COSMIC RAYS - where do they come from?

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

----------------------  2858  -  COSMIC  RAYS  -  where do they come from?  

-  Cosmic Rays create these atmospheric crashes that rain down gigantic showers of secondary particles to the surface of our planet.  Despite being discovered more than a century ago, physicists still don’t know where cosmic rays come from. 

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-  The short answer to why we can’t trace cosmic rays back to their source is magnetic fields.  Charged cosmic-ray particles are redirected by the magnetic fields they pass through on their long journey through space.  As magnetic fields in space have local, small, randomly oriented structures, a prediction of the exact path of a cosmic-ray particle is impossible. 

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-  We do know that cosmic rays are comprised of extremely energetic charged particles ,  like protons, alpha particles, and atomic nuclei like helium and iron, with miniscule proportions of antiparticles thrown into the mix.

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-  It’s hard to imagine just how shocking the discovery of cosmic rays must have been to physicists in the early 1900s. The energies of these particles were monumental in comparison to those of every other particle they had observed until that point.

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-   The average energy of a solar “photon” is approximately 1.4 electron volts (eV). For reference, a flying mosquito has an energy of about 1 trillion eV, or 10^12 eV, but a mosquito is also much, much larger than a single particle. Meanwhile, an alpha particle emitted during the decay of Uranium-238 possess 4.27x10^6 eV of energy (or, 4,270,000 electron-volts)

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-  Compare that to a cosmic ray “proton“, which has an energy of some 10^20 eV.

Imagine a proton that is accelerated so that it has an energy of 100 Joule.  This energy corresponds to that of a tennis ball smashed with a velocity of around  124 miles per hour. Only, the tennis ball 10^29 times heavier than the proton. 

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-  That means a proton can only reach that extreme, macroscopic energy by traveling at almost the speed of light. The universe must be able to accelerate particles to these energies, but we still do not know how it does it.  The processes that accelerate cosmic rays to such astounding energies must result from powerful and violent events, which considerably narrows down possible sources.

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-  One of the best ways of accelerating particles is a shock front that occurs when a medium with a large velocity runs into a slower one, producing a shock, a sudden change in the properties of the medium.  In the case of the universe, the changed properties are velocity and density, and even magnetic fields. The field becomes highly turbulent in that process. And the combination of a shock front with turbulence is a great particle accelerator.

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-  What could produce such a shock front? One likely suspect is supernovae. As a shell of shocked material blasted away from an exploding star, it hits the cool interstellar medium that lies between stars, almost like a cosmic tsunami.  The phenomena of a traveling shock front can also be found in active galaxies, where huge plasma jet exist.

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-  A better understanding cosmic rays, as well as their origins, is expected to open an important window into tremendously powerful and awe-inspiring cosmic events, such as supernovae and collisions between black holes and neutron stars. 

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-  It was August 1912 when Austrian-American physicist Victor Hess began a series of flights to the upper atmosphere in a hydrogen-filled balloon equipped with an electroscope. His aim was to take measurements of ionizing radiation. 

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-  At the time, it was widely believed that radiation from the Earth itself was responsible for this phenomenon of knocking electrons off atoms. Should this be the case, however ionization should be strongest near the planet’s surface.

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-  That’s not what Hess found.  Hess discovered something startling. At a nosebleed-inducing altitude of 3.3 miles, ionization rates of the air were three times that measured at sea level. He concluded that the source of this ionization was not coming from below our feet, but instead from above.

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-   Further measurements made during a solar eclipse also showed the Sun wasn’t the source of this ionization radiation.

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-  During the course of seven balloon trips, Hess discovered cosmic rays , later confirmed and named by Robert Millikan in 1925 , coming from beyond our solar system.  While the detection of cosmic rays has been associated with balloon flights ever since, the upper atmosphere isn’t the most convenient laboratory to investigate the high-energy particle collisions they produce.

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-  To study the collisions caused by cosmic rays, particle physicists retreated below ground, employing increasingly monstrous particle accelerators to slam together particles in an attempt to replicate the collisions that cosmic rays spark in the upper atmosphere. 

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-  CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is 16-mile circumference deep tunnel beneath the French/Swiss border. despite its impressive size, power and utility, the LHC still can’t reach the energies produced by cosmic ray collisions.

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-  At roughly the same time as a balloon ride changed our perspective of the universe forever, a physicist named Einstein was working on a wild theory that would radically change our understanding of the fabric of space-time. And this theory, many decades later, could provide the next step to decoding cosmic rays.

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-  The discovery of gravitational waves , ripples in space-time predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity,  has made a new form of astronomy possible, allowing us to investigate events and objects that we could never hope to observe in the electromagnetic spectrum alone.

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-  This combination of electromagnetic or “traditional” astronomy and gravitational-wave detections, along with detecting neutrinos, which are ghost-like particles with virtually no mass or electric charge, is known as multi-messenger astronomy. And it has a significant role to play in future investigations of cosmic rays, and, the high-energy universe.

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-  There is no other way than multi-messenger astronomy to understand the origin and impact of cosmic rays. Cosmic rays alone cannot give an answer, neither can gamma-rays or neutrinos for themselves.

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-  The hope is that we can answer the question of the origin of cosmic rays within the next decade. This sounds like a long time, but given the fact that cosmic rays were discovered in 1912, 10 years is short.  Let’s keep working.

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----------------------------------  Other Reviews about cosmic Rays:

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-  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 ). 

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-  2739  -  COSMIC  RAYS  -  new discoveries?  -  A lot of what we know about the Standard Model of Nature’s fundamental particles came from studying Cosmic Rays.  All ordinary matter that we know is made of Leptons and Quarks.  Cosmic Rays are mostly protons that are made up of 3 Quarks

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

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

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

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

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-  1747 -  Compares Cosmic Rays and Gamma Rays.  Adding up the power of Cosmic Rays leads to 10^29 megawatts, or  billion times the power of the Sun’s output.   This review footnotes 11 other Reviews about Cosmic Rays.  

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-  1659  -  Cosmic Rays can take tens of million so years traveling at near light speeds in their magnetically twisted spiral paths to reach Earth.

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-  1624  -  Most Cosmic Rays pass through Earth without touching anything.   How powerful are Cosmic Rays?  How often do they reach Earth?  What new discoveries have discovered the source of the high energy Cosmic Rays?

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-  1568  -  Cosmic Rays hit air molecules and create a shower of billions of electrons, muons, positrons, pions, etc.

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-  1496  -  90% of Cosmic Rays reaching Earth’s surface are protons.  About 10 of them pass through your thumb every minute.

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-  1377  -  Astronauts experience much higher bombardment of Cosmic Rays 5,000 hit their body every second.

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-  810  -  an average body absorbs enough Cosmic Ray energy to equate to 2 chest X-rays per year.

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-  709 -  the risks of space travel.

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-  386 - Gamma Rays and Cosmic Rays

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-  October 10, 2020                                                                              2858                                                                                                                                              

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

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

--------------------- ---  Sunday, October 11, 2020  ---------------------------

NUCLEAR FUSION - what is happening with nuclear energy?

 -  2857  -  NUCLEAR  FUSION  -  what is happening with nuclear energy?  Fission reactors have been shut down because of the problems with disposing of the radioactive waste.  Fusion reactors solve this problem.  These reactors split water into hydrogen and oxygen to get hydrogen for fuel and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere which is a good thing.  

---------------  2857  -  NUCLEAR  FUSION  -  what is happening with nuclear energy?    

-  What makes this so difficult?  A teenager can do it.  Well, the trick is that it takes more energy going in that is coming out.

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-  For example, a teenager holds the new Guinness World Record for the youngest person to achieve fusion, a feat that he pulled off when he was just 12 years old.

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-  His tiny reactor uses electricity to smash deuterium together, producing helium and an energetic neutron.  This teen genius at a U.S. middle school has built a working, tiny nuclear fusion reactor, and made it into Guinness World Records “just hours” before his 13th birthday.

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-  Using electricity to accelerate two atoms of deuterium together so they fuse into an atom of helium-3, releasing a neutron, which can be used to heat up water and turn a steam engine, which in turn produces electricity.

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-  Will this compact reactor finally deliver fusion?  There are some key definitions and points to keep in mind here. Oswalt is industrious and obviously very bright young boy, but he’s just one of a thriving community of homemade fusion makers. Remember the college student who tried to sell an almost-ready-to-use fusion reactor to pay his college tuition?

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-  These reactors are fun and exciting, but they use far more energy than they replace, compared with the commercial power fusion projects aiming for fusion that outpaces the energy put into them. Nuclear fusion can never be a power source unless it well exceeds the energy required to reach and sustain fusion.

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-  At just 12 years old, Oswalt beat the previous world record by a full two years. He joins a running list of “fusioneers” who have achieved fusion at home.

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-  Fusioneers have accomplished goals ranging from winning a school science fair to earning a $75,000 college scholarship, which really shows how you have to choose your fusion audience carefully.

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-  An MIT- and startup-designed fusion reactor could be testing in four years and online within 10.  The scientists say this ambitious timeline is a result of careful, transparent planning, not handwaving.

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-  Researchers are collaborating on a new “compact” fusion reactor that could feasibly be built and go online much faster than existing fusion reactor concepts.

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-  Construction of a reactor, called “Sparc“, is expected to begin next spring and take three or four years.  Next comes phases of testing and then, if the reactor reaches productive fusion, a long process of designing and building a power plant. 

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-  The world's largest fusion reactor begins assembly as NASA found another way into nuclear fusion.  “Sparc” scientists learned some lessons from groups developing the current generation of small fission reactors as well as those with their eyes on next-generation fission, improving materials and shrinking costs.

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-  A traditional ‘tokamak” like “ITER” uses a gigantic magnetic field to contain the extraordinarily hot plasma. “Sparc“, meanwhile, uses a newer electromagnet technology, with high temperature superconductors that can produce a much higher magnetic field.

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

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-  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.

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-  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.

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-   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 fussy containment. The promise of almost limitless power for almost limitless time is what keeps people searching.

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-  There are also major and inherent downsides. 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. 

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-  Sparc has made headlines for being very transparent about what, when, and how the team behind the reactor is doing things. While that creates higher expectations, it also has the potential to build more interest and trust

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

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-  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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-  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.

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-   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.   

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-  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.

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-   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.

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- 2434 -  NUCLEAR ENERGY  -  Nuclear Energy is ready for a comeback in the US after 30 years in dormancy.  The US does not have the money, not the expertise, not the engineers, not the teachers but other nations do and we are teaming up to make a nuclear comeback

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-  2245  -Nuclear Reactors  -  The UK and France are in a major shift out of nuclear power and into renewable energy sources like wind and solar.  Here is where they are with this transition in 2019.

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-  2231  -  NUCLEAR  ENERGY  -   the dark side.  Thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel are in temporary storage in 35 US states, with no permanent solution in the works. Experts now show how to end this status quo.  Will Congress listen?    This review presents the dark side of nuclear power in the US, nuclear waste.

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-  2225  -  Nuclear Energy is the only large scale, cost effective energy source that will reduce greenhouse emissions.  Wind and Solar will help, but they can not supply the huge baseload of power needed.  Coal, nuclear, or hydroelectric are left.  Natural gas will be expensive.  Hydroelectric is at capacity and can not be expanded.  Nuclear becomes the only viable option to substitute for coal.

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-  701  -  Nuclear energy is ready for a come back in the US.  The 400 plants in the world will grow to 568 by 2020.

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-  689  Nuclear terrorism potential is evaluated.  There was over 3,600,000 pounds of nuclear material spread around the world in 2006

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-  636 -   Iran enriches uranium.

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-  October 10, 2020                                                                              2857                                                                                                                                                

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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 10, 2020  ---------------------------

UNIVERSE - creation in seven “days“?

 -  2856  -  UNIVERSE  -  creation in seven “days“?   The broadly accepted theory for the origin and evolution of our universe is the Big Bang model, which states that the universe began as an incredibly hot, dense point roughly 13.7 billion years ago.  How did the universe go from being fractions of an inch  across to what it is today?

 

---------------------------  2856  -  UNIVERSE  -  creation in seven “days“?    

-  It took quite a bit more than seven “days” to create the universe as we know it today.  But, that depends how the bible defines what a “day’ is?  What if a “day” stood for 1 billion years instead 1/360 th of a year?

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- This “day” began with a  Big Bang.  It was not an explosion in space. It was the appearance of space everywhere in the universe.  According to this Big Bang theory, the universe was born as a very hot, very dense, single point in space.

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-   From observations of the “cosmic microwave background‘, which contains the afterglow of light and radiation left over from the Big Bang, we have clues as to how it all began. This background radiation pervades the universe and is visible to microwave detectors, which allows scientists to piece together clues of the early universe.

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-  In 2001, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) began studying the conditions as they existed in the early universe by measuring radiation from the cosmic microwave background. WMAP was able to determine the age of the universe to be 13.7 billion years old.

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-  When the universe was very young, like a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, it underwent an incredible growth spurt. During this burst of expansion, which is known as “inflation“, the universe grew exponentially and doubled in size at least 90 times.  2^90 is a very large number!

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-  The universe was expanding, and as it expanded, it got cooler and less dense.  After inflation, the universe continued to grow, but at a slower rate. As space expanded, the universe continued to cool and matter formed.

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-  Light chemical elements were created within the first three minutes of the universe's formation. As the universe expanded, temperatures cooled and protons and neutrons collided to make deuterium, which is an isotope of hydrogen. Much of this deuterium combined to make helium.  Hydrogen and helium were the expanding gas in the early universe

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-  For the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, however, the intense heat from the universe's creation made it essentially too hot for light to shine. Atoms crashed together with enough force to break up into a dense, opaque plasma of protons, neutrons and electrons that scattered light like fog.  These are the three elements of the first neutral atom.

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-  About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, matter cooled enough for electrons to combine with nuclei to form these neutral atoms. This phase is known as "recombination," and the absorption of free electrons caused the universe to become transparent. The light that was unleashed at this time is detectable today in the form of radiation from the cosmic microwave background.

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-  The era of recombination was followed by a period of darkness before stars and other bright objects were formed. Roughly 400 million years after the Big Bang, the universe began to come out of its dark ages. This period in the universe's evolution is called the age of “re-ionization“.

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-  This dynamic phase was thought to have lasted more than a 500 million years, but based on new observations, scientists think re-ionization may have occurred more rapidly than previously thought. 

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-  During this time, clumps of gas collapsed enough to form the very first stars and galaxies. The emitted ultraviolet light from these energetic events cleared out and destroyed most of the surrounding neutral hydrogen gas. 

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-  The process of re-ionization, plus the clearing of foggy hydrogen gas, caused the universe to become transparent to ultraviolet light for the first time.

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-  Astronomers comb the universe looking for the most far-flung and oldest galaxies to help them understand the properties of this early universe. Similarly, by studying the cosmic microwave background, astronomers can work backwards to piece together the events that came before. 

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-  Data from missions like WMAP and the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), which launched in 1989, and the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990, all help scientists try to solve the most enduring mysteries and answer the most debated questions in cosmology.

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-  Our solar system is estimated to have been born a little after 9 billion years after the Big Bang, making it about 4.6 billion years old. According to current estimates, the Sun is one of more than 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone, and orbits roughly 25,000 light-years from the galactic core.

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-  The Sun and the rest of our solar system was formed from a giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust known as the solar nebula. As gravity caused the nebula to collapse, it spun faster and flattened into a disk. During this phase, most of the material was pulled toward the center to form the Sun. 

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-  In the 1960s and 1970s, astronomers began thinking that there might be more mass in the universe than what is visible. Vera Rubin, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, observed the speeds of stars at various locations in galaxies.

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-  Her calculations using basic Newtonian physics should imply that stars on the outskirts of a galaxy would orbit more slowly than stars at the center, but Rubin found no difference in the velocities of stars farther out. In fact, she found that all stars in a galaxy seem to circle the center at more or less the same speed. 

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-  This meant that the galaxy was surrounded by more mass.  This mysterious and invisible mass became known as “dark matter“. Dark matter is inferred because of the gravitational pull it exerts on regular matter. 

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-  One hypothesis states the mysterious stuff could be formed by exotic particles that don't interact with light or regular matter, which is why it has been so difficult to detect.

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-  Dark matter is thought to make up 23 percent of the universe. In comparison, only 4 percent of the universe is composed of regular matter, which encompasses stars, planets and people.

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-  In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble made a revolutionary discovery about the universe. Using a newly constructed telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles, Hubble observed that the universe is not static, but rather is expanding.

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-  In 1998, the space telescope named after the famous astronomer, the Hubble Space Telescope, studied very distant supernovas and found that, a long time ago, the universe was expanding more slowly than it is today. This discovery was surprising because it was long thought that the gravity of matter in the universe would slow its expansion, or even cause it to contract. 

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-  “Dark energy” became the theory to explain this.  It is thought to be the strange force that is pulling the cosmos apart at ever-increasing speeds, but it remains undetected and shrouded in mystery. The existence of this elusive energy, which is thought to make up 73 percent of the universe, is one of the most hotly debated topics in cosmology, the science to explain the universe

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-  While much has been discovered about the creation and evolution of the universe, there are enduring questions that remain unanswered. Dark matter and dark energy remain two of the biggest mysteries, but cosmologists continue to probe the universe in hopes of better understanding how it all began.

-

-  It took quite a bit more than seven days to create the universe as we know it today.  A new paradigm for understanding the earliest eras in the history of the universe uses techniques from an area of modern physics called “loop quantum cosmology“.

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-  The scientists now have extended analyses that include quantum physics farther back in time than ever before, all the way to the beginning. The new paradigm of loop quantum origins shows, for the first time, that the large-scale structures we now see in the universe evolved from fundamental fluctuations in the essential quantum nature of "space-time," which existed even at the very beginning of the universe over 14 billion years ago. 

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-  This new paradigm provides a conceptual and mathematical framework for describing the exotic "quantum-mechanical geometry of space-time" in the very early universe. The paradigm shows that, during this early era, the universe was compressed to such unimaginable densities that its behavior was ruled not by the classical physics of Einstein's general theory of relativity, but by an even more fundamental theory that also incorporates the strange dynamics of quantum mechanics. 

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-  The density of matter was huge then, 10^94 grams per cubic centimeter, as compared with the density of an atomic nucleus today, which is only 10^14 grams / cc.

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-  In this bizarre quantum-mechanical environment,  one can speak only of probabilities of events rather than certainties, physical properties naturally would be vastly different from the way we experience them today.

-

-   Among these differences, are the concept of "time," as well as the changing dynamics of various systems over time as they experience the “fabric of quantum geometry”. 

-

-   No space observatories have been able to detect anything as long ago and far away as the very early eras of the universe described by the new paradigm. But a few observatories have come close. 

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-  Cosmic background radiation has been detected in an era when the universe was only 380,000 years old. That period of rapid expansion was called "inflation".   The universe  burst out into a much-diluted version of its earlier super-compressed self.

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-   At the beginning of inflation, the density of the universe was a trillion times less than during its infancy, so quantum factors now are much less important in ruling the large-scale dynamics of matter and geometry.

-

-  Observations of the cosmic background radiation show that the universe had a predominantly uniform consistency after inflation, except for a light sprinkling of some regions that were more dense and others that were less dense. 

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-  The standard inflationary theory for describing the early universe, uses the classical-physics equations of Einstein and treats space-time as a smooth continuum.  The inflationary theory has had remarkable success in explaining the observed features of the cosmic background radiation.

-

-  Yet this model is incomplete. It retains the idea that the universe burst forth from nothing in a Big Bang, which naturally results from the inability of the paradigm's general-relativity physics to describe extreme quantum-mechanical situations.  The quantum theory of gravity, like loop quantum cosmology, goes beyond Einstein in order to capture the true physics near the origin of the universe.

-

-  When scientists use the inflation paradigm together with Einstein's equations to model the evolution of the seed-like areas sprinkled throughout the cosmic background radiation, they find that the irregularities serve as seeds that evolve over time into the galaxy clusters and other large-scale structures that we see in the universe today. 

-

-  Amazingly, the new loop-quantum-origins paradigm with its quantum-cosmology equations, found that fundamental fluctuations in the very nature of space at the moment of the Big Bounce evolve to become the seed-like structures seen in the cosmic microwave background.

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-  The genesis of the cosmic structure of our universe from the inflationary epoch all the way to the Big Bounce, covering some 11 orders of magnitude in the density of matter and the curvature of space-time.  That is 10^11 power!

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-  Cosmic inflation explains why the universe is billions of years old, as well as why the universe is nearly flat. The theory's conclusions about how the universe should look match observations by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

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-  But is inflation the only model that can explain the beginnings of the universe? But, other possibilities would require strange physics, such as a speed of sound faster than the speed of light.

-

-  Science has found only three kinds of early universe theories that can explain the distribution of matter in today's universe, assuming that the standard theory of gravity is correct and that the universe was expanding in early times.

-

-  According to the physicists' calculations, viable early universe theories must incorporate either an accelerated cosmic expansion (inflation); a speed of sound faster than the speed of light; or energies so high that scientists would need to invoke a theory of quantum gravity such as string theory, which predicts the existence of extra dimensions of space-time.

-

-  The theory of inflation turns out to be the only way to do it within the context of standard physics," with formulating the idea for the study.   Inflation doesn't require any exotic physics. It's just standard particle physics.

-

-  Cosmic inflation accounts for the distribution of the matter in the universe by incorporating quantum field theory, which states that under "normal" circumstances, particles of matter and something called antimatter can pop into existence suddenly, before meeting and annihilating each other almost instantly.

-

-  According to cosmic inflation, materializing pairs of matter and antimatter particles flew apart so quickly in the rapidly expanding early universe that they did not have time to recombine. The same principle applied to gravitons and antigravitons, which form gravity waves.

-

-  These particles became the basis of all structure in the universe today, with tiny fluctuations in the matter in the universe collapsing to form stars, planets and galaxies. 

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-  Obviously we still have more to learn,  Keep studying.  Always remain in school.  

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-  October 8, 2020                                                                              2856                                                                                                                                                

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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 9, 2020  ---------------------------

VENUS - our sister planet.

 -  2855  -  VENUS  -  our sister planet.    Venus is our next door neighbor in the Solar System.  It is about the same size as Earth, 82% in mass but 95% in diameter, 7,521 miles versus Earth’s 7,926 mile diameter.  Venus is closer to the Sun at 72% of the Earth-Sun distance.  You would think that Venus would have many more similarities with Earth, but the truth is it could not be much different.  Venus is the brightest, hottest, deadliest, second closet planet to the Sun.

---------------------------  2855  -  VENUS  -  our sister planet.    

-  Venus is our sister planet.  But a weird sister she is  Venus is the second planet from the Sun and is an oddity in many ways.

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-  On June 5, 2012, we saw a ultra-rare transit of Venus, in which the planet passed in front of the sun as seen from Earth. The planet Venus completed its transit across the Sun’s diameter in 6 hours and 40 minutes.  We have learned a lot more about the planet Venus.  Here are some of the interesting facts:  

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-  There are more volcanoes on Venus than on any other planet in the solar system. Astronomers know of more than 1,600 volcanoes on its surface, but there are likely many more too small for us to see. Scientists think most of these are dormant, though a handful may still be active.

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-  A day on Venus lasts 243 Earth days.  That is how long it takes Venus to make one rotation, while a year on Venus, its revolution period around the sun is shorter, at just 224.7 Earth days.

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-  Of all the solar system's planets, Venus is the closest to a twin of Earth. The two bodies are nearly of equal size, and Venus' composition is largely the same as Earth's. The orbit of Venus is also the closest to Earth's of any solar system planet. Both worlds have relatively young surfaces, and both have thick atmospheres with clouds.  However,  Venus' clouds are mostly made of poisonous sulfuric acid.

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-  Venus is scorching hot.  Because the bulk of its atmosphere is made of carbon dioxide, an extreme greenhouse effect is warming the surface of Venus. Temperatures there can reach a scorching 870 degrees Fahrenheit.  That is hot enough to melt lead.

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-  The air pressure on the surface of Venus is extreme, about 90 times higher than the pressure at sea level here on Earth. In other words, the pressure on Venus is about the same as the water pressure on Earth about half a mile under the ocean.

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-  Venus is rare among the planets in that we can see it cross in front of the sun. Only Venus and Mercury do this from the vantage point of Earth. Venus transits occur rarely, with pairs separated by eight years coming around less than once a century.

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-  While Venus is not nearly the largest planet of the solar system, its proximity to Earth makes it the brightest of the planets in the sky. It  qualifies as the second-brightest object in the nighttime sky, after only the moon.

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-   Venus has been a target of observation for millennia.  The ancient Babylonians tracked its wanderings through the sky in records that date as far back as 1600 BC. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras was the first to discover that the brightest stars in the morning and evening sky were in fact the same object, Venus.

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-  Winds swipe across Venus at super-fast speeds that can reach 450 miles an hour in its middle cloud layer. These Venusian winds are faster than the speediest tornado on Earth.

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-  Venus has phases.  Because Venus orbits the sun within Earth's orbit, the planet appears to have phases like the moon. When Venus is on the opposite side of the sun, it is in full phase, while it appears in new phase when it is between the Earth and the sun.  The first person to witness these phases was Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1610

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-----------------  There are several other reviews about Venus if u r interested:

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-  2735  - VENUS  -  explain its strange rotation ?   Venus is unique in our Solar System because it is what’s known as a “super-rotator“.  That means that Venus’ atmosphere rotates faster than the planet itself. Only Saturn’s moon Titan has the same characteristic.

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-   2246  -  Venus our sister planet.  What is it really like there?  What are the “gravity waves”  spotted in its upper atmosphere?  Could Venus ever have had conditions that could support life?  Could this tell us about the likelihood of finding life on similar bodies like these exoplanets?  What is the history and the math used to study the planet next door?  

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-  1873  -  Venus and Mercury.   Space probes to the inner planets have brought us new knowledge of the Solar System formation.  Like expected new knowledge has brought new mysteries to solve.

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-   1778  -  Venus must have some resurfacing hiding many old crater scars. Mars and Venus, our Sister Planets.  Mars has become a cold, dry desert with an ultra-thin atmosphere.  Venus has turned itself inside-out with intense heat and an ultra-thick atmosphere.  Earth is in the middle.

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-  1729  -  Walk with Venus on a Starry night . Compare the differences from Earth

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-  1706  -  January 2015 watch for Mercury and Venus, low in the western sky.  These two planets could not be more different.  Try this review for comparisons.

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-  1480   - June 5, 21012, Venus will pass in front of the Sun.  Use it to calculate the distance to Venus.    Venus has not crossed the face of the Sun since 1882. It did last time in 2004.  Then the transit across the Sun again in 2012, June 5th.  We are fortunate in the U.S. to be on the sun-facing side when this happens.  The Venus transit will not happen again until 2117, someone needs to take notes for me.  I will miss this one.

-  1368  -  Venus is our  nearest planet.  Next to the Moon it is the brightest object in the night sky.  Its reflective clouds make it the brightest in reflecting sunlight.  A property called “albedo” , or, reflectivity.  The Reflectivity of Earth is 29%.  The reflectivity of the Moon is 12%.  The reflectivity of Venus is 75%.

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-  1176   -  Since April 11, 2006, the ESA, European Space Agency, has had a spacecraft orbiting Venus, “Venus Express“.  The data collected  from this and other missions paints a far different picture:  The clouds are not water clouds, they are sulfuric acid clouds.  The atmosphere is not like ours with nitrogen and oxygen but almost entirely carbon dioxide:

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---------------  Earth:   77% nitrogen,  21% oxygen.

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--------------  Venus:   96% carbon dioxide ,   3% nitrogen

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-  945  -  Venus greenhouse effect.

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-  817  -  Venus mysteries.  Venus is our next door neighbor in the Solar System.  It is about the same size as Earth, 82% in mass but 95% in diameter, 7,521 miles versus Earth’s 7,926 mile diameter.  Venus is closer to the Sun at 72% of the Earth-Sun distance.  You would think that Venus would have many more similarities with Earth, but the truth is it could not be much different.  Venus is the brightest, hottest, deadliest, second closet planet to the Sun.

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-  587  -  Venus is tilted just 3 degrees from perpendicular.  It takes 163 days to reach our sister planet, the second rock from the Sun, and it should arrive in April, 2006.  Venus is the third brightest object in the Sky following the Sun and the Moon.  It is also called the evening star and the morning star.  

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- It is our sister planet because it is so close, formed at the same time and about the same size.  Venus diameter is 7,521 miles, Earth is 7,926 miles, a difference barely the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles.  Venus is 5 *10^24 kilograms and Earth is 6*10^24 Kilograms, 81.5% the mass of the Earth .  But Venus is different:

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-  1480  -  Learn how to calculate the Venus transit of the Sun.  It happened in 2012.  The transit took 67 hours on June 12.  The next transit is in 2117.   These transit measurements were first made in 1761, then again in 1769 making a calculation for the Earth - Sun distance to be 93,726,000 miles.  Today our precise measurement is 92,955,000 miles.

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-  October 7, 2020                                                                              2855                                                                                                                                                

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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 9, 2020  ---------------------------

MILKY WAY GALAXY - learn more about our home?

 -  2854 -  MILKY  WAY  GALAXY -  learn more about our home?   The satellite “Gaia” has truly revolutionized the study of the Milky Way. It ushered in “galactic archaeology“, a discipline that searches for evidence of past galactic events in the characteristics and behavior of the stars and stellar populations.  

------------------  2854 - MILKY  WAY  GALAXY -  learn more about our home?   

-  On a clear night you can see the Milky Way Galaxy stretching across the night sky.  The center of the galaxy is located jut above the spout of the teapot, the constellation Sagistarius on the southern horizon.  

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-  The mission for Gaia is reconstructing the Milky Way’s evolution to the past and future over billions of years. The Milky Way is a galactic cannibal.  Astronomers have suspected since the 1990s that the Milky Way was born out of collisions between smaller galaxies that had taken place over the billions of years of its history.

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-   Earth-based telescopes, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, provided first hints of the galaxy’s violent past, but it wasn’t until Gaia that astronomers could really deconstruct the processes that led to the creation of the Universe that surrounds us.

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-  In 2018 astronomers discovered that a group of 30,000 stars moves in a synchronized way through the neighborhood of the Sun in the opposite direction to the rest of a sample of seven million stars.  This atypical motion pattern matched what the scientists had previously observed in computer simulations modeling galactic collisions and mergers.

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-  These stars also stood out in the “Hertzsprung-Russell diagram“, which compares the color and brightness of stars, indicating that they come from a different stellar population, that is from another galaxy.

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-  The stars, which now form part of the Milky Way’s  inner halo and the outer layer of the galactic disc, must have originated from another galaxy. This galaxy, since nicknamed Gaia-Enceladus, must have collided with the Milky Way some 10 billion years ago. 

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-  About the size of one of the Magellanic Clouds which  are two satellite galaxies roughly ten times smaller than the current size of the Milky Way, Gaia-Enceladus smashed into and was gradually devoured by the Milky Way, which was at that time only four times bigger than Gaia-Enceladus.

- 

-   In 2019, astronomers discovered in the Gaia data a signature of another collision with a smaller galaxy, since then nicknamed “Sequoia“, which had hit the Milky Way’s galactic disc not long after Gaia-Enceladus.

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-   Gaia has also shed light on the interactions with the dwarf galaxy “Sagittarius“, which has been orbiting around the Milky Way’s core for billions of years.  Discovered in the 1990s, Sagittarius contains only a few tens of millions of stars, compared to the Milky Way’s hundreds of billions, which makes it 10,000 times less massive than the Milky Way.

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-   As the Milky Way’s gravity pulled Sagittarius closer, the smaller galaxy started smashing through the Milky Way’s disc. That happened at least three times in the past, some five or six billion years ago, two billion years ago, and one billion years ago. 

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-  With each collision, the Milky Way stripped stars from Sagittarius, leaving the dwarf galaxy smaller and smaller. Eventually, Sagittarius will be completely devoured by the Milky Way. Yet, the dwarf has a profound effect on its larger cannibal.

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-   In the wake of each Sagittarius’ crash through the Milky Way’s disc, stars formation in the galaxy accelerated. In fact, one of those periods roughly coincided with the formation of our Sun and the Solar System some 4.7 billion years ago.

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-  Each collision caused ripples in the interstellar medium, like a rock thrown into water. As a result, the concentration of gas and dust in some areas of the Milky Way increased to the level that triggered more star formation.

-  After this initial violent epoch of star formation, partly triggered by an earlier merger, the Milky Way had reached a balanced state in which stars were forming steadily.  The galaxy was relatively quiet. Suddenly, Sagittarius fell in and disrupted the equilibrium, causing all the previously still gas and dust inside the larger galaxy to slosh around like ripples in water.

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-  Further research of this data calculated the true size and brightness of millions of stars observed by Gaia. From the information about the size and brightness, astronomers could deduce the age of individual stars. The study concluded that star formation in the Milky Was had been declining since its formation until about five billion years ago when it suddenly ramped up.

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-  Up to half of the total mass of all the stars ever created in the Milky Way’s thin disk, which contains most of the Galaxy’s stars, was produced during this period.  It now appears that without the “in fall” of the relatively small Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, the Milky Way would have looked very different today and would have had much fewer stars.

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-   Before Gaia, astronomers were limited in their attempts to study the structure of the Milky Way. They knew that the Milky Way was a spiral galaxy, a pancake-like disc of stars with a pattern of spiral arms rotating around a much denser core.

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-  The spiral arms are areas of densely packed gas and stellar matter that appear, when observed in other galaxies, in bluer shades than the rest of the disc, which indicates the hotter temperature of the stars within them. Since hot stars are massive stars and since massive stars are young stars, astronomers can tell that spiral arms are areas where stars are being formed.

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-  The Sun is located in one of the two smaller arms, named the Orion arm, some 26,000 light years away from the Milky Way’s center, completing one rotation around the center in about 230,000,000 years.

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-  In January 2020 patterns in the density of stars in the Milky Way were compared to those with previously identified.  There are several theories for spiral-arm structure formation.  Many astronomers believe that spiral arms are short-lived structures caused by some sort of gravitational instability and that they disappear within a couple of rotations and then re-emerge with some different pattern.

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-  Spiral arms do not contain the same stars throughout their billions years of existence. Spiral arms are like traffic jams, areas where stars concentrate while waiting to squeeze through some sort of a bottleneck.  Stars are moving out at the front but the traffic jam stays because stars are piling up at the back.

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-  In addition to these main structures, research based on Gaia data has revealed that the entire disc of the galaxy is alive and moving in many different ways and directions as a result of the various forces that act within the galaxy. 

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-  The Milky Way is constantly being disturbed by other bodies, dwarf galaxies and stellar clusters, that orbit around it. These interactions leave lasting imprints on the Milky Way, which can be observed hundreds of millions of years later. 

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-  In 2018, astronomers found millions of stars following a snail-shape position and motion pattern in the Milky Way’s disc. Their calculations revealed that this ripple was most probably a result of one of the past collisions with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy.

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-  The periodic collisions with Sagittarius are believed to have had a profound effect on how stars move in the Milky Way. Some even claim that the 10,000 times more massive Milky Way’s trademark spiral structure might be a result of the crashes with Sagittarius.

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-  The Milky Way is also constantly stripping stars from dwarf galaxies and stellar clusters with which it interacts. Astronomers have identified streams of stars ripped from these bodies that frequently stretch over distances of thousands of light-years, covering a large portion of the sky.

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-  Data about such streams can help astronomers assess the gravitational force and therefore the mass distribution of the Milky Way and hence reveal how galaxies acquire stars.

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-  Gaia has also found stars in the Milky Way’s disc that are traveling at such high speeds that they might be able to escape the galaxy’s gravitational pull or might have been expelled from other galaxies and subsequently captured by the Milky Way.

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-  Of the seven million Gaia stars with full 3D velocity measurements, some twenty stars could be traveling fast enough to eventually escape from the Milky Way.  But rather than flying away from the galactic center, most of the high-velocity stars seem to be racing towards it.

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-  It is possible that these intergalactic interlopers come from the Large Magellanic Cloud, a relatively small galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, or they may originate from a galaxy even further away.

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-   Stars can be accelerated to high velocities when they interact with a supermassive black hole.  The presence of these stars might be a sign of such black holes in nearby galaxies. But the stars may also have once been part of a double-star system in another galaxy, flung towards the Milky Way when their companion star exploded as a supernova.

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-  If these stars do come from other galaxies, they would carry the imprint of their place of origin. They could provide unique insight into distant universes that otherwise would be much more difficult to study.

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-  The astronomers, however, admit that these sprinting stars could be native to our Galaxy’s halo, accelerated and pushed inwards through interactions with one of the dwarf galaxies that fell towards the Milky Way during its build-up history. 

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-   A star from the Milky Way halo is likely to be fairly old and mostly made of hydrogen, whereas stars from other galaxies could contain lots of heavier elements.  Looking at the colors of stars tells us more about what they are made of.

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-    In 2019, scientists discovered that interstellar gas clouds in the Sun’s galactic neighborhood form a 9,000 light-years long wave that undulates about 500 light-years above and below the galactic disc. The 400 light-years wide wave is part of what astronomers describe as the “Local Arm“, a small spiral arm of the Milky Way close to the Sun.

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-  Interstellar gas clouds interest researchers because they give birth to stars when they collapse. Prior to the 2019 discovery, it was believed that such clouds in the solar neighborhood are concentrated in the so-called Gould Belt, a ring of young stars, gas, and dust which arches above and below the galactic plane.

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-  The Sun lies only 500 light-years from the wave at its closest and almost appears as if it is surfing it. In fact,  the Sun crossed the wave only some 13 million years ago and will cross it again and again in the future.

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-  The scientists do not know what caused this unexpected, undulating shape. A past collision with a massive body,  a dwarf galaxy, could be a possible explanation but further studies and more Gaia data are needed to really get a good understanding.

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-  In any case, the findings challenge astronomers to revise theories about the distribution of gas in the Sun’s neighborhood.

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-  The Milky Way is also our home and you should learn more about it. 

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------------------------------  Other Reviews available;

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- 2655  -  MILKY  WAY  - our home in the cosmos?  -   This center of the Milky Way is located in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, the “Teapot” group of stars low in the southern sky.  The exact center is located just above the spout of the teapot.  The center bulge would be much, much brighter if we could see through the enormous dust cloud of intergalactic dust that lies between us and the center.

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-  2411 -  Our Milky  Way, the Galaxy that is  our home.  It is an awe-inspiring place full of stars, supernovas, nebulas, energy and dark matter.  But, many aspects of it remain mysterious, even to scientists.   

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-  2325  -  Calculating Milky Way’s Black Hole.  Black Holes are both simple and complex.  We can calculate their mass, radius, lifetime, energy consumption using simple algebra.  At the same time, their immense gravity causes space to bend, lengths to shorten, time to slow and mass to increase.  

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-  2324   -   MILKY  WAY  -  how to explain its rotation?  This Review is about new things we are learning about our own Milky Way Galaxy.  What is mysterious is that what we learn seems to defy the physics that we think we know.  Certainly our solar system’s planets are rotating with different physics than stars in our galaxy or other galaxies.  What’s going on?  What are we missing?

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-   2057  -  Our closest galaxy, not the Andromeda Galaxy.  -  The Andromeda Galaxy is our closest large spiral galaxy.  The closest small galaxies are a formation that is actually within the Milky Way itself.  These are dwarf galaxies that we’ve only known about the last ten years.  The closet known galaxy in the Milky Way is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy.   

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-   1919  -  How did planets form?  Theory is that gas and dust orbiting the star (our Sun) coalesced and multiple collisions created little planets ( planetesimals) that with further collisions created the large planets.  Stars form into galaxies much the same way.

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-  1889  -  Evolution of the galaxies  Computer modeling and new extensive observations of our Milky Way Galaxy are telling us a story of galactic creation.  The greatest mystery still is the you are here learning about it.

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-  1804  -  Placing 1,000 Milky Ways end for end spans 100 million lightyears which is the size of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies.

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-  1703  -  Many of the dwarf galaxies that were swallowed up by the Milky Way have left streams of stars stretching across the sky.

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-  1526  -  The galaxy center is like a pin ball machine.

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-  1492  -  The diameter of the bulge at the center of the galaxy is 8,000 lightyears.

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-  1348  -  During the time it took light from 13.7 billion lightyears to reach us the Universe has grown to 45 billion lightyears.

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-  1337  -  The gas falling into the Blackhole at the center emits 50 times more energy than hydrogen-helium fusion would.  This review lists 8 more earlier reviews about the Milky Way Galaxy

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-  October 6, 2020                                                                              2854                                                                                                                                                

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

-----  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, October 6, 2020  ---------------------------

ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE - how did we get here?

 -  2853  -  ANTHROPIC  PRINCIPLE  -  how did we get here?  The simple fact of our existence can guide us towards understanding what certain parameters that govern our Universe must actually be, but only if we stick to what’s scientifically measurable, at least in principle.

--------------------  2853  -  ANTHROPIC  PRINCIPLE  -  how did we get here?   

-  You are reading this.  You did get here.  But how?  Some aspects of our Universe appear to be objectively true for everyone, while others are dependent on the actions and properties of the observer.  It is a mystery we are still trying to figure out. Our universe is constrained by the necessity that it allows your existence.

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- Although the scientific process, combined with our experiments and observations, have uncovered many of the fundamental physical laws and entities that govern our Universe, there’s still much that remains unknown. 

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-   Descartes was able to reason, “I think, therefore I am,” the fact of our existence, the fact that “we are”, has inevitable physical consequences for the Universe as well. 

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-  Rene Descartes, 1596-1650, was a French philosopher and mathematician.  He concluded that everything was open to doubt except conscious experience and existence as a necessary condition of this.  Here’s what the simple fact that we exist can teach us about the nature of our reality.

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-  If the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning, What was It?  Time isn’t just another dimension.  The Universe has a set of governing rules, and we’ve been able to make some sense of at least some of them. We understand how gravity works at a continuous, non-quantum level and by matter and energy curving spacetime and by that curved spacetime dictating how matter and energy move through it. I am not saying I understand these rules.

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-  We know a large portion of the particles that exist from the Standard Model and how they interact through the three other fundamental forces, including at the quantum level.

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-   And, we know that we exist, composed of those very same particles and obeying those very same laws of nature.

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-  We exist as observers, here and now, within the Universe, and therefore the Universe is compatible with our existence at this particular location in spacetime.  

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-  Our Universe, including the fundamental parameters which it depends on, must exist in such a way that observers such as ourselves could exist within it at some point.  I know, seems to be stating the obvious!

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-  These statements above are known, as the “Weak Anthropic Principle” and the “Strong Anthropic Principle“. They can enable us to draw incredibly powerful conclusions and constraints about what our Universe is like.

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-  Think about these facts, all together. The Universe has parameters, constants, and laws that govern it. We exist within this Universe. Therefore, the sum total of everything that determines how the Universe works must allow for creatures like us to come into existence within it.

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-  This seems like a set of simple, self-evident facts. If the Universe were such that it was physically impossible for creatures like us to exist, then we would never have come into existence. If the Universe had properties that were incompatible with any form of intelligent life existing, then no observers like us could be here..

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-  But we are here. We exist. And therefore, our Universe does exist with such properties that an intelligent observer could have possibly evolved within it. The fact that we are here and that we actively engage in the act of observing the Universe implies  the Universe is wired in such a way that our existence is possible.

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-  That is the essence of the Anthropic Principle.

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-  It doesn’t seem like this statement should be controversial. It also doesn’t seem like it teaches us very much, at least on the surface. If we start to look at a variety of physical puzzles that the Universe has presented to us over the years, we start to see just how powerful an idea it can be for scientific discovery.

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-  The fact that we are observers made of atoms and that many of those atoms are carbon atoms, tells us that the Universe must have created carbon in some fashion. The light elements, like hydrogen, helium, and their various isotopes, were formed in the early stages of the Big Bang. The heavier elements are formed in stars of various types throughout their lives.

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-  In order to form those heavier elements, there must be some way to form carbon, the sixth element in the periodic table. Carbon, in its most common form, has 6 protons and 6 neutrons in its nucleus. If it’s formed in stars, there must be some way to form it from the other elements that already exist in stars: elements like hydrogen and helium.   But, the numbers don’t work out.

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-  We know the mass of carbon-12, and the masses of the helium and hydrogen nuclei that are so abundant in the stars. The easiest way to get there would be to take three independent helium-4 nuclei and fuse them all together simultaneously. 

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-  Helium-4 has two protons and two neutrons in its nucleus, so it’s easy to imagine that fusing three of them together would give you carbon-12, and hence could create the carbon we need in our Universe.

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-  However, three helium nuclei, combined, are too massive to efficiently produce carbon-12.  When two helium-4 nuclei fuse together, they produce beryllium-8 for just 10^-16 seconds, before it decays back to two helium nuclei. Although occasionally a third helium-4 nucleus could get in there if the temperatures are high enough, the energies are all wrong for producing carbon-12; there’s too much energy. The reaction just wouldn’t give us enough of the carbon our Universe needs.

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- Physicist Fred Hoyle understood how the anthropic principle worked, and realized that the Universe needed a pathway to make carbon from helium. He theorized that if there were an excited state of the carbon-12 nucleus, at a higher energy that was closer to the rest mass of three helium-4 nuclei combined, the reaction could occur.

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-   This nuclear state, known as the Hoyle State, was discovered just five years later by nuclear physicist Willie Fowler, who also discovered the triple-alpha process that formed it, just as Hoyle predicted.

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-   At another time the anthropic principle was successfully applied was to the puzzle of understanding what the vacuum energy of the Universe is. In quantum field theory, you can try to calculate what the energy of empty space is: known as the zero-point energy of space. If you were to remove all the particles and external fields from a region of space, no masses, no charges, no light, no radiation, no gravitational waves, no curved spacetime, etc. , you’d be left with empty space.

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-  But that empty space would still contain the laws of physics in them, which means that it would still contain the fluctuating quantum fields that exist everywhere throughout the Universe.

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-   If we try and calculate what the energy density of that empty space is, we get an absurd value that’s far too high: so large that it would cause the Universe to have recollapsed just a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. The answer we get from doing that calculation is wrong.

-

-   So what’s the right value, then? Although we still don’t know how to calculate it, today, physicist Stephen Weinberg calculated an upper limit on what it could possibly be back in 1987, making astonishing use of the anthropic principle. 

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-  The energy of empty space determines how quickly the Universe expands or contracts, even apart from all the matter and radiation within it. If that expansion (or contraction) rate is too high, we could never form life, planets, stars, or even molecules and atoms within the Universe.

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-  If we use the fact that our Universe has galaxies, stars, planets, and even human beings on one of them, we can place extraordinary limits on how much vacuum energy could possibly be in the Universe. Weinberg’s 1987 calculation demonstrated that it must be at least 118 orders of magnitude, that is, a factor of 10^118,  smaller than the value obtained from quantum field theory calculations.

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-  When dark energy was empirically discovered in 1998, we got to measure that number for the first time: it was 120 orders of magnitude (a factor of 10^120) smaller than the naïve prediction. Even without the necessary tools to perform the calculations needed to obtain the answer, the anthropic principle got us remarkably close.

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-  In 1986, John Barrow, co-wrote a prominent book with Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. They redefined the anthropic principle as the following two statements:

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---------------------  The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probably but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exists sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirement that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so.

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---------------------  The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in history.

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-  Although these statements might seem equivalent on the surface to the prior ones, they add up to something very different. Instead of contending that “our existence, as observers, means that the Universe’s laws must allow observers to possibly exist,” we now have “the Universe must allow carbon-based, intelligent life, and that hypothetical Universes where that life does not develop are not permitted.”

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-  This  controversial reframing of the anthropic principle takes us from demanding that the Universe must not make it impossible for observers to exist, because we do, to mandating that a Universe where intelligent observers do not arise cannot be allowed. If that sounds like an enormous leap of faith that is not supported by either science or reason, you’re not alone. 

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-  The Universe, as it exists, was designed with the goal of generating and sustaining observers.  Observers are necessary to bring the Universe into being.  An ensemble of Universes with different fundamental laws and constants are necessary for our Universe to exist.

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-   You don’t have to look far to find untrue claims that the anthropic principle does any or all of the following: supports a multiverse, provides evidence for the string landscape, requires we have a Jupiter-like gas giant to protect Earth from asteroids, and to explain why Earth is 26,000 light-years away from the galactic center. 

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-  What is true is that we do exist, the laws of nature exist, and some of the great cosmic unknowns can be legitimately constrained by the facts of our existence. In that sense alone, the anthropic principle has scientific value. But as soon as we start speculating about relationships, causes, or phenomena that we cannot detect or measure, we leave science behind.

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-  The simple fact of our existence can guide us towards understanding what certain parameters that govern our Universe must actually be, but only if we stick to what’s scientifically measurable, at least in principle.  Hard to wrap your head around these ideas, that seem obvious.  A contradiction, right?

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---------------------------------------  Other Reviews for you:

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-    2558  -  ANTHROPIC  PRINCIPLE  -  if the universe was any different we would not be here to witness it. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, only gravitation matters. The Universe expands at the rate it does throughout its history for two reasons alone: our laws of gravity and all the forms of energy that exist in the Universe. If things were slightly different from how they actually are, we wouldn't exist.

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-  2512  -  ANTHROPOLOGY  -  who‘s your daddy?  Theory has it that your Daddy came out of Africa 2,500,000 years ago.  Some primitive stone tools have been found on an island 240 miles off the coast of Yemen that are 2,600,000 years old.  Another theory based on discoveries in Georgia , Russia, indicate that Homo-Erectus may have migrated to Asia and then back to Africa where the first Homo-Sapiens evolved. 

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-  October 4, 2020                                                                              2853                                                                                                                                                

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

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

--------------------- ---  Monday, October 5, 2020  ---------------------------

HYDROGEN FUEL - can we get it from sea water?

 -  2852  -  HYDROGEN  FUEL  -  can we get it from sea water?  -  Hydrogen is an ideal fuel if we could harvest it from sea water.  There is plenty of sea water easy to get. And, when you burn hydrogen that turns back into water again.  A perfect cycle.  A breakthrough into splitting water into its parts, hydrogen and oxygen,  could make renewable energy pay off, even when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

--------------------  2852  -  HYDROGEN  FUEL  -  can we get it from sea water  

-  Hydrogen is an ideal fuel if we could harvest it from sea water.  There is plenty of sea water easy to get. And, when you burn hydrogen that turns back into water again.  A perfect cycle.  

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-  A breakthrough into splitting water into its parts, hydrogen and oxygen,  could make renewable energy pay off, even when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

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-  When solar and wind power is available we could use it for “water splitting“.  Electrolysis is a process that uses electricity to split H2O into hydrogen and oxygen.  We could then store the energy in the form of hydrogen fuel.

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-  Currently the most popular system used for water splitting, or water electrolysis, relies on precious metals as catalysts.  Recent research has developed a system that uses less expensive and more abundant materials as catalysts.  This new system uses a nickel-iron based catalyst, which is much cheaper, but the performance is comparable.

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-  Most water splitting today is conducted using a piece of equipment called a “proton exchange membrane water electrolyzer“, which generates hydrogen at a high production rate. It is expensive, and works under very acidic conditions, requiring precious metal catalysts such as platinum and iridium as well as corrosion-resistant metal plates made of titanium.

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-  The research team worked to solve this problem by splitting water under alkaline, or basic, conditions with an “anion exchange membrane electrolyzer“. This type of electolyzer does not need a catalyst based on precious metals. This catalyst is based on nickel and iron, elements that are less expensive and more abundant in the environment.

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-   The electrode binder is a hydroxide conducting polymer that binds catalysts and provides a high pH environment for fast electrochemical reactions.  This system has boosted the hydrogen production rate to nearly ten times the rate of previous anion exchange membrane electrolyzers, making it comparable with the more expensive proton exchange membrane electrolyzer.

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-  About 10 million metric tons of hydrogen are currently produced in the United States every year, mostly by using natural gas in a process called “natural gas reforming“. Hydrogen produced from a water splitting process that is powered by electricity from renewable energy holds many economic and environmental benefits.

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-  The global hydrogen generation market is expected reach $199.1 billion by 2023. Potential markets for hydrogen energy include everything from mass energy conversion and power grid management to fuel cells for cars. There are approximately 600 wind farms in the United States ready for direct connections to water electrolysis systems

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-  The power of the sun, wind and sea may soon combine to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuel. 

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-  This new method for "sea water splitting" could make it easier to turn wind and solar energy into a storable and portable fuel.  Hydrogen is a great fuel, but you have to make it.  

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-  The only sustainable way to do that is to use renewable energy and produce it from water. You also need to use water that people do not want to use for other things, and that would be sea water. So, the holy grail of producing hydrogen would be to combine the sea water and the wind and solar energy found in coastal and offshore environments.

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-  Despite the abundance of sea water, it is not commonly used for water splitting. Unless the water is desalinated prior to entering the electrolyzer, an expensive extra step, the chloride ions in sea water turn into toxic chlorine gas, which degrades the equipment and seeps into the environment.

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-  To prevent this, a new process inserts a thin, semi -permeable membrane that was originally developed for purifying water in the reverse osmosis (RO) treatment process. The RO membrane replaced the ion-exchange membrane commonly used in electrolyzers.

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-  The RO process put a really high pressure on the water and push it through the membrane and keep the chloride ions behind.

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-  In an electrolyzer, sea water would no longer be pushed through the RO membrane, but contained by it. A membrane is used to help separate the reactions that occur near two submerged electrodes, a positively charged anode and a negatively charged cathode, connected by an external power source. 

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-  When the power is turned on, water molecules start splitting at the anode, releasing tiny hydrogen ions called protons and creating oxygen gas. The protons then pass through the membrane and combine with electrons at the cathode to form hydrogen gas.

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-  With the RO membrane inserted, seawater is kept on the cathode side, and the chloride ions are too big to pass through the membrane and reach the anode, averting the production of chlorine gas.

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-  In water splitting other salts are intentionally dissolved in the water to help make it conductive. The ion-exchange membrane, which filters ions by electrical charge, allows salt ions to pass through. The RO membrane does not.

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-  Sea water can be converted into hydrogen fuel using this design for a sea water electrolyzer  RO membranes inhibit salt motion, but the only way you generate current in a circuit is because charged ions in the water move between two electrodes.

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-  Recently, the researchers received a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue investigating sea water electrolysis. 

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-  The world is looking for renewable hydrogen.  Saudi Arabia has planned to build a $5 billion hydrogen facility that is going to use sea water. Right now, they have to desalinate their sea water for agriculture and drinking water.  

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-  October 4, 2020                                                                              2852                                                                                                                                                

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

-----  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, October 5, 2020  ---------------------------