Monday, October 15, 2018

Astronomy's Strange Discoveries.



-  2125  - Astronomy's Strange Discoveries.  (1)  The Deadliest blast of Gamma Ray,  (2)  The fastest star leaving the galaxy.  (3)  The planet hot enough to melt lead.  (4)  The asteroids older than Earth.  (5)  The biggest collision of galaxies.  (6)  The farthest galaxy
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----------------------------------  2125  - Astronomy's Strange Discoveries.  
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-  "What the heck is goin on round here?" is what my grandson Nathan said all the time.  He was 3 years old and whenever he encountered something strange, “ What the heck’s goin on round here?”
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-  That must  be the way astronomers feel these days.  As technology allows them to see more and make more discoveries they encounter some very strange ones.  Here are a few examples:
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-------------------  (1)  The Deadliest blast of Gamma Rays
-------------------  (2)  The fastest star leaving the galaxy
-------------------  (3)  The planet hot enough to melt lead
-------------------  (4)  The asteroids older than Earth
-------------------  (5)  The biggest collision of galaxies
-------------------  (6)  The farthest galaxy
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-  (6)  The farthest galaxy.  Its starlight is just now reaching us.  The starlight left the galaxy 13,000,000,000 years ago.  At the time the Universe was only 750,000,000 years old.  Astronomers believe the very first stars appeared about 100,000,000 years after the Big Bang.  But, that galaxies did not form until about 1,000,000,000 years.  So, this galaxy that the Hubble Deep Field telescope discovered must be one of the very first galaxies.
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-  It is a young galaxy with many bright forming stars.  When the very first stars and galaxies formed they were made of only hydrogen and helium ( an electron and a proton, or two electrons and two protons.)  None of the heavier elements were yet created. 
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-  However, the first stars were massive and had very short lives, about 10,000,000 years.  When they died they went supernova and spread the periodic table of elements into interstellar space for the next generation of stars to use.
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-  (5)  The biggest collision of galaxies.  The Spitzer Space Telescope has images of four galaxies all colliding in  a cluster called CL0958+4702.  When this merger is finished it will be 10 times the size of the Milky Way.
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-  The Milky Way will double in size in 2,000,000,000 years.  That is when the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will begin to merge.  The massive Black Holes at the center of each galaxy will form a Quasar  that will light up the sky in a galactic way.  There will be lots of new star formation during this collision.
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-  (4)  The asteroids older than Earth.  Asteroids 234 Barbara, 387 Aquitania, and 980 Anacostia have mineral signatures that date these space rocks to be 4,550,000,000 years old.  The four rocky planets here today were first formed by billions of asteroids, colliding, fragmenting, and coalescing together as they orbit the Sun in the original accretion disk.  If we can get more data on these asteroids we could learn how our Solar System was formed.
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-  (3)  The planet hot enough to melt lead.  The planet orbiting the star HD149026 was discovered in 2005.  The method used was the radial velocity method.  The star wobbles as the star and the planet orbit around a common center of gravity.
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-   So, the star comes towards us than goes away from us in a periodic cycle for each orbit.  The change in wavelength of the light occurs with the change in radial velocity as it appears from Earth.
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- Later astronomers discovered that the planet past in front of its star causing a tiny decrease in light, about 0.003 magnitude, on every orbit which took only 3 days.  The mass of the planet was calculated to 36% the mass of Jupiter, or 114 times the mass of the Earth.  The light reflection was 30%, a 0.30 albedo, putting its surface temperature at 1,540 Kelvin.
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-   The albedo depends on the surface composition and the color.  The darker the surface, the more light it absorbs and the less it reflects.  It this case the planet absorbs 70% of the light.
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-------------  Temperature  =  280 Kelvin * ((1 - albedo) / AU distance from star^2)^0.25
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-  The day-side brightness temperature was measured in the infrared 8,000 nanometers to be 2,300 K.  This extremely high temperature indicates the planet must be unusually dark in color.  A black ball of charcoal with a temperature above the boiling point of lead. (footnote 1)
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-  The diameter of the planet is 73% that of Jupiter and 83% that of Saturn. So the density is 1350 kg/m^3.  The core must be 70 times more massive than Earth.  The planet must contain more rocks and metals than all 9 planets in our Solar System.  Its gravity would be 10 times that of Earth’s.  This is not a planet for sissies.
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-  (2)  The fastest star leaving the galaxy.  HE 0437-5439 discovered in 2005 is traveling 1,600,000 miles per hour.  This exceeds the escape velocity for the Milky Way Galaxy, meaning it is going to fly out into intergalactic space leaving our galaxy forever. (footnote 2) 
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-  The star is only 30,000,000 years old.  It is 9 times the mass of our Sun and 200,000 lightyears away in the Constellation Dorado.  The best guess is that the star was a binary in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy.  The super massive Black hole at the center of this galaxy pulled the one star in and the binary star was flung out in the opposite direction at a velocity needed to conserve the angular momentum of the pair.  The Conservation of Energy at work.
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-  (1)  The Deadliest blast of Gamma Rays.  If you were looking into the night sky on March 19,2005  at the Constellation Bootes, you could have seen an object with your naked eye that was 7,500,000,000 lightyears away.
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-  The Great Galaxy of Andromeda is 250,000,000 light years away and you can see that with the naked eye in the northeast night sky.  All the other objects you can see, 2,000 to 3,000 in number, on a good night are less than 76,000 lightyears away.  They are all in the Milky Way which is 100,000 lightyears in diameter and we lie 26,000 lightyears form the center.
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-  This bright flash was Gamma Ray burst, GRB 080319B.  It had a visible light Magnitude of 5 to 6.  6 about the limit of naked eye seeing.  The redshift of the flash was measured to be 0.94 which translates to a distance of 7,500,000,000 lightyears, half way to the Big Bang. 
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-  At the time that the flash occurred the Earth was not yet formed.  The flash lasted for 20 to 40 seconds.  The luminosity of the flash was 2,500,000 times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded.  The flash is caused  when a massive star runs out of fuel and the core collapses to form a Black Hole. 
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-  This shockwave released an intense burst of high-energy Gamma Rays and ejecting particle jets that rip through space at nearly the speed of light like a cosmic blowtorch.  When the jets plow into surrounding interstellar clouds they heat the gas to brilliant afterglows.  These burst are the most luminous explosions in the cosmos since the Big Bang.
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(1)  The mass is 36% of Jupiter’s 1.9*10^27 kilograms.  The radius is 73% that of Jupiter’s 71,492 kilometers.  The volume is 4/3 pi*r^3.  Volume = 5.23*10^23 meters^3.  Density = mass per unit volume.  Density = 1,300 kg / m^3.  Coal is 1350 kg/m^3.
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(2)  The Escape Velocity = 2*G*M / R.  Where the Mass of the Milky May is 10^11 solar mass making it  1.9 * 10^41 kilograms.  The Radius of the Milky Way is 2.6*10^20 meters.  G = 6.67*10^-11 m^3 / kg*sec^2.  Velocity = 312,000 meters per second.  Velocity = 698,500 miles per hour for the escape velocity to leave the galaxy.
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-  October 15, 2018.      
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 ---------------------    Monday, October 15, 2018        -------------------------
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