JimsAstronomy

Saturday, October 3, 2020

Index of recent reviews

- Available on blog or request a copy:

- 2830 - CHANDRA - X-ray telescope. From the launch of the Aerobee rocket in 1962, astronomers had known that the X-ray sky wasn’t dark, instead it is teeming with high-energy photons. Chandra telescope sharpened the view, resolving almost all of the background into its individual sources. Data from Chandra and XMM-Newton suggest that most of the sources that remain undetected are shrouded in gas and dust.

- 2831 - SUN - the Solar Orbiter spacecraft. - A new spacecraft is journeying to the Sun to snap the first pictures of the Sun's north and south poles. “Solar Orbiter“, a collaboration between the European Space Agency, or ESA, and NASA.

- 2832 - CLIMATE CHANGES - we can barely see? With each new year that comes upon us changes occur throughout the entire observable Universe. Despite all appearances that things don't change very much, particularly on cosmic scales, our planet, the Solar System, the galaxy, and even the entire Universe all undergo significant changes that are not only detectable, but that cumulatively add up as time goes on. Here are some changes you may not have noticed:

- 2833 - SUNSPOTS - and the California forest fires. Observers study the Sun closely, so we can better understand the life and activity of our star. Humans have observed sunspots, dark blotches that arise from strong magnetic activity, for more than 1,000 years, and tracked them in detail since the invention of the telescope, for the past 400.

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

- 2835 - NEUTRINOS - a thermal history. If you could see neutrinos you could see back in time to 1 second after the Big Bang. To see with visible light, we see with photons. And, because the Universe is expanding seeing with visible light, near the red end of the spectrum, we can see back to when the Universe was 2.3 billion years old, 17 % its current size.

- 2836 - GENEALOGY - from Jim to blue algae. Kathy’s genealogy is in Review 520 and it goes back to Adam and Eve, 12 pages but a fascinating read. The Detrick’s genealogy is Review 521. It doesn’t go back so far, just back to circus performers and horse thieves. Jim’s genealogy in this review goes back the farthest, to blue algae.

- 2837 - BACTERIA - could they be builders? Buildings are not unlike a human body. They have bones and skin; they breathe. Electrified, they consume energy, regulate temperature and generate waste. Buildings are organisms, albeit inanimate ones. But what if buildings, walls, roofs, floors, windows, were actually alive, grown, maintained and healed by living materials?

- 2838 - RELATIVITY - as scientists explain it? The Universe is hard to explain. Here are our best minds trying with their favorite theories. God provides a simpler explanation. It is just the way he made things. Yet, we keep trying to understand how he did it. Here are the scientists that have they best ideas to date, 2020. We keep trying to understand how we got here? It ain’t easy?

- 2839 - ELEMENTS - how were they created? Our Universe started with only 4 elements. We look around Earth and we can find 116 elements. How did all that star dust get here? How did life come up out of these elements? You are really made of stardust!

- 2840 - CMB - cosmic microwave background echo? We only understand a bit about 5% of the Universe that is ordinary matter and we are clueless about 95% of the Universe that is Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Astronomers are getting better instruments into space that can measure the granularity of the CMB with higher resolution and they can begin measuring the polarization of the photons.

- 2841 - CMB - Cosmic Background Radiation - First discovered in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson who were doing experiments with radio antennas for Bell Telephone labs. The theory of its existence was first proposed by astronomer George Gamow in 1948, but they did not have any radio receivers that could listen for those frequencies back then.

-- 2842 - STARS - at the extremes of astronomy? The stars in the night sky can become boring. Also the same except for the fact that the Earth is going around in circles to our star. But the same pattern seems to repeat itself every year. Along comes astronomy and we see these stars in a whole new perspective.

- 2843 - BIG BANG - a theory in crisis? A series of powerful observations has made it clear that our universe has expanded for billions of years, emerging from the hot, dense state we call the Big Bang. When we compare the results from different kinds of measurements, the expansion rate of the universe, the temperature patterns in the light released when the first atoms formed, the abundances of various chemical elements, and the distribution of galaxies and other large-scale structures, we find stunning agreement of how the physics all happened. Why it happened is still a mystery.

- 2844 - CHANDRA - X-rays to sound and Infrared? Galaxy clusters have proven key to testing dark matter and understanding dark energy. X-ray observations first revealed the wildly hot gas within clusters, gas that would have drifted away if it weren’t for the cluster’s dark matter, which gravitationally holds it in place.

- 2845 - ELECTRON - defining the wave function? In water waves, the quantity that varies periodically is the height of the water surface. In sound waves, it is the pressure that varies. In light waves, electric and magnetic fields vary. What is it that varies in the case of “matter waves“?

- 2846 - ELON MUSK - defines his battery? During Tesla's long-awaited "Battery Day" on Tuesday September 22, 2020, Elon Musk announced several innovations that could transform the battery industry. Musk focused on an in-house redesign of the lithium ion battery, which he says will use nickel cathodes, rather than cobalt.

- 2847 - EXOPLANETS - CHEOPS - exploring other planets. September, 2020, eight months after the space telescope CHEOPS started its journey into space. CHEOPS is the first European Space Agency mission dedicated to characterizing known exoplanets. Exoplanets are planets outside the Solar System. They were first discovered in 1995.

- 2849 - COSMIC INFLATION- explaining the Big Bang? Cosmic inflation is revealing answers has only raised more questions. The puzzles that have arisen this time, however, may truly never be solved. If that information is no longer present in our Universe, it will take a revolution to solve the greatest puzzle of all: “where did all this come from“?

- 2850 - FUSION REACTOR - the dream of limitless electricity? A new “compact” fusion reactor that could feasibly be built and go online much faster than existing fusion reactor concepts. Construction of a reactor, called “Sparcs“, is being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a spin off company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, is expected to begin next spring, 2021, and take three or four years to provide us limitless energy.

- 2851 - FUSION - how does it work in the stars? - The fusion in the core of stars can be analyzed as simple hydrogen nuclei, which are protons, fusing together to create heavier elements. Each fusion process up to the element Iron releases some amount of energy. Knowing how much energy our Sun puts out we can estimate the lifetime of our star, how long it will take to “burn up” all of this proton fuel.

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FUSION - how does it work in the stars?

--------------------------- 2851 - FUSION - how does it work in the stars?

- This is how fusion work in the stars? See Review 2638 to learn how fusion works on the planet Earth. If we can get Earth’s nuclear fusion reactors working above a breakeven point they could supply all the electrical energy needs of the planet with no pollution.

- You look into the night sky and every shining star is a fusion reactor. It is so common, it can’t be that complicated. Well we have been seriously trying for 60 years and the breakeven point is still another many more years away, maybe 50 to 100 years away. Fusion is “simple“, it is just not “easy“. This review will focus on how the stars do it. 2638 Review is how engineers on the planet are doing it.

- Our Sun is a star that is a big ball of hydrogen. It originally collects as a ball of gas out of a cloud of hydrogen gas. Gravity constantly pulls matter into the densest center of gravity. Eventually it all condenses into a sphere of gas.

- As the mass and gravity of the sphere grows the center of the sphere gets hotter and denser until the hydrogen gas ionizes into a “plasma“. Essentially this plasma is the nucleus of the hydrogen atoms separated from the negatively charged electrons.

- The electrons become free electrons and the nuclei remaining are positively charged protons. The protons are heavier and get pulled into the center of gravity with immense density and temperature.

- Protons are like positive charges that repeal each other with the electromagnetic force. When the mass reaches 10% of the mass of our Sun the force of gravity can begin to overcome this electromagnetic force separating the protons. Nuclear fusion can begin.

- The Sun is fusing these protons into Helium nuclei with its core temperature at 15,000,000 Centigrade. (The surface temperature of the Sun is 6,000 Centigrade). This same process occurs in all the stars.

- However, if the mass of the stars is larger then fusion can continue beyond 2 Hydrogen , H-1, nuclei fusing into Helium nuclei,(He-2). When 3 protons fuse together they form Lithium, (Li-3). When 4 protons fuse together they form Beryllium, 5 - forms Boron, 6 - Carbon, 7 - Nitrogen, and this continues right up each of the heavier elements in the Periodic Table to 28 protons fuse to form Iron, Fe-28).

- At the element Fe- 28 - Iron the fusion process does not release excess energy. Up until iron each element is slightly lighter than the sum of its parts( i.e.: protons). The excess mass is converted to energy according to E = mc^2. Elements heavier than Iron require the addition of energy in order to fuse together rather the having an excess of energy.

- When the core of the star becomes Iron no more excess energy is produced. The star collapses and rebounds into a massive explosion called a supernova. It is in this explosion that higher energies are reached and elements heavier than iron are produced.

- The natural elements all the way up to 92 protons fusing to form Uranium, (U-92). But, supernovae are another Review. This review will cover the first step in the fusion process and the one we are trying to replicate here on the planet Earth.

- 2 protons fuse into Helium, or, said in another way, 2 Hydrogen nuclei fuse into one Helium-2 nucleus. Or, to be more accurate to where we are heading, 4 protons fuse into a heavy isotope of Helium-4 which contains 2 protons and 2 neutrons with energy left over for 26.8 electron volts of sun power heading toward the surface of the Sun.

- This “sun power:” eventually leaves the surface with a total output power of 3.9 *10^26 watts. 8 minutes later it reaches the surface of Earth providing 1,300 watts of sun power on every square meter area, about yhe size of a solar panel on the roof of many houses.

- Let’s go back to the core of the Sun and see step by step how this fusion actually happens:

- (1) One proton fuses with a proton electron pair which is a neutron forming a Hydrogen isotope nucleus, called Deuterium. The Deuterium nucleus is one proton and one neutron. In addition to the H-2 Deuterium nucleus an anti-electron, an electron- neutrino, and 0.4 million electron volts of energy are produced. The anti-electron is also called a positron. The energy produced is abbreviated 0.4 MeV, million electron-volts.

- (2) This process is repeated with 2 other protons. The total reaction now contains: 2 H2. Deuterium nuclei + 2 anti electrons + 2 neutrinos and a total of 0.8 MeV.

- (3) Both of these processes fuse with other neutrons creating a Hydrogen-3 isotope with one proton and 2 neutrons, plus Gamma Rays, and plus energy of 5.5MeV. For a total of 6.3 MeV, for the first fusion and 6.3 MeV again for the second fusion.

- Now the grand total of particles and energy in the fusion reaction is 2 protons and 4 neutrons in the 2 H-3 nuclei, 2 Gamma Rays and 11.8 MeV.

- (4) When the above two processes fuse together the grand total of particles and energy released becomes 2 protons and 2 neutrons fuse to form Helium-4 and the 2 free neutrons decay to form 2 protons, and + 7 Gamma Rays, and + 2 neutrinos, and + releasing an additional 13.0 MeV of energy.

- This brings the total energy released to 24.8 MeV.

- (5) The last step involves the 2 anti electrons that were produced which collide with 2 free electrons and annihilate each other into 4 Gamma Rays and 2.0 MeV of energy.

The total energy released from this 5 step process becomes 26.8 MeV.

- Note that 4 protons were consumed for 26.8 / 4, or 6.7 MeV per proton. And, 2 protons were left over to repeat the process starting with step (1) again. This is referred to as a “chain reaction” that will continue over and over again until all the protons are consumed.

- There are other fusion processes occurring in the dynamic plasma at the core of the Sun, but this is one of the fundamental fusion processes going on. If we used purely this process and assumed the Sun was a giant ball of protons how long would it shine before it ran out of protons to fuse?

-------------------- The total mass of the Sun is 2.0 * 10^30 kilograms.

-------------------- The mass of a single proton is 1.67 *10^-27 kilograms.

- Their simple division tells us that there are 1.2*10^57 protons in the Sun. Of course, only the protons at the core of the Sun are at the pressures and temperatures necessary to cause a nuclear fusion reaction. Approximately 10% of the Sun’s mass can be considered the core. So, the core would contain 1.2 * 10^56 protons.

- We know that the total energy output the these core protons are producing is 3.9 * 10^26 Watts. A Watt is a Joule of energy per second. There are 1.6022*10^19 electron-volts in one Joule of Energy. Therefore the Sun’s total output power in electron-volts per second is:

---------------- 3.9 * 10^26 / 1. 6022 *10^-19 = 2.434*10^45 eV / second

---------------- Sun’s energy = 2.434 * 10^39 MeV / second

- We have calculated the energy contribution per proton to be 6.7 MeV. Again simple division tells us how many protons are being consumed each second in the core of the Sun.

-------------- 2.434 * 10^39 MeV / second / 6.7 MeV = 3.6 * 10^38 protons / second

- The Sun’s core has 1.2 * 10^56 protons and it is burning 3.6 * 10^38 protons each second, how many seconds can this last?

--------------- 1.2 * 10^56 protons / 3.6 * 10^38 protons/ second = 3.3 * 10^17 seconds. There are 31,560,000 seconds in a year.

- So, that means that the Sun’s core can burn protons for about 10 billion years. This has been going on for about 5 billion years so the Sun has burned through about half of its supply of protons. We have another 5 billion years to go.

- More massive stars than our Sun actually have shorter lives because they burn hotter and faster and go through their supply of protons with a shorter lifetime.

------ 25 Solar Mass Star --------- 80,000 Luminosity of Sun ----- 3 million years

------ 3 Solar Mass Star --------------- 60 Luminosity of Sun ----- 500 million years

------ 1 Solar Mass Star ---------------- 1 Luminosity of Sun ----- 10,000 million years

------ 1/2 Solar Mass Star ----------- 3 % Luminosity of Sun ----- 200,000 million years

October 3, 2020 1249 2851

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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” -----------

--------------------- --- Saturday, October 3, 2020 ---------------------------

FUSION REACTOR - the dream of limitless electricity?

-------------- 2850 - FUSION REACTOR - the dream of limitless electricity?

- I did a book report in high school 60 years ago about how fusion generated electricity would bring us limitless energy. I should not have gotten a good grade because here we are and it is still “ 5 “ more years until it works. Engineering is theory to practice to production.

- If the reactor reaches productive fusion, a long process begins for designing and building a power plant. The two key takeaways are improving materials and shrinking costs. A traditional “tokamak” like “ITER” uses a gigantic magnetic field to contain the extraordinarily hot plasma. Sparc uses a “a newer electromagnet technology that uses so-called high temperature superconductors that can produce a much higher magnetic field.

- That means a smaller amount of plasma, a smaller entire reactor form factor, and perhaps fewer problems with containing and sustaining plasma, which have challenged existing plasma fusion projects.

- Research programs and government projects around the world have studied the “tokamak, stellarator“, and other fusion reactor design for decades with relatively few milestones reached. The record for sustained fusion time is just a fraction of a second, and one industry joke goes that fusion is always 30 years away. Well , it has been over 60.

- The fraction of a second on record was also totally subsumed by the massive amount of energy the host reactor used to get up to temperature and stay contained and externally cooled. It is not efficient if it takes more energy in than you get out.

- Fusion involves heating contained matter to at least or even many times more than the temperature of the sun, and then keeping that reaction at temperature with necessarily difficult containment. But, the promise of almost limitless power for almost limitless time is what keeps people searching.

- Sparc promises to return 10 times the energy it uses as power output, which is very, very far from the “limitless energy” concept suggested by the sun.

- NASA too has made tiny, but promising steps toward lattice confinement nuclear fusion. Magnetic fusion requires massive heat and is still not sustainable for energy use.

- NASA has unlocked nuclear fusion on a tiny scale, with a phenomenon called lattice confinement fusion that takes place in the narrow channels between atoms. In the reaction, the common nuclear fuel deuterium gets trapped in the “empty” atomic space in a solid metal. What results is a “Goldilocks effect” that’s neither supercooled nor superheated, but where atoms reach fusion-level energy.

- “Lattice confinement” may sound complex, but it's just a mechanism, by comparison, tokamaks like ITER and stellarators use “magnetic confinement.” These are the ways scientists plan to condense and then corral the fantastical amount of energy from the fusion reaction.

- In a traditional magnetic fusion reaction, extraordinary heat is used to combat atoms’ natural reaction forces and keep them confined in a plasma together. And in another method called “inertial confinement” fuel is compressed to extremely high levels but for only a short, nano-second period of time, when fusion can occur.

- In the new method, conditions sufficient for fusion are created in the confines of the metal lattice that is held at ambient temperature. While the metal lattice, loaded with deuterium fuel, may initially appear to be at room temperature, the new method creates an energetic environment inside the lattice where individual atoms achieve equivalent fusion-level kinetic energies.

- The fuel is also far more dense, because that’s how the reaction is triggered. A metal such as erbium is “‘deuterated’ or loaded with deuterium atoms, ‘deuterons,’ packing the fuel a billion times denser than in magnetic confinement (tokamak) fusion reactors. In the new method, a neutron source ‘heats’ or accelerates deuterons sufficiently such that when colliding with a neighboring deuteron it causes fusion reactions.

- With atoms packed so densely within the atomic lattice of another element, the required energy to induce fusion goes way, way down. It’s aided by the lattice itself, which works to filter which particles get through and pushes the right kinds even closer together. But there’s a huge gulf between individual atoms at energy rates resembling fusion versus a real, commercial-scale application of nuclear fusion.

- This is an important first step and one that offers an alternative to the spectacular scale of major tokamak and stellarator projects around the world. Even the smallest magnetic confinement fusion reactors require sun-hot fusion temperatures that have continued to create engineering problems.

- Scientists are doing cutting-edge work on all these kinds of reactors, but a way that didn’t require heating to and maintaining millions of degrees could be a lot simpler. At the very least, it could be suited to applications where a magnetic fusion reactor isn’t feasible.

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

- 2639 - FUSION REACTORS - for our electricity? See Review 2638 about the history of fusion reactors. When I was in high school I learned in physics class that fusion was going to replace fission and our electricity would no longer depend o fossil fuels. Electricity would essentially be free. Well 60 years later and we are still saying that “recent developments” in the world of fusion power are giving scientists newfound optimism for the elusive ‘holy grail’ of energy technologies.

- 2638 - FUSION - from stars to electricity? How does fusion work in the stars? See the end of this review to learn how fusion works on the planet Earth. If we can get Earth’s nuclear fusion reactors working above a breakeven point they could supply all the electrical energy needs of the planet with no pollution. This review is 8 pages.

- How Does Fusion Work in the Stars? The fusion in the core of stars can be analyzed as simple hydrogen nuclei, which are protons, fusing together to create heavier elements. Each fusion process up to the element Iron releases some amount of energy. Knowing how much energy our Sun puts out we can estimate the lifetime of our star, how long it will take to “burn up” all of this proton fuel.

- 1068 - Muon Capture. The cyclotron used to produce the Muons. On October 4, 2009 I attended a lecture at SSU by Tom Banks from Lawrence Berkeley Labs. His topic was experimental physics in Muon Capture. Tom received an award for having the best physics dissertation last year. To understand the experiment of Muon Capture we need to first understand, “ What’s a Muon?”.

- September 30, 2020 2850

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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” -----------

--------------------- --- Saturday, October 3, 2020 ---------------------------

Friday, October 2, 2020

EXOPLANETS - CHEOPS - exploring other planets

--------------------------- 2847 - EXOPLANETS - CHEOPS - exploring other planets

- The Science Operations Center of CHEOPS is located at the observatory of the University of Geneva. Using data from the CHEOPS satellite, scientists have recently carried out a detailed study of the exoplanet WASP-189b.

- WASP-189b is one of the most extreme planets in the universe. It is an exoplanet orbiting the star HD 133112, one of the hottest stars known to have a planetary system. The WASP-189 system is 322 light years away and located in the constellation Libra.

- WASP-189b is a gas giant that orbits very close to its host star. It takes less than 3 days for it to circle its star, and it is 20 times closer to it than Earth is to the Sun. The planet is more than one and a half times as large as Jupiter.

- WASP-189b has a permanent day side, which is always exposed to the light of the star, and, accordingly, a permanent night side. This means that its climate is completely different from that of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system.

- The estimated temperature of WASP-189b is 3,200 degrees Celsius. Planets like WASP-189b are called "ultra-hot Jupiters". Iron melts at such a high temperature, and even becomes gaseous. This object is one of the most extreme planets we know of.

- Highly precise brightness measurements are required for this exploration. We cannot see the planet itself as it is too far away and too close to its host star. When a planet passes in front of its star as seen from Earth, the star seems fainter for a short time. This phenomenon is called a “transit“.

- Because the exoplanet WASP-189b is so close to its star, its dayside is so bright that we can even measure the 'missing' light when the planet passes behind its star; which is called an “occultation“.

- The planet does not reflect a lot of starlight. Instead, most of the starlight gets absorbed by the planet, heating it up and making it shine. The planet is not very reflective because there are no clouds present on its dayside. Clouds cannot form at such high temperatures.

- The transit of this gas giant in front of its star is asymmetrical. This happens when the star possesses brighter and darker zones on its surface. The star itself rotates so quickly that its shape is no longer spherical; but ellipsoidal. The star is being pulled outwards at its equator.

- The star is considerably larger and more than two thousand degrees Celsius hotter than our sun. Because it is so hot, the star appears blue and not yellow-white like the sun.

- January, 2020 Cheops took its first, intentionally blurred images of stars. The deliberate defocusing is at the core of the mission’s observing strategy, which improves the measurement precision by spreading the light coming from distant stars over many pixels of its detector.

- More than 4,000 planets, and still counting, are known to be orbiting stars other than the Sun. The goal is to characterize these planets, providing constraints on their structure, formation and evolution.

- Cheops is a small, 1.5 meter sized satellite. To measure how well Cheops performs scientists had to first needed to observe stars whose properties are well known, stars that are well-behaved. hand-picked to be very stable, with no signs of activity.

- The commissioning period demonstrated that Cheops achieves the required photometric precision and, importantly, it also showed that the satellite can be commanded by the ground segment team as needed to perform its science observations.

- Cheops is to measure planet sizes with unprecedented precision and accuracy and to determine their densities by combining these with independent measurements of their masses.

- Another of the targets was HD 93396, a subgiant yellow star located 320 light-years away, slightly cooler and three times larger than our Sun. The focus of the observations was KELT-11b, a puffy gaseous planet about 30% larger in size than Jupiter, in an orbit that is much closer to the star than Mercury is to the Sun.

- The light curve of this star shows a clear dip caused by the eight hour-long transit of KELT-11b. From these data, the scientists have determined very precisely the diameter of the planet: 181,600 kilometers , plus or minus 4,300 km.

- A ‘hot super-Earth’ planet , known as 55 Cancri e. A ‘warm Neptune’, GJ 436b, is losing its atmosphere due to the glare from its host star.

- There is so much more to learn from exoplanet observations. We are just getting started. Stay tuned, maybe one of them will get in touch with us?

------------------------------- Other Reviews about exoplanets;

- 2770 - EXOPLANETS - are we alone? Some significant developments need to happen before we can answer the question with any confidence: We will get better at detecting Earth-like planets in the habitable zone and even be able to detect what's in their atmospheres (if they have one).

- 2702 - EXOPLANETS - new discoveries? If astronomers do detect an exoplanet with a significant oxygen atmosphere, that can only mean an alien biosphere has created it. It is only a matter of time before enough planetary atmospheres will have been surveyed to find one with such life signs. When that day dawns, we will have written a new chapter in the search for life and be able to actually estimate how much life exists in the universe!

- 2280 - We know there is life in the Universe. We are living proof of that. But is there life on exoplanets which are planets around other suns outside our own solar system? Exoplanets are common, we have found over 4,000 but as for life we are the only evidence so far.

- 2233 - EXOPLANETS- The TESS Space Mission. The next generation exoplanet hunter is TESS, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, has already found eight confirmed planets in its first four months of observing and some are unlike anything astronomers have seen before.

- September 29, 2020 2847

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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” -----------

--------------------- --- Friday, October 2, 2020 ---------------------------

Thursday, October 1, 2020

ELON MUSK - defines his battery?

--------------------------- 2846 - ELON MUSK - defines his battery?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- What does it all add up to? It's not exactly clear. While the Tesla shareholders who showed up to the Battery Day event in person.

- But for now, we're definitely not holding our breath for that cheap Tesla.

- September 27, 2020 2846

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--------------------- --- Thursday, October 1, 2020 ---------------------------

COSMIC INFLATION- explaining the Big Bang?

-------------------- 2849 - COSMIC INFLATION- explaining the Big Bang?

- The 20th century brought us General Relativity, Quantum Physics, and the Big Bang, all accompanied by spectacular observational and experimental successes. But, for the Big Bang, it left some unexplained problems that required us to go farther.

- We found an uncomfortable conclusion that we are still reckoning with today: any information about the beginning of the Universe is no longer contained within our observable cosmos. Here’s the disconcerting story.

- In the 1920s our conception of the Universe changed forever as two sets of observations came together in perfect harmony. For the past few years, scientists led by Vesto Slipher had begun to measure spectral lines, emission and absorption features, of a variety of stars and nebulae.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Those are some remarkable and mind-bending facts, as they enable us to extrapolate what’s going to happen to the Universe as time marches inexorably forwards. But the same laws of physics that tell us what’s going to happen in the future can also tell us what happened in the past, and the Universe itself is no exception.

- If the Universe is expanding, cooling, and getting less dense today, that means it was smaller, hotter, and denser in the distant past.

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

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

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

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

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

- All of these predictions have been observationally confirmed, with that leftover bath of radiation, originally known as the “primeval fireball” and now called the “cosmic microwave background“, discovered in the mid-1960s.

- We can extrapolate the Big Bang all the way back, arbitrarily far into the past, until all the matter and energy in the Universe is concentrated into a single point.

- The Universe would reach infinitely high temperatures and densities, creating a physical condition known as a “singularity“, where the laws of physics as we know them give predictions that no longer make sense and cannot be valid anymore.

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

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

- Only, there were a number of unresolved puzzles that the Big Bang posed, but presented no answers for. Why did regions that were causally disconnected, had no time to exchange information, even at the speed of light, have the same temperatures as one another?

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

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

- Then, in late 1979, a young theorist named Alan Guth had a spectacular realization that changed history. His new theory was known as “cosmic inflation“, and postulated that perhaps the idea of the Big Bang was only a good extrapolation back to a certain point in time, where it was preceded and set up by this inflationary state.

- Instead of reaching arbitrary high temperatures, densities, and energies, inflation states that:

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

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

which caused the Universe to expand exponentially where the expansion rate doesn’t change over time,

------------------------- Which drives the Universe to a flat, empty, uniform state,

until inflation ends.

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

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

- The expansion rate and the energy density were perfectly balanced because inflation gave that same expansion rate and energy density to the Universe prior to the Big Bang. And there were no left over, high-energy remnants because the Universe only reached a finite temperature after inflation ended.

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

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

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

------------------------ Some fluctuations should be on super-horizon scales: fluctuations on scales larger than light could have traveled since the hot Big Bang. Those fluctuations should be almost, but not perfectly, scale-invariant, with slightly greater magnitudes on large scales than small ones.

- The fluctuations from inflation get stretched across the Universe, creating overdensities. With data from satellites like COBE, WMAP, and Planck, tested only inflation yields predictions that are in line with what we’ve observed.

- But this means that the Big Bang wasn’t the very beginning of everything; it was only the beginning of the Universe as we’re familiar with it.

- Prior to the hot Big Bang, there was a state known as cosmic inflation, that eventually ended and gave rise to the hot Big Bang, and we can observe the imprints of cosmic inflation on the Universe today.

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

- It is possible that inflation lasted for only that duration, or for far longer. It’s possible that the inflationary state was eternal, or that it was transient, arising from something else. It’s possible that the Universe did begin with a singularity, or arose as part of a cycle, or has always existed.

- But, that information doesn’t exist in our Universe. Inflation by its very nature erases whatever existed in the pre-inflationary Universe.

- The quantum fluctuations that occur during inflation getting stretches across space.

In many ways, inflation is like pressing the cosmic “reset” button. Whatever existed prior to the inflationary state, if anything, gets expanded away so rapidly and thoroughly that all we’re left with is empty, uniform space with the quantum fluctuations that inflation creates superimposed atop it.

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

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

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

----------------------------------- here are some other reviews;

- 2236 - COSMIC INFLATION - expanding over 14 billion years. Cosmic Inflation has been expanding the universe for 14 billion years. Science has discovered that the Universe is expanding at an ever increasing acceleration today. If we run time backwards the universe must have started at a point. This point of a compact universe is called a singularity. The whole Universe compacted into a single point of energy.

- 2164 - The Universe is 13.8 billion years old. We know how fast it has been expanding. We know that the Universe is 31 % matter of which is only 5% is Ordinary Matter. We know that the other 23% matter is invisible Dark Matter that we know is there but we do not understand what it is. The rest is energy of some sort that remains another mystery that is creating and accelerating the expansion, we call it Dark Energy.

- 1680 - Cosmic Inflation theory assumes that everything started out as quantum fluctuations that got amplified into cosmic inflation. This is evidenced by systematic analysis down to 5-sigma accuracy and using two different modes of detection.

- 1824 - Today inflation is used to explain why space is flat. Flat meaning the universe has the critical density to just balance gravity pull and Dark Energy push.

- 1586 - The critical density variations of the cosmic background re 113,000 lightyears across.

- 1305 - Cosmic harmonics tell us that the Cosmic background radiation started 115,000 years before and ended 487,000 years after the Big Bang.

- 836 - The Hubble Constant of expansion is 49,000 miles per hour per million lightyears of separation.

- There are also several reviews about the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.

- September 30, 2020 2849

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

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

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--------------------- --- Thursday, October 1, 2020 ---------------------------

ELECTRON - defining the wave function?

--------------------------- 2845 - ELECTRON - defining the wave function?

- What is it that varies in the case of “matter waves“?

- The quantity whose variations make up matter waves is called the “wave function“. The value of the wave function associated with a moving body at the particular point x, y, z in space at the time t is related to the probability of finding the body there at the time.

- The wave function itself, however, has no direct physical significance. There is a simple reason why the wave function cannot be interpreted in terms of an experiment. The probability that something to be in a certain place at a given time must lie between 0 (the object is definitely not there) and 1 (the object is definitely there).

- An intermediate probability, say 0.2, means that there is a 20% chance of finding the object. But the amplitude of a wave can be negative as well as positive, and a negative probability, say 0.2, is meaningless. Hence the wavefunction cannot be an observable quantity.

- This objection does not apply to the square of the absolute value of the wave function, which is known as “probability density“. A large value wavefunction square means the strong possibility of the body's presence, while a small value means the slight possibility of its presence. As long as wavefunction square is not actually 0 somewhere, however, there is a definite chance, however small, of detecting it there. This interpretation was first made by Max Born in 1926.

- There is a big difference between the probability of an event and the event itself. Although we can speak of the wave function that describes a particle as being spread out in space, this does not mean that the particle itself is thus spread out.

- When an experiment is performed to detect electrons a whole electron is either found at a certain time and place or it is not; there is no such thing as a 20 percent of an electron. However, it is entirely possible for there to be a 20 percent chance that the electron be found at that time and place, and it is this likelihood that is specified by wavefunction square.

- If an experiment involves a great many identical objects all described by the same wave function, the actual density (number per unit volume) of objects at x, y, z at the time “t” is proportional to the corresponding value of wavefunction square.

- Compare the connection between the wavefunction and the density of particles it describes. Consider the formation of a double-slit interference by photons. In the wave model, the light intensity at a place on the screen depends on E² the average over a complete cycle of the square of the instantaneous magnitude E of the “em” wave's electric field.

- In the particle model, this intensity depends instead on Nhf, where N is the number of photons per second per unit area that reach the same place on the screen. Both descriptions must give the same value for the intensity, so N is proportional to E².

- If N is large enough, somebody looking at the screen would see the usual double-slit interference pattern and would have no reason to doubt the wave model. If N is small perhaps so small that only one photon at a time reaches the screen the observer would find a series of apparently random flashes and would assume that he is watching quantum behavior.

- If the observer keeps track of the flashes for long enough, though, the pattern they form will be the same as when N is large. Thus the observer is entitled to conclude that the probability of finding a photon at a certain place and time depends on the value of E².

- If we regard each photon as somehow having a wave associated with it, the intensity of this wave at a given place on the screen determines the likelihood that a photon will arrive there. When it passes through the slits, light is behaving as a wave does. When it strikes the screen, light is behaving as a particle does.

- The linear momentum, angular momentum, and energy of the body are other quantities that can be established from the wavefunction. The problem of quantum mechanics is to determine the wavefunction for a body when its freedom of motion is limited by the action of external forces.

- Wave functions are usually complex with both real and imaginary parts. A probability, however, must be a positive real quantity. The probability density (wavefunction square) for a complex wavefunction is therefore taken as the product wavefunction with its complex conjugate.

- The complex conjugate of any function is obtained by replacing i(√-1) by -i wherever it appears in the function. Every complex function can be written in the form:

------------------------ wavefunction= A+iB, where A and B are real functions.

------------------------ Wavefunction*= A-iB.

------------------------ Wavefunction square = A²-i²B² = A²+ B².

------------------------ Wavefunction square is always a positive real quantity, as required.

- Before we consider the actual calculation of the wavefunction, we can establish certain requirements it must always fulfill. For one thing, since wavefunction square is proportional to the probability density P of finding the body, the integral of wavefunction over all space must be finite ,the body is somewhere.

- If the integral is zero, the particle does not exist, and the integral obviously cannot be infinity and still mean anything . Furthermore, wavefunction square cannot be negative or complex because of the way it is defined. The only possibility left is that the integral be a finite quantity if the wavefunction is to describe a real body.

- It is usually convenient to have wavefunction square be equal to the probability density “P” of finding the particle described by the wavefunction, rather than merely be proportional to P.

- If the wavefunction square is equal to P, then it must be true that the integral of the wavefunction square from - ∞ to + ∞ equal to 1, since if the particle exists somewhere at all time. This wavefunction is said to be normalized. Every acceptable wave function can be normalized by multiplying it by an appropriate constant.

- This gets more complicated as we introduce more dimensions, but we will only consider an electron traveling in a line, in one dimension. The definite integral from a to b gives us the probability that the electron is in between points a and b. So given the wave function, the electron is most likely to be found at its tallest peak or its lowest trough, depending on which one is deeper.

- But how does this wave function define superposition? Put simply the wave function can be broken down into many states. Let's say an electron can have only two states: spin up, and spin down, two completely independent states.

- An interesting thing happens when the electron is observed. One of the probabilities drops to zero, and the other jumps up to one. This is called the "collapse" of the superposition. This is not only for this one case.

- In a scenario where the particle is in a superposition of 15 states, all other probabilities drop to zero except for a single one, which jumps to one. The wave function becomes something called a “delta function“, where it has a peak at the measured value, this is why after you take a single measurement of the state of a quantum particle, it will continue to show that same state if you measure it again and again and again.

- If you let the wave function settle back into its original waveform after a long time, it may give a different point. This means by measuring the particle, you directly alter the wave function.

- The wavelength of the function is the momentum of the particle. A longer wavelength implies a smaller momentum. The important thing to understand here is that for a particle where we know the momentum, the wavefunction square will be the same everywhere, and we will no longer have any idea as to where the particle is.

- When we know the position, the wavelength will always be different, and we will have no idea what the momentum is. This is called the “Heisenberg uncertainty principle“.

- Heisenberg uncertainty principle is inextricably linked to the wavefunction. But what is the function itself? Nobody knows. This is a mystery that's been unsolved for nearly a century. Nobody really knows what this function is, but we use it, nonetheless.

- This function has evaded understanding and there are definitely some theories out there as to what the function could be, but, nobody knows what this function is.

- I don’t know either. Here are some more reviews about electrons:

- 2557 - ELECTRON - just the fundamentals? The electron is the one fundamental particle that most affects our daily lives. It is responsible for all electricity, magnetism, chemistry and biology, to name a few. It was first identified as a particle in 1874.

- 507 - “What is an Electron. The Lorentz Factor”

- 730 - “ Antimatter”

- 1226 - there are 3 generations of electrons.

- 1652 - electrons are all round us.

- 2232 - what is the shape of an electron?

- 2373 - what is an electron?

- 2495 - electron’s best description imagined

- September 25, 2020 2845

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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

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--------------------- --- Thursday, October 1, 2020 ---------------------------

JimsAstronomy

Saturday, October 3, 2020

Index of recent reviews

FUSION - how does it work in the stars?

FUSION REACTOR - the dream of limitless electricity?

Friday, October 2, 2020

EXOPLANETS - CHEOPS - exploring other planets

Thursday, October 1, 2020

ELON MUSK - defines his battery?

COSMIC INFLATION- explaining the Big Bang?

ELECTRON - defining the wave function?

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