Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler – Page 6 – Discussions of Topics Related to Science and Science Fiction

The evidence for Global Warming continues to grow, and the World now seems certain to experience its hottest year ever recorded.

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.

Astronomy News for September 2023: The James Webb Space Telescope begins to show off what it can do.

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.

Book Review: ‘The Dent in the Universe’ by E. W. Doc Parris

Last year I published a review of a book entitled ‘Recursion’ by author Blake Crouch. In that review I praised ‘Recursion’ for having a very unusual slant on the old SF theme of time travel. Like ‘Recursion’, the plot of ‘The Dent in the Universe’ by author E. W. Doc Parris also concerns a very different, and interesting kind of time travel, although as you might guess the results are every bit as chaotic.

Cover Art for “A Dent in the Universe” by E.W. Doc Parris. (Credit: Amazon)

Author of ‘A Dent in the Universe’ E. W. Doc Parris. (Credit: Amazon)

One Corporation is a high-tech company operating out of California’s silicon valley in the near future, the 2030s. The company specializes in developing video games and their chief claim to fame is the sChip, an integrated circuit that uses Quantum Entanglement to achieve Faster Than Light (FTL) communications with other sChips. This property allows gamers all over the world to play One Corporation’s video games together without any nasty time delays because of distance. (Actually there are some theorists who think something like that might be possible.)

Einstein called Quantum Entanglement “Fuzzy action at a Distance.” but could it be faster than light? (Credit: The Quantum Atlas)

About ten years after the sChip is first introduced an accident causes a large portion of the network to crash, a gamer spilled his coke onto his terminal. An investigation by One Corporation’s chief scientist, the guy who invented the sChip in the first place, reveals that the crash originated when the coke spilling gamers sChip sent a conformation signal to his buddy’s sChip BEFORE it was asked for the conformation. It seems sChips are not only capable of FTL they can send messages into the past.

Time Travel is one of the oldest and most often used plot device in Science Fiction. In fact it’s been used so often that you have to be very cleaver to come up with a new approach to the idea! (Credit: Penguin Random House)

That’s the neat part about ‘The Dent in the Universe’. Here time travel is limited to only information being send through time, not material objects. Another constraint on time travel in ‘The Dent in the Universe’ is that time travel is only possible through sChips and therefore the farthest back it is possible to go is ten years, when the first sChip was made.

In ‘A Dent in the Universe’ sending messages back in time is only possible through a special integrated circuit, the ‘S Chip’ and hence you can only go as far back in time as to when the first S Chip was made. (Credit: In Compliance Magazine)

Of course it was a part of Stephan Hawkins’ work over decades that showed that information is still energy so it is a material object. Think about it, in a computer information is stored by flipping magnetic fields, something that requires energy to do. So sending information back in time is still sending a material object, the energy to flip a magnetic field, back in time. Nevertheless the unique take on time travel, and the consequences thereof, is the best part of ‘The Dent in the Universe’.

Stephen Hawking spend much of his career wondering if information is destroyed by entering a black hole. His research did show how information is a kind of energy however. (Credit: Nature)

The worst part is the villain, a serial killer of the Bind Torture Kill or Jeffery Dalmer type. I don’t consider myself to have a weak stomach but there were several sections of ‘The Dent in the Universe’ that were simply unpleasant to read, and that’s being kind. There were a lot of gory details that simply weren’t necessary for the plot as far as I was concerned. By the way the idea of a serial killer getting his hands on a time machine isn’t new. Back in the 1979 there was a movie called ‘Time after Time’ where Jack the Ripper, played by David Warner, got his hand’s on H. G. Wells’ time Machine and traveled to 1980s San Francisco. Wells was played by Malcolm McDowell.

In the 1979 movie ‘Time After Time’ H. G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell left) shows Jack the Ripper (David Warner right) his Time Machine. Jack then uses it to escape to 1980s San Francisco. (Credit: Film-Authority.com)

All of that is quite a shame because much of ‘The Dent in the Universe’ is well plotted out, something very necessary in a time travel story and rather exciting. The story could have worked just as well without so much graphic gore.

I’m not a big fan of Slasher movies, which was a big problem I had with ‘A dent in the Universe’, the villain was just too gory for my taste. (Credit: Medium)

I do have one other complaint as well. Like many SF stories that take place in the near future ‘The Dent in the Universe’ is filled with techno-talk. The computer gamers all say things like “Rashad’s device processed a D-pad signal at the I/O bus”. Meanwhile the detective’s hunting the serial killer all say things like “That’s inside the feeding zone. Walking distance to the MPWS station, Good eyes Detective Baker, good eyes.” Sometimes I wonder if authors are just trying to impress their readers with how in tune they are with the language spoken by experts in various fields.

Nowadays every profession has its own specialized jargon. Writing an entire novel using only those forms of speech can be a bit tiring after a while however. (Credit: Tech Talk)

And finally it turns out that ‘The Dent in the Universe’ is just the first installment in another series of novels. I haven’t made up my mind as to whether I’ll read the next installment. As I said ‘The Dent in the Universe’ had some really interesting parts, as well as some very unpleasant ones.

Paleontology News for November 2023:

Several new stories about the history of life here on Earth have caught my attention. One concerns the discovery of a fossil creature from the Cambrian period when animals with hard parts first evolved and that links together two groups of the huge phylum the Arthropods. The other two are studies of two important groups of animals, one a little known family of dinosaurs while the other concerns the origins of a very important family of insects, the bees. As usual I will discuss the oldest fossil animal first and then go forward in time.

Paleontologists at work, or is this fun it’s hard to tell! (Credit: The Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University)

As far as we can tell the Arthropods have been the largest and most diverse grouping of animals going all the way back to the very first animals with hard parts. While the name Arthropod means ‘jointed leg’ the Arthropods are also known for their hard exoskeletons and segmented bodies.

The largest and most diverse of the animal phylums, arthropods are surely the most successful form of life in the history of our planet. (Credit: Britannica)

Earth’s ancient oceans were filled with arthropods like the trilobites, the Eurypterids or water scorpions and horseshoe crabs just as today’s are filled with shrimp, lobsters and crabs. In the early Cambrian period, (520 to 550) million years ago there was a lot more experimentation going on in evolution as illustrated by some of the ‘weird wonders’ that have been discovered at the famous Burgess Shale in British Columbia.

Some of the weird and wonderful creatures that lived 520 million years ago and which we only know about thanks to the Burgess Shale fossil site. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)

Another fossil site where strange creatures from the Cambrian period have been discovered is outside the town of Chengjiang in China’s southern Yunnan Province. Recently a new species of shrimp like Arthropod has been discovered there that truly is a ‘weird wonder’ but which shows characteristics of two different groups of Arthropods and therefore serves as something of a missing link between them.

An artist’s impression of Kylinxia zhangi from the Chengjiang fossil site in China. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The animal has been given the name of Kylinxia zhangi and measures about 5 cm in length by 1.2 cm in width. While the body resembles that of a modern shrimp K zhangi possesses two large grasping appendages at it’s front and three large compound eyes on its head, that’s right three eyes!

Beautifully preserved specimen of K zhangi clearly showing the large grabbing ‘arm’ at the front. (Credit: Sci.News)

Using the best preserved specimens of K zhangi researchers at Leicester University in the UK carried out a CT scan of the fossils to better visualize it’s anatomy. One of the surprises they discovered was that the head of K zhangi was composed of a fusion of six segments, the same number as in modern insects. While it is too early to suggest any definite relationship between K zhangi and insects the fact shows how the basic building blocks of Arthropods were being experimented with, leading to the immense diversity we see today.

The heads of all insects are built from of fusion of six body segments. K zhangi’s head is also composed of six body segments. Is there a relationship or just a coincidence? (Credit: Pixels)

Speaking of insects some of the best known and most valuable of the six-legged creatures are the bees. Everyone knows, or should know that bees not only produce honey but also pollinate a wide variety of the plants that we grow to eat. Much of our agricultural industry is dependent on pollination by bees with honey just a special side bonus.

A honeybee covered in pollen. Most flowering plants are dependent on other creatures to fertilize them and bees do more than their share of that work! (Credit: Let’s talk science)

Since bees are so important it’s understandable that paleontologists would like to understand their evolution, where and under what conditions they first appeared. For such a widespread group of small animals trying to gather enough data to see the big picture has been difficult however.

120 million years ago the ancient super continent of Gondwana was composed of what today we call South America, Africa, India, Antarctica and Australia. (Credit: Free University of Berlin)

Now a new study from researchers at Washington State University have combined data, including DNA studies, of modern bees with fossil evidence to generate a geneological map of bee evolution. According to the study bees first evolved from their cousins the wasps around 120 million years ago on the ancient super-continent of Gondwana, which has since broken up into Africa, South America and Antarctica. What appears to have caused the predatory wasps to become peaceful gatherers of pollen and nectar was the evolution of the first flowering plants. In fact the study seems to argue for a kind of co-evolution back and forth between flowering plants and bees.

Fossil of one of the first flowers! Flowering plants appear to have evolved at almost the same time as bees evolving from wasps. No coincidence there! (Credit: Sci.news)

Published in the journal Current Biology the team analyzed the DNA from over 200 species of bees living today while comparing their anatomical characteristics with those of 185 fossil bee specimens. Based on this data the researchers developed a genomic map of bee evolution and distribution from the early Cretaceous period to today. One surprising fact the team discovered was that all seven bee families developed before the end of the Cretaceous, in other words the bees appear to have survived the extinction of the dinosaurs rather well!

A bee from the age of the dinosaurs, 100 MYA. All seven families of bees evolved before the asteroid hit that killed the dinosaurs so bees survived that extinction rather well. (Credit: EarthSky)

The question now is whether or not bees can survive the extinction event going on right now thanks to human destruction of the environment. Many species of bees are in danger of extinction because of global warming, pollution and invasive species like the killer hornet that prey on bees. Hopefully studies like the Washington State University’s will help us to protect these busy little creatures, rather than making them one more victim of our ignorance and greed.

Today our friends the bees face many challenges, most of them caused by us. Murder Hornets from Japan are only one the the threats to these very useful insects. (Credit: CBS News)

Finally today I’d like to stay in the Cretaceous period to discuss a little known group of dinosaurs called the Rhabdodontidae. The Rhabdodontidae consist of nine species, all of which seen to have been confined to the continent of Europe and the period 86 to 66 million years ago. Europe at that time consisted of an Archipelago of large and small islands and the Rhabdodontidae seem to have suffered from the phenomenon of ‘island dwarfism’ because as a group they were rather small dinosaurs at 2-6 meters in length. Plant eaters like the Hadrosaurs the Rhabdodontidae had a similar body shape but the head was quite different because instead of the familiar ‘duck bill’ of the Hadrosaurs the Rhabdodontidae had a pointy beak covered in keratin.

Europe isn’t exactly famous for its dinosaurs so you’d think that European paleontologists would be anxious to study their own unique family the Rhabdodontidae. (Credit: EurekAlert)

Although the first named species of the Rhabdodontidae was discovered more than 150 years ago there is still a lot about them that paleontologists don’t know such as their posture, mode of walking and eating. In fact no complete fossil specimen of a Rhabdodontidae has ever been found so most of our knowledge of them comes from putting the pieces together like in a jigsaw. Ever since the late 19th century Europe’s dinosaurs have taken back seat in recognition to the iconic dinosaurs of North America like the T rex or Triceratops. Perhaps it’s time for European paleontologists to do a little more digging in their own backyard and find that complete Rhabdodontidae.

Space News for October 2023: OSIRIS-Rex, the Parker Solar Probe and Chandrayaan-3 on the Moon all making news.

The big news in space this month is the return of the OSIRIS-Rex probe from its seven-year long mission to the asteroid Bennu, see my posts of 21 October 2020 and 1 May 2021. During the probe’s more than yearlong study of the asteroid in October of 2020 the spacecraft made a pogo stick style bounce off of Bennu that succeeded in collecting an estimated 250 grams of the asteroid’s material. Once the spacecraft had gathered its precious cargo it ignited its rockets once more for the three-year journey back home.

Artist’s impression of the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft’s touch and go collection of a sample of the asteroid Bennu. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)

On September 24th, as the school bus sized main probe passed by the Earth it dropped off a suitcase sized capsule that entered our atmosphere at around 8:40 AM Mountain Daylight Time. The capsule’s descent, including both drogue and main parachute deployment, were flawless and at 8:53 MDT the capsule landed at the US Army’s Proving Ground in Utah and within 30 minutes a NASA recovery team was on the spot and the capsule secured.

The re-entry capsule containing the sample collected by OSIRIS-Rex at Bennu as it was recovered in the Utah desert. (Credit: Flickr)

Taking the utmost care to prevent the capsule’s precious contents from becoming contaminated by anything of this Earth, the NASA personnel took it to a small, especially prepared clean room at the Army base. There the capsule underwent more procedures designed to prevent contamination in order to prepare it for its plane ride to the Johnson Space Center at Houston.

In order to prevent contamination of the material from Bennu the sample collected by OSIRIS-Rex was placed in this chamber which was itself inside a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. (Credit: NASA Blogs)

That plane ride took place the very next day and now the samples of asteroid dirt are in Texas undergoing their initial evaluation. A public announcement of the results of those initial tests took place later in the month. In the years to come scientists all over the world will have their chance to study some of the material brought back from Bennu in the hopes of learning clues as to how our Solar system came into being as well as how some of the chemicals of life, basically carbon and water, came to our Earth.

NASA bigwigs discussing the initial results of the sample brought back by OSIRIS-Rex. The big news is that they collected a lot more material than they ever expected. (Credit: Ariziona Daily Star)

O’k so the capsule contained material from Bennu landed safely back here on Earth but what about the main OSIRIS-Rex space probe, what’s going to happen to it? Well, it’s still out there, after dropping off the capsule it fired it engines again and is now on it’s way to another asteroid, one named Apophis which the probe is scheduled to reach in 2029. By the by, that same year Apophis will also pass by our planet at one tenth the distance of the Moon.

The OSIRIS-Rex sample collection maneuver was so successful that some material didn’t get inside the container, see left center of image. NASA scientists are still glad to have it and will catalog everything before actually opening the main container to see what all’s inside. (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

Another NASA interplanetary probe has also been making some dramatic headlines is the Parker Solar Probe which continues to adjust it orbit taking it closer and ever closer to the Sun, see my posts of 7 June 2017 and 18 December 2019. Now just getting to the Sun is dangerous enough, its surface temperature is over 5,000º C after all and last year in September of 2022 the hazards of getting too close to the Sun increased dramatically.

In order to protect itself from the Sun’s heat the Parker Solar Probe has a very sophisticated Heat Shield. (Credit: Phys.org)

You see the Sun can be quite violent at times, remember it is really a million and a half kilometer wide hydrogen bomb that’s been going off for over 4 billion years now. Explosions on the Sun’s surface are common and can result in what are called Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) that can hurl billions of tons of plasma away from the Sun. And the closer you get to the Sun the more likely it is that sooner or later you’ll get hit by a CME.

A Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) larger than the Sun itself. Such explosions are really very common and can cause considerable damage to our modern electronics based society. (Credit: EarthSky)

That’s exactly what happened to the Parker Solar probe last September. In fact that CME was one of the most powerful ever observed. Well protected by its massive heat shield Parker not only survived the two day long ordeal but the probe actually succeeded in filming the CME as it went by. You can watch that video by clicking on the link below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF_e5eYgJ3Y

The Sun’s eleven year sunspot cycle is expected to peak in 2025 or 26 and the Parker probe’s trajectory was designed so that it will make its closest approaches at just that time. So Parker will almost certainly encounter even more violent CMEs in the years to come. It’s important to learn all that we can about these powerful events because as our society grows ever more dependent on electrical power and electronics in general the threat of a CME striking our planet and causing massive damage to our infrastructure grows as well.

Just some of the many ways that a CME can cause damage here on Earth. (credit: Hindustan Times)

While the Parker Solar Probe faces extraordinary hazards as it gets ever closer to the Sun space is a dangerous place for any spacecraft. That danger was illustrated by what appears to be the fate of India’s Chandrayaan 3 probe that landed at the Moon’s south polar region just last month.

The Moon isn’t a comfortable place to live either. The Chandrayaan 3 probe and its rover had to endure the long Lunar day where temperatures can reach 200 degrees C but the equally severe Lunar night seems to have been too much for them. (Credit: NDTV)

The success of Chandrayaan 3 made India only the fourth nation to land a probe on the Lunar surface and the first to land near the south pole where it is hoped water ice may be hidden at the bottom of some craters, see my post of 9 September 2023. Chandrayaan landed at the start of the two week long lunar day, sending back priceless data on conditions at the South Pole. Chandrayaan even deployed a small rover vehicle that puttered around the main lander making further measurements.

The Chandrayaan 3 lander as photographed by its rover. (Credit: Space.com)

At the end of the lunar day both the rover and the main lander were ordered to go into a sleep mode for the two week long lunar night during which time the probe’s solar cells would not be able to generate power and the outside temperature could drop to well below -200º C. Even doing so there was no guarantee that either the lander or rover would survive the ordeal.

Hoping to survive the harsh Lunar night the Indian engineers put both Chandrayaan 3 and its rover into a sleep mode. It doesn’t appear to have worked. (Credit: YouTube)

At the moment it appears Chandrayaan 3 has not survived. Engineers at the Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) report that they have not received any signals from the spacecraft and hopes are diminishing that it will revive. Nevertheless Chandrayaan’s mission was a success, a success that told us a great deal about our Moon’s south polar region.

Is there ice at the Moon’s South Pole. If there is then that’s where the first long term human habitation of our satellite will begin. (Credit: SOEST Hawaii)

The knowledge sent back to Earth by missions like OSIRIS-Rex, Parker and Chandrayaan make taking the risks of those missions well worth the effort.

Astronomy News for October 2023: The James Webb Space Telescope begins to show off what it can do.

Lifted into orbit back in (December of 2021) the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spent its first months away from Earth calibrating its instruments while the world’s astronomers waited eagerly. 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 may not look much like the telescopes we’re used to seeing but the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the most powerful instrument ever for observing the Universe. (Credit:General Dynamics Mission Systems)

To the unaided eye the Milky Way is just a dim wisp of light across the night sky. But by taking a time exposure it becomes much more brilliant and impressive. (Credit: Dave Marrow Photography)

Infrared light, with longer wavelengths than visible light, is actually a much larger portion of the entire Electromagnetic spectrum than visible light is. (Credit: Study.com)

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 full 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.

A dozen years ago the Hubble space telescope took the image of the Whirlpool galaxy on the right. Now JWST has taken the image on the left. The increase in detail is obvious. (Credit: Business Insider)

The detail in this closeup of the JWST Whirlpool image can tell astrophysicists a lot about how galaxies are structured. (Credit: ESA/Webb)

The Ring Nebula as seen by JWST. This is the most likely scenario for the eventual fate of our own Sun so as you might guess astronomers are very interested in all of the details. (Credit: Daily Express US)

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 pushed out 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.

Stars spend about 90% of their life on the main sequence of the HR Diagram burning hydrogen. As they run out of hydrogen they begin to burn helium, becoming a red giant in the process. Eventually a star like our Sun will shed its outer layers, run out of helium and become a white dwarf. (Credit: Britannica)

Many star systems contain more than one star, our own Sun is actually in a minority. One of the few double stars systems that can be seen with the naked eye is in the Big Dipper, Mizar and Alcor. (Credit: Earthsky)

Carl Sagen liked to say that we were all made of star stuff and except for the hydrogen in your body all the other elements were made in stars. Objects like the Ring Nebula and supernova spread those elements throughout the galaxy so that they can form new planets and perhaps new life. (Credit: National Science Foundation)

The JWST image of supernova SN1987A. Only a very few stars are massive enough to explode the way this star did so there are only a few examples close enough for astronomers to study adequately. (Credit: Webb Space Telescope)

Another comparison of Hubble (r) vs. Webb (l) of SN1987A. (Credit: Business Insider)

It is thought that the Neutron Star left over after a supernova event becomes a Pulsar beaming radio waves like a lighthouse. If the beams aren’t pointed at you a Pulsar can be difficult to detect however and that seems to be the case with SN1987A. (Credit: aether.lbl.gov)

Nobel Prizes for 2023 are awarded in Medicine, Physics and Chemistry

Every year during the first week of October the Nobel prizes are awarded for the sciences and this year the order of announcement was Physiology or Medicine on Monday the second with Physics on Tuesday the third and Chemistry on Wednesday the fourth. Not only did the Medicine prize lead off this year but the award was also arguably the most important and controversial of the three prizes. I’ll discuss each award in the order in which it was announced.

If only everybody lived by such a motto! (Credit: NobelPrize.org)

The announcement on Monday that the Physiology prize was awarded to University of Pennsylvania (UofP) researchers Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman was hardly a surprise. You see the pair’s research on messenger RNA (mRNA) as a means to develop vaccines is what allowed the quick fabrication of the Civid-19 vaccines by both Pfizer and Moderna. To date more than 650 million people have received a Covid-19 vaccine and the work of Drs. Karikó and Weissman is credited with saving millions of lives.

Doctors Katalin Kariko (l) and Drew Weissman (r), the 2023 recipients of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. (Credit: NobelPrize.org)

Thirty years ago such a result would have seemed very unlikely. Back then the problems of working with mRNA were so great that the possibility of using it as a vaccine appeared hopeless. RNA is a much more delicate chemical than its cousin DNA, which is why our bodies use DNA for long term storage of genetic information while RNA is used as a short-term messenger. At the same time experiments had shown that when RNA was injected into a lab animal the result was often a severe inflammation at the area of injection.

mRNA is manufactured in the cell nucleus from DNA. It then moves to the ribosomes where it is used to manufacture proteins. Hence ‘Messenger’ RNA. (Credit: Wikipedia)

It was for these reasons that in the mid-1990s Dr. Karikó lost all of the funding for her work and was refused a tenure track position at UofP. In fact she was almost kicked out of the university and forced to return to her home in Hungary. Only a chance meeting with Dr. Weissman, who was working on the human immune system and who had a secure source of funding, enabled Karikó to continue working on mRNA.

‘No bucks, no Buck Rogers’. It’s unfortunate but true. Modern science depends on funding, lot’s of it! (Credit: Imgur)

Even when the two researchers published their key results of how to modify mRNA and deliver it successfully into the body in 2005 few people took notice. It really is something of a miracle that the pharmaceutical community did begin to pay attention in time so that the Covid-19 vaccines could be developed and tested quickly enough to save millions of lives.

It took more than twenty years to develop the vaccine for polio, even longer for measles. But thanks to the work of Kariko and Weissman the Covid vaccine was ready and tested in less than two years! (Credit: Phila.gov)

Now for the controversy. As I mentioned above Dr. Karikó was officially kicked out of the UofP when she lost her funding and only managed to remain in the US thanks to her collaboration with Dr. Weissman. The question is, how much of her problems were also due to her being a woman, and an immigrant! Right now the university is justly praising Dr. Karikó for her work there despite having tried several times to fire her. Hopefully that was because of Dr. Karikó’s lack of funding, not her sex or nationality. Still the UofP and academia in general may want to take a moment to review their criteria for who gets funding and why!

The University of Pennsylvania is now celebrating the work of a scientist they almost got rid of. But at least they are admitting to that fact. Hopefully this incident will cause all universities to reconsider how they deal with their scientists. Ben Franklin, their founder, would certainly approve of that! (Credit: The Daily Pennsylvanian)

The awarding of the Physics Nobel on Tuesday was a lot less divisive. This year’s award went to Pierre Agostini, Anne L’Huillier, both originally from France along with the Hungarian born Ferenc Krausz for their work in generating high-speed laser pulses at the attosecond scale. Like a strobe light that captures movements so fast that they are just a blur to human eyes the team’s attosecond lasers allow scientists to actually see the movements of electrons in chemical reactions and solid state electronics.

Doctors Pierre Agostini (l), Ferenc Krausz (c) and Anne L’Huillier (r) were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention of laser systems that can pulse at one quintillionth of a second. (Credit: NobelPrize.org)

Consider a water molecule for a moment, a single oxygen atom that “shares” the electrons of two hydrogen atoms. Well, back when I was in college we were taught that the electrons in a water molecule behaved something like a cloud, quantum mechanics allowed you to calculate probabilities of where they’d be but trying to actually see them, forget it, they just moved too fast.

Generating attosecond pulses may look complicated, because it is. Still its only with such short flashes of light that we can see what electrons are doing in atoms and molecules. (Credit: Phys.org)

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that Drs. Agostini, L’Huillier and Krausz developed lasers that could flash at the attosecond scale, fast enough to capture a solid image of a electron in motion. An attosecond by the way is one quintillionth of a second, that’s 10^-18 or 0.000000000000000001 seconds. As a comparison there are about as many attoseconds in a single second as there are seconds in the current age of the Universe, 13.5 billion years.

There are about as many attoseconds in a single as there have been seconds in the lifetime of the Universe so far! (Credit: Insight IAS)

The development of attosecond light pulses has already enabled chemists to better understand how chemical reactions happen and therefore how to better predict their properties. At the same time a better understanding of how electrons behave in semi-conductor materials should help led to better solid-state electronics.

Just a few of the things that scientists can now clearly observe thanks to attosecond pulses. (Credit: DiMauro The Ohio State University)

Finally on Wednesday the Chemistry prize was announced and as with Physics it was a celebration of the small, only this time small in size rather than duration. The recipients of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry were Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov, all Americans. These three scientists were honoured for their pioneering work in the development of nanocrystals, crystals whose size is measured in millionths of a meter and are also known as “quantum dots”.

For their achievements in nanotechnology the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Moungi Bawendi (l), Louis Brus (c) and Alexei Ekimov (r). (Credit: NobelPrize.org)

It was back in the 1980s that Drs. Brus and Ekimov first created quantum dots independently of each other and studied their properties. Then in the 1990s Bawendi discovered techniques to manufacture high quality nanocrystals in large quantity, thereby establishing one of the sectors of the current field of nano-technology. Today quantum dots are used in a wide range of products from QLED TV screens to imaging in biochemistry and even in medicine and increasing the efficiency of solar cells.

Because their are so small the colour of a quantum dots literally changes with its size. That’s what makes them so useful in modern electronics. (Credit: Samsung)

So we celebrate the achievements of the best in the fields of Medicine, Physics and Chemistry. Throughout the year the various sports each get their separate seasons and it seems like politics just goes on year round so I suppose we should be grateful that pure science at least gets some notice one week out of the year.

Physicists at CERN finally succeed in demonstrating that Anti-Matter falls in a gravitational field just as normal Matter does.

It was ninety-five years ago in 1928 that British Physicist Paul Dirac first suggested the possibility of a form of anti-electron, that is an electron with a positive rather than a negative electrical charge. The idea did not attract much attention until four years later in 1932 when Physicist Carl Anderson, who knew nothing about Dirac’s prediction, discovered just such a positively charged electron in the cosmic rays he was studying. In the years that followed many of the particles that physicists studied were found to have an opposite, anti-particle. Soon the whole ensemble was being referred to as Anti-Matter.

Dirac (l), Anderson (r) and the first evidence of the existence of anti-matter (m). (Credit: The Scientific Odessey)

As I said above anti-particles have the opposite electric charge of their ‘normal’ counterparts, so when exposed to an electro-magnetic field they always behave in exactly the opposite way as their matter counterpart does. This led physicist Richard Feynman to suggest in 1949 that anti particles could be described as normal particles going backward in time. If such a thing were real however, then wouldn’t anti-matter behave in the opposite way that matter does in a gravitational field as well? Shouldn’t anti-matter go upward in Earth’s gravitational field?

Luke in his landspeeder in the original ‘Star Wars’. Anti-gravity is as much a part of science fiction as aliens or time travel! But is it real? (Credit: Fandom)

It’s not that easy to determine how anti-matter behaves in a gravitational field. You see anti-particles annihilate instantly as soon as they come into contact with their particle counterpart, so they usually only last a tiny fraction of a second. Plus, since they are generated in high-energy collisions, in particle accelerators or cosmic rays, they are moving at close to the speed of light. Combined that makes it all but impossible to measure the tiny effect of gravity on anti-particles.

A typical high energy event recorded at CERN. All this happened in less than a trillionth of a second and while half of the traces you see are from anti-matter try measuring the tiny effect on them that gravity has! (Credit: Fermilab Today)

If anti-matter did possess anti-gravity however that would be a tremendous discovery, and not only just because anti-gravity is something people have wondered about, written about for hundreds of years. You see all of the models of particle physics we have tell us that the Universe should contain exactly the same amount of anti-matter as it does matter. In fact back in the big bang matter and anti-matter should have been created in exactly equal amounts and then quickly annihilated each other leaving a Universe of only particles of light.

Is there an Anti-Universe going backward in time from the Big Bang just as our Universe went forward. It would solve many problems in our understanding of the cosmos but it would also require anti-particles to exhibit anti-gravity in our Universe. (Credit: American Physical Society)

As far as we can tell however our Universe is almost entirely composed of matter, certainly our galaxy is only matter. If it wasn’t we would detect the telltale signs of matter anti-matter annihilation in the interstellar medium. We feel the same about other galaxies as well. For example if Andromeda were composed of anti-matter then the tiny amount of gas and dust between Andromeda and our Milky Way would again show the signs of annihilation.

The space between galaxies isn’t quite empty, so if Andromeda were composed of anti-matter there would be collisions and annihilation between its anti-particles and the particles of our Milky Way. Nothing like that has been observed by astronomers. (Credit: Science News)

If anti-matter had anti-gravity however then it would be repulsed by matter, eventually matter and anti-matter would segregate into a Universe and an anti-Universe. However, any kind of Anti-gravity would violate Einstein’s principal of equivalence, which is the basis for his General Theory of Relativity. But maybe the equivalence principal just doesn’t hold when you mix matter and anti-matter.

Actually first tested when Galileo dropped his balls from the leaning tower of Pisa, Einstein extended Galileo’s idea so that gravity and acceleration are exactly equal! (Credit: YouTube)

So physicists have long wanted to find out, did anti-matter have anti-gravity? As I said above it’s not an easy experiment to carry out. First you’d need a lot of anti-particles. Then you’d have to slow down your anti-particles, all while keeping them in a vacuum so that they don’t come into contact with, and annihilate normal particles. You also have the problem of the electric charge of the anti-particles because you see the electromagnetic field is so much stronger than gravity that even a refrigerator magnet, or the potential of a 9-volt battery would be enough to completely ruin your measurement. Combining charged anti-particles to form neutral anti-atoms would be the best way to solve that problem, but again, easier said than done.

The effect of a magnetic of Electric field on a charged sub-atomic particle is so much stronger than the effect of gravity that it makes gravity all but invisible. (Credit: YouTube)

The best place to find anti-particles is at a particle accelerator, like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the largest, most powerful atom smasher in the world currently. That makes CERN the best place in the world to try to measure the effect of gravity on anti-matter and Physicist Jeffery Hangst has spent the last thirty years designing and building the experiment to make that measurement.

Thw world’s largest and most power scientific instrument the LHC has already made numerous discoveries and now looks to discover how anti-matter behaves in a gravitational field. (Credit: AlpheaPedia Wiki)

One of the pieces of equipment they’ve built at CERN to accompany the LHC is the Extra-Low-ENergy-Anti-proton (ELENA) ring that is capable of delivering about seven and a half million anti-protons every 120 seconds while the LHC is operating. About half a million of those are successfully captured in a solenoid magnet, I said handling anti-particles wasn’t easy.

Anti-Protons are inserted into the ELENA ring at CERN and slowed down to reduce their energy and velocity making them easier to work with. (Credit: Michael Dudek)

After being captured the anti-protons are cooled and injected into a device named the ALPHA-g where they are combined with anti-electrons, the two combine to form electrically neutral atoms of anti-hydrogen. These atoms are then cooled further to about four degrees above absolute zero. At the end of this operation only about one hundred anti-atoms remain to be tested, like I said anti-matter isn’t easy to handle.

The Alpha-g experiment being installed at CERN. Anti-Hydrogen atoms were trapped in the center of the column and then allowed to either fall, or rise in Earth’s gravity. (Credit: Science)

Once cooling is completed the magnet field confining the anti-hydrogen atoms is turned off allowing them to either fall or rise due to Earth’s gravitational field. Which direction the anti-atoms went was ascertained by detecting the annihilation of the anti-atoms with normal atoms in plugs positioned above and below the containment solenoid.

The anti-Gravity data from CERN. The measured data, crosses, lies near but not exactly on the calculated normal gravity line, top line. It’s definitely not even close to the anti-gravity, bottom calculated line. (Credit: Anderson, Baker, Bertsche et al)

To make certain of the result the experiment was repeated a dozen times but each test showed the same result, anti-hydrogen, and hence anti-protons and anti-electrons fall in Earth’s gravitational field. Anti-matter dos not possess anti-gravity but the measurement did suggest that anti-matter falls more slowly than normal matter, only 75% as fast. The errors in the experiment are so large however that anti-matter falling at exactly the same rate as normal matter cannot be ruled out. The physicists at CERN are planning further experiments, and further refinements of their experiment to measure more accurately just how fast anti-matter does fall.

Leader of the Alpha collaboration at CERN Professor Jeffery Hangst spent 30 years designing and building the experiment that finally showed how gravity behaves in a gravitational field. (Credit: Alpha Experiment CERN)

If anti-matter does fall more slowly than matter that would still violate the Principal of Equivalence and any difference would still be a clue as to why anti-matter is so rare in our Universe. But for now at least we finally know that anti-matter does not possess anti-gravity. A shame really, that would have been so cool!

Geology News for September 2023: Evidence of Plate Tectonics early in Earth’s history and will our planet have another Super-Continent some time in the future.

It may not seem like it to such short lived creatures as we humans but the Earth is really a very dynamic place. Yes, it’s true that we do notice the occasional outburst like an earthquake or volcanic eruption but we are hardly aware of the constant and steady but slow, emphasis on slow, movements of the ground beneath our feet. That movement is called Plate Tectonics and as an example the entire North American continent is moving westward at a rate of about five centimeters per year. Now that may not sound like a lot but for an entire continent, and remember the Earth has a lot of time for little movements to add up to big changes.

An erupting Volcano is the most obvious evidence of a dynamic planet, but the ground beneath your feet is constantly moving with the tectonic plates that carry entire continents. (Credit: AZ Animals)

Today the surface of the globe consists of about fifteen different sections or plates, some big, some smaller, that push and squeeze against each other. Sometimes the plates grow, as when seafloor spreading is forcing North American and Europe apart. Sometimes they shrink as when subduction around the edge of the Pacific eats away at the largest plate.

The surface of the Earth is broken up into a number of tectonic plates that push and jostle against each other. That interaction is the cause of most earthquakes and volcanoes. (Credit: ThoughtCo)

Geologists studying plate tectonics of course ask themselves just when in Earth’s history did the process of plate tectonics begin. They know for example that about 250 million years plate tectonics caused all of the land masses to come together to form one giant super-continent that’s been named ‘Pangaea’. However four and a half billion years ago the Earth’s surface was still molten so there certainly weren’t any tectonic plates back then.

As our planet was forming it was under constant bombardment by asteroids and other pieces of space rock. The heat of that energy kept Earth’s surface molten for millions of years. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)

Did plate tectonics begin as soon as Earth had a solid surface? Or were there other processes at work on the early Earth before plate tectonics started? Just when did plate tectonics begin to reshape Earth’s surface?

So did the tectonic plates form as the Earth’s surface cooled and became solid or did they form sometime later? (Credit: Universe Today)

Recent evidence has been found in the Pilbara Craton region of western Australia which sheds light on that question. The rocks of the Craton are among the oldest on Earth’s surface, some are dated back to about 3.2 billion years ago. Using instruments and techniques of their own invention a team of geologists from Harvard University in the US led by Alec Brenner and Roger Fu showed that 3.2 billion years ago the entire Pilbara Craton region was moving at a speed of 6.1 centimeters per year, a rate very similar to that which our modern tectonic plates are moving.

The Pilbara Craton region of western Australia contains some of the oldest rocks on the surface of the Earth. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Just by looking at some of the rocks of the Pilbara Craton even an amateur can tell that they are old, that a lot of geology has happened here! (Credit: Reddit)

Doctors Brenner and Fu also found evidence for another of our planet’s dynamic processes, the flipping of Earth’s magnetic poles, north becoming south and south, north, see my posts of 8 February 2017 and 16 January 2017. While there is still a great deal that we don’t understand about how the magnetic poles flip, or why our planet even has magnetic poles for that matter, there is overwhelming evidence that they have flipped 183 times in the last 83 million years. Now the evidence that Brenner and Fu have uncovered shows that the poles have been switching for at least over three billion years.

Geological evidence tells us that our planet’s magnetic poles have ‘flipped’ many times, north becoming south and vice versa. (Credit: NASA Climate Change)

Speaking of their discoveries Doctor Brenner remarked. “It paints this picture of an early Earth that was already really geodynamically mature. It had a lot of the same sorts of dynamic processes that result in an Earth that has essentially more stable environmental and surface conditions, making it more feasible for life to evolve and develop.”

Geologist Alec Brenner having fun. That’s the best part of being a scientists, we actually love our work! (Credit: Research Gate)

So plate tectonics has been causing Earth’s land masses to push and collide and bounce off of each other for over 3 billion years now. And as I mentioned above 250 million years ago all of the planet’s land masses were jammed together in a single super-continent. What about the future? Is another super-continent going to happen some day?

About 250 million years ago the movement of the tectonic plates brought all of Earth’s continents together into a single supercontinent called Pangea. Will that happen again? (Credit: Live Science)

Yes, according to a new study conducted by researchers led by Australia’s Curtin University. In fact according to the model super-continents occur on Earth about every 600 million years so the next one should form about 280 million years from now around the North Pole.

The future supercontinent ‘Amasia’ predicted by the geophysicists at Curtin University. We only have about 280 million years to wait! (Credit: Science)

The researchers have already given the coming super-continent a name ‘Amasia’ because, according to led author Dr. Chuan Huang, it will form when North America and Asia collide causing the Pacific Ocean to vanish. Of course that’s not going to happen for a long time. A long time that is to such short lived mayflies as we humans.

NASA joins the investigation into Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and no; I’m not going to call them Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP)

Why does it seem that, whenever we humans can’t make any progress in solving a problem we just change the name of it in order to make it appear that we’re getting somewhere? Take abortion as an example, it’s been a contentious issue now for over fifty years which is why nobody refers to themselves as either pro-abortion or anti-abortion anymore. No, you’re either pro-choice or pro-life, public relations wise it’s always best to be pro-something rather than anti-anything.

Why do we humans always seem to try to hide our meanings? The issue is abortion but we have to use terms like pro-choice or pro-life. In the same way we hide the issue of flying saucers by first calling them UFOs and now UAPs. (Credit: The Survey center on American Life)

Now we’re doing the same thing with Unidentified Flying Objects or UFOs that over the last seventy-five years have been the biggest and longest lasting conspiracy theory, see my post of 30 June 2022. Decade after decade has gone by with no better evidence for the existence of flying saucers than we had back in the 1950s. Still people insist that there has to be something going on so Congress decided to get involved and back on May 17th held meetings to discuss the latest sightings, including two films taken by Naval Aviators. Both the Pentagon and the Intelligence services were called upon to testify and just to let everybody know that they weren’t just sitting on their butts it was decided to change the name of UFOs to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon or UAP.

Some of the best new evidence for UFOs comes from naval aviators flying off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. This video is referred ton in the media as the ‘Go Fast’ video because the object in the video appears to be moving at impossible speeds Notice the numbers on both sides of the object in the center. They’ll become important later. (Credit: The Guardian)

Despite all of the ‘new evidence’, which once again is no better than the evidence we had in the 1950s, the military had to admit that it couldn’t explain all of the sightings but that there was no evidence that UFOs were either advanced aircraft built by our enemies, Russia or China, or Extra-Terrestrial in origin. The only decision made at the hearings was to have NASA get involved and see what the space agency thought about the whole matter. Which if you think about it is something the government probably should have done sixty years ago.

Filmed in Great Falls Montana in 1950 the Marianna UFO film, which you can check out on YouTube, is still completely unexplained and still as good of evidence for the existence of UFOs as anything presented since. (Credit: Journalnews)

So NASA gathered a panel of scientists, academicians and other technical experts, including an astronaut to form an ‘Independent Study Team’ to look into the matter. As a group the team is highly qualified, several are professors from major universities like George mason University, Boston University and UC San Diego. There are also several scientists from both private corporations and the US government including the FAA. The team chair is Dr. David Spergel of the Simons Foundation think tank and finally the team included former astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year living on the International Space Station and whose brother, another former astronaut is now a Senator from Arizona.

NASA’s ‘Independent Study Group’ for the investigation into UFOs. There’s a lot of talent here but really this is something that should have been tried 60 years ago. (Credit: NASA Science)

On the 14th of September NASA released a report from the Independent Study Team that included analysis of some of the best known recent sightings but that also served to inform Congress of the expertise and scientific assets that NASA could bring to the study of UFOs. Indeed, much of the report, which you can read for yourself at the web address: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/uap_independent_study_team_-_final_report_0.pdf

reads something like a sales brochure for NASA. Throughout the report phrases like “NASA – with its extensive expertise in these domains and global reputation for scientific openness” or “NASA’s assets can play a vital role” show that the space agency would be happy to undertake a long term study of UFOs, with adequate funding of course.

It’s true, in order to do science somebody has to pay for it! NASA has always known that funding is key to space exploration. (Credit: SlidePlayer)

To show what NASA can do the report does include analysis of several well known recent sightings especially the ‘Go Fast’ video taken by a Naval Aviator flying off of the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier, a video that was shown at the congressional hearing back in May. From the measured data shown on the video itself and using a little simple mathematics the team was able to demonstrate that is was the Navy plane that was going fast, not the object it filmed. In fact the object was traveling no faster than 40 mph, and with the wind. The report confidently states that in all likelihood the UFO was drifting with the wind, in other words it was nothing more than a misidentified balloon.

The NASA teams explanation of the ‘Go Fast’ video shown in the figure above. Many UFO sightings happen when the observer is moving but thinks it’s the strange object they’re looking at is what’s moving. (Credit: NASA)

At the same time as it’s studying UFOs NASA could use the money to study actual Phenomenon like the Red Sprites shown here. (Credit: NASA)

So, should the federal government fund NASA to conduct a long term examination of UFOs in the hope that when the final report is published everyone will accept it. As I said above this is something that might have made sense sixty years ago but today the ‘true believers’ on either side will never accept any answer but the one they want. My fear is that NASA will explain the great majority of the UFO sightings while at the same time there will always be a small percentage of ‘Unknowns’. This is the same situation that Project Blue Book wound up in sixty years ago and which only served to generate rumors that the federal Government was ‘hiding the truth’ about flying saucers, an accusation that NASA may very soon find itself to be the target of.

With all of the times that the government has kept the truth from us can you really blame people for thinking the same thing about UFOs? (Credit: Nixon Library)

If space aliens were actually visiting Earth, in such great numbers as UFO believers insist wouldn’t they have contacted us by now, or conquered us by now or at least have DONE SOMETHING BY NOW!