Cleaning up some old hand written story snippets to a story or just some random bits of stuff that has come to me.
As human started to travel to new star systems and encountering worlds floating in space without a star they found a lot of them very similar to the planets and moons around their own host system. Many of the icy planets and moons got named after the icy moons of Saturn, Jupiter or the minor planet Pluto and a number like Europa 1….n or Enceladus 1….n and so on. The large planets got mostly named after the giants in Earths solar system, barren worlds got named after either Luna or Mercury, miserable places to live got named after Venus if too hot or too cold and small after Mars. The habitable planets got named after cities, countries or what ever the colonists want to call them. For centuries scout craft went into the space in between the stars to find rogue planets, planets with no host star to warm them.
Europa 12439 was one of the thousands of Europa class planets that were found in the depths of space or a rogue planet. It was just over 1600 km wide with an average temperature of 3K most of the surface was ice, ice mountains, icy plains and some signs of fresh water freezing over old ice in some spots, but these were still millions of years old. Over the years there have been attempts to change the names of these planets to Luke, Skywalker, Perry, Steven, Bob, Evan, Rebecca, Cara and Jay but have failed. This base was at the very edge of explored space. On one side of the planet that constantly pointed towards the galaxy was the main base about 400 meter in radius and mostly under the ice. There was a ring of windows around the outside and the top was concave making it a large receiver with several tunnels leading to structures like what was called the garage which was a hanger with a half a dozen fighters, a couple of shuttles, ground vehicles, and a freighter. Another outbuilding was an experiment to drill to the ocean underneath to see if there was anything under the ice. but most of the signal that it listened to was from hyperspace relays, tracking messages and movement of ships throughout the different regions of space. On the other side was a giant radio telescope array called Shostak 6, named after a SETI scientist, there were about a dozen of these arrays on planets in the local neighbourhood of planets, they were joined into the Tarter Array and the data compiled at the Drake Institute on Sagan 1, all of the arrays were pointed towards the galaxy of Andromeda. . It took 2 years to get this base thru hyperspace so the usual time on station was another 2 years and another 2 home so only the most dedicated were usually out here, and was usually a small crew at that.
The Cosmic Connectome/The Man of a Trillion Worlds
When this series came out I wasn’t planning on doing a write up every week on it. And I know Ann Druyan and Niel deGrasse Tyson and Set MacFarlane don’t know about this please don’t sue me and thanks for not suing me..
Tonight’s first episode was on the human brain starting with what the ancient cure for epilepsy which was once was called the sacred disease because for a long time no one knew exactly what caused it. In Greek times they would sacrifice a goat to a god to appease the god to stop the seizures. Hippocrates the father of modern medicine said at the time they thought it as an ailment that they could figure out caused other than a supernatural one but one day it the cause will be known. Now fast forward to the 1800’s in France to the researcher Paul Broca. He had a patient Tan, the [atient got this name because from the age of 30 to 51 all he could say was Tan. After Tan died Broca dissected Tans brain and found that a part of the brain was damaged, this now known as Brocas region and the are of the brain that was found to the seat of speech. Broca was known who really cared for his patients but he was a product of his time he thought males were smarter than females and that whites were smarter than other races. Another leap came about Han Berger, he took an year off from studying to join the German Calvary. While training he was knocked his horse and nearly ran over by a cart. When he became a professor at a university he had a secret lab. Right after the training exercise he got a letter from his father saying Hans sister had a feeling something bad was going to happen. So Han wanted to find a way that people could communicate other large distances. In his secret lab he attached to his head electrodes and measured what happened under different conditions. Not mentioned in the show was Wilder Penfield who attached electrodes directly to regions of the brain to find what triggered seizures. But what do we know about the brain, we don’t have any fossils of brains to see the evolution of it because it soft and soft tissues don’t really fossilize well. There is a large organism on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean that is about the size of France made from a lot of smaller organisms. If one in the center needs food it releases a Potassium from a ion channel, a spot on the a cell wall that allows ions to travel and the rest of the mass will eat less until the center gets what it needs. About a 600 million years ago something like a flatworm developed a group of cells just to run the rest of body, to remember things and to learn not really a brain but what is called a ganglion. As creatures evolved over the years bits and pieces were added to the brain. The human brain has 86 billion neurons with each with thousands on connections to other neurons. There are different regions of the brain like there is the occipital lobe which is connected to eyes, and one part on the right side is does logic while the on the left side does creative stuff, all the parts are connected to one another. What makes us different is it the number of connections, is it what the connections tells the brain to do, some might get endorphins released while in social interactions and others like me under get the chemicals that give the sensation of anxiety.
In 1784 a young amateur astronomer in the county of York England John Goodricke noticed that Beta Lyrae changed it brightness over time and he found he could predict the pattern on how the star changed brightness. Two years later he was admitted into the Royal Society in England but he died of Pneumonia at the age of 21 but died before he found out. Abut 150 years later a Gerard Kuiper, and astronomer you emigrated from Holland to run the Macdonald Observatory in Texas decided to studt Beta Lyrae.He found a lot of usual suspects in the spectrum but there were a couple of bright lines that weren’t suppose to be there. He eventually figured out it was a binary star system. A binary system is when two stars orbit one another there are several types of binaries, this turned out to be what is called a contact binary. Their gas envelopes actually touch each other or some material is transferred between stars. Kuiper found that about half all the stars are binaries, the number is probably more like seventy five percent. Kuiper thought that the difference between a system with planets and a binary system is that when the system started is that the ones with stars the clumps were larger and the ones with planets the clumps were smaller. Eventually he started to look at the atmospheres of the moons and planets in the solar system this angered another scientist H.C Urey a chemists. Both of them started off in poor families, Urey started his profession career as a teacher in a mining town in Montana, one of the people in the town encouraged him to go further, eventually to a Nobel prize and to the University of Chicago. At the time scientists in one field wouldn’t deal with scientists in other fields, but this was going to change. After the Russians launched the first satellite the Americans and Russians were in the space race which led to the creation of NASA. Both Urey and Kuiper worked for NASA and since they did not like each other they had a go between. A young student who worked with Urey and Miller on the famous Urey-Miller experiment and got a rather harsh criticism by Urey when the decided to write a paper about life in the universe. Then he went to work at the Macdoanld Observatory to work under Kuiper to study Mars during its closest approach, but could see much on Mars because there were dust storms across the pjlanets. This meant plenty of time to talk and for Kuiper to give advise to the student. This student went to be the editor of Icarus a multi-discplinary journal, made researching respectable, promoted science to the public which at the time got him a lot of flak and even wrote science fiction, of course this person is Carl Sagan.
Here a couple of podcasts with Ann Druyan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson:
What are Exomoons, well first thing is no one has found any exomoons yet but they are moons that orbit planets around stars other than our own. There will be two papers in this write up on moons in red dwarf systems one is about the habitability of theoretical moons around M dwarf class stars and moons that start their orbits around planets but eventually are ejected and can become planets themselves called ploonets, and some of these might break up and might be a solution to Tabby’s star.
Out of the 4011 planets found as if when this paper was published some there are some 258 planets are around M dwarf class of star. M dwarfs are about a third of mass of the sun but make up 2/3 the number of stars on the galaxy. So studying planets and moons around them gives a pretty good idea about these objects thru out the galaxy. These type of stars generally give off about half the heat of the sun the planets have to be much closer to the star, this means they are more acceptable to solar flares and radiation form the star, and they are probably tidally locked which one side is always facing the star like one side of the moon is facing the Earth. Since one side heats up and the other side is always dark there will be winds that will carry some of the heat to the other side of the planet plus a region that will always be in twilight. Also if there is a moon orbiting the the planet the magnetic fields of the planet might protect the moon from radiation the star also depending on the moons orbit the planet itself might shield the moon when a solar flare is ejected from the star.
Out of the total 4011 exoplanets found 109 are around M dwarfs otherwise known as Red Dwarfs, 258 were rejected because they were too far from the planet. That left 3774 planets out of those 258 were discovered around 109 Red Dwarf stars ranging from a distance of 1.30 pc Proxima Centauri b to 430 pc away kepler 235.The radial velocity method gives the mass of a planet and the transient method only gives the diameter of a planet. Only thirteen of these planets have both the radius and the mass and the other 192 have either mass or radii. The largest planet has a radius of 0.78 of the Earth radius and to the smallest of 0.52 of the Earth radius and that is n system of J1928-4437. The masses range from 0.10 Earth masses to 0.39 Earth masses. Thirty three lay in the habitable zone of the stars, 9 have masses 5 to 10 Earth masses, 10 have masses greater than 10 Earth masses and the other fourteen are probably are mini Neptunes and probably not habitable at all. The criteria that would affect if a moon would be habitable would be the Roche radius if inside the radius the moon will break apart eventually and create a ring like Saturn rings and this giving by 1.34*(Mp/ρm) . Where Mp is the mass of the planet and ρm is the density of the moon, so a less dense moon would break up further out than a less dense moon, and a moon around a more massive would break up further away then a moon closer a less massive planet. Another thing that effect the habitability of the moon is how much heat is released from tidal interactions. If the moons would be an Io like moon that is constantly erupting would have to have between 1020 TW to 13400 TW of energy to warm the core enough. For a moon to be like Venus it would have to be greater 13400 TW. And for Earth twins it would be between 20 and 100 TW of energy, at 100 TW the would start to melt assuming a rocky world, these calculations are based off of 4 most likely chooses for exomoons. These are CD 23 1056 b a giant exoplanet around a M0.0 V type star, IL Aquaris two giant expoplanets around a M4.0 V type star, Ross 1003b eccentric (highly stretched out orbit) Saturn mass exoplanet in a muli planet system around a M40 star.
Ploonets are moons that once orbited planets but because of the interaction between the planet, star and moon have been ejected until being a planet of its own. A lot of these planets are what are know as hot Jupiters, large gas giants close to the star. These planets probably far from the star with the moon and moved inwards to be closer to the star. When these systems get closer to the star they become unstable and the moon or moons can be ejected and if they are ejected with the right speed they can go into orbit around the star, get ejected out of the system or crash into the star. Some of these that get go into their own orbit can break-up and create a debris field, KIC-846852 or Tabby’s star.
In this study planets from 0.5 to 1.8 Neptune masses were used and the mass range for the moons were 1 to 10 times the mass of Titan and different distances form the star for the planet was used from a=0.3,0.5,0.75 and 1.0 AU and the distance between the planet and moon is 3 times the radius of the planet. The letter a is used for the semi-major axis or the long axis of the ellipse and b is used for the semi-minor radius, e is the ratio between the two. If the moon gets too far from the planet it will be ejected, this is called the Hill radius or Hill sphere, inside it stays in orbit and outside it goes bye-bye, the formula for this is rh=a*(1-e)*(Mstar/3Mplanet)1/3 where M is the mass of the planet and M star is the mass of the star. Where the orbit is a perfect circle e =0 and rh=a*(mstar/3Mplanet)1/3. When the planet-moon system gets close to the host star the Hill radius decreases because the star will pull on the moon and pull it away from the planet.
Previous simulations have shown that moons should from in about 1000 years to 100,000 years while the movement of the planet moon system should take 100,000 to 10 millions years so there is plenty of time for moons to from before they get the final orbit closer to the star. The simulations would simulate a lifespan of 500,000 years once the planet moon system gets to its final orbit. Fifty two percent of the simulations had the moons colliding with the planet (44 percent), six percent of them collided with the sun and two percent. Of the other forty eight percent, 54 percent got into a higher orbit than the planet, 28 percent of them went into a highly eccentric orbit.
These paper a just a couple of papers starting to think about exomoons and whether or not they would be a good place for life to start on and whether or not they would last long enough for life to evolve on them. They could form around larger planets and the magnetic fields could protect the planets from the radiation from the parent star. The planet might give the planet extra warming so the the planet and moon do not have to be as close to the star which might be a better spot for life to evolve. Plus if they are in highly eccentric orbits the moon might be on the planets shadow while close to the sun and on the other side while far around form the star.
When the first generations of stars died they one the minerals that was produced was olivine which either has iron or magnesium. When the Earth formed oceans seams of this mineral was formed on the ocean floors where long snake like formations formed called serpentine. This serpentation of hot rocks and magma released large amount of CO2 and methane thru the oceans and into the atmosphere which kept the Earth warm. Also some of these compounds were trapped in caves under the water where the chains of molecules grew larger and larger and eventually self replicated the beginnings of life. Looking for serpentine formations is one of the key ways of figuring out where life could of started. The first lifeforms that came about did not need oxygen or were anaerobic but soon came the cyanobacteria about 2.7 billion years ago. They took off anywhere there was water and also gave off oxygen. This changed the atmosphere of the planet change the color of the sky to blue, it reacted with minerals in the crust forming rust for the first time, and still does this on peoples cars today. But the oxygen reacted with the methane in the atmosphere to create more CO2 than methane, methane is stronger greenhouse gas so the temperature of the planet dropped and became an ice ball (irony alert) until the volcanoes dumped enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to warm the planet again, this went back and forth for a while. Another new chemical that came about was ozone, which is O3, ozone was what protects us from the UV light form the sun. About 541 billion years ago a lot different species of life came about this life had bones, shells, gills and limbs this was the Cambrian Explosion.
NASA has a scale on which to rate the chances of life on the world or if our life will affect it. The moon is a class 1 world no chance of life and our life couldn’t flourish there, Jupiter and Saturn are classed as type 2 and there are three worlds that are classed as type 5 restricted worlds these are Mars, Europa and Enceladus.
Once life started on Earth there needed to be an instruction book on how to make more life just like it self. All living life was either RNA or DNA, RNA or ribonucleic acid which is a single strand of four bases of adenine(A), cytosine(C), uracil(U) and guanine(G) and DNA Dioxyrebonucleic acid which has base pairs of adenine(A), cytosine(C),Thymine(T) and guanine(G) which is a double helix and A pairs with T and C with G. DNA exist within the nucleus of the cell of Eukaryotes and when a protein is needed a section of DNA that encodes for that protein is copied by making a mirror copy of that section, with one exception when an A is on the DNA molecule it is encoded with a Uracil instead of Thymine on the mRNA molecule. Then the messenger RNA or mRNA molecule goes out of the nucleus of the cell and goes to the ribosome where it matches three of the bases with an ammo acid which there are twenty 13 we can make from scratch the other seven we have to ingest. The string of ammo acids forms a protein. Everything in the body, from the cell, to tissues to organs are made this way except for the mitochondria which have their own genetic code and is passed down thru the material line only.
We only recently as a species started to understand how this all worked, at has only been about 150 years actually. One of the early investigators was Gregor Mendel who was a monk who wanted to a professor but failed his exams so became a substitute teacher so he had a lot of time on his hands. So what does every sub teacher with too much time do he of course experiments on peas. On thing he tracked was the color of the peas. During his first run he would find that 75 % of the peas turned out be yellow and 25% green and when he cross breed them it was about 50/50. He realized some traits were what called dominated and others are recessive. We have all kinds of what we genes that are recessive and dominated, some have recessive genes that encode for stuff like ALS or asthma. Another trail that went led to genetics was that there was an English scientist who got a job on a bot called the beagle that went around the world. He noticed that finches a type of bird on group of islands had different beak shapes and sizes depending on what they ate. We really didn’t call it genetics until 35 years after Mendels death by Bateson.
Bateson had a Russian student named Vavilov. Vavilov was brought in a family were the parents started off poor and moved up in society to the upper middle class and all four siblings became scientist. Russia like everyone else who grew crops were dependent on the weather but sometimes there could be droughts or a volcano might eject enough material to block out enough sunlight to cool the Earth. At times there were devastating failures that led to starvation of the peasants while the upper classes ate food from around the world ,this was probably one of major reasons for the communist up raising and Stalin starved some his opponents out of existence. Vavilov became so respected he a opened his agricultural institute. His goal was to find where the species used in agriculture came from so he find the ancestor and then he could figure out how it was changed and how to change it to get better crops. While he was out doing this all over the world on of his proteges wanted the attention that Vavilov got his name was Lysenko. Lysenko did not think genes were behind how organisms developed but he thought instead of breed wheat all he had to was to soak the seed grains in cold water and they would grow in the Russian winter. This was based off of a different theory called Lamarckism, which is older than Darwainism. Lamarckism if a giraffe wanted a long neck to get to the leaves on the top of a tree all it had to was grow a longer neck by doing neck ups and it pass this down to its offspring. Darwainism is that a gene is copied wrong and this and other mistakes might make a change that will give the organism an advantage over others and its offspring survive better and spread the gene. Eventually Vavilov was charged with anti-soviet activities and spying (the Russians were ahead of the Americans on this one) and after 400 sessions of torture was sentence to die by starvation while the Germans were attacking. At this time in Lenningrad the city where he set up his institute was under siege, the population was starving but the scientist at the institute stayed there an continued there work and guarded the seed collection 250,000 species. Even thou they only got two pieces bread a day none of scientists touched a grain of rice, three of them died. Why did they do this, like Neil said at the end of the shoe, “Did you eat today?”.
The Mars 2020 rover will be the next rover on the ground and will launch from Earth in July or August and take about six months to arrive on the red planet. It’s mission is to continue the mission of the other rovers, landers and orbiters on or around Mars. That is to determine if there was life on Mars, to characterize the climate and geology of Mars and get ready for the Human exploration of the plnet in the future. The Rover will find interesting rocks determined by scientists on Earth and go over the the rock and take a sample and put in a pre-cleaned tube and seal it eventually putting then caches over the surface for future missions to pick them for and send them back to Earth. There are a number of instruments. The first is the mastcam Z located about 2 m high on the mast with its eyes 24.2 cm about so it can take stereoscopic images with 2 mega pixels with an image average size of 1600 by 1200 pixels an will send back 148 per average sol, a sol is a martian day that is longer than the Earth day by about 39 minutes. This will let the scientists to find possible targets to investigate and probably a lot of pictures for the public. Another instrument is MEDA or Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer it will measure wind speed and direction also will measure temperature, humidity and amount and dust in the wind. There will be an experiment to see how much oxygen can be made out of the atmosphere to be used for propellant and for breathing, it can produce up to 10 grams per experiment running about 2 hours each time, this unit will be called MOXIE for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. There is going to be a ground penetrating radar, that will see what is under the rover for up to 10 meters under the craft using frequencies of 150 to 1200 megahertz, this instrument will be called RIMFAX for Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment. PIXL for Planetary Instrument for X-ray lithochemistry, this instrument is to have close look at the soil texture and have close up pictures of the soil. SHERLOC will not look fro criminals on the red planet but will be Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organic Chemicals. Another camera will be the SuperCam which will be at the head of the mast which will analyze the chemistry of the soil with a laser looking for organic compounds. There are three possible landing zones for the lander ,Columbia hills, Jezero Crater and NE Syrtis Major. Columbia hills more specifically Gustav crater has been surveyed by the Spirit Rover where it was found that there was a underground spring that bubble up, then there is NE Syrtis where there was once water that had an underground hot springs and the water came up to the surface to allow microbes to survive. Then there is Jezero crater where a river ran by it and overflowed the rim of crater, also maybe a good place for life. Where ever it lands it will give a better view of what happened 3.5 billion years ago and if there was life there, if life did exist what happened to it? And can we survive there and if we can change for our survival.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ann Druyan and Seth MacFarlane are back in the ship of the imagination fuelled by the engines of wonder and skepticism with the most recent version of Sagan’s Cosmos. The first episode explores where we have been before before we can think of how we are going to explore space. First is the cosmic calendar where each month represents just over a billion years and each day represents about 40,000 million years. The Mammals don’t show up until December 26 and we didn’t came about until the last seconds of the last day. At first we roamed around looking for whatever we could find either gathering berries or hunting game. But about 20,000 years ago farming began, we learned how to plant seeds, to take of the plants and harvest the plants. This eventually lead to cities starting about 9,000 years ago. On the walls of one on the earliest cities in Anatolia in present day turkey started drawing maps of their city. Also cities allowed for people to gather and communicate and travellers from other lands would go and do trade goods and ideas. One such city was Amsterdam in the 1600’s where there was van Leeuwenhoek who was using simple lenses to look at microscopic life, Huygens who used to lenses together to explore Saturn’s rings and discover Titan and Spinoza. Spinoza pondered that the God was the principles and mechanisms that ran the universe, some 250 years later a German physicists by the name of Einstein was asked if he believed in a God and he said it was the God of Spinoza.
What will be the first things sent to other solar systems probably will be solar sails. Light can exert a pressure on object. There have been at least two solar sails sent into space by the planetary society, one failed and the other launched last year was successful. These craft would be small and probably just consist of a sail of a thin film and a several computer chips, many will be launched at once because a lot will be damaged and probably using a laser to give them a boost. They could travel up to a fifth the speed of light which means the nearest star which is 4 light years away would take 20 years to get there and 4 years for their signal to get back to the Earth. But like the Lapita people that started in southern China and moved to Taiwan. Eventually they moved on to the Philippines, Vanuatu and eventually to Hawaii, we will have to travel to stars to preserve our race or more likely our descendants. Time to ride the the ship of the imagination with those twin engines of wonder and skepticism, come be part of the universe that is trying to understand the universe.
A Brief History of Time when I bought this book in the mid ’90s had already sold 100 million copies as the cover says, so it is probably one of the most read if not the most read science book in history or at least started book. It along with some of Carl Sagan’s books probably started the popularity of modern science books. In February of 1997, there was a conference for undergrad students in the Atlantic provinces in Physics and Astronomy. I have bad nerves in some areas and one was public speaking, in the previous year I gave one about the telescope at my university and that year I gave a quick 15 minute talk about black holes based off this book. Since then I have read the book several times. On the remarkable things about of Hawking is that when he was a graduate student at Cambridge diagnosed with ALS which shuts down the nervous system over time, he was told he probably wouldn’t live more then a couple of years, that was in the 1960’s and he passed away in 2018.
Besides being busy trying to figure how black holes behave and how the universe started he made plenty of media appearances in Star Trek the Next Generation, The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory, and a couple of his own series including Stephan Hawking’s universe where he states he has sold more books on physics then Madonna has on sex.
One of Hawking’s expertise was black holes. Before there is a black hole there is usually a star a really massive star. A star is a balancing act between gravity and pressure holding the star together and the energy being generating form the core pushing outwards and trying to rip the star apart. Pressure is basically force over an area, right now there is 101.325 kPa of pressure on you. A Pa or Pascal is the unit of pressure which is a N/m2 and is the unit of force so a newton is mass* acceleration and acceleration is about 9.8 m/s2, so basically over every meter there is over 10,000 kg of mass but this goes up in the atmosphere several hundred kilometers so it is spread out over many kilometers. There is also some other things that need to discussed before discussing black holes. First thing is a quality of particles called spin on way to think of spin is that of a spinning top but particles like electrons because they really don’t have an axis to spin around. Another way of seeing them is that particles like electrons, protons and neutrons that have a spin of 1/2 look like a double headed arrow you only have to move half way around before it looks like they way you started, particles that have spin of 1 takes a full rotation before it looks like they way you started like a single headed arrow, particles of spin 2 takes two full spins before it looks like when you started. Also there is the speed of light has to taken into account. The speed of light considered was considered like the speed of everything else it was relative to everything else if you travelling at 10 m/s and light was measuring 15 m/s in the same direction you would measure light as moving at 5 m/s. Ole Christian Roemer noticed that the times for the moons of Jupiter to pass in front of Jupiter varied and he realized that that this was because the distance between Jupiter and Earth changed during their orbits and calculated the speed of light to about 140,000 miles per second compared to 186,000 miles per second we know today but the measurements he was using was not as accurate. In the 1800’s James Clarke Maxwell while working on the equations on electrodyaminics the speed of light came out to be 186,000 miles per second and it was found to be fixed. And for a while after people like Lorentz was trying to figure out how to deal with this and eventually there was a physicists working at patent office in Switzerland. He realized that when you travelled near the speed light funky things happen, time actually slows down for the traveller and in the direction of travel the length of the traveller gets shorter. Ten years later he came up with his general theory of relativity which dealt with how gravity works. He realized that space and time were interconnected in something called space time, there is length,width and height and time all woven together it is kind of get your head around. One way to see it is that x axis is all the space coordinates and the y axis is time. Now if you have a light source like the Sun emitting light at the origin, the line that shows how light is travelling thru space time is a 45 degree line and if you rotate around the y axis it forms a cone. Now what does this all have to do with black holes. Since stars are a combination of the thermonuclear energy coming form the core and the pressure and gravity pushing things down. What happens when the core runs out fuel to burn. The pressure and gravity pushes everything down. There was a very smart man from India which most people just referred to as Chandra and on a long boat ride from India to England he had a lot quiet alone time, could you just imagine such a thing nowadays. While on this trip he did he figured that the electrons in core of the Sun obeyed the Pauli Exclusion principle that meant only two could have the same position and velocity and the maximum speed they could have would be the speed of light and figured that the maximum mass that could hold back the collapse of more than 1.5 solar masses and later found to be around 1.4 solar masses. Later it was found that the neutrons and protons could keep a star under about 2.5 solar masses from collapsing any further, that is if the don’t spin if they spin it is higher, the lowest mass neutron star as there are called is about 3 solar masses. Anything larger the pressure and gravity would be more dominate the Pauli Exclusion principle and the a black hole will form. One of the first candidates was Cygnus X-1. It is a bright x-ray source which are high energy light, at that particular spot there is no obvious source of the x-rays but there is a nearby giant blue star. The material from the massive star is attracted a region of high gravity and as the material come crushing the collisions in the material heats up and creates x-rays. There was a famous bet between Hawing and another physicists Kip Thorne, Hawking bet there wasn’t a black hole and if he won he would get four years of his favourite magazine Private Eye and Thorne bet that there was a black hole and if he won he would get a subscription to his magazine of choice. Thorn got his magazine subscription. There
Now for this section I am going to combine some stuff out this book and the Origins book because I am having some trouble editing that article at the moment. In 1981 Hawking was at a conference held at the Vatican by the Jesuit order. The Jesuits are the branch of church that usually don’t where the dog collar as call it and before they become Jesuits they have to great a degree in something like science. When I was at UNB and St. Mary’s there was a Jesuit by the name of Dr. William loncs who was the last Jesuit at St. Mary’s and there is a Jesuit who for a long time worked at a podcasting network and now works directly at the Vatican setting up podcasting for the church, he is known as the digital Jesuit. But the conference Hawking was told by the Pope that they can study what happened at the big bang but not the moment of the big bang because that was God’s moment. It was a Jesuit who originally came up with the idea of the Big Bang. According to Hawking either the universe started with chaotic boundary conditions or a no boundary conditions start. A no boundary situation the universe in its lifetime would look like a globe. The north or south pole would be the beginning and the universe would expand and then the universe would contract over time and go back to in size over time, this does eliminate the singularity at the beginning and the end. Then there is the chaotic boundary condition which implies that the universe is infinite or there is an infinite number of universes. In the chaotic boundary conditions something called inflation happens. When the gravitational force separated from the other forces the universe rapidly expanded, this idea was originally thought of by Dr. Guth at MIT, the problem with the idea was that he thought small regions rapidly but these regions could not reconnect because they were travelling away from each other at the speed of light. Then Linde in Russia thought there could of been on master bubble that formed originally. Here is the thing Hawking didn’t talk much about dark energy and dark matter. The first evidence for dark matter was when Fritz Zwicky yes that guy was studying the movement of galaxies in the Coma cluster. The Coma cluster is a group of galaxies in the Coma Berenices constellation, while measuring the speed of galaxies in the out skirts of the cluster they were travelling too fast. In the 1960’s Vera Rubin was measuring the rotation speed of galaxies and found the stars on the outskirts were also travelling to fast. If you are orbiting a central object your orbital speed will decrease by a set amount, now it looked liked there was more mass than expected to keep things rotating so fast. There have been several candidate theories that have come up to explain this missing matter or Dark Matter(DM). There have been several solutions to what is DM, the first is MACHOs or MAssive Compact Halo Objects, these would be rogue planets, black holes and brown dwarfs, not enough of these have been found to account for all the mass needed. There are WIMPS or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, these particles don’t interact with matter thru nuclear reactions or with light but they have mass, this makes them hard to detect because we can’t make any detectors to detect them. There are other theories like MOND or Modifed Newtonian Dynamics, were gravity only decrease at large distances by the inverse of radius and not the square of the radius. Then there is Dark Energy. When Einstein came up with his theory of General Relativity (GR) there was a term that came out of the math where the universe should be expanding, Einstein didn’t like this so he dropped the term. About a decade latter Hubble found that the universe was expanding, Einstein put the term back into his equations and admitted it was his greatest blunder. In the 1990’s two teams one from Harvard and the other on the west coast of the US found the universe was expanding at a faster and faster rate. Since there is no source of the energy needed it has been dubbed Dark Energy. There have been found that the difference between Dark Energy and Dark Matter 0.46 and the two have add up to 1 so DM is around 0.23 and DE is around 0.73 with 4 percent of universe being the matter we made of also in the early universe DM was about a million times that of DE and over the 13.6 billion years since the Big Bang the DE has been increase while the DM has been decreasing, eventually the DE will be a million times that of that the DM. So what does mean for the universe. It means it will keep expanding and expanding. Also it probably means that the original universe had chaotic boundary conditions vs a no boundary condition.
This book is still in print today for a good reason. It is great book and if you are interested in black holes and the universe it good start. Some of the info of course is out date because it was written in the 80’s And Hawking died when I write this two weeks from now. But he was one of the great thinkers of the Twentieth century. But…
This book was written to accompany a Nova special series, Nova being a long running scien documentary series of PBS. It probably was the first introduction for a lot of people to Dr. Tyson to the general public. Yes a lot of this stuff is a bit of retelling of some stuff already written but I probably was a bit wrong like galaxies probably started before stars, theories and understanding change in science, that is what it separates it from like some other human interests.
Well let us start at the beginning, at the moment time began, there was no time or space as we know it before this, well you could not really use before to describe it because there was no time. Since then there have 13.7 billion years until know. At the beginning all the forces were united the only for 10-35 seconds then gravity separated and the electroweak and strong forces were still untied. Between 10-37 to 10-35 the universe expanded from the the size of proton to the size pea, the energy to this probably came form the transition from on phase to another like ice expanding as freezes from water, this rapid expansion is what is referred as inflation. Until the first trillionith of a second happened the three forces were one and then strong force froze out and then eventually the weak and electromagnetic force separated. For the first millionith and the temperature of a second the universe consisted of just quarks, particles that make the large hadrons like protons and neutrons, also there were the leptons like the electrons and the neutrinos. Then the quarks when the temperature got below 100 million degrees, combined to make neutrons and protons, this early universe was about 90 percent hydrogen almost ten percent helium and a few parts per thousand of lithium . For the next 380,000 the universe was a white hot fog the photons had enough energy to excite every electron from the hydrogen atoms that they were part of, if you were there you couldn’t see an atoms diameter in front of you. Then the universe cleared up and this as far back as we can see, 380,000 years after the beginning over time these photons have been stretched as space expanded and lost energy and now have a temperature of 2.72 K. This was actually originally found by accident by Wilson and Penzias in 1964 while they were testing a new way of broadcasting signals for Bell labs while using a microwave antenna. At first they thought it was something closer to the ground and even scrubbed the insides thinking it could of been something pigeon droppings. They actually bet a group at Princeton trying to build a specific antenna to find it. Eventually COBE and WMAP were launched to map it.
On these maps there are spots that are cooler and warmer then others by thousandths of a degree. Some of these spots are were galaxies and galaxy clusters formed. Large clouds of the gas spun around and in the center there was so much mass that these regions directly collapsed into what are now the super massive black holes that are in the center of spiral galaxies. The gas in these clouds collapse into stars that could of been hundreds or thousands the size of the sun because there was no impurities to halt them from forming, these stars lasted only millions of years because more massive the stars the faster they burn up their fuels. There are several main types of galaxies, the ellipticals, the spirals and the irregulars. The spirals have arms with a central bulge area with an number of arms and some have a bar structure an arm out from either end of the bar, they have 100 billion solar masses. The arms have giant gas and dust clouds that from when the material gets caught up in arms like cars in a traffic jam. Then there are the elliptical galaxies which are larger and look like an ellipse from all directions, they have about 1 trillion solar masses but little gas so little star formation happening. Then there are the irregulars which are blob like galaxies typically smaller than the spiral galaxies around 1 billion solar masses and a lot of star forming areas, the most close ones can be seen in the southern hemispheres, their are the large and small Magellanic clouds, the closest the Large Magellanic cloud is about 260,000 light years away. Edwin Hubble had the idea that ellipitcals eventually started to spin and flatten in disks to create the spirals and barred spirals but since the ellpiticals don’t have much gas this probably not the case.
While studying the galaxies a couple of things were discovered one was dark matter and the other is dark energy. Dark energy was first came to light in the 1930’s when Fritz Zwicky was studying a cluster of galaxies in the constellation Coma Berenices called the Coma cluster. Another observation that shined some light on this was by Vera Rubin in the 60’s where stars at the outer edge of galaxies were travelling to fast. If you orbit the center of mass the further you go out the slower you should be moving like a figure skater spinning, when their arms are close to the body they faster they spin and when there arms are out stretched the slower thy move. There are several candidate solutions to this problem, one are WIMPS or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or MACHOS or Massive compact Halo Objects, and another is MOND or Modified Newtonian Gravity.
Another partial post,enjoy, gotta get up, don’t know when the rest will be post.
First thing I have to say I am not a real fan of the Aliens and Predator franchise, I don’t think I have seen Predator or the whole thing. This movie and its sequel Covenant which was actually this movie was on and I probably put a little part of that in this article. The original movies were about an Alien that would lay an egg in some unexpecting person and later a immature version of the creature would pop out of the chest and start killing everyone in sight. Then there was the predator an alien hunter who would have cloaks and all kinds of fancy weapons and tech. Eventually the two were brought together and both were genetically engineered to hunt one another and humans were basically cattle or used to host the eggs of the Xenomorph or Aliens. I kind of think there were reboots to the originals even thou some of the same people were involved in both.
At the beginning of the film there is a scene where a giant looking human is standing over a water fall and a ship is a far above. He takes some kind of substance where then he dies and his body breakdown down to the DNA in a matter of minutes as he falls into the falls. This probably means he is seeding life on this planet and probably is Earth. This an example of Panspermia which is an idea that life was spread out thru the cosmos. Like a bacteria riding inside an asteroid or a comet and life coming to life from that. One of the chief proponents of this was Fred Hoyle who also championed a theory of the universe called the Steady state model and coined the term black hole to make fun of the concept. Steady state universe is an Universe where it is infinity old, it still expands but matter just comes into existence to keep the average density of the Universe. There was an episode of Star Trek:The Next generation where there was a race that seeded all the planets they thought cold have life in the future. This kind of explains why they all look the same on the show and in the movies. But there some major issues with Panspermia model. The Universe started with 90 percent Hydrogen, about 10 percent Helium and a few parts per thousand of Lithium. So when the first stars were only made from these elements and created the more massive elements over time. There were no planets because there was really nothing to make planets from and there was no life because there was nowhere for it to form or anything to make it from. The stars matured and exploded and collided creating and distributing the heavier elements. Depending on the mass of the star this could take a few million years to billion of years. And since the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old the universe is about 13.7 billion years, so there was time but it took time for things to travel the distances between stars, so unless you had a space fairing species doing it, it is probably is unlikely.
Then a group of archaeologists on the island of Skye in northern Scotland uncover a cave with a humans around a giant pointing to a group of dots on the sky. They interpret this a group of stars that these aliens want humans to go to because they are seen in drawings around the world like in Egypt, Mexico and in Hawaii. There is a huge problem with this first of stars move, first they orbit around the center of the galaxy this it radial velocity and there is there velocity to the tangent of this called the tangential velocity and when add the squares and square root the result (vectors) you get the proper motion. The point is over time stars move over time so they would be some drift over time and they would be near stars that they were around a few thousand years before depending on there velocity.
They arrive at a gas giant class star with a moon that has an Earth like atmosphere except a little heavier in carbon dioxide. This is were they expect to find the Engineers as they were dubbed by the scientists on the mission. They go down to planet where they find an installation and of course one of the scientist couldn’t wait until in the mourning so they rush in with a large vehicle and couple of dune buggy things. They go in find a holographic recording of the Engineers running away, then they enter a cargo bay are where there a mysterious cylinders, with something in them. They of course take one back along with a head of the Engineers, I would built in scanners into on the vehicles so they wouldn’t have to take dangerous items back to the ship. On board the ship is an android who while they were travelling was to look after them while they where in hibernation but now he kind of turns on them. He takes a small organism from the cylinder and feeds it to one of the scientist. This base was actually a biological weapons facility where the Engineers were engineering a creature to take back to Earth to wipe out the Humans, this of course were the first generations of the Xenomorphs. This of course leads to the argument over genetic engineering or maybe intelligent design. Genetic engineering is changing the genetic code of something to hopefully benefit you.
The reason the mission was funded was because the head person of the Weyland corporation wanted to meet his maker, he couldn’t wrap his head around the fact it could of been a matter of chance, we had to be here for a reason or someone put us here. This kind is lie Intelligent Design which just says there must be a maker the arguments for this are usually based of the watchmaker argument, that is a watch is complicated and needs someone to build it. The arguments are usually based off of the human eye, but if you study other lifeforms on the planet there are some that have just a light sensitive patch, and others over time had concave spots on their heads to eventually the eyes of mammals,birds, fish, reptiles. Another argument is that some bacteria have flagellum that move like a propeller on a boat to move them about. Again they say that the bacteria couldn’t just evolve this at once but some bacteria just have a spike to infect other bacteria or other life and there are other similar structures that were there in previous bacteria that could be used in the flagellum. Plus there are gaps in the fossil record so they say a new line has been created, this is a version of god of the gaps. Also you could also see someone try a heavy handed lesson on the evils of genetic engineering. We have for hundreds or thousands of years selected traits that we wanted in plants and livestock. Recently we have learned ho to make changes in the DNA to quicken these outcomes usually now using a process like CRISPR. Here is the thing if you are building a weapon to attack a race similar to yours and it backfires maybe not a good idea but if you are using to make rice that produces beta creatine so people can have vitamin A, so they don’t go blind then probably not a bad idea.
First thing I have to say I am not a real fan of the Aliens and Predator franchise, I don’t think I have seen Predator or the whole thing. This movie and its sequel Covenant which was actually this movie was on and I probably put a little part of that in this article. The original movies were about an Alien that would lay an egg in some unexpecting person and later a immature version of the creature would pop out of the chest and start killing everyone in sight. Then there was the predator an alien hunter who would have cloaks and all kinds of fancy weapons and tech. Eventually the two were brought together and both were genetically engineered to hunt one another and humans were basically cattle or used to host the eggs of the Xenomorph or Aliens. I kind of think there were reboots to the originals even thou some of the same people were involved in both.
At the beginning of the film there is a scene where a giant looking human is standing over a water fall and a ship is a far above. He takes some kind of substance where then he dies and his body breakdown down to the DNA in a matter of minutes as he falls into the falls. This probably means he is seeding life on this planet and probably is Earth. This an example of Panspermia which is an idea that life was spread out thru the cosmos. Like a bacteria riding inside an asteroid or a comet and life coming to life from that. One of the chief proponents of this was Fred Hoyle who also championed a theory of the universe called the Steady state model and coined the term black hole to make fun of the concept. Steady state universe is an Universe where it is infinity old, it still expands but matter just comes into existence to keep the average density of the Universe. There was an episode of Star Trek:The Next generation where there was a race that seeded all the planets they thought cold have life in the future. This kind of explains why they all look the same on the show and in the movies. But there some major issues with Panspermia model. The Universe started with 90 percent Hydrogen, about 10 percent Helium and a few parts per thousand of Lithium. So when the first stars were only made from these elements and created the more massive elements over time. There were no planets because there was really nothing to make planets from and there was no life because there was nowhere for it to form or anything to make it from. The stars matured and exploded and collided creating and distributing the heavier elements. Depending on the mass of the star this could take a few million years to billion of years. And since the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old the universe is about 13.7 billion years, so there was time but it took time for things to travel the distances between stars, so unless you had a space fairing species doing it, it is probably is unlikely.
Then a group of archaeologists on the island of Skye in northern Scotland uncover a cave with a humans around a giant pointing to a group of dots on the sky. They interpret this a group of stars that these aliens want humans to go to because they are seen in drawings around the world like in Egypt, Mexico and in Hawaii. There is a huge problem with this first of stars move, first they orbit around the center of the galaxy this it radial velocity and there is there velocity to the tangent of this called the tangential velocity and when add the squares and square root the result (vectors) you get the proper motion. The point is over time stars move over time so they would be some drift over time and they would be near stars that they were around a few thousand years before depending on there velocity.
They arrive at a gas giant class star with a moon that has an Earth like atmosphere except a little heavier in carbon dioxide. This is were they expect to find the Engineers as they were dubbed by the scientists on the mission. They go down to planet where they find an installation and of course one of the scientist couldn’t wait until in the mourning so they rush in with a large vehicle and couple of dune buggy things. They go in find a holographic recording of the Engineers running away, then they enter a cargo bay are where there a mysterious cylinders, with something in them. They of course take one back along with a head of the Engineers, I would built in scanners into on the vehicles so they wouldn’t have to take dangerous items back to the ship. On board the ship is an android who while they were travelling was to look after them while they where in hibernation but now he kind of turns on them. He takes a small organism from the cylinder and feeds it to one of the scientist. This base was actually a biological weapons facility where the Engineers were engineering a creature to take back to Earth to wipe out the Humans, this of course were the first generations of the Xenomorphs. This of course leads to the argument over genetic engineering or maybe intelligent design. Genetic engineering is changing the genetic code of something to hopefully benefit you.
There will be more later but I need a nap and I have decided to add a few things.
