By Hal Brown (My blog has stories that piqued my interest today)
Where the hell did Scarlet go? I want to tell her that I am so fed up with thinking about Trump that at least for this morning I don’t give a damn.
Instead I thought I’d look at science news and share some articles that were published just in the past few days. Since it is raining here, I’ll start with the weather on a couple of far away planets.
Excerpt: A trio of researchers, two with Harvard University, the other the University of Alberta, has found evidence that weather on Saturn and Jupiter may be driven by dramatically different forces than weather on Earth. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, Rakesh Kumar Yadav, Moritz Heimpel and Jeremy Bloxham describe computer simulations showing that major weather systems on Jupiter and Saturn might be driven by internal rather than external forces, resulting in outcomes such as the formation of large anticyclones like Jupiter's famous red spot.
Weather on Earth is primarily driven by processes that take place in a thin layer of the atmosphere near the planet's surface. For many years, it has been thought that similar processes drive weather on other planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn. In this new effort, the researchers demonstrate that such theories may be wrong.
While we are rightfully lauding the successful SpaceX's Dragon Resilience Spacecraft launch most of the media attention has been on the amazing images of the rocket and videos of the new crew joining the crew that is already there. Short shrift is being given to the numerous experiments being conducted on the International Space Station (described here on Wikipedia) and, below on the NASA website:
The universe is really, really vast (duh) and there are earthbound scientists making discoveries about it that cause them to rethink their existing theories and find new things every day that don’t require them being launched into space.
In the articles below the links are below the images.
Excerpt:
Einstein
However, increasingly accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background, a remnant of light in the very early universe, yielded a different Hubble constant: about 67 kilometers per second.
How can that be? Why the difference? Could this difference tell us anything new about the universe and physics? "This," says Leiden physicist David Harvey, "is why a third measurement, independent from the other two, has come into view: gravitational lenses."
Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a concentration of mass, such as a galaxy, can bend the path of light, much like a lens does. When a galaxy is in front of a bright light source, the light is bent around it and can reach Earth via different routes, providing two, and sometimes even four, images of the same source…
HoliCOW
In 1964, the Norwegian astrophysicist Sjur Refsdal had an "a-ha" moment: When the lensing galaxy is a bit off-center, one route is longer than the other. That means that the light takes longer by that path. So when there is a variation of the brightness of the quasar, this blip will be visible in one image before the other. The difference could be days, or even weeks or months.
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Excerpt:
On May 24, four European telescopes took part in the global effort to understand mysterious cosmic flashes. The telescopes captured flashes of radio waves from an extreme, magnetised star in our galaxy. All are shown in this illustration. Credit: Danielle Futselaar/artsource.nl
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By studying the site of a spectacular stellar explosion seen in April 2020, a Chalmers-led team of scientists have used four European radio telescopes to confirm that astronomy’s most exciting puzzle is about to be solved. Fast radio bursts, unpredictable millisecond-long radio signals seen at huge distances across the universe, are generated by extreme stars called magnetars – and are astonishingly diverse in brightness.
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For over a decade, the phenomenon known as fast radio bursts has excited and mystified astronomers. These extraordinarily bright but extremely brief flashes of radio waves – lasting only milliseconds – reach Earth from galaxies billions of light years away.
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In April 2020, one of the bursts was for the first time detected from within our galaxy, the Milky Way, by radio telescopes CHIME and STARE2. The unexpected flare was traced to a previously-known source only 25,000 light years from Earth in the constellation of Vulpecula, the Fox, and scientists all over the world coordinated their efforts to follow up the discovery.
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Excerpt:
At least one prebiotic molecule, an ingredient for building life, can form in the harsh environment of interstellar space, far from stars and planets, new research shows.
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The amino acid glycine - the simplest amino acid, without which life can't exist - was thought to require irradiation from stars to form. But new laboratory experiments show that it can form via what is known as "dark chemistry", which takes place without energetic irradiation.
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Glycine has been detected in a few interesting places. It seems to have turned up in a meteorite, and in the atmosphere of Venus.
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Of particular interest is its presence in the atmosphere of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, hinting that the molecule could form independently of the Sun or planets.
Excerpt:
An astrophysicist and a neurosurgeon walked into a room.
It may sound like the beginning of a bad joke, but what a pair of Italian researchers came up with is a truly galaxy brain take: The structures of the observable universe, they say, is astonishingly similar to the neuronal networks of the human brain.
University of Bologna astrophysicist Franco Vazza and University of Verona neurosurgeon Alberto Feletti detail the surprising similarities between the cosmic network of galaxies and the complex web of neurons in the human brain exhibit in a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Physics. Despite being roughly 27 orders of magnitude apart in scale, the human brain and the composition of the cosmic web show similar levels of complexity and self-organization, according to the researchers.
The brain contains an estimated 69 billion neurons, while the observable universe is composed of at least 100 billion galaxies, strung together loosely like a web. Both actual galaxies and neurons only account for about 30 percent of the total masses of the universe and brain, respectively. And both galaxies and neurons arrange themselves like beads on long strings or filaments.
In the case of galaxies, the remaining 70 percent of mass is dark energy. The equivalent in the human brain, the duo said: water.
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Excerpt:
Theories on how the Milky Way formed are set to be rewritten following discoveries about the behavior of some of its oldest stars.
An investigation into the orbits of the Galaxy's metal-poor stars—assumed to be among the most ancient in existence—has found that some of them travel in previously unpredicted patterns.
And last but not least, the mysterious Kraken Galaxy:
Excerpt:
The Milky Way has collided and merged with multiple other galaxies over its long lifespan, but piecing together its history has been a painstaking task.
A new analysis of dense star clusters orbiting the Milky Way has now given us the most complete galactic merger history yet. And in those data is a previously unknown merger event that took place 11 billion years ago, and completely altered our galaxy's shape. Astronomers have named that galaxy - subsumed by the Milky Way - the Kraken.
This story is dedicated to the first science teacher I ever had, Mr. Niqoue, at Traphagen Jr. High School in Mt. Vernon, NY. I think of him often as figuratively turning over in his grave considering the ignorant anti-science president who thankfully will soon be walking around one of his Florida golf courses playing with his little putter.
Well, I made it to the end of this but couldn’t resist taking a slam at Trump. The first version of this diary looked like this but I decided to add him.
Afterword:
By chance I live in a retirement community of about 500 residents and up until last month six months of them were physicists. None of them knew each other before they moved here. I know all of them pretty well. Some taught and did their research in universities, one in his retirements is finishing up a book on his area of specialty, my across the street neighbor was instrumental in developing a top secret technology for the government, and just last month a seventh physicist moved in who did research for NASA.