3895 - MILKY WAY & ANDROMEDA - galaxies.

 

-  3895  -  MILKY WAY  & ANDROMEDA  -  galaxies.    Results suggest that very early supermassive black holes were often heavily obscured by dust, perhaps as a consequence of the intense star formation activity in their host galaxies.

--------------  3895  -   MILKY WAY  & ANDROMEDA  -  galaxies.

-    26,000 light years away, a strange and enormous cloud is being stretched and strained under the tremendous tidal forces of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. In just 13 years, astronomers expect this cloud, known as X7, to be torn to shreds by the extreme environment.

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-    The doomed cloud is 3,000 times longer than the distance from the Earth to the Sun.  It provides clues to the strange and extreme environment around a black hole 4 million times more massive than the Sun.

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-    When “X7” was first noticed in 2007, astronomers described it as a comet-shaped object close to the galactic center.  Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) at the center of the Milky Way acts like gas clouds when far from the black hole only to hold together like stars as they draw closer in their orbits.

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-    Despite its cometary comparison, X7 was vastly more massive than any comet, about 50 times the mass of Earth altogether.  Astronomers have been able to watch X7 stretch and shift in real-time over the decade.  In that time, X7 grew twice as long as it once was indicating that it is being stretched out by Sgr A* like a noodle.

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-    A filament like X7 is an extreme object in an extreme environment even though it’s traveling at 490 miles per second, its orbit around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way would take 170 years if it were to complete.

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-    Just what type of object X7 is and where it came from is still something of a mystery. When it was first detected, astronomers thought it might be the result of a jet or wind blown out from a nearby star, S0-73. But looking over data from the last 20 years, the team found the two aren’t moving in the same direction, nor are they in quite the same three-dimensional volume.

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-     A gas filament like X7 might have been ejected from a nearby star, or it could have been stripped away from some other larger structure.  Astronomers suspects X7 is the result of a close scrape between two binary stars.

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-    In the extreme tidal environment around a supermassive black hole, binary stars are common, and so are the collisions and mergers between them. If two stars grazed against each other, a long stream of gas and dust would be ejected from their violent collision, which would match the shape and behavior of X7.

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-   Even though it’s zooming around the center of our galaxy at tremendous speeds, X7 will be ripped apart by Sagittarius A*’s tidal forces long before it completes its next 170-year orbit.

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-    In 2036,  X7 will reach its periapse passage, its closest approach to the black hole.   Even though X7 is zipping around Sagittarius A* 26,000 light years away (and its fate was sealed about 25,987 years ago), that’s still 794,000 light years closer than the next-closest supermassive black hole, in the dwarf galaxy Leo. This means astronomers will have a close-up view of what happens to a gas cloud very close to a supermassive black hole.

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-  Along with the Keck telescopes used to observe it since 2002, the JWST is scheduled to take a look at the Sagittarius A* and X7 in the coming months, 2023, JWST observes in different spectra than the Keck observatory.  This will give astronomers insights into its structure of the thing.

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-    Elseware in the Universe astronomers from have discovered a rapidly growing black hole in one of the most extreme galaxies known in the very early Universe. The discovery of the galaxy and the black hole at its center provides new clues on the formation of the very first supermassive black holes.

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-    Using observations taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory sited in Chile, astronomers have determined that the galaxy, named COS-87259, containing this new supermassive black hole is very extreme, forming stars at a rate 1000 times that of our own Milky Way and containing over a billion solar masses worth of interstellar dust. The galaxy shines bright from both this intense burst of star formation and the growing supermassive black hole at its center.

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-    The black hole is considered to be a new type of primordial black hole, one heavily enshrouded by cosmic “dust”, causing nearly all of its light to be emitted in the mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

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-    The researchers have also found that this growing supermassive black hole (frequently referred to as an active galactic nucleus) is generating a strong jet of material moving at near light speed through the host galaxy.

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-    Black holes with masses millions to billions of times greater than that of our own Sun sit at the center of nearly every galaxy. How these super - massive black holes first formed remains a mystery for scientists, particularly because several of these objects have been found when the Universe was very young.

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-    Because the light from these sources takes so long to reach us, we see them as they existed in the past; in this case, just 750 million years after the Big Bang, which is approximately 5% of the current age of the Universe.

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-    The only other class of supermassive black holes we knew about in the very early Universe are quasars, which are active black holes that are relatively unobscured by cosmic dust. These quasars are extremely rare at distances similar to COS-87259, with only a few tens located over the full sky.

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-   Similar types of objects have been found in the more local, present-day Universe.   Two galaxies crash together generating an intense starburst as well as heavy obscuration of the growing supermassive black hole in one of the two galaxies.

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-  Astronomers are building a much better understanding of how billion solar mass black holes were able to form so early on in the lifetime of the Universe, as well how the most massive galaxies first evolved.

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            February 28, 2023        MILKY WAY  & ANDROMEDA  -  galaxies.             3895                                                                                                                         

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--------------------- ---  Tuesday, February 28, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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WATER ON PLANETS - is there life there?

 -  3893  -  WATER  ON  PLANETS  -  is there life there?    This research adds another link in the chemical chain reaching from the Big Bang to life.  How do organic molecules in space gain nitrogen atoms, which are critical components to amino acids, DNA, and life?    This work shows how the materials for life are wrapped up in the formation of stars, solar systems, and planets.

--------------  3893  -   WATER  ON  PLANETS  -  is there life there?

-    Among other discoveries made by the “Curiosity rover” exploring Mars is rippled rock textures suggesting lakes existed in a region of ancient Mars that scientists expected to be drier. 

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-    When NASA’s “Curiosity rover” arrived at the “sulfate-bearing unit” last fall, scientists thought they’d seen the last evidence that lakes once covered this region of Mars. That’s because the rock layers here formed in drier settings than regions explored earlier in the mission. The area’s sulfates, salty minerals, are thought to have been left behind when water was drying to a trickle.

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-   Curiosity’s team was surprised to discover the mission’s clearest evidence yet of ancient water ripples that formed within lakes. Billions of years ago, waves on the surface of a shallow lake stirred up sediment at the lake bottom, over time creating rippled textures left in rock.

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-    Curiosity rover climbed through thousands of feet of lake deposits and never saw evidence like this and now we found it in a place we expected to be dry.  Since 2014, the rover has been ascending the foothills of “Mount Sharp”, a 3-mile-tall mountain that was once laced with lakes and streams that would have provided a rich environment for microbial life, if any ever formed on the Red Planet.

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-    Billions of years ago, waves on the surface of a shallow lake stirred up sediment at the lake bottom. Over time, the sediment formed into rocks with rippled textures that are the clearest evidence of waves and water that NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has ever found.

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-    “Mount Sharp” is made up of layers, with the oldest at the bottom of the mountain and the youngest at the top. As the rover ascends, it progresses along a Martian timeline, allowing scientists to study how Mars evolved from a planet that was more Earth-like in its ancient past, with a warmer climate and plentiful water, to the freezing desert it is today.

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-    This rock layer is so hard that Curiosity hasn’t been able to drill a sample from it despite several attempts.  Lower down the mountain, on “Vera Rubin Ridge,” Curiosity had to try three times before finding a spot soft enough to drill.

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-   At the bottom of this valley, called “Gediz Vallis”, is a mound of boulders and debris that are believed to have been swept there by wet landslides billions of years ago.

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-    Wind carved the valley, but a channel running through it that starts higher up on Mount Sharp is thought to have been eroded by a small river. Scientists suspect wet landslides also occurred here, sending car-size boulders and debris to the bottom of the valley.

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-    Because the resulting debris pile sits on top of all the other layers in the valley, it’s clearly one of the youngest features on Mount Sharp. Curiosity got a glimpse of this debris at Gediz Vallis Ridge twice last year but could only survey it from a distance.

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-    Curiosity used its “ChemCam instrument” to view Gediz Vallis Ridge, spotting boulders that are thought to have been washed down in an ancient debris flow. One reason scientists are interested in this ridge is because it includes boulders which originated much higher up on Mount Sharp, where Curiosity won’t be able to reach.

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-   One more clue within the Marker Band that has fascinated the team is an unusual rock texture likely caused by some sort of regular cycle in the weather or climate, such as dust storms. Not far from the rippled textures are rocks made of layers that are regular in their spacing and thickness.

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-    This kind of rhythmic pattern in rock layers on Earth often stems from atmospheric events happening at periodic intervals. It’s possible the rhythmic patterns in these Martian rocks resulted from similar events, hinting at changes in the Red Planet’s ancient climate.

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-    The wave ripples, debris flows, and rhythmic layers all tell us that the story of wet-to-dry on Mars wasn’t simple.    Mars’ ancient climate had a wonderful complexity to it, much like Earth’s.

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-    After Mars,  astronomers are also searching for water in exoplanets. There is a population of ocean-world exoplanets, “water-worlds”, around   M-dwarf stars. Water-worlds, also known as ocean worlds, are planets that possess bodies of liquid water either directly on its surface, such as Earth, or somewhere beneath it, such as Jupiter’s moon, Europa and Saturn’s moon, Enceladus.

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-   Super-Earths and sub-Neptunes with hydrogen (H) / helium (He) atmospheres were searched for close-in exoplanets orbiting M-dwarf stars in an attempt to calculate their total water mass.

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-    Those planets containing a significant fraction of their total mass         (10-50%) in water might be extremely rare or nonexistent.  This would imply planet formation is fairly uniform across a wide range of stellar masses, producing the same type of planets: terrestrial worlds that acquired a few percent by mass of hydrogen gas from the accretion disc around the young star.

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-    James Webb Space Telescope observations of sub-Neptunes  may suggest that large mass fractions of water in their atmosphere ( steam atmospheres)  that the planets are indeed water-worlds.   However, if the atmospheres are consistent with being dominated by H/He, then it suggests that they are not water-worlds.

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-  The raw materials for life form early on in “Stellar Nurseries” doesn’t appear from nothing. Its origins are wrapped up in the same long, arduous process that creates the elements, then stars, then planets. Then, if everything lines up just right, after billions of years, a simple, single-celled organism can appear, maybe in a puddle of water on a hospitable planet somewhere.  You think?

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-    Stars form in Giant Molecular Clouds, vast stellar nurseries that can be hundreds of light-years across and contain millions of solar masses of gas and dust. These nurseries contain mostly hydrogen, the stuff of star formation. But they also contain carbon, and the carbon, hydrogen, and some other atoms combine to form complex molecules that are the rudiments of life.

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-    Some important organic molecules can form in these stellar nurseries. Life requires organic chemistry, and all the life we know of is carbon-based. That means carbon and its ability to form large, complex and durable molecules that can branch off into rings and chains is at the heart of life.

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-   Each carbon atom can form chemical bonds with four other atoms, and that means that carbon-based molecules can contain thousands of atoms. Unsurprisingly, carbon is present in all organic matter.

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-     In nature, chemistry evolved over time. The Universe began with only hydrogen and helium (and a little lithium.)  Over time, more elements formed and that allowed more complex chemicals to form. Once carbon was synthesized in stars and spread out into the Universe, the stage was set for truly complex chemistry.

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-   In the present-day Universe, all of the elements that can occur naturally already occur. The stage is set for chemistry to work its magic, creating all kinds of organic compounds, even in gas clouds.

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-     That’s what a team of researchers sees happening in the Taurus Molecular Cloud,  a stellar nursery about 440 light-years away. It’s called a molecular cloud because the hydrogen atoms are paired together into molecules (H2.) Scientists observe the Cloud in detail because it’s a stellar nursery.

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-   It’s probably the closest star-forming region to Earth, and astronomers study it extensively. Telescopes like the Herschel Space Observatory have taken its portrait many times.

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-   There are surprisingly large amounts of “five-membered ring compounds.” Each of these compounds is built on a pentagon of carbon atoms.  Finding complex chemicals in a very cold environments, around -263 degrees Celsius is unexzpected.   That’s only 10 degrees above absolute zero. The cold temperatures are what allow the clouds to collapse and form stars. If they were warmer, there would be outward pressure that inhibited the collapse. But chemical reactions normally require energy, so finding so many of them in frigid TMC-1 is puzzling.

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-    In 2021, researchers found another chemical that helps explain the presence of the pentagon-shaped compounds without any energy source. It’s called ortho-benzene, and it’s a small molecule based on six carbon atoms instead of five. It also has four hydrogen atoms. Its key property is that it can easily react with other molecules without needing a lot of heat.

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-   But just because ortho-benzene has the potential to create the pentagon-shaped compounds in TMC-1 doesn’t mean that it is creating them.  Researchers used UV light from the synchrotron in lab experiments to identify chemical compounds that might be created in stellar nurseries.

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-   They saw that ortho-benzene, the same chemical found in the starless core TMC-1, combined with another type of chemical called methyl radicals to form more complex molecules.   It’s a good hint, but it didn’t yet explain the presence of the pentagon-shaped molecules they found in TMC-1.

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-    Next, the researchers turned to computer models of stellar nurseries spanning several light-years in space. Those models produced the same mix of organic molecules that astronomers observed in TMC-1 using telescopes. It appears that ortho-benzene is capable of driving the production of the pentagon-shaped fulvenallene and 1- and 2-ethynylcyclopentadiene.         This compound will be on your next spelling test. 

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            February 28, 2023       WATER  ON  PLANETS  -  is there life there?            3893                                                                                                                         

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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”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Tuesday, February 28, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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HYDROGEN CARS - the future is here?

 

-  3894  -    HYDROGEN  CARS  -  the future is here?

            ---------  3894  -     HYDROGEN  CARS  -  the future is here?

-   Gary is looking to buy one of these.  Sure hope he gives us a ride?  Fuel cells seem to be the solution to every problem that everyone has ever had with an Electric Vehicle. They'll do upwards of 400 miles on a tank, refuel in only a few minutes, and use about 90 percent less heavy metals than an EV.

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-  So what's the problem Gary? The problem is the fuel. There are literally more Tesla Superchargers in San Francisco alone than there are hydrogen stations in the entirety of the U.S.

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-    Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, and plenty of others have been showing off fuel cell cars for decades, none of which have gone into mass production.

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-   Hydrogen itself can be produced in a number of ways, some more environmentally conscious than others, but in an ideal world the stuff can be pulled straight out of water by a process called electrolysis, where renewable energy (typically wind or solar) is used to split the H from the O, emissions-free.

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-   That hydrogen can then be run through  a “fuel cell” to generate power.  An array of fuel cells combine the pure hydrogen with oxygen from the air. From that reaction, you get back out what you put in: electricity and water. The electricity powers the car, while the water goes back to the earth out the tail pipe.

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-   The process is more complicated than a battery-electric car, but fuel-cell cars are still Evs,  still driven by electric motors. They still have batteries, too, but tiny ones, about 95 percent smaller than that on a Tesla Model S.

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-   That battery only serves as a bit of a buffer. The fuel cell array itself can directly provide enough electricity to drive the BMW iX5 in normal conditions.   BMW has partnered with Toyota to develop the fuel cell technology. In the case of the BMW iX5, 383 individual fuel cells are arrayed together to provide the near-400-horsepower performance.

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-   Driving the BMW iX5 is just like driving any other electric BMW. Pull the shifter into D, push on the right pedal, and the car glides forward silently. It's only under full-throttle acceleration that you get just the slightest bit of a whooshing sound from the fuel cell as it sucks in air and hydrogen as fast as it possibly can.

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-    All 396 horsepower is available instantly, making this SUV feel like a much sportier car.  The iX5's handling is relaxed and a 0-to-60 mph time of under six seconds is respectable.

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-    BMW estimates over 300 miles of range on a single tank of hydrogen, which puts it on par with big-battery luxury EVs like the Mercedes-Benz EQS. But, there's a major difference: the iX5 refuels in just a few minutes.

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-    The process is really no more complicated than gassing up a traditional car. You just pull up to a pump, connect the pressurized line, and press a button to start. Filling a three-quarters-empty tank took three minutes and five seconds.

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-   Even the fastest of fast charging for an EV these days takes a good 15 to 20 minutes for an 80 percent charge, and about an hour to go to full. Cost? About $75 for that hydrogen, but prices are extremely elevated now thanks to energy shortages stemming from the Ukraine war. Normally, they'd be closer to half that.  $35 for a fill up.

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-   The hydrogen is stored in a pair of tanks, cleverly packaged to run along the central transmission tunnel in the car and beneath the rear seats. This means that the iX5 gives up neither cargo capacity nor legroom.

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-    Those tanks are made of carbon fiber and are incredibly hard to damage in a crash. They also have safety valves to ensure that, in a situation like a vehicle fire, the hydrogen is vented safely,  more of a hiss than a boom.

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-  Gary says the car is great to drive, the range is more than adequate, and the fast refueling makes it a practical solution for anybody with a long way to go.

-   It comes down to supply and demand. Specifically, the lack of supply. There are only about 70 refueling stations in the entirety of the U.S., all in California. We've seen pilot programs like the Toyota Mirai in small numbers for years, but nobody wants to invest in building more hydrogen stations elsewhere without more cars on the road. Meanwhile, nobody will buy cars without filling stations.  A catch 22!

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-    In the U.S., but Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York have all signed on to an agreement to create a series of "Hydrogen Hubs". Support for hydrogen doesn't have to come at the expense of building out EV charging networks. In fact, it might be cheaper to build both, saturating urban and main travel routes with high-speed battery chargers while leaving the more rural areas to hydrogen.

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-    The most efficient way forward is not relying on ever bigger, ever heavier batteries in EVs, but instead smaller, more practical city EVs complemented with fuel-cell-powered cars for those who need to go farther or tow more.

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-   Hydrogen not only solves many EV problems like range and recharging, but that fuel cell cars will thrive when the world's lithium supply chain hits its breaking point. "You already see that in '27 and '28, there will be a scarcity. So that is where hydrogen comes in. It uses less raw materials in a much, much smaller battery.

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-   An ideal future is where areas bathed in sunlight use solar cells to generate hydrogen, which will be loaded onto next-gen tankers and shipped to countries around the world, emissions-free from the air and back to it.

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-   It sounds like an impossible dream, but Japan is already importing hydrogen from Australia, and there are plenty of other places in the world where this could happen. I hope Gary gives us a ride in his new car.

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February 27, 2023          HYDROGEN  CARS  -  the future is here?                3894                                                                                                                         

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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”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Monday, February 27, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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3892 - MASSIVE BLACK HOLES - went missing?

 

-  3892  -    MASSIVE  BLACK  HOLES  -    went missing?    This is a really surprising result. If expansionary dark energy does lurk inside the cores of black holes, it will solve two long-standing puzzles faced by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes how gravity affects the universe at large scales.

          -----------  3892  -   MASSIVE  BLACK  HOLES  -    went missing?

-     Astronomers are searching for signs of a supermassive black hole in the galaxy cluster Abell 2261.  Nearly all large galaxies contain central black holes, and the galaxy in the middle of Abell 2261 is expected to contain a particularly massive one.

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-    Scientists think this galaxy underwent a merger with another galaxy in the past, which could have caused a newly formed larger black hole to be ejected.    Despite careful searches with Chandra and other telescopes, astronomers do not yet know what happened to this giant black hole.

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-    Despite searching with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have no evidence that a distant black hole estimated to weigh between 3 billion and 100 billion times the mass of the Sun is anywhere to be found.

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-    This missing black hole should be in the enormous galaxy in the center of the galaxy cluster Abell 2261, which is located about 2.7 billion light years from Earth.

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-    Nearly every large galaxy in the Universe contains a supermassive black hole in their center, with a mass that is millions or billions of times that of the Sun. Since the mass of a central black hole usually tracks with the mass of the galaxy itself, astronomers expect the galaxy in the center of Abell 2261 to contain a supermassive black hole that rivals the heft of some of the largest known black holes in the Universe.

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-    Astronomers looked for material that has been superheated as it fell towards the black hole and produced X-rays, but did not detect such a source.  Astronomers considered an alternative explanation, in which the black hole was ejected from the host galaxy's center. This violent event may have resulted from two galaxies merging to form the observed galaxy, accompanied by the central black hole in each galaxy merging to form one enormous black hole.

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-   When black holes merge, they produce ripples in spacetime, gravitational waves. If the huge amount of gravitational waves generated by such an event were stronger in one direction than another, the theory predicts that the new, even more massive black hole would have been sent careening away from the center of the galaxy in the opposite direction. This is called a recoiling black hole.

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-  Astronomers have not found definitive evidence for recoiling black holes and it is not known whether supermassive black holes even get close enough to each other to produce gravitational waves and merge; so far, astronomers have only verified the mergers of much smaller black holes.

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-    The galaxy at the center of Abell 2261 is an excellent cluster to search for a recoiling black hole because there are two indirect signs that a merger between two massive black holes might have taken place.

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-    First, data from the Hubble and Subaru optical observations reveal a galactic core, the central region where the number of stars in the galaxy in a given patch of the galaxy is at or close to the maximum value, that is much larger than expected for a galaxy of its size.

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-   The second sign is that the densest concentration of stars in the galaxy is over 2,000 light years away from the center of the galaxy.

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-    During a merger, the supermassive black hole in each galaxy sinks toward the center of the newly coalesced galaxy. If they become bound to each other by gravity and their orbit begins to shrink, the black holes are expected to interact with surrounding stars and eject them from the center of the galaxy.

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-    This would explain Abell 2261's large core. The off-center concentration of stars may also have been caused by a violent event such as the merger of two supermassive black holes and subsequent recoil of single, larger black hole that results.

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-  Astronomers turned to Chandra to look for material that had been superheated and produced X-rays as it fell towards the black hole. While the Chandra data did reveal that the densest hot gas was not in the center of the galaxy, they did not reveal any possible X-ray signatures of a growing supermassive black hole. no X-ray source was found in the center of the cluster, or in any of the clumps of stars, or at the site of the radio emission.

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-  They concluded that either there is no black hole at any of these locations, or that it is pulling material in too slowly to produce a detectable X-ray signal.

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-   The mystery of this gigantic black hole's location therefore continues. If Webb is unable to find the black hole, then the best explanation is that the black hole has recoiled well out of the center of the galaxy.

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-    Supermassive black holes could be the engines driving the expansion of the universe, according to research that proposes a solution to "one of the biggest problems in cosmology."

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-    By comparing supermassive black holes across nine billion years of cosmic history, astronomers have discovered a clue that the ravenous behemoths lurking at the hearts of most large galaxies may be the source of dark energy, the mysterious force that makes up 68% of the known universe and causes its accelerating expansion.

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-   Over the last century, astronomers discovered that the universe was expanding at an ever faster pace. This was surprising given that, acting on its own, gravity should be expected to slowly crumple the cosmos together in an event known as the Big Crunch.

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-    To explain the discrepancy, scientists proposed that something powerful enough to counteract gravity must exist, and was pushing everything in the universe further apart. They named that something “dark energy”.

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-    But for dark energy to reverse a cosmic collapse, it would have to be present in such enormous quantities that it makes up the vast majority of the universe.

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-   Now, the new studies have seemingly found a clue as to how the hidden phenomenon works. Comparing the masses of black holes at the centers of two sets of galaxies.  The astronomers found that throughout the universe giant black holes had ballooned to be seven to 20 times larger than they once were, a monstrous growth that couldn't be explained simply by black holes devouring stars or colliding and combining with each other.

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-  The researchers propose that black holes are growing in lockstep with the universe, overcoming the star-crushing, light-capturing forces at their cores with a hypothetical type of dark energy called vacuum energy that makes them expand ever outwards. And, somehow, they drag the entire fabric of the cosmos out with them.

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-   This is a really surprising result. If expansionary dark energy does lurk inside the cores of black holes, it will solve two long-standing puzzles faced by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes how gravity affects the universe at large scales.

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-  Firstly, it would explain how the universe doesn’t collapse due to the large and ubiquitous force of gravitational attraction and, secondly, it would do away with the need for singularities (infinitesimal points where the laws of physics break down) to explain the workings of black holes' dark hearts.

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-    To confirm their theory, astrophysicists will need to ensure that nothing else is contributing to the black holes' mysterious growth by making even more detailed observations of their masses throughout time, while also closely tracking the increase to these masses with the expansion of the universe.

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February 26, 2023     MASSIVE  BLACK  HOLES  -  and universe expansion?     3892                                                                                                                          

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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”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Sunday, February 26, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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3891 - EARLIEST GALAXIES - Webb discoveries?

 

-  3891 -   EARLIEST  GALAXIES  -  Webb discoveries?  -    Astronomers are poring over the very first images from the brand new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).   July 2022, barely a week after those first images from the revolutionary super telescope were released. Twenty-five years in the making, a hundred to a thousand times more powerful than any previous telescope, one of the biggest and most ambitious scientific experiments in human history, and what do we see?

-------------  3891  -   EARLIEST  GALAXIES  -  Webb discoveries?

-   The Webb telescope took decades to build, because it had to be made foldable to fit on top of a rocket and be sent into the coldness of space, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.   Far from the heat glow of the Earth, Webb can detect the faintest infrared light from the distant universe.

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-   Among the pictures is a small red dot that will shake up our understanding of how the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang.  "UFOs,"  the new galaxies, ultra-red flattened objects, that all look like flying saucers. In the color images they appear very red because all the light is coming out in the infrared, while the galaxies are invisible at wavelengths humans can see.

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-    Infrared is JWST's superpower, allowing it to spy the most distant galaxies. Ultraviolet and visible light from the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang is stretched out by the expansion of the universe as it travels towards us, so by the time the light reaches us we see it as infrared light.

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-    All of Erica's galaxies look like saucers, except one.  This is something very different, distance 13.1 billion light years, mass 100 billion stars. Impossibly early, impossibly massive galaxies.

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-  At this distance, the light took 13 billion years to reach us, so we are seeing the galaxies at a time when the universe was only 700 million years old, barely 5% of its current age of 13.8 billion years. If this is true, this galaxy has formed as many stars as our present-day Milky Way. In record time.  One day later I had found six.

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-   Could we have discovered astronomy's missing link?  As we look out in space and back in time, we see the "corpses" of fully formed, mature galaxies appear seemingly out of nowhere around 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.

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-    These galaxies have stopped forming stars.  The stellar ages of these dead galaxies suggest they must have formed much earlier in the universe, but Hubble has never been able to spot their earlier, living stages.

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-    Early dead galaxies are truly bizarre creatures, packing as many stars as the Milky Way, but in a size 30 times smaller. Imagine an adult, weighing 100 kilos, but standing 6cm tall. Our little red dots are equally bizarre. They look like baby versions of the same galaxies, also weighing in at 100 kilos, with a height of 6cm.  Too many stars, too early

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-    To produce these galaxies so quickly, you almost need all the gas in the universe to turn into stars at near 100% efficiency. This discovery could transform our understanding of how the earliest galaxies in the universe formed.  The implication is that there is different channel, a fast track, that produces monster galaxies very quickly, very efficiently. A fast track for the top 1%.

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-    The first step to solve this mystery is to confirm the distances with spectroscopy, where we put the light of each of these galaxies through a prism, and split it into its rainbow-like fingerprint. This will tell us the distance to 0.1% accuracy.  It will also tell us what is producing the light, whether it is stars or something else more exotic.

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-   By chance,  month earlier, JWST already targeted one of the six candidate massive galaxies and it turned out to be a distant baby quasar. A quasar is a phenomenon that occurs when gas falls into a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy and starts to shine brightly.

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-   Quasars can outshine their entire host galaxy, so it is impossible to tell how many stars are there and whether the galaxy is really that massive. Could that be the answer for all of them? Baby quasars everywhere?

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            February 26, 2023       EARLIEST  GALAXIES  -  Webb discoveries?      3891                                                                                                                           

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--------------------- ---  Sunday, February 26, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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