3011 - ELON MUSK - launch at sea?

 -  3011  -  ELON  MUSK  -  launch at sea?   Launches and landing at sea has been a part of Musk long-term vision for SpaceX .  Elon  Musk is not just defining space launches he is redefining the auto industry.  He is redefining the battery? 

-----------------------------  3011  -  ELON  MUSK  -  launch at sea?

-  Elon Musk has been open about how he and the company he founded plan to make space more accessible and allow humanity to become an “interplanetary species.”

-

-  A key element to this plan is the Starship and Super-Heavy launch system, which will allow for regular trips to the Moon as well as the eventual creation of the first human colony on Mars.

-

-  Musk’s plan is the creation of spaceports at sea that will allow for greater flexibility with launches and landings.  SpaceX recently acquired two former oil drilling rigs off the coast of Texas. These spaceports have been dubbed “Phobos” and “Deimos” (after Mars’ two satellites) and are currently undergoing modifications to conduct Starship launches in the near future.

-

-  Elon Musk has been up front about his plans to use floating spaceports for future Starship launches. But the first hints that they were close to realizing this goal came last summer when SpaceX indicated on their website that it was looking for experienced offshore crane operators, electricians, and engineers. The postings also indicated that the jobs were related to the development of the Starship.

-

-  The posting specified that the positions were located in Brownsville, Texas, the closest town to SpaceX’s Boca Chica Launch Facility.  SpaceX is building floating, superheavy-class spaceports for Mars, moon & hypersonic travel around Earth. Lusk said he needs to be far enough away so as not to bother heavily populated areas. The launch & landing are not subtle. But you could get within a few miles of the spaceport in a boat.

-

-  SpaceX is not alone in seeking offshore launch facilities. China has also been working on its own floating spaceport, which is located off the coast of Haiyang city in the eastern province of Shandong. Once it is fully operational, the “Eastern Aerospace Port” will be China’s fourth spaceport and the only one that is not located inland.

-

-  Spaceports at sea offer a number of advantages over inland launch facilities. For starters, launches for inland facilities often result in spent stages falling back to Earth, which can pose significant damage to populated areas and result in hazardous chemicals and unspent propellant leaking into the ground.  Inland facilities require extensive safety procedures and cleanup operations.

-

-  While SpaceX circumvents much of this danger by launching from Boca Chica and Cape Canaveral, SpaceX hopes to conduct regular launches with the Starship and Super Heavy. 

-

-  This launch system poses a significant noise problem. Once complete, each Super Heavy will have no less than 20 Raptor engines.  With regular launches taking place, this will mean that the blast areas around the launch pads will need to be wide, and noise concerns will also need to be taken into account. 

-

-  Musk’s long-term plan for making regular trips to Mars call for orbital refueling, where a tanker version of the Starship modified to carry propellant will meet with and refuel a passenger and payload version of the Starship after they have reach orbit.

-

-  Musk has also hinted in the past that SpaceX could be conducting intercontinental flights with the Starship someday. According to an animation released by the company in 2017 , this would involve having spaceports off the coast of major cities that would be serviced by passenger boats. 

-

-  Launches and landing at sea has been a part of Musk long-term vision for SpaceX .  Elon  Musk  is not just defining space launches he is redefining the auto industry.  He is redefining the battery? 

-

-  During Tesla's long-awaited "Battery Day" on September 22, 2020, Elon  announced several innovations that could transform the battery industry.   He is focused on an in-house redesign of the lithium ion battery, which he says will use nickel cathodes, rather than cobalt.

- 

-   Elon sees future economies of scale in battery production, making a $25,000 Tesla possible in the next three years.

-

-  During the Tesla CEO's highly anticipated "Battery Day" event.   Musk announced an ambitious slate of innovations, and even an all-new manufacturing plant, that Tesla will pursue over the next 10 years in order to start producing its own batteries.

-

-  He says it is incredibly important that we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy.  Musk sees Tesla taking on a more significant role in sustainable energy generation and storage, in addition to creating more affordable electric vehicles.

-

-   Musk plans to phase out cobalt in its battery cathodes in favor of nickel, a silvery lustrous metal found in mines across the globe, with high concentrations of nickel ore in Indonesia, Russia, Canada, and the Philippines.

-

-  This, plus other redesigns of the lithium-ion battery, will enable Tesla to make more energy-dense, in-house batteries that not only increase the range for the company's luxury electric vehicles, but also enable cost benefits that will lead to a $25,000 fully autonomous electric vehicle in the next three years, by 2023.

-

-  Tesla's ultimate plan is to halve the cost of a kilowatt hour in the factory, leading to greater economies of scale in the electric vehicle, lithium-ion battery, and sustainable energy generation industries. To do that, Tesla is redesigning the fundamentals of the battery cell.

-

-  Each cylindrical battery has a "cap" (+) and a "can," (-) which are the negative and positive portions of the cell.   Inside the can, there is a tab connected to the cell, plus a "jellyroll" that contains the positive and negative electrodes.

-

-   In a Tesla cell, there's about one meter's length of jellyroll, which looks like a rolled-up Swiss cake. From there, the lithium ions move between the anode and cathode to recharge or give off energy.

-

-  Tesla sees the ideal cell design having a 46-millimeter diameter.  The company has introduced a new "tabless" architecture that it's calling the 4680 cell.

-

-  The resulting battery is simpler to manufacture, requires fewer parts, and looks a bit like a mandala of metallic shingles. It enables six times more power than Tesla's previous battery, and gives Tesla vehicles about 16 percent more range before taking into account other battery improvements.

-

-  The distance that the electron has to travel is much less.  Even though the cell is bigger, it has more power, the power to weight ratio is much smaller than with tabs.

-

-   To transition all vehicles with an internal combustion engine to electric ones, it will take a great deal of battery production, about 150 terawatt hours per year. Tesla has generated about 17 terawatt hours of solar energy to date.

-

-   A terawatt is 1,000 times more than a gigawatt.  One terawatt is equivalent to one trillion watts.  That represents a huge leap in sustainable energy growth. Tesla will need to generate 100 times more battery power than current levels to reach its ambitious new goal of 10 terawatt hours of battery production per year.

-

- Tesla's existing Gigafactories in Sparks, Nevada; Buffalo, New York; Shanghai, China; and a fourth under construction in Berlin, Germany, aren't satisfactory for these lofty energy production goals just yet. 

-

- In fact, it would take 135 Nevada Gigafactories to produce 20 terawatt hours of battery power each year.  Tesla is ramping up production of its new tabless cells at its pilot battery manufacturing firm at an undisclosed location near Fremont, California.   A full-fledged manufacturing plant could produce energy on the order of 200 gigawatt hours per year.

-

-  The cathode is a structure that holds ions while retaining its structure and shape. Without it, battery capacity quickly drops. In a sense, cathodes are like bookshelves, where the metal is like the shelf, and the lithium is the book. Depending on the metal used in the cathode, there are different amounts of "books," or lithium, that can fit.

-

-  Nickel is the cheapest and most energy-dense material that companies could use in cathodes. However, cobalt is currently the most popular option, due to its stability. Instead, Tesla wants to move toward a reliance on nickel, bringing its batteries down to zero percent cobalt.

-

-  All of this adds up to a 76 percent reduction in process costs and a move toward sustainability, with zero percent wastewater as a byproduct.  Musk says the goal is to move beyond the need for new battery-grade nickel, and instead focus on using recycled nickel from existing batteries. That way, there's less reliance on mining.

-

-  Last December, 2019, International Rights Advocates filed a lawsuit against Tesla, along with Apple, Google, and Dell, representing 14 parents and children who allegedly died or were injured while working in the cobalt mines that supplied the metal to those tech companies.

-

-  In the future car shells will be made of batteries.  In the early days of aircraft planes actually carried their fuel tanks like cargo. Today, though, manufacturers have realized a better design, wherein the fuel tanks are fitted inside the wings, becoming part of its structure.

-

-  Tesla will use its new batteries as a structural component in its cars. Because the non-cell portion of the battery has negative mass, it allows Tesla to pack the cells more densely.

-

-  This will lead to 370 fewer parts in the cars, representing a 10 percent reduction in mass that should make the vehicles feel more agile.

-

-  It's no secret that Teslas are a luxury vehicle, and, that's detrimental to the company's green missions. Although there are other mass model electric vehicles, from the Nissan Leaf to the Chevy Bolt, the price tag on each of Tesla's cars lead to lost customers that may instead purchase a car with an internal combustion engine.

-

-  So the goal is to create a more affordable Tesla. With the expected economies of scale that will result from Tesla's in-house battery operation, Musk said the budget car could be here sooner rather than later.

- 

January 31, 2021            ELON  MUSK  -  launch at sea?                3011                                                                                                                                                            

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

-----  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”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Sunday, January 31, 2021  ---------------------------

3008 - MATH - shuttle to the Moon?

 -  3008 -  MATH  -  shuttle to the Moon?  -  Does the Space Shuttle have the payload capacity to carry enough extra fuel for this one-way trip?  No, the Shuttle does not have enough capacity to lift all of the required fuel to Earth orbit.  Here is why that is true:

--------------------------  3008  -  MATH  -  shuttle to the Moon?  

-   Near Earth orbits, what do we mean?  We can think of successive orbits at increasing distance from Earth as representing a ladder. A spacecraft needs to expend more energy the higher up the ladder its orbit is from the surface of earth. This means that more distant orbits require larger launch vehicles and longer ‘burn’ times to get to them, than orbits close to Earth.

-

-   Think of the process of changing from one orbit to the other as a series of speed (velocity) changes. For example, the orbit of the Space Shuttle at an altitude of 380 kilometers   (236 miles) has an orbital speed of 7.68 km/s  (17,179 miles per hour). 

-

-  The more distant orbits of the commercial geostationary communications satellites, located 35,800 km (22,245  miles)from Earth’s surface, represent an orbital speed of 3.07 km/sec   (6,867 miles per hour)

-

-  You might think that, since the GEO satellite orbit speed is slower than the Space Shuttle, all you have to do is ‘slow down’ the Space Shuttle by decreasing its kinetic energy, and it will move out to GEO satellite orbits. 

-

-  In fact, because of the way that kinetic energy changes in a gravitational field, you actually have to increase the kinetic energy of the Space Shuttle to make this orbit change. 

-

-  This is done by turning on its rockets for enough time to move it outwards from Earth. Once its orbit speed has dropped 4.61 km/s  (10,312 miles per hour) to the new value of 3.07 km/s  (6,867 miles per hour), it will find itself at GEO orbit altitude. 

-

------------------------    Lunar distance : 384,000 km

- 

------------------------    Shuttle Orbital Speed : 17,500 miles / hr 

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------------------------    Maximum cargo mass : 55,000 pounds 

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-  Knowing that the Moon is ‘located’ at an orbit speed of 1.0 km/sec  92,237 miles per hour).  What must be the Space Shuttle speed change to reach lunar orbit?

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-----------------  Delta-V = 1.0 – 7.68 = - 6.68 km/sec.      (-14,943  miles per hour)

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- When the Shuttle “Orbital Maneuvering System”  (OMS) is turned on, it can cause a speed change of 0.6 meters / second for every second that the engines are burning. How many seconds would the OMS have to remain on in order for the Space Shuttle to build up the necessary velocity change to reach the Moon? 

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---------------- The delta-V to get to the moon is 6,680 meters/sec. The OMS can produce 0.6 m/s every second, so the total burn time would have to be T = 6,680 / 0.6 or about 11,000 seconds or 3 hours of continuous thrust. 

-

-  The OMS can produce a maximum delta-V of 1,000 meters / second before consuming all of its 9,700 pounds of fuel. How many pounds of fuel will the OMS have to expend to get to the Moon? 

-

-------------------  We need a total delta-V of 6,680 m/s, so 9,700 pounds x (6,680/1,000) = 64,796 pounds of fuel. 

-

-  Does the Space Shuttle have the payload capacity to carry enough extra fuel for this one-way trip? 

-

------------------------   The maximum cargo mass is 55,000 pounds, so the OMS fuel would require 64,796 / 55,000 = 1.2 times the maximum load of the Space Shuttle cargo bay

----------------------  No, the Shuttle does not have enough capacity to lift all of the required OMS fuel to Earth orbit. 

-

-  Now you high school students can figure out how big a rocket we need to take astronauts to the Moon.  Then sign up after graduation.  Here are some more reviews:

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

-   2969 -  MATH  -   for a Rocket Launch?  -  You give your students a photo of a rocket launch at Kennedy Space Center.  The night time exposure was 2.5 minutes.  How far from launch did the rocket reach its orbit at 300 miles altitude?  Well let’s do the math:

-

-  2966 -  MATH  -  Invented to Solve Problems?   This review discusses the languages of math and how they were invented to solve problems.   Mathematics is a language.  It can be used to explain observations, to solve problems, to find results and to predict results in the future.

-

-  1235  Equations are sentences in sort hand

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-  1213  How to calculate odds for poker hands.

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-  1086  Formulas for space time, velocity.

-  1095  Math is a learned discipline.

-  1042  Calculate areas by connecting the dots, Pick’s Theorem

-  1041  The star with the golden ratio

-  1042  The calculus of a circle.

-  853  Math, the golden ratio

-  803  Transcendental numbers, “e” and “pi”.

-  649  The Greeks invented numbers.

-  805  Gambling

-  796  Science and Math, Part I

-  798  Science and Math, Part II.

-  799  Science and Math, Part III.

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January 30, 2021         MATH  -  shuttle to the Moon?                      3008                                                                                                                                                           

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

-----  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”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Saturday, January 30, 2021  ---------------------------

3009 - COSMIC RAYS - and Dark Matter?

 -  3009 -   COSMIC  RAYS  -  and Dark Matter?  When the forces of gravity and electromagnetism compete inside a giant star, eventually gravity always wins and the star collapses. So the fact that dark matter is 80% of the mass in the universe, and not 99.99999%,  and regular matter is 20% as opposed to zero, strikes physicists as odd. 

--------------------------------  3009  -  COSMIC  RAYS  -  and Dark Matter?  

-  Cosmic rays are not rays at all but rather tiny particles cruising through the universe at nearly the speed of light. They can be made of electrons, protons or even ions of heavier elements. 

-

-  Cosmic Rays are created in all sorts of high-energy processes throughout the universe, from supernova explosions to the mergers of stars to the final moments when gas gets sucked up by a blackhole.

-

-  Cosmic rays come in all sorts of energies, and generally speaking the higher-energy cosmic rays are rarer than their low-energy relatives. This relationship changes in a very slight way at a particular energy, 10^15 electron-volts,  which is called the "knee." 

-

-  The electron-volt, or eV, is just the way that particle physicists are measuring energy levels. For comparison, the most powerful particle collider on Earth, the Large Hadron Collider, can achieve 13 X 10^12 eV, which is often denoted as 13 tera electron-volts, or 13 TeV.

-

-   Above an energy of 10^15 eV, cosmic rays are much rarer than you would expect. This has led astronomers to believe that any cosmic rays at this energy level and higher come from outside the galaxy, while processes within the Milky Way are capable of producing cosmic rays up to and including 10^15 eV.

-

-  Whatever is creating these cosmic rays would be in the "peta" range of Greek prefixes, and therefore over 1,000 times more powerful than our best particle accelerators, nature.  The mission is to find the source of PeV-scale cosmic rays in the Milky Way. 

-

-  Despite their energies, it's hard to pinpoint their origins. That's because cosmic rays are made of charged particles, and charged particles traveling through interstellar space respond to our galaxy's magnetic field. Thus when you see a high-energy cosmic ray coming from a particular direction in the sky, you actually have no idea where it truly came from.  Its path has bent and curved over the course of its journey to Earth.

-

-  Instead of hunting for cosmic rays directly, we can search for some of their relatives. When cosmic rays accidentally strike a cloud of interstellar gas, they can emit “gamma rays“, a high-energy form of radiation. These gamma rays shoot straight-line through the galaxy, allowing us to directly pinpoint their origins.

-

-  If we see a source of strong gamma-ray emission, we can look for nearby sources of PeV cosmic rays.  This was the method employed by a team of researchers using HAWC, which is located on the Sierra Negra Volcano of south-central Mexico. 

-

-  HAWC "stares" up at the sky with a series of tanks filled with ultra-pure water. When high-energy particles or radiation enter the tanks, they emit a flash of blue light, allowing astronomers to trace back the source onto the sky.

-

-  Astronomers have found a source of gamma rays exceeding 200 TeV, which could only be created by even more powerful cosmic rays — the kinds of cosmic rays that reach up into the PeV scale. 

-

-  The source, “HAWC J1825-134“, lies roughly in the direction of the galactic center. HAWC J1825-134 appears to us as a bright blotch of gamma rays, illuminated by some unknown fount of cosmic rays.  This is perhaps the most powerful known source of cosmic rays in the Milky Way.

-

-  A few of the usual suspect sources of high-energy cosmic rays sit within a few thousand light-years of HAWC J1825-134, but none of them can easily explain the signal.  The galactic center itself is a known generator of intense cosmic ray action, but it's way too far away from HAWC J1825-134, so it has no bearing on this measurement.

-

-  There are some supernova remnants, and supernovae sure are powerful. But all the supernovae in the region of HAWC J1825-134 went off ages ago far too long in the past to be creating these high-energy cosmic rays now.

-

-  “Pulsars” are the rapidly spinning dense remnant cores of massive stars and also produce copious amounts of cosmic rays. But those too sit too far away from the source of gamma rays the energies of the electrons and protons coming off the pulsar just aren't pwerful enough to travel the thousands of light-years to the location of the gamma ray emission.

-

-  The source of these record-breaking cosmic rays appears to be none other than a giant “molecular cloud“. These clouds are giant, lumbering dust and gas, that roam the galaxy. They occasionally contract in on themselves and turn into stars, but otherwise they can remain cool and loose for billions of years.

-

-   Not causing anyone any serious threat and barely even noticeable unless you have good infrared telescopes they are the last place you would expect to find such insanely high energies.

-

-  Located within the cloud complex is a cluster of newborn stars, but baby stars aren't thought to be powerful enough to launch cosmic rays like this. The researchers themselves admit that they don't know how this cloud is doing it, but somehow, when nobody was paying attention, it generated some of the most powerful particles in the entire galaxy.

-

- The fact that you are reading this is even more of a mystery.  The most lingering mysteries of the universe is why anything exists at all.

-

- That's because, in the universe today, matter and its antimatter counterpart should form in equal amounts, and then these two oppositely charged types of matter would annihilate each other on contact. So all the matter in the universe should have disappeared as soon as it formed, canceling itself out on contact with its antimatter counterpart.

-

-  But that didn't happen. Now, new research hypothesizes that early in the universe, there was a mysterious "kick" that produced more matter than antimatter, leading to today's imbalance. And that imbalance may have also led to the creation of “dark matter“, the mysterious substance that tugs on everything else yet doesn't interact with light.

-

-  We don't know what dark matter is, but it's definitely out there. It makes up about 80% of all the matter in the universe, far outweighing the stars, galaxies, dust and gas that we can see. 

-

-  And while dark matter is certainly a heavyweight in our universe, it is, oddly, not that much of a dominating factor.  In physics rarely do two competing forces come out in balance. 

-

-  When the forces of gravity and electromagnetism compete inside a giant star, eventually gravity always wins and the star collapses. So the fact that dark matter is 80% of the mass in the universe, and not 99.99999%,  and regular matter is 20% as opposed to zero, strikes physicists as odd.  

-

-  Compounding the issue is that, as far as we know, the generation of regular matter and dark matter had absolutely nothing to do with each other. We have no clue how dark matter originated in the early universe, but whatever it was, it's currently outside the bounds of known physics.

-

-  And regular matter in the extremely early universe (when it was a second old), physicists suspect that regular matter was in perfect balance with antimatter (which is the same as normal matter but with an opposite electric charge). 

-

-  We suspect this even split because we see this kind of symmetry play out today in our particle colliders, which can replicate the extreme conditions of the early universe: If you have a high-energy reaction that generates regular matter, it has an equal chance of generating antimatter instead.

-

-  But at some point when the universe was less than a minute old the balance between matter and antimatter shifted, and regular matter flooded the universe, relegating antimatter to obscurity.

-

-  On one hand, we have a massive symmetry-breaking event that led to regular matter winning over antimatter. On the other hand, we have a completely mysterious event that led to dark matter becoming the dominant, but not super dominant, form of matter in the universe. 

-

-  Perhaps these two processes are connected, and the birth of dark matter was related to the victory of matter over antimatter.  New research makes this claim by relying on something called the “baryon number symmetry“. Baryons are all of the particles made of quarks (such as protons and neutrons). 

-

-  The symmetry simply states that the number of baryons entering an interaction must equal the number exiting it. They're allowed to change identities, but the total number must be the same. The same symmetry holds for reactions involving antiquarks.

-

-  This symmetry reigns in all of our experiments in the present-day universe, but it must have been violated in the early cosmos.   That is how we ended up with more matter than antimatter.

-

-  In physics, every time a symmetry of nature gets broken, a new kind of particle, known as a "Goldstone boson," pops up to  enforce the breaking of the symmetry. In the modern universe, for instance, the pion is a kind of Goldstone boson that appears when a symmetry of the strong nuclear force is broken.

-

-  Maybe the dark matter is a kind of Goldstone boson, associated with the breaking of baryon number symmetry in the early cosmos.  The idea is called "the kick." Baryon number symmetry is never broken in our experiments, but something exciting must have happened in the early universe. It was a violent but brief event, snuffing out almost all antimatter. And whatever exotic mix of conditions happened, the baryon number symmetry broke, allowing a new Goldstone boson to appear.

-

-  During that singular event, the universe became flooded with dark matter particles. But then, whatever conditions that led to the symmetry breaking ended, and the universe returned to normalcy. By then, however, it was too late; the dark matter and all the rest of the matter remained.

-

-  After that first epic minute of the universe's history, once symmetry returned to the universe, dark matter was relegated to the shadows, never to interact with normal matter again.  And the reason that there is (very roughly) the same amount of dark matter and regular matter is that they were related.  

-

-  The new model doesn't predict the exact 80/20 split between dark and normal matter. But it does suggest the reason that dark matter and normal matter are in roughly equal balance is because they had their origins in the same event.

-

-  It's a very clean and intriguing idea, but it still doesn't explain exactly how that early symmetry breaking took place. But that's for another paper.  One of you readers need to be working on this.         -------------------------------  Other reviews available:

-

- 2937  -  COSMIC  RAYS  -  where do they come from?  Cosmic rays are mostly protons, the nucleus of atoms that have a positive electrical charge.  They are traveling at near light speed and are entering Earth’s atmosphere and your very own body every second. 

-

-  2858  -  COSMIC  RAYS  -  where do they come from?  Earth is being constantly bombarded from space by “cosmic rays” of an unknown origin!   Mysterious cosmic rays traveling at speeds approaching that of light constantly pelt Earth’s upper atmosphere from the depths of space, creating high-energy collisions that dwarf those produced in even the most powerful particle colliders. 

-

-  2834 -  COSMIC  RAYS  -  The Risks of Space Travel.    The scariest menace for space travelers are Cosmic Rays. They are not “rays” at all. They are charged particles that are everywhere in space hurtling at near light speed.  Most are positive ions of hydrogen  nuclei ( a proton, H+1 ) but some are the nuclei of the heavier elements, even iron ( Fe +26 ). 

-

- 2739  -  COSMIC  RAYS  -  new discoveries?  -  A lot of what we know about the Standard Model of Nature’s fundamental particles came from studying Cosmic Rays.  All ordinary matter that we know is made of Leptons and Quarks.  

-

- 2729  -  COSMIC  RAYS  -  to explain an expanding Universe?  Could the Universe have expanded faster than the speed of light?   The Universe appears to be “homogeneous” and “isotropic“ , the same in all directions.  If light really was faster in the beginning then that could explain it.  One way to test this theory is to study cosmic rays.  

-

-  2305  -   Cosmic Rays are not rays at all, they are particles, sub-atomic particles, traveling through space at nearly the speed of light. Look at your thumbnail.  Now imagine that 200 cosmic ray particles traveled through your thumb nail every second.   Thousands of these ‘rays” zipping through your body and through the entire Earth.

-

-   1927  -  Cosmic Rays, are they a curse or are they a blessing?  See Review 1926 about Cosmic Rays and Planetesimals.   This review continues the discussion about Cosmic Rays.

-

-   1926  - To learn how Cosmic Rays may be responsible for the evolution of life on Earth.

-

January 29, 2021          COSMIC  RAYS  -   and Dark Matter ?       3009                                                                                                                                                            

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

-----  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”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Saturday, January 30, 2021  ---------------------------

Index of reviews , request number 4 copy

- -  2983 - SPACE  -  news stories in the year 2020? 

-  2984 - QUANTUM  MECHANICS  -  make the best clocks?  Precise optical clocks are but one application of the optical comb. Optical combs are transforming precision measurement in many areas, from finding planets around distant stars (precision doppler measurements), to potentially measuring the expansion of space itself (time dependence of redshift).

-  2985 - ASTRONOMY   -  how fast is universe expanding?  In order to understand where our Universe came from and where it’s going, you need to measure how much it’s expanding. If everything is moving away from everything else, we can extrapolate in either direction to figure out both our past and our future. 

-  2986 -  GAMMA  RAYS  -  magnetars and neutron stars.   If the neutron star is spinning very fast it can create a rotating magnetic field that is a ‘pulsar’ or a ‘magnetar” depending on how strong the magnetic field is.  Our newest telescopes and instruments are beginning to measure the characteristics of these extreme stars. 

-  2987 - AVOGADRO’S  -  kilogram has how many moles?  To measure the mass in kilograms we need to have a kilogram standard.  Science would like to have a standard defined in some way tied to nature’s fundamental constants.  Like the length of the meter is defined in terms of the constant speed of light.  

-  2988 - REALITY  -  what is it really?  What is Reality and How Do Astronomers Deal with It?   Is the Universe 3 dimensional?  How did space begin?  Why is there matter filling space?  How were galaxies born?   What is Dark Matter?  Is all the matter found in galaxies?  What is Dark Energy?  Will the Universe expand forever?

-  2989 -  STRING  THEORY  -  is this the new math?  String Theory is the math astronomers use to delve into all these ideas.  There has been some success working with multiple dimensions.  But, nothing has been grounded in a physical reality that we can test and verify.  It is still all theory after 30 years of trying. But, astronomers are not giving up.  There is still a lot of explaining to do.

-  2990 - SPACETIME  -  at the micro-level?  Space and time change at the macro-level to keep the velocity of communications a constant.  Take some time to think about that statement.  At the micro-level space and time become lumpy with uncertainties and seem to avoid this limitation all together.  We live in the middle of these extremes and only recognize them at the frontiers of physics and astronomy.

-  2991  - GRAVITY WAVES  -  lensing and detection?  -  With the help of an automated supernova-hunting and a galaxy sitting 2 billion light years away from Earth that’s acting as a “magnifying glass,’’ astronomers have captured multiple images of a Type 1a supernova appearing in four different locations on the sky. So far this is the only Type 1a discovered that has exhibited this effect.

-  2992 - VELOCITIES  -  the Universe in motion?   Everything in the Universe is in motion.  It gets  more complicated than you can imagine.  Let’s start with our Milky Way and work our way around the Universe.

-  2993 - PULSARS  - are used to find Dark Matter?  -  Pulsars can be used to measure tiny changes of acceleration within the Milky Way, scanning internally for Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

-  2994 - NEUTRON  STAR  -  amazing math and physics?  -Neutron Stars are amazing objects for astronomers to study.  The Crab Nebula is powered by a neutron star.  Ordinary Matter should be called Ordinary Space.  The matter part is almost negligible. 99.999,999,999,999,9 % of solid matter is empty space.  It is not solid at all.  What makes it feel solid is the electromagnetic force.

-  2995 -  -   CRAB  NEBULA  -   Neutron Star math?   There are over 1000 “Pulsars” that astronomers have identified.  Probably the most studied of these is the “Crab Nebula” which was a supernova that exploded in the year 1054 and today is a rotating pulsar. 

-  2996 -   NEBULAE  -  Jewel Bug, math -  Hubble's Wide Field Camera observed the nebulae in 2019 and 2020 using its full, panchromatic capabilities.  Astronomers have been using emission line images from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared light to learn more about their properties. 

-  2997 -   SUPERNOVA  -  gold forged in exploding stars?  -  Astronomers are winding back the clock on the expanding remains of a nearby, exploded star. By using our Hubble Space Telescope, they retraced the speedy shrapnel from the blast to calculate a more accurate estimate of the location and time of the exploding star.

-  2998 -   GALAXIES -  when galaxies collide?  What happens to the central black holes growing at the cores of each? A new study using the Chandra X-ray Observatory and several other telescopes reveals new information about how many black holes remain after these galactic smash ups.

-  2999 -   NEUTRON  STARS  -   and magnetars?  -  Astronomers may have captured the first good look at giant flares from the strongest magnets in the universe.  The likely cause of these giant flares that are Starquakes trillions of trillions of times stronger than any earthquakes.

-  3001 -  GALAXIES  -  collide.   The Milky Way is not a static object. Things are changing rapidly everywhere.  To peer back to the galaxy’s earliest days, astronomers seek stars that were around back then. These stars were fashioned only from hydrogen and helium, the universe’s rawest materials. Fortunately, the smaller stars from this early stock are also slow to burn, so many are still shining after 13 billion years.

-  3002 -   AXIONS -   could they exist in stars?   More than 400 light-years from Earth, there is a cluster of young neutron stars that are  hot for their age. These stars, known as the "Magnificent Seven," emit a stream of ultra-high-energy X-rays that scientists haven't been able to explain. Could “axions” explain things?

-  3003 -   VOYAGER  -  43 year journey in space?  -  Both Voyager spacecraft are still going strong after 43 years in space, with each regularly sending back science to Earth from their remaining operating instruments. Voyager 2 flew incommunicado for several months in 2020 due to planned repairs and upgrades to its radio communications facility here on Earth but made contact again in November.

-  3004 -   MAGNETARS  -  spinning neutron stars?   When stars grow too big they collapse their atoms and blow up as a supernova.   The collapsed center core left behind are the electrons crushed into the protons leaving only neutrons to form the neutron star.  It is only 12 miles in diameter.   Neutron stars can have some bizarre behaviors renaming them magnetars and pulsars.

-  3005 -  SATURN  - our Cassini visit?  -  NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, has been sending pictures for13 years. Cassini spacecraft was launched from Earth on October 15, 1997. Instead of taking the direct route, it made multiple flybys of Venus, a flyby of Earth and a flyby of Jupiter. Each one of these close encounters boosted Cassini’s velocity, allowing it to make the journey with less escape velocity from Earth.

-  3006 -   NEUTRINOS  -  what have we learned?   Neutrinos are the smallest atomic particles.  If we could see neutrinos they would be exceptional probes into our environment.  Neutrinos are produced in fusions  reactions in the Sun and stars,  and in radioactive decay in the earth's crust.   The “ICECUBE neutrino detector” at the South Pole has over 5,000 light sensors to detect neutrinos interacting with atoms in the ice.  

3004 - MAGNETARS - spinning neutron stars?

 -  3004 -   MAGNETARS  -  spinning neutron stars?   When stars grow too big they collapse their atoms and blow up as a supernova.   The collapsed center core left behind are the electrons crushed into the protons leaving only neutrons to form the neutron star.  It is only 12 miles in diameter.   Neutron stars can have some bizarre behaviors renaming them magnetars and pulsars.

--------------------  3004  -  MAGNETARS  -  spinning neutron stars?

-  If a magnetar flew past Earth within 100,000 miles, the intense magnetic field of the exotic object would destroy the data on every credit card on the planet.  The magnetar,  “1E 1048.1-5937“, is located 9,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina.   The original star, out of which the magnetar formed, had a mass 30 to 40 times that of the Sun.

-

-  Such a massive beginning would help explain the difference between magnetars and their close cousins, pulsars.  Pulsars are stellar corpses that serve as the radio lighthouses of the galaxy. Spinning around several times a second, they flash the galaxy with a beam of radio waves.

-

-  Magnetars are similar, but they flash X-rays, and at a slower rate once every 10 seconds. They also occasionally let out a burst of gamma rays.

-

- There are about 1,500 known pulsars, but less than a dozen firmly identified magnetars. What makes magnetars special is their magnetic field, which is thousands of times stronger than that of normal pulsars and billions of times stronger than that of any magnet on Earth.

-

- These magnetic fields can be measured by observing how quickly the spin of the magnetar slows down. A rotating magnet gives off energy, and the greater the magnetic field, the faster the energy loss. Magnetars exhibit rapid deceleration, which implies a huge magnetic field.   After 10,000 years a magnetar will slow down enough to turn off its X-ray flash.

-

-  Magnetars and pulsars belong to a class of objects called neutron stars, which are big balls of tightly packed neutrons no larger than a big city.  When stars above about eight solar masses run out of fuel to burn, they explode in what is called a “supernova“. What remains can collapses into a neutron star. 

-

-  To have such large magnetic fields, magnetars are thought to originate from the supernova of very massive stars.   It takes a very massive star, some 30 to 40 solar masses.  This progenitor star lives 5-6 million years before it explodes , creating the magnetar in its ashes. Massive stars die young. Our middle-ages Sun, by comparison, is about 4.6 billion years old.

-

-   Astronomers used to think that really massive stars formed blackholes when they died.  But in the past few years they have realized that some of these stars could form pulsars, because they go on a rapid weight-loss program before they explode as supernovae. At the very end of its life, the star likely lost 90 percent of its mass, which would make it skinny enough to become a neutron star, as opposed to a blackhole. 

-

-  In our galaxy there are only about 10 neutron stars from a massive enough progenitor and at the right age to be magnetars right now. There could be many more "dead" magnetars in the galaxy. 

-

-  Observations of "starquakes" have allowed scientists to estimate the thickness of a neutron star's crust for the first time.  Neutron stars are very dense objects that mark the endpoints of the lives of some stars.

-

-   Using a technique similar to seismology here on Earth, researchers estimated that the crust of a highly magnetic neutron star, a "magnetar," is nearly 1 mile thick and made of material so tightly packed that a teaspoonful of the stuff would weigh about 10 million tons on Earth.

-

A neutron star forms when an ancient star several times more massive than our Sun runs through its entire stock of nuclear fuel. The star collapses under the weight of its own gravity and explodes in a cataclysmic event called a supernova.

-

-  The blast ejects most of the star's mass into space, leaving behind a dense, rapidly spinning core about the size of a small city and roughly 1.4 times more massive than our Sun.

-

-  Magnetar's are neutron stars whose magnetic fields are thousands of times stronger than their pulsars. Astronomers have detected only about a dozen such stars. A magnetar's magnetic field is equivalent to about a hundred trillion refrigerator magnets and so strong that it could slow a steel locomotive from as far away as the Moon.

-

-  The flash resulted from a violent explosion called a "hyperflare," which occurs when a magnetar's magnetic field lines become so twisted with one another that they snap. Like a tightly wound rubber band that finally breaks, the snapping released tremendous amounts of energy, triggering a "starquake" that buckled the star's crust.

-

-  The researchers calculated the thickness of the magnetar's crust by comparing the frequencies of energy waves traveling around the star against those passing through its interior.  If an even larger starquake could be observed, it could provide a glimpse into what kind matter makes up a neutron star's core.

-

-  The interior of neutron stars has been a source of great mystery and speculation for scientists. The pressure and density inside a neutron star core is thought to be so great that it could harbor exotic particles not made apparent since the moment of the Big Bang.

-

-  One possibility is that the stars' interiors are home to unbound versions of the building blocks of protons and neutrons, called quarks. Even the most powerful particle accelerators on Earth can't muster up the energies needed to reveal free quarks.

-

-  Astronomers have discovered two neutron stars orbiting each other once every 2.4 hours and spiraling inward toward an eventual dramatic collision. The finding suggest such intense events are far more common than was thought.  Astronomers could detect elusive "gravitational waves," which should be spawned in the final seconds prior to the mighty mergers. 

-

- A neutron star is already stellar corpse. It is formed when an aged star explodes and as much material as what's in our Sun collapses into a region the size of a city. A teaspoonful, brought to Earth, would weigh a billion tons or so. Neutron stars are stuffed almost entirely with neutrons, subatomic particles that can huddle extremely close together.

-

-  Only six neutron-star pairs, called binary systems, are now known.  Previous studies of other pairs have shown that these exotic dance teams spiral toward each other and must eventually crash and unite, possibly becoming a black hole. Einstein theorized that space-warping gravitational waves caused by two accelerated masses in orbit are the reason for this orbital decay.

-

-  As Einstein's theory has it, any pair of neutron stars should begin a detectable death chirp moments before they merge.  One minute before the stars merge, their orbit has shrunk to a size of only a few hundred miles and the two neutron stars move around each other some 30 times each second, producing strong gravitational waves with that same frequency (30 hertz).

-

-  In the last minute before the merger, the orbital frequency increases rapidly, from 30 to 1,000 times per second; the strength of the gravitational wave emission increases simultaneously.  When the waves reach Earth, their effect would be to displace the oceans by an amount roughly 10 times the diameter of an atomic nucleus.

-

-  There are several projects around the world designed to detect these otherwise unnoticed waves. Among the most prominent is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). 

-

-  Gravitational waves are said to be similar to light waves. Both propagate through space at different frequencies, radiating outward like ripples on a pond. But gravitational radiation is much weaker than electromagnetic radiation, which includes light, radio waves and X-rays. This is because the fundamental force of gravity is weaker than the fundamental electromagnetic force.

-

-  The Sun is a middle-aged star about 8 light-minutes from us. Its tantrums, though cosmically pitiful compared to the magnetar explosion, routinely squish Earth's protective magnetic field and alter our atmosphere, lighting up the night sky with colorful lights called “aurora“.

-

-  Solar storms also alter the shape of Earth's ionosphere, a region of the atmosphere 50 miles up where gas is so thin that electrons can be stripped from atoms and molecules and roam free for short periods. Fluctuations in solar radiation cause the ionosphere to expand and contract.

-

-  A neutron star is the remnant of a star that was once several times more massive than the Sun. When their nuclear fuel is depleted, they explode as a supernova. The remaining dense core is slightly more massive than the Sun but has a diameter typically no more than 12 miles. 

-

-  Millions of neutron stars fill the Milky Way galaxy. A dozen or so are ultra-magnetic neutron stars, or  magnetars. The magnetic field around one is about 1,000 trillion gauss, strong enough to strip information from a credit card at a distance halfway to the Moon.

-

-  A relatively small, dense object racing across the sky and heading our way at more than 100 times the speed of a Concorde jet has been identified as our solar system's closest known neutron star.

-

-  The compact remains of an ancient explosion, less than 12 miles in diameter but 10 trillion times denser than steel, the neutron star zips along at roughly 240,000 miles per hour. Most neutron stars are found in paired or binary star systems but this runaway object has broken free of its larger companion, giving astronomers a rare treat. 

-

- The object, first spotted in 1992, was confirmed to be a neutron star in 1996. But only now has its distance from Earth been determined, using data provided by the Hubble Space Telescope. The object, also described as the corpse of a star, currently is about 200 light-years away. It is due to pass by Earth in about 300,000 years, but will safely miss by about 170 light-years.

-

-  When massive stars go supernova they produce a magnificent nebula. But if the star is not massive enough to produce a blackhole, it usually leaves behind a neutron star.

A neutron star crams as much mass as our sun into a sphere just 10 miles across. Squeezing out the empty space that makes up most of the suns volume, neutron stars leave naked atomic nuclei crammed together.

-

-  This dense star rotates has an intense magnetic field and a thin crust of iron nuclei packed into a crystalline lattice.  A neutron star  has an extra strong magnetic field. At about 44 trillion gauss, the magnetic field is 1,000 times stronger than that of an ordinary neutron star. By comparison, the Earth's magnetic field is a tame 0.6 gauss, and a refrigerator magnet's, a feeble 100 gauss.

-

-  The most a human being can normally expect to be exposed to in his life is about 100,000 gauss from a magnetic resonance imager.  A field of 1 billion gauss would turn you into magnetized mush.

-

-  Since the stars magnetic field drags on it, it slows it each rotation. The losses are almost imperceptible, about 1 part in 100 billion.  But that represents a lot of energy since it's braking such a compact yet massive object. In the span of about 10,000 years it slows down to become an  X-ray Pulsar.  Only six are known to date.

-

-  Under the magnetar theory, one way that energy is released is when the diamond-like crust suddenly cracks, shifting and pumping energy into the ionized gases trapped around the magnetar.   The result of the “star quake” arrives at Earth as brilliant gamma-ray flares. On Aug. 27, 1998, such an outburst ionized as much of the Earth's outer atmosphere as the sun would at high noon.

-

-  We in California know that earthquakes don't last for a fraction of a second.   The slowing of the star is caused not by the magnetic field but by its generating a wind that departs at close to the speed of light.  This is evidence for a new state of matter heavier than any previously known, equivalent in density to stuffing all of Earth into an auditorium.

-

-  The research involved two stars expected to be neutron stars, remnants of exploded stars that are composed primarily of neutrons and would be very dense.  Each of the stars in the two new studies may contain exotic particles called quarks.

-

-  Quarks are thought to be fundamental building blocks of matter. But they have never been observed alone, instead always existing together as the components of other matter. If they were liberated inside a star, they could theoretically be compressed into a smaller sphere.

-

-  Massive, dying stars vibrate like giant speakers and emit an audible hum before exploding in one of nature's most spectacular blasts.   Sound waves, not ghostly particles called neutrinos, deal the final blow to stars before they become supernovas.

-

-  Supernovas are powerful stellar blasts that briefly outshine entire galaxies and radiate more energy than our Sun will in its entire lifetime. Only a star that is between 10 to 25 times more massive than our Sun can become a supernova. After it has burned for 10 to 20 million years or so, the star runs out of fuel and develops a dense iron core about the size of Earth.

-

-  The iron core grows until its density becomes so great that it collapses under its own weight. The core contracts, but then almost immediately springs back again. This sudden rebounding action generates a shockwave that speeds outward.  It is this departing shockwave that triggers the supernova explosion.

-

-  The problem is that in even the best computer simulations, the shock wave isn't powerful enough on its own to break through the dense layers of superheated gas that envelops the core. In the models, the shock wave stalls as if muffled by a blanket and the supernova explosion never occurs.

-

-  In the late 1980s, scientists began experimenting with the idea that ghostly subatomic particles known as neutrinos might provide the extra power boost needed to complete the blast.  Neutrinos have no charge and are nearly massless. 

-

-  They are produced in vast quantities during the final stages of a massive star's life and stream out of the star's inner core. It was thought that these escaping particles might carry enough energy out of the core to the star's outer layers to complete the explosion.  But even when scientists incorporated the outflow of neutrinos into their computer simulations, it still wasn't enough to produce consistent supernovas. 

-

-  The team's model shows that after about half a second, the collapsing inner core begins to vibrate. After about 700 milliseconds, the vibrations become so energetic that they create sound waves with audible frequencies in the range of 200 to 400 hertz, or around middle C.

-

-  Instead of neutrino's heating up the material behind the shock, we had acoustic power doing it. The material on the inside is oscillating like a very, very strong speaker and sending out energy via sound.  The sound waves replace neutrinos as energy carriers.

-

-  The sound waves propagate out through the material and heat it up.  It acts in a way similar to the way neutrinos would act but with more efficiency.  That is the way supernovas happen.  Trust me.

-

- 1383  - Magnetars - Lethal Neutron Stars Neutron Stars can generate intense magnetic fields creating star quakes that release lethal Gamma Ray Bursts.

-

-  1223 -  Where Do Big Stars Go When They Die?   Big stars have short lives and dramatic deaths.  This review highlights the bigger supernovae explosions that create Gamma Ray Bursts, Magnetars, and Pulsars.  It refers to a small satellite student project that hopes to contribute to our understanding of these cosmic wonders.

-

-  1159  -  What Are Magnetars?  After a supernova explosion of a massive star the remaining core can collapse into a Neutron Star, or a Blackhole, depending on how massive the core is that remains.  In certain situations the core could be a rapidly spinning , intensely magnetic Neutron Star, called a Magnetar. Neutron Stars are made of neutrons, not charged particles.  Spinning neutrons would not create a magnetic field.  Nothing escapes a Blackhole.  So, how can Neutron Stars and Blackholes create the enormous magnetic fields?

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January 27, 2021         MAGNETARS  -  spinning neutron stars?       3004                                                                                                                                                            

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--------------------- ---  Thursday, January 28, 2021  ---------------------------

3005 - SATURN - our Cassini visit?

 -  3005 -  SATURN  - our Cassini visit?  -  NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, has been sending pictures for13 years. Cassini spacecraft was launched from Earth on October 15, 1997. Instead of taking the direct route, it made multiple flybys of Venus, a flyby of Earth and a flyby of Jupiter. Each one of these close encounters boosted Cassini’s velocity, allowing it to make the journey with less escape velocity from Earth.

----------------------------------  3005  -  SATURN  - our Cassini visit?

-  Saturn is this crazy, ringed world, in the Solar System.   It is different than any other place we’ve ever seen. In a small telescope, you can really see the ball of the planet, you can see its rings. 

-

-  Cassini arrived at Saturn on July 1st, 2004 and began its science operations shortly after that. The primary mission lasted 4 years, and then NASA extended its mission two more times. The first ending in 2010, and the second due to end in 2017.

-

-  Before Cassini, we only had flybys of Saturn. NASA’s Pioneer 11, and Voyagers 1 and 2 both zipped past the planet and its moons, snapping pictures as they went.

-

-  But Cassini was there to stay. To orbit around and around the planet, taking photos, measuring magnetic fields, and studying chemicals.

-

-  For Saturn itself, Cassini was able to make regular observations of the planet as it passed through entire seasons. This allowed it to watch how the weather and atmospheric patterns changed over time. The spacecraft watched lightning storms dance through the cloudtops at night.

-

-   In 2010, Cassini watched a huge storm erupt in the planet’s northern hemisphere. This storm dug deep into Saturn’s lower atmosphere, dredging up ice from a layer 160 kilometers below and mixing it onto the surface. This was the first time that astronomers were able to directly study this water ice on Saturn, which is normally in a layer hidden from view.

-

-  The second highlight is the massive hexagonal storm churning away in Saturn’s northern pole. This storm was originally seen by Voyager, but Cassini used its infrared and visible wavelength instruments.

-

-  Why a hexagon? That’s still a little unclear, but it seems like when you rotate fluids of different speeds, you get multi-sided structures like this.  Cassini showed how the hexagonal storm has changed in color as Saturn moved through its seasons.

-

-  Cassini studied Saturn’s rings in great detail, confirming that they’re made up of ice particles, ranging in size as small a piece of dust to as large as a mountain. But the rings themselves are actually quite thin. Just 10 meters thick in some places. Not 10 kilometers, not 10 million kilometers, 10 meters, 30 feet.  That is thin.

-

-  The spacecraft helped scientists uncover the source of Saturn’s E-ring, which is made up of fresh icy particles blasting out of its moon Enceladus.

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-  Waves, generated in the rings and enhanced by nearby moons move and change over time in ways we’ve never been able to study anywhere else in the Solar System.

-

-  Cassini has showed us that Saturn’s rings are a much more dynamic place than we ever thought. Some moons are creating rings, other moons are absorbing or distorting them. The rings generate bizarre spoke patterns larger than Earth that come and go because of electrostatic charges.

-

-  Titan is Saturn’s largest moon.  Cassini was carrying a special payload to assist with its exploration of Titan: the Huygens lander. This tiny probe detached from Cassini just before its arrival at Saturn, and parachuted through the cloudtops on January 14, 2005, analyzing all the way. Huygens returned images of its descent through the atmosphere, and even images of the freezing surface of Titan.

-

-   Cassini’s observations of Titan took the story even further. Instead of a cold, dead world, Cassini showed that it has active weather, as well as lakes, oceans and rivers of hydrocarbons. It has shifting dunes of pulverized rock hard water ice.

-

-  If there’s one place that needs exploring even further, it’s Titan. We should return with sailboats, submarines and rovers to better explore this amazing place.

-

-  Cassini helped scientists understand why Saturn’s moon “Iapetus” has one light side and one dark side. The moon is tidally locked to Saturn, its dark side always leading the moon in orbit. It’s collecting debris from another Saturnian moon, Phoebe, like bugs hitting the windshield of a car.

-

-  Perhaps the most exciting discovery that Cassini made during its mission is the strange behavior of Saturn’s moon “Enceladus“. The spacecraft discovered that there are jets of water ice blasting out of the moon’s southern pole. An ocean of liquid water, heated up by tidal interactions with Saturn, is spewing out into space.

-

-  Wherever we find water on Earth, we find life. We thought that water in the icy outer Solar System would be hard to reach, but here it is, right at the surface, venting into space, and waiting for us to come back and investigate it further.

-

-  On September 15, 2017, the Cassini mission ended. NASA is going to crash the spacecraft into Saturn, killing it dead.  NASA’s Opportunity rover, still going, 13 years longer than anticipated. Or the Voyagers, out in the depths of the void, helping us explore the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space. These things are built to last.

-

-  The problem is that the Saturnian system contains some of the best environments for life in the Solar System. Saturn’s moon Enceladus has geysers of water blasting out into space.

-

-  Cassini spacecraft is covered in Earth-based bacteria and other microscopic organisms that hitched a ride to Saturn, and would be glad to take a nice hot Enceladian bath. All they need is liquid water and a few organic chemicals to get going, and Enceladus seems to have both.

-

-  NASA feels that it’s safer to end Cassini now, when they can still control it, than to wait until they lose communication or run out of propellant in the future. The chances that Cassini will actually crash into an icy moon and infect it with our Earth life are remote, but why take the risk?

-

-  Cassini has been taking a series of orbits to prepare itself for its final mission. Starting in April, it’ll actually cross inside the orbit of the rings, getting closer and closer to Saturn. And on September 15th, it’ll briefly become a meteor, flashing through the upper atmosphere of Saturn, gone forever.

-

-  Even in its final moments, Cassini is going to be sciencing as hard as it can. We’ll learn more about the density of consistency of the rings close to the planet. We’ll learn more about the planet’s upper atmosphere, storms and clouds with the closest possible photographs you can take.

-

-  The perfect finale to one of the most successful space missions in human history. A mission that revealed as many new mysteries about Saturn as it helped us answer. A mission that showed us not only a distant alien world, but our own planet in perspective in this vast Solar System.

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January 25, 2021           SATURN  - our Cassini visit?                      3005                                                                                                                                                          

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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”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Wednesday, January 27, 2021  ---------------------------

3006 - NEUTRINOS - what have we learned?

 -  3006 -   NEUTRINOS  -  what have we learned?   Neutrinos are the smallest atomic particles.  If we could see neutrinos they would be exceptional probes into our environment.  Neutrinos are produced in fusions  reactions in the Sun and stars,  and in radioactive decay in the earth's crust.   The “ICECUBE neutrino detector” at the South Pole has over 5,000 light sensors to detect neutrinos interacting with atoms in the ice.  

-------------------  3006  -  NEUTRINOS  -  what have we learned?

-  Neutrinos are the smallest atomic particles.  If we could see neutrinos they would be exceptional probes into our environment. Neutrino means " the little one", they were first detected in 1956. 

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-   There are 3 varieties of neutrinos that behave the same, but all  have different atomic weights.  They all are electrically neutral so they pass through matter undetected.   More than 50,000,000,000,000 neutrinos pass through your body every second.  ( Review 2835 for more.)

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-  Neutrinos are produced in fusions  reactions in the Sun and stars,  and in radioactive decay in the earth's crust.  Potassium 40 in our body is one of these natural radioactive decay elements.  Your body emits 340,000,000 neutrinos each day.  The Sun emits 2*10^36 and the Earth receives 65 billion neutrinos per second per square centimeter.   (Review 630:  Six sources of Neutrinos.  The history of the discoveries of neutrinos from 1927 to 2006)

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-  Where have all the neutrinos gone?  Neutrinos have been thought to exist since 1930.  When radioactive decay added up the before energy and the after energy a small amount was missing.  Wolfgang Pauli called this missing energy the neutrino.  (Review 1139)

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-  ICECUBE is a neutrino telescope built deep in the ice at the South Pole. ( Review 1219 describes how the telescope was built, how it works and what it expects to discover.)

-

-  There may be an undiscovered particle called the "sterile neutrino".  This neutrino would interact with gravity but not with any of the other forces.  This may explain Dark Matter that makes up 23% of the Universe.  (Reviesw 1511)

-

-  In order for the neutrino to be nearly massless it must have a very weak interaction with the Higgs Field.  Every particle has a counterpart anti-particle .  The neutrino may be different and be its own anti-particle. (Review 1589)

-

-  In 2013 neutrinos can be routinely detected.  Neutrinos are "leptons´ because they have 1/2 spin in their angular momentum.  Neutrinos leave the Sun and reach us in 8 minutes.  While reading this sentence 5,000,000 of them passed through your thumbnail.  (Review 1608)

-

-  Neutrinos are neutral particles that travel in a straight line. They arrive hours ahead of light coming from supernovae explosions.  The mass of these neutrinos must be very, very small because they are traveling nearly the speed of light.  Neutrino measurements show some that are accelerated to energies above 50 trillion electron volts.  Two detections were even at 1,000 trillion electron volts.  (Review 1631)

-

-  Particle physics is trying to reduce the Universe to as few particles as possible. It is narrowed down to 12 particles. Three of these are neutrinos. Physicists are searching for a violation in the Law of Conservation of mass/energy.  (Review 1814)

-

-  Are their neutrinos that are right handed?  Only a few neutrinos interact with the atoms in your body over your entire lifetime.  Discovering sterile neutrinos may help explain the source of neutrino mass.  There are  hundreds of math models working on this problem.  (Review 1840)

-

-  Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles that reside with electrons and protons at the center of atoms.  There are three types: electron, muon, tau neutrinos.  (Review 1978)

-

-  There is an experiment that is sending neutrinos through the earth from Illinois to the detector in South Dakota.  Neutrinos may acquire their mass through a new undiscovered type of physics.  Other particles inside atoms obtain their mass by interacting with the Higgs Field.  (Review 2026)

-

-  The ICECUBE neutrino detector at the South Pole has over 5,000 light sensors to detect neutrinos interacting with atoms in the ice.  The array of sensors is designed to plot the direction from which the neutrinos are coming.  Astronomers then search for the origin, the source.  

-

-   Neutrinos are neutral particles and travel in a straight line.  The source was a blazar, a super massive blackhole at the center of a galaxy.  February, 1987, 25 neutrinos were detected in Japan, the U.S., and in Russia.   3 hours later the light came from this exploding supernova.   By November x-rays and gamma rays arrived.  All created from this star's collapse.  99% of the total explosive energy comes in the form of neutrinos.  

-

-  In September, 2017, ICECUBE detected another high energy neutrino.  Then the Swift x-ray telescope detected nine sources of x-rays coming from that same part of the sky.  Two days later the Fermi space telescope detected gamma rays coming from the same sources. 

-

-   Optical telescopes identified a source brightening over the past 50 days.  Another telescope identified a “blazar” , a huge blackhole emitting jets as it swallowed mass.  Radio light detections further identified the source to be the blazar.  

-

-  Gravitational waves were detected by the LIGO observatory resulting from the merger of two blackholes.

-

-  Astronomers have a whole raft of new detectors used to explore the Universe.  Past the electromagnetic spectrum gravity waves and neutrino detectors have been added to the mix.  ("Neutrinos at the ends of the Earth", Francis Halzen, October, 2015.)

-  The neutrino is a tiny elementary particle that is a billion times more abundant than protons and electrons that make up our normal atoms.  Neutrinos are produced in the fusion reactions of our Sun and in the natural radioactive decay of elements in the Earth’s crust.

-

-  The neutrino is a tiny elementary particle that is a billion times more abundant than protons and electrons that make up our normal atoms.  Neutrinos are produced in the fusion reactions of our Sun and in the natural radioactive decay of elements in the Earth’s crust.

-

-  This may surprise you but your body contains about 20 milligrams of Potassium 40.  This is one of these natural radioactive elements.  During normal radioactive decay inside your body you are emitting 340,000,000 neutrinos each day.  These neutrinos leave your body at light speed and travel to the farthest ends of the Universe.

-

-  Neutrinos are invisible, they carry no electric charge, and have almost no mass.  Consequently, they pass through most everything with no interactions at all.  In fact, from all the various sources there are 1,000,000,000,000 neutrinos (trillions) passing through your body every second.

-

-  Before describing where neutrinos come from I first need to define how we measure them and how we can tell them apart.  We know that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared (E = mc^2).  So, mass can be describe as Energy divided by the speed of light squared (m = E/c^2).  One convenient way to measure mass in small particles is in electron volts. 

-

-   One electron volt, one eV, equals the energy of one electron falling through an electrostatic potential difference of one volt.  This is a very small amount of energy.  1 ev = 1.6 * 10^-19 joules of energy.  One electron volt is the energy needed to lift a grain of sand one centimeter off the surface of Earth.  One eV is the energy used in the blink of an eye.

-

------------------   There are 18,750,000,000,000,000 eV in an uncontrollable sneeze.

-

------------------   A Sneeze = 3*10^-3 joules / 1.6*10^-19 joules/eV = 1.875 * 10^16 eV

-

 -  An electron has a rest mass of 511,000 eV.  If the electron disintegrates into pure energy it would yield 1,022,000 eV of energy.  

-

-   A proton has a mass of 938,000,000 eV.  One kilogram of mass = 90*10^15 joules.  1 eV/cm^2 = 1.783*10^-36 kilograms.  Charged particles in a nuclear bomb explosion range from 300,000 to 3,000,000 eV.  A molecule in the air has an average energy of

0.03 eV. 

-

-   Hopefully, these numbers give you some flavor of energy in electron volts.  Now we will use this measure to describe the sources of neutrinos:

-

-  Neutrinos from stars, and from our Sun:

-

--------------------------------------  .000006 neutrinos / cm^3  at 20,000,000 eV

-

-  The sun emits 2*10^38 neutrinos per second.  The Earth’s surface receives 40,000,000,000 neutrinos per second per square centimeter.  The Sun generates these neutrinos through the fusion of hydrogen into helium.  85% of the Sun’s neutrinos come from two protons combining to form Deuterium nuclei plus a positron and plus an electron neutrino.  Deutrium is heavy hydrogen, it is a proton combined with a neutron.

-

-  Neutrinos from high energy particle accelerators and from nuclear reactors, or from nuclear bombs:

-

----------------------------------------  5*10^20 neutrons per second  at  4,000,000 eV

-

-  A nuclear reactor core will radiate 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 neutrinos each second.  Neutrinos from particle accelerators today very with mean energies from 30,000,000 eV to 30,000,000,000 eV.

-

-  Neutrinos from natural radioactivity in Earth’s crust:

-

----------------------------------------  6,000,000 neutrino / second / centimeter^2

-

Natural radioactivity occurs from beta decay of Uranium, Thorium, and Potassium 40.  It is equivalent to about 20,000 nuclear plants.

-

-  Neutrinos from the Big Bang:

-

------------------------  330 neutrinos /cm^3 over the whole Universe at .0004 eV

-

-  This is very similar to the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation that was caused by the decoupling of photons from electrons, 300,000 years after the Big Bang that started out as light and now comes to us as microwave energy, 1.4 Ghz at 2.73 degrees Kelvin. (You can convert energy in electron volts to temperature in Kelvin multiplying by 11,605).  

-

-  The Neutrino Cosmic Background comes from decoupling of neutrinos emitted by neutrons about one second after the Big Bang.  Before the decoupling neutrinos were absorbed by protons as fast as emitted by neutrons. 

-

-   After one second of cooling the lower temperature prevented the protons from absorbing neutrinos and the neutron emitted neutrinos were free.  Today, they are very low energy, only .0004 eV.  By comparison, on average, there are 330,000,000 neutrinos, 0.5 protons, and 1,000,000,000 photons in each cubic meter of the Universe

-

-   Neutrinos from Supernova explosions:

-

---------------------------------------------  0.0002 neutrino / cm^3

-

-  These were first detected in the Supernova 1987a in the Magellan Cloud exploding 150,000 lightyears from Earth.

-

-  Neutrinos from Cosmic Rays:

-

-  When a Cosmic Ray penetrates Earth’s atmosphere hitting a gas molecule it shatters and generates a shower of elementary particles.  Cosmic Rays are hydrogen nuclei (protons) traveling at nearly the speed of light.  Among the particles are atmospheric neutrinos.

-

-  The sum of all of these sources create trillions of neutrinos traveling through your body, and everything else, every second at the speed of light.  400,000,000,000 from the Sun, 50,000,000 from natural radioactivity, 100,000,000 from nuclear plants all around the world.

-

-  These neutrinos are very difficult to detect and to measure.  The most successful experiment in detecting the very high energy neutrinos is occurring in the Antarctic.   Here experiments called AMANDA II and ICECUBE  have used hot water drills to drill deep holes into the ice.  They have sunk 677 glass optical modules arranged on 19 cables down as deep as 1,500 meters.  They form an array of detectors 500 meters high by 120 meters in diameter.  

-

-  The glass modules work like light bulbs in reverse.  They detect light signals and send electric data up to computers on the surface.  The light signals come from looking down through the Earth into the Northern Hemisphere.  Only neutrinos can easily traverse through the Earth, yet some do crash in to ice atom nuclei scattering other elementary particles, called muons. 

-

-   These muons travel in water faster than light travels in water (ice).  (Light travels about 75% as fast in water as it does in a vacuum.)  The faster muons create a shockwave much like breaking the sound barrier, that in turn creates a blue streak of light, called Cherenkov Radiation.  

-

-  It is these streaks of light that are detected.  From the array of detectors the direction and the energy levels of the neutrinos can be calculated.  Neutrinos have been detected that are 100 times more energy than we can create in our most powerful particle accelerators.

-

-  ICECUBE is planning to expand the array to 4,800 optical modules covering one cubic kilometer.  This instrument will be , in effect, a neutrino telescope looking down through the Earth into the Northern Hemisphere to learn where these high energy neutrinos are coming from. 

-

-   By “seeing” with neutrinos it will allow us to see things we have never seen before.  We understand our Universe by seeing photons.  But, photons have disadvantages, they interact with matter, they scatter in gas and dust, they bend with gravity, they slow down in different mediums, they change wavelength with velocity.  Neutrinos can avoid some of this interference in what we see.  If we can learn to see with neutrinos we will surely discover many new things unseen before.

-

-  By looking at the neutrinos emitted from the Sun we discovered only 1/3 as many as our calculations showed should be there.  The Sun burns 600,000,000 tons of hydrogen into helium every second, so we know how many neutrinos are produced.  From this study we have learned that there are really three types of neutrinos:

-

------------------- Electron neutrinos    < 2.5 eV

-

------------------- Muon neutrinos < 170,000 eV

-

------------------- Tau neutrinos < 18,000,000 eV

-

-  We do not know the exact masses for these neutrinos but we have learned that neutrinos oscillate between the three different types.  Neutrinos leave the Sun as electron neutrinos.  In the 8 minutes, traveling at the speed of light, they arrive at Earth with 2/3rds changed into the other types and undetected. 

-

-  On March 30, 2006 Fermi National Labs announced the discovery of the tau neutrino.  Electron neutrinos were discovered in 1956 and muon neutrinos in 1962.  Now, all three types have been produced.  

-

------------------------------      The history of neutrinos:

-

1927 - The spectrum of beta decay as discovered to be continuous

1930 -  To account for energy conservation in beta decay Wolfgang Pauli  hypothesized the existence of neutrinos. 

1932 - neutron is discovered

1946 - neutrino to accompany muon is proposed.

1956 - neutrinos discovered coming from nuclear reactors.

1957 - neutrinos found to be left-handed.  Neutrino oscillation proposed.

1962 - neutrinos come in 3 flavors proposed.  Muon neutrino discovered.

1965 - neutrinos discovered in natural radioactive decay in gold mine in South Africa.

1968 - solar neutrinos detected, only one third number expected.

1976 - tau lepton discovered.

1987 - neutrinos discovered from Supernova 1987a.

1989 - neutrinos determined to come in three species, electron, muon and tau.

2000 - tau particles produced in Fermilab.

2002 - neutrino oscillations between 3 species explains number of solar neutrinos detected.

2006  -  Fermi lab announced tau neutrino was discovered.

-

-   Neutrinos are Fermions which are elementary particles having a spin of ½.  Spin is the angular momentum of a rotating particle.  Fermions include Leptons, quarks, and baryons.  Neutrinos are also Leptons.  Leptons do not partake in the Strong Nuclear Force interactions.  They interact only through the Weak Nuclear Force.  There are six types of Leptons:  electron,   muon,  tau,   electron neutrino,    muon neutrino,   and tau neutrino.

-  

------------------------------------  Other reviews available:

-

-   2973 -  NEUTRINOS  -  the littlest particles!   Many more discoveries are needed to explain neutrinos.  A detector in the ice at the South Pole may make these new neutrino discoveries.  Another experiment is sending neutrinos from Illinois to South Dakota. Neutrinos are a billion times more abundant than electrons.  

-

-   2938  - NEUTRINO  -  and cosmic ray discoveries? -  We all know that all material is made of atoms. Atoms combine into elements and molecules to create our material world.  But what makes up atoms?  You may have already learned that they are made up of electrons and protons.  Now we enter the world of Particle Physics, what makes up protons?

-

-  2835  -  NEUTRINOS  -  a thermal history.  If you could see neutrinos you could see back in time to 1 second after the Big Bang.  To see with visible light, we see with photons.  And, because the Universe is expanding seeing with visible light, near the red end of the spectrum, we can see back to when the Universe was 2.3 billion years old, 

17 % its current size.

-

-  2762  -  NEUTRINOS  - experiments to learn more? The difficult-to-detect neutrino seems to undergo a strange identity-flipping process, and if this reaction occurs differently between neutrinos and antineutrinos, then this process, called neutrino oscillation, could help physicists explain why matter dominates over antimatter. 

-

-    2619  - NEUTRINOS  -  and other mysterious particles?  Our best model of particle physics is being challenged with the weirdness a series of strange events in Antarctica. Strange results from laboratory experiments suggest a ghostly new species of neutrinos beyond the three described in the Standard Model. And the universe seems full of dark matter that no particle in the Standard Model can explain.  

-

-   2223  -  Astronomers have learned much more about the Universe with their “microwave telescopes”.  They have determined the Universe to be 13,800,000,000 years old.  They have determined that only 5% or the Universe is visible or ordinary matter.  The rest is Dark Matter (25%) and Dark Energy (70%) .  To learn more astronomers want to be able to use “neutrino telescopes” and “gravity wave telescopes”.  

-

-  2131  -  Neutrinos - The Little Neutral Ones.  The neutrino is a tiny elementary particle that is a billion times more abundant than protons and electrons that make up our normal atoms.  Neutrinos are produced in the fusion reactions of our Sun and in the natural radioactive decay of elements in the Earth’s crust. Potassium 40 in your body is emitting 340,000,000 neutrinos every day. This review contains the history of discoveries of neutrinos.

-

-  2093  -  Neutrinos  -  What have we learned?  -  Neutrinos are the smallest atomic particles.  If we could see neutrinos they would be exceptional probes into our environment.  Neutrinos are produced in fusions  reactions in the Sun and stars,  and in radioactive decay in the earth's crust.   The ICECUBE neutrino detector at the South Pole has over 5,000 light sensors to detect neutrinos interacting with atoms in the ice.  

-

-  2026  -  Many more discoveries are needed to explain neutrinos.  A detector in the ice at the South Pole may make these new neutrino discoveries.  Another experiment is sending neutrinos from Illinois to South Dakota. Neutrinos are a billion times more abundant than electrons.  

January 26, 2021                NEUTRINOS                    2093   2131     3006                                                                                                                                                            

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