over the last century but that hasn’t taken away the sense of mystery from these ancient ruins! (Credit: HistoryExtra)
Begun about the year 2200BCE Stonehenge was initially a circular trench dug into the soil with the excavated earth forming a circular henge inside the trench. It wasn’t until some 500 years later that the first stones were brought to the site and placed inside the earthen ring. These first stones are known as ‘Bluestones’, each weighing about 5 metric tonnes that were brought from the Mynydd Preseli region of western Wales, a full 290 kilometers from Stonehenge. See my post of 27 February 2019. How stone aged men managed to transport these large stones such a great distance is still a subject of controversy.
One of the techniques proposed by modern archaeologists for how the big Sarsen stones of Stonehenge were transported. (Credit: Bradshaw Foundation)And once the ancient Britons got the stones to the site of Stonehenge they then had to erect them! (Credit: English Heritage)
The larger ‘Sarsen Stones’, some weighing as much as 55 metric Tonnes, were brought to the site around the year 1500 BCE. While these massive rocks came from a much closer location just some 25 kilometers to the north bringing them to the Stonehenge site must still have required the cooperation of hundreds if not thousands of people indicating a society with considerable organization.
The Heel stone at Stonehenge lies a distance outside the main ring of the stone circle but from inside it aligns with the rising of the sun on the summer solstice, the first day of summer. (Credit: Daily Mail)The rising of the Sun on the first day of summer as seen from the center of Stonehenge. You can understand why the ancient Britons built this wonderful place. (Credit: EarthSky)
Several of the individual stones at Stonehenge have been given special names such as the Heel stone, which sits away from the other stones near the entrance to the original, and the slaughter stone, so named because early archaeologists thought it could have been used for human sacrifice. Both of these stones are Sarsen stones.
The Altar stone at Stonehenge, so named because of its placement in the circle and its lying flat on the ground. But was it actually used as an altar, we can only guess? (Credit: The Stones of Stonehenge)
One of the Bluestones also has a special name, the Altar stone, so named because the other Bluestones seem to orient towards it as if it were the place where certain ceremonies were enacted. Now a new study by researchers at the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University in the UK have questioned whether the Altar stone is in fact a Bluestone after all. For one thing, although the Altar stone is about the same size and shape as the Bluestones the others are primarily igneous rocks while the Altar stone is made of sandstone. Now there are sandstone deposits near the quarry in Whales were the Bluestones came from and it has long been thought that was the Altar stone’s source.
This outcropping of rocks in Wales has been chemically demonstrated to be the actual quarry where the Stonehenge Bluestones came from some 290 km from the site of Stonehenge. (Credit: The Sun)
The new study conducted several different analysis of the material of the Altar stone including Ramen Spectroscopy, XRF analysis, optical petrography and SEM-EDS analysis. What the researchers found was that the Altar stone had a significantly higher level of the element Barium than the stones from the Welsh quarry, so it definitely did not come from the same place as the other Bluestones.
The study of racks and minerals using different forms of light, optical petrography, can not only tell you a great deal about the rocks but can be very beautiful as well. (Credit: YouTube)
Where did the Altar stone come from, no one knows. So now the hunt is on to try to find the geographic source of the Altar stone. At the same time archaeologists now have to try to understand why that particular stone, from wherever it came from, was brought to Stonehenge. Now we have yet another mystery to add to all the mysteries surrounding Stonehenge.
A clan of Homo erectus, our ancestors half a million years ago. There is a great deal of evidence that H erectus used fire and hunted as shown in this artist’s drawing but the hut in the center? New evidence does indicate that H erectus may have built structures as well! (Credit: Fine Art in America)
The second structure in the news recently may not be as famous as Stonehenge but it is certainly much older, in fact at an estimated age of 475,000 years old it may be the earliest wooden structure known have to been built by humans. In fact the structure wasn’t built by our species Homo sapiens but probably by our ancestral species Homo erectus.
It just two pieces of wood lying together but those pieces have been worked with stone tools so as to fit together making them the oldest known wooden construction made by human beings. (Credit: The Guardian)
The wood was discovered in the sands at the bottom of the river beneath the Kalambo falls in Zambia not far from the border with Tanzania by archaeologists from the University of Liverpool and the University of Aberystwyth. The location had been studied by archaeologists ever since the 1950s and pieces of wood that shows signs of having been worked by humans have been found there before. Those artifacts included sticks used for digging, the hafts of spears and wood used to build fires. The wooden pieces from the riverbed were preserved because they had been essentially ‘pickled’ by the acidic water of the river.
The Kalambo Falls in Kenya are not only very beautiful but the area around them are an archaeological treasure for the study of our ancient ancestors. (Credit: Tanzania Tourism)
The new find however consists of two much larger wooden logs, each about 2m long, which had been worked by stone tools in such a way as to fit together in a ‘T’ shape. The archaeologists who found the logs think that the wooden T probably served either as a foundation for either a dwelling of some kind or more likely an earthen platform from which to fish in the river.
Tom Sawyer knew that fishing was better off of a wooden platform. So apparently did Homo erectus. (Credit: Amazon.com)
Unlike earlier pieces of wood from beneath the falls the team was able to get a more precise date on the logs by using a new dating technique known as luminescence dating. This technique depends on the fact that grains of sand will pick up natural radioactivity from the environment over time. By heating up those grains and analyzing the light they emit their age can be determined. Luminescence dating is quickly becoming an important tool in archaeology and paleontology because it is able to measure the age of objects that are too old to be determined by Carbon14 but too young to use Potassium-Argon dating.
Luminescence dating can be used to determine how long grains of soil have been buried away from the light of the Sun. (Credit: Geographisches Institut)
The find in Zambia pushes back in time the date of the first known use of wood to build structures showing that even our remote ancestor were capable of innovation and invention.
Quit a lot happened in space this past month for both manned and robotic missions. While I usually start with the manned missions this month the Lucy space probe made an interesting and surprising discovery so I’ll begin there.
The Lucy probe, launched back on the 16th of October in 2021, is on a mission to study the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter beginning in 2027. For a description of the Trojan asteroids see my post of 6 January 2017. Before reaching the Trojans however Lucy was scheduled to pass by a small main belt asteroid named Dinkinesh, which means, “you are marvelous” in the Amharic language of Ethiopia. It was during the planning for the mission that the engineers at Goddard Space Center decided that Dinkinesh would represent a good opportunity to test Lucy’s cameras and other sensors so the small asteroid was added to the list of asteroids Lucy would study making a total of eight planned flybys at launch.
The Lucy probe compared to a human being. Those are some really big solar arrays. They’re needed because the sunlight out at the orbit of Jupiter is much weaker than here near Earth. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Turns out that studying Dinkinesh was a great idea because as Lucy passed by on the first of November the images sent back by the probe showed that the small asteroid, about 790m in diameter, had an even smaller moon orbiting around it. While pleased with the surprising discovery the technicians controlling Lucy at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab were equally satisfied at the performance of Lucy’s Terminal Tracking System and it’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. Having successfully encountered Dinkinesh Lucy is now ready to begin its prime mission of studying Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.
A flyby of the Near Earth Object (NEO) Dinkinesh was intended to be just a test of the probe’s equipment but it turned out to be a nice discovery as a tiny satellite asteroid was orbiting the rather small itself, main asteroid. (Credit: Space.com)
Closer to Earth China has successfully carried out a crew exchange at their Tiangong space station. The station, which is smaller than the International Space Station (ISS), is normally crewed by three taikonauts (as China calls its astronauts). For the past six months it had been the crew of China’s Shenzhou-16 manned mission who had occupied Tiangong but on 26 October China launched the Shenzhou-17 mission from its space port on the isle of Xinhau. A day later Shenzhou-17 docked at Tiangong allowing the Shenzhou-16 crew to return home to Earth, which they did successfully on the 31st of October.
Image of the Shenzhou-17 spacecraft docking with the Tiangong space station. (Credit: Kalkine Media)
Keep in mind the fact that both NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos have carried out dozens of such crew exchanges at the ISS over the last two decades. The fact that China is now keeping its space station manned so smoothly and professionally however is a testament to how far China’s manned space program has come.
Humanity now has two Manned Space Stations orbiting the Earth. (Credit: YouTube)
Two other news items may tell us something about the future direction of space exploration in the decades to come. The first story concerns Sierra Space Corporation’s long awaited Dream Chaser space plane / mini shuttle. The Dream Chaser design does in fact bear a striking resemblance to the space shuttle and is intended to operate in much the same fashion. Launched into orbit on top of an Atlas rocket or perhaps even a Space X falcon 9 the Dream Chaser would dock at the ISS or another space station. Returning to Earth the Dream Chaser would fly into the atmosphere, experiencing no more than 1.5 g’s in the process and land on a runway like any ordinary plane.
Looking very much like a small shuttle the first Dream Chaser spacecraft will merely carry cargo to the International Space Station but eventually Sierra Space Corp. intends to use it to carry passengers as well. (Credit: Space.com)
Initially intended to deliver cargo to and from Earth orbit Sierra Space hopes that one day the Dream Chaser will also carry people into orbit. Right now however the Dream Chaser still has yet to fly. Indeed the first Dream Chaser space plane has just recently finished its construction at the company’s factory at Louisville, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. That first Dream Chaser, which has been named Tenacity, will now be shipped to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Ohio to undergo a series of tests to verify that it is capable of withstanding the rigors of space.
The first Dream Chaser, named Tenacity, undergoing construction at Sierra Space Corp. Tenacity has now been shipped the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to begin its testing. (Credit: YouTube)
Dream Chaser represents yet another attempt at finding ways to lower the cost of getting into space in order to expand human exploration. Sierra Space Corporation hopes that the first, unmanned flight of this interesting spaceplane could come as early as next year providing some competition to Space X’s Dragon capsule.
The first Dream Chaser will rocket into orbit aboard an Atlas V launch vehicle, perhaps as early as next year. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Finally another current limit on our exploration of our Solar System are the low exhaust velocities possible with chemical rocket fuels. I have in several posts discussed both Nuclear and Ion rocket engines which have to potential to provide much greater exhaust velocities and thereby much greater total delta velocities for space travel. See post of 29 April 2020. Recently NASA and the aerospace corporation Aerojet Rocketdyne have carried out a series of tests on the most powerful ion rocket engine ever developed. Known as the Advanced Electric Propulsion System or AEPS the engine operates at a power consumption of 12 kW.
The Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) at full thrust during a test at Aerojet Rocketdyne corp. (Credit: Parabolic Arc)
Now ion engines function in a very different way than the chemical rockets we’re used to seeing. In an ion engine the atoms of an inert gas, usually xenon, have an electron stripped from them giving them an electric charge. A high voltage potential then accelerates those ions to a velocity that is scores if not hundreds of times faster than the atoms in a chemical rocket. As the ions are fired out the engine, giving it a thrust, the electrons are reattached to the atoms because otherwise the engine, and the space ship connected to it would quickly build up a tremendous static electric charge.
Cutaway view of the AEPS. A gas is stripped of its electrons making the atoms charged ions. Those ions are then electrically accelerated and fired out the back producing thrust. (Credit: NextBigFuture.com)
One major difference between a chemical and an ion rocket engine is that while a chemical rocket gives a big thrust for a few minutes, the first stage of a Space X Falcon 9 only fires for about four minutes, an ion engine gives a small thrust, but it can do so for days or weeks or even years.
The first stage engines of the Saturn V produced a huge amount of thrust. But they could only do so for about five minutes. An ion engine can fire for months or even years eventually producing an ever greater delta-V. (Credit: National Institute of Standards and Technology)
NASA has used ion engines in past missions, notably the Dawn deep space probe to the minor planet Ceres and the large asteroid Vesta along with the recently launched Psyche space probe. The space agency hopes to use AEPS on the Gateway space station to be placed in Lunar Orbit sometime around 2025.
The Dawn space probe visited both the Minor Planet Ceres and the asteroid Vesta using its ion engine to provide thrust for years. (Credit: Space.com)
Plans for the future even as we have successes in the present, that’s progress in our exploration of space.
In my last post I recounted some of the severe weather events that have already taken place here in the year 2023, a year that will almost certainly be recorded as the warmest in human history, or at least that is until 2024. To be honest I could have written two or three times as much as I did write in that post, extreme weather was basically everywhere this year and many locations around the world suffered for long periods of time or several times over.
Even before this year has set a new record, the top 10 hottest years ever recorded have all come in the last twelve years. That’s kinda scary!!!! (Credit: KCRA)
The important thing to keep in mind is that in 2023 for the first time the average global temperature could cross over the 1.5ºC above pre-industrial average that scientists have been warning will bring ever greater climate change and the natural disasters that accompany it. If, as now predicted this year’s El Niǹo continues into 2024 then the world could remain above that threshold and next year’s weather could be even worse.
The consensus is that El Nino has caused 2023 to be even hotter than predicted. With El Nino still hanging around will next year be even hotter? (Credit: YouTube)
So with the evidence of climate change all around us is the human race as a whole finally waking up to the danger we ourselves are creating? Are governments and the media paying attention, enough attention so that some real progress will finally be made?
Young people are paying attention to the dangers of global warming, are you? (Credit: Denise Pass)
The answer of course is both yes and no. There are clear signs that a large fraction of society is becoming very concerned about the world’s environmental future and are ready to do something about it. As you might guess young people are in the forefront of this movement.
It’s easy to understand why young people are concerned about climate change, it’s the future they’re going to have to live in. (Credit: Oregon Public Broadcasting)
A main focus of the efforts undertaken so far by young people worried about their future has been in courtrooms around the world. This summer a lawsuit was filed in Montana by 16 of the state’s teenagers alleging that the state government has violated the Montana constitution by failing to “maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment for present and future generations.” The Judge in the case agreed, ruling that the state was violating the rights of young people when it enacted policies that prohibit the state from considering the effects on the environment of fossil fuel extraction in the state. Whether or not that judgment will affect the coal and oil industry in Montana remains to be seen, indeed the state is already appealing the decision. However the simple fact that a of that kind case could be brought and won in such a deep red state as Montana is clear evidence that more and more people are becoming concerned about our changing climate. Similar lawsuits have been filed by a group of teenagers in Hawaii and by young people suing the Federal Government as well.
The Montana children who chose to act like adults while the adults in the State Legislature chose to act like children. (Credit: Vox)
Meanwhile in other countries a similar lawsuit was brought by 6 youngsters in Portugal, but these plaintiffs were a bit more ambitious, they decided to sue the entire European Union along with the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Russia and Turkey, 32 countries in all. In this case the plaintiffs allege that the increasing temperatures and drought conditions in their country are generating a Sahara desert like environment in Portugal that is again to the determent of their future lives. They blame this growing problem on the reluctance of the 32 governments to enact significant policies for fighting climate change, specifically legislation to curb CO2 emissions.
Talk ’bout David versus Goliath, six kids in Portugal are suing 32 countries over climate change. (Credit:Climate Home News)
This suit, brought before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg could actually have major consequences, at least for the EU countries. Again the idea is that the entire future lives of these young people are being harmed by the shortsighted policies of the present. The success for these lawsuits, even if only partial so far, will generate more and more such cases until governments are finally forced to take real action.
For half a century now the world seems to have been concerned only with the next paycheck, the next quarter’s profit, the next election. All the while the foundation of the world we live in has been crumbling beneath our feet. (Credit: Mashvisor)By a large majority now the people of the US support combating climate change. But with the special interests willing to spend so much money keep on emitting greenhouse gasses will that be enough? (Credit: CNN)
Which some governments are actually doing, if only in small steps so far. Here in the US last year the Biden administration, as a part of its Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), succeed in allocating the most money ever for subsidies to boost green energy production. This money is targeted not only for new solar and wind power projects but also to help reduce the cost of electric vehicles (EV) and to increase the number of EV charging stations throughout the nation. At the same time President Biden has announced the formation of his American Climate Corps (ACC), an organization patterned after the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps and intended as a training program for young people leading to good jobs in green energy and climate mitigation. Although both the ACC and the IRA are insufficient to solve the coming climate crisis they are at least steps in the right direction, and can serve as foundations for further programs if the political will for fighting climate change increases.
While the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is a board piece of legislation intended to fix many problems it does provide a considerable amount of money for Green Energy and other environmental issues. (Credit: AFL-CIO)
A few individual states are also taking action. In California the state’s attorney general has filed a lawsuit against Exxon-Mobile, BP, Shell, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, all the big oil companies alleging that for decades they have been fully aware of the effect that fossil fuel emissions were having on the environment. The suit contends that the oil companies deliberately continued to minimize the threat of global warming while suppressing the data collected by their own scientists.
As the damage caused by climate change grows, 25 billion dollar environmental disasters so far this year, the number of suits against Oil Companies will also grow (Credit: Informed Comment)
Meanwhile voters in Switzerland have passed a referendum calling for their government to enact legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions by their country. The measure, which passed with 59.1% of the vote for and 40.9% against requires Switzerland to achieve ‘net zero’ carbon emissions by 2050. More immediately it provides more than 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.3 billion US dollars) to help Swiss citizens and companies develop greener energy programs.
Switzerland is a country famous for its glaciers. But for how much longer. The Swiss people voted this year to try to keep such beauty as this. (Credit: AP News)
In parallel with the actions taken by environmental activists and groups there has been a significant increase in the coverage of climate change in many, although certainly not all, media outlets. During the heat of the Summer CNN and MSNBC devoted extensive time to the major environmental stories like Phoenix’s streak of days over 110ºF, the wildfires in Canada and the resulting smoke that drifted down into the US, and of course the great loss of life in the wildfire in Maui. So important were these stories that even Fox news was forced to cover them to some extent. The winner for news coverage of climate change however has to be the Weather Channel, which has even created a daily program, Pattrn, devoted to climate change and other environmental issues.
A major cable network devoting an entire hour every day to environmental issues, especially climate change. Who would have ever have thought it possible? (Credit: www.pattrn.com)
So there is progress, even if only in small steps so far. But as Isaac Newton pointed out, “For every action there is an equal an opposite reaction,” and the climate deniers have been busy as well. So, for every attempt at government action to fight global warming there has been an effort to deny or hide the facts, such as the decision by the Florida Department of Education, as directed by the state’s Governor Ron DeSantis, to approve climate change denying videos for use in the classroom.
Running for President as ‘Trump without the Chaos’ Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has ordered his state’s schools to deny climate change when teaching children. (Credit: Imgur)
At the same time court cases brought by citizens concerned about the future of our planet are opposed by lawyers and officials bought and paid for by the petroleum industry who care about nothing but their next quarter’s profit. The lawsuit won in Montana is already being appealed while other cases are being delayed or obstructed.
Have you seen this ad from the Americans for Prosperity? An Ernst Hemingway lookalike telling us that Prosperity is Possible, at least it is for oil billionaire Charles Koch, he’s the one paying for the ad! (Credit: YouTube)
Finally, even as the overwhelming number of environmental stories has forced Fox news to actually cover global warming they still try with all of their might to obscure the issue by making such absurd claims as that the extreme temperatures endured by Phoenix this summer were caused by ‘the heat island effect’. ‘Heat Islands’ caused by the concrete and asphalt in a city is a real enough phenomenon but one that doesn’t explain the equally high temperatures in the desert around Phoenix, nor the high temperatures in Greece, or Portugal or Vietnam or etc, etc, etc.
During June, July and August there was hardly anywhere on Earth that wasn’t setting record high temps. Is this our Future? (Credit: NASA Climate Change)
About the only thing we can say for certain concerning the world’s reaction to 2023 being the hottest year on record is that the political war over global warming is heating up. Right now world leaders have gathered in the United Arab Emirates for the COP28 meeting on climate change. As I write these words there is considerable division over whether the phrase ‘phasing out of fossil fuels’ manages to get included in the final report that every country must agree to or will the entire conference break apart over the issue. I’ll be sure to keep you informed.
Holding a conference on Climate Change in a country grown rich from oil! Not a good idea. (Credit: State Department)
Addendum: The COP28 final accord has been agreed upon in Dubai and it’s something of a victory for the struggle to fight climate change. For the first time the conferences final document does for the first time explicitly mention fossil fuels as the leading cause of climate change. (Think about that, it took world leaders 28 years just to finally agree that coal, oil and natural gas are causing climate change.) In addition the final accord also calls for a ‘Transitioning away from’ the use of fossil fuels.
The first draft of a final agreement at COP28 caused a firestorm at the weak language about getting rid of fossil fuels. (Credit: BBC)In the end even the Oil executive who was the president of the conference was forced to accept language that at least called for the elimination of fossil fuels. (Credit: CNN)
Now don’t get too excited. The timetable for that transitioning is very non-specific, and there are no enforcement provisions of any kind. Any country that wants to can simply ignore their commitment any time they choose. Nevertheless getting 198 nations, many of them fossil fuel producers or are dependent on fossil fuels, to agree to someday getting rid of those pollutants is a major achievement.
The main parts of the agreement. The big question is whether or not the countries that signed up for this will actually do it! (Credit: CNN)He’s right, it’s really up to all of us to keep up the pressure on our governments and get the job of zero carbon emissions done. (Credit: CNN)
Perhaps the climate disasters of the past year have finally made the nations of the world take notice of the disaster looming not too far in the future. The nations of the world have made a commitment; it’s going to be up to all of us to see to it that they keep it.
COP28, the annual international conference on Climate Change has started in Dubai, 30November, and so I’ll be posting about global warming the next several weeks.
Meeting in the United Arab Emirates the COP28 conference on Climate Change has already been criticized for being hosted by an oil kingdom while allowing petroleum lobbyists free reign. (Credit: Campaign Middle East)
Barring a miracle now the year 2023 is going to wind up as the hottest year ever recorded for the entire planet and that by a wide margin. The declared culprits of this temperature rise are usually stated in the media as being the steady increase in temperature caused by global warming coupled with the return of the phenomenon El Niǹo in the Pacific Ocean. El Niǹo was last observed back in 2016, the previous hottest year on record before 2023. Together they have caused the Earth’s average temperature to rise very close to the 1.5ºC increase over pre-industrial averages that scientists have been saying for decades now will bring about far worse climate conditions.
While still not fully understood the El Nino ocean current in the Pacific Ocean does lead to warmer conditions around the world. (Credit: NOAASciJinks)
And that prediction has certainly appeared to come true. Phoenix Arizona, already one of the hottest cities on Earth, smashed its previous record of consecutive days above 110ºF (43.3ºC), going from 18 to 31. At the same time the city also set a record for most consecutive days where the low temperature at night never got below 90ºF (36.25ºC). (I’ve been to Phoenix and I know it’s a dry heat there but nevertheless I can’t even imagine what a month of temperatures that hot is like.)
Just one day of 110 degree heat would be too much for most people so just imagine 30 days in a row! (Credit: Los Angeles Times)
Phoenix of course is just one example of record shattering heat; many other parts of the world also saw record high temperatures. Places as far apart as Vietnam, France and China each experienced all time record temperatures. For a few days in August the entire nation of Iran was forced to shut down all but emergency services because it was simply too hot for anyone to remain outdoors for any length of time. And just to put a cap on the record setting temperatures on the 17th of November the average temperature for the entire planet passed the 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial level mark for the first time, a very dangerous sign of things to come.
While tying the record temperature set in Death Valley just last year the heat in Ahvaz Iran was actually much worse because unlike California it’s very humid in the Persian Gulf so the heat index was the highest ever recorded.
Then there were the massive wildfires around the planet in places like Greece, China and even Hawaii where 99 people died as a wildfire surged across the island of Maui. But by far the worst fires were the hundreds that spread throughout Canada. Think about it, Canada is the largest nation on Earth by area and most of that is sparsely populated forest so when Canada suffers its worst ever wildfire season that’s a lot of trees being burned. The smoke from those Canadian fires even drifted south into the United States giving cities like New York, Philadelphia and Minneapolis their worst ever measured air quality conditions.
On June 5th Philadelphia experienced a nice late spring day (l). Two days later the city experienced its worst air quality day ever (r) all because of wildfires thousands of kilometers away in Canada! (Credit: WHYY)
The increase in heat also brought with it drought conditions across southern Europe, the southern US, China and worst of all large parts of northern Africa, where millions of people live on the edge of survival during the best of times. Drought conditions have caused many of the world’s great rivers to see unprecedented drops in their water levels. For example sections of the Amazon are experiencing their lowest water levels in over 120 years. Meanwhile the drought conditions throughout the Mississippi watershed has caused the flow of that great river to become so anemic that salt water from the Gulf of Mexico has pushed its way upriver almost to the city of New Orleans, threatening the city’s water supply.
Drought conditions throughout the Mississippi watershed have caused salt water from the Gulf of Mexico to back up into the lower Mississippi threatening the water supply of New Orleans. (Credit: CNN)
At the same time other areas of world like Libya, Scotland and even usually dry southern California were stricken with periods of severe flooding. Providing further evidence that global warming doesn’t cause one particular kind of weather disaster but simply causes all types of weather to become more extreme.
They don’t have Hurricanes in the Mediterranean but Storm Daniel was as destructive as any tropical storm, devastating several cities along the Libyan coast. (Credit: Floodlist)
The world’s oceans did not escape from the extreme heat either. The hottest ocean temperature ever recorded was measured in the Caribbean not far from the Florida Keys at over 32.4ºC (90ºF) while the average ocean temperature in early August reached 20.96ºC (69.71ºF), the warmest global average ever recorded. One result of this record heat is that vast stretches of coral reefs around the world are being bleached and could die if temperatures continue to rise.
While all of the world’s oceans are warming in July the temperature measured in the Florida Keys surpassed 100 degrees F for the first time ever. (Credit: Washington Post)
In the Polar Regions the extreme heat did exactly what you would expect as the sea ice around both the North Pole and Antarctica fell below the lowest levels ever previously observed. Glaciers from the Alps to the Himalayas to the Andes and Rockies all saw a continuation of the melting that has been seen for decades now. A recent survey in Switzerland has concluded that the glaciers in that country famed for its glaciers have lost 10% of their volume in just the last two years, that’s the same amount as was lost over the thirty years between 1960 and 1990. By the by it was the retreat of the world’s glaciers that was actually the first real evidence for global warming.
The Trient glacier in Switzerland pictured in 1891 (l) and 2023 (r). Much of southern Europe gets its waters from rivers that flow from glaciers like Trient, if they disappear large parts of southern Europe could become a desert. (Credit: NBC News)
All in all this has simply been a record shattering year for global warming starting with the month of June being measured as the hottest June ever recorded. Then the month of July was recorded as being simply the hottest month ever recorded. July didn’t keep that record for long however as August surged past July’s average temperature to become the new hottest month of all time. September was not quite so hot, just the hottest September ever recorded, as was October. So unless November and December are really below average in temperature, very unlikely with El Niǹo still warming the eastern Pacific, then 2023 will become the hottest year on record, possibly breaking that crucial 1.5ºC above pre-industrial averages that climatologists are convinced will generate even worst climatic conditions.
The effect on the Planet of 1.5 degree warming versus 2 degrees. We still have hopes of staying below 1.5 degrees but for at least one day we’ve gone over 2 degrees and we’re still not even trying to do enough to stop the relentless climb. (Credit: Panda.org)
So if all of the foregoing just seems like a long litany of climate disasters, well it is, and things are just going to get much worse if we don’t really start taking climate change seriously. Next week I’ll discuss some of the ways that people in government and in the media are starting to take global warming seriously, and some of the ways that the petroleum industry and its apologists are still trying to cause confusion in order to continue to deceive the average person.
Lifted into orbit back in (December of 2021) the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spent its first months in orbit calibrating its instruments while the world’s astronomers eagerly waited. Well JWST has been in operation for a little over a year now and NASA has taken the opportunity to release some of the more spectacular images sent back by the space telescope.
It was almost two years ago the the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched in orbit. Now astronomers are released some of the first results, the first discoveries made by this largest and most advanced space telescope. (Credit: Safran)
First a bit of a reminder, JWST operates as most large astronomical telescopes do by taking long exposure digital images of whatever astronomical object it is studying. Most of those ‘deep space’ objects are actually very dim and the only way to get good images is to open up the telescope’s camera and allow the light to gather photon by photon over a long period of time. The images are then computer enhanced to bring out the details the astronomers are interested in. In other words the pictures released by NASA are not what you would see if you actually looked into a telescope at the same object.
In astronomy time exposures can make dim objects brighter and allow objects that are invisible to become observable. (Credit: Photzy)
Another big difference between JWST and other telescopes, even the Hubble Space Telescope is that JWST views objects primarily in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This allows JWST to see details that are completely invisible to our eyes. That is the reason that JWST had to be placed more than a million kilometers from the Earth because the infrared light coming from both the Sun and the Earth would blind it if it weren’t protected. Again the digital images taken by the JWST in the infrared are then converted by a computer into visible images for astronomers, and the rest of us to see.
The difference between Hubble’s image of the Pillars of Creation in visible light (l) and the JWST image in the infrared is obvious. The dust that obscured Hubble’s image is gone in the JWST image allowing astronomers to actually see stars being born. (Credit: www.asc-csa.gc.ca)
The first set of images released from the JWST team at (John Hopkins Physics Lab) was of the well known ‘Whirlpool Galaxy’ often referred to as Messier 51 or just M51. At a distance of 27 million light years from Earth this galaxy is a favourite target of amateur astronomers not far from the Big Dipper in the sky. While M51 is a typical spiral galaxy it happens to be facing our galaxy almost head on so that our view of its spiral arms is simply magnificent. A very beautiful image of M51 was taken by Hubble a dozen years ago and astronomers have been itching to get a view with JWST ever since.
Hubble’s image of the Whirlpool galaxy only succeeded in making astronomers hungry for more. (Credit: ESA/Hubble)
Now they’ve done just that and the image is beyond expectations. One of the reasons JWST operates in the infrared is that infrared light can pass through the gas and dust that tends to blur the details in the spiral arms of galaxies like M51 in visible light. That means that JWST sees deeper into the galaxy, imaging structure never seen before. The same is also true of the small dwarf galaxy NGC 5195 located at the end of M51’s ‘tail’ and whose gravitational field is actually responsible for much of the structure of the Whirlpool’s spiral arms. Images such as JWST’s of the Whirlpool not only are beautiful but they give astrophysicists a lot of data to use in their efforts to understand how galaxies are structured and how they change with time.
JWST’s image of the center of the Whirlpool galaxy is simply breathtaking in its detail. (Credit: Mint)
The next astronomical object that the JWST team released images of was a lot closer to home, a mere 2,600 light years away. The Ring Nebula or M57 as it is known is located in the night sky near the bright star Vega and is in many ways a glimpse into the future fate of our own Sun. The star at the center of the ring was once about the same mass as our Sun but about a billion years ago it used up all of its hydrogen fuel and began to burn helium. In order to do that the star’s core had to get smaller and hotter which caused its outer regions to puff up making the star a ‘Red Giant’.
Probably the best known Red Giant is the star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion. The star is not only larger than our Sun it is actually larger than the orbit of Jupiter!!! (Credit: Brian Koberlein)
Then, less than a million years ago the star started to run out of helium so again its core got smaller and hotter, so much so that its outer regions were ejected from the star into interstellar space. This material was mostly ejected from the star’s equatorial region so it formed a ring around the original star, the Ring Nebula.
The JWST actually took two images of the Ring Nebula with its different instruments. On the right is the view from the Near Infrared NIRCam camera and on the left is from the Mid Infrared MIRI camera. (Credit: Prestige Online)
Since the ring itself is made up of gas and dust JWST’s ability to see in the infrared makes it the perfect instrument with which to study M57. The images taken by JWST show an enormous amount to detail that was never seen before including about 20,000 dense clumps of matter and a halo of 10 concentric arcs with 400 spikes. JWST also discovered that the central star causing the ring is not alone, it has two smaller companion stars, one about 35 astronomical units (AU) from the central star, an astronomical unit is Earth’s distance from our Sun, and the other more distant at 14,400 AU.
Because the distances in space are so huge astronomers use units like the Astronomical Unit, the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. (Credit: Study.com)
Like the images of the Whirlpool galaxy astrophysicists will have plenty to keep them busy analyzing what JWST has found at the Ring Nebula. Nebulas like the ring are not only important because they show our Sun’s future but also because the material ejected from such nebula is how heavier elements like Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen and Silicon get spread around the galaxy so that they can form planets like our Earth.
With the exception of Hydrogen and Helium all the other elements are manufactured inside stars. Planetary nebula like the ring nebula are one way those elements are released into the galaxy. (Credit: ZME Science)
The final set of images taken by JWST are of Supernova 1987A (SN1987A), the closest supernova to Earth in the last 400 years and the only supernova to date for which we have a picture of the star taken before it blew up. Supernova are rare events that only happen when a huge star, at least 20 times the mass of our Sun has used up all of the nuclear fuel available to it. When that happens the star’s core collapses into a neutron star or even a black hole. The rest of the star explodes in one of the most powerful events in the Universe.
Another comparison of Hubble (r) versus JWST (l). The greater detail in the JWST image is obvious. (Credit: Business Insider)
Obviously studying supernovas is a lot of fun but the problem is that they are so rare that detailed data is hard to get, most of the supernovas observed by astronomers are in galaxies billions of light years away. That’s why astronomers were so anxious for JWST to observe SN1987A. The Hubble space telescope had been observing the supernova for years and had watched as the shock wave from the explosion caught up to and slammed into material ejected from the star before it went nova.
The arrow in the top image points to the star that became the nova SN1987A. Bottom left is the star as it shined while going Nova and the bottom right is the JWST image today. (Credit: Reddit)
The images from JWST show that collision in even greater detail with a cluster of material that looks like a string of pearls. The JWST will continue to observe the dynamic changes around SN1987A while also searching for the neutron star that must have formed in the explosion but which so far has eluded detection.
An object as massive as the Sun but is only the size of a city is a neutron star. SN1987A should have formed such an object but we have yet to detect it. (Credit: Wikipedia)
The images released by the team (at Johns Hopkins) are just the beginning of the marvels that astronomers hope JWST will reveal in the years to come. Just as Hubble altered and illuminated our view of the Universe JWST is sure to do the same.
