Yo, Brian Stelter!

When I was a kid, I got nicknamed “Bald Eagle” because I actually was getting notably thin “up there.” Of course today “Bald Eagle” might be a cool nickname, but in Junior High School, it definitely was not a cool thing.

Fast forward to today, and now here I am over twenty years older than you are, and even in spite of that poor start, I have better hair than you do.

And I am not a piss-guzzling, shit-gobbling communist “journalist” (what a sick joke) either.

On both accounts you must absolutely hate looking into the mirror.

And Oh By The Way probably more people read my physics posts than watch you bloviate on air.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.

Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.

I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

Given the results of Tuesday’s elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.

This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you piece of rancid weasel shit?

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

While We Wait…and Wait…and Wait, for The Storm

Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is called the Pastoral symphony, because its theme was a day spent in the country. The fourth (of five) movements depicts a storm, and is subtitled ‘Thunder Storm.’

The fifth is subtitled “Shepherds’ Song. Happy and Thankful Feelings after the Storm (Allegretto).” The fifth movement is the first thing I listened to on Thursday before Thanksgiving as it appeared that the wretched “poo flu” was finally going away. (It finally was gone a day later.)

Beethoven’s Fifth (dah dah dah daaaaah….) and Sixth symphonies both premiered at the same concert on 22 December, 1808 in Vienna. The entire four hour program was filled with new Beethoven music, conducted by Beethoven himself. It’s an almost infamous moment in music history as the whole thing bordered on being a fiasco. The orchestra was lackluster, and one of the other vocal pieces suffered by being sung by a teenager with stage fright. The original performer had quit after Beethoven insulted her. Fellow composer Antonio Salieri (the same Salieri depicted so unfavorably [and unjustly so] in Amadeus) was holding a benefit concert the same day, and he and Beethoven nearly had a falling out over the schedule conflict.

Purism Phones–Do NOT Purchase

I know for quite some time I have been looking forward to the Purism smart phone, entirely open source with hardware kill switches for the camera, mike and other things. They’re basically Linux boxes with call capability. I’ve touted them on this site. I now wish I had not.

Alas they have been slow coming onto the market, and their main page says “Shipping Now” (for the USA version of the phone.

The implication is that if you order your phone it will be shipped soon.

Multiple people, me among them, have been waiting over half a year for the phone that is “shipping now” and, candidly, I don’t expect ever to receive it. Unfortunately the fine print in their order policy says you can’t get a refund until they’re ready to ship the phone. So I am out the money as well.

I don’t expect anyone ordering today will get their phone any faster.

I can no longer recommend this company, even though I’m happy with the laptop they sold me three years ago. Their technical people are solid; their sales/web people, on the other hand…

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1774.20
Silver $22.61
Platinum $940.00
Palladium $1900.00
Rhodium $14,850.00

This week, 3 PM MT on Friday, markets closed for the weekend

Gold $1,783.20
Silver $22.27
Platinum $950.00
Palladium $1,852.00
Rhodium $14,800.00

At the end of the week: not a lot of movement this time, and all in different directions.

Part XXX (and the last)
Acceleration! Surprise!

A couple of go-backs and review

This is a video I should have included a couple of weeks ago.

Especially starting at 1:43, this is of interest because it lets you see how a nearly-uniform early universe “clumped up” over time. You focus on the same volume of space, and your field of view expands with the universe, so what you are looking at is basically the same matter following the history of the universe.

The filaments and lumpy areas contain millions of galaxies.

This is a computer simulation, of course, but at the end they compare it to what we actually see when we survey the universe. It’s a pretty close match, so this simulation (unlike climatological models) is probably pretty close.

(Even though the simulation has a much, much bigger physical scope, the system is mathematically a lot simpler than a good climate model should be.)

And some reminders:

The critical density is the overall density of the universe that would be necessary for space to be flat (large triangles–and I mean large triangles, millions or billions of light years in extent–have inside angles that total to 180 degrees). Higher than this, and those triangles have total angles higher than 180 degrees, lower than that, the angles are less. Generally this gets set up in such a way that 1 equals the critical density and you’ll often see a ratio quoted. Judging from the matter and dark matter we are able to detect, the density is Ω = 0.3; i.e., the universe is at 0.3 times the critical density.

Energy also makes a contribution since it is equivalent to mass. But in our current universe, there is far more mass than there are photons, once you do the conversion. We live in a matter-dominated universe. Once upon a time, it was actually dominated by photons. But when the universe doubles in size, the amount of matter per cubic meter is 1/8th what it was before (because the volume is 2x2x2=8 times as much). But the same thing happens to the photons, when you count photons. But, because their wavelengths have stretched, each individual photon is now half as energetic as it was before, so the amount of energy from photons is 1/16th what it was before. If you run that tape backwards, and go back far enough, eventually photons dominate over matter.

The critical density also determines the ultimate fate of the universe. If Ω > 1, the universe’s expansion will eventually halt, reverse, and there will be a “big crunch” at some point in the future.

If Ω < 1, the universe will continue to expand forever, and the expansion velocity will always exceed zero. At time infinity the expansion velocity will still be some positive number.

If Ω = 1 exactly, as time goes to infinity the universe expands slower and slower, and the speed of the expansion will go to zero at time infinity.

(These cases are analogous to a rocket being fired at less than, greater than, and exactly at escape velocity.)

The cosmic redshift, Z, of some galaxy or galaxy cluster, will be some number greater than zero. It’s directly related to the ratio of the size of the universe back when that galaxy emitted the light we are now seeing, and the size today (which is set to 1). [See part 27] If a galaxy’s redshift is Z=1, then just add one to that number (getting…let me see here…where’s my calculator? Ah!) 2, and you know that today’s universe is twice the size it was when that galaxy emitted the light, or alternatively, it was 1/2 the size then that it is now.

OK, now on to new stuff.

The Quest to Plot the History of the Universe

I mentioned recently that actually plotting Hubble’s Constant versus time has been an important preoccupation of astronomers and cosmologists.

As it sits right now, near our own galaxy space seems to be expanding at 70 kilometers per second, per megaparsec distant from here. Galaxies one megaparsec away are receding at 70 km/sec, those two megaparsecs away are receding at 140 km/sec, and so on. That’s the speed due to the expansion of space itself, the so called “comoving speed.” Galaxies might also have some additional velocity because they’re gravitationally attracted to some other galaxy; this is how it is that M-31, the “Andromeda Galaxy,” is actually moving towards us (and will collide in about 5 billion years, about the same time CNN finally broadcasts a truthful news story, probably by mistake).

This was actually used, for a while, as the next rung on the cosmic distance ladder. If you couldn’t see any Cepheid variables in a galaxy because it was just too darn far away, you could measure its redshift, compute its velocity, and divide by Hubble’s Constant, and get a rough estimate of how far away the galaxy is.

The problem is, no one actually thinks the Hubble Constant is, well, constant. They usually call it the Hubble Parameter, and its current value is labeled H₀ to denote “Hubble’s Parameter right now.”

It’s expected that it was higher in the past, and will drop in the future, because the galaxies all attract each other, which puts the brakes on the expansion. One of the big questions has been whether the galaxies will eventually stop receding, then reverse and start coming back together into a Big Crunch, or whether their speed will reach zero as the separation reaches infinity (just barely not a Big Crunch, like being exactly at escape velocity), or whether there’s extra speed and the galaxies will always be moving apart from each other.

So if we can measure the red shift (easy–in fact it’s the only easy thing to measure), and the distance to the galaxy, we can determine what H was back then, or equivalently, be able to plot the scale factor versus time.

What we know to start with is the scale factor of the universe (by definition, it’s 1) and today’s Hubble parameter. And the time can be set to 0, arbitrarily. Negative times are times in the past, positive times, are in the future.

We can set up a graph like this and plot the one point we know on it and (since the Hubble parameter is a rate of expansion) the slope of the line it’s on, right now:

But now we don’t know what the rest of the line is.

If the density of the universe is Ω>1, the slope should decrease rapidly in the future (and should have decreased up until now, quite rapidly); we can draw a notional line for that case, and as you can see the universe expands (distances between galaxies increase) up to some time in the future, then it shrinks again. But this line must cross through our one known point representing the present time and present size of the universe; and where it crosses through our point it has to be at the same slope.

We can add two more lines for Ω = 1 and Ω < 1. And even a third for Ω = 0, in which case the expansion rate is constant–the same as our original slope. In all three cases the conditions for “now” have to match what we actually see.

One thing to notice–the faster the universe’s expansion is slowing down, the closer in time to today was when the universe had zero size…in other words, the more recent was the Big Bang.

In other words if we can plot the scale factor versus time, we know how old the universe is and we find out what the Hubble parameter was at different times in the past…and because we will now know for certain what Ω is, we can extrapolate into the future.

Although we can currently see back to fairly low scale factors, we don’t know where in time those scale factors are, so we don’t know the shape of the line we want to plot.

And in order to know the time, we need to measure the distance. Because, with light carrying the image, the distance is proportional to how long ago the light was emitted. A galaxy a billion light years away is being seen as it was a billion years ago–and the redshift it has represents the universe’s scale factor, a billion years ago. This is called the lookback time and it directly correlates with distance.

So we need, for every galaxy, a scale factor and a lookback time.

The scale factor relates easily to the redshift, and the red shift is easy to measure.

Lookback time relates easily to distance, but distance is, as I said a few weeks ago, a cast iron bitch to measure. For very distant galaxies, all of the methods I’ve mentioned so far are useless. Even the Cepheid variables are unusable, because at those distances they’re too faint to pick out from the rest of the galaxies they are in. (And simply extrapolating the current Hubble parameter–well, that’s the gross approximation we’re trying to replace.)

We need a new standard candle, one much brighter than a Cepheid variable.

Once we have that, we can fill in the lines, and it’s pretty much expected it will look like the green, blue, or purple lines.

As it happens, we do have a brighter “standard” candle, but it’s rare and evanescent. If one is in a galaxy now, it’ll be gone in a year and it might be decades before another one appears in that galaxy.

The Other Kind of Supernova

A few weeks ago I talked about supernovas. Specifically, I talked about core collapse supernovas–ones that result from a large star finally losing its battle against gravity as it begins trying to fuse iron to generate energy–and it turns out that reaction consumes energy.

But those aren’t the only type of supernova. There are two major types and core collapse supernovas are actually labeled Type II. What’s Type I, then?

Consider a binary star. One of the stars is a white dwarf–basically a star smaller than or maybe just a little bit larger than the sun, having run out of hydrogen and helium, now shrunken down into a very dense ember that will take billions of years to finally cool off.

The other star is, perhaps, a red giant, because it’s a star that hasn’t quite reached the end of its life…yet.

The outer layers of the red giant may very well be so close to the white dwarf that the white dwarf strips them away and adds that material to itself.

The only problem is, there’s an upper limit to how massive a white dwarf can be; about 1.44 times the mass of the sun. (This isn’t quite the same thing as Chandrasekhar’s limit, but it is related.)

If enough matter gets pulled into the white dwarf, it could cross that limit. A star that exceeded that limit in the first place would have become a neutron star (or perhaps even a black hole if it really busts that limit). In this case, though, it’s a bit different and what ends up happening is a large proportion of this “dead” white dwarf suddenly undergoes a chain reaction and the gas from the other star, plus the carbon and oxygen already in the white dwarf, fuses.

All at once.

There’s a big explosion, known as a “Type Ia Supernova.” (That’s supposed to be a Roman numeral I. Sans serif fonts can be stupid sometimes.)

It turns out that every Type Ia supernova is identical in brightness. If you see two of them, and one looks a quarter as bright as the other, you know that the fainter one is twice as far away. Also, they follow the same luminosity curve. So even if you don’t catch it at its brightest, you can watch it fade for a while match that curve to part of the full curve for a Type Ia, and then figure out how bright it had been.

(And I need to be clear, you can tell from the spectrum what kind of supernova it is–no one will mistake a Core Collapse for a Ia.)

And a supernova of either type can outshine the galaxy it’s in. Very easy to see, as easy as the galaxy is.

So if we look at a galaxy and happen to catch a Type Ia supernova in progress, we can measure the distance to that galaxy by measuring the brightness of the supernova, and match that distance with the redshift.

As I indicated before, though, these are fairly rare occurrences; any particular galaxy might not have a Type Ia supernova for decades. But for our purposes, we don’t need to measure every galaxy’s distance, just a representative sample of them.

And there are a lot of galaxies. The usual estimate (based on the Hubble Deep Space Field, a photograph taken by Hubble where it simply “stared” at one part of space for months, to bring up even the faintest objects in that direction) is 100 billion galaxies that we can see from Earth. I’ve even seen some articles go ten times higher to an even trillion.

What we want to do, then, is hunt for Type Ia supernovae in distant galaxies, and use those to get a distance and redshift reading for those galaxies. We do this by photographing thousands upon thousands of galaxies, then going back later to look at them again. If we see a new “star” there, it is a candidate supernova. Further observation will hopefully establish it’s a Type Ia supernova.

This project was undertaken by two separate teams in the 1990s. When they spotted a Type Ia supernova, they’d look again a while later to see how much the supernova had dimmed. They could then figure out what part of the fading of the supernova they were witnessing, and know how bright it had been originally.

Here’s just one example.

Often when they show pictures of a supernova, there will be two arrows pointing to it, added in post-processing, so they often joke that all you have to do is look for arrows in the sky to find one.

The two teams were the High-Z Supernova Search Team led by Brian Schmidt and Nicholas P Suntzeff, and the Supernova Cosmology Project led by Saul Perlmutter.

The rivalry was friendly.

Both teams were actually glad the other team was doing the same thing; they would thereby serve as a check for each other. But that doesn’t mean the wanted the other team to be first.

In 1998, Adam Reiss from the High Z Supernova Search Team published his team’s results; and shortly after that, the other team published as well.

Was the expansion of the universe slowing down rapidly, indicating that we’d end up in a Big Crunch someday (Ω>1)? Was it expanding in such a way that it’d never quite slow down to zero, indicating the amount of “stuff” in the universe was at the critical density (Ω=1)? Or did it have excess energy and would never slow down to zero (Ω<1)?

Scientists were fairly confident that Ω=1. Because we seem to be close to that value by every measurement ever made, and calculations indicated that we had to have been much, much closer to 1 in the distant past. At some point, if Ω really is 0.3 now, in the distant past it would have been Ω=0.99999999999. Why would it not just be at 1.0 in the first place?

Well, thanks to those two teams, we know the shape of the curve. And the answer is:

None Of The Above

Surprise!!!

(This is why we check theory against reality, folks!)

The expansion of the universe is accelerating. And has been for a few billion years. Before that, it was indeed slowing down, but now, some unknown factor was becoming more prominent and starting to give the universe a big push.

Here’s what’s actually going on, shown in red:

This was very, very surprising, to say the least.

(This is, by the way, the sort of moment a good scientist lives for: finding something totally unexpected that forces a re-evaluation.)

Something is pushing the universe apart, something that became dominant over gravity a few billion years ago.

What is that something?

We don’t know.

That doesn’t stop us from giving it a name, and that name is “Dark Energy.”

We know it’s some form of energy. And we believe that it’s absolutely, uniformly distributed throughout space.

And we know that when we add it all together, its total mass-equivalent is 0.70 Ω.

Which means Ω = 1.0 and space is flat…which is what we’ve been measuring. So even though the blue curve isn’t right…we have the Ω value it was supposed to match with.

So now we know, at a very high level, what the universe is made of. About 70% Dark Energy, 25% Dark Matter, and 5% ordinary matter and photons.

That means that we really don’t have even the most basic understanding of 95% of the stuff in the universe!

Science is far from done with this!

Notice something else too: With that history, the universe is slightly older than it would have been otherwise. That solves the nagging problem of those old globular clusters that turn out to be older than the universe was thought to be. And so now the best figure for the age of the universe is now: 13.787±0.020 billion years.

And there are a couple of other nagging problems that are neatly solved by this, which is why it’s pretty much accepted by astrophysicists and cosmologists today, even though it was a total “WTF!!” when it was first announced.

So what does the future hold? The universe will continue to expand. Eventually, many billions or even trillions of years from now, future astronomers will only be able to see the local group of galaxies. Those are gravitationally bound to each other and therefore don’t move apart as space expands.

Some speculate that the repulsion is going to grow stronger and stronger as the universe expands, so that the local group will get ripped apart, then the individual galaxies, then even stars and planets…and perhaps even molecules, atoms and nucleons, and that those last few phases will happen very quickly when they do get here. This is called the “big rip” but I hasten to remind any reading this, that it is speculative.

We’d sure like to know what Dark Energy actually is. Then we could at least speculate more intelligently.

Some think it might be “vacuum energy,” energy inherent in quantum fluctuations in even totally empty space. The only problem is when we try to calculate how much vacuum energy there ought to be, it’s something like 10¹¹² joules per cubic meter. Which is to say 10⁴⁶ times more energy than has been released by all the stars in all of the galaxies throughout the entire history of the universe so far (note: that’s from a quick back-of-the envelope calculation I did, but I shouldn’t be off by more than a factor of a billion–puny by comparison to these numbers). Whereas dark energy, whatever it is, would have to be about 10^-8 joules per cubic meter to fit what we are seeing.

That’s only an error of a factor of 10¹²⁰, which I will write out, The theory gives a value for vacuum energy

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

times as high as it “ought” to be, to fit dark energy. This seems to just about everyone to indicate that the theory of vacuum energy might need to be polished just a bit, since it is even more wrong than Critical Race Theory.

There’s an idea of something called “quintessence” which would be a sort of energy inherent in vacuum, though the amount of it per cubic meter is allowed to change over time. (It’s absolutely uniform at any given time, but that amount can change with time.)

And finally, there’s Einstein’s cosmological constant, which he called his greatest mistake ever. Maybe not!

Einstein used the Greek letter Λ (capital lambda–that’s not an A, and if it was, it’d be missing the crossbar) to represent this constant, and he used it as a “fudge factor” to prevent the universe from collapsing when he first tried to apply general relativity to the whole universe. That’s because everyone back in the late 1910s thought the universe was static. Hubble and Lemaitre had not yet discovered the universe was expanding under the impetus from the Big Bang.

Even if dark energy doesn’t turn out to be Einstein’s cosmological constant, it’s often symbolized by Λ anyway.

Since Λ is uniform per cubic meter of space, and space is growing, the total amount of Dark Energy is increasing as the universe expands. The total amount of matter remains the same (though it gets spread thinner and thinner), and the energy in photons is actually decreasing with time. So it stands to reason that at some point dark energy becomes dominant, and indeed it already has since it is already over half of the stuff in the universe.

So we have a universe which consists of dark energy and cold dark matter (cold because dark matter moves a lot slower than the speed of light). The ordinary matter we are made of is insignificant by comparison.

The model is called the ΛCDM (“Lambda Cee Dee Em”) model.

And now for my editorial comment: Λ will be uniformly spread throughout space. When we find out what it is, it probably won’t be very complicated. Cold dark matter will likely be more complicated, but not very complex in structure; after all it only reacts weakly. (That is a double meaning: it reacts weakly in the usual sense, and it also reacts with the weak nuclear force.) Regular old matter, on the other hand, has a vast variety of structures. That is, after all, what chemistry and more broadly, material science is all about, and of course you are made of it too. So the complexity will probably turn out to be almost entirely in that 5 percent of the universe that is “ordinary” matter.

Where To From Here?

I’ve brought us up to the present day. Yes, this is the last part of the “physics posts,” at least so far as the historical approach goes. If you’re still with me, go buy the “I survived SteveInCO’s Deplorable Physics Posts” bumper sticker. (If on the other hand, you just scrolled over them…you ain’t earned it! No stolen valor, please!)

Theoretical physicists are trying to figure out what dark matter and dark energy are. On the dark matter front, they’re trying to come up with coherent predictions of new particles, everything from string theory to supersymmetry and even membrane theory. All of this is entirely speculative; nothing has been detected, and many of the theories aren’t even refined enough to make a prediction that can be checked.

And dark energy, being much more recently noticed, is completely off the wall.

Which is not to say that absolutely nothing has happened since 1998. But it’s stuff I’ve already covered, like the top quark and the Higgs boson.

How about astrophysics? Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope and various very large telescopes on Earth (Palomar is still doing excellent work, despite being built in the mid 20th century–what a feat of engineering–but it has plenty of company now, much larger telescopes using adaptive optics to cancel out the turbulence of our own atmosphere), we can see things thirteen billion light years away–just barely. Why no further? Ideally we’d like to get back past those last six or seven hundred million years, maybe see back to shortly after the Cosmic Microwave Background, which was a mere 300-400 thousand years after the big bang.

Because further away than about ten billion light years, things become so red-shifted that we do not see any visible light at all; it has all been stretched to infrared wavelengths. If you have infrared sensors, this can be dealt with, but there are enormous practical problems that limit what can be done.

Visible light has wavelengths 380-800 nanometers (billionths of a meter). The short wavelength/high frequency light looks violet, the longer/low frequency light looks red. The cosmological red shift at extreme distances pushes all of the light from galaxies out past 800 nanometers.

Hubble’s sensors can’t see anything longer than about 2400 nanometers, and earth’s atmosphere blocks things at that wavelength, so we’re currently limited as to how far into the infrared we can see. If we want to see the very oldest galaxies, and better yet, the individual big stars that we think formed very shortly after the big bang, we’re going to need a bigger telescope, and one that can see deep into the infrared.

We don’t have one. Not yet. That will be a topic for next week.

One Loose End

One of the 1894 mysteries hasn’t come to complete closure even yet, but we know the outlines of the answer.

How was the solar system formed?

Well, we know what happens. The Hubble Space Telescope has looked into the Orion Nebula and can actually see stars and their planetary systems being formed, and it is indeed by accretion from nebulae.

The bulk of the mass ends up in the star, but there’s a large disk of gas and dust (and that “dust” is all stuff that formed in prior generations of stars) that eventually starts to clump up into small bodies, which collect into larger bodies called “planetesimals” which in turn combine into planets.

What we don’t understand is how some of those stages of growth actually happen. For instance, a B-B sized particle of stuff colliding with a 1 meter boulder will likely ricochet off of it, rather than sticking to it. Gravity just isn’t strong enough for objects of that size. So even though we can actually watch the process happen–which settles a lot of things–we still don’t understand it.

If just seeing it happen is good enough, check that one off; if you want a full understanding, then don’t.

What A Ride, And It’s Not Over

There’s so much we know that we didn’t know before Galileo did his first experiments rolling balls down inclined planes, a bit over four centuries ago…but there is also so much we don’t know. The hard sciences seem to have gone through a golden age already, but I suspect the best is yet to come.

We are humans, we use our minds as our primary means of survival. That comes with curiosity, a desire to learn what makes the universe ‘tick.’ And then inventiveness to put it to use. It’s our unique legacy, but it’s also our future. We press on!

NOT the end. The story is still being written.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Hey China!

Or rather, “Hey Chinese Communist Party and your entire array of servitors, ass-wipers, and fellators!”

You’re not even worth my time this week. When you decide to act like civilized people, maybe I’ll give you a lesson or two in how non-barbarians behave.

Hey BiteMe!
(Or, Whoever Has Their Hand Rammed Up That Putrefying Meat Puppet’s Ass)

[Language warning]

You and yours have caused a lot of injury. Literal injury with your war on people who don’t want to take an untested vaccine. When people die in an emergency room because a hospital won’t admit them because they haven’t had their clot shot, that’s a crime.

I’m going to address here the insult on top of the injury, because I am among the insulted. I still have my health but apparently you want me to live under the 8th Street Bridge (which actually isn’t on 8th Street, but whatever, that’s what the I-25 overpass over Cimarron is called), so maybe if you have your way that won’t be true for long. Dreadful time of year to become homeless.

No, you’re just trying to make me unemployed, because I won’t take your fucking shots.

Well, that threat is NOT going to work. I. Won’t. Take. Your. Fucking. Shots.

And neither will any of my coworkers who haven’t already had them…and those people who got the shots are a small minority. Most of those got the shots before we began to understand how nasty they truly are.

One of my coworkers was thinking he might have to knuckle under at least until he found another job…but don’t you even think (you do sometimes think, don’t you?) of finding that encouraging.

Don’t think that, because his resolve has hardened.

You’re LOSING.

You LOSER.

You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.

I would love to see you die an agonizing, humiliating death. (This isn’t a threat, because I am not threatening to cause that death. I am just announcing my intention to party if it happens.) It would be just recompense for the way you’re killing America…and millions of Americans.

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $1786.70
Silver $23.18
Platinum $961.00
Palladium $1838
Rhodium $14,500

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $1774.20
Silver $22.61
Platinum $940.00
Palladium $1900.00
Rhodium $14,850.00

A general decline except in the more obscure platinum group metals (palladium and rhodium). Was that big breakout just a flash in the pan?

XXIX Where did the Helium Come From?

A go-back:

You have actually seen the Cosmic Microwave Background.

About ten percent of TV static is actually the cosmic microwave background, being picked up by your TV set’s antenna.

OK, on to this week’s edumacation.

I dropped this into Part XXII on Powering Stars.

We know, now, that intergalactic gas consists of about three quarters hydrogen and one quarter helium. This gas is hot enough to radiate in X rays, but we can analyze the spectra.

There is only a trace of lithium in this gas, maybe a tiny bit of beryllium, and absolutely nothing else.

This is gas that was never part of a star. This is the original composition of the universe. [At least, as far as ordinary matter goes…but THAT is a future story.]

Part 22

…and it turns out this is a big clue.

I also mentioned, in part XXVII on the Cosmic Microwave Background, that Alpher and Gamow had predicted the cosmic microwave background on the basis of other work they were doing.

I’m now going to discuss that “other work.”

The best info I can find on the abundances of elements in the universe, before stars formed and started making heavier nuclei, is that, by weight, the universe is ~75% hydrogen 1 (one proton, zero neutrons), ~25% helium 4 (two protons, two neutrons), 0.01% each of hydrogen-2 (also known as deuterium, one proton, one neutron), 0.01 percent of helium-3 (two protons, one neutron), and 0.1 parts in a billion of lithium-7 (three protons, four neutrons). This is measured in nebulae consisting of gas that has never been a part of a star.

Alpher was a graduate student working on his PhD under Gamow in 1949; and he performed the first theoretical calculations on what sort of “stuff” ought to have come out of the Big Bang.

Gamow, before sending Alpher’s paper in for publication, added Hans Bethe (1906-2005) to the list of authors. Bethe was indeed a well-regarded astrophysicist (he did a lot of the work in figuring out how stars form elements, and would eventually win the Nobel Prize in 1967 for his work), but he had nothing whatsoever to do with this bit of research on the Big Bang. He had no idea his name was going onto this paper.

So why did Gamow put his name on the paper? So that the list of names would be Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow. Which looks a lot like “Alpha, Beta, Gamma” which, before they were Covid variants, were letters of the Greek alphabet, which, back then, every working physicist and astronomer knew (and that’s why so many of those weird baryons in the “particle zoo” ended up with Greek letter names). It sounds even more like it when you consider that the “th” in Bethe should be pronounced like a “t”, German having lost the th sound centuries ago.

What a prankster!

Alpher was not happy; his PhD dissertation now had him sharing credit with two prominent physicists and he feared that people would assume he had done very little of the actual work. Of course, this is now one of the most famous stories of how geeky scientific humor can be, so the truth of the matter is well known.

That first “Alphabet Paper” doesn’t hold up perfectly, because we now know a lot more than we did then, but it’s a major landmark in the history of cosmology. It got the Big Things right.

So what do we understand about this process now?

About one second after the Big Bang, the universe was a very hot, very dense mass of stuff. So hot and so dense even protons and neutrons couldn’t survive; they’d be blown apart into their constituent quarks with all the gluons (strong force carrying particles) being exchanged between the quarks (and the gluons themselves). It’s very hard to force a quark to separate from a proton or neutron; this universe was hot enough, with particles slamming into each other hard enough, that the neutrons and protons couldn’t even form and stay together in the first place. No sooner would a neutron or proton form than it would be smashed apart again.

It was at one second with the temperature about two billion degrees Kelvin and falling, that this began to change. Protons and neutrons could form without being immediately blown apart again. (This is analogous to the formation of atoms at about 300,000 years after the Big Bang; the temperature became cool enough to let electrons orbit nuclei unmolested.) This is called “proton neutron freezeout.” [Note: I am getting inconsistent search results as to exactly when protons and neutrons began to form.]

The ratio seems to have been about one neutron for every six protons. This is because the proton is a lower energy combination and would be formed preferentially.

Ten to twenty seconds later, temperatures dropped low enough that if a neutron got stuck to a proton, it would stay attached. Before this time, an extremely energetic photon was liable to come along and blow the thing apart. But now deuterium (1 proton, 1 neutron) could form.

There’s an important but subtle difference here versus hydrogen fusion in stars. It’s very difficult to form deuterium in a star because there aren’t any free neutrons there. Two protons have to overcome their mutual repulsion, and one of them has to undergo positive beta decay at the same time, to form a deuterium nucleus. This, on average, takes about nine billion years to happen inside of a star.

The reason there aren’t any free neutrons inside of stars is that free neutrons are unstable. They have a half life of roughly 880 seconds, which means in well under one day, they’re all gone. The reactions going on in stars, in fact, don’t release fresh neutrons either.

But right after the big bang, there are plenty of neutrons; they were just formed. And a neutron has no trouble sticking to a proton–there’s no mutual repulsion in this circumstance, it just has to be moving slow enough to stick rather than ricocheting off.

Over the next ten to twenty minutes, just about every neutron was consumed this way, and any that weren’t didn’t last long. In this time some of the neutrons did decay before they could find a proton; so the ratio was now one neutron for every seven protons.

Deuterium is stable–just barely. Nucleons would really rather be part of a a helium 4 nucleus, which can be formed by combining two deuterium nuclei. And indeed, almost all of the deuterium then combined with other deuterium to form helium 4 (two protons, two neutrons). Helium-4 is very stable indeed.

And at this point the universe was already too cool for carbon to form, as it does in older, heavier stars. And after about 20 minutes, it was too cool for deuterium and helium 4 to form; anything that hadn’t found a “mate” by this time, never would–at least not until stars formed.

So with one nucleon (or baryon) out of every eight being a neutron, starting with an original inventory of sixteen particles, there are two neutrons and fourteen protons. The two neutrons (and two of the 14 protons) end up in one helium 4 nucleus, and the twelve remaining protons become hydrogen. By mass, that’s 1/4 helium, 3/4 hydrogen, by counting atoms, on the other hand, it’s 12 hydrogen atoms to one helium atom.

Some helium 3 also formed, but it’s as rare as deuterium that didn’t happen to combine.

A very small amount of beryllium 7 and lithium 7 formed; the beryllium 7 decayed by positive beta decay into lithium 7.

An even smaller amount of lithium 6 is expected to have formed, but the amount is less than we could measure today.

As you might imagine, the original proportion of neutrons to protons matters greatly (if there were more neutrons, more deuterium and helium could form). Another parameter that matters is how many photons there are per baryon. That, in fact, matters a great deal. You can plug different photon/baryon numbers into the theory and get wildly different concentrations of the end products H-1, H-2, He-3, He-4 and Li-7.

This photon-to-baryon ratio is actually usually expressed the other way around; as baryons to photons, and the value that results in what we actually see today is about six baryons for every ten billion photons.

Here’s a chart showing the different densities (hydrogen-1 is not drawn, it’s 1 and everything else is relative to it) versus the photon/baryon ratios.

In this chart the actual values are shown as circles, and they all correspond to the same photon/baryon ratio at the time of nucleosynthesis.

Now most conceivable combinations simply can’t be gotten out of the theory. You can imagine, for instance, there being twenty times as much deuterium as hydrogen-1; but there’s no photon/baryon ratio in the theory that will let that happen. The mere fact that there is a match for four numbers at the same value tells us the theory is solid and hence we can be pretty confident how many photons there were at that time, versus baryons.

This number can be used to determine how much “normal” matter there was in the early universe…and it’s about 5 percent of the critical density. This is strong evidence that most of the total amount of matter we detect by its gravitational effects (about 30 percent of the critical density) is not normal matter, but rather “dark matter.”

Whatever the heck that is.

Back in part 27 I discussed what the universe looked like 300,000 or so years after the Big Bang. Now I’ve talked about 1 second to twenty minutes.

Dammit, Steve, go back one more second! What was going on at zero seconds!? Tell me!!!

Well, I can’t. Nobody can. At least not in any sort of detailed, physical way. To get past 10^-47 seconds with even a wild guess, we’d need a quantum theory of gravity…which we don’t have. And the situation isn’t much better for any time before about 10^-6 seconds.

The universe changed multiple times in that first second, and (going backwards toward zero) things were at higher and higher temperatures (energies). We have no real way of knowing what was going on at any energy higher than we can generate in particle colliders. (This is yet another reason cosmologists pay attention to particle physics–places like the Large Hadron Collider are the only labs that can reproduce conditions in the very, very early universe. They just can’t go back to zero.) Thus the closer you get to zero, the more and more speculative things get. (And yes, there’s a lot of speculation; but at least it’s educated speculation.)

I normally shy away from the speculative stuff, but I’m going to make an exception here.

Probably the most important speculation is that between 10^-36 seconds and 10^-32 seconds (in other words, about the amount of time it takes for a RINO to stab us in the back given the opportunity), the universe went through an epoch of really fast “inflation” where it increased in size by at least a factor of 10⁷⁸. I think that sets a new record for most gigantic number I’ve ever used in one of these posts (other than a passing reference to a centillion, which is 10³⁰³). Now this isn’t solid by any means, but such a thing would explain a few things we do see today, quite adequately. For instance, the uniformity of the cosmic microwave background. If inflation happened, then different parts of the universe that (otherwise) could never have interacted with each other did interact with each other, and the universe had time to become nearly uniform in temperature and density. So most cosmologists are pretty confident that this did happen, at least until a better idea comes along. And even if this is the correct explanation, of course the picture gets refined with each piece of new data. And no one really has any solid notion what could have caused “inflation” to happen.

The “Big Bang” term itself is a placeholder for something we’re pretty sure happened…but cannot describe in any kind of meaningful detail. Questions and (largely unbridled) speculation about it abound.

In the meantime, though, we at least have a good, solid notion where all the elements came from. The hydrogen and helium came about mere moments after the Big Bang, and everything else was made in stars or from dead stars. (Even though stars make helium, most of the helium “out there” is still original, Big-Bang helium. On the other hand, the helium here on Earth is not from either source, but rather from alpha decays since the earth formed.)

And we have one more line of evidence for “dark matter.” One that doesn’t depend on our understanding of gravity.

Next: A big surprise.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Okay you knuckledragging ChiComs trying to take us down…here’s a history lesson for you.

For millennia, you had to suffer from this:

Yep. Steppe Nomads. They laid waste to your country, burned, raped and pillaged (but not in that order–they’re smarter than you are) for century after century.

You know who figured out how to take them on and win? The Russians.

Not you, the Russians. And it took them less than two centuries. And Oh By The Way they were among the most backward cultures in Europe at the time.

You couldn’t invent an alphabet, you couldn’t take care of barbarians on horseback, and you think you can take this board down?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! We’re laughing at you, you knuckledragging dehumanized communists…worshipers of a mass-murderer who killed sixty million people!

I mean, you still think Communism is a good idea even after having lived through it!

By my reckoning that makes you orders of magnitude more stupid than AOC, and that takes serious effort.

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

All realistic hope lies in the audits, and perhaps the Lindell lawsuit (that will depend on how honestly the system responds to the suit).

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Political Science In Summation

It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).

(A comment I wrote last week that garnered some praise.)

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

(Paper) Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1846.50
Silver $24.67
Platinum $1036.00
Palladium $2146.00
Rhodium $15,100.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $1786.70
Silver $23.18
Platinum $961.00
Palladium $1838
Rhodium $14,500

There’s no way to sugar coat it. This week was a blood bath. Anyone with palladium (and that does include me) lost $300 per ounce. Gold is heading right back to the levels it was at not so long ago.

XXVII The Cosmic Microwave Background

You’re going to get TWO parts this week. Thanksgiving Bonus!

The year is 1948. Ralph Alpher (1921-2007) and Robert Herman (194-1997) were doing work in close relation to work being done by Alpher’s PhD thesis adviser, George Gamow (1904-1968). At the time astronomers were still arguing about whether there had been a Big Bang, a definite ‘beginning’ to what we see around us, or whether we were in a ‘Steady State’ universe, and it had always looked pretty much as it does now. Always, as in always, back forever.

[Incidentally, the work this is related to is even more important than what I’m talking about here…but it makes more sense to cover it later. And no, it won’t be in the other part this week.]

Neither side denied that galaxies appeared to be rushing apart, and that the further apart they appeared to be the greater their speed away from each other.

The Steady State folks hypothesized that as the distance between two “neighbor” galaxies, A and B doubled, enough matter was spontaneously generated–out of nothing–to form a new galaxy in between A & B. By the time this new galaxy, call it C, had formed, it would be at about the same distance from A as B had been earlier, and it would be moving away from A at the same speed that B had originally been moving. Meanwhile the universe was now eight times bigger in volume (but twice as “wide”) than it had been previously, but it would also have eight times as much matter in it. This takes a certain amount of time, call it the “doubling time”

This would be going on everywhere, all the time. And if the universe was of infinite extent…well, run the tape backwards. A “doubling time” before the present, the universe was half as big as it was. All distances were half as great.

But half of infinity is still infinity. So you could go backward in time infinitely far, and you’d still see a universe with about the same density of galaxies you see today. It would look the same.

Contrast that with the Big Bang version, where, if you run the tape backward, you are compressing the same amount of matter into smaller and smaller amounts of space. It should heat up.

Run the tape back far enough, say to when the universe was about 1/1000th of its current size, and the universe ought to be so hot that all of the matter in it (not just the matter in stars) is plasma–the electrons have been knocked completely off their atoms.

Plasma is opaque. Photons can’t get very far before hitting and being absorbed by electrons; the electrons, of course are jumping around in energy levels every time the collide with each other, and emitting photons that get nowhere.

This is why we can’t see into the Sun. There’s a layer below which everything is plasma, and if you were there (without being vaporized), you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.

So imagine a time when the universe was at a temperature just above this point, and as it expands, the temperature drops.

Suddenly atoms form as electrons settle into orbitals and actually stay there, and the universe becomes transparent. There’s a crapload of high-temperature photons out there, and now they are free to run loose. And they ought to correspond to a temperature of roughly 3000 K.

And if this actually happened, they should still be running loose today. Can we detect them? If so, the Big Bang has a huge piece of evidence in its favor and Steady State is in big trouble.

That was the question Alpher and Herman asked. They did some calculations, and figured we should be able to see these photons today, but that they would now correspond to a temperature of 5 K. Which is microwaves, very much like what your microwave oven uses. Back then the technology to generate and detect them simply didn’t exist.

They then re-ran their calculations based on new values for the Hubble parameter a couple of years ago, and revised their estimate to 28 K. Then again back down to 5 K.

The Hubble parameter is notoriously difficult to measure.

This is the parameter that tells you, given how far away a galaxy is, how fast it appears to be receding. Modern values are close to 70 km/second, for every megaparsec of distance. But it wasn’t long ago that one group’s data said it was close to 50 and another group’s data indicated 100. Both groups insisted their data showed they had to be right, yet they couldn’t both be. As it turned out, neither was.

It’s called the Hubble parameter, by the way, because there’s no particular reason to suppose that it doesn’t change over time. In fact there’s a special symbol for its value today, H₀. And it’s a project of modern cosmology to plot the value of H versus time back in the past. This will be a topic for another day.

Where we left off talking about cosmology, people were pretty much estimating distances to distant galaxies–galaxies so far away we couldn’t see their Cepheid variables–by simply measuring their redshift, turning that into a speed, then dividing by H₀. Of course that assumes H always equals H₀.

It’s important to point out (again) that this is not the same sort of red shift you get from, say, Smokey’s radar gun.

A radar gun bounces a very precisely tuned frequency of radar waves off of your car, and then measures the frequency of what bounces back. If your car is stationary, the return frequency is the same. If your car is moving towards Smokey, the return pulses will be slightly closer together. If you’ve passed Smokey and are moving away from him, the pulses are further apart.

You can compute the “red shift” like this: Subtract the frequency of the return signal from the frequency of the emitted signal (i.e., subtract what the radar gun sees coming back from your no-doubt-bright-red car, from what the radar gun sent out). Then divide by what was measured coming back.

z = (f_emitted – f_returned) / f_returned

That number is invariably labeled z.

If you do some algebra, simply dividing the frequency of what the radar gun sent out, by the frequency of what came back, should equal 1+z.

The redshift of different galaxies turns out to have a very different cause. Now this is going to seem a bit freakish, but in fact galaxies are pretty much stationary.

The space between them is actually expanding.

That makes no damn sense if you think about space and time like Isaac Newton did, absolutely rigid and fixed, but according to Einstein’s General Theory, space and time can curve and stretch, and they do. It’s difficult to wrap our minds around, but that’s what’s going on.

A photon bopping along at about 300 million hertz, three hundred million cycles a second, will have a wavelength about a meter long–because it travels three hundred million meters in that second.

If, while it’s travelling along, the space between galaxies doubles in size, then the photon’s waves stretch to be two meters long. It can’t travel any faster to make this up, so now its frequency is only 150 million cycles per second. This means the photon actually loses energy as the space it travels through expands.

If the photon happens to be visible light it has a much, much shorter wavelength (half of a millionth of a meter, for instance), but as it stretches it looks redder and redder because red wavelengths are longer than blue ones.

So the redshift of these photons is directly related to how much space has stretched since the photon was emitted. In fact, you can write the following: 1 + z = a_now/a_then. The two as are “scale factors” but what really matters is the ratio between them. If z is 1 for some photon, 1+z = 2, and the scale factor today is twice as big as it was then. The universe has doubled in size; space has, everywhere stretched to double its old size, since the photon was emitted.

OK, returning to Alpher and Herman.

There was some discussion of their idea of there being a microwave remnant of the Big Bang until about 1955, but cosmology wasn’t considered a very serious area of study back then. And we simply didn’t have the technology to detect it if it were there. So the notion was largely forgotten.

Until about 1964. In the early 1960s Yakov Zeldovich (1914-1987) found their work, and Robert Dicke (1916-1997) reinvented that particular wheel about the same time. In 1964, David Todd Wilkinson (1935-2002) and Peter Roll at Princeton University in New Jersey decided to start building something called a Dicke Radiometer to look for microwave rays coming from the sky.

Meanwhile, Just Down The Road

This is New Jersey we’re discussing here. The damn state is so small everyone in it can get into the same freaking food fight. And if I lived there in that anti-gun tyrrany, if anything worse than Kalifornia’s, I’d probably need a food fight to relieve the stress.

And they can’t run an honest election as well as a bunch of southerners in Virginia, which should chap their look-down-on-Bubba asses. But since it won’t chap their asses enough to suit me, I am going to insult them and tell “small state” jokes about them. I may visit someday, but I doubt I could fit my truck into the state.

But seriously, just a few miles down the road from Princeton, at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias (born 1933) and Robert Woodrow Wilson (born 1936), a couple of electrical engineers were building a microwave antenna to test the feasibility of using microwaves to transmit signals. Their particular antenna had a Dicke Radiometer in it.

Something was wrong, though. There was noise in the system, noise they couldn’t get rid of.

They were pretty sure the noise was in their equipment, because no matter which way they pointed that antenna, the noise was there. If it had been someone testing out their prototype microwave oven somewhere else in the state, they’d only have picked it up while the antenna was pointing towards it. But this was always there no matter which way they pointed the antenna.

They even shotgunned the pigeons who were building nests in their antenna, so that when they cleaned out the poop, it would stay clean. But even that didn’t work. Noise in their system.

Finally in desperation they called Princeton University to see if they knew anything.

They ended up talking to Dicke himself, and Dicke knew what was going on. What was going on was that their team had been scooped.

Penzias and Wilson had found, quite by accident, what we now call the Cosmic Microwave Background.

The “Big Bang Theory” (a bit of a misnomer) not only had accounted for the galaxies (apparently) moving further apart, it had made an actual prediction of a previously unknown phenomenon, and it had panned out.

Steady State was dead. The universe, at least in its present form, has a beginning. (One can ask “what was there before the Big Bang” and it’s a plausible question, though most think that that is when space time itself began, and that therefore there can be no “before,” it’s like asking what is north of the north pole.)

Penzias and Wilson won the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics.

So this is what’s going on: Those 3000K photons now have been stretched by a factor of 1090. And their temperature is 2.725 K today.

NASA has launched two satellites to study this radiation in detail: COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) and WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. It was originally simply MAP, but after Wilkinson died of cancer, it was renamed in his honor). COBE, when it was launched, had been the second most elaborate satellite NASA had ever built–right after the Hubble Space Telescope.

Their charter was to measure the cosmic microwave background in every direction.

It turns out to be almost perfectly uniform–once you factor out the (regular) Doppler redshift/blueshift due to the Sun’s motion around the center of our galaxy, and the galaxy’s true motion towards the Hercules cluster. Uniform to 1 part in 100,000. This indicates that the universe, at the time it cooled and released all those photons to run free, was very, very smooth, much more so than it is today (the universe is now clumped into galaxies, which clump into clusters and superclusters). Back then a cubic light year of universe had some certain amount of matter and energy in it, and adjacent cubic light years might be different by 1/1000th of a percent.

If you’ve ever seen this picture:

…it’s the Cosmic Microwave Background…with very slight differences in temperature shown in different colors, with the contrast dialed way up. Every direction in the sky is represented somewhere in that ellipse.

Cosmologists have been able to learn a lot from this image. A lot of details of the big bang theory have yet to be worked out, however several possibilities have been decisively eliminated by this data. It has also been used to demonstrate that space is flat, or very nearly so.

It’s essentially blackbody radiation, so at any point, it should follow a very specific curve. Now usually when something like this is measured, it’s not quite a perfect blackbody, so the match to the curve isn’t precise. But COBE took some measurements, and when plotted against the curve, you see:

There’s no visible difference between the data in red, and the theory, in blue.

I understand that when this was presented at a scientific conference, there was a standing ovation because theory and data matched so perfectly.

Steady state was dead, face down in the Hudson River. Or the Delaware. Not sure which, doesn’t matter. It’s not as if those two rivers are more than 50 feet apart.

One thing that was learned had to do with the fact that the radiation is indeed so uniform.

It’s now thought that the universe was 380,000 years old when it became transparent, and that this is basically a picture of the universe at that moment. What is striking is that in the subsequent 13+ billion years, the microwaves from (say) the dead center of that ellipse are reaching us. 180 degrees away, near the left or right side of the diagram, those microwaves are now reaching us.

Those two locations still cannot see each other. They never could in the past, they don’t now. They have no way whatsoever of knowing each others’ state or affecting each other, not in the past and certainly not now.

So how is it that they’re the same temperature to one part in 100,000?

That is a question that has occupied astronomers for quite some time. There’s a likely (but not certain) answer to that question…but that’s for another day.

XXVIII Dark Matter

Not to be confused with “Dark Meat.”

Yes, I am writing this on Thanksgiving, so “white meat” and “dark meat” are on my mind. Having taken Steve’s Own Wonder Weight Loss Elixir early last week (somehow, no one is beating my door down trying to order some), I’m going to hang on to the conquered ground in my own personal Battle Of The Bulge. (Having gained that hill painfully, I don’t want to give it up.)

Newtonian gravitational theory is a marvel. I’d say that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it long preceded sliced-at-the-bakery bread and the sliced bread doesn’t come close to beating it.

But–even aside from General Relativity tweaking it–there’s only so much you can do with it.

If there are exactly two bodies in the universe, say a planet orbiting a star, and they’re both uniform spheres (no oblateness, though they are allowed to vary with density with distance from the center), you can specify the position and velocity of each body at a certain time, call it t, and then you can simply plug some other time into a few formulae and know, immediately where those bodies are at that time. It can be before t or after t. It can be a second later, it can be ten billion years earlier. Plug-and-chuck, on a calculator (though you want at least a scientific calculator, not a four-banger that just has +, -, *, and / on it). The same procedure gets you the answer, in the same amount of time, no matter how different the times are.

Add a third body…even a dust mote ten billion miles away…and everything changes. Now in fact, you can ignore the dust mote. You probably didn’t measure the mass of the star and planet that accurately! But in essence, as soon as there are three (or more) bodies involved, you can’t just plug and chuck into a few formulae to predict things at at arbitrarily chosen future date.

A lot of mathematical work during the 18th and 19th centuries went into working out some special cases of the three body problem. For instance, if there is a small body orbiting a large body in a perfect circle, you can put a third body either 60 degrees ahead or 60 degrees behind the second body, on the same circle, travelling at the same speed. So the three bodies are at the points of a perfect equilateral triangle. It turns out that that situation is stable. In fact, it’s stable enough that even if the third body is slightly out of place, it will tend to move into place. There are a few other places you can put that third body…e.g., at a precisely balanced point between the other two bodies…but those are metastable; if it’s slightly off in positioning…by a zillionth of a meter…it will drift away from that point. The mathematician who worked this out was named Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813, he actually was born in what is now Italy as Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia).

There are at least a million asteroids 60 degrees ahead and behind Jupiter, for instance, known as the Trojan asteroids because the first ones discovered were named after characters in the Illiad, and they’re liable to stay there forever or at least until something else wanders in and jerks them around or hits them.

But for the most part, the general “three body” problem is not solveable in “closed form” which is mathematician-speak for having a nice tidy equation or set of equations.

Our solar system, of course has a sun, eight planets, a shitload of asteroids in the “asteroid belt” between Mars and Jupiter, more asteroids orbiting right outside of Neptune’s orbit (including Pluto), and likely even more stuff way out there, 50,000 AUs or more. You can’t do two body stuff far into the future on, say, the Sun/Earth pair and expect it to be accurate. Jupiter is the main body perturbing things, but by no means the only one. All of these bodies are pulling on all of the other bodies, and the effects do add up.

NASA, of course, sends space probes to other planets, and in figuring out where they’re going to go, they have to account for the Earth, the Sun, and the destination planet. And if they do a flyby for “slingshot,” they’ll want to include the planets being slungshot off of (is that a word? It is now) as well. The good news is they can do something called “patched conics” where they ignore the sun and the destination while near the earth, both Earth and the destination (but not the sun!) while in transit, then just the destination while there. That’s not perfectly accurate, but it’s accurate enough to see if the mission is feasible.

But in general, to work a problem like this, you need numerical integration. You start out with everything in an initial state: their locations, their velocities, and of course their masses. You compute all the forces between every pair of objects, and you step forward some very, very small amount of time. Of course now thanks to those forces the velocities are now different, and because everything is moving, none of the positions are exactly the same as they were before. So at the new time (one step after the initial time), you have to recompute everything again, then take the next step. And over and over again.

The shorter the step, the more accurate it is, and there are other tricks you can use to increase accuracy. In grad school I wrote a three body integrator that used a method called “Adams-Bashforth.” I tested it by running a known two body problem through it (satellite in a circular orbit); when I got to a step size small enough where the accumulated errors were less than a millionth of a meter after a month, I figured it was accurate enough, and that computer spent a solid day cranking the thirty or so scenarios in my thesis. (It would have been about a month, but I had just plugged a co-processor into the motherboard. A good thing. I didn’t have a month.)

Nowadays, they can model two galaxies colliding with each other, with a million representative stars in each, and take movies of what happens. For instance, this is what’s going to happen when M31 in Andromeda collides with our galaxy in about five billion years. Stars are far enough apart that the two galaxies will probably pass right through each other with no head on collisions, but every star is pulling on every other star throughout the entire collision.

Fortunately, it’s not always necessary to precisely know the fate of each individual body.

For centuries, astronomers have known about objects called “globular clusters.” These are compact groupings of stars, and they actually tend to be outside the galactic disk (but still be bound to the galaxy). There’s a swarm of these things accompanying the Milky Way, out in what is called the “galactic halo.”

Modeling something like this precisely would be a pain, but you can make general statistical inferences without doing that, thanks to the virial theorem. (Not “viral”, “virial.”)

The virial theorem relates the average total kinetic energy of the cluster, over time, with the total potential energy. (It’s not just used for star clusters; it gets used for other sorts of systems as well.) You can measure the speeds of the individual stars (easy to do with Doppler shifts off their spectra), their distances from each other, and get some notion of the total energy of the system, as well as its total mass.

Of course, you could estimate the total mass by counting the number of stars and multiplying by the average mass of a star, but this will fail if some of the mass of the cluster is not visible for some reason or another. For instance, imagine if there is a lot of interstellar gas. Or a black hole. Or neutron stars that have long since stopped rotating and pulsing.

So, time now for a jarring change in perspective.

It’s 1933, and Fritz Zwicky (1898-1974) is studying a galactic cluster, in particular the Coma cluster in the constellation Coma Berenices. It has over a thousand galaxies in it, and is about 100 megaparsecs away (over 300 million light years). The individual members aren’t just stars, they’re entire galaxies. [Zwicky coined the term ‘supernova’ and built some of the very first jet engines, too.]

He concluded that there is far more mass in that cluster than just the obvious masses of all the stars in the galaxies in the cluster. In fact, he figured that what we could see shining as stars was 1/400th of the mass of the cluster

Zwicky coined the term ‘dark matter’ (actually, he was Swiss German, so he said ‘dunkle Materie’) to describe the 399/400ths of the stuff in the frame of the picture that cannot be seen.

Of course, there are obvious possible explanations for this. Interstellar and even intergalactic gas wouldn’t have been visible to Zwicky; neither would things like planetary-sized bodies and so on. So this became a bit of a curiosity but not of real concern.

Now let’s consider a single galaxy. A star near the center of that galaxy isn’t going to be moving very fast in orbiting the galaxy, it’s surrounded by most of the mass of the galaxy, the gravitational pulls of everything outside its orbit are pretty much going to cancel out. Its orbital speed is really only going to depend on the mass inside its orbit. Further out, there’s more mass inside the orbit; a star out there is going to orbit faster. The further out you get, the faster the star will orbit (a situation exactly the opposite of what we have in the solar system) up to a point. Eventually you’re outside of the galaxy and the further out you get, the further away the galaxy is and the slower you orbit. So if you were to plot this against distance from the galactic center, it ought to start at near zero when you’re at the the center, rapidly climb to a peak, then drop off in an inverse-square fashion.

In 1939 Horace W. Babcock (1912-2003) took measurements of star velocities in the Andromeda galaxy to draw such a curve, and didn’t get this result. Speeds got high…and stayed high, much higher than expected, as he measured the velocities of stars further and further away from the center of a galaxy.

In the 1970s Vera Rubin (1928-2016) and many others repeated this work with many other galaxies, and the results were consistent. When you got beyond the visible edge of a galaxy, there was a lot of invisible mass. You couldn’t see it…until you measured its gravitational effect on lone stars way out there beyond the galaxy’s ‘suburbs.’

Was it gas that had somehow never been pulled fully into the galaxies? It turns out there is some such gas, and in fact the gas is a few times more massive more than the stars. We can detect the gas directly now; it turns out to be very hot, and glows in X rays. (We have to observe those in orbit; the earth’s atmosphere blocks them.)

One more piece of evidence.

Recall that General relativity explains gravity as space being warped by masses. Even light gets bent. This was first seen in 1919 by Arthur Eddington during a solar eclipse, a discovery which made the front page of the New York Times back when it wasn’t fake news, and made Einstein a celebrity.

It’s possible for a nearby galaxy to bend the light from a farther galaxy. It’s not only possible, it’s quite common. In the most extreme case, you can see a galaxy splitting a much more distant galaxy into four pieces, like this:

Another spectacular example of this is this “Einstein ring” photographed by Hubble. The distant galaxy is almost directly behind the near one. It gets distorted into a nearly-complete ring.

Now usually we don’t get something nearly this tidy. What we’ll see is a galaxy off to the side, stretched out into a long, thin arc.

And it doesn’t have to be just a galaxy. A galaxy cluster can do this. Consider the following, which is a picture of the galaxy cluster Abell 1689. [No, we don’t bother naming individual galaxies any more…there are hundreds of billions of them.]

Here if you look closely you can see all sorts of short, straight lines…and your mind’s eye can even connect them into concentric rings about the cluster.

The cluster as a whole is lensing dozens or even hundreds of further galaxies.

And it’s possible to work backwards, and determine where the mass is distributed.

After accounting for every sort of regular matter we know how to detect, we’re only at about 20% of the amount of matter we would need to have, to do this. Furthermore, most of this mysterious mass isn’t in the galaxies.

It’s as if there’s something massive out there, and a galaxy is simply a visible manifestation of the center of that mass. As if the “normal” matter condenses into galaxies, but the other “dark” matter condenses some, but not as much. It’s not uniformly distributed throughout all of space, but clumps up in galactic clusters. In a very real sense these invisible clumps are the galactic clusters, since they are most of the mass of the clusters–those bright blobs are just a side effect.

This should be enough to convince you the stuff is there. Especially when I remind you that there are thousands of such examples, not just the ones I cherrypicked for this essay. Strictly speaking, of course, I haven’t proved anything because I’ve showed you none of the math. But the people who have seen it are mostly pretty confident.

So what IS this stuff?

YOU tell ME. Then go collect your Nobel Prize.

Because the person who solves it WILL get a Nobel Prize.

This is a question that has been occupying astronomers for a couple of decades now. And for the most part they can tell you what it is NOT.

It’s not just interstellar or intergalactic gas. That sort of material can be seen now; it glows in X rays. Even though that gas is more massive than visible galaxies, it’s not that much more massive. We presently think the dark stuff is 5 or 6 times as massive as the galaxies and the gas.

It doesn’t seem to want to interact via electromagnetism at all–which is why we can’t see it with light at all. (That’s an electromagnetic interaction.)

We know it does interact with gravity, and it probably interacts with the weak force but not the strong force.

Such matter would have a tough time even interacting with other matter of the same type, and that even includes collisions. That would explain why it doesn’t condense with galaxies. Ordinary matter becomes galaxies because as it passes through the densest part of the cloud, it collides, slows down and loses mechanical energy. If dark matter doesn’t collide with things, or at least not as readily, that explains why it hasn’t condensed as much as the regular matter in galaxies has.

Which means it’s not baryonic matter–it’s not made out of baryons, i.e., protons and neutrons. In fact “baryonic matter” is now a synonym for “ordinary” matter.

The one thing in the standard model we saw two parts ago (last week) that seems like it could fit is neutrinos. Those interact only with gravity and the weak force.

The problem is neutrinos move too fast: At light speed (if they have no mass) or just below (if in fact they have a tiny mass). They wouldn’t, therefore, clump up even as much as dark matter has been shown to clump up.

So most astronomers and astrophysicists are pretty confident (but not sure), that whatever dark matter is, it’s not in the standard model of particle physics at all. Which means 4/5 or 5/6ths of all the matter out there doesn’t appear in the standard model!

That’s what I meant when I said we know it’s not complete.

There is a generic placeholder answer to the question: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. (WIMPs.) Massive because they must be slow compared to the speed of light. It’s some sort of particle we don’t know about yet. There’s quite a bit of speculation on what that might be, but nothing even remotely conclusive, and of course any coherent guess will be tried out in particle accelerators, or looked for in detectors.

Another possibility that some haven’t completely given up on is the Massive Compact Halo Object (MACHO) which would be things like black holes and rogue planets ant the like. (Of course the name was inspired by WIMP.)

A third possibility comes about from considering the nature of the evidence. There are multiple lines of evidence, but every single one of them ultimately depends on the assumption that we understand gravity properly.

What if gravity doesn’t drop off as an inverse square function after (say) ten thousand light years? This class of ideas is called MOND, for MOdified Newtonian Dynamics.

This last has fallen into disfavor (though there are die hard holdouts), because of the Bullet Cluster.

Here is the Bullet Cluster. It’s over a billion parsecs away.

There’s a large cluster on the left, and a smaller one on the right. It turns out they are both at the same distance from us, 1.141 Gpc or 3.7 billion light years. Which means this is what it looked like 3.7 billion years ago.

This is a visible light picture. When we photograph the intergalactic gas, which glows in X ray wavelengths, this is what we see:

The X rays come from gas clouds between the two clusters. (Unfortunately these two pictures aren’t to the same scale, but I will show you a picture with a super-imposition done on it, shortly.)

It’s apparent that the two clusters collided. Since the galaxies are far enough apart, no galaxies actually collided, so the galaxy clusters just went right through each other, like two shotgun blasts crossing in midair.

But the intergalactic gas fills space, and so the gas clouds accompanying the galaxies hit head on and slowed each other down. Thus the clusters left their intergalactic gas behind.

Finally, we can look for the dark matter by studying all gravitational lensing in the picture, and show it in blue:

The dark matter, responsible for most of the lensing, stayed with the galaxies. It’s not gas.

Putting them all together we have:

Now it becomes clear, the dark matter stayed with the galaxies–it didn’t collide meaningfully with the dark matter from the other cluster–but the hot gas did collide, and is now not moving along with the galaxies and dark matter.

There’s basically no way to account for this with a modified theory of gravity (though some astrophysicists still fight for it).

So we are back to asking: What is this stuff?

We know it’s there. We know how much of it there is. We’ll have another line of evidence that it’s not ordinary matter in an upcoming installment.

But we don’t know what it is. That’s a 2021 physics question.

And this is the sort of thing that occupies both the people who study the universe…and the people who study particles smaller than protons. One cannot imagine what ought to be two more different subjects, yet they are inextricably tied together.

Ordinary and dark matter put together account for about 30 percent of the mass/energy needed to make the universe “flat.” Suspiciously close to 100 percent, as I explained last week. But the fact of the matter is, everything we know about particle physics accounts for a fifth or a sixth of all the matter that exists. And why is the total amount (dark plus regular) off–but not by all that much–from the one number that is “special”–the critical density that would make spacetime “flat”?

That story is far from over.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

You knuckle-dragging barbarians are still trying to muck with this site, so I’ll just repeat what I said last time.

Up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

So Just this Once Justice Has Been Done

Kyle Rittenhouse goes free. Not guilty on all counts!

He shot some real dirtbags, though he didn’t know at the time just how dirtbag they were, so that can’t justify it. What justified it was the dirtbags were coming after him. He did miss one, and merely wound another (Grosskreutz, who should now be prosecuted for attacking Rittenhouse. Though maybe we owe him thanks because he blew up the persecution’s case with his testimony.)

A lot of real shitbags need to pay for this. Not just the rioters, but the persecution, the media, the political “leadership” in this country that came down against him when enough was out to acquit him almost immediately, on and on. Sure there will be defamation suits but that’s not enough. These people will probably launch gofundmes to pay their awards for them anyway; there are enough Leftist mushbrains to make that happen.

But in the meantime, we celebrate what we did get.

Loop it if you like; I will wait.

https://youtu.be/SkcLUkuQpPQ?t=760

Richly deserved.

And justice, after all, is seeing that people get what they deserve, not just with criminal acts, but even in our personal lives.

Justice can be done. So…

Justice Must Be Done

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

The Audit

The Audit is definitely heating up. Let’s see if the Opposition manages to squelch it and its consequences. I’ll be honest; I expect it to be ignored by anyone capable of ordering Biden/Harris to step down.

Nevertheless, anything that can be done to make Biden look less legitimate is a worthy thing!

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $1866.10
Silver $25.42
Platinum $1091.00
Palladium $2195.00
Rhodium $15,100.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $1846.50
Silver $24.67
Platinum $1036.00
Palladium $2146.00
Rhodium $15,100.00

I looked earlier today and things were a bit higher, but right now it does look like gold is trying to drift downward…or is being pushed downward. I was about to say it looked solidly established in the 1850s-1860s but…nooope.

Physics — The “Standard Model”

I’m finally feeling well enough to try to take this on.

Last week I told the story of how all sorts of unexpected medium (~200 electron masses) and heavy weight particles (1800 electron masses and up) began turning up in particle physicists’ cloud chambers, leading to a ridiculous-seeming ‘zoo’ of particles that all seemed fundamental (though all except the previously-known proton are unstable).

And of Murray Gell-Mann and Zweig brought order to the confusion by postulating that there were in fact three types (called “flavors”) of quarks (and three matching types of anti-quarks) that made up all of these these particles…including the proton and neutron. A quark and anti-quark pair (usually of a different flavor) made up a meson (medium weight particle), and three quarks made up a baryon (heavy weight particle).

The three flavors are “up” (+2/3 electric charge), “down” (-1/3 electric charge) and “strange (-1/3 electric charge).

And then the idea that there was a new fundamental kind of charge, different from electric charge, called the color charge. Where the electric charge comes in positive and negative forms, the color charge has three forms, none of them quite the opposite of any of the others, but all three of them adding up to “neutral.” This reminded someone of the primary colors red, green, and blue [primary when dealing with light emitting sources, not paints, where it’s the red, blue and yellow you’re probably thinking of] and so the three charges were named red, green and blue.

It turns out that this is the real “strong force” and the “strong nuclear force” noted in the past, that holds protons and neutrons together in the nucleus is just a side effect of it. No, the real strong force holds the protons and neutrons themselves together!

Strong interactions within a proton or neutron generate a pion (a meson), which will decay almost instantly unless it runs into another proton or neutron immediately, in which case it interacts with that particle; that interaction is the “strong nuclear force.” That other proton or neutron has to be practically touching the first one for this to work at all, so that’s why the strong nuclear force had such a short range.

And these are particles a trillionth of a millimeter across, roughly, so when I say “short range” I mean “short range.”

The real strong force operating by quarks exchanging “gluons,” much like the electromagnetic force operates by charged particles exchanging photons. But it is much, much more complicated than that. A photon, once emitted, has no electric charge and no mass, so even though it carries the electromagnetic force, it’s not affected by it. It won’t be bent by electric or magnetic fields. It won’t be affected by other photons. But a gluon itself has a color charge and a mass! That means it can interact with quarks and other gluons, by exchanging yet more gluons…which can exchange yet more gluons. This was a seemingly-intractable mess that, frankly, I don’t understand the resolution to. But they did resolve it. (Richard Feynman had a lot to do with that.)

So there was this totally new and much deeper understanding of the strong force (no longer the strong “nuclear” force). The whole topic is now called “quantum chromodynamics” to match with “quantum electrodynamics” (the completely up-to-date marriage of quantum physics and Maxwell’s and Einstein’s work).

[As an aside, every experiment made to test quantum electrodynamics has been a perfect match, down to ten parts in a billion of precision. Nothing else in physics is this solid.]

Later on, physicists discovered three more quarks, the charm quark (+2/3 charge), bottom quark (-1/3 charge), and top quark (+2/3 charge) and they got grouped into three “generations: Generation 1 is the up and down quarks, and those make up protons and neutrons and thus the overwhelming majority of everything you see around you by mass (the rest of the mass is electrons; and of course you see photons; in fact you see with photons). Generation 2 is the charmed and strange quarks, while Generation 3 are the top and bottom quarks.

But what about the weak force?

The weak force, it turns out is the only force that can change a quark’s flavor, from say, down to up.

Consider a neutron, out all by its lonesome. It contains an up quark (+2/3 electric charge) and two down quarks (-1/3 each electric charge). Each of those quarks is a different color charge, but it actually doesn’t matter which one is which.

The weak force operates here by changing one of the down quarks to an up quark. That raises the charge of that quark an entire unit, from -1/3 to +2/3, which means that some particle with a negative charge unit has to be generated to make up for it (electric charge is (still) always conserved). Well, now, an electron fills the bill nicely. But if you generate an electron, you’ve created a lepton, and an anti-lepton must be generated to make up for that. (The total number of leptons can never change, but anti-leptons count as –1 lepton.) And an anti-neutrino fills that bill, since neutrinos are leptons and anti-neutrinos are therefore anti-leptons.

I’ve just described negative beta decay.

(If you get the feeling, after watching all that book-balancing going on, that physics is a lot like accounting, well, yes, yes it is! Except you’re keeping books in six different currencies at once, between conserving quark number, lepton number, electric charge, angular momentum, linear momentum and occasionally mass-energy.)

And indeed the result is a proton, and electron, and an anti-neutrino.

Logically, there should be particles that mediate this force too, and indeed predictions were made in 1968. This had come about because, fresh off the success of quantum electrodynamics, physicists had turned to trying to “crack” the weak force, and Sheldon Glashow (1932 and still alive), Stephen Weinberg (1933-July 23 2021), and Abdus Salam (1926-1996) put forward a prediction that not only related the weak force to electromagnetism, but suggested three new particles. The first two were the W⁺ and W^– “bosons” (bosons are particles with integer spin, force carrying particles are all bosons), named W for the weak force, and they have + and – 1 unit of electric charge, respectively. The third particle is the Z boson, which has no charge at all (and Z for Zero).

These particles were found in 1973.

Beta Decay, the Modern Understanding

So what really happens in a beta decay? One of the down quarks in a neutron emits a W- boson. That alone turns the down quark to an up quark, and that quark’s involvement is over. About 10^-25 seconds later (enough time for the W particle to move about 3 percent of the width of the neutron it’s inside), the W particle breaks down into the electron (which carries off all the charge) and antineutrino. That avoids having three things happen at once.

Below is a Feynman Diagram of the interaction. Starting at the lower left, the neutron, consisting of one up and two down quarks is moving (in space) slightly to the right, but is climbing along the time axis. Then one of the down quarks spits out the W^– particles, and the neutron turns into a proton, which recoils…exactly like a rifle firing a bullet. Exit shiny new proton, stage upper left. The W boson moves off then becomes an anti-neutrino (with that Greek “nu” ν that looks like a v to us for a symbol, the bar over it denotes it’s an antiparticle, as does the arrow pointing backwards in time), and an electron.

Feynman diagrams are actually enormously powerful visualization tools (and helped solve the mess with gluon-gluon interactions) and I really should have found some excuse to introduce them sooner. Actually, I’m being charitable: I feel like an idiot for not using them sooner.

I just dropped a tiny spoiler (soon to be resolved) in that diagram; notice the antineutrino is subscripted with an e, ν_e.

Muon Decay

Another place where the weak force comes into play is the decays of muons and tauons. Recall that these are basically bigger “cousins” of the electron, and indeed these particles decay, ultimately, into electrons. These are all leptons.

Let’s look at the muon decay, in another Feynman diagram.

Here the muon (μ^–), in many ways just a bloated electron, enters at stage lower left, decides it’s bored with being a muon, and decides to become a neutrino (with zero charge). So it upchucks a W^– to get rid of the charge. [Sorry about the imagery, but recent events in my life suggested it to me.] Everything is kosher to the guys with the green eyeshades, because there’s one lepton going in and one going out (neutrinos are leptons). But that W^– lives only about ten times as long as a politician’s promise not to violate your rights, and breaks down into an antineutrino and an electron. The electron bears the charge of the W^– particle, the anti-neutrino balances the lepton number of the electron.

So what’s the deal here? That neutrino that the muon turned into has a cute little μ subscript (ν_μ) and the antineutrino from the W^– breakdown has an e subscript (ν_e, though unfortunately I can’t draw the bar over it in this text editor).

As it turns out the charged leptons come in three generations, electron, muon, and tauon…and so do the neutrinos!

As if the dang neutrino isn’t a slippery enough little bugger, now there’s three kinds of them?

In fact there seem to be three generations of everything: leptons, quarks, and subdividing, three generations of neutrinos, “electron-ish” leptons, -1/3 quarks and +2/3 quarks.

The Sun is Safe, and You Still Have To Do Your Taxes (Dammit).

And this helped to solve a mystery that was beginning to bother people. Really bother them.

Nuclear fusion should generate neutrinos. We can check this because there is a big fusion reactor less than a hundred million miles away: the Sun. Based on the energy output of the sun, and the amount of energy each fusion reaction generates (measured in a laboratory), we can know how many reactions are taking place each second; we can use simple geometry to figure out how many neutrinos should pass through detectors here on Earth. And we can do further calculations to figure out the tiny number of neutrinos that should actually react with the detector and therefore be detected rather than just cruising on through to go on, probably, forever.

The problem was, we only detected a third as many neutrinos as we thought. Either we just didn’t understand something…or the Sun was shutting down for some reason. Which would be bad. We’d only find out ten thousand years or so after it happened, because it takes that long for the heat and light generated by the fusion to work its way out (the neutrinos zip out instantly since all the matter of the sun is nothing to them). When, suddenly, no more light and heat…we’re up shit creek.

It turns out that neutrinos can change generation. This suggestion was made clear back in 1957 by Bruno Pontecorvo (1913-1993) and eventually was confirmed by experiments done at neutrino detectors. It takes some time for neutrinos to do this, which is why the effect was visible in solar neutrinos (which are 8 minutes, 20 seconds old) but not in neutrinos generated by nuclear reactors here on earth (which are less than a millionth of a second old). One implication of this is that neutrinos do have a mass, albeit one we still can’t measure (much, much less than an electron, which is the lightest thing we know of that isn’t zero mass). The details are still being worked out.

The last bit of fallout from the work done in 1968 was the Higgs boson. It turns out to be the particle representing a field that gives particles mass. So electrons, muons, tauons and quarks interact with it (as do the W, Z, and gluon), but photons do not. [At least one theory of neutrino mass claims it gets its mass from something other than the Higgs field.]

That particle was finally found in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider. And if you’ve wondered why on earth it’s the Large Hadron Collider, recall that a hadron is any particle made of quarks including both mesons and baryons.

[And yes, it must be told. Richard Dawkins (yes, that Richard Dawkins) mentioned the LHC in a book he wrote before the Higgs was finally discovered, and he got the proofs back from the publisher. And sure enough someone had flubbed and in print was “Large Hardon Collider.” He has quite a good sense of humor, actually, and he begged the publisher to leave the misprint in, but they removed it. (There is, or at least was, on his website a troll named “Rawhard Dickins” that he tolerated.) It was only a couple of years later that “the typo we’ve all been waiting for” finally appeared on a website.]

The Standard Model…Ta Da!!

So that completes what is actually named “the standard model” of particle physics. It pretty much sums up everything we’ve every seen in a collider.

Here’s a graphic. This one includes the anti-particles in columns 4-6. (Most such diagrams do not; it’s assumed you know they’re there.)

[Sorry, Zoe, I don’t know a quick way to describe this one, and listing what’s in each cell in a 8×4 grid would be tedious.]

One thing sometimes included in the diagram, but not this diagram, is the “graviton,” the force carrying particle for the gravitational force. But, we really can’t even hazard much of a guess as to what such a particle would be like, because we’d need a quantum theory of gravity.

We don’t have one. Personally I’m not even sure there can be one, but really, I am WAY beyond my pay grade here.

There are a couple of other details that still need to be worked out (neutrino mass would result in a tweak to the theory, not its breakage), but again, it seems like everything we’ve ever seen in a particle collider or a lab of any type fits into this, with the nagging exception of gravity–we just have to figure out how to bolt that onto the schema.

So is physics done?

Nope.

Not even close.

Because we have excellent reason to believe that this diagram only categorizes one sixth of the matter in the universe.

Wait, since this explains everything we do see…that would mean we only see one sixth of the matter in the universe!

And if we can’t see it, how do we even know it exists?

What’s up with that?

Back to the astronomers…

Fuck Joe Biden

No expansion on this thought necessary.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.

Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.

I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

Given the results of Tuesday’s elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.

This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you piece of rancid weasel shit?

Election Cheating

Republicans won…in Virginia, and maybe in New Jersey, and in a lot of local races nationwide (including school boards–very critical in the long term).

If we can’t possibly win without an honest system, and we know the system has not been fixed…uh, what’s up? Seems like a bit of a contradiction.

So I will modify my stance somewhat, in the light of new information: Apparently the automated cheating that’s rather subtle could be overcome. And indeed it was overcome in 2020 as well.

That’s when the Left/Establishment went to good old fashioned blatant ballot-box stuffing, putting up cardboard to block the view into election centers and running ballot after ballot through the machines. To say nothing of the six figure dumps of votes entirely for China Joe and Skanky Hoe.

This time, for whatever reason, they didn’t go that far.

Perhaps it’s just so they can claim “See, Republicans can win elections, so we’re not cheating and Trump was just a Loser.” In which case, I’ll go back to my original stance and say that we cannot win until the election process is fixed. But then I’ll go on to add: unless they decide for tactical reasons to let us win a couple.

So for now, I’ll stick with:

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1785.10
Silver $23.99
Platinum $1028.00
Palladium $2087.00
Rhodium $15,250.00

This week, 3 PM MT on Friday, markets closed for the weekend

Gold $1819.00
Silver $24.25
Platinum $1042.00
Palladium $2117.00
Rhodium $15,500.00

Everything is UP. Gold has busted $1800. Silver has busted $24. I suspect they’re going to continue upward, for now.

The Distance Ladder

A couple of go-backs

A couple of things I failed to mention last time.

Schwarzschild (the name is German for “black shield,” ironically enough) did his theoretical work in 1915, immediately after Einstein published the theory of general relativity. His solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity was the first one, in fact. Astrophysicists are still careful to distinguish “Schwarzschild black holes” from rotating black holes. Schwarzschild was killed in action on the Eastern Front in World War I.

There probably is no such thing as an actual non-rotating black hole. Such would have to be formed from a non-rotating massive star (or a nebula with absolutely no rotation, in the case of the supermassive black holes). Remember that even the tiniest rotation will be magnified, and magnified a lot, as the object shrinks down from light years (or tens of trillions of kilometers) across, to star-sized (hundreds of thousands of kilometers) to just a few kilometers in radius, just as the figure skater spins much faster when she pulls her arms in.

Black holes are generally safe…as long as you’re far enough away. If the sun were magically to be replaced by an equal-mass black hole, the Earth would continue in its orbit and not be sucked in. It’s only when you get to within about 3 Schwarzschild radii that you can’t have a stable orbit. (And the Schwarzschild radius is the radius at which the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light.) For the sun the Schwarzschild radius is 2,950 meters (not kilometers, meters). Earth could be made into a black hole too–if you could manage to compress it until its radius is 8.87 millimeters.

Measuring Distances

Astronomers can easily measure the direction of a star. This was being done with surprisingly high precision even before the invention of the telescope. As seen from earth, the sky forms a “celestial sphere” and every star’s position on that sphere can be measured and plotted in star charts. The celestial sphere appears to rotate on an axis (really it’s the earth that rotates on that axis, in the opposite direction), so that defines north and south “poles” on the celestial sphere; and halfway between them is the celestial equator. So you can get something like “latitude” on the celestial sphere, only it’s called “declination” or “Dec.” Longitude is trickier because there’s no objective zero point, but can be handled too. The sun, of course, moves along the celestial sphere following the “zodiac” which is a circle tilted at a 23.5 degree angle to the celestial equator (and again, it’s not the sun that’s really moving, it’s the earth orbiting the sun making the sun appear to move). The place where the zodiac crosses the celestial equator, when the sun is moving from the southern celestial hemisphere into the northern celestial hemisphere, is called “the first point of Aries” and is also the zero “longitude” point by convention. When you see a statement like “Spring will start at 4:46 PM on March 21″ that’s really the time the sun will (appear to) cross through the first point of Aries”. But here’s a wrinkle with regard to celestial longitude: It’s measured not in degrees but in hours. 24 hours makes up the full circle, then those are divided into minutes and seconds just like degrees are. And it’s called “Right Ascension” or “R.A.,” not longitude.

If you remember last week I posted a rather colorful plot of the orbits of some stars at the center of the Milky Way around the supermassive black hole there, plotted on a grid. The grid is marked off in seconds of arc (i.e., the kind of second that is 1/3600th of a degree, not the kind of second that is 1/3600th of an hour of right ascension), with respect to the declination and right ascension of that black hole. That is what those scales mean.

In any case it’s easy to measure this sort of thing; one of the two most manifestly obvious things about a star is what direction it’s in. (The other is how bright it is.)

But that alone will not tell us where the star is. In three dimensional space, you need three coordinates. In a Cartesian (square/cubic) grid, you need x, y, and z. In this case, you’re dealing with spherical coordinates, and you still need three of them (that’s why it’s “three dimensional” space): Right ascension, declination, and distance.

And unlike right ascension and declination, distance to a star is a cast-iron bitch to measure accurately.

I’ve told, here and especially elsewhere, the story of how we first determined the distance from Earth to the Sun (and hence all of the other distances within the solar system, since we already knew the ratios of the distances to each other). This was in the 1760s and it required observations of Venus transiting the Sun (i.e., crossing directly between Earth and the Sun so as to appear as a black dot crossing the fact of the sun, rather than crossing north/”above” or south/”below” the sun as it laps us in its orbit). This distance is called an “Astronomical Unit” (AU), and is currently defined to be 149,597,870,700 meters (in other words if we ever measure it in the future and it turns out the actual distance isn’t quite this, we’ll keep this number for the astronomical unit anyway). (And [Oh By The Way] knowing the average distance from the earth to the sun to the nearest 100 meters is, in and of itself, quite a triumph of measurement.)

With extremely painstaking measurements, best done on photographic plates, it became possible to measure distances to some stars once we knew this. It took until the mid 1800s. What happens is, as the earth revolves around the sun, its position changes by roughly 300 million kilometers, and that will cause nearer stars to appear to shift back and forth in relation to farther stars, just like you can shift your head back and forth and, say, a nearby light pole in a parking lot will appear to move back and forth with respect to the mountains in the background. (Folks in Kansas and especially Florida and Louisiana will have to adjust that example a bit.) This is known as parallax.

If you know how far you are moving your head, and can measure how many degrees along the horizon the pole appears to shift, it’s straightforward trigonometry to determine the distance to the light pole.

Even with the earth moving back-and-forth 300 million kilometers, the parallax of even the nearest star is less than one second of arc. (But note, this is quoted, for historical reasons, with respect to half of the earth’s orbital diameter, i.e., its orbital radius, which is to say, versus a 1 AU baseline, not a 2 AU baseline.) An arcsecond is about the width of a quarter at eighteen thousand feet (over three miles).

It’s possible to compute how far away something has to be to have a (half) parallax of one arc second as seen from a body orbiting with a radius of 1AU. Again, straightforward trigonometry. And, to the nearest meter (it has to be rounded because the formula has pi in it), it’s 30,856,775,814,913,673 meters. Or about 31 quadrillion meters or 31 trillion kilometers. This is called a “parsec” (short for “parallax-second”), and it’s roughly equal to 206,000 AU. (If you consider that Neptune’s orbit is roughly 30 AUs in radius, you can see how truly vast this distance is even compared to our solar system, which is measured in billions of miles. And this is closer than the nearest star.)

Astronomers–and I mean people who do astronomy for a living–think in and use parsecs. You’ve heard of light years, I am sure. That’s the distance light travels in a year. A parsec is actually about 3.26 light years, or alternatively, it takes 3.26 years for light to travel one parsec.

Astronomers talking to the public basically have to multiply everything by 3.26 so they can express it in light years. Why work in parsecs, then? Well, when they measure a parallax, they just have to divide it into 1 arc second to get the distance in parsecs. A 0.5 second parallax, means a two parsec distance, and so on.

The first successful parallax-based distance measurement was of the star Vega (visible low in the west shortly after sunset this time of year; it’s part of the Summer Triangle asterism); its parallax is almost exactly 1/8th of an arc second, so its distance was roughly 8 parsecs.

This was conceptually easy, but parallaxes were so small that by 1900 only 60 stars had had their distances measured. The process sped up in the early 20th century, to be sure…but since even with a small telescope hundreds of thousands of stars are visible, we weren’t going to finish off the list any time soon. Plus, of course, the fact that most of these stars are so distant they couldn’t be measured by the instruments of the time–they were in fact used as the backdrop for the nearer stars to move against. (Even today, with satellites doing the work, we really can’t get past about 1600 light years with this method.)

Clearly, if we were going to measure lots of stellar distances, we’d need another method.

But now for a wrenching change of subject.

The Shape of the Universe

William Herschel (1738-1822) is best known as the discoverer of the planet George. At least, that’s what he wanted to name it, after the King of England, George III.

(I’ll pause now and give you all a chance to quit vomiting at the prospect of naming a planet after that particular asshole.)

This name was not accepted by most astronomers, so instead they named it after every asshole: Uranus. And of course, that probably leads to even more bad jokes than naming it “George” would have. Astronomers school themselves to say “YER in us” instead of “your Anus” when they name that planet, but even that sounds too much like “urinous” (full or redolent of urine). Perhaps they should have gone with “OO rahn us,” probably closer to how the Greeks pronounced that name (father of the Titans) in any case. (And no, I didn’t mean to usurp Wheatie’s word of the day, but if you can find a good use for “urinous” with respect to current events–shouldn’t be that challenging–go right on ahead.)

Anyhow, Herschel did a lot of other things, perhaps the most important of which was discovery of infrared light. But for our purposes today, he was also the first to suggest that the stars, if their three-dimensional positions could be plotted, would form a disc with a central bulge, sort of like some renderings of flying saucers; and that the Sun would not be at the center of this shape.

How did he conclude this? If you get away from city lights (and that was easy to do in his day; nothing was as brightly lit back then as it is now), you will see a faintly glowing cloudy band stretching across the night sky. In fact, this cloudy band runs clear around the celestial sphere, including through the part we cannot see from the United States because it’s too far south. It’s most prominent where it runs through the constellation Sagittarius, but it also runs through Cassiopeia (the “W” in the northern sky) and the northern cross (part of Cygnus), in fact it runs along the long member of the cross. (This part of it should be readily visible shortly after dark…again, if you get the heck away from city lights.)

The ancient Greeks, of course, had spotted this band, and had named it γαλαξίας κύκλος (galaxias kyklos) or “milky circle” since the pale faint color suggested milk to them; they even had conjured up a myth that it was actual milk from the breast of Hera, queen of the gods. The Romans called it via lactea which translates directly to “Milky Way.”

When Galileo turned his telescope on the Milky Way, it turned out to be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of stars that were individually too faint to be seen by the unaided eye, but together turned into this “milky way” stretching across the sky.

What Herschel had done was to catalogue thousands of stars and other deep sky objects, like nebulae, and to note that more of them were in the general direction of Sagittarius than any other direction, and of course most were in the plane of the Milky Way than other directions (such as 90 degrees away from it, where almost no stars are). And exactly opposite of Sagittarius, the Milky Way was thinnest.

That’s what we’d see if all the stars were spread out evenly in a fairly flat disc, and we were inside the disk but off center. We’d see the most stars looking through the center, lots of stars looking any other direction through the disc (the least when looking away from the center, because the distance to the edge of the disc is shortest in this direction) and much less looking perpendicularly to the disc.

The Milky Way is not just brighter in the direction of Sagittarius, but broader, which is why Herschel believed (correctly) there was a central bulge in that direction.

Note that Herschel was working before we could measure the distance to stars (and well before spectroscopy and stellar classification), so he was going entirely off their brightness, assuming that dimmer stars were further away. However, he was still essentially right about the shape of this conglomeration of stars.

It was believed that everything–the entire universe–was within this structure. That included not just stars, but also nebulae, in essence either dark, opaque clouds of gas and dust, or in some cases such clouds brightly lit by nearby stars.

One fairly obvious and prominent nebula is in the sword of Orion; it looks a bit fuzzy to the unaided eye (instead of being a crisp point of light like other things “up there”) but in binoculars it is obviously a glowing cloud of gas lit by stars embedded within it.

In fact, this is a place where stars and planetary systems are forming–right now. This is abundantly clear from observations, including from Hubble Space Telescope images.

Other nebulae had distinctly spiral shapes, like, for instance, this one:

And this is pretty much where things sat, clear into the early part of the 20th century. The universe was believed to consist of the Milky Way, surrounded by empty space.

But there were proponents of a different idea, that these spiral nebulae were actually separate galaxies. On April 26, 1920, in fact, there was a debate held at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History; today it is known as the “Great Debate.” Harlow Shapley argued the spiral nebulae were on the outskirts of this galaxy, while Heber Curtis argued that they were in fact, distinct galaxies and therefore very far away, outside of this galaxy.

Note that this was just over a century ago. The issue wouldn’t be settled until 1924.

We have only known about other galaxies definitively for less than a century. Think about that.

How could the people who thought that “spiral nebulae” were in fact separate galaxies outside our own actually prove it? Or alternatively, be made to shut up? Well, the most straightforward way to do that would be to show that they were far, far away–or not.

Which brings me back to pointing out that in astronomy, measuring distances is a cast-iron bitch.

Even with today’s satellite technology, we can barely get parallaxes over 1% of the distance across this galaxy; certainly in 1920 using stone knives and bearskins we’d never be able to prove something was outside the galaxy with parallaxes.

A Standard Candle

But we already had a solution to this.

We go to HAH-vuhd, 1908-1912, and yet another woman, Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921).

I point out the fact that she was, indeed, a “she” because in those days it was very unusual for women to be involved with the “hard” sciences. How, then, did so many of them end up clustered at Harvard?

As it happens the astronomer Edward Charles Pickering (1848-1919) had developed a method of taking the spectra of multiple stars all at once by putting a prism in front of a photographic plate. He had,over decades, assembled a team of women to go through the data for 220,000 stars. This was primarily because they were cheap labor, but also because even back then women were appreciated for work that required attention to detail. [For instance, the US Mint preferred women for work as adjusters, who’d file excess precious metal off of unstruck planchets.] Annie Jump Cannon, whom we’ve met previously, emerged as their natural leader. The group became known as “Pickering’s Computers” (this was well before the invention of the electricity powered computer) and are now known as the Harvard Computers. They didn’t have doctorates (not by any means) but their contributions to astronomy today are well-regarded.

There were so many photographic plates involved–and back then these were sheets of glass coated with emulsion–that Pickering’s research was said to weigh 120 tons.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin (whom I discussed previously; she discovered the stars were mostly made of hydrogen) was not one of the computers; she actually was a graduate student who worked closely with them.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt, on the other hand, was one of the computers and she established the first “standard candle.”

Clear back in September of 1784, Edward Pigott noticed that the star Eta Aquilae was variable; it would regularly dim, then brighten suddenly, then dim again. It would do so with the same period; every pulsation took the same amount of time, known as the period. (We now know that stars like this actually pulsate in size, like a yo-yo dieter only much more rapidly.) Just a few months later a different astronomer noticed the same for Delta Cephei. The periods range from a few days to a few months.[A digression about these names. There are thousands of stars in the sky visible to the naked eye; countless more visible with a telescope. They can’t all be given unique names (though hundreds have been, everything from Betelgeuse [famous] to Zubenelschamali [not so famous]). So in 1603, just before the invention of the telescope, Johann Bayer came up with a system of labeling the brightest star in a constellation as “alpha” (such as Alpha Orionis–Betelgeuse). Beta would go to the second brightest star and so on. This would be followed by the Latin genitive of the constellation name. So Betelgeuse was “Alpha of Orion,” strictly translated. This is called the Bayer designation, and has been extended since then. Continuing to look at Orion, alpha through kappa, the brightest ten stars: Eight of them have “real” names, one (theta) is actually the Orion nebula, and eta is (as far as Wikipoo knows) nameless. The three belt stars are among the named stars, the four stars of the not-quite-a-rectangle also all have names. Returning to Cepheids, Delta Cephei was designated the fourth brightest star in Cepheus by Bayer.]

There turned out to be an entire class of these variable stars and they became known as Cepheid variables in honor of Delta Cephei. Several dozen had been discovered by the end of the 19th century. Today we know that they are typically stars four to twenty times as massive as the sun, and therefore very bright, up to 100,000 times as bright–but this was not apparent before Henrietta Swan Leavitt studied them.

In 1908 Henrietta Swan Leavitt began measuring the apparent brightness and periods of numerous Cepheids in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. Apparently there are thousands of Cepheids in these clouds, though they appear quite faint compared to the ones previously discovered.

The SMC and LMC are patches of milkiness that are quite apparent to the naked eye, provided you are far enough south; they are deep in the southern celestial hemisphere, and the further south an object is, the further south you have to be for it to be above the horizon. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds were noted by Antonio Pigafetta, who was with Ferdinand Magellan on his voyage (yes, that Magellan, famous for being the first to circumnavigate the Earth in the early 1500s). Of course many had noticed them before, anyone from Australian aborigines to Arabic astronomers and some other early European explorers, but for some reason this guy was able to tell the European scientific community about them and have it “stick.”

Leavitt noticed that the Cepheids in the Magellanic Clouds had an interesting correlation: the brighter they appeared, the longer their periods.

It was logical to suppose that Cepheids in one of the clouds are all at about the same distance from us. Which would mean the brighter ones really were intrinsically brighter than their dimmer cousins. And if the brighter ones had the longer periods…well then!

So what we had was a “standard candle” (Leavitt coined the term), in other words something of known intrinsic brightness. If you could measure the period of a Cepheid, and it had a long period, you knew it was the same intrinsic brightness as one with the same period in the Large Magellanic Cloud. If it looked dimmer, then it was actually further away. If it looked brighter, it was closer. So you could tell the (relative) distance of a Cepheid by measuring its period.

Leavitt published in 1912.

All we needed now was to measure the distance to one Cepheid variable by some other means and we’d know the distance to all of them. Eijnar Hertzsprung (as in “Hertzsprung Russell Diagram”, 1873-1967) measured the distance to several Cepheids by parallax in 1913.

We had our standard candle and were off to the races now.

In 1924, Edwin Hubble (after whom the space telescope is named, 1889-1953) working at the Mt. Wilson observatory in southern California, was able to detect very faint Cepheids in many of the “spiral nebulae,” measure their periods, determine that they were well outside the bounds of “the” “one and only” galaxy, and could therefore establish, once and for all, that the spiral nebulae they were in were actually separate galaxies.

The universe had just gotten bigger. A lot bigger. Some of the galaxies Hubble was able to measure were sixty or so million light years away; which is to say six hundred million trillion kilometers away (which is to say six hundred quintillion kilometers). That’s a lot more than the 100,000 light year diameter of this galaxy, which hitherto had been thought to be the entire universe.

A bunch of those galaxies about fifty or sixty million light years away are in the constellation Virgo, and that group is now known as the “Virgo cluster.”

And there were many, many dimmer “spiral nebulae” in which no Cepheids could be detected at all–presumably because those nebulae were so far away the Cepheids in them were too faint to see. So how big, precisely, is this universe of ours? Certainly at least hundreds of millions of light years!

At the other end of the scale, and most famously, there is a “spiral nebula” in Andromeda. You can see it with your own unaided eye, far away from city lights. (I personally find it hard to see; I have to look away from it slightly to see it. But it certainly shows up in binoculars!) It’s now called the Andromeda Galaxy, thanks to Hubble. It’s about 2 million light years away. The LMC and SMC are much closer, they’re now considered satellite smaller galaxies in orbit about our own galaxy. There are a few other very close galaxies, such as M-33; together with the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies they make up the imaginatively-named “Local Group.” Twenty quadrillion kilometers may not seem terribly “local” to you, but for galaxies, that’s Standing Room Only and get your elbow out of my eye!

That telescope on Mt. Wilson? It was a monster in its day, with a 100 inch mirror. It still exists today; you can see it on tours during the daytime. It is not, however, used by professional astronomers any more as it’s simply not powerful enough. However, for several thousand dollars a night, you can rent the telescope–though as far as I know that opportunity is only extended to astronomy clubs.

But in terms of its historical impact on our view of the universe, it is probably second only to Galileo’s telescopes. Hubble himself is considered a Giant of astronomy; those astronomy clubs can actually use the same telescope he used.

But Hubble was not done in 1924. If anything, what he went on to do after this was even more important.

Redshifts

Vesto Melvin Slipher (1875-1969), had, back in the 1910s, looked at “spiral neblulae” through a spectroscope and had been able to measure their velocity towards or away from us (the “radial” velocity) by noting the Doppler shift of the spectral lines.

Almost all of them were moving away from us, as indicated by a shift towards longer wavelengths (lower frequencies). This is the famous “red shift” because the lines in the visible spectrum were shifted towards red, the longer wavelengths of visible light. Very few were shifted towards violet (which, for some reason is called a blue shift, not a violet shift). This was peculiar; after all a bunch of objects “out there” should have a pretty random assortment of radial velocities…yet almost all of these spirals were moving away from us, and rather rapidly, too.

For example, M-87 in the Virgo Cluster (this is the one with the really big black hole at its center–but Slipher had no idea about that) is moving away from us at 1284 kilometers per second. Which is pretty doggone fast.

Hubble took this data, combined it with his distance measurements, and made a plot.

And got the surprise of his life.

It turns out that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is receding, The main exceptions turned out to be within the Local Group; some of those galaxies actually are headed towards us (like Andromeda, which will collide with this galaxy in about five billion years).

M-87 is 16.4 megaparsecs (million parsecs) away from us which puts it at about 53.5 million light years off.

What is it about the Milky Way galaxy that is repelling almost all of the other galaxies?

Nothing, actually. It turns out that a hypothetical observer in any galaxy will see all of the other galaxies rushing away from him, the further away, the faster.

Hubble was able to determine that for every megaparsec of distance, a galaxy is going to be moving 500 kilometers per second. As it turns out, there were significant problems with using Cepheid variables–it turns out there are two distinct classes of them that behave differently. I’ve ignored that fact up til now. But now, this recession rate is known to be 74 km/second…for each megaparsec of distance. This is known as the Hubble parameter, now. And the fact that further galaxies recede faster is now known as Hubble’s Law.

Bang!

But, run the movie backwards! What happens? Since galaxies twice as far away move twice as fast, if you run the movie backwards, all galaxies come together simultaneously at some point. Which means (if you halt the reverse at this point and start looking at it in forward motion) everything was in one place, then there was a big explosion (or something like that) and all of the pieces got blown away from from the other pieces at some point in the distant past, eventually leading to what we see today.

Time for Einstein and Company to step in.

One thing that was instantly apparent to Albert Einstein when he formulated General Relativity was that it could be applied to the universe as a whole. Einstein believed (as most did in 1915) that the universe was essentially static and unchanging on a large scale. What we see now was pretty much what had been there…back forever.

However, both General Relativity and Newtonian gravity said that if the universe consisted of a bunch of stationary objects, they’d simply attract each other and start to move closer to each other, in exactly the same way that a stationary apple a meter above the floor will, without support, fall.

So Einstein, believing that this wasn’t what was happening (he really didn’t have evidence of that; this was before Hubble), put a fudge factor into his equation, a cosmological constant repulsion that counteracted what would otherwise be the natural inclination of the universe to contract.

Hubble’s discovery was an attitude adjuster for Einstein. The universe was not static and unchanging, it had not always existed. It had instead had a beginning, and from that beginning everything rushed apart. Clearly, ever since then, the galaxies had been slowing down due to their mutual attraction, but also, clearly, they hadn’t come to a halt. With the residual motion evident even today, there was no need for the cosmological constant fudge factor in his equations.

Einstein later considered it the biggest mistake of his life and he was probably right because he didn’t vote for Joe Biden.

[I say that, but perhaps a check of the voter rolls for Princeton, NJ is in order.]

In 1922, Alexander Alexandrovich Friedmann (1888-1925) worked with Einstein’s General Relativity equation, and derived a relationship between the average density of the universe (in kilograms per cubic meter, for instance–and by the way this number is very, very small!), its current expansion velocity, and its acceleration; this equation could be used to determine the future state of the universe (or any past state). You could essentially get the Hubble parameter out of it with the right inputs; and the equation can be rearranged to use the Hubble parameter as one of its coefficients.

The equation makes it clear that the Hubble parameter is not a constant, it can change. And indeed it’s expected to start out at a high value when everything was bunched together, then drop as things slow down over time as galaxies attract each other–exactly the way an apple thrown up into the air slows down and stops.

Another part of the equation is an expression for how fast the Hubble parameter is changing with time.

The big unknown, actually, is the average density of the universe. There is a certain value of it, which will cause the universe to expand forever, but as the time goes to infinity the speeds drop to zero…as if everything were currently moving exactly at escape velocity. This is the critical density, and the actual density could conceivably be one billionth (or a centillionth) of that value, or a billion times as much.

Determining the ratio of the actual density to the critical density has occupied a large part of the efforts of cosmologists over the last century. I had originally written a bunch more on that here…but this article has gotten long enough, and I don’t want to get too historically askew. Suffice it to say that early estimates were less than 1, but more than 0.01, meaning that there didn’t appear to be enough matter in the universe to cause its expansion to slow down and have it recollapse. But these numbers are suspiciously close to 1 when you consider the range of conceivable values is literally infinite.

It appeared at the time as though it was one third of the value, which is close enough to 1 (compared to all of the other possible ratios) to make scientists suspect it really is 1 and we’re just not measuring it right.

But this is general relativity we are dealing with here, not Newtonian mechanics, so the Friedman equation is actually an equation about how much space time is warped. That makes it more than just an equation about escape velocity. And so there are some things about it that are distinctly counter-intuitive.

First off, the galaxies that rushed away from the original point location are not moving through space. Instead, space itself is expanding. Originally, space itself was small; as it expanded all the matter in the universe stretched out with it, and eventually coalesced to form galaxies. (If the galaxies started moving in some different direction after the Big Bang, because they were near some giant cluster and are attracted to it, that’s actual motion. (And today we believe the Milky Way is moving towards the Virgo cluster.)

One consequence of space expanding is that the red shifts that we see are actually due, not to a Doppler effect but rather, to the fact that while the photon was travelling from the distant galaxy to our eyes the space stretched, which stretched the photon into a longer wavelength. One rather odd consequence of this is that a photon, once emitted, will lose energy as it travels through intergalactic space because its frequency is dropping.

Second, space-time across the expanse of the universe has a shape. And it turns out that a value of density lower than the critical density would imply that space has negative curvature, and a value that is higher would imply that space has positive curvature.

Now what the heck does that mean? How can space be curved? Well, we already know it can be warped and that’s what gravity actually is. But this deserves some elaboration.

You were taught in geometry class that the sum of the three interior angles of a triangle is always 180 degrees. That’s a fundamental property of flat space.

But really, this is only true if the triangle is drawn on a flat plane.

If you were to travel from the equator directly to the north pole, make a right-angle (90 degree) left turn, then head back to the equator (traveling south), then, on reaching the equator, make another right-angle left turn (now traveling east), you’d end up back where you started, eventually. You could then turn left 90 degrees and be facing north, like you were in the beginning.

You’ve drawn three straight lines, and are back where you started; that’s a triangle. But every interior angle is 90 degrees so the total of the three is 270 degrees.

This “breaks” that 180 degree rule I just reminded you of, but the earth is not flat, it’s (roughly) spherical. It exhibits positive curvature.

Now imagine a surface like a saddle or a Pringles chip, extended to infinity. (The bell of a tuba also works.) Drawing a triangle on that kind of surface gives you a sum of interior angles less than 180 degrees.

If the universe has too high a density, its expansion will eventually cease (at a time short of infinity) and it will collapse back in on itself again. This would render space-time the four dimensional equivalent of a sphere.

If it’s below the critical density, then even at infinity there’s velocity left to the expansion, and space time is shaped somewhat like that saddle.

If it’s exactly at the critical density, then space time is, on the whole, flat.

How can we tell? Try measuring the interior angles of a really big triangle. Preferably one billions of light years in size. (And believe it or not, today’s scientists think they’ve actually done something like that, and they believe the universe to be flat. But I am WAY ahead of the story here.)

If this makes your head hurt, you’re not alone, believe me.

Anyhow, to return to our narrative, a lot of astronomers did not want to accept that the universe didn’t have a definite beginning. Fred Hoyle, famously, refused to accept it, and died in 2002 still refusing to believe it.

It’s not that he didn’t believe that the galaxies were rushing away from each other, but rather, he imagined that as galaxies grew further apart, new matter in the form of hydrogen atoms was being spontaneously created, which would then coalesce to form new galaxies. This would result in the universe of the distant past, or the distant future, looking about the same as it does today, rather than the galaxies being closer together, or further apart, respectively. This is known as the steady state theory, and from what I can see, virtually no scientist accepts it today. Certainly, we’ve never detected any sign of hydrogen spontaneously being created throughout space, as it would have to be if Steady State were true.

Hoyle, trying to characterize the theory he disagreed with so vehemently, came up with the moniker “Big Bang.” He claims he wasn’t trying to be derisive, but many took it as such. The proponents proudly adopted the term to describe that instant–roughly 11 to 13 billion years ago–when everything in the universe was jammed close together.

(It’s not as if people haven’t, at other times, proudly adopted what was supposed to be a derisive label. Right, oh fellow Deplorables?)

The Big Bang theory was simultaneously worked out by Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), who was not only an astronomer, but also a Catholic priest. He certainly had no problem with the universe having a beginning! In fact Hubble’s Law is often called the Hubble-Lemaitre’s Law.

There was one minor issue though.

Running the tape backwards, the Big Bang appeared to be ten or eleven billion years old. This was based on extrapolating the current expansion rate backwards, and accounting for how the expansion rate was undoubtedly faster in the past. Yet we also had good reason to believe that globular clusters–groupings of thousands to millions of stars that mostly exist above and below the plane of this galaxy–are at least 13 billion years old. Clearly it’s absurd that globular clusters could be older than the universe that they are part of, so this was a nagging issue for quite some time.

The Next Rung Of The Ladder

With Hubble-Lemaitre’s Law established, we had a new way to measure distance. If we couldn’t see Cepheid variables in some galaxy because it was too far away from us, we could instead measure its red shift, turn a mathematical crank, and get a distance out, one likely to be over a hundred million light years.

In fact, when quasars were first discovered, their red shifts were measured and they were instantly some of the most distant objects ever detected. Some were even billions of light years away. But there is a complication here. The farther away a galaxy is, the further back in time we are looking. If we look at M-87, we are seeing it as it was 53 million years ago, because the light has traveled 53 million light years to get to us, and for the light to be getting to us now, it has to have left M-87 53 million years ago.

Similarly for more distant galaxies. As our telescopes became more and more sensitive, we were looking at galaxies further and further into the past. Quasars, it turns out, all happened well in the past, and now we know they are a “young galaxy” thing as the black holes at the galactic centers devour interstellar gas. In older galaxies, that interstellar gas is as gone as last Thanksgiving’s dinner.

But, if the universe has been slowing down its expansion rate, 53 million years ago, or a billion years ago, the Hubble parameter must have been higher. If we compute a distance to a galaxy using a constant Hubble parameter, we’re introducing an error.

Of course this relies on what is ultimately an assumption: That the Hubble parameter is indeed decreasing. It’s an assumption that seems to make sense, because after all everything in the universe is being attracted to everything else. On the other hand, if you’re a galaxy surrounded by other galaxies, their pulls should all cancel out, and that same is true of all of those other galaxies too–they’re all surrounded by other galaxies.

So scientists wanted to check that assumption–and the data gathered would help nail down the average density of the universe a bit better.

So we needed some other way to measure the distance to a galaxy, and compare it to the distance inferred from its red shift. If the first distance was further, that would imply that the Hubble parameter used to be bigger than it is today (as expected) and we could even, if we did this with enough galaxies with different red shifts, be able to plot how much the Hubble parameter was at any given time in the past.

But to do that, we needed another “Standard Candle,” one a lot brighter than Cepheid variables.

And we eventually found one.

But here, I think, is where I need to pause.

I’m going to shift gears next time. But not really. Because as you investigate the very earliest stages of the universe (I am talking about, say, 1 second after the Big Bang) you find yourself needing to know about particle physics.

So switching from talking about the entire universe, to talking about stuff much smaller than atoms, isn’t as jarring as it might seem at first.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Hey China!

Or rather, “Hey Chinese Communist Party and your entire array of servitors, ass-wipers, and fellators!”

You’re not even worth my time this week. When you decide to act like civilized people, maybe I’ll give you a lesson or two in how non-barbarians behave.

Hey BiteMe!
(Or, Whoever Has Their Hand Rammed Up That Putrefying Meat Puppet’s Ass)

[Language warning]

You and yours have caused a lot of injury. Literal injury with your war on people who don’t want to take an untested vaccine. When people die in an emergency room because a hospital won’t admit them because they haven’t had their clot shot, that’s a crime.

I’m going to address here the insult on top of the injury, because I am among the insulted. I still have my health but apparently you want me to live under the 8th Street Bridge (which actually isn’t on 8th Street, but whatever, that’s what the I-25 overpass over Cimarron is called), so maybe if you have your way that won’t be true for long. Dreadful time of year to become homeless.

No, you’re just trying to make me unemployed, because I won’t take your fucking shots.

Well, that threat is NOT going to work. I. Won’t. Take. Your. Fucking. Shots.

And neither will any of my coworkers who haven’t already had them…and those people who got the shots are a small minority. Most of those got the shots before we began to understand how nasty they truly are.

One of my coworkers was thinking he might have to knuckle under at least until he found another job…but don’t you even think (you do sometimes think, don’t you?) of finding that encouraging.

Don’t think that, because his resolve has hardened.

You’re LOSING.

You LOSER.

You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.

I would love to see you die an agonizing, humiliating death. (This isn’t a threat, because I am not threatening to cause that death. I am just announcing my intention to party if it happens.) It would be just recompense for the way you’re killing America…and millions of Americans.

Anti-Science?

So you think I’m anti-science for refusing the “vaccine”?

Uh, you do know who you’re talking about, right? The guy who writes the physics posts?

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

The Audit

On that note, reading comments on the Friday thread, there seems to be mixed opinions on whether the audit was good news, bad news, and if good news, exactly what could be done with it.

I suspect a lot of discussion will be going on today, as we digest what we’ve seen and read.

But at least it finally is out.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $1793.00
Silver $24.40
Platinum $1047.00
Palladium $2104
Rhodium $15,250

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $1785.10
Silver $23.99
Platinum $1028.00
Palladium $2087.00
Rhodium $15,250.00

Gold at least seems to have pulled out of the 1750s. The PGMs are basically going nowhere, perhaps because their demand largely rests on cars and no one can build cars right now because of the supply chain blah blah blah.

Extreme Stars

Last week, I mentioned in passing several kinds of what one might think of as “extreme” stars.

Ordinary stars are fusing hydrogen to make helium. Astronomers call them “main sequence stars” and they range from large, hot, very luminous (and hence short-lived) blue stars all the way down through small, faint, cool, dim (and hence long-lived, none have died of old age yet) red stars called “red dwarfs.”

Stars go “extreme” when they run out of hydrogen fuel. Red dwarfs, we believe, will simply turn into white dwarfs–stars that consist of the “ash” of nuclear fusion, and are no longer generating heat…rather, they radiate their residual heat, albeit at very high temperatures. Medium-sized stars like our sun will become red giant stars that fuse the helium ash of their prior main sequence lives, then after running out of helium while making carbon and oxygen, they too will become white dwarfs.

Red Giants and Supergiants

Red giant stars are pretty extreme…in physical size, at least; when the sun goes red giant it will swell up immensely. It may well swallow up the earth, and certainly will swallow up Mercury and Venus.

Red giant phases are the common denominator, for stars about 30% of sun-mass and up. (A star about ten times the mass of the sun becomes a ‘supergiant’ but that’s essentially the same thing, just much bigger. Examples are Betelegeuse and Antares.) All such stars swell up and burn helium; the more massive ones will continue past that, burning carbon, oxygen and eventually silicon; then they will start on iron.

White Dwarfs

White dwarfs are even more extreme. They’re about the size of the earth (and remember they’re the corpses of something a few tens or even hundreds of thousand times the mass of earth), so they are very dense, many tons per teaspoonful. There’s basically nothing to stop the star from collapsing once it no longer generates energy and heat from nuclear fusion, so it does precisely that: collapses. The end result is a star corpse, held “up” purely by the repulsion of the electrons in it. It does, of course grow hotter as the pressure increases during the collapse, so this corpse glows white hot. But that heat simply radiates away, never to be replaced. White dwarfs will cool off and stop radiating visible light…eventually.

Heavier stars go through all of this, but at the end, the electron repulsion won’t stop the collapse. The star is simply too massive, the self-gravitation of all that mass is just…too much.

This sort of star shows up after a core-collapse supernova, which isn’t just a Boom! or even a KaBoom!!! It’s most assuredly an earth-shattering kaboom.

Literally. If our sun were to do this, Earth would be literally blown to bits. Not just “oh all the life on the surface got wiped out,” I mean blown to bits. Fortunately our Sun isn’t nearly massive enough for this to happen…and it won’t even get to white dwarf status for another five billion years or so. (So no, you shouldn’t skip paying your bills.)

Neutron Stars (Pulsars)

In a neutron star the pressure is so great that the electrons are forced into the nuclei. They combine with the protons, and the star simply turns into a big mass of neutrons.

Neutron stars will form whenever the leftover remnant of the star is more than 1.4 times the mass of the sun. This number is known as Chandrasekhar’s limit because was calculated in 1931 by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. At that time, though, he had simply calculated when the electron pressure would fail; he didn’t realize that a ball of neutrons would form if, say, the star’s mass was just above his number. (The neutron hadn’t been discovered yet.)

A neutron star is roughly ten miles across.

Compressing the star into something that small makes for a very dense object. Imagine the weight of the Great Pyramid in a teaspoon. It also does two other things: First, remember your angular momentum. As a rotating object shrinks, it rotates faster and faster. And stars do rotate.

The typical neutron star rotates a couple of thousand times per second.

Also, the star had a magnetic field. Concentrating that into a smaller star simply makes it more intense. More than likely the poles of the magnet won’t be lined up with the axis of rotation, so as the star rotates, its magnetic poles sweep across the sky like a lighthouse. A lighthouse on your washing machine’s spin cycle. (Though even that isn’t nearly fast enough.) The star ejects all sorts of particles along its magnetic axes, and over time it slows down.

These stars were first discovered via radio telescope in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell. The signals from them are so regular that at first some thought we might finally have found little green men. Eventually we figured out what was going on and they were dubbed “pulsars” (from pulsating stars).

This video is audio of a few pulsars, first ones rotating slowly enough we perceive the individual pulses. But at higher frequencies we simply hear a tone of the matching frequency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_3sHeUNn1k

But even this is not as extreme as it gets.

Black Holes

If the star’s core remnant (after large parts of it get blown away) is sufficiently massive, even the neutrons are crushed.

As far as we know, there’s nothing to stop complete collapse at this point. And by complete, I mean collapse until the star has zero diameter. And I do mean zero. Which also means an infinite density.

An infinite density doesn’t seem physically possible–nature abhors infinities–but if there’s anything to prevent it, it’s beyond the ken of present day physics.

Or perhaps it’s not an issue at all.

Yes, I am talking about black holes.

Why is it called a black hole?

As you might imagine, these extreme stars (even the relatively un-extreme white dwarf) have very high surface gravities. After all that’s part-and-parcel of crushing matter down to such small sizes.

The sun’s surface gravity is about 28 times that of earth. That’s 28 g. An object that weighs one pound on earth would weigh 28 pounds on the sun.

A white dwarf might have the same mass as the sun but be far more compact, that means the radius is smaller and the strength of the force of gravity goes up as the radius goes down. In fact, half the radius is four times the strength. So a white dwarf might have a surface gravity of 100,000 g.

A neutron star typically has a surface gravity of 100 billion g.

Each of these implies a surface escape velocity. The earth’s escape velocity is about 11 km/second, the sun’s escape velocity is 617 kilometers per second. That white dwarf will come in at about 3000 kilometers per second. A neutron star will come in at 100,000 kilometers per second.

That’s about a third of the speed of light.

Well, that should bring up the question: Can something exist where the surface gravity is so high that the escape velocity is the speed of light? Or higher?

If so it’d be impossible to escape that object. You can’t launch a rocket that fast, because any object with mass can’t even reach the speed of light–let alone exceed it.

This idea isn’t particularly new. John Michel, in 1784, wondered if there might be stars so massive their light couldn’t escape them. He called them dark stars. He imagined an object the same density as the sun, but perhaps 500 times the diameter.

Of course he didn’t understand that an object so massive would simply crush itself down to a denser, smaller object, even going past the neutron star limit. He had no idea what neutrons were; no one did.

The critique his idea faced wasn’t on that basis. A couple of decades after his suggestion, light became understood as a wave with no mass, and by Newtonian theory the force of gravity requires an object with mass, acting on another object with mass. The two masses are multiplied together (then multiplied and divided by other things) to compute the force

If one of the two objects has no mass, the force is zero. According to the Newtonian understanding of gravity, therefore, light should be totally unaffected by gravity, and it would still escape the so-called “dark star” which wouldn’t, therefore, be dark at all.

But then the idea became worth taking seriously again after 1915, when Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity was put forth. And even more so after general relativity was bolstered by Arthur Eddington’s measurements of apparent star positions during a solar eclipse.

Gravity now was understood not as a force between two masses, which had to be proportional to their product, but rather as distortions in spacetime caused by any mass.

So a high-mass star bends spacetime. And any object travelling freely, without any acceleration being applied to it, would try to follow those bends. Even an object with no mass at all, because the object’s mass plays no role in determining its path. It’s not experiencing a force at all.

This is not to say there isn’t a force involved when standing, say, on a planet. The Newtonian understanding is that an object is being pulled toward another object by a force, and (if it’s an apple and a planet) the surface of the planet is acted upon by the force on the apple, giving the sensation that the apple has weight. The Einsteinian understanding is that the apple is trying to travel a straight line in space time, because that’s what all things do, but the surface of the planet is pushing the apple off the path, applying a force to it, and thereby presenting the sensation of weight.

Once the idea of a dark star became reasonable again, the theory guys got back to work.

The Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, about 2.17 solar masses (though it’s a lot harder to nail down this value, so don’t hold me to it), is the upper limit of neutron star mass. Past that, the neutrons can’t hold the star “up” and it just keeps collapsing.

There’s nothing known that can prevent it from collapsing down to an infinitely dense mathematical point. Which is a physical absurdity. But of course, we don’t know everything, and as I hinted at above, it might not even be an issue.

What would one of these objects look like?

It would emit absolutely no light. Or anything else. (It might emit Hawking radiation, which I’ll hopefully remember to explain a bit later.)

Regardless of the actual size of the object, there is a certain radius from the center, above which the escape velocity is below the speed of light, and below which, the escape velocity is above the speed of light.

Because of that anything below that radius, is invisible to us, it’s gone from the universe, never to return. This level is called the event horizon, or sometimes the Schwarzschild surface, after the man who first did this particular computation, characterizing a non-rotating black hole. And the radius of that surface is called the Schwarzschild radius.

And its blackness led to the name “black hole,” which was coined by a student of John Wheeler’s in 1967. Wheeler decided it was perfect and used it himself and it caught on.

The only way we can tell anything is there is from the object’s gravitation. The black hole has two other properties: if the stuff inside the event horizon has a net electrical charge, so will the black hole, and also, the black hole might rotate, which could change the shape of the event horizon.

A black hole formed from a collapsing star will certainly be rotating, even faster than the pulsars do because the radius is that much smaller.

If we can’t see one of these things, how will we ever detect one?

I dropped a couple of hints above, but there’s also another way, and that’s to detect the matter falling into a black hole before it crosses the event horizon.

Consider a binary star system. The two stars are formed at the same time, but the more massive of the pair ultimately goes supernova and ends up being a black hole. The black hole and what’s left of the other star after the big kaboom will continue orbiting each other. If the distance between the two is small enough, then an interesting thing occurs. Ordinary stars constantly lose some mass through their “solar wind” and coronal mass ejections. In this case, some of that mass will hit the black hole, or come very close to it. It can be gravitationally captured by the black hole, resulting in a spinning disc of gas.

Gas, in orbit, will eventually collapse into the black hole. This wouldn’t necessarily be true of a single discrete object, but the gas consists of individual atoms that bump into each other, and some of those particles lose velocity as a result. Over time, the gas spirals inward, at faster and faster speeds: its temperature can reach millions of degrees, and it will emit X-rays due to its black body radiation.

We can see those X rays.

The very first black hole to be seen is known as Cygnus X-1, because it was the first X-ray source discovered in the constellation Cygnus (which contains the northern cross–at this time of year it’s in the western sky immediately after sunset). This source was discovered in 1964, and by the mid 1970s it was accepted as being a black hole, with a companion star losing mass through the “accretion disc.”

The amount of energy lost by matter in the accretion disc is about a third of the energy of the mass of that material from E=mc². If we could actually “tame” a black hole and feed anything, even garbage into it, then harness the radiation output from the accretion disc, it’d be a fantastic source of energy.

For reasons that (as I understand it) are still unclear, there are often two jets of energy coming out from near the event horizon perpendicular to the accretion disk, too. Below is an artist’s conception:

There was, however, another surprise in store for astronomers. When they began using radio telescopes in the 1950s, they identified a number of point-like radio sources, and by analyzing their spectra they were able to tell that these objects were very, very, very distant (I’ll discuss that some more next time). They were named “Quasi Stellar radio sources” which got shortened to “quasar.” For many years these were a mystery. It turned out that these things were belting out truly enormous amounts of energy, far more so entire galaxies. And we had every reason to believe they were small.

We now believe we understand these objects.

It turns out that every galaxy has, at its center, a supermassive black hole, one with anywhere from ten thousand to billions of times the mass of the sun. The one at the center of the galaxy M-87 is particularly enormous, about 6.5 billion solar masses, and we’ve been able to image its accretion disc with radio telescopes; below is a false color image based on that data:

With M-87’s central black hole we can even see one of the jets being shot out of the thing. Below is a picture of the core of M-87 taken by the Hubble Space Telescope; the blue is a false color rendering of one of the jets.

Quasars are far away, which means we are seeing the light that left them a long time ago, many billions of years. It seems that young galaxies go through a phase where vast quantities of matter is falling into their central black holes, and that accounts for the astounding amount of energy blasting out of these things.

What about our galaxy, the Milky Way? Though we can’t see, with visible light, the center of our galaxy–there’s too much dust and gas in the line of sight–we can see the stars near the center with infrared light.

And after watching them for about ten or fifteen years, it became clear they were orbiting something invisible. They were orbiting close enough that that put an upper constraint on that object’s size, and their orbital speed showed the mass of the object: four million times the mass of the sun. This object is known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”) because it too is a radio source; it’s constantly sucking in small amounts of debris and gas.

One of these central stars has been rather imaginitively named S2 and its motion over the past couple of years is practically iconic to astronomers:

Here is plot of S2’s position over time:

And a plot of the orbits of dozens of stars shows them in orbit about something. Here are a few prominent ones including S2.

[If you remember that objects orbiting much more massive ones do so in ellipses, with the primary object at one of the foci of the ellipse, you might object to what you’re seeing in this last diagram. The black dot represents the black hole, and it’s clearly not at the focus of many of those ellipses. (The foci of an ellipse are both on the center-line, drawn along the long axis of the ellipse, called the major axis; in the case of S2 that centerline is to the right of the black dot.) This difficulty is overcome, though, when we realize we’re not looking at those ellipses face on. We’re looking at them at some sort of oblique angle. What you see when you look at an ellipse at an oblique angle is always a different ellipse with different (apparent) foci. Think of looking at the outline of a circular manhole cover from, say 30 feet away and five or six feet above the roadway; that outline appears elliptical. If the manhole cover itself were elliptical, you’d see some different ellipse, depending on its orientation from your point of view it might appear skinnier (more eccentric) or rounder (less eccentric) than the actual ellipse is.]

The conclusion that the dark object at the center of this mess has the mass of four million suns came from determining, based on the speed of the objects at different points on the ellipses, the actual orientation of their orbits (if an object moves most quickly at a certain point on the ellipse, you know that, whatever the ellipse looks like to us, that point is actually the point nearest the primary), and from this the actual lengths of the axes of these ellipses, and hence going from there to the mass of the primary. (The period of the orbit depends on the mass of the primary and the major axis, only–though astronomers’ formulae actually work with half the length of the major axis, called the “semi-major axis.”)

It should be a source of amazement that we can collect this data from so far away (approximately 30,000 light years or 180 quadrillion miles) and infer there is a nearly invisible object there, at the very center of our galaxy, and figure out its mass.

But in telling you this, I’ve actually gotten ahead of myself.

We really need to go back to the 1920s again. And explain galaxies and those staggering distances to the quasars.

But before I conclude, there’s a lot I did not say here. I didn’t discuss wormholes and using black holes to get into hyperspace, and all of that. Largely because all of that is very, very speculative and even if true, would probably destroy any spaceship that tried it.

As you get close to a black hole you feel very high tidal stresses. If you’re going in foot first, your feet feel considerably more gravity than your head, because they’re closer to the source of the gravity. (This effect exists even here, but is unnoticeable because the difference in force between your feet and your head is small.) This results in a net force that tries to stretch you out; if it’s strong enough it will stretch you out, it will be stronger than the bonds between the molecules that make you up. And the closer you get the stronger this tidal stress gets.

People who study black holes actually, and I am not making this up, call it “spaghettification.” Any solid object gets stretched into something looking like spaghetti.

If it were you, you’d feel this happen very quickly.

If someone were well outside the black hole watching, though, he’d never see the process end. Remember that under general relativity, lower objects’s clocks run slower than higher objects’ clocks do. And you can’t get any lower than the event horizon of a black hole. The observer far away will see you come to a standstill as your clock gets slower and slower, never quite reaching the time at which you cross the event horizon.

This might be the answer to the objection that an infinitely dense mass at a point is physically absurd. The collapse of the black hole itself might not ever complete because the clock runs slower and slower. This is actually speculation too; the math is extremely difficult and as far as I know no one has managed to solve the problem yet.

Well, that’s my rather over-simplified and under-coherent account of black holes. If you want a much more complete treatment, I suggest you go to the Wikipoo article on black holes.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Okay you knuckledragging ChiComs trying to take us down…here’s a history lesson for you.

For millennia, you had to suffer from this:

Yep. Steppe Nomads. They laid waste to your country, burned, raped and pillaged (but not in that order–they’re smarter than you are) for century after century.

You know who figured out how to take them on and win? The Russians.

Not you, the Russians. And it took them less than two centuries. And Oh By The Way they were among the most backward cultures in Europe at the time.

You couldn’t invent an alphabet, you couldn’t take care of barbarians on horseback, and you think you can take this board down?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! We’re laughing at you, you knuckledragging dehumanized communists…worshipers of a mass-murderer who killed sixty million people!

I mean, you still think Communism is a good idea even after having lived through it!

By my reckoning that makes you orders of magnitude more stupid than AOC, and that takes serious effort.

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

All realistic hope lies in the audits, and perhaps the Lindell lawsuit (that will depend on how honestly the system responds to the suit).

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Political Science In Summation

It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).

(A comment I wrote last week that garnered some praise.)

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

(Paper) Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1768.40
Silver $23.40
Platinum $1059.00
Palladium $2162.00
Rhodium $15,150.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $1793.00
Silver $24.40
Platinum $1047.00
Palladium $2104
Rhodium $15,250

Nice moves upward for gold and silver, but the platinum group metals are considerably mixed.

XXII Powering Stars

One of the things that was puzzling physicists and astronomers in the late 1800s and even into the early 1900s is how stars could continue to belt out such phenomenal amounts of energy every second, year in, year out for millions and even billions of years.

Our sun, for instance, has been pumping out 3.828 x 10²⁶ watts, continuously, for billions of years. To be sure the current conclusion is that this number is actually increasing slowly so that in the past, say a billion years ago, it might have been ten percent less.

To put that into some sort of context, the best estimate we can make is that the entire human race uses 15 terawatts, that’s 1.5 x 10¹³ watts. The sun belts out ten trillion times as much power as we consume.

That power goes out in all directions from the sun, and only a tiny fraction of it hits the earth. By my calculations, the earth catches about 1/2 of one billionth of all of that energy, because that’s the fraction of the possible directions for light shining from the sun, that is covered by the disc of the earth as seen from the sun. (I may very well have dropped a decimal somewhere.) If that number is right, the Earth absorbs solar energy at a rate of 176,000 terawatts.

Where does this energy come from?

In the 1800s the only imaginable energy sources were combustion (like burning coal), the sun getting hotter as it shrank, and objects striking the sun. These were all unsatisfactory answers. A sun-sized pile of coal (never mind the oxygen needed to burn it) would have run out in a couple of thousand years [not long enough even to account for history since Caesar, much less all of recorded history]. The other two sources would last less than a million years at most (and there’s simply not enough junk in the solar system to hit the sun and supply the energy that way, or we ourselves would be getting bombarded by it).

We had every reason back then to believe the Earth is tens of millions of years old, though many argued it had to be much older. They were correct. We now have every reason to believe it’s roughly 4.5 billion years old. (Anyone disagreeing today is either simply ignorant of the evidence in favor of this statement and the massive preponderance of evidence in favor of earth being billions of years old (without putting a precise number on it), or is (in rare cases) quite aware of the evidence and is lying.)

So we need a way to power the Sun–and other stars–that can keep them going for billions of years.

And indeed Arthur Eddington–he is the astronomer who measured the deflection of starlight by the sun in 1919, which was strong evidence in favor of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, which in turn had been published in 1915–well, Arthur Eddington suggested in 1920 that perhaps it was nuclear energy that powered the stars.

Nuclear energy had not been known in the 1800s, but it was now apparent that nuclear energy could supply roughly a million times as much energy as coal, per unit mass.

Fission of uranium would be plentiful, if only the sun were made of uranium, but honestly the biggest yield would come from the fusion of hydrogen into helium. If only the sun were made of hydrogen.

We know today that it is roughly 3/4 hydrogen, but that was not clear in 1920. We had spectroscopic evidence that the Sun contained certain ingredients (most of the elements are in the Sun at some concentration or another) but it wasn’t clear how much of anything there was. The proportions were a mystery. In fact the consensus at the time was that the Sun was pretty much made up of the same sorts of things, in the same proportion, as Earth. There was some reason to believe this, but we didn’t have all the facts.

Enter Cecilia Payne (later Ceclia Payne-Gaposhkin) (1900-1979).

Classifying Stars

But first, let’s go back a bit further to Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941).

Annie Jump Cannon, along with Edward Pickering, was responsible for the current scheme by which stars are classified. She did most of the grunt work, he got most of the credit (though that is changing). This current scheme is known as the Harvard classification because, well, they were working at Harvard (pronounced HAH-vahd).

How do you classify stars? The same way you classify anything else: on the basis of what you can perceive about the objects. And with stars, that’s very confined. You have the star’s direction in the sky, its brightness, and its color. With telescopes, and some very specialized accessories, you can get the star’s spectrum, which is actually very useful since it can tell us what the star is made of, how fast it’s moving radially (towards or away from us–but this won’t include any sideways motion as seen from Earth), and even how fast it’s rotating in absolute terms. Today we can even use those spectra to detect planets orbiting those stars.

We truly didn’t have a science of astrophysics until we got a good close look at those spectra.

All of those things I mentioned as being able to be determined from spectra depend on absorption lines. These had first been noticed by Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787-1826) in the Sun’s spectrum (and so they are called “Fraunhofer lines”). They are dark bands visible in star spectra.

Later on in the 1800s it was realized that these lines were actually characteristic of different elements in the Sun. Different atoms would either absorb or emit certain wavelengths of light under differing circumstances. For instance if you heat a sample in a Bunsen burner flame, the atoms in the sample will emit only certain frequencies of light, creating an emission spectrum; under other circumstances those atoms will absorb those same frequencies from “white” light, leaving dark bands in the spectrum.

It turns out the Fraunhofer lines were due to the Sun’s atmosphere absorbing some of the light emitted by the photosphere (which is the part of the sun we actually see if we are so foolish as to look directly at it).

And indeed helium was detected in the sun’s atmosphere by this means decades before it was discovered on earth. The name “helium” comes from Helios, the Greek god of the Sun who rode his very bright chariot across the sky every day.

When we turned telescopes to look at (other) stars, they too exhibited absorption lines, but they didn’t all exhibit the same absorption lines.

And those differences gave way to a variety of classification systems.

Annie Jump Cannon looked at hundreds of thousands of spectra and could classify them on sight, according to systems then in use, and eventually according to the system she refined in 1901-1912.

One thing that had been noticed, certainly by her and probably by others before her, was that there was a strong correlation between the color of a star, and which spectral lines were prominent.

And we already knew from studying blackbody radiation that the color of a star was determined by its temperature. Blue stars are hot, at least ten thousand Kelvins. White stars are hotter than our sun, which is a yellow-white and therefore has a temperature of 5,772K–or rather the other way around.

(And this is why you can’t buy a light bulb any more without selecting its “color temperature,” you’re picking the color of the light according to the temperature it simulates. A true tungsten light bulb filament actually did get as hot as its color temperature, and the light it emitted tended to be quite yellowish in color. And of course this is a “thing” in photography since the camera cannot adjust what it sees, but our eyes can, based on ambient color temperature.)

Annie Jump Cannon divided stars into classes with letter names (holdovers from older systems) O, B, A, F, G, K, M. Type O stars were the bluest (and hottest) of stars, down through G (like our sun) to M (reddish color).

Why these particular colors? A “white” star has the peak of its black body emission curve in the middle of the visible part of the spectrum, so the curve is about the same height at both the purple and red ends of the spectrum. It’s fairly uniform across that range, and we perceive that mixture as “white.” A cooler star has its peak somewhere below the red end of the spectrum so what we see contains more red light than yellow or blue light–so we see orange or red. And blue stars are so hot most of their radiation is ultraviolet; the visible light part has much more blue than red in it.

Cannon actually subdivided each of those letters into ten sub-types, numbered from 0-9 with zero being the hottest. Since these plots always put the hot end of the spectrum at the left (which is counterintuitive, but the habit formed, and once formed, stuck, and we are stuck with it today), you’d see a progression from O0 to O9, then B0 through B9, and so on.

Another useful thing to consider is how bright the star is, intrinsically. Not just how bright it looked, but how much light did it actually emit, compared to our sun? But in order to know that, we have to know two things: how bright it appeared to be here on Earth, and how far away it was. The first was easy, the second very hard, and in fact impossible to determine much of the time because the star was too far away for our measuring methods to work.

Nevertheless, when plotting luminosity against temperature, we saw some clear trends, and not entirely what was expected.

Most stars ran along a diagonal line that got named the “Main Sequence.” Other stars were of similar colors but much, much brighter intrinsically. And a few were obviously very hot, but also very dim. In particular, Sirius B was one of the latter (I described it in my second post on stars).

Once we had absolute luminosities in hand, something became apparent. You would expect a hotter star to be brighter, just as white hot coals in your fireplace are brighter than redder coals. And we could indeed calculate how bright they should be compared to cooler stars from the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. (An object twice as hot as another object emits sixteen times the energy as that other one does.)

When we looked at the luminosity of hotter stars, though, they were even brighter than they should have been. But there was a very simple answer to that. They were brighter than one would expect, because they were physically larger than the dimmer stars, just as a coal twice the size as another coal will emit twice as much light as the other, even at the same temperature.

So combine the two: Imagine a white hot coal twice the size of a red hot coal, and the white hot coal is now 32 times brighter than the red coal; more than can be accounted for just by its temperature or by its size.

Eventually we were even able to figure out the mass of these stars (especially when they were parts of binary star systems–we could determine the mass by watching how fast the stars orbited each other), and all of this was confirmed.

And all this largely from the data that Annie Jump Cannon meticulously collected, analyzed and cataloged.

Cecilia Payne Fills the Gas Tank

OK, now we are ready for Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin.

She was at Harvard (yes, HAHvuhd again) in 1924, working on her doctoral thesis–she would go on to become the first female given a doctorate in astronomy by HAHvuhd…though it was actually Radcliffe, the associated womens’ college.

She took up an issue, that being what stars are made of.

That should have been pretty easy, right? We had their spectra with all of those wonderful absorption lines, after all. O stars had lots of helium in then. A stars had lots of iron and magnesium and silicon in them. And so on, down to M stars that had spectra of molecules in them like TiO₂. That was how we divided them into their classes, after all!

But it turns out that many of these absorption lines weren’t from (say) ordinary iron or ordinary helium. They were from ionized iron, iron that had lost a couple of electrons. What difference does that make? The absorption lines (or emission lines under other circumstances) are caused by electrons absorbing (emitting) that precise wavelength of light in order to jump to a higher (lower) orbit.

When an atom is ionized, it has lost some electrons, and it hangs on to the remaining electrons more strongly, so it takes more energy for them to jump to higher orbits. This changes the absorption spectrum of that atom.

One way to knock those electrons off in the first place is to heat the atoms; that makes them move faster and when they slam into each other it could be hard enough to knock some electrons away. Thus the amount of ionized substances depends on their temperature.

This had first been realized by the Indian physicist Megnad Saha, but Cecilia Payne (she married Gaposhkin in 1934, so she was still Cecilia Payne in 1924) was the first to try to apply it to stars.

The prevailing theory at the time was that our Sun was made up of pretty much the same things as the Earth. All that calcium in the spectrum seemed to fit (there is a lot of calcium in the Earth’s rocks), as do other spectral lines from unionized (i.e., not ionized, rather than not a member of the UAW or Teamsters) elements. Meanwhile the hydrogen lines are very weak, especially compared to bigger stars.

Payne corrected for all those temperature effects, and came to the realization that the Sun…and other stars as well…were mostly hydrogen and helium. In fact the Sun is 74.9 percent hydrogen, 23.8 percent helium, and only 1.8 percent everything else.

This is so striking that astrophysicists today call everything that isn’t hydrogen and helium “metals” as a short hand. Since most of the elements in the periodic table are metals, that’s not a bad bit of scientific slang.

When Payne submitted her dissertation for review, it was criticized severely. She (unfortunately) backed down and wrote a paragraph into it dismissing her own data as spurious.

By 1929 her main critic, Henry Norris Russel, came to the same conclusion by a different method. He had the integrity to mention in his paper that Payne had got there first, but he still often gets the credit for discovering the stars are mostly hydrogen.

Mostly hydrogen.

So maybe (getting back, at last, to where we started) stars really did get their energy from fusing hydrogen. They certainly had the raw ingredient for it. The sun has the mass of 333,000 Earths, and three quarters of that is hydrogen. That is an absolute shitload of the stuff.

We knew from the binding energy curve how much energy is released (how much mass is converted to energy) per hydrogen atom, when four of them are brought together to form helium. We know the power output of the sun. Given those numbers it’s simple arithmetic to figure out how much the sun would have to “burn” and that amount is 620 million metric tons per second (a metric ton is a thousand kilograms, which on earth weighs roughly 2200 lbs).

4.26 million metric tons of this mass is converted to energy. That is a LOT of energy. And this happens every second. When you plug that into E=mc², you get that number I quoted above, 3.838×10²⁶ joules, and since that’s every second, that’s the number of Watts as well.

Divide that 620 million metric tons into the mass of the sun, and it’s clear that there’s enough fuel in the Sun to last billions of years–and indeed it has; we are about midway through that phase of the Sun’s life.

Tunneling Through Hurdles

But I am getting ahead of myself.

There was an additional hurdle the hydrogen fusion suggestion (not even really a hypothesis even now) had to clear before it could be taken seriously. And it was a difficulty Arthur Eddington had recognized clear back in 1920.

In order to fuse hydrogen into helium, you have to bring two protons together close enough that the strong nuclear force (which is so short range the protons have to be almost touching each other for it to take effect) overwhelms the electrical repulsion of the protons…which, if you’ll remember is a strong enough that we people could feel it (even out of those dinky little protons).

This can be done by making the protons move fast enough right toward each other. The repulsion causes them to slow down, stop, and reverse course…but if they’re moving so fast that they don’t stop until they get close enough, then they’ve climbed over the so-called “Coulomb barrier” (named after Coulomb, who first discovered the law of electrostatic forces) and can stick to each other.

How to make protons move fast? Heat them up. Temperature, after all, is simply a measure of the average kinetic energy of the atoms in a substance. Hotter temperatures mean higher speed of the atoms, particularly in a gas or superheated plasma.

At the kinds of temperatures we’re talking about, the electrons are stripped off the atoms, completely. You have bare protons zipping around in a swarm of loose electrons. (This is called a plasma, and it’s a fourth state of matter: solid, liquid, gas, plasma.)

The problem was, the interior of the Sun was believed to be at 17 million K, and even that temperature simply isn’t high enough.

But there actually is a way, and it’s supplied by quantum mechanics. Because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the speed and position of particles isn’t precisely set at any given time, and if the speed isn’t set, the kinetic energy isn’t either. A particle with not enough energy (one would think) to jump over a potential “barrier” therefore gets to do so sometimes anyway. It’s much more likely if the particle is close to having enough, than if it is not.

This bit of quantum strangeness is called “quantum tunneling” and allows a particle which has no business jumping over a barrier to do so anyway, and physicists likened it to “tunneling” through the wall.

At the temperatures inside the sun, the probability of this happening is small, but not so small it never happens (as you see in the more familiar world where you fail to tunnel through blank walls unless you’re in a Road Runner cartoon).

If it were hotter inside the sun, the energy levels would be higher and the probability of tunneling through the barrier would be higher. But even as it is, it’s high enough that a tiny fraction of the protons do manage to “tunnel” through the barrier, and fusion can then happen.

But there is yet another hurdle, if you will pardon the expression.

When those two protons do glom onto each other, the resulting “diproton” is so unstable it simply falls apart right away.

But every once in a while, at the exact moment the diproton forms, one of the protons undergoes positive beta decay and becomes a neutron. In the process it releases a positron (anti-electron) and a neutrino. The positron finds an electron (they’re everywhere and literally anywhere in a plasma), they mutually annihilate and release a gamma ray–pure energy.

(The neutrino is a matter neutrino, not an antimatter antineutrino, because it counterbalances the antimatter positron, unlike in nuclear reactors here on earth where an antineutrino is created to counterbalance the electron produced by “regular” beta decay.)

A proton and a neutron will stick together. In fact this is hydrogen-2 or deuterium. Or rather, it’s a deuterium nucleus, known as a deuteron. (And yes, the joke is that the study of deuterons is known as deuteronomy.)

This beta decay at exactly the right time is a very rare event. And this is a good thing! Consider all those protons slam-dancing at 17 million degrees K for billions of years. If this event wasn’t rare, they’d be used up quickly rather than the supply lasting for billions of years. It’s not as if hydrogen is in a fuel tank until the sun is ready to burn it. No, it’s sitting on the fire, and has been sitting on the fire all along. It’s just that it’s burning very, very slowly.

The average survival time of a lone proton in the center of the sun is nine billion years. Yet it collides with a lot of protons at the temperature and pressure at the core of the Sun.

This was all outlined by Hans Bethe in 1939, at a Nobel lecture he gave.

The next step is for the deuteron to glom onto another proton. This takes, on average, about a second. The result is a helium-3 nucleus, two protons and one neutron.

After an average time of 400 years, two helium-3 nuclei will collide, and the result will be one helium-4 nucleus, and two freed-up protons, ready for another nine billion years on average of bachelorhood.

Six protons in, two protons out, plus one helium nucleus, plus gamma rays, plus two neutrinos. And a lot of energy. This is called the proton-proton chain.

Bethe also outlined another process, which involves four protons being added to carbon nuclei successively, with a couple of beta decays along the way, until an oxygen nucleus is created, which then spits out an alpha particle and reverts back to being the original carbon nucleus. This method is called the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen chain, or CNO chain, and it nets a helium-4 nucleus after consuming four protons.

It turns out that in stars more massive than the sun, this is the dominant mode. The temperatures are high enough to support it more readily than the proton-proton chain.

I’m now going to jump ahead to the modern understanding rather than going through the detailed history of how it was hashed out.

We know, now, that intergalactic gas consists of about three quarters hydrogen and one quarter helium. This gas is hot enough to radiate in X rays, but we can analyze the spectra.

There is only a trace of lithium in this gas, maybe a tiny bit of beryllium, and absolutely nothing else.

This is gas that was never part of a star. This is the original composition of the universe. [At least, as far as ordinary matter goes…but THAT is a future story.]

All of the “metals” we see today have to have come from somewhere. And indeed stars made them.

Because fusing hydrogen to helium isn’t the only way stars can make energy.

The Life of A Star

So let’s walk through this.

A cloud of (mostly) hydrogen gas…a very big cloud, trillions of miles across…contracts under its own gravity. As it contracts, it heats up (just like any other gas). But that’s no problem, gravity continues to crunch the cloud down.

The only thing that will stop the contraction is an equal but opposite pressure coming from the inside of the cloud. The pressure from the cloud depends on its size, a smaller cloud has less mass, less gravitation, and less pressure, so it will take less of this hypothetical internal pressure to get it to stop contracting.

I called it a hypothetical internal pressure, but it’s actually real. As the pressure and temperature at the center of the cloud go up, the hydrogen gas loses its electrons, the protons start slamming into each other, and at a temperature somewhat lower than at the center of the sun, some nuclear fusion begins to occur. If it’s a small cloud, that releases enough energy to heat the core up enough to stop the contraction. A bigger cloud will continue to contract, raising the temperature higher, to the point where more fusion happens, and then finally a balance is struck.

This balance is when the star becomes a well behaved, ordinary star, and it is now a “main sequence” star.

The main sequence is where all the hydrogen-burning stars go.

When I say “more fusion happens” I mean that more fusion happens for each ton of the star’s mass. In other words, it burns its fuel faster.

The bigger the star, the faster it burns its fuel, not just in absolute terms but in proportion to its mass. Bigger stars thus live much shorter lives than smaller ones.

It happens they are also a lot rarer than small stars.

One star in ten million is an O type star. These are 15 – 90 times as massive as the sun, but they are anywhere from 30,000 to a million times as luminous. If a star 90 times the size of the sun burns its fuel a million times as fast…well, you can see that it’s going to run out about 10000 times faster. Indeed they live only a few million years. Almost every O type star that has ever existed is long gone.

On the other end of the scale are the M type stars. About 75 percent of all stars are M type main sequence stars (at least, judging from the stars near the Sun). They are anywhere from 8% to 57% the mass of the sun, but even the biggest ones emit 7% of the light of the Sun. (The smallest emits 0.03% the light of the sun.) They’re cool and consequently reddish; they’re called “red dwarfs”.

(Red dwarfs may be 75 percent of all stars, but if you step outside at night and look up, you won’t see any red dwarfs. They’re simply too faint to be seen by the naked eye. The nearest star to us (other than the Sun, of course) is a red dwarf and cannot be seen without a telescope. This is not to say that you won’t see red stars…but those will be red giants. Which I’ll get to below.)

Red dwarf stars are long lived. It is estimated that one 16% the mass of the sun will last 2.5 trillion years. That’s an estimate, of course, because no one has seen one die. The universe isn’t even 1/100 th that age yet. Every red dwarf that has ever formed is still with us. (Even a “big” red dwarf 57% the mass of the sun should last at least 30 billion years, also older than the universe.)

OK, this is well and good. We have a pretty thorough description here of how hydrogen is made into helium. But not only is it still bottled up in a star…it’s also still not metals.

Remember that the material of the universe originally contained no metals, except maybe a smidge of lithium and beryllium. Yet we have these elements today…if not, you wouldn’t be reading this and I’d never have written it, because we would not exist.

Where did the metals come from? If they come from stars, how do they get out of the stars?

Well we need to follow this story further. (Kids, stop asking “are we there yet?” after every paragraph.)

What happens when a star runs out of hydrogen fuel?

It depends on the star. Those tiny red dwarfs, less than 25% the mass of the sun, are simply done. They shrink until the only thing holding them up is the mutual repulsion of the electrons. At this point they weigh maybe a million tons per cubic meter. They’re very hot, but that’s residual heat that slowly radiates away–no new energy is being created. Because they’re hot–hotter than they were as living stars, they are now known as white dwarfs, and are approximately the size of the Earth. Sirius B is a notable example of a white dwarf (I talked about it in one of my “stars” articles).

But wait.

Didn’t I say that no M stars had died yet? If so how do we have white dwarfs?

Because bigger stars also become white dwarfs. They take a more indirect route, but get there faster.

Stars bigger than 25 percent the mass of the sun follow a different path when they run out of hydrogen. They also begin to contract once again, but the temperatures in their interiors climb a lot higher.

They climb high enough, to 100 million K, that helium begins to fuse, three nuclei at a time, into carbon. (This is called the triple alpha process, because the three helium nuclei are three alpha particles.)

This happens at much higher temperatures. Under all of this heat the star expands. It gets downright bloated.

When the sun hits this phase it will probably bloat enough to swallow the earth.

That huge surface is actually rather cool for a star, it’s a hundred million miles (or more, for bigger stars) away from the raging inferno where carbon is being made.

The star is a giant, but it is red, hence the name “red giant.” It puts out a LOT more light than a red dwarf, in fact it puts out much more light than it did before. That pushes it up out of the “main sequence” and into the territory of the “giant” stars, to the top and right of that Hertzsprung-Russel diagram. These are giants in size, not mass…they’re no more massive than main sequence stars.

Helium converting to carbon produces less energy, kilogram for kilogram, than does hydrogen fusing to helium. Yet the giant star doing so must produce more energy to produce all that heat that makes it bloat.

In other words, all that helium “ash” from the hydrogen fusion, is going to itself be burned much faster than the hydrogen was. The star will get hot enough to do so, because it seeks balance.

Red giant phases don’t last very long compared to the time the star spent on the main sequence, happily burning their birthright of hydrogen.

If the star is the size of the sun, this is the end of the line. During this phase the star is a bit unstable, and may blow off some of its outer layers, producing a “planetary nebula” (called that because they used to be mistaken for planets in telescopes), and so a star like this might return some of the carbon it produced to space. But then the star dies, and it shrinks into a white dwarf. This white dwarf will contain carbon in it–a lot of carbon, but it does no good; it’s stuck in the white dwarf.

Of course, now when stars are formed from gas that already has metal in it, they return some of that too, but that’s not where that stuff came from. So where did it come from?

Big Stars are Metal Factories–complete with a shipping department.

Kids, we’re not there yet.

Stars considerably larger than the Sun, when they run out of helium in their cores, start to fuse the carbon. Again, this is at even higher temperatures. And again, this is a diminishing return. Less energy from the fusion, with a higher temperature having to be maintained, means this phase is short.

Also, around the core there is still some helium, and even the layers immediately outside the core are hot enough to fuse helium to helium, making more carbon, or helium to carbon making oxygen.

The star turns into a giant onion, each layer going inwards making bigger and bigger nuclei, and this (at last) is where all the good stuff forms, all the elements up to iron, in point of fact the elements that make up us.

Cooked in the centers of massive stars.

The only thing we need to close the loop, now, is to explain how all that stuff gets out of the stars. That would explain where all the metals that already exist in the Sun came from. Somehow, those metals were made in long-dead massive stars, then ended up in the cloud that contracted to form the Sun.

So here it is. The massive star eventually has a core of silicon, and there’s not enough other stuff in the core (though there is in layers surrounding the core) to keep going. The star heats up again, and commences to fuse the silicon into iron.

There are vast amounts of silicon in there, many times the weight of the earth.

The star rips through it in a day. Yes, a day.

It now has a core made of iron.

And now it cannot make energy any more. Because fusing iron consumes energy.

So the core collapses.

There’s a bit of a rebound effect. I say a bit. That rebound is actually one of the biggest explosions there is, a “core collapse supernova.”

The explosion is so bright, it outshines the other 100 billion (or so) stars in that galaxy, for a few weeks.

The last time one of these happened in our galaxy where we could see it was in the 1600s, just before the invention of the telescope, and the supernova was visible during the daytime.

Supermassive stars live fast and die hard. Bruce Willis has nothing on them.

That big explosion flings vast quantities of all the stuff the star has been brewing out into space, later to coalesce into new stars…and planets. And in the case of some star that blew itself to bits over four and a half billion years ago, the stuff eventually made us.

In the process, a lot of neutrons are created, and glom onto existing atoms, making heavier atoms, and until recently, it was believed that even gold, lead, and uranium were primarily produced this way. What an image: all the gold in your jewelry was once hurtling through space at a tenth the speed of light, blasted out of the guts of a star bigger than the sun.

What a pretty story. So pretty a lot of people like to say “we are made of star stuff.”

It is a fact that we owe our very existence to the death of big stars. Our bodies are made of atoms flung from their funeral pyres.

The Neutrinos Prove It

What’s the evidence?

There’s a lot of evidence, in fact, including the composition of nebulae (gas clouds), and especially the nebulae that have been blown out of supernovae. Stellar compositions are the evidence that started the whole thing, but shouldn’t be forgotten. A lot of “little things” all consistent with this framework.

But I want to focus on neutrinos.

In fact, this is why I undertook this whole damn series.

I wanted to talk about neutrinos. And connect them to stars…remember I talked about stars in the two science posts before this series. I was going to tie the smallest known particle of matter to the biggest discrete objects out there: stars (galaxies and galaxy clusters are bigger, but they don’t strike us as being objects but rather groups of objects).

But they are so ghostly, so non-reactive, that I would need to really justify their existence and tell the story of how they were discovered. And that entailed yet more background. I was going to just explain how they solved some problems with conservation laws…but then that meant I needed to explain those.

I thought maybe I’d write four parts. Then the doggone thing took on a life of its own. It ended up being twenty parts before I got to neutrinos. And another two before I connected them to stars.

So here I finally am.

One of the most important pieces of evidence that stars are, indeed, fusing hydrogen into helium, and so on as appropriate, is the neutrinos.

Those two protons coming together to make a deuteron, release a positron and a neutrino in the accompanying beta decay. This means that IF nuclear fusion powers stars, then ordinary stars are sources of neutrinos, and that most definitely includes our sun.

But also, a supernova, a dying star, gigantic numbers of neutrinos all at once in the fury of nuclear reactions going on all at once in the explosion–the reactions that give us all those heavy elements, elements heavier than iron.

There was a supernova of this kind 168,000 years ago in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The light reached us in 1987. A star known as Sanduleak -69 202 had just died.

It is estimated that this supernova released 10⁵⁸ neutrinos. All at once.

I’ve thrown some big numbers at you over the course of this series, but that number is staggering. I’m not going to pretend to imagine how much that is.

Divide it by a trillion…it’s still 10⁴⁶. Still a staggeringly huge number beyond our experience. And a hundred billion billion times as much as that ridiculously huge number I used for the power output of the sun.

If you had been a billion miles from that star when it blew up, here’s what you would have seen. The neutrinos hitting almost instantly–they were made in the core at the moment of the explosion but just zipped right on through everything. Then the light, actually delayed by all that matter being blasted out. Then the matter would have reached you as a blast wave to end all blast waves.

Except that you wouldn’t have seen the light or the matter, because you’d have been killed instantly by the neutrinos. There were so many of them that even at their ridiculously low likelihood of interacting with you rather than passing right on through, enough of them would have interacted with you to kill you instantly from the radiation.

It’s estimated that the light from the explosion–which, remember, outshines billions of stars–is one percent of the energy contained from the actual material blast. And that is one percent of the energy carried off by the neutrinos.

The light, bright enough to be seen from earth that far away (one of the first people to see the supernova was an astronomer at a major observatory in the Andes, outside taking a smoke break; he noticed that the Large Magellanic Cloud had a “new” star in it), was a sideshow.

So why are the neutrinos from the sun and exploding blue supergiants such a big deal?

Because we can detect neutrinos. And therefore, if we don’t see these neutrinos, something is wrong with our theory.

Large tanks of water, deep underground in mines so that nothing can get to them other than neutrinos, can be surrounded by flash detectors, which will register a hit every now and again. We can even tell, from the direction of motion of the products of the reaction, what direction the neutrinos came from. (And it’s a neutrino detector–we don’t have to wait for daytime or nighttime, it runs 24/7, and it doesn’t matter whether the sun or the supernova is “up” or not.

Twenty five neutrinos (a big signal for neutrinos) were detected from the supernova.

More importantly, these tanks have been detecting neutrinos from the Sun for years. That is a sure sign that nuclear fusion is happening there. And, they are of precisely the energy one would expect from the creation of deuterium from regular hydrogen.

There was just one hitch, with regard to the Sun’s neutrinos. We can calculate, from the power output of the sun, how many fusion reactions must be happening each second inside the sun, because we know how much energy each individual reaction releases. (It’s a geek’s story problem.) That gives us the number of neutrinos. We can figure out how many of them must be going through the detectors. And we know how likely it is that any given neutrino will be stopped inside the detector, letting us detect it. In other words, we know how many neutrinos should be detected coming from the sun, on average, during a given time period.

The number we detected was 1/3rd as much as it should be.

Ah, well, you solve one mystery (what makes the sun and other stars shine?) and you get presented with another mystery (where are the neutrinos?).

This is science moving forward.

And now, I think, I’m going to continue this series, even though it has reached the original planned conclusion.

I’m going to step from the neutrino, to something very, very big….much bigger than stars.

And then I’ll tell the story of that missing third…but that’s going to take a few installments.

Bonus Stuff

You put out more energy than the sun…sort of

The core of the Sun is at 17 million K, but what is its energy density?

How much energy is being generated in each cubic meter? The very high temperature has no bearing on this; some particular cubic meter of the sun stays at 17 million K because its surroundings are at that temperature. Heat leaks out of the core only where it meets the higher layers of the Sun. In fact it takes tens of thousands of years for a photon in the sun’s core to make it to the surface.

Energy density is how much energy is generated per…kilogram or cubic meter depending. Gasoline has a higher energy density than car batteries (even the ones for electric cars), for instance.

The energy density of the core of the sun turns out to be…wait for it…about 276.5 watts per cubic meter.

That is not a typo. Yes, we think of the core of the sun as a raging inferno, because there’s a lot of energy trapped in there. But as to how much new energy it generates every second, it’s actually quite sparse.

YOU produce 100-150 Watts just sitting on your butt reading this (more if you’re scratching your head really hard), because you have to keep your body temperature above room temperature. And your volume is a LOT less than a cubic meter. In other words, you generate more energy than a same-sized piece of the Sun’s core.

In fact a cubic meter of compost generates about the same amount of power as a cubic meter of sun’s core. (It just can’t do it for billions of years, so no, the sun isn’t a big compost heap.)

The reason the sun puts out so much power is that the core of the Sun is huge, roughly 200,000 miles across. That is a lot of cubic meters!!

So where did the gold come from?

I alluded to the belief that gold primarily came out of supernovas being an “until recently” sort of thing. So what’s the current theory? Core collapse supernovas leave behind either (for stars a couple of times more massive than the sun) a neutron star) or (very massive stars) a black hole.

What is a neutron star? It’s almost the ultimate collapse. It is what happens when even electron-to-electron repulsion can’t stop a star from collapsing, and the star doesn’t stop collapsing at white dwarf levels. Much of the star in a supernova gets blown away, but the remainder is usually much more massive than the sun. That remnant collapses. The electrons are forced into the nuclei, and combine with the protons to make neutrons. The entire remnant becomes one big ball of neutrons, with maybe a surface layer of white dwarf-style matter. The entire mass of the thing ends up in a ball perhaps ten miles across, weighing billions of tons per teaspoon.

When two of these neutron stars happen to collide–perhaps because two massive stars both went supernova and the neutron stars eventually lost all of their orbital energy to gravitational waves and then collided with each other–a lot of neutron debris splashes out there, decays and becomes heavy atoms, like gold. Entire earth-masses of gold are produced in this way and scattered across the cosmos. Now that we have observed neutron star collisions, we realize that most of the really heavy elements out there came from neutron star collisions, not from supernovae.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

You knuckle-dragging barbarians are still trying to muck with this site, so I’ll just repeat what I said last time.

Up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Justice Must Be Done

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

The Audit

The Audit is definitely heating up. Let’s see if the Opposition manages to squelch it and its consequences. I’ll be honest; I expect it to be ignored by anyone capable of ordering Biden/Harris to step down.

Nevertheless, anything that can be done to make Biden look less legitimate is a worthy thing!

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $1758.00
Silver $22.75
Platinum $1031.00
Palladium $2167.00
Rhodium $14,850.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $1768.40
Silver $23.40
Platinum $1059.00
Palladium $2162.00
Rhodium $15,150.00

A bit of a break out upward earlier this week, things looked good early Thursday for gold. But it took a major hit Friday. Palladium dropped 65 bucks on Friday.

Sorry No Physics Today

Too much going on in my life right now. I might get to it next week. I might not.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!