Saturday, October 30, 2021

3320 - SUN FLARES - this Halloween, 2021.

  -  3320   - SUN  FLARES  -  this Halloween, 2021.  The sun is currently in the beginning phase of its latest 11-year solar cycle, “solar cycle 25“, in which its activity rises and falls over time. Currently its activity is relatively low. But,  we get our first solar flare for Halloween.


---------------------  3320  -  SUN  FLARES  -  this Halloween, 2021.

-  The sun brings gives light and warmth to all life on Earth.  Solar flares, eruptions and other sun storms can have serious effects to satellites and other systems around or on Earth.  Here are some of the worst solar storms known to humanity.

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-  The Carrington Event of 1859 was the first documented event of a solar flare impacting Earth. The event occurred  on September 1 and is named after Richard Carrington, the solar astronomer who witnessed the event through his private observatory telescope and sketched the sun's sunspots at the time. The flare was the largest documented solar storm in the last 500 years.

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-  The Carrington solar storm event sparked major aurora displays that were visible as far south as the Caribbean. It also caused severe interruptions in global telegraph communications, even shocking some telegraph operators and sparking fires when discharges from the lines ignited telegraph paper.

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-  The major solar flare that erupted on Aug. 4, 1972 knocked out long-distance phone communication across some states, including Illinois.  In fact, it caused AT&T to redesign its power system for transatlantic cables.

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-  In March 1989, a powerful solar flare set off a major March 13 power blackout in Canada that left six million people without electricity for nine hours.  The flare disrupted electric power transmission from the Hydro Québec generating station and even melted some power transformers in New Jersey.

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-  The Bastille Day event takes its name from the French national holiday since it occurred the same day on July 14, 2000. This was a major solar eruption that registered an X5 on the scale of solar flares.

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-  The Bastille Day event caused some satellites to short-circuit and led to some radio blackouts. It remains one of the most highly observed solar storm events and was the most powerful flare since 1989.

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- On October 28, 2003, the sun unleashed a solar flare. The intense sun storm was so strong it overwhelmed the spacecraft sensor measuring it. The sensor topped out at X28, already a massive flare, but later analysis found that the flare reached a peak strength of about X45.

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-  The solar storm was part of a string of at least nine major flares over a two-week period.

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-  When a major X-class solar flare erupted on the sun on Dec. 5, 2006, it registered a powerful X9 on the space weather scale.  This storm from the sun disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes.

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- The sun storm was so powerful it actually damaged the solar X-ray imager instrument on the GOES 13 satellite that snapped its picture.

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-  A  massive solar flare from the sun could lead to a dazzling northern lights display for parts of the northern United States this Halloween year 2021.   The sun storm, a powerful X1-class solar flare, erupted from the sun on Thursday, October 28, 2021 and sent a vast cloud of charged particles toward Earth that should arrive over Halloween weekend.

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-   Those particles will slam into the Earth's atmosphere to amplify the regular northern lights caused by the sun's solar wind.  The solar flare, the second most powerful eruption from the sun this year, sparked a strong geomagnetic storm that should supercharge the northern lights, and could make them visible from as far south as New York, Idaho, Illinois, Oregon, Maryland and Nevada.

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-  The solar flare was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection , a huge eruption of radiation, that spewed solar particles away from the sun at a mind-boggling 2.5 million miles per hour..  

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-  This solar flare erupted from an active sunspot called “AR2887” that is currently located in the center of the sun as it makes its way across the star's face, as seen from Earth. Another active sunspot, “AR2891“, rotated into view this week for its own two-week trip across the sun's face. It fired off a moderate, M-class solar flare on Sunday (October 24, 2021).

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-  X-class solar flares are the strongest type of sun eruptions. When they're aimed directly at Earth, the most powerful ones can endanger astronauts in space, interfere with satellite communications signals and affect power grids on Earth.

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-   Thursday's solar flare caused a temporary radio blackout for high frequencies, as well as a GPS blackout for systems that use low-frequency signals.

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-   The sun is currently in the beginning phase of its latest 11-year solar cycle, “solar cycle 25“, in which its activity rises and falls over time. Currently its activity is relatively low.  There is more to come.10/30/21

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-  October 30, 2021     SUN  FLARES  -  this Halloween, 2021          3320                                                                                                                                                   

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

-----  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, October 30, 2021  ---------------------------






3319 - DARK ENERGY - what is causing it?

  -  3319   -  DARK  ENERGY  -  what is causing it?  What is causing the accelerating expansion of the universe?  It requires energy to accelerate anything.   Let’s call it “dark energy”.   It has never been directly observed or measured. Instead, scientists can only make inferences about it from its effects on the space and matter that we can see.


---------------------  3319  -  DARK  ENERGY  -  what is causing it?  

-   Here on Earth researchers claim that hints of dark energy were detected at the “Gran Sasso National Laboratory” in Italy during an experiment designed to detect dark matter.

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-  Looking at data from the “XENON1T“, an experiment designed to detect rare interactions between hypothetical dark matter particles and components of the noble gas xenon held in a special detector.

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-    Statistically, there is a 5 percent chance the detection was an anomaly. The detection of the 2012 discovery Higgs Boson, by comparison, was much more certain, there was only a chance in about 3.5 million that detection was anomalous.

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-  Dark energy repels instead of attracts, meaning it’s the energy that is expanding the universe.   Physicists have known the universe is expanding for years, but in the late 1990s, observations made it clear that the universe was not just growing larger but doing so at an “accelerating rate“.   A constant velocity needs no energy expended, but to accelerate something an additional energy is required.  That is physics as we know it.

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-  Why it's a strange result is that since normal gravity is attractive, we would expect all the galaxies to be pulling on each other and slowing down the expansion of the universe.  Its accelerating expansion was a giant surprise.  And one we can not explain.

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-  All the known stuff should be pulling in on the universe not pushing outward. So astrophysicists dreamed up new stuff to explain the strange behavior: “dark energy“. Filling all of space, dark energy’s negative pressure is inflating the cosmos like a balloon.

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-  It’s believed to be about 68 percent of the mass of the universe, though the ratio grows with the expansion of the universe. Dark energy seems to interact very little with gravity.  Remember mass and energy are two different forms of the same thing, E  =  mc^2.

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-  Around 27 percent of the mass is dark matter, which is unrelated to dark energy. Dark matter may be objects we can’t easily detect or matter made out of exotic particles. Normal matter consisting of the remaining 5 percent. Both dark matter and normal matter interact with gravity.

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-    Finding out the nature of dark energy is essential for finding the fate of our universe, but here are a few theories on what might happen.  In June, 2020, a XENON team reported their experiment had recorded an excessive number of particle interactions with electrons in the detector compared with their predictions.

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-   The  XENON1T experiment may have incidentally detected dark energy “chameleon” particles, a hypothetical form of dark energy that could be created in the Sun and, under the conditions of the XENON1T experiment, interact with normal matter in much the same way as solar axions, but without contradicting observations of other stars.

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-  “Chameleon theories” are just one of many frameworks for understanding dark energy.  Scientists are exploring the prospects for direct detection of dark energy by current and upcoming terrestrial dark matter direct detection experiments. 

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-  If dark energy is driven by a new light degree of freedom coupled to matter and photons then dark energy quanta are predicted to be produced in the Sun. These quanta free-stream toward Earth where they can interact with Standard Model particles in the detection chambers of direct detection experiments, presenting the possibility that these experiments could be used to test dark energy. 

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-  Screening mechanisms, which suppress fifth forces associated with new light particles, and are a necessary feature of many dark energy models, prevent production processes from occurring in the core of the Sun, and similarly, in the cores of red giant, horizontal branch, and white dwarf stars.

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-   Instead, the coupling of dark energy to photons leads to production in the strong magnetic field of the “solar tachocline” via a mechanism analogous to the “Primakoff process“.

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-  Solar tachocline is the transition region of stars of more than 0.3 solar masses, between the radiative interior and the differentially rotating outer convective zone. 

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-  This difference causes the region to have a very large shear as the rotation rate changes very rapidly. The convective exterior rotates as a normal fluid with differential rotation with the poles rotating slowly and the equator rotating quickly. 

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-  The radiative interior exhibits solid-body rotation, possibly due to a fossil field. The rotation rate through the interior is roughly equal to the rotation rate at mid-latitudes, in-between the rate at the slow poles and the fast equator.

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-   Recent results from helioseismology indicate that the tachocline is located at a radius of at most 0.70 times the solar radius (measured from the core, with the surface  at 1 solar radius), with a thickness of 0.04 times the solar radius. This would mean the area has a very large shear profile that is one way that large scale magnetic fields can be formed.

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-  The geometry and width of the tachocline are thought to play an important role in models of the stellar dynamos by winding up the weaker poloidal field to create a much stronger toroidal field. 

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-  Recent radio observations of cooler stars and brown dwarfs, which do not have a radiative core and only have a convective zone, demonstrate that they maintain large-scale, solar-strength magnetic fields and display solar-like activity despite the absence of tachoclines. This suggests that the convective zone alone may be responsible for the function of the solar dynamo.

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-  The Primakoff effect, named after Henry Primakoff, is the resonant production of neutral pseudoscalar mesons by high-energy photons interacting with an atomic nucleus. It can be viewed as the reverse process of the decay of the meson into two photons and has been used for the measurement of the decay width of neutral mesons.

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-  It could also take place in stars and be a production mechanism of certain hypothetical particles, such as the axion.  The Primakoff effect is the conversion of axions into photons in the presence of very strong electromagnetic field.

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-  The  XENON dark matter experiment is installed underground at the Laboratory Nazionali del Gran Sasso of INFN, Italy. A 62 kilogram liquid xenon target is operated as a dual phase (liquid/gas) time projection chamber to search for interactions of dark matter particles.

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-  In the XENON experiment any particle interaction in the liquid xenon  yields two signals: a prompt flash of light, and a delayed charge signal. Together, these two signals give away the energy and position of the interaction as well as the type of the interacting particle. 

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-  An interaction in the target generates scintillation light which is recorded as a prompt signal  by two arrays of photomultiplier tubes at the top and bottom of the chamber. In addition, each interaction liberates electrons, which are drifted by an electric field to the liquid-gas interface with a speed of about 2 mm/μs.  (2 millimeters per microsecond)

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-   There, a strong electric field extracts the electrons and generates proportional scintillation which is recorded by the same photomultiplier arrays as a delayed signal. 

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-  The time difference between these two signals gives the depth of the interaction in the time-projection chamber with a resolution of a few millimeters. The hit pattern of the  signal on the top array allows to reconstruct the horizontal position of the interaction vertex also with a resolution of a few mm.

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-   This experiment is able to precisely localize events in all three coordinates. This enables the fiducialization of the target, yielding a dramatic reduction of external radioactive backgrounds due to the self-shielding capability of liquid xenon.

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-  The ratio of the two signals allows to discriminate electronic recoils, which are the dominant background, from nuclear recoils, which are expected from Dark Matter interactions. 

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-  The more energy a particle deposits in the detector, the brighter both signals are, hence allowing us to reconstruct the particle’s deposited energy as well.

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-   This allows for detectable signals on Earth while evading the strong constraints that would typically result from stellar probes of new light particles.

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-  By eexamining whether the electron recoil excess recently reported by the XENON1T collaboration can be explained by chameleon-screened dark energy, and finding that such a model is preferred over the background-only hypothesis at the 2.0 sigma level, in a large range of parameter space not excluded by stellar probes. 

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-  This raises the tantalizing possibility that XENON1T may have achieved the first direct detection of dark energy.   Possibility, but it’s still dark.

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-  October 29,  2021      DARK  ENERGY  -  what is causing it?       3319                                                                                                                                                   

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

-----  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, October 30, 2021  ---------------------------






3318 - SUN - Milankovitch cycles in orbits

  -  3318  -  SUN  -  Milankovitch cycles in orbits?  Cycles play key roles in Earth’s short-term weather and long-term climate. A century ago, Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovitch hypothesized the long-term, collective effects of changes in Earth’s position relative to the Sun are a strong driver of Earth’s long-term climate, and are responsible for triggering the beginning and end of glaciation periods, the Ice Ages.


---------------------  3318  -  SUN  -  Milankovitch cycles in orbits

-  Our lives literally revolve around sun cycles  Our sun cycles are a series of events that are repeated regularly in the same order. But there are ‘hundreds’ of different types of cycles in our world and in the universe. 

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-  Some are natural, such as the change of the seasons, annual animal migrations or the circadian rhythms that govern our sleep patterns. Others are human-produced, like growing and harvesting crops, musical rhythms or economic cycles.

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-   Milankovitch examined how variations in three types of Earth orbital movements affect how much solar radiation (known as insolation) reaches the top of Earth’s atmosphere as well as where the insolation reaches.

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-   These cyclical orbital movements, which became known as the Milankovitch cycles, cause variations of up to 25 percent in the amount of incoming insolation at Earth’s mid-latitudes, the areas of our planet located between about 30 and 60 degrees north and south of the equator.

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-----------------------  The Milankovitch cycles include:

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-----------------------  The shape of Earth’s orbit, known as “eccentricity“;

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-----------------------  The angle Earth’s axis is tilted with respect to Earth’s orbital plane, known as “obliquity”

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-----------------------  The direction Earth’s axis of rotation is pointed, known as “precession“.

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----------------------  Eccentricity – Earth’s annual pilgrimage around the Sun isn’t perfectly circular, but it’s pretty close. Over time, the pull of gravity from our solar system’s two largest gas giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, causes the shape of Earth’s orbit to vary from nearly circular to slightly elliptical. Eccentricity measures how much the shape of Earth’s orbit departs from a perfect circle. These variations affect the distance between Earth and the Sun.

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-  Eccentricity is the reason why our seasons are slightly different lengths, with summers in the Northern Hemisphere currently about 4.5 days longer than winters, and springs about three days longer than autumns. As eccentricity decreases, the length of our seasons gradually evens out.

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-  The difference in the distance between Earth’s closest approach to the Sun (known as perihelion), which occurs on or about January 3 each year, and its farthest departure from the Sun (known as aphelion) on or about July 4, is currently about 5.1 million kilometers (about 3.2 million miles), a variation of 3.4 percent. That means each January, about 6.8 percent more incoming solar radiation reaches Earth than it does each July.

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- When Earth’s orbit is at its most elliptic, about 23 percent more incoming solar radiation reaches Earth at our planet’s closest approach to the Sun each year than does at its farthest departure from the Sun. Currently, Earth’s eccentricity is near its least elliptic (most circular) and is very slowly decreasing, in a cycle that spans about 100,000 years.

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- The total change in global annual insolation due to the eccentricity cycle is very small. Because variations in Earth’s eccentricity are fairly small, they’re a relatively minor factor in annual seasonal climate variations.

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-----------------------  Obliquity – The angle Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted as it travels around the Sun is known as obliquity. Obliquity is why Earth has seasons. Over the last million years, it has varied between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees perpendicular to Earth’s orbital plane.

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-   The greater Earth’s axial tilt angle, the more extreme our seasons are, as each hemisphere receives more solar radiation during its summer, when the hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun, and less during winter, when it is tilted away. 

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-  Larger tilt angles favor periods of deglaciation, the melting and retreat of glaciers and ice sheets. These effects aren’t uniform globally,  higher latitudes receive a larger change in total solar radiation than areas closer to the equator.

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-  Earth’s axis is currently tilted 23.4 degrees, or about half way between its extremes, and this angle is very slowly decreasing in a cycle that spans about 41,000 years. It was last at its maximum tilt about 10,700 years ago and will reach its minimum tilt about 9,800 years from now. 

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-  As obliquity decreases, it gradually helps make our seasons milder, resulting in increasingly warmer winters, and cooler summers that gradually, over time, allow snow and ice at high latitudes to build up into large ice sheets. As ice cover increases, it reflects more of the Sun’s energy back into space, promoting even further cooling.

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-----------------------  Precession – As Earth rotates, it wobbles slightly upon its axis, like a slightly off-center spinning toy top. This wobble is due to tidal forces caused by the gravitational influences of the Sun and Moon that cause Earth to bulge at the equator, affecting its rotation. The trend in the direction of this wobble relative to the fixed positions of stars is known as axial precession. The cycle of axial precession spans about 25,771.5 years.

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-  Axial precession makes seasonal contrasts more extreme in one hemisphere and less extreme in the other. Currently perihelion occurs during winter in the Northern Hemisphere and in summer in the Southern Hemisphere. 

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-  This makes Southern Hemisphere summers hotter and moderates Northern Hemisphere seasonal variations. But in about 13,000 years, axial precession will cause these conditions to flip, with the Northern Hemisphere seeing more extremes in solar radiation and the Southern Hemisphere experiencing more moderate seasonal variations.

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-  Axial precession also gradually changes the timing of the seasons, causing them to begin earlier over time, and gradually changes which star Earth’s axis points to at the North Pole (the North Star). Today Earth’s North Stars are Polaris and Polaris Australis, but a couple of thousand years ago, they were Kochab and Pherkad.

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----------------   Apsidal precession. Not only does Earth’s axis wobble, but Earth’s entire orbital ellipse also wobbles irregularly, primarily due to its interactions with Jupiter and Saturn. The cycle of apsidal precession spans about 112,000 years. Apsidal precession changes the orientation of Earth’s orbit relative to the elliptical plane.

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-  The combined effects of axial and apsidal precession result in an overall precession cycle spanning about 23,000 years on average.

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-  The small changes set in motion by Milankovitch cycles operate separately and together to influence Earth’s climate over very long time spans, leading to larger changes in our climate over tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. 

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-  Milankovitch combined the cycles to create a comprehensive mathematical model for calculating differences in solar radiation at various Earth latitudes along with corresponding surface temperatures. The model is a climate time machine: it can be run backward and forward to examine past and future climate conditions.

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-  Milankovitch assumed changes in radiation at some latitudes and in some seasons are more important than others to the growth and retreat of ice sheets. In addition, it was his belief that obliquity was the most important of the three cycles for climate, because it affects the amount of insolation in Earth’s northern high-latitude regions during summer The relative role of precession versus obliquity is still a matter of scientific study.

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-  He calculated that Ice Ages occur approximately every 41,000 years. Subsequent research confirms that they did occur at 41,000-year intervals between one and three million years ago. But about 800,000 years ago, the cycle of Ice Ages lengthened to 100,000 years, matching Earth’s eccentricity cycle. While various theories have been proposed to explain this transition, scientists do not yet have a clear answer.

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-  Milankovitch’s work was supported by other researchers of his time, and he authored numerous publications on his hypothesis. But it wasn’t until about 10 years after his death in 1958 that the global science community began to take serious notice of his theory.

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-   In 1976, a study using deep-sea sediment cores found that Milankovitch cycles correspond with periods of major climate change over the past 450,000 years, with Ice Ages occurring when Earth was undergoing different stages of orbital variation.

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-  Several other projects and studies have also upheld the validity of Milankovitch’s work, including research using data from ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica that has provided strong evidence of Milankovitch cycles going back many hundreds of thousands of years. 

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-  Scientific research to better understand the mechanisms that cause changes in Earth’s rotation and how specifically Milankovitch cycles combine to affect climate is ongoing. But the theory that they drive the timing of glacial-interglacial cycles is well accepted.

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-  A look back to understand how we arrived at the present time after millions of years. New indications suggest we owe that brain and other biological evolutions to the slow millenarian variations in the movement of celestial bodies, the Milankovitch cycles.

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-  The possible influence of the great astronomical cycles in the Earth’s climate, and therefore in the evolution of living beings, was already proposed back in the 19th century by scientists such as the Frenchman Joseph Adhémar or the Scot James Croll. 

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-  Both men explained glaciations as being due to climatic changes caused by cyclic variations in the Earth’s orbit. However, their works were largely ignored until a Serbian engineer with a deeply mathematical mind breathed new life into them at the beginning of the 20th century.

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-  Milutin Milankovitch (28 May 1879 – 12 December 1958) began his career calculating and designing structures, but when in 1909 he accepted a chair of applied mathematics at the University of Belgrade, he saw the opportunity to devote himself to unraveling the mathematics that govern the world. 

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-  His chosen field was the climate, a field in which, at that time, hardly any basic physics and elementary calculus was being applied. Without anything like a computer or even a calculator, Milankovitch began to develop complex mathematical models that related the orbital variation of the Earth to the distribution and seasonality of solar irradiation, and that were able to predict the temperature at a specific latitude, either today or half a million years ago.

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-  The Milankovitch model is based on three parameters that vary over time due to gravitational interactions between objects in the Solar System: the eccentricity of the orbit, obliquity, and precession. The consequence of these Milankovitch cycles is that the entire terrestrial climate varies over millennia.

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-   Now, we are in a decreasing eccentricity, with a medium obliquity, and the precession means that the northern hemisphere is currently tilted towards the Sun (summer boreal) when the Earth is at its maximum distance (aphelion), and the opposite six months later, which softens both the summer and winter temperatures in the northern latitudes.

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-  Since the 1970s various studies have supported the Serbian’s model and predictions, showing that both the geological data of ancient strata and the fossil record of certain organisms are compatible with fluctuations in climate that can explain the periodicity of the glaciations every 100,000 years. A recent study has confirmed the evidence of climatic cycles in rock sediments up to 215 million years ago, at the dawn of the dinosaur era.

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-  The climatic cycles could have imposed alternating periods of floods and droughts which led to the appearance of Homo erectus.   Recent studies have proposed that climatic cycles imposed alternating periods of floods and droughts in East Africa, which led, 1.9 million years ago, to the appearance of Homo erectus, the first human with a large brain.

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-   These cycles also drove the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa, a journey that takes us across space and time to the rhythm of the Milankovitch cycles.  Who knew?

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-  October 29, 2021    SUN  -  Milankovitch cycles in orbits?             3318                                                                                                                                                   

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

-----  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, October 30, 2021  ---------------------------






Thursday, October 28, 2021

3316 - EARTH - extinctions of species?

  -  3316   -  EARTH  -   extinctions of species?  The extinctions on Earth snuffed out more than half of the species in five mammal groups.  Fossils of the key groups used to unveil the “Eocene-Oligocene Extinction” in Africa with primates, the “carnivorous hyaenodont“, and  rodents. 


---------------------  3316  -  EARTH  -   extinctions of species?   

-  Fossils from the “Fayum Depression” in Egypt are stored at the Duke Lemur Center's Division of Fossil Primates. Here is what we learn from bones:

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-  About 34 million years ago, a "lost extinction" in Africa wiped out the majority of primates, rodents and carnivores that preyed on the two groups. Species vanished in a slow-motion wave that spanned millions of years and yet went undetected by scientists  until now.

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-  This previously unseen extinction bridges two geologic epochs: the Eocene (55.8 million to 33.9 million years ago) and the Oligocene (33.9 million to 23 million years ago). 

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-  When the Eocene's greenhouse climate began shifting toward the “icehouse temperatures” that marked the Oligocene, sea levels dropped, the Antarctic ice sheet grew, and approximately two-thirds of all animal species in Europe and Asia went extinct. 

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-  Researchers thought that life in Africa had escaped this fate, and that animals there were shielded from the worst impacts of a cooling climate by their nearness to the equator. 

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-  A spotty African fossil record from that period offered scientists few clues about what really happened to the continent's animal life as Earth cooled; a new look at animal lineages recently showed that climate change at the Eocene's end took a devastating toll on African mammal life, too.

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-  Using hundreds of fossils spanning tens of millions of years from the middle of the Eocene into the Oligocene scientists reconstructed evolutionary timelines in family trees across five African mammal groups.

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-   The researchers focused their attention on two groups of primates, two rodent groups and one group of extinct carnivores known as “hyaenadonts” ("hyena teeth") that preyed upon rodents and primates. 

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-  In Africa, we just don't have the density of the fossil record that you see on other landmasses.


-  Dental CT scans show that mammal teeth became less diverse during the early Oligocene extinction events. 

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-  The fossils had to track species diversity and loss over time in those animal groups.  Patterns began to emerge, showing that around 34 million years ago, a cooling Earth lopped off entire branches of those mammals' family trees. 

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-  Species diversity didn't drop abruptly, as is often the case in global mass extinction events. Rather, the decline happened over millions of years, until 63% of the species in those mammal groups had disappeared. 

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-  Over the course of 4 million years, this gradual slow loss of all of the lineages that had been present in the late Eocene.  The biggest trough of that lineage diversity curve really bottoms out at 30 million years ago, and then starts to pick back up around 28 million years ago. 

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-  When those groups began to diversify again, many of the new species had evolved new traits that weren't present in species that came before the extinctions, according to the study.  

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-  Rodent and primate species that emerged during the Oligocene had different tooth shapes than their extinct cousins, hinting that these animals were adapted to survive in different ecosystems than their predecessors experienced. 

-  Extinction is interesting in that it kills things, but it also opens up new ecological opportunities for the lineages that survive into this new world. 

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-  Was it global cooling that extinguished those African mammals? While that was probably a factor, other evidence from Africa and the Arabian peninsula from around 31 million years ago suggests that unusually active volcanoes may have posed another insurmountable challenge to their survival.

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-  All this volcanic activity that would ultimately lead to the rising and development of the Ethiopian highlands, it started around 31 million years ago with some really dramatic volcanic super-eruptions. 

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-   That part of eastern Africa was continually being altered by these volcanic events. If not necessarily causing extinctions, those constant changes to the environment may have been at least delaying diversification in some of these lineages.

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-  October 25, 2021       EARTH  -   extinctions of species?              3310                                                                                                                                                   

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

-----  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”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Thursday, October 28, 2021  ---------------------------






3317 - EARTH’S - magnetic bubble?

  -  3317  -  EARTH’S  -  magnetic bubble?  A tiny line in a light spectrum reveals a distant part of the Universe that we may not be able to “see” but can deduce through decades of research, and our imagination, transforming data into accretion disks, giant stars, plasma flying at near light-speeds, powerful X-Rays, and spinning stellar relics. 


---------------------  3317  -  EARTH’S  -  magnetic bubble?

-  Our little corner of the universe, our solar system, is nestled inside the Milky Way galaxy with more than 100 billion other stars.  We're protected from radiation by the heliosphere, which itself is created by another source of radiation, the Sun. 

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-  The Sun constantly spews charged particles, called the “solar wind“, from its surface. The solar wind spans out to about four times the distance of Neptune, carrying with it the magnetic field from the Sun.

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-  Magnetic fields tend to push up against each other, but not mix.  Inside the bubble of the heliosphere are mostly particles and magnetic fields from the Sun. Outside this bubble are those from the galaxy.

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-   "Heliosphere" is the combination of two words: "Helios," the Greek word for the Sun, and "sphere," a broad region of influence.

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-  The heliosphere was discovered in the late 1950s, and many questions about it remain. As scientists study the heliosphere, they learn more about how it reduces astronauts' and spacecrafts' exposure to radiation and more generally, how stars can influence their nearby planets.

-

-  Some radiation surrounds us every day. When we sunbathe, we're basking in radiation from the Sun. We use radiation to warm leftovers in our kitchen microwaves and rely on it for medical imaging.

-

-  Space radiation, however, is more similar to the radiation released by radioactive elements like uranium. The space radiation that comes at us from other stars is called galactic cosmic radiation (GCR). 

-

-  Active areas in the galaxy - like supernovae, black holes, and neutron stars - can strip the electrons from atoms and accelerate the nuclei to almost the speed of light, producing galactic cosmic radiation .

-

-  The heliosphere changes in size throughout the “solar cycle“.  On Earth, we have three layers  of protection from space radiation. The first is the heliosphere, which helps block cosmic radiation from reaching the major planets in the solar system. 

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-   Earth's magnetic field produces a shield called the magnetosphere, which keeps cosmic radiation out away from Earth and low-orbiting satellites like the International Space Station.  Then the gases of Earth's atmosphere absorb radiation.

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-  When astronauts head to the Moon or to Mars, they won't have the same protection we have on Earth. They'll only have the protection of the heliosphere, which fluctuates in size throughout the Sun's 11-year cycle.

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-  In each solar cycle, the Sun goes through periods of intense activity and powerful solar winds, and quieter periods. Like a balloon, when the wind calms down, the heliosphere deflates. When it picks up, the heliosphere expands.

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-   The effect the heliosphere has on cosmic rays allows for human exploration missions with longer duration.   The challenge for us is to better understand the interaction of cosmic rays with the heliosphere and its boundaries.

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-  Looking at the heliosphere layers from inside outward:

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--------------------   Termination shock: All of the major planets in our solar system are located in the heliosphere's innermost layer. Here, the solar wind emanates out from the Sun at full speed, about a million miles per hour, for billions of miles, unaffected by the pressure from the galaxy. The outer boundary of this core layer is called the termination shock.


--------------------   Heliosheath: Beyond the termination shock is the heliosheath. Here, the solar wind moves more slowly and deflects as it faces the pressure of the interstellar medium outside.


--------------------   Heliopause: The heliopause marks the sharp, final plasma boundary between the Sun and the rest of the galaxy. Here, the magnetic fields of the solar and interstellar winds push up against each other, and the inside and outside pressures are in balance.


--------------------   Outer Heliosheath: The region just beyond the heliopause, which is still influenced by the presence of the heliosphere, is called the outer heliosheath.

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-  Many NASA missions study the Sun and the innermost parts of the heliosphere. But only two human-made objects have crossed the boundary of the solar system and entered interstellar space.

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-  In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Each spacecraft is equipped with tools to measure the magnetic fields and the particles it is directly passing through. After swinging past the outer planets on a grand tour, they exited the heliopause in 2012 and 2018 respectively and are currently in the outer heliosheath. They discovered that cosmic rays are about three times more intense outside the heliopause than deep inside the heliosphere.

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-  The Voyagers work with the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) to study the heliosphere. IBEX is a 176-pound, suitcase-sized satellite launched by NASA in 2008. Since then, IBEX has orbited Earth, equipped with telescopes observing the outer boundary of the heliosphere. 

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-  IBEX captures and analyzes a class of particle called energetic neutral atoms, or ENAs, that cross its path. ENAs form where the interstellar medium and the solar wind meet. Some ENAs stream back toward the center of the solar system - and IBEX.  By collecting a lot of those individual atoms, science is able to make this inside out image of our heliosphere.

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-  In 2025, NASA will launch the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP). IMAP's ENA cameras are higher resolution and more sensitive than IBEX's.

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-  In 2009, IBEX returned a finding so shocking that researchers initially wondered if the instrument may have malfunctioned. That discovery became known as the IBEX Ribbon - a band across the sky where ENA emissions are two or three times brighter than the rest of the sky.

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-   Our Sun is a star like billions of other stars in the universe. Some of those stars also have astrospheres, like the heliosphere, but this is the only astrosphere we are actually inside of and can study closely.

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-  A magnetic tunnel surrounds the Earth.  What if our eyes could see radio waves?  You look up into the sky and see a tunnel of rope-like filaments made of radio waves. The structure would be about 1,000 light-years long and would be about 350 light-years away.

This tunnel explains two of the brightest radio features in the sky.

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-  Astronomers discovered the North Polar Spur and the Fan Region in the 1960s when radio astronomy was getting going. The North Polar Spur is a massive ridge of hot gas that rises above the plane of the Milky Way. It emits x-rays and radio waves.

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-   The Fan Region is one of the most dominant polarized radio features in the sky.  If we were to look up in the sky, we would see this tunnel-like structure in just about every direction we looked, if we had eyes that could see radio light.”

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-  The feature is made up of 1,000 light-years long “ropes,” which themselves are made up of charged particles and a magnetic field. 

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-  Magnetic fields don’t exist in isolation.  They all must connect to each other. So a next step is to better understand how this local magnetic field connects both to the larger-scale Galactic magnetic field and also to the smaller scale magnetic fields of our Sun and Earth.

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-  The strongest magnetic field ever recorded in the Universe was discovered at the surface of a neutron star called “GRO J1008-57” with a magnetic field strength of approximately 1 billion Tesla. For comparison, the Earth’s magnetic field clocks in at about 1/20,000 of a Tesla.  This is tens of trillions of times weaker than you’d experience on this neutron star.

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-  Neutron stars are the “dead cores” of once massive stars which have ended their lives as supernova. These stars exhausted their supply of hydrogen fuel in their core and a power balance between the internal energy of the star surging outward, and the star’s own massive gravity crushing inward, is cataclysmically unbalanced, gravity wins. 

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-  The star collapses in on itself. The outer layers fall onto the core crushing it into the densest object we know of in the Universe, a neutron star. Even atoms are crushed. Negatively charged electrons are forced into the atomic nuclei meeting their positive proton counterparts creating more neutrons. 

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-  When the core can be crushed no further, the outer remaining material of the star rebounds back into space in a massive explosion, a supernova. The resulting neutron star, made of the crushed stellar core, is so dense that a single sugar-cube-sized sampling would weigh billions of tons, as much as a mountain.

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-  Neutron stars are typically about 20 kilometers in diameter and can still be a million degrees Kelvin at the surface.

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-  GRO J1008-57 is a spinning neutron star or “pulsar.” Pulsars were first discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell through observations of a regular radio “pulse” of 1.33 seconds.  The pulses were determined not to be of human origin so the object was designated, though facetiously, LGM1 (Little Green Men 1).

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-   A spinning neutron star projects a beam of energy along its magnetic poles that sweeps across space as the star rotates, like the beams from a turning lighthouse. Depending on the orientation of the star, those beams can sweep along Earth’s field of view resulting in a “pulse” of energy with each of the star’s rotations. 

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-  But why do neutron stars have incredibly powerful magnetic fields? Seems counterintuitive given that they are made of neutrally charged particles (where neutron gets its name). 

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-   If you were to cut away a neutron star, it is formed of several layers. A cloud of remaining electrons near the surface, further down traces of charged “impurities” of various atomic nuclei remaining after the formation of the neutron star, a crust of neutrons, and a core of a theorized frictionless neutron fluid further mixed with impurities. 

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-  The combination of layers makes the star incredibly conductive. Spin a very conductive object and you create a churning flow of charged particles which generates a powerful magnetic field.

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-   Our planet’s own magnetic field is itself created by the rotation of the Earth’s nickel-iron core.

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-   Neutron star rotations are astonishingly fast. Like a figure skater retracting their arms to spin more quickly, the “angular momentum” of the original giant star, millions of kilometers in radius, is preserved and transferred to an ever faster spinning compact object only 10 km wide.  Imagine a spinning figure skater with arms millions of kilometers long pulling them all the way to the center of their body. 

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-  The first neutron star discovered had a rotation period of 1.33 seconds. GRO J1008-57 is 93.3 seconds . Some rotate in milliseconds. So, these “dead” stars are the size of a city, denser than any material in the universe, are a million degrees, and spin at a good fraction of the speed of light. 

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-   How can we measure the strength of a pulsar’s magnetic energy? A special technique can be used with a specific class of pulsars which GRO J1008-57 belongs to called “accretion powered X-Ray pulsars“.

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-    GRO J1008-57, about 20,000 light years from Earth, is actually in a binary gravitational relationship with a living class B companion star. B’s are hefty stars, a dozen or so times the mass of our Sun and thousands of times brighter. 

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-  GRO J1008-57’s super density creates a powerful gravitational pull 100 billion times more powerful than Earth’s which rips stellar material off its companion. That material falls toward the neutron star. It becomes entangled in the neutron star’s magnetic field flowing along the “lines” of that field to the north and south magnetic poles where it accumulates or accretes on the surface.

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-  The stellar material slams into the surface at half the speed of light releasing tremendous X-Ray energy.  These X-Rays, before radiating away from the neutron star, pass through the magnetic field at the neutron star’s surface. 

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-  The magnetic field scatters some of the X-Rays leaving a gap or “absorption line” in the spectrum of the X-Rays. It’s like a fingerprint left by the magnetic field on the X-Ray energy that we can see with our telescopes. Where that absorption line appears along the X-Ray spectrum directly relates to the strength of the magnetic field at the neutron star’s surface where the stellar material is falling. The line is known as a “Cyclotron Resonance Scattering Feature“.

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-  In 2017, the brightest X-Ray outburst ever observed from GRO J1008-57 was recorded by the Chinese Insight-HXMT satellite.  Scientists analyzed the Cyclotron abortion lines in the X-Ray spectrum received. 

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-  They had discovered lines in the spectrum corresponding to a 1-billion Tesla magnetic field. That is the most powerful ever recorded in the Universe. Powerful enough to literally pull atoms apart. 

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-  So, if it doesn’t vaporize you with its immense heat, or obliterating gravity, your atomic structure would basically dissolve in the magnetic forces.

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-  A tiny line reveals a distant part of the Universe that we may not be able to “see” but can deduce through decades of research, and our imagination, transforming data into accretion disks, giant stars, plasma flying at near light-speeds, powerful X-Rays, and spinning stellar relics. SCIENCE!! What can it tell you?

-

-  October 27, 2021       EARTH’S  -  magnetic bubble?                     3310                                                                                                                                                   

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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”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Thursday, October 28, 2021  ---------------------------






3315 - BLACKHOLES - how gravity creates them?

  -  3315   -  BLACKHOLES  -  how gravity creates them?  We do not understand what happens inside a Black Hole because as the mass concentrates into a Singularity all the Theories of Relativity break down.  Gravity can not be calculated at the quantum level. We need a new theory that combines relativity and quantum mechanics for the force of gravity before our math can deal further.

-


---------------------  3315  -   BLACKHOLES  -  how gravity creates them?

-  Blackholes are truly black and there are only two ways to describe them or find them.  One description is their mass and the other is their rotation.  That’s it.  No other light or information comes out of a Blackhole.

-

-   (Steven Hawking’s radiation is contrary to this idea of no information escaping.  But that is a different Review.  This one is hard enough to understand.)

-

-  A star exists because nuclear fusion creates heat which creates outward pressure which counterbalances the inward force of gravity.  When a star burns all of its fuel it can no longer produce heat, and therefore outward pressure, so the inward force of gravity wins the battle and collapses the star into a “neutron star” or a “singularity“  which is a blackhole.. 

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-   If the star is large enough and the gravity strong enough the star compresses into a Singularity at the center of a Blackhole.

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-  A Blackhole is created because the gravity is so strong no energy can escape.  No light, no electromagnetic radiation, no information of any kind can escape the blackhole once it has formed.

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-  Normally things can escape a mass by obtaining an “escape velocity” fast enough to overcome the pull of gravity.  The escape velocity for some mass leaving Earth is 25,000 miles per hour.  This applies to any mass escaping Earth’s gravity, from a spaceship, to a baseball, to a gas molecule.  The equation that describes this escape velocity is:


---------------------  Escape velocity^2  =  2 * G * Mass Earth / Radius         

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---------------------   Radius of the Earth = 6.378*10^6 meters = 3,963 miles

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---------------------  Velocity = 11,200 meters/second  =  25,054 miles per hour


-  The Sun is 300,000 times more massive than the Earth, so the escape velocity for the Sun is much faster, 1,500,000 miles per hour.

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----------------------  The radius of the Sun is 6.9599*10^8 meters  =  432,470 miles

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-----------------------  Velocity = 6.67*10^5 meters / second  =  1.5*10^6 miles per hour

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-  A star 8 times more massive than the Sun would collapse into a blackhole and have an escape velocity greater than 671,100,000 miles per hour.  This is faster than the speed of light.  Nothing can exceed the speed of light, so this escape velocity can never be attained, so nothing can escape, so you have a Blackhole.

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-  The other interesting part of this equation is that escape velocity depends on the radius.  If you compressed the mass of the Earth into a sphere 3/4th inch in diameter it would become a Blackolhe.  All the Earth’s mass would shrink into a Singularity in the center of this Blackole.

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---------------------   “Schwarzchild Radius” of the Earth if it becomes a Blackhole 

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---------------------   Set the escape velocity  =  the velocity of light

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---------------------   C^2  =  2 * G * Mass Earth / radius

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---------------------   c^2 is the velocity of light^2 = 9 * 10^16 meters^2/seconds^2

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---------------------   G = the Gravitational Constant = 6.67 * 10^-11 meters^3/Kg * sec^2

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---------------------   Mass of the Earth = 5.97*10^24 kilograms

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---------------------   Substitute into the equation and solve for radius:

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---------------------   Radius = 8.85 * 10^-3 meters

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---------------------   Radius  =  0.348 inches

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-  If all the mass of the Sun were compressed to a radius of 2 miles it too would become a Blackhole. 

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--------------------  Schwarzchild Radius of the Sun if it becomes a Blackhole 

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--------------------  Mass of the Sun = 1.9891*10^30 kilograms.

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--------------------  Substitute into the equation above and solve for radius:

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--------------------  Radius = 2,950 meters  =  1.83 miles

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-  To become a blackhole a star must have an escape velocity greater than 300,000 kilometers/second, 671,100,000 miles per hour.

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-  The radius of the Black Hole is called the “Event Horizon“.  It is the spherical surface at a point where gravity overcomes all other forces.  It is the line where everything turns black and nothing escapes.  

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-  There is no material at this surface, no material exists at the Event Horizon.  Gravity continues to compress all material into a single point at the center, called the “Singularity“.  The Singularity is where all the mass of the Blackhole is concentrated.  It is just a theory.  We don’t really know what happens inside a blackhole?

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-  One misconception about Blackholes is that these become giant vacuum cleaners sucking in everything that is around them.  This is not the case.  The only force is gravity created by the mass in the Singularity. 

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-   If we did compress our Sun into a diameter of 4 miles and it became a Blackhole Singularity, all the planets in the Solar System would not notice a difference.  All the orbits about the Blackhole would be exactly the same as they are with today‘s Sun.  

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-  However, they would notice it getting colder as none of the Sun’s radiation would be warming the Solar System any more.  Light and heat would disappear when the Sun shrunk into a Blackhole.  The equation for gravity remains the same outside the Event Horizon of a Blackhole.

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----------------------    The force of gravity  =  G * mass1 * mass2 / radius^2

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-  There is a Black Hole in the center of every galaxy.  At the center of our Milky Way the Black Hole is 4,000,000 times the mass of our Sun, 4*10^6 Solar Mass.  Our Milky Way Black Hole is 26,000 lightyears away and rotating once very 30 minutes.

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-  Every massive star, >30 Solar Mass, lives for only 4,000,000 years, runs out of fuel, and in one second collapses into a Blackhole.  There are millions of these Blackholes throughout our Milky Way Galaxy.  The remnants of massive stars with short lives are everywhere.  The closest Blackhole is 15 lightyears away, but others are spread all over the galaxy.

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-  Most stars in the Universe are not single stars like our Sun.  Most are binary stars, two stars orbiting each other.  As one star is larger than the other, or one is older than the other, one will collapse into a Blackhole first. The other star continues to orbit the Blackhole. 

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-   The mass of the Blackhole creates tidal forces on the other star causing its shape to teardrop.  The is much the same as the tides on Earth as the Moon causes the oceans on the near side of Earth to rise and the oceans on the far side to rise causing a flattening on the adjacent sides and bulges of high tides on either end facing and farthest from the Moon.

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-  The difference with the Binary Blackhole is that the gravity is so great it not only causes the tides it actually pulls material away from the other star.  The material spirals into the Blackhole forming an accretion disk around the Event Horizon.  The gas and material orbit at near the speed of light.  

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-   Friction between the fast moving gas and material causes enormous heat, millions of degrees, which in turn creates X-ray radiation.  This is how we can see the Blackholes.  X-ray telescopes can see the accretion disks of Binary Black Holes light up with a ring of X-rays.

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-  The center of the Milky Way being a massive Blackhole, was discovered by studying the stars orbiting around the accretion disk.  The stars were studied  since 1992, and were found to be moving in ellipses around a center of mass and traveling at 4% the speed of light, 26,800,000 miles per hour.  The Blackhole at the center has a mass of 4,000,000 Suns  and is only 10 light-seconds in diameter.

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-  Calculating the mass of the Milky Way Black Hole using the velocity of an orbiting star:

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-------------------- The star is in an elliptical orbit traveling at 4% the speed of light or 12,000 kilometers / second.

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-------------------- If we assume the orbit is circular the equation for orbital velocity is:

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-------------------- Orbital Velocity^2 = G * Mass / radius

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-------------------- The radius is 500 times the Event Horizon = 5.895*10^12 meters.

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--------------------   The is 819 light seconds, or 3.6 billion miles.

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-------------------- Mass of the Blackhole = 127 * 10^36 kilograms.

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-------------------- Dividing by the Solar Mass = 64,000,000 solar mass.

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-------------------- The calculation using Relativity equations = 4,000,000 solar mass. So, our equations from Kepler start to break down at 4% the speed of light and we have to use Einstein’s relativity equations. I have yet to master those equations.  Sorry.

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---------------------  The radius of the Event Horizon in the Milky Way Blackhole.

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---------------------  If the mass of the Blackhole is 4 million solar mass we can calculate the radius of the Event Horizon.

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 ---------------------  C^2 = 2 * G * Mass Earth / radius

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---------------------  Radius = 11.79*10^9 meters = 7.3 million miles

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---------------------  Radius = 1.64 light seconds.

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---------------------  Again, using relativity equations the answer is 2 million miles, 10 light seconds, but astronomers and theoretical physicists are still wrestling with these calculations.  We are getting closer to the right answers, but there is always more to learn.

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-  The center bulge of the Milky Way has a mass of 1,000,000,000,000 solar mass.  The mass of all the stars is 100,000,000,000 solar mass.  That means that 90% of the total mass is Dark Matter and only 10% is ordinary matter found in the stars.  

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-  The fact that we can see the stars at the center of the Milky Way means that the galaxy’s Blackhole is relatively quiet.  The accretion disk does emit some X-rays and some infrared radiation but not enough to outshine the neighboring stars. 

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-   In many other galaxies the radiation from the Blackhole accretion disk is so bright it appears as a point source outshining all the stars in the whole galaxy, brighter than more than 1,000,000,000,000 of the galaxy’s stars.

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-  Blackholes and accretion disks are the source of Quasars, Gamma Ray Bursters, Magnetars, and other astronomical phenomena.  When the accretion disks pulls an extensive amount of gas in the orbiting gas becomes ionized creating a magnetic force.

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-   The Blackhole itself can not have any magnetic force, but the orbiting gas in the disk can.  The magnetic force becomes so great it shoots jets of gas and radiation out the poles of the accretion disk with tremendous energy. 

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-   Blackhole accretion disk rotations have been measured from one rotation in 10 minutes to 1000 rotations per second.  The energy released in 10 seconds along the gamma ray jets can exceed all the energy released from our Sun over its entire lifetime, 10 billion years.

-  When rotations become extremely fast, approaching the speed of light, the General Theory of Relativity requires distortions in space and time.  The Singularity becomes a ring rather than a point.

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-    The disk experiences frame-dragging that drags space and time around with it, time is slowed, and gravity causes a red-shift in radiation.  Blackholes become the labs to study these strange effects of General Relativity as rotational velocities approach the speed of light.

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-  What happens inside a Blackhole because as the mass concentrates into a Singularity all the Theories of Relativity break down?  Gravity can not be calculated at the quantum level.  

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-  We need a new theory that combines relativity and quantum mechanics for the force of gravity before our math can deal further?

-

-  October 25, 2021         BLACKHOLES  -  how gravity creates them?      3315                                                                                                                                                  

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

-----  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”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Thursday, October 28, 2021  ---------------------------






Monday, October 25, 2021

3314 - UNIVERSE - how much is it expanding?

  -  3314   -  UNIVERSE  -  how much is it expanding? The universe is expanding, with every galaxy beyond the Local Group speeding away from us. Today, most of the universe's galaxies are already receding faster than the speed of light. All galaxies currently beyond 18 billion light-years are forever unreachable by us, no matter how much time passes.  Their light will never get to us.  We can not travel faster than light.


---------------------  3314 -  UNIVERSE  -  how much is it expanding? 

-  Our universe, everywhere and in all directions, is filled with stars and galaxies. The Milky Way offers a spectacular view of a great many stars in our galaxy. Beyond our galaxy, however, are trillions of others, nearly all of which are expanding away from us. 

From our vantage point, we observe up to 46.1 billion light-years away.

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-  As long as the light from any galaxy that was emitted at the start of the hot Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago would have reached us by today, that object is within our presently observable universe. However, not every observable object is reachable.   Our visible universe contains an estimated 2 trillion galaxies.

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-  The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) may have observed a region of sky just 1/32,000,000  of the total, but was able to uncover 5,500 galaxies within it  This is an estimated 10% of the total number of galaxies actually contained in this pencil-beam-style slice.

-

-   The remaining 90% of galaxies are either too faint or too red or too obscured for Hubble to reveal.   However, most of them are already permanently unreachable by us.

-

-   Although there are magnified, ultra-distant, very red and even infrared galaxies in the extreme Deep Field, there are galaxies that are even more distant out there than what we’ve discovered in our deepest-to-date views. 

-

-  These galaxies will always remain visible to us, but we will never see them as they are today, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang.   They most certainly have changed during that time it took their light to reach us.  

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-  As the universe expands, the space between all unbound objects increases over time.

Beyond distances of 14.5 billion light-years, space’s expansion pushes galaxies away faster than light can travel.

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-  Looking back through cosmic time in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, “ALMA”, traced the presence of carbon monoxide gas.   ALMA can spot features in galaxies that Hubble cannot, and how galaxies that may be entirely invisible to Hubble could be seen by ALMA. All of these galaxies will always be visible to us, but not reachable by us. 

-

-  Over time, the expansion rate still drops, but remains positive and large because of “dark energy“.  This is the name we give whatever is expanding our universe.

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-  The expected fates of the universe all correspond to a universe where the matter and energy combined fight against the initial expansion rate. In our observed universe, a cosmic acceleration is caused by some type of dark energy.   Dark energy, whatever that is, is inherent to space itself, never decreases, even as the universe expands.

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-  As the universe expands, the matter density dilutes, but the radiation also becomes cooler as its wavelengths get stretched to longer, less energetic states. Dark energy’s density, on the other hand, will remain constant if it behaves as is currently thought, which is as a “form of energy intrinsic to space itself“. 

-

-  All galaxies beyond a certain distance always remain unreachable, even at the speed of light.  Our deepest galaxy surveys can reveal objects tens of billions of light years away, but there are more galaxies within the observable universe we still have yet to reveal.  But, our telescopes are getting better.

-

-  There are parts of the universe that are not yet visible today that will someday become observable to us, and there are parts that are visible to us that are no longer reachable by us, even if we traveled at the speed of light. 

-

-  The present “reachability limit” has a boundary 18 billion light-years away.  The limit of the visible universe is 46.1 billion light-years, as that’s the limit of how far away an object that emitted light that would just be reaching us today would be after expanding away from us for 13.8 billion years.   Hard to wrap your mind around this!

-

-  Beyond about 18 billion light-years, we can never access a galaxy even if we traveled towards it at the speed of light.  All galaxies closer than that could be reached if we left today; all galaxies beyond that are unreachable.

-

-  Given enough time, light that was emitted by a distant object will arrive at our eyes, even in an expanding universe. However, if a distant galaxy’s recession speed reaches and remains above the speed of light, we can never reach it, even if we can receive light from its distant past.

-

-  Only 6% of presently observable galaxies remain reachable; 94% already lie beyond our reach.  Each year, another 160 billion stars, enough to compose one major galaxy,  become newly unreachable.

-

-  The final stars, in the M81 group, will become unreachable after another 100 billion years.  Located a mere 3.6 Megaparsecs away from our Local Group, the M81 group is the nearest substantial group of galaxies to our own Local Group, but will remain gravitationally unbound. 

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-  After 100 billion years, even these galaxies will become unreachable to us, even if we were to leave at the speed of light. After that, only our “Local Group of galaxies” will remain within reach.

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-  The Local Group of galaxies is dominated by Andromeda and the Milky Way, and additionally consists of about 60 other, smaller galaxies. All are located within 5 million light-years of one another, with the nearest galactic groups beyond our own remaining gravitationally unbound from ourselves for all-time.  Maybe?  As far as we know?

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-  October 24, 2021     UNIVERSE  -  how much is it expanding?      3314                                                                                                                                                   

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