UNIVERSE - born in billion year steps?

 -  2809  -  UNIVERSE  -  born in billion year steps?  -  This review summarizes what science thinks is the way the Universe evolved after its birth 13,750,000,000 years ago.  The most astounding part is that what we know is only a very small percentage of what is out there.  The mass-energy of the Universe is huge.  We are made of heavy elements that are like 0.03% of it.  And, we have been recycled several times.  If you do not know the answer it must be science. 

---------------  2809  -  UNIVERSE  - born in billion year steps?

-  The Hubble Ultra Deep Field image was obtained staring at one spot in the sky for months.  The image gathered after that long exposure contained over 10,000 galaxies.  The area in the sky was 1/100 the size of the Full Moon.  If you scale that up to the full sky there are at least 200,000,000,000 galaxies out there within the range of the Hubble Space Telescope if we pointed it in every direction.

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-  However, 96% of the total mass-energy of the Universe is not made of galaxies. Only 4% of the entire Cosmos is what we know as “normal matter”,  or baryons.  Baryons are atoms that are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons.  One conclusion you could make from this proportion is that galaxy formation is very inefficient.

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------------------------  70% is Dark Energy, we do not know what that is.

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------------------------  25% is Dark Matter, we do not know what that is either.

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------------------------  4%  is neutrons and protons, mostly hydrogen and helium

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------------------------  1 % is the stars and galaxies.

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------------------------  0.3% is neutrinos.

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------------------------  0.005 % is radiation of all types except Dark Energy.

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-------------------------  0.03 % is the heavy elements, oxygen, carbon, neon, iron, the stuff we are made of and everything around us is made of.

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-  This is humbling.  The more we learn about the Universe the more mysterious it becomes.

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-  Most of our conclusions have come from study of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.    This mostly uniform radiation that is all around us has small variations in temperature that reflect the matter density that existed before the galaxies first formed.

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-  Another source of knowledge comes from study of nuclear fusion.  How the first elements were formed in the Big Bang.  The proportions of helium, deuterium and lithium give the same answers as the Cosmic Microwave Background.  This was the matter that formed in the first few minutes of the Universe and the radiation that was released after 380,000 years.

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-  Most of the galaxies we see today began forming 9,000,000,000 years ago.  The clusters of galaxies are just the high-density nodes of the Cosmic web of Dark Matter.  

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-  The initial distribution of matter in the early Universe grew in density due to gravity gradually forming a more massive system.  The gas clouds of hydrogen and helium would loose energy and cool because they radiated light.  The clouds would fall into the centers of these Dark Matter systems and begin to form stars.

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-  8,000,000,000 years ago the birth rate of stars was 10 to 20 times higher than what we see today.  Galaxies grew with these massive halos of Dark Matter.  The gas within galaxies cooled and collapsed into clouds that allowed molecular hydrogen to form.

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-  Under the continuous compression of gravity these clouds eventually reached a density needed to start nuclear fusion and form stars.  It is the radiation of the nuclear fusion that counteracted the compression of gravity.  This balance between the two forces is what holds stars together. 

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-  Bigger galaxies grew from the collisions and mergers of smaller galaxies.  However, today galaxies exist in a limited range of masses.  There must be a counter acting force that stops the compression of gravity that works in galaxies as well as it works in stars.

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-   One such force might be the stellar winds from supernovae explosions.  Another might come from the energy created by massive Blackholes that are in the centers of most large galaxies.

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-  Most of the baryonic normal matter in the Universe is gaseous and not galactic.  Most of this gas exists in the form of the intergalactic medium that has escaped the galaxies or has yet to form galaxies.

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-    In another 5,000,000,000 years our Solar System will join the interstellar medium.  Our Sun will balloon into a Planetary Nebulae as its hydrogen fuel runs out.  The inner planets will evaporate into the heavy elements and join the interstellar medium.  The baryons of matter repeat these cycles over and over again.

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-  The material that make up our lives and our daily lives came from recycled elements.  From stars forming and dying in galactic disks.  

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-  The calcium in your fingernail may have come from a supernova explosion that occurred 12,000,000,000 years ago.  That calcium atom is still working fine as old as it is.  However, your warrantee is about up and the cycle will continue as the Universe evolves.  

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-  It was Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant humans to occupy the planet, who said, I am but a seashore scavenger, roaming the beach picking up shells of knowledge here and there when there is a whole ocean of knowledge unknown that lies in front of me.

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-  If you do not know the answer it must be science.  An announcement will be made shortly, stay tuned.

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-  August 31, 2020                           1275                                            2809                                                                                                                                                 

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UNIVERSE - expansion controlled by dark matter?

 -  2808  -  UNIVERSE  -  expansion controlled by dark matter?  Dark Matter somehow forms the galaxies we have today?  At some point stars of all masses that we see today appear?  The smaller mass stars live for billions of years but when did they form.  What role did Blackholes play in this picture? 

 

---------------  2808  - UNIVERSE  -  expansion controlled by dark matter?

-    Why did the Universe turn dark, then light up again?  The entire Universe is based on a single moment when time and space, matter and 3 dimensions exploded in a brilliant flash of energy.  

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-  But, after that violent  birth the Universe went dark.  The Universe exploded as a smooth , hot , dense soup of high energy particles of matter and anti-matter.  The matter and the radiation were at the same temperature. Photons could not travel without being reabsorbed and re-emitted by a particle of matter.  The matter was Quarks and Gluons and Electrons that somehow survived annihilation from the anti-matter.

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-  The Universe was expanding and cooling to where Quarks would stick together with the Gluons to form protons and neutrons.  The protons were still positively charged nuclei of hydrogen.  This all happened in the first second after the Big Bang.

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-  Expansion and cooling continued for another 3 minutes and the protons and neutrons were able to combine to form helium and lithium nuclei  Helium nuclei has 2 neutrons and 2 protons.  Lithium nuclei has 3 neutrons and 3 protons.

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-  It took another 380,000 years before the expansion and cooling allowed these positively charged nuclei to capture the negatively charged electrons to form neutral hydrogen, helium and lithium atoms.  When this happened the atoms became neutral and lost their electric charge. 

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-    The neutral atoms no longer absorbed and emitted all the photon radiation.  Photons that were linked to the naked electrons and naked protons were released and could expand freely with the expanding Universe. 

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-  This first release of light is seen today as microwave radiation.  The Gamma Rays that started out with this first burst of light were stretched in their wavelengths as the Universe expanded and cooled.  Today it is the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation at 2.73 Kelvin, 0.15 centimeters wavelength, and 200 Gigahertz frequency

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-  The neutral atoms of hydrogen released the high energy photons however hydrogen atoms can still absorb lower energy wavelengths in the visible and ultraviolet wavelengths. This is the light absorbed in your eyes so to your eyes the Universe appears dark again. 

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-  These were the Dark Ages for astronomy.  There was no visible light.  The cosmic soup would have been extraordinarily smooth.  Ripples in the soup of neutral hydrogen would be less that 1 part in 10,000 from the average smooth density.  Everything that gravity was doing to pull matter together the Universe expansion was undoing to pull matter apart.

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-  The 1 part in 10,000 ripples in the smoothness of the matter density was enough for gravity to form some lumps.  Eventually the lumps grew and gravity halted expansion in that immediate region.  The lumps grew to Earth-size clumps of Dark Matter.  

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-  The Dark Matter clumps grew to giant halos and surrounded the visible, light producing parts of our galaxies.  Dark Matter grew to 1,000 Solar Mass but visible matter was still too hot to appear.

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-  When Dark Matter grew to 10,000 Solar Mass ordinary matter of hydrogen gas began to appear.  Dark Matter can not emit electromagnetic radiation.  Ordinary matter can.  Therefore, ordinary matter can cool and slow down as it emits electromagnetic energy, including  visible light.

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-    Hydrogen and helium condensed in the centers of these Dark Matter Halos.  Stars began to form when this gas collapsed into gravitational wells . When density reaches nuclear fusion the stars turned on in a burst of light.

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-  Hydrogen gas alone cools very slowly.  The heavier elements did not exist yet but they cool much faster.  Dark Matter halos grew to 1,000,000 Solar Mass about the time the stars turned on.

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-  All of this theory is the results from computer simulations that astronomers have developed.  These simulations create stars of 100 Solar Mass. But 100 Solar Mass stars are short lived.  Only 1,000,000 years before they explode as supernova. 

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-   This scenario in the computer models creates many unknowns.  The supernovae would release heavy metals and ultraviolet radiation that would ionize the hydrogen gases out to 1,000 lightyears from the exploding stars.  This would stop the growth of neutral atoms that were releasing the light. 

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-   If the star was 300 Solar Mass it would implode into a Blackhole before becoming a supernova. Either way the Universe was turning into the Dark Ages again.  Astronomers really do not know what happens next.  It is all a balancing act. Where does the order of the Universe come out of this chaos of matter and energy?

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-  Dark Matter somehow forms the galaxies we have today?  At some point stars of all masses that we see today appear?  The smaller mass stars live for billions of years but when did they form.  

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-  What role did Blackholes play in this picture?  Gas in-falling to a Blackhole emits ultraviolet radiation that too would ionize more gas.  Did Blackholes stop again the release of visible light?

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-  All this happened in out first billion years.  You probably had no idea that the material in your body is 13,700,000,000 years old.  Some of those heavy elements in your body could have been born in this first billion years of universal chaos.  

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-  From light to darkness to light to darkness to light again.  Astronomers are getting better telescopes into space to see if we can look further back in time and unravel this mystery of those first billion years.

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-  Today’s astronomers do not just use visible light.  The can use X-rays and Gamma Rays, Neutrinos and Gravity Waves, whatever will lead to new discoveries?

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-  August 31, 2020                                       1146                                2808                                                                                                                                                

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-----  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---- 

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UNIVERSE EXPANDING - violate conservation of energy?

 -  2807  -  UNIVERSE EXPANDING  -  violate conservation of energy?  As the Universe expands the light waves get stretched to lower energies.  Where does this loss of energy go?  This review discusses the law of Conservation of Energy and how spacetime causes us to see this is a loss of energy. 

------------  2807  -  UNIVERSE EXPANDING  -  violate conservation of energy?

-  Does Expanding Universe Violate the Conservation of Energy?  The law of Conservation of Energy is fundamental to all of physics.  It says that energy can never be created or destroyed.  It can be transformed from one form to another but the total energy always remains unchanged. 

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-   The energy released in the Big Bang is the same energy we have in the Universe today.  If we could add up all the different forms of energy, including mass, the Universe total would remain unchanged.  If true, how do we explain the expanding Universe that is continually diluting itself and loosing energy?

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-  The Universe is expanding.  As space expands the electromagnetic wavelengths get stretched.  Light wavelengths get “red-shifted”.  The longer wavelengths and lower frequencies have lower energy.  

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- That is why the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation we see today is 1,000 times longer wavelength than when it left the source 300,000 years after the Big Bang.  When light started on its journey to us it was Gamma Ray radiation at a temperature of 3,000 Kelvin.   What we see today is Microwave radiation at about 3 Kelvin.  The Universe has expanded by a factor of 1,000 and the radiation has cooled by a factor of 1,000.

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-  Light is loosing energy in the expansion of the Universe.  But, where does this energy go?  It must transform into something else?  If thermal energy goes down something else must go up if the law of Conservation of Energy is to hold up.  Energy can not be destroyed?    Here are the direct proportional relationships:

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-----------------------  Energy  =  a constant  *  Temperature

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----------------------  Temperature  =   a constant  * Frequency

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----------------------  Energy  =   a constant  * Frequency

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-  The point of this review is that energy appears to be lost, but, on the scale of the individual photons the energy is conserved.  How does this figure?

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Here is how  we calculate the apparent loss in energy from the CMB release till today?

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---------------------------  Energy is directly proportional to Temperature.  If two things are proportional they can be turned into an equality with the proper constant of proportionality.

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------------  Energy =  Constant  *  Temperature

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-------------  E  =  k * T

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-  The temperature of the CMB when light was released corresponded to the ions of atomic nuclei capturing electrons and become neutral atoms.  This occurs at 3,000 Kelvin.  If the energy is measured in electron volts the constant is 0.000428

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-------------  E  =  0.000428 * 3,000

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------------  Energy  = 1.28 electron volts.

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-  This is the energy level of a Gamma Ray photon.

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-   After the Universe expanded and cooled by a factor or 1,000 the temperature measured today is about 3 Kelvin.

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----------------  E  =  0.000428 * 3

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The energy in the Microwave Background is 0.00128 electron volts.

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-  How the constant of proportionality  “k above was calculated:  

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-   The constant = k =  Planck’s constant * Constant speed of light /  Wien’s displacement Constant.

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---------------k  =  h * c / 0.0029

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-------------  h  =  4.136*10^-15 electron volt * seconds.

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-------------  c  =  3*10^8 meters per second

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--------------Wien’s Displacement =  0.0029 meter * Kelvin

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--------------k  =  0.000428  electron volts / Kelvin.

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-  The same calculations can be made with the change in wavelength or the change in frequency of the CMB radiation. 

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---------  Temperature is directly proportional to frequency

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---------  T = K * f

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---------  T  =  10^-11 * f

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--------- Temperature = 10^-11 * frequency

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-----------  K  =  0.0029 / c

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-  Temperature is indirectly proportional to wavelength

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--------  T  =  0.0029 / w

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--------- 0.0029 is Wien’s Displacement Constant.

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-  When T = 3,000 Kelvin the frequency is 3 * 10^14 cycles per second  =  300 terahertz.

Wavelength =  10^-6 meters.  Gamma Rays.

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-  When T = 3 Kelvin the frequency is 3 * 10^11 cycles per second =  300 gigahertz.

Wavelength =  10^-3 meters =  0.1 centimeters.  Microwaves.

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-  Emmy Noether is a mathematician who proved that the Laws of Conservation depend upon the Symmetry in the Universe.  Wherever the Universe displays Continuous Symmetry there is a conservation law associated with it.  The physical laws stay the same with the passage of time. 

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-   Because the physical laws stay the same with the passage of time then, Time is in Continuous Symmetry.  The same is true with space.  The physical laws remain the same regardless of location in space.  There is Spatial Symmetry too.

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-  Temporal Symmetry dictates the Law of Conservation of Energy.  Spatial Symmetry dictates the Law of Conservation of Momentum.    Rotational Symmetry requires that the laws of physics do not change with at change in direction.  Rotational Symmetry dictates the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum.  

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-  If a law does not change regardless of the situation it obeys the law is in Continuous Symmetry.  Noether’s  law of mathematics states that whenever you have a Continuous Symmetry you must have a Law of Conservation.

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-  The way astronomer’s know that the light from distant galaxies is redshifted is because the wavelengths of photons emitted or absorbed by the hydrogen atom are the same everywhere ( Spatial Symmetry). 

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-   When the photons arrived at the astronomer they were stretched in proportion to the distance from the source.  You are familiar with the Doppler Shift of sound waves caused by relative motion.  Cosmological redshifts are different, but analogous.  Although the distant galaxies appear to be flying away from us actually the space between us is expanding. 

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-   The photons are not loosing energy they simply look different from our frame of reference.  To us they appear stretched by expanding space.  The Geometry of Spacetime is changing the Law of the Conservation of Energy is not.  What appears as a loss of energy ( increasing wavelength) is actually photons slowing down as geometry changes.  

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-  This is the basis of spacetime in the Theory of Relativity.  Time slows down as a function of motion speeding up.

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-  Particles have wavelike properties and the larger the particle’s momentum the smaller its wavelength and the greater its energy.  Particles can have higher momentum by having higher mass or higher velocity, or both.

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-  For example:  A baseball traveling 90 miles per hour has a wavelength of 1.1*10^-34 meters.  Not so the batter would notice.  However, an electron traveling at 90 miles an hour has a wavelength of 1.8*10^-5 meters.  That is very small also , but, relative to the electron it is 29 magnitudes larger than the size of the electron. 

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-  The baseball traveling 90 miles per hour is traveling 40 meters per second.  The mass of the baseball is 0.15 kilograms.  The electron’s mass is 9.108*10^-31 kilograms.

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--------------------  Wavelength =  Planck’s Constant / Momentum.

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--------------------   Momentum = mass * velocity

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--------------------  Wavelength of the baseball =  1.1*10^-34 meters

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--------------------  Wavelength of the electron =  1.8 * 10^-5 meters.

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- A particle’s wavelength increases by exactly the same proportions as a photon’s wavelength.  Light and matter behave the same when it comes to energy loss in an expanding Universe. Again the energy loss paradox is resolved when you take into account that you are measuring velocity in different frames of reference.

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-  How it appears to us:  It appears that Dark Energy is expanding the Universe but it does not dilute as the Universe expands.  It represents 73% of the total mass-energy in the Universe and it remains the same percentage as the Universe expands. 

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-   Noether’s law of symmetry falls apart in this changing spatial geometry.  Changing geometry breaks the Temporal Symmetry and the Conservation of Energy no longer holds.  In reality the total energy in the Universe becomes “ indefinable.  It appears that empty space does not have a physical reality.

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-  The hard part to grasp is that with relative motion we see photons from different perspectives.  The drop in energy is just a matter of perspective and relative motion.  

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-  To gain this perspective think of two galaxies receding from each other in an expanding Universe.  The galaxy’s redshift is identical to the Doppler shift to an observer receding at the same velocity as the galaxy.  To measure the velocities you must trace the trajectories of the galaxy and the observer not in space, but in spacetime.

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-    Compare the velocity of the galaxy at the time the photon was emitted with the velocity of the observer at the time the photon was received.  Now calculate the relative velocity.  The redshift observed can be accounted for with relative motion and not to the energy loss. 

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-  The race car sounds faster coming towards you and slower after it passes you.  Even though the race car is traveling at the same speed.

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-  In the same way, the Universe is expanding it is not leaking energy.

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- The Cosmic Microwave Background, CMB, wavelengths are not a single frequency but cover the range from 0.5 to 0.05 centimeters with a peak at 0.11 centimeters.  The peak energy level is 0.00124 electron volts.

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-  August 31, 2020                           1227                                           2807                                                                                                                                                 

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-----  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---- 

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UNIVERSE AGE - measuring the oldest light.

 -  2806  -  UNIVERSE  AGE  - measuring the oldest light.  Ancient light from the Big Bang has revealed a new estimate for the universe's age of 13.77 billion years, + or - 40 million years.  The new estimate, based on data from an array of telescopes in the Chilean Atacama Desert.  The new data also estimates how fast is the universe expanding.    

---------------  2806  - UNIVERSE  AGE  - measuring the oldest light.  

-  I finally found something older then the guys in my coffee club.  Ancient light from the Big Bang has revealed a new estimate for the universe's age of 13.77 billion years, + or - 40 million years. 

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-  Physicists need to understand the universe's expansion rate to make any sense of cosmology.  They know that a mysterious substance called “dark energy” is causing the universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate in all directions.  But, how fast is it expanding?  And, is it a constant expansion or an accelerating expansion.  And, what is causing it?

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-  When astronomers point their telescopes into space to measure the Hubble constant ,the number that describes how fast the universe is expanding at different distances from us or another point,  they come up with numbers that disagree with each other, depending on the method they use.

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-  The Hubble Constant tells us the universe is expand at an accelerating rate of  49,300 miles per hour for ever million lightyears of distance.

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-  One method, based on measurements of how fast nearby galaxies are moving away from the Milky Way, produces one number for H0. Another method, based on studying the oldest light in space, or cosmic microwave background (CMB), produces a different number for H0.   Which is right?

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-  This disagreement has left scientists wondering whether there's some important blind spot in their measurements or theories. 

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-  The data from the Planck satellite, released in 2018, were the most important measurements of the CMB before now. With an unprecedented level of precision, they showed how sharply CMB measurements of H0 disagree with measurements based on the movement of nearby galaxies.

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-  These new results recalculated the CMB measurement from scratch using an entirely different set of telescope data and calculations, and came up with very similar results. That alone doesn't prove that the CMB measurement of H0 is correct.   There could still be some problem with the physics theories used to make the calculation.

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-  Relying on data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, the researchers tracked faint differences between different parts of the CMB, which appears to have different energy levels in different parts of the sky. 

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-  The CMB, which formed as the universe cooled after the Big Bang, is detectable in every direction in space as a microwave glow. It's more than 13 billion light-years in the distance, a relic of a time before stars and galaxies formed. 

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-  By combining  theories on how the CMB formed with precise measurements of its fluctuations, physicists can determine how fast the universe was expanding at that moment in time. That data can then be used to calculate H0.

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-  The other  methodically scanned half the sky looking particularly at microwave light. These researchers spent years cleaning up and analyzing the data with the aid of supercomputers, removing other microwave sources that are not part of the CMB, to stitch together a full map of the CMB. 

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-  That whole time, they "blinded" themselves to the implications of their work, they wrote in their papers, meaning they didn't look at how their choices affected estimates of H0 until the very end. Only when the full CMB map was complete did the researchers use it to calculate H0.

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-  The new CMB map also offered a new measure for the distance between Earth and the CMB. That distance, combined with a new measurement of how fast the universe has expanded over time, allowed a precise calculation of the age of the universe.

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-   It's still possible that some error in those theories is messing up the  calculation. But it's not clear what the error would be.

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-  The other approach to calculating H0 relies on pulsing stars known as “Cepheids“, which reside in distant galaxies and pulse regularly. That timed pulsing allows researchers to perform precise calculations of their motion and distances from Earth.

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-  With those direct speed measurements, it's fairly straightforward to come up with a measurement of H0. There are no complicated cosmological theories involved. But it's possible, some scientists have proposed, that our region of the universe is just weirdly empty, and not representative of the whole universe. 

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-  It is even possible that there are measurement issues with the cepheids, and that these cosmic measuring sticks don't work quite the way physicists expect. 

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-   Stay tuned there is still more to learn how we got here.  I will save that for the next Review.

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-  August 31, 2020                                                                              2806                                                                                                                                                 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-----  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---- 

---   Some reviews are at:  --------------     http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----  

--  email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews 

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WHITE DWARF - stars.

 -  2805  -  WHITE  DWARF  -  stars.  The stars in the sky may seem ageless and unchanging, but eventually most of them will turn into White Dwarf Stars.  This is the last observable stage of evolution for low- and medium-mass stars. These dim stellar corpses dot the galaxy, leftovers of stars that once burned bright.

-  

---------------  2805 -  WHITE  DWARF  -  stars.  

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-  Stars have lifetimes just like us.  Their life times depend on their size.  The bigger the star the shorter the life.  The smaller the star the longer it lives.

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-  Main-sequence stars, like our the Sun, form from clouds of dust and gas drawn together by gravity. How the stars evolve through their lifetime depends on their mass.  Our Sun will eventually become a White Dwarf.  

-

-  The most massive stars, with eight times the mass of the Sun or more, will never become White Dwarfs. Instead, at the end of their lives, they will explode in a violent supernova, leaving behind a Neutron Star or Blackhole.

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-   Low- to medium-mass stars, such as the Sun, will eventually swell up into Red Giants. After that, the stars shed their outer layers into a ring known as a planetary nebulae.  The core that is left behind will be a White Dwarf, a star in which no hydrogen fusion occurs.

-

-  Smaller stars, such as Red Dwarfs, don't make it to the red giant state. Red dwarfs take trillions of years to consume their fuel, far longer than the 13.8-billion-year-old age of the universe, so no red dwarfs have yet become white dwarfs.  

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-  When a star runs out of fuel, it no longer experiences an outward push from the process of fusion and it collapses inward on itself. White dwarfs contain approximately the mass of the Sun but have roughly the radius of Earth. 

-

-  This makes white dwarfs among the densest objects in space, beaten out only by neutron stars and black holes. The gravity on the surface of a white dwarf is 350,000 times that of gravity on Earth. That means a 150-pound person on Earth would weigh 50 million pounds on the surface of a white dwarf.

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-  White dwarfs reach this incredible density because they are collapsed so tightly that their electrons are smashed together, forming what is called "degenerate matter." The former stars will keep collapsing until the electrons themselves provide enough of an outward-pressing force to halt the crunch.

-

-   The more mass, the greater the pull inward, so a more massive white dwarf has a smaller radius than its less massive counterpart. Those conditions mean that, after shedding much of its mass during the red giant phase, no white dwarf can exceed 1.4 times the mass of the sun.

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-  When a star swells up to become a red giant, it engulfs its closest planets. But some can still survive. NASA’s Spitzer spacecraft revealed that at least 1 to 3 percent of white dwarf stars have contaminated atmospheres that suggest rocky material has fallen into them.  Those the fate of the closer planets.

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-   New research suggests that the Milky Way's preponderance of positrons could come from a specialized type of supernova from colliding low-mass white dwarfs .  This is an explosion that is difficult to detect, but rich in an isotope that generates this kind of antimatter.

-

-   Many white dwarfs fade away into relative obscurity, eventually radiating away all of their energy and becoming so-called “black dwarfs“, but those that share a system with companion stars may suffer a different fate.

-

-  If the white dwarf is part of a binary system, it may be able to pull material from its companion onto its surface. Increasing the white dwarf's mass can have some interesting results.

-

-  One possibility is that the added mass could cause it to collapse into a much denser neutron star.  A far more explosive result is the “Type 1a supernova“. As the white dwarf pulls material from a companion star, the temperature increases, eventually triggering a runaway reaction that detonates in a violent supernova that destroys the white dwarf. 

-

In 2012, researchers were able to closely observe the complex shells of gas surrounding a Type 1a supernova in fine detail.  The white dwarf may pull just enough material from its companion to briefly ignite in a “nova“, a far smaller explosion. Because the white dwarf remains intact, it can repeat the process several times when it reaches that critical point, breathing life back into the dying star over and over again.

-

-  Astronomers recently spotted perhaps the strangest white dwarf star yet  It was a dead star the spins twice a second, sucking down material from a nearby companion as it goes.

-

-  When stars like the sun die, they heave off their outer atmospheres into space. After the fury dies down, only the core, a white-hot ball of carbon and oxygen, is left behind. That ball, no bigger than planet Earth, is supported not by the normal nuclear fusion inside living stars, but by the exotic quantum force known as degeneracy pressure.

-

-  But most stars do not live alone; most have siblings. And those stars can orbit in silent watchfulness as their companion ends its life in a blaze, leaving behind the corpse that is a white dwarf. Over time, that companion can either begin the final stages of its life itself, or spiral in too closely,  close enough to begin a destructive dance as they orbit one another.

-

-  When this happens, material from the white dwarf's companion can wind up on the surface of the white dwarf, building a thick layer of hydrogen around its carbon-oxygen body. In this situation and with enough time and enough material, a cataclysm can occur. A flash of nuclear fusion is created by the intense pressures in the atmosphere. This flash of energy releases in a blast of radiation, visible from light-years away.

-

-  These events used to be called "novas”.  Recently a team of astronomers spotted one of these novas.  Called a unique “cataclysmic variable star’ dubbed “ J2056“.   This is a binary system sitting about 850 light-years away from Earth   It is known as an "intermediate polar" cataclysmic variable star. 

-

-  White dwarfs are full of charged particles, like most things in the universe. They are also relatively small and spin pretty quickly. The quickly spinning charged particles generate magnetic fields, which fan out far beyond the surface of the white dwarf and affect how the material from its companion star actually makes it onto the surface of the white dwarf.

-

-  If the white dwarf star's magnetic fields are weak, the hydrogen from its companion star settles into a nice, regular disk of accretion, steadily feeding onto the white dwarf. If the magnetic fields are strong, they funnel the gas into streams that wrap around the white dwarf and strike the poles, like a super-charged aurora borealis.

-

-  However,  if the magnetic fields are middling, not too weak, but not too strong, we get what is known as "intermediate polar." The word "polar" here refers to the structure of the magnetic field itself.

-

-   In this case, the magnetic fields aren't strong enough to completely disrupt the formation of an accretion disk, but they are beefy enough to tangle up the gas near the white dwarf. This prevents a regular, smooth flow of gas, causing the white dwarf to flicker and flare irregularly and unpredictably.

-

-   “J2056 white dwarf” is an example of this intermediate polar system, which means that gas from its companion star can form an accretion disk around the white dwarf, but it has trouble actually making it to the white dwarf's surface. This white dwarf is only capable of accumulating about the equivalent of Earth's atmosphere every year, which as these systems go isn't all that much.

-

-  J2056 isn't emitting a lot of X-ray radiation, which is also atypical of these kinds of systems.  Lastly, J2056 is spinning. Fast. In fact, it's the fastest-known confirmed white dwarf, clocking in at a rotation period of roughly 29 seconds per complete revolution.

-

-  So how did J2056 get so fast? It could be that the configuration of its magnetic fields are just right and therefore able to pull material down onto its surface in quick spurts, accelerating the white dwarf like a stellar carousel. But its magnetic fields aren't strong enough to slow down the rotation through electromagnetic interactions with the surrounding accretion disk.

-

-  Still, the relative dimness of its X-rays and the supremely fast orbit of its companion remain to be explained. The companion star orbits once every 1.76 hours

-

-  J2056 could represent a brand-new class of cataclysmic variable stars, or it could be just a complete oddball. Either way, understanding how it works could help us to understand how magnetic fields operate around white dwarfs, which is important for understanding how they live and how they are born.

-

-  Astronomers always have more to learn.  If you can’t keep up take notes.  

-

-  August 30, 2020                                                                              2805                                                                                                                                                 

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-----  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---- 

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--  email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews 

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 ---------------------   Sunday, August 30, 2020  -------------------------

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QUARKS - particles we can not see?

 -  2804  -  QUARKS  -  particles we can not see?   Quarks are fundamental particles that are hard to see, and almost impossible to measure.  They are never found outside the atomic nucleus.  These tiny particles are the basis of the family of subatomic particles called “hadrons“. 

-  

---------------  2804  -  QUARKS  -  particles we can not see?

-

-  Everyone knows that atoms are made up of electron and protons.  Electrons are fundamental particles.  But, protons and neutron are not fundamental particles because they are in turn made up of even other fundamental particles.  These other fundamental particles in the nucleus of atoms are called “quarks and gluons”.

-

-  With every discovery in this field of particle physics in the past 50 years many more questions arise about how quarks influence the universe's growth and ultimate fate. 

-

-  The first quarks appeared about 10^minus 12 seconds after the universe was formed, in the same era where the weak force formed.  The “weak force”  today is the basis for some radioactivity.  At that instant moment the weak force separated from the electromagnetic force. 

-

-  A mystery arose in the 1960s when researchers using the Stanford Linear Accelerator  found that the electrons were scattering from each other more widely than calculations suggested. More research found that there were at least three locations where electrons scattered more than expected within the nucleon of  atoms, meaning something was causing that scattering. That started the basis for our understanding of quarks today.

-

-  Murray Gell-Mann, the co-proposer for the quark model in the 1960s, drew inspiration for the spelling from the 1939 James Joyce book "Finnegan's Wake," which read: "Three quarks for Muster Mark! / Sure he has not got much of a bark / And sure any he has it's all beside the mark." 

-

-  Quarks come in six different flavors. Protons are made of two up quarks and one down quark, while neutrons contain two down quarks and one up quark.  Physicists refer to the different types of quark as flavors: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top. 

-

-  The biggest differentiation between the flavors is their mass, but some also differ by charge and by spin. For instance, while all quarks have the same spin of 1/2, three of them (up, charm and top) have charge 2/3, and the other three (down, strange and bottom) have charge minus 1/3.

-

-   And just because a quark starts out as a particular flavor doesn't mean it will stay that way; down quarks can easily transform into up quarks, and charm quarks can change into strange quarks. 

-

-  An ordinary proton or neutron is formed of three quarks bound together by gluons, the carriers of the color force. Above a critical temperature, protons and neutrons and other forms of hadronic matter 'melt' into a hot, dense soup of free quarks.  An ordinary proton or neutron  is formed of three quarks bound together by gluons, carriers of the color force. 

-

-  Above this critical temperature, protons and neutrons and other forms of hadronic matter 'melt' into a hot, dense soup of free quarks and gluons, called the quark-gluon “plasma“. 

-

-  Quarks can't be measured, because the energy required produces an antimatter equivalent (called an antiquark) before they can be observed separately. The mass of quarks is best determined by techniques such as using a supercomputer to simulate the interactions between quarks and gluons, with gluons being the particles that glue the quarks together.

-

-   In 2014, researchers published the first observation of a “charm quark” decaying into its antiparticle, providing more information about how matter behaves. Because particles and antiparticles should destroy each other, one would think the universe should just have photons and other elementary particles. Yet antiphotons and antiparticles still exist, leading to the mystery of why the universe is made mostly of matter and not equal parts of antimatter.

-

-  Nailing down the mass of the top quark could reveal to researchers one of two ghastly scenarios: that the universe could end in 10 billion years, or  if the top quark is heavier than expected, energy carried through the vacuum of space could collapse. 

-

-  Behind the Scenes at Humongous U.S. Atom Smasher is a computer simulation of a collision of two beams of gold nuclei in the STAR detector. The beams travel in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light before colliding. The resulting particles fly in all directions to be measured by the cylinder-shaped detector. 

-

- The mass of quarks is best determined by techniques such as using a supercomputer to simulate the interactions between quarks and gluons, with gluons being the particles that glue quarks together.

-

-  The first observation of a charm quark decaying into its antiparticle in 2014 provided more information about how matter behaves. Because particles and antiparticles should destroy each other, one would think the universe should just have photons and other elementary particles. Yet antiphotons and antiparticles still exist, leading to the mystery of why the universe is made mostly of matter and not antimatter.

-

-  Nailing down the mass of the top quark could reveal to researchers one of two ghastly scenarios.  The universe could end in 10 billion years;   If the top quark is heavier than expected, energy carried through the vacuum of space could collapse.

-

-   If space collapses we will likely collapse with it!  End of story.

-

-  August 30, 2020                                                                              2804                                                                                                                                                 

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-----  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---- 

---   Some reviews are at:  --------------     http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----  

--  email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews 

---  to:  ------    jamesdetrick@comcast.net  ------  “Jim Detrick”  -----------

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 ---------------------   Sunday, August 30, 2020  -------------------------

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PULSARS - Magnetars, stars behaving badly?

 -  2803  -  PULSARS  -  Magnetars, stars behaving badly?  Pulsars and magnetars are stars behaving badly.  But, they are still following the laws of physics.  These are Neutron stars.  When stars get so big, their gravity gets so intense, the electrons collapse into the nucleus of protons and the star’s core made only of neutrons becomes a “Neutron Star” only 12 miles in diameter.  

---------------  2803  - PULSARS  -  Magnetars, stars behaving badly?

-  Neutron stars have tested Einstein's 90-year-old general theory of relativity through a series of some of its most stringent tests ever imagined.  It passed the tests. 

-

-   Radio observations show that a recently discovered binary “pulsar” is behaving in lockstep accordance with Einstein's theory of gravity in at least four different ways, including the emission of gravitational waves and bizarre effects that occur when massive objects slow down the passage of time.

-

-   The binary pulsar, known as “J0737–3039“, was discovered in late 2003 using the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia.   Astronomers instantly recognized the importance of this system, because the two neutron stars are separated by only 500,000 miles, which is only about twice the Earth–Moon distance. 

-

-  At that small distance, the two 1.3-solar-mass neutron stars whirl around each other at a breakneck 670,000 miles per hour, completing an orbit every 2.4 hours.

-

-  . General relativity predicts that two stars orbiting so closely will throw off gravitational waves which are “ripples in the fabric of space-time” generated by the motions of very massive objects. 

-

-  The rotating stars will lose orbital energy and inch closer together.  This system is doing exactly what Einstein's theory predicts. The orbit shrinks by 7 millimeters per day, which is exactly in accordance with general relativity equations.

-

-  The astronomers have also measured another change in the binary pulsar's orbit, and found it to be consistent with other the predictions of general relativity. The “periastron” ,the point in the two pulsars' orbit where they come closest, advances 17 degrees per year, which is the largest ever observed. 

-  These astronomers observed another strange prediction of general relativity that clocks will run slower when closer to a massive object. When one pulsar approaches its partner's intense gravitational field, its rotational period appears to slow down by as much as 0.38 millisecond.

-

-  When one pulsar passes behind the other and its signal travels through the warped space-time created by the foreground pulsar, it adds a 90 microsecond delay to the arrival of its signal. With its 88-degree angle, we are very fortunate to see this system almost perfectly edge-on

-

-  Pulsars are the collapsed cores of massive stars that exploded as supernovae. These stellar remnants rotate with extreme regularity, and their pulsed radio emission makes these dense objects virtually perfect clocks for measuring subtle gravitational effects.

-

-  Pulsars are unique neutron stars being among the most extreme objects in the Universe. They are formed when a massive star dies in a "supernova explosion" . During this dramatic event, the core of the star suddenly collapses under its own weight and the outer parts are violently ejected into surrounding space.  The electrons collapse into the protons and the nucleus becomes a solid sphere of neutrons.

-

-  One of the best known examples is the Crab Nebula in the constellation Taurus (The Bull). This nebula is the gaseous remnant of a star that exploded in the year 1054 and also left behind the pulsar, which is a rotating neutron star.

-

-  A supernova explosion is a very complex event that is still not well understood. Nor is the structure of a neutron star known in any detail. It depends on the extreme properties of matter that has been compressed to incredibly high densities, far beyond the reach of physics experiments on Earth.

-

-  The ultimate fate of a neutron star is also unclear. From the observed rates of supernova explosions in other galaxies, it appears that several hundred million neutron stars must have formed in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. However, most of these are now invisible, having since long cooled down and become completely inactive while fading out of sight.

-

-  When there is no sign of the associated supernova remnant and it must therefore be at least 100,000 years "old".  Unlike younger isolated neutron stars or neutron stars in binary stellar systems, known as “RX J1856.5-3754“, does not show any sign of activity whatsoever, such as variability or pulsations.

-  

-  However the emission of X-rays indicates a very high temperature for the star. From the moment of their violent birth, neutron stars are thought to lose energy and to cool down continuously. But then, how can an old neutron star like this one be so hot?

-

-  One possible explanation is that some interstellar material, gas and dust grains, is being captured by its strong gravitational field. Such particles would fall freely towards the surface of the neutron star and arrive there with about half the speed of light.

-

-   Since the kinetic energy of these particles is proportionate to the second power of the velocity, (velocity squared), even small amounts of matter would deposit much energy upon impact, thereby heating the neutron star.

-

-  While the chances for this were slim, a detection of such spectral features would be a real break-through in the study of neutron stars. If present in the spectrum, they could for instance be used to measure directly the immense strength of the gravitational field on the surface, which expected to be about 10^ 12 times stronger than that on the surface of the Earth.

-

-   It might be possible to determine the gravitational redshift, a relativistic effect whereby the light quanta (photons) that are emitted from the surface lose about 20% of their energy as they escape from the neutron star. Their wavelength is consequently red-shifted by that amount.

-

-   Most likely, the strong radiation from the very hot surface of the neutron star is ionizing hydrogen atoms (separating them back into a proton and an electron) in the surroundings, a process that also takes place near very hot, normal stars. The observed emission is then produced when, at a later time, the protons and electrons again recombine into hydrogen atoms.

-

-  With the inferred hydrogen density near the neutron star, about one thousand years will elapse between the moment of ionization by the passing neutron star and the subsequent re-unification of a proton with an electron to form a hydrogen atom.

-

-  During this time, however, the fast-moving neutron star will have covered a substantial distance. For this reason, it is expected that much of the hydrogen emission will not be seen very close to the neutron star, but rather along its "recent" trajectory.

-

-  The shape of the trajectory cone is like that of a "bowshock" from a ship, plowing through water. Similarly shaped cones have been found around fast-moving radio pulsars and massive stars. However, for those objects, the bowshock forms because of a strong outflow of particles from the star or the pulsar’s "stellar wind", that collides with the interstellar matter.

-

-  At present, it is still uncertain whether the observed density of the surrounding interstellar matter is sufficient to heat the star to the observed temperature. It is possible that sometimes in the past the neutron star managed to collect more matter during its travel through interstellar space, was heated, and is now slowly cooling down. In another million years or so, it will become undetectable, until it happens to pass through another dense interstellar region. And so on...

-

-   These nuclear furnaces in the Sun and stars creates blistering heat and blinding light. Magnetism, however, plays no role in the fusion process that converts their mass to energy.  However, recently, researchers have found that neutron stars, already among the all-time weirdest objects, can be wrapped in magnetic fields brawny enough to affect the rest of the universe. 

-

-  The first hint of magnetic trouble arrived March 5, 1979, when a gamma-ray burst swept through the solar system at the speed of light. Radiation monitors aboard spacecraft near Venus and Earth suddenly went off scale. 

-

-  The deadly torrent lasted for only one-fifth second, but in that eye blink, some mysterious object had given off twice the energy our Sun had emitted since the building of the Pyramids! Scientists could not explain the burst by any known phenomenon. Eventually, the culprit was narrowed down to an invisible neutron star in a neighboring galaxy. 

-  

-  All neutron stars are tiny. Maybe 12 miles in diameter.  They’re among the few suns with a solid surface which is an indestructible, half-mile-thick crust floating atop a bizarre fluid of subatomic particles. Each apple seed-sized speck outweighs a loaded freight train. 

-

-  A neutron star forms when a massive star collapses and sends supernova brilliance outward while its tiny remnant core implodes. That core, now a 12-mile-wide sun of its own, spins crazily, often hundreds of times a second. Such frenzied motion causes its magnetic field to wrap around itself, intensifying the field lines.

-

-   What’s new about all this is an indication that during the youth of a neutron star, its magnetic field can reach the strength of a thousand trillion gauss. (Earth’s magnetism is less than 1 gauss.) Such stars are now logically called magnetars.

-

-  Astronomers have now discovered 23 confirmed magnetars, but only one, in Cassiopeia, is visible through optical telescopes. Astronomers detected the others solely by the types of radiation they emit. The nearest is a less than 9,000 light-years away, and more than a million other unknown magnetars are thought to be unseen in the dusty hallways of our Milky Way. 

-

-  The biggest magnetar that came on December 27, 2004 emitted more energy in a tenth of a second than our Sun has released in 100,000 years! If it were located within 10 light-years of us, it would have obliterated our planet’s ozone layer and caused mass extinction. That includes you and me.

-

-  The magnetar source is utterly invisible in visible light.  It lurks directly behind the center of our galaxy, on the opposite side of the Milky Way, some 50,000 light-years away. Its name is “SGR 1806–20“. This object in the constellation Sagittarius is the most magnetic object ever perceived. 

-

-  The 2004 burst changed our ionosphere from night to day. Some fishermen in the arctic saw a sudden aurora at that moment.

-

-   Magnetars have a unique source of power. All of its energy comes from the gradual loss of its magnetic field.”   The intense magnetism bends and deforms a magnetar’s solid crust to produce “starquakes.” 

-

-  These starquakes are nothing like the tremors we get here, which can merely destroy a city. A neutron star’s ultra-dense starquakes release titanic bursts of energy that actually create electrons and antimatter positrons. When those combine and annihilate each other, they produce the lethal gamma rays that sweep through the universe. 

-

-  This intense magnetism slows the star‘s rotation. In a mere 10,000 years the magnetic field weakens to a only 2 trillion times greater than Earth’s. Then, the starquakes stop and the gamma rays die out. 

-

-  These magnetars embody the physics of extremes: density, gravity, and magnetism.  At 2,000 miles distance the magnetar still appears as just a pinpoint, but its magnetism  pulls every group of atoms into long, strange, needle formations.  

-

-  Now, tell me, astronomy is not interesting?  Even amazing beyond your imagination?

-

-  August 27, 2020                                                                            2803                                                                                                                                               

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-----  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---- 

---   Some reviews are at:  --------------     http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----  

--  email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews 

---  to:  ------    jamesdetrick@comcast.net  ------  “Jim Detrick”  -----------

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 ---------------------   Friday, August 28, 2020  -------------------------

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INFLATION - we came from a Big Bang?

 -  2801  -  INFLATION  -  we came from a Big Bang?  -  Of all the questions humanity has ever pondered, “where did all of this come from?”, is the most profound. The idea that we could find the answers by examining the Universe itself was foreign until recently, when scientific measurements began to solve the puzzles that had stymied philosophers, theologians, and thinkers alike.  

---------------  2801  -  INFLATION  -  we came from a Big Bang?

-   General Relativity, quantum physics, and the Big Bang were theories that were accompanied by spectacular observational and experimental successes. These frameworks enabled us to make theoretical predictions that we then went out and tested, and they passed with flying colors while the alternatives fell away. 

-

-  The Big Bang left some unexplained problems further investigation.  A closer look found an uncomfortable conclusion that we’re still reckoning with today: any information about the beginning of the Universe is no longer contained within our observable cosmos. 

-

Looking back to greater distances means looking back in time.  In the 1920s our conception of the Universe changed forever as two sets of observations came together in perfect harmony.

-

- Vesto Slipher had begun to measure spectral lines, emission and absorption features, of a variety of stars and nebulae. Because atoms are the same everywhere in the Universe, the electrons within them make the same transitions: they have the same absorption and emission spectra. But a few of these nebulae, the spirals and ellipticals in particular, had extremely large redshifts that corresponded to high recession speeds: faster than anything else in our galaxy.

-

-  Starting in 1923, Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason began measuring individual stars in these nebulae, determining the distances to them. They were far beyond our own Milky Way: millions of light-years away in most instances. 

-

-  When you combined the distance and redshift measurements together, it all pointed to one inescapable conclusion that was also theoretically supported by Einstein’s General theory of Relativity: the Universe was expanding. The farther away a galaxy is, the faster it appears to recede from us.

-

-  If the Universe is expanding today, that means that all of the following must be true;

-

-------------------------------  The Universe is getting less dense, as the fixed amount of matter in it occupies larger and larger volumes.

-

-------------------------------  The Universe is cooling, as the light within it gets stretched to longer wavelengths.

-

-------------------------------  And galaxies that aren’t gravitationally bound together are getting farther apart over time.

-

-  Those are some remarkable and mind-bending facts, as they enable us to extrapolate what’s going to happen to the Universe as time marches inexorably forwards. 

-

-  The same laws of physics that tell us what’s going to happen in the future can also tell us what happened in the past, and the Universe itself is no exception. If the Universe is expanding, cooling, and getting less dense today, that means it was smaller, hotter, and denser in the distant past.

-

-   The big idea of the Big Bang was to extrapolate this back as far as possible: to ever hotter, denser, and more uniform states as we go earlier and earlier. This led to a series of remarkable predictions, including that:

-

-------------------------------  More distant galaxies should be smaller, more numerous, lower in mass, and richer in hot, blue stars than their modern-day counterparts,

-

-------------------------------  There should be fewer and fewer heavy elements as we look backwards in time,

-

-------------------------------  There should come a time when the Universe was too hot to form neutral atoms and a leftover bath of now-cold radiation that exists from that time,

-

-------------------------------  There should even come a time where atomic nuclei were blasted apart by the ultra-energetic radiation leaving a relic mix of hydrogen and helium isotopes.

-

-  All four of these predictions have been observationally confirmed, with that leftover bath of radiation called the cosmic microwave background discovered in the mid-1960s often referred to as the smoking gun of the Big Bang.

-

-  You might think that this means that we can extrapolate the Big Bang all the way back, arbitrarily far into the past, until all the matter and energy in the Universe is concentrated into a single point. The Universe would reach infinitely high temperatures and densities, creating a physical condition known as a “singularity“: where the laws of physics as we know them give predictions that no longer make sense and cannot be valid anymore.

-

-  The Universe began with a Big Bang some finite time ago, corresponding to the birth of space and time, and that everything we’ve ever observed has been a product of that aftermath. 

-

-  For the first time, we had a scientific answer that truly indicated not only that the Universe had a beginning, but when that beginning occurred. In the words of Georges Lemaitre, the first person to put together the physics of the expanding Universe, it was “a day without yesterday.”

-

-  Only, there were a number of unresolved puzzles that the Big Bang posed, but presented no answers for;

-

-------------------------------  Why did regions that were causally disconnected, had no time to exchange information, even at the speed of light, have the same temperatures as one another?

-

--------------------------------   Why were the initial expansion rate of the Universe and the total amount of energy in the Universe which gravitates and fights the expansion, perfectly balanced early on: to more than 50 decimal places?

-

-------------------------------   Why, if we reached these ultra-high temperatures and densities early on, are there no leftover relic remnants from those times in our Universe today?

-

-  Throughout the 1970s, the top physicists and astrophysicists in the world worried about these problems, theorizing about possible answers to these puzzles. Then, in late 1979, a young theorist named Alan Guth had a spectacular realization that changed history.

-

-  Here are the 3 big puzzles his theory solved: the horizon, the flatness, and the monopole problems.  The new theory was known as “cosmic inflation‘, and postulated that perhaps the idea of the Big Bang was only a good extrapolation back to a certain point in time, where it was preceded and set up by this inflationary state. Instead of reaching arbitrary high temperatures, densities, and energies, inflation states that:

-

-------------------------------  The Universe was no longer filled with matter and radiation,

but instead possessed a large amount of energy intrinsic to the fabric of space itself,

which caused the Universe to expand exponentially, where the expansion rate doesn’t change over time, which drives the Universe to a flat, empty, uniform state,

until inflation ends.

-

-------------------------------   When he inflation ends, the energy that was inherent to space itself ,  the energy that’s the same everywhere, except for the quantum fluctuations imprinted atop it gets converted into matter and energy.  The result is resulting a hot Big Bang.

-

-  Theoretically, this was a brilliant leap, because it offered a plausible physical explanation for the observed properties the Big Bang alone could not account for. Causally disconnected regions have the same temperature because they all arose from the same inflationary “patch” of space. 

-

-  The expansion rate and the energy density were perfectly balanced because inflation gave that same expansion rate and energy density to the Universe prior to the Big Bang.

-

- There were no left over, high-energy remnants because the Universe only reached a finite temperature after inflation ended.

-

-  In fact, inflation also made a series of novel predictions that differed from that of the non-inflationary Big Bang, meaning we could go out and test this idea. As of today, in 2020, we’ve collected data that puts four of those predictions to the test:

-

-------------------------------  The Universe should have a maximum, non-infinite upper limit to the temperatures reached during the hot Big Bang.

-

-------------------------------  Inflation should possess quantum fluctuations that become density imperfections in the Universe that are 100% adiabatic with constant entropy.

-

-------------------------------  Some fluctuations should be on super-horizon scales: fluctuations on scales larger than light could have traveled since the hot Big Bang.

Those fluctuations should be almost, but not perfectly, scale-invariant, with slightly greater magnitudes on large scales than small ones.

-

-------------------------------  The fluctuations from inflation get stretched across the Universe, creating over densities.

-

-  With data from satellites like COBE, WMAP, and Planck, astronomers have tested all four, and only inflation yields predictions that are in line with what they have observed.

-

-   This means that the Big Bang wasn’t the very beginning of everything; it was only the beginning of the Universe as we’re familiar with it. Prior to the hot Big Bang, there was a state known as “cosmic inflation“, that eventually ended and gave rise to the hot Big Bang, and we can observe the imprints of cosmic inflation on the Universe today.

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-  But only for the last tiny, minuscule fraction of a second of inflation, only for the final ~10-33 seconds of it can we observe the imprints that inflation left on our Universe. 

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-  It is possible that inflation lasted for only that duration, or for far longer. It’s possible that the inflationary state was eternal, or that it was transient, arising from something else.

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-   It’s possible that the Universe did begin with a singularity, or arose as part of a cycle, or has always existed. But that information doesn’t exist in our Universe. Inflation erases whatever existed in the pre-inflationary Universe.

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-  Whatever existed prior to the inflationary state, if anything, gets expanded away so rapidly and thoroughly that all we’re left with is empty, uniform space with the quantum fluctuations that inflation creates superimposed atop it. 

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-  When inflation ends, only a tiny volume of that space, somewhere between the size of a soccer ball and a city block , will become our observable Universe. Everything else, including any of the information that would enable us to reconstruct what happened earlier in our Universe’s past, now lies forever beyond our reach.

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-  It is one of the most remarkable achievements of science that we can go back billions of years in time and understand when and how our Universe, as we know it, came to be this way. 

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-  Like many adventures, revealing those answers has only raised more questions. The puzzles that have arisen this time, however, may truly never be solved. If that information is no longer present in our Universe, it will take a revolution to solve the greatest puzzle of all: “where did all this come from?” lingers on!

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-  August 25, 2020                                                                       2801                                                                                                                                                 

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 ---------------------   Thursday, August 27, 2020  -------------------------

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SPACE - hazards to avoid?

 -  2802  -  SPACE  -  hazards to avoid?    Astronomers have been studying over 2,000 Pulsars and Magnetars and they have interesting stories.  The names are not important but I will identify them just for your own research.  There are so many hazards in outer space beginning with the vacuum of space.

------------------------------  2802  -  SPACE  -  hazards to avoid?           

-  Space hazards are not just star explosions.   It starts with the vacuum of space itself. 

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-  July 2003 the world saw the tragedy of Columbia as the spacecraft tried to return to Mother Earth.  Once in space Earth becomes the heaven you want to get to.

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-  On March 18, 1965 Soviet cosmonaut, Aleksei Leonov was outside his space craft, the Voskhod 2, when his space suit started expanding.  The flexible pressurized material started inflating like a balloon.  When he tried to get back through the open hatch he would not fit.

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-   Leonov started releasing pressure from his suit but the suit had already stretched and it wouldn’t shrink enough to fit through the hatch.  When the air was nearly gone out of the suit and he was about to lose consciousness he managed to squeeze through the hatch and get back to safety.

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-  In outer space, or standing on the Moon, unprotected the skin on the shadow side of the body would freeze at -250 Fahrenheit.  At the same time the skin facing the Sun would be lit with ultraviolet radiation 250 times more intense than a summer beach tan.  Your skin would blister and burn in 14 seconds.

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-  We all know that water boils at lower temperatures at higher altitudes.  Coffee boils in Denver 10 degrees cooler that it does in San Francisco.  At 63,000 feet elevation at 98.6 Fahrenheit your blood begins to boil.  The blood boiling happened to three Soviet cosmonauts in 1971 when a vent popped open in their space craft.  Once the pressure was lost their blood came to a boil before they could close the vent.

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-  In space unprotected parts of your body boil and freeze at the same time.  The liquids in your body boil wildly and freeze instantly in to strange ice sculptures.

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-  Astronauts in outer space after leaving the Earth’s magnetosphere started seeing meteors whiz in front to their eyes.  Medical experts on the ground concluded that cosmic rays were zipping through their skulls setting off false signals inside their brains.  That can’t be good for you.  But, maybe you have experienced one of those flashes?

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I think I will go home, sit in by back yard and just stare into space.  I don’t need to go there.  It gets worse if you encounter a gamma ray burst.  The further you go into space the more hazards you encounter:

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-  If you could actually see gamma ray bursts they would drive you nuts.  They hit us on average once a day, coming from any direction and would briefly out shine everything else in the sky.  They last less than 17 seconds with some faint afterglow lasting minutes later.

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-  Gamma ray bursts have been spotted 12,800,000,000 light years away.  They are caused by massive stars, greater than 30 times our Sun, that collapse into a black hole when their fuel burns up.  Massive stars only live a few million years because they burn fuel so rapidly.  In contrast our Sun will live 12,000,000,000 years before it turns into a red giant.

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-  These gamma ray bursts started occurring 900,000 years after the Big Bang , indicating that massive stars must have formed very rapidly.  The early Universe must have been full of massive stars and exploding stars.  When these stars explode they collapse in one second due to their massive gravity.  When they collapse they create a cone shaped jet of gamma ray radiation shooting out the pole of the spinning black hole that remains.

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-  This is all happening once a day at the edge of our Universe.  They are the farthest things away but we can still see them because the burst of radiation is so powerful.  Gamma ray bursts are the third wonder and hazard of the Universe.

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-  Neutron Stars, Pulsars and Magnetars also come from dying stars.  A star’s life is determined by its size.  Mass is everything.  Our Sun, with a solar mass of 1, is our standard unit of measurement.

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-  One solar mass is 1,980,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms (1.98*10^30), or 330,000 Earth masses.  

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-  Stars range in mass from 0.2 solar mass to 25 solar mass.  Above 26 solar mass the star becomes a Black Hole.

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-----------------------------  up to 7 solar mass          -  White Dwarf

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 ----------------------------  8 to 25 solar mass          -  Neutron Star

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 ----------------------------  greater than 26 solar mass  -  Black Hole

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-  Our Sun will evolve into a White Dwarf in another 5 billion years.

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-  There are about 1 million Neutron Stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.  About 2,000 of these have been discovered to date.  Most of the neutron stars identified are Pulsars.  About 12 have been identified as Magnetars.

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-----------------------------   Pulsars    -Period < 1 second   -Magnetism 10^8 gauss

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-----------------------------   Magnetars  -Period > 10 seconds   -Magnetism 10^14 gauss

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-  The differences between Pulsars and Magnetars is their rotation periods and the strength of their magnetic fields.  Pulsars have rotation periods of .001 to 1 second per revolution while Magnetars are much slower, 10 to 100 seconds per revolution.  

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-   The magnetic field of a Pulsar is 10^8 gauss, while the magnetic field of a Magnetar is over 1000 times greater, up to 10^15 gauss.  Both have jets of charged particles and radiation that shoot out the magnetic poles of the rotating Neutron Star. 

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-   If the spin axis is offset from the magnetic poles axis the jets are rotating beams, like lighthouse beacons, sweeping around circles in space.  If the path of the beam sweeps through Earth we see a pulse of radiation, thus the name Pulsars.  Most Pulsar’s radiation beams are radio waves.

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-   Magnetars are more massive with 1000 times greater magnetic fields and they pulse radiation in x-rays and gamma rays.  Magnetars magnetic fields are immense, a billion times stronger than any magnet produced on Earth.

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-    A rotating magnet gives of energy and this causes the Magnetar Neutron Star to slow down its rotation over time.  After 10,000 years the decelerating spin of the Magnetar will cease giving off the X-ray pulses.  

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-  Magnetars are created when the most massive stars go Supernova.  When massive stars, 25 to 40 solar mass explode in a Supernova 10% to 20% of the mass may be blown off into space leaving a mass less than 26 solar mass behind as a remnant.  If the mass is greater than 26 solar mass the remnant is a Black Hole.  

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-  The massive star has a short life, maybe 10 million years.  It burns all its fuel up to iron, fusion of all the elements from hydrogen, helium, lithium, …………… up to iron.  When the  star is mostly all iron, fusion stops.  

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-  There is no fusion radiation created to hold the star up from the opposing gravity.  The star collapses.  If the weight of the star remnant is greater than 7 solar mass the pressure of gravity will be so great as to crush the iron atoms themselves. 

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-   The atom’s electrons collapse from their shells into the nucleus, smashing into protons and forming neutrons.  A super dense Neutron Star is what remains.  The rest of the star has exploded into space.  The Neutron Star is 17 miles in diameter.  It is so dense that one cubic centimeter (a sugar cube) would weigh 2,700,000,000 tons on Earth.

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-   SGR 1806 observed December 27, 2004 was the brightest burst of gamma ray radiation ever recorded.  It contained more energy in 0.1 seconds than the Sun emits in 100,000 years.  After the spike of gamma rays there was a tail of X-rays followed by radio waves.  

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-  Astronomers believe that the intense radiation was created when the intense, rotating magnetic fields of a Magnetar become twisted and snap, disconnecting and reconnecting, causing a starquake in the surface of the Neutron Star and an enormous outpouring of energy.  The expanding energy creates a bubble of colliding matter and interstellar gas. 

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-   This expanding bubble is traveling at 25% the speed of light and emitting radio waves.  This particular Magnetar was 50,000 lightyears away and astronomers expect to be able to monitor this afterglow of radio waves for another 15 years.

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-  Another expanding bubble 70 lightyears across has a Magnetar at its center.  The original massive star must have been 30 to 40 solar mass exploding at 5 to 6 million years of age about 3,000 years ago.  This bubble can not be expanding from the X-ray radiation pressure alone.  It is not strong enough.  There must also be solar wind of charged particles traveling 5 times faster and a million time denser than our Sun’s solar wind.  

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-  Another explanation is that the extra power is coming from neutrinos radiating out of the star’s inner core.  These explanations are still coming up short.  

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-  A third theory is that the collapsing inner core sets up an oscillation, a vibration of sound waves in the acoustic range of 200 to 400 cycles per second.  This acoustic power coming from an vibrating core would act like a very strong speaker sending out energy via sound waves.  This could create enough energy to explain the expanding bubble of dense hot gas.  More observations and calculations are needed before we know which alternative is the correct one.

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-  August 27, 1998 Earth was struck by a brilliant gamma ray flare thought to be caused by a starquake on a Magnetar.  The Neutron Star has a thin crust of iron nuclei packed into a crystal lattice and magnetic field equal to 44,000,000,000,000 gauss.  

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-   The Earth’s magnetic field that turns a compass needle is 0.6 gauss.  A permanent magnet that sticks to the refrigerator is 100 gauss.  A billion gauss would turn your body into magnetized mush.  The starquake occurs when this intense magnetic field gets twisted and snaps, disconnecting and reconnecting, cracking the diamond like crust in the surface of the star.  The star quake releases an intense flash of gamma rays.

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-  The closest Neutron Star to us is RXJ1856 spotted in 1992, confirmed to be a neutron star in 1996, is 200 lightyears away.  The closest it will get is 170 lightyears in 300,000 years from now. 

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-   It is 7 miles in diameter traveling at 240,000 miles per hour.  It is traveling alone; however, there is a second hot, blue star traveling in the opposite direction.  These two must have been a binary system that were shot apart when one star went supernova about 1 million years ago. 

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-  PSRJO737 is a binary system of two neutron stars 2,000 lightyears away, orbiting each other every 2.4 hours.  They are twice as far apart as the Earth and the Moon.  Only 6 Neutron Star pairs have been discovered to date. 

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-   Massive stars in orbit are under constant acceleration, constant speed but constantly changing direction in a circular orbit.  Einstein’s equations show that huge masses under acceleration will emit gravitational waves, similar to the way accelerating charged particles emit electromagnetic waves. 

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-   Except gravity is much weaker and the gravitational waves are much more difficult to detect.  The gravitational waves do carry off energy, and the orbit of the rotating stars is decaying.  In 85 million years they will have spiraled into a massive collision, probably merging into a Black Hole.  

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-  Gravitational waves are just beginning to get detected.  These orbits are predictably decaying just as the equations say with gravity waves being created.  New instruments are designed to detect these waves.   The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, LIGO,  has just begun detecting these gravity waves generated by rotating Neutron Stars, or rotating Black Holes.

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-  RXJ1856 is much smaller in diameter than expected for Neutron Stars, only 7 miles diameter.  It is also very hot: 1,200,000 degrees F.  This star coupled with a second star 3C-58 that went supernova in the year 1181 have similar properties and are convincing astronomers that these Neutron Stars have collapsed into a new form of matter.  

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-  The star’s core is no longer neutrons but quark-gluon plasma.  Astronomers want to study these stars more closely.  If RXJ1856 is made only of quarks it will have a sharp edge.  If it made of neutrons it will have a fuzzy edge along its outer iron surface typical of neutron stars.

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-  Quarks have never been observed and we do not expect to ever see one using Earth based experiments.  If Neutron Stars have actually created stand alone quarks, a new form of matter, it would be an astonishing discovery for scientists.

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-  August 26, 2020                590    593    642                                    2802                                                                                                                                                 

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---   Some reviews are at:  --------------     http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----  

--  email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews 

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 ---------------------   Thursday, August 27, 2020  -------------------------

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