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…

Loop it if you like; I will wait.

Richly deserved.

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 (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $1831.80
Silver $24.31
Platinum $1043.00
Palladium $2194.00
Rhodium $17,650.00

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

Gold $1791.20
Silver $22.56
Platinum $1019.00
Palladium $2466.00
Rhodium $17,750.00

A major hammering for gold, silver and platinum. Conversely, palladium is going nuts again. I guess people are buying catalytic converters (with minor propulsive attachments so they can move around) again. Supposedly, everybody but everybody expects the Fed (I am fed up with the Fed) to raise interest rates. That suddenly makes dollars more attractive than they were last week, even though the rate of inflation hasn’t changed. Hence gold going down when you would think the dollar should be spiraling around the drain (of the toilet).

James Webb Space Telescope Update

OK, it’s all deployed, it’s in its orbit…so what comes next? What’s going to occupy the next five months?

Well, the telescope has to cool down. Yes, 348 degrees below zero F is not cold enough for those infrared sensors. It’s going to take a while. Heat can only be carried away three ways…conduction, convection, and radiation, and two of those are unavailable in space. The spacecraft isn’t touching anything else, so conduction won’t work, and it’s not fluid, so convection can’t work either. (Convection is the process that causes water near or at the boiling point to roil; heated water from the bottom of the pot rises, carrying the heat to the surface; cooler water at the top descends where it will get heated.) So what’s left is radiation, losing the heat by electromagnetic black body radiation. This is what causes an incandescent light bulb filament to cool off and stop glowing (in visible light) the moment you flip the light switch. Sometimes you can see it take a perceptible amount of time to dim. But that’s the heat in the filament being turned into light and radiating away.

A light bulb filament cools off fast, but that’s because it’s very hot. JWST is a mere 112 degrees (F) above absolute zero, so it will radiate much more slowly.

In fact, how much an object radiates is proportional to the fourth power of its temperature. An object at 100 degrees above absolute zero radiates sixteen times as much as one at 50 degrees above absolute zero. JWST, as it gets closer and closer to absolute zero, radiates less and less.

Besides just cooling JWST off, the instruments behind the mirror must be turned on and calibrated, but this can’t be done until the instruments cool down some more…though I believe at least some of them are close to their maximum operating temperature.

So, what can be done right now? The third thing: Mirror alignment. Here’s the last paragraph of the latest entry on the NASA JWST blog.

Next up: HD 84406! That is the first star Webb will point at to gather engineering data to start the mirror alignment process. The team chose a bright star (magnitude 6.7 at a distance of about 260 light-years, as measured by Gaia). The star is a sun-like G star in the Ursa Major constellation, which can be seen by Webb at this time of the year. This is just the first step; HD 84406 will be too bright to study with Webb once the telescope starts to come into focus. But for now, it is the perfect target to begin our search for photons, a search that will lead us to the distant universe.

NASA Blog: https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/01/27/the-webb-team-looks-back-on-successful-deployments/

It’s in astronomese. Fortunately I speak it well enough to translate. (It’s not just for professional astronomers; there are probably millions of amateur astronomers or just general geeky types who will have no problem reading that paragraph. But most here are not among them.)

Short translation: They’re basically going to point Webb at a particular star that’s fairly bright, and fiddle with the individual mirror segments to get them aligned with each other. The eighteen hexagons were all made to look as if they were cut from a parabolic mirror; they must be lined up to within nanometers of that parabolic shape. This is expected to take about three months

Longer translation: As above, but I’m going to do a deep dive on some of the specifics that will seem cryptic.

Let’s start with “HD 84406.” That’s a catalog number, the Henry Draper catalog. This catalog contains over 225,300 stars and was published between 1918 and 1924. (If you thought these posts were boring, go read the catalog. This is part of an index to it, and No, I have no idea why the numbers aren’t sequential: Henry Draper Catalogue – SKY-MAP)

[Annie Jump Cannon, who you might remember from one of my physics posts, was very heavily involved in the publication of this catalog and a couple of extensions to it that have come out since.]

Of course only about 6000 stars are bright enough to be visible to the unaided (naked) eye even far away from city lights, so clearly most of these Henry Draper stars are very, very dim.

“The team chose a bright star (magnitude 6.7…” OK they’re calling HD 84406 a “bright star” because it’s at “magnitude 6.7.” What does “magnitude 6.7” mean?

It’s a historical artifact. The brightness of astronomical objects is given in this funky magnitude scale. The lower the number, the brighter the star, so yes that seems backwards! This is because they would say something like “Spica is a first-magnitude star.” A “second-magnitude” star is clearly a lesser star than a “first magnitude” star. A “sixth magnitude” star was one that was just barely visible under ideal conditions.

Astronomers came up with instruments to objectively measure this sort of thing, however, and the magnitude scale got modified. In 1856 the modern scale was adopted, it was suggested by Norman Pogson at Oxford. Under his system, the scale is logarithmic and a star of magnitude X is 2.512 times as bright as a star of magnitude X+1. OK, so where did they pull that number from? Someone’s rectal database?

Actually that number is the fifth root of 100. Basically, a first magnitude star is 100 times as bright as a sixth magnitude star. That’s five “magnitudes” and it’s a logarithmic scale, so a single magnitude is going to be whatever number you can multiply by itself five times to get 100, i.e., the fifth root of 100, or about 2.512. (Remember, some people take an astronomy class in college because they are severely math challenged and have to take a science class to graduate and figure astronomy won’t have any math in it. But you can’t even describe stars’ brightnesses without logarithms-base-fifth-root-of-100. Bwahahaha!)

With a logarithmic scale, you can have fractional/decimal magnitudes, and more fun ensues. As it turns out many ancient “first magnitude” stars are actually considerably brighter than others. On the modern scale Sirius is -1.46 (a negative number), Arcturus is -0.04 (basically 0 on a 1-6 scale), Aldebaran is 0.85 and Spica is 1.04. Nor do you need to confine it to those little point-like stars in the night sky; nebulae, planets, the Sun and the Moon are on the scale too. The sun is magnitude -27. Sometimes, if you catch it just right the International Space Station is at -6. By the way, if it’s not a pointlike object, the magnitude is totaled up over the entire span of the object, so imagine the sun’s brightness in a single point (much more intense!), and that point is over ten billion times brighter than the point-source we call Sirius. When they describe the brightness of a nebula, it can seem misleadingly bright because the light from the nebula is smeared out over some patch of sky, rather than being gathered together in a point like a star is. So a nebula of a certain magnitude will always look fainter than a star of the same magnitude.

OK, so now when we see that HD 84406 is magnitude 6.7, we can judge that it’s actually not even visible to the unaided human eye! Yet they called it “bright” and even “too bright to study with Webb.”

[Note: some people (authors of books for amateur astronomers in particular) in very dark places (e.g., on the eastern slope of the “Big Island” of Hawaii) claim to be able to see clear down to magnitude 8. I’m not sure I believe them, to be honest.]

But if your eye’s pupil is 22 feet across, that actually will seem to be pretty damned bright! And that’s basically what JWST has going for it. So once they’re done using this blazingly bright star to align the mirrors, they won’t spend time looking at it any longer.

Next, “at a distance of about 260 light-years…” That’s the distance to the star, and a light year is the distance light travels in one year…about six trillion miles. 260×6 = 1560 trillion miles, that’s how far away HD 88406 is.

Next there’s this: “…The star is a sun-like G star in the Ursa Major constellation,” A “G star” is a reference to the star’s spectral class, which is to say the pattern of absorption lines in the spectrum; it so happens that G is the class the Sun is in. It’s mainly a rough shorthand for how hot the star is, and hence what color it is. Yellowish-white is the G type color. “In the Ursa Major constellation” means if you look at the Big Bear constellation, HD 88406 appears to be in it. Ursa Major includes the Big Dipper (but that’s not the whole constellation by any means). Astronomers actually drew boundaries between the 88 recognized constellations quite some time ago so every bit of sky (even apparently empty places) are part of a constellation; a star doesn’t have to be on the line drawings to be considered part of the constellation.

Nor must you be a star to be “in” a constellation. Galaxies, too are in constellations, it’s just a way to indicate where they appear as seen from earth. (For instance “the” Andromeda Galaxy, M31 is in the constellation of Andromeda. And, to expand on things I said earlier, M is for the Messier Catalog which has about 110 objects in it; it’s also cataloged in the New General Catalog as NGC 224. The magnitude of M31 is 3.44 but remember it’s smeared out over a certain part of the sky so it looks very faint. I can barely see it; in fact I’m never quite sure I really am seeing it. It shows up well even in tiny binoculars, though.)

Wow, there’s an awful lot behind that paragraph from NASA, ain’t there?

No Science Post This Week

Having beaten exoplanets into the ground, I’m not sure what I want to take up next. Of course you might be protesting that you just read one, but it’s largely stuff covered earlier, and it’s in what would otherwise seem a totally random order, dictated by the phrasing of a NASA blog post.

Fuck Joe Biden

Biden, you don’t even get ONE scoop of ice cream today.

(Please post this somewhere permanent, as it will continue to be true; the SOB will never deserve a scoop.)

Incidentally, I’m writing this on Friday. This morning I saw a full-sized pickup truck in the oncoming left turn lane with a forest of flags in the bed. Once he turned and drove left-to-right in front of me, I could see two American flags near the cab, and SIX “Let’s Go Brandon” flags near the tailgate. That was unusual; usually there’s a mix of FJB (only not abbreviated) and “Trump Won” and “Trump 2024” flags when someone does this.

I haven’t seen such a display in a few weeks, by the way. Even the guy at the office complex where I work with the FJB flag on his pickup seems to have removed it (or doesn’t work there any more–trucks all look alike to me from the back, and all crossovers look like cockroaches).

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 !!!

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 posts than watch you bloviate on air. And yes, I know your ratings dropped again. One would think there’s be a limit to that…you can’t drop below zero, can you?

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

Well, I probably should change out Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.

Here’s the first movement of Mozart’s 40th Symphony, played by an orchestra in Georgia.

…no, the other Georgia, the one whose capital is Tbilisi. (And yes there is no vowel between the T and the b, and they pronounce it with no “uh” in between. It’s actually not hard. The same language sometimes strings six or seven consonants in a row.)

Mozart didn’t number his symphonies, and for the first part of his life he did not keep track of everything he composed. Later on, he did. But it seems like every few years or so someone opens a drawer in a piece of antique furniture and–lo and behold!–there is an early Mozart symphony in there, one previously unknown. Some are fakes, of course.

When someone first undertook to number Mozart’s symphonies sequentially, there were 41 known; and the later ones’ dates were known because Mozart had started keeping track. So this is his second to last symphony.

As early ones were found in someone’s antique desk, they got numbered 42, 43, and so forth out of order, and so now you will see references to symphony #55. [Also, #2, #3, and #37 aren’t actually his, but were attributed by mistake.] But do not be fooled, his last three symphonies were numbers 39, 40 and 41–there’s a document trail. He wrote them all fairly close together in 1788, in fact he went straight from writing #40 to writing #41 without some other intervening work. He probably never heard them performed.

They’re all well worth listening to. His style was getting more expressive and dramatic. In his earlier life a symphony had to follow rules and not be too outrageous. And the 40th had plenty of stuff in it that was outrageous–by the standards of the 1780s, anyway. The effect at the time was of dropping an Iron Maiden track into the playlist of an “easy listening” station. (Just having it be in a minor key was “out there.”)

Beethoven, of course, continued the trend. That storm movement from last week? It would never have been tolerated in the 1780s.

Mozart died in 1791, about six decades too early; he wasn’t even forty yet. Beethoven’s 5th and 6th symphonies came along in 1808. The two never met. Beethoven was planning to study under Mozart in 1790, but something or other (I don’t remember what) caused that to fall awry, and the next year…it was too late.

If Mozart had lived, would he have been right beside Beethoven, breaking all the rules but doing so with genius? This last trio of Mozart’s are an argument in favor. Mozart was clearly chafing a bit under the conventions of his day.

For comparison here’s a randomly-chosen early symphony, #14…the entire thing is barely 20 minutes long and that’s long for its time. In 1771, when this was written, a symphony wasn’t a major work. I like his symphonies as a class, but people used to Beethoven might find a lot of his early ones to be very…hum drum.

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1798.00
Silver $22.45
Platinum $969.00
Palladium $2025.00
Rhodium $18,500.00

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

Gold $1,819.10
Silver $23.06
Platinum $979.00
Palladium $1,875.00
Rhodium $17,400.00

At the end of the week: Things are up, net, for this week in gold/silver/platinum land, however everything went down today from higher levels..

How To Find Extrasolar Planets

There are basically three methods used to find extrasolar planets, though there are a couple of oddball exceptions to that.

But I have to get a couple of preliminaries out of the way, first.

With respect to this particular topic, I’m going to be throwing around “astronomical units.” An astronomical unit was originally defined to be the average distance between Earth and the Sun; it’s a holdover from the days when we had no idea what that distance actually was, but could readily determine the distances between everything in the solar system, in terms of that distance. So we could say that Jupiter was 5.2 AU from the Sun, and that was useful information, even if we didn’t know how much an AU was. Of course now we have very accurate measurements, accurate enough that we finally decided in 2012 to define the AU in meters (which technically decouples it from the Earth-Sun distance–if we end up refining that measurement at some future, our defined AU could be not quite the distance from Earth to the Sun).

In any case, an AU is: 149,597,870,700 m or roughly 150 million kilometers (a somewhat round number) or 93 million miles. And having said that, I probably won’t talk about kilometers or miles ever again in this article, unless it’s a totally different context (like the size of a planet).

Because the scientists themselves invariably use AUs as their yardstick when working inside a planetary system.

The light year–the distance light travels in a year–is a much longer distance:  9,460,730,472,580,800 or roughly 10 trillion kilometers/6 trillion miles. In this particular case, this is a unit they use mostly for talking to us rubes..they generally prefer the parsec (~3.26 light years). Either unit is suitable for talking about distances to other stars; the nearest stars being a bit over four light years away.

Comparing the two units a light year is about 63,240 AU.

Which right there be a big hint. If an AU is a good unit to measure planetary systems with, and it’s about 1/60,000th the size of a good unit to measure the distances between stars (and hence their planetary systems, if they have them)–proportionally speaking the distance between planetary systems is HUGE in comparison to the sizes of the systems themselves. And it’s true: If the Earth’s orbit (which has a diameter of 2 AU) were the size of a ping pong ball (2 AU = 40mm) the nearest star would be over five kilometers away. Even figuring the solar system (including Kuiper Belt objects) at 100 AUs in diameter, that’s still a LOT of space between planetary systems.

OK, leaving distances behind us for now, masses have a similar phenomenon. Astronomers never talk in kilograms or pounds. Instead, they talk in earth masses, Jupiter masses, or when dealing with stars, solar masses. Because if they didn’t they’d be throwing around numbers like 1.9 x 10²⁷ kg (the mass of Jupiter). Literally astronomical numbers. And they’re a pain.

That’s three different units, so let me inter-relate them. Jupiter has 317.8 times the mass of Earth. The sun has 1047 times the mass of Jupiter. So the Sun has 332,950 earth masses in it. Those are fairly big leaps, one to the next, which is why astronomers will tend to use whatever unit makes the most sense at the moment.

Finally, there’s the matter of angular distance. The moon (and sun), as seen from the earth, cover circles half a degree across. In other words, if you could somehow stretch a string from the right edge of the moon, down to you, then another string to the left edge, then take out a protractor and measure the angle between the strings…it would be about half a degree. A degree is subdivided into 60 minutes of arc, so the angle is also expressable as 30 arc seconds. A minute of arc is about the width of a quarter seen at a hundred yards.

A minute of arc can in turn be subdivided into 60 arc seconds, and now you’re getting very narrow. Arc seconds start pushing close to how fine a telescope can resolve things. But astronomers do talk about milliarcseconds (thousandths of an arc second). They tend to use these units a lot, too. (It’s something that can be directly measured, right off a photograph of the night sky for instance. To get actual distances between two objects that are, say, 24.7 arc seconds apart, we need to know how far away the objects are)

OK, on to the detection methods. I said that most extrasolar planets have been found with one of three methods. I’m also going to list a fourth method that seems like it ought to work…but never did work out very well.

Direct Imaging

The blindingly obvious one, of course, is to simply point a telescope at some star and look. Are there planets near it?

I said “blindingly” for a reason, though.

Astronomers can figure out what it’d be like to try to see Earth this way, from some other star. Even from a relatively close distance like 25 light years, it’s damned near impossible.

The earth shines solely by reflected sunlight. And it’s small enough, and far enough away from the Sun, that it only intercepts a billionth of the light the sun cranks out, continuously. So even if it reflected all of the light that hit it, it couldn’t possibly be more than a billionth as bright as the Sun.

At that distance, an AU (our distance from the Sun remember) is much less than a second of arc in the sky. So we need to spot something a billionth as bright as the sun, basically right next to the sun, even as seen in our sharpest telescopes.

This has been compared to trying to spot a firefly, flying next to a Las Vegas searchlight…all the way from New York.

But if you think about it…a large planet–at least the size of Jupiter–further away from a star might be doable, if you can somehow mask the star itself so its light doesn’t blind the telescope.

Wobbles

It’s a bit of a simplification to refer to a planet orbiting a star. Or for that matter, a moon orbiting a planet…or anything else in such a context.

Whatever the two things are, they actually both orbit about their center of gravity–also called the barycenter. If a moon has 1/81th the mass of the planet it orbits, the center of gravity is a point 1/82nd of the distance from the planet to the moon. That might actually be inside the planet, but it’s not at the center of the planet. (And that’s the number for the Earth/Moon system.)

Here’s an example, with the barycenter inside the larger body.

In principle, we should be able to detect a dark body (like a planet) orbiting a star–if we can see the star wobble.

The wobble would be extremely small. Obviously the closer the star the better. But there’s a complicating factor: The stars aren’t stationary. They do move around up there, they just do it slowly enough we don’t notice. However some constellations have noticeably changed shape since the Greeks first mapped them; this is especially the case when one of the bright stars in the constellation is bright because it’s close to us. Obviously, it will appear to move faster across our sky the closer it is, given an actual speed (in kilometers/second).

This is called proper motion and it’s measured in terms of the arc across the sky. And really it’s only one component of a star’s motion–its the component of the motion that’s perpendicular to our line of sight. Movement toward or away from us doesn’t show at all, and it’s called radial motion.

The star that is moving across our sky the fastest is one that’s not visible to the unaided eye; it’s called Barnard’s star (or Barnard’s Arrow), and it’s moving at .802 arc seconds per year. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a huge proper motion.

So this method should work on nearby stars, but they will be the stars with the highest proper motion. So we would need to plot the position of the star over a couple of years, and see if, instead of traveling in a straight line, it’s drawing curclicues in the sky, like someone writing “eeeeeeeee” in cursive. If so, we can figure out how long it takes for the invisible planet to orbit the visible star–the time it takes to draw one of those cursive “e”s. You can even tell the eccentricity (how narrowly elliptical it is, versus being nearly circular) of the orbit from the exact shape of the “eeeeee.”

If there is an identical star-and-planet pair twice as far away, the “eeeee” drawn on the celestial sphere will be half as big. This method is very sensitive to the star’s distance.

Besides requiring a relatively close star, this method would work best for a planetary system whose orbits are face-on to us. If they’re tipped in some oblique plane relative, then less of the planetary motion (and balancing motion of the star) is perpendicular to us, so there will be, apparently, less wobble to detect. And we might not be able to assess that. A face-on small planet could have the same apparent effect as a much more massive planet, in an orbit that’s nearly edge-on.

This method was tried a lot in the mid 20th century and perhaps earlier, and failed–there were some claims of finding planets around nearby stars with it, but none of them are accepted today.

Transits

Conceptually, this one is very, very simple. Here’s a photograph I took about ten years ago, that will serve as an illustration of how this one could work:

That is our Sun, photographed through a filter like those given out for viewing eclipses. There’s a dark spot; that’s the planet Venus, which does cross directly in front of the Sun as seen from Earth twice every hundred years or so. The next such occurrence will be in 2117.

Imagine watching an event like this from several light years away. What would you see?

You wouldn’t see the Sun’s disc, not from that far away, and you certainly wouldn’t see the dark dot of the planet crossing in front of it. But what you would see, if you had an accurate enough light meter, is a slight drop in the brightness of the star as the planet crossed in front of it.

And the amount of the drop will indicate how big the planet is in relation to the star. This is the only one of these methods that will show us the size of the planet.

If we wait around for the next transit, we know the period of the planet, i.e., the length of its year. (Of course, if there are two or even more planets transiting from time to time, we need to watch for a longer time until we can see the overlapping patterns and sort them out.)

You could even tell if the planet had an atmosphere, based on how the light brightness drops as the planet begins to cross in front of the star. A fairly sharp transition indicates no atmosphere, a slight dimming at the very beginning indicates the planet has an atmosphere that reduced the star’s brightness ever so slightly before the actual opaque body of the planet got into the act.

With a spectroscopic analysis (the whole running-the-light-through-a-prism-and-looking-for-absorption-lines thing) you might even get some notion of what’s in the atmosphere.

Also, you can wait for the planet to pass behind the star and see what changes. It would be a very tiny dimming–after all the planet will be a billionth as bright as the star–but you could look at the difference in the light, not just how bright it is, but spectroscopically–and learn something about the temperature and composition of the planet.

So long as the star is close enough that we can see it easily (in a telescope of course), it doesn’t matter how far away it is. (Of course if the star is so far away we can barely detect it at all to begin with, then we won’t be able to measure the tiny drop in brightness involved.)

So this is a very versatile method, but it has one really big disadvantage: It won’t work unless the planetary orbital plane is edge on to us. And almost all of them shouldn’t be–they’ll be at some random tilt. So there could be fifteen planets orbiting some star but if their orbits are in any configuration other than edge-on, we’d never have even a hint of them. Also, to truly work well, this method must be done from a space telescope–the Earth’s atmosphere introduces too much noise (the highly technical term for the noise is “twinkling”) that would overwhelm the very slight difference in brightness we are looking for.

Doppler Shift

Method number 4 brings our old friend the Doppler shift to the table. Please note, this is a “real” Doppler shift, due to approach/recession speed of the star, not the cosmological red shift due to the stretching of space. So we’re about to use Smokey’s means of measuring your speed, on the star.

Here’s a video explaining why Doppler shift happens (in case you need a review):

One objection you might have, is that if a star emits a continuous spectrum, how can you tell it red-shifts as it moves away from us? Sure, the light that would be reddish-orange looks a little bit redder. but there’s other, slightly more orange light that gets redshifted to replace the original reddish-orange light.

This is a very good objection, but it’s based on a premise that’s not quite true; stars don’t emit a perfectly continuous spectrum. Their atmospheres absorb certain very specific wavelengths, leaving gaps in the spectra, and we can measure where those gaps are.

The gaps should be at certain exact frequencies. But if the star is heading towards or away from us, those gaps shift. We’re actually measuring the red (or blue) shift from the gaps. So if we measure where the gaps are and they’re not quite where we’d measure them in the lab, we know the entire spectrum has shifted either towards blue or red.

Most of what we know about stars comes from studying their spectra–and we know quite a lot about them. If you’re a professional astronomer, this is a big part of your life.

Returning to exoplanets: This is really another way to detect a planet by noticing the star’s wobble, except that this time, we’re using the Doppler shift to measure the wobble. We can watch the star’s radial (toward or away from us) speed over a period of time, and note any sort of periodic variation. For example some star might be moving towards us at 12.5 kilometers per second. But if we measure it repeatedly over time, and one year it’s moving at 12.510 kilometers per second, but six years later, it’s moving at 12.490 kilometers per second, but then six years later, it’s back to 12.510 kilometers/second…well then we can infer that there’s a 0.01 kilometer/second or 10 meter/second wobble…that takes twelve years to cycle.

This is precisely how Jupiter would affect our Sun, by the way: a ten meter per second “signal” over a space of about 12 years.

We can measure Doppler shifts to within about a meter per second, so we could detect Jupiter by this means. But we have to watch for a long enough time that the planet completes a couple of orbits, otherwise we don’t know what part of the Doppler shift is from the simple straight-line motion of the star, and what part is induced “wobble” from the planet(s) orbiting the star. And if there are multiple planets, the signal is more complicated.

The earth, unfortunately, only induces a ten centimeter (or so) per second wobble in the Sun…which means we couldn’t detect it by this method.

The good news is this is another method that can work on distant stars. As long as we can take a spectrograph of it, we can use this method…if we have the patience to wait for a planetary orbit or two.

Once we know the size and period of the wobble, we can figure out how massive the planet is…well, sort of. Allow me to explain.

The detected red-and-blue shifts will be greatest if the planetary orbit is edge on to us. That way (ignoring for the moment the actual overall radial motion of the star) the planet will be travelling directly towards us on one side of its orbit (and the star will be receding–red shift), and directly away from us on the other side (and the star will be approaching–blue shift). But if the orbit is tilted at a 60 degree angle to us, instead of 0 degrees, the signal will be half as strong. The same planet, at the same distance from the star, will produce only half as much of a blue/red shift in its star.

This method won’t tell us that inclination, so when we get a signal and use it to determine the planet’s mass, it’s a minimum value. The planet could be twice as massive as we measured–but in an orbit with a 60 degree tilt, rather than edge on. It’s called the “sin I” error because the error depends directly on the sine of the inclination angle, I.

The First Extrasolar Planet Detection

So which of these methods was used in 1992 when the first extrasolar planets were detected?

Well, none of the above, actually.

That first extrasolar detection came completely out of left field, from a place no one would have dreamed to go looking. This is a classic example of serendipity: some scientists saw something odd they couldn’t explain…and when they followed up on it, they got a nice little surprise.

On February 9, 1990, Polish astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan used the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and discovered a new pulsar, which eventually became designated “PSR B1257+12” (meaning it was at 12 hours, 57 minutes right ascension, declination +12). The pulse length is 6.22 milliseconds (9650 RPM). And the pulsar is 2600 light years away, meaning that the signal we get from it today left the pulsar almost a century before Leonidas was born.

A pulsar is a neutron star (and a neutron star is the corpse of a dead star, the supernova “leftover” of a star that wasn’t quite massive enough to form a black hole) spinning about an axis and sweeping us with at least one of the two beams of energy focused by its extremely intense magnetic field, in exactly the same way a light house beam sweeps past. Only much, much faster.

Over time, as the pulsar radiates energy away, it will spin slower an slower, but in the short term it’s an extremely regular signal.

Except that this particular pulsar’s signal wasn’t quite so regular; it seemed to shift a bit in period over time. Why would this be?

It turns out, this pulsar is orbited by planets. The shift in interval between pulses is due to a bit of red shift/blue shift like wobble; as the pulsar moves towards us, its pulses seem to be spaced more closely, as it moes away, they are spaced further apart. Even though the phenomenon is similar, this isn’t quite a normal Doppler shift, because it’s the interval between pulses, rather than the frequency of steadily-emitted light, that is affected.

This was quite a surprise. The usual assumption is that any planets orbiting near a star that goes supernova will be destroyed. And I don’t mean “destroyed” as in “all life on the planet will be killed,” I mean “destroyed” as in “the entire ball of rock will be gone.” But perhaps something different happened here.

Astronomers are pretty sure the planets (there are at least three of them) are not original but formed after the neutron star was created. In this particular case, it is believed by many that this particular pulsar is the result of the merger of two white dwarfs, not of a supernova.

Wolszczan discovered two of the planets himself in 1992, a third planet was discovered in 1994.

These planets, and the pulsar itself actually got named, and in all cases the names suggest death and graveyards, appropriate since the pulsar itself is the corpse of a star. Or two, if the merger theory is correct.

The pulsar itself is now named Lich, after a sort of mythical undead creature, similar to a zombie.

Poltergeist and Phobetor (“Frightenter”) were the first two planets discovered. They weigh in at 4.3 and 3.9 Earth masses, respectively, at distances of 0.36 and 0.46 AU. Draugr (named for an undead creature from Norse mythology) is the third planet discovered, but it’s closer to Lich at 0.19 AU. Its mass is a mere 0.02 Earth masses, making it by far the lightest extrasolar planet discovered to date. These were originally labeled B, C, and A respectively (in order of distance from Lich), before the current convention was established; now Draugr is labeled ‘b” and Poltergeist and Phobetor ‘c’ and ‘d.’

There are some hints of an asteroid belt in this system, or possibly a Kuiper belt.

Now this is a very bizarre system, totally unexpected. The discovery hit us out of left field, and for three years the only planets known other than the ones orbiting our own sun…were orbiting a neutron star. Did I mention this is bizarre?

I personally cannot imagine a more grim, inhospitable place to visit, and apparently neither could the people who named the pulsar and its planets. Awash in the flickering beam of instantly-lethal radiation (the sort that vaporizes your eyeballs and melts your body) from the corpse of a star, this is merely a Hell where the fire is particle beams instead of burning sulfur. And it is a cold Hell, too; even Draugr, the closest, is expected to have a surface temperature of -7 C.

You wouldn’t suffer for more than a second or two.

More “normal” extrasolar planets would have to wait until 1995…but even with them, there were some real surprises.

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 it looks like enough people agree, that you’re having to back down, you worthless asswipe.

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 $1830.80
Silver $23.40
Platinum $973.00
Palladium $1995
Rhodium $15,300

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $1798.00
Silver $22.45
Platinum $969.00
Palladium $2025.00
Rhodium $18,500.00

Yep, the manipulators are trying, once again, to push gold and silver down. But inflation is real, and they won’t be able to keep that going forever.

Palladium and rhodium are up–rhodium is WAY up. I wonder what that’s about?

James Webb Space Telescope Update

As I write this Friday afternoon, JWST has unfolded the main mirror, on the port side. A lot of holds had be released, then the mirrors swung into place, then two hours to latch it into place.

The other half should be done today, and indeed nasa.gov/live will stream the process.

Once this is done the telescope is fully deployed. It will then be a matter of getting 18 mirrors to work as one; a very meticulous multi-day process.

Mirror temperature as of 1:30 ET on Friday is -264 F.

Our Solar System as Archetype

I wrote a few articles on physics and astrophysics culminating in the latest cosmological discoveries, and my timing was very good on those, because the spacecraft that will almost certainly move the frontiers of knowledge forward in that area was about to be launched.

But there is another “hot topic” in astronomy these days, one that, at least to my way of thinking, is more “astronomy” than “physics,” whereas cosmology is about 50-50. Of course your opinion on what belongs in what bucket can certainly differ from mine.

That is the topic of “extrasolar planets.” In other words, planets orbiting around other stars, rather than our Sun.

In fact planetary science in general has become a lot more of a hot field of study now. Before we could send space probes to other planets, almost no astronomer paid any attention to the planets. The big telescopes that astronomers had to beg, borrow or steal time on were devoted to studying galaxies and stars.

It’s very different nowadays. We have now found indications of planets orbiting other stars, and in some few cases have even managed to image them. They’re featureless dots, of course…but they are dots in a picture.

But then, that’s because of our perspective.

The Cassini space probe, which orbited Saturn for many years, would occasionally pass “behind” Saturn as seen from the sun. This of course is a vantage point unavailable from here, so it would take pictures, many of them showing bright halos of dust…they’re worth checking out. Some of them show, as an incidental, a thing that is also shown here in this picture. Upper left is the “night side” of Saturn, upper center and right are a bit of the rings. The one dot, conspicuous because it’s the only bright spot in the rest of the picture…is Earth.

Just a dot.

Keep that in mind as we discuss the “just a dot” planets orbiting other stars.

One way we might manage more than “just a dot” is with (wait for it…) the James Webb Space Telescope.

So it’s useful over here in this branch of knowledge as well.

A Preliminary Gripe or Two

First, a minor pet peeve of mine. Our sun’s system of planets is called “The Solar System.” Solar comes from Sol, a Latin name for the sun. So the “Solar System” is named after the star.

What do we call systems of planets orbiting other stars? Do we call them “Stellar Systems” from the Latin word for “Star”?

Oh, Hell no. That would make too much sense. We call them planetary systems. A “stellar system” is a grouping of stars, maybe two stars orbiting each other in a binary, maybe a globular cluster of up to a million stars, maybe even a whole galaxy.

So that brings us to Gripe Number Two. When what looks like a star is observed to really be a binary star, the two individual stars get lettered A and B. Alpha Centauri (the nearest naked-eye visible star to our sun) is a binary; the two stars are Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. There is a third star, much fainter and further away; it’s actually closer than the other two, and is itself the nearest star other than the sun, period (though we might someday look at some other faint star and discover it’s even closer–in fact we might even discover that we are a binary star; the Sun and some faint red star out there somewhere). That faint star is called Proxima Centauri, or Alpha Centauri C.

So what did they do when they started discovering exoplanets? Star Trek episodes used the custom of simply numbering the planets, and using Roman numerals, for example “Rigel VI,” presumably the sixth planet out from Rigel. (Incidentally, there were a LOT of habitable planets orbiting Rigel in the original Star Trek.) I’ve seen this convention in a lot of other science fiction that I’ve read.

The astronomers didn’t do this with real extrasolar planets. They decided to go with lower case letters, as a sort of “extension” of their convention for labeling stars. The lower case letters would be applied in the order of discovery…and the first such letter is ‘b,’ not ‘a.’ Why? Because the star itself is ‘a.’ Why on earth they should have decided to designate the star itself as if it were a planet, is totally beyond me. SMH.

OK, on to the main meat of this week’s post.

Our Solar System

Until thirty years ago (1992), this planetary system, the Solar System, was the only one known. We didn’t know if, perhaps, this was an unusual, freak occurrence and planetary systems were rare, or common. One old theory of formation (discounted for other reasons) was that at some time in the past another star had passed very close to the sun, pulling a bunch of material out which condensed to form the planets. This would be a very rare occurence, and it would have been entirely possible that there’d only be two planetary systems in the galaxy–ours, and the one belonging to the other star that sideswiped the sun way back when.

Most astronomers who gave it any thought suspected that planetary systems were a lot more common than that. But what would they be like? Well, we only had one example. And we had pretty good arguments for supposing a lot of the characteristics of this planetary system weren’t random, but there for reasons coming straight out of physics and chemistry.

So in order to understand other planetary systems, we need to understand ours. Because it was likely an archetype of what we would find out there when we finally did find things out there.

Imagine someone on the outside looking at the solar system.

They’d only be 14 hundredths of a percent off if they were to conclude that all that was there was a star. The Sun is 99.86 percent of the entire mass of the system. (Sadie can have fun with the fact that that is the same as the percentage of Congress that is worthless. Quite a coincidence!)

The sun is almost entirely hydrogen and helium, in a 3:1 ratio by mass–that’s what came out of the Big Bang. It also contains a lot of other elements in much smaller, almost trace percentages–those mostly came from prior stars that brewed them up and then either shed them as planetary nebulae (that name is a bit of misnomer; nothing to do with planets), or blew them out into space in a supernova.

Of course an observer from the outside won’t stop there. He/she/it probably belongs to a species that calls a planet home, so he/she/it is probably looking for planets. Those are good real estate. (Though it should be noted that many speculate we will be able someday to build a thriving civilization in space, particularly in the asteroid belt.)

A closer look will reveal Jupiter, orbiting a bit less than a billion kilometers out. When we look even closer, we’ll see other planets, but Jupiter is 2.5 times the mass of everything else (that isn’t Sun) put together. So a good second approximation is that the solar system consists of the Sun, Jupiter…and miscellaneous debris.

We are, of course, most interested in that debris because we live on the fourth largest piece of it.

An even closer look reveals the following pattern. There are essentially five “zones” in the solar system. Going outward from the sun, we have four large bodies that are mostly rocks, with very few volatiles.(“Volatiles” are simply substances with a relatively low boiling point, like water and carbon dioxide, as opposed to silicon dioxide, which when found in nature is called “quartz” and is probably the most common constituent of rocks.)

(If you are about to object that Earth is mostly water, you should realize that Earth is mostly water at the surface. The ocean is a few miles deep on average, below that it’s mostly rock for a couple of thousand miles, with a core in the center made almost entirely of iron. By volume the Earth has almost no volatiles, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain a lot of oxygen–it’s part of most mineral molecules and in that form is not volatile.)

Then there is a belt of stuff even we would call debris: the asteroids. Some of them are large enough that their gravity pulls them into a spherical shape; others are quite irregular.

The books I read as a kid (mostly ten to twenty years old at the time) claimed there were about 1500 known asteroids (I’m going from memory); today we know of hundreds of thousands.

The asteroid belt actually covers a wide span of distances. Nearer asteroids are mostly rocky, outer ones have some “ices” on them.

I need to stop and explain that when planetary scientists talk about ices, they don’t just mean water ice, they also mean methane, ammonia, and carbon dioxide. All these things we on Earth think of as gases or liquids, at least under the conditions prevalent here on the surface.

In fact there is a line called the “frost line” where ices will form, even in places that get direct sunlight. Closer than that to the sun, it’s too warm for that. The frost line is about 5 times as far from the sun as Earth is, (defined to be 1 Astronomical Unit; the frost line is at 5 AU).

Beyond the asteroid belt, we find Jupiter, and then the largest piece of “miscellaneous debris” in the solar system, Saturn.

These two planets are largely made up of hydrogen and helium, just like the sun. However, we know there was some rocky stuff made out of the other elements, because Jupiter and Saturn have large moons (larger than the smallest planet, Mercury) made out of both rocks and volatiles. In fact some of these moons probably contain more water than Earth does; a frozen layer on the outside, a liquid layer underneath, kept so by the moons’ internal heat, which in turn is generated by tidal forces acting relentlessly on the moons.

Planetary scientists actually find those outer planet moons to be the most interesting objects of study right now, more so than the planets they orbit. There’s speculation there could be life in those oceans.

Moving further out, there are Uranus and Neptune. These are both about 30,000 miles across (compared with Earth’s ~8000 miles and Jupiter’s 88,000 miles), and they are largely composed of ices. Their atmospheres contain a lot of methane and ammonia. These were once lumped into the same group as Jupiter and Saturn, but now astronomers have decided the differences are significant and there is a new class of object called “ice giants.” They too have moons made up of rock and ice.

Beyond Neptune are a large number of other bodies, much like asteroids but largely made up of ice. At the prevailing temperatures out there, in face, water ice is essentially just another rock…at those temperatures it’s hard stuff. Pluto is one of these bodies, actually, which is why it got “demoted” from being a planet. Once we found more objects like it–many of them larger than Pluto–we realized it was something different. This region of the Solar System is called the Kuiper Belt, after Gerard Kuiper (1905-1973) who did a lot of planetary science even when it wasn’t fashionable, but ironically did not predict the Kuiper Belt.

The best estimates are that there’s 200 times as much stuff in the Kuiper Belt as there is in the “regular” asteroid belt.

And by no means are small objects confined to these belts!

So that’s our overall picture. Close to the sun, bodies are rocky. Further away, smaller bodies are ice and rock–more ice, proportionately, the further out you go. Big bodies tend to be BIG bodies, though, and they are largely made out of gas.

All of this is plausibly explained by the best models of the formation of the solar system (and other planetary systems); the nebula, mostly gas but some dust as well, that forms the system begins to contract, favors a disk-like shape with most of the mass at the center, then out in the disk, solid objects (rocks, and if far enough away, ices too) start consolidating into “planetesimals” and those consolidate into planets.

We don’t understand all of the dynamics of this process. Parts of it are still a mystery. But we can watch stars and planetary systems in the act of forming right now in the Orion Nebula. (And the James Webb Space Telescope will hopefully show us more than we can see at present. Infrared light can cut through nebular dust easily.)

As the star at the center contracts, it gets hot, and eventually starts fusing hydrogen into helium. All that energy pouring out of the star basically blasts all the light gases out of the inner solar system. And any that were in the atmosphere of planets like Earth heats up.

The temperature of an object is directly related to the average kinetic energy of the molecules or atoms is made of. But what that means is that a sample of hydrogen at (say) 0 C has H₂ molecules in it that are moving faster than a sample of oxygen at the same temperature. That’s because although the hydrogen molecules have the same kinetic energy as the oxygen molecules, they are lighter…which means they must move faster than the oxygen molecules do at the same temperature.

It’s an average velocity; some molecules move slower, some faster. The faster hydrogen molecules actually move at escape velocity, and if at the upper, very thin layers of the atmosphere, they “bleed off” because they don’t run into anything they might bounce off off, and lose some momentum to, until it’s too late. (Even water vapor will do this to some extent, but much more slowly than hydrogen or helium.)

[This is why, every time you let helium escape party balloons and the like, it’s gone for good. It will dilute in the atmosphere to the point it’s not worth trying to purify, and will eventually work its way upward and diffuse away. Helium is probably the ultimate limited resource. At least until we can get into space and scoop it out of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s atmospheres. Meanwhile, helium is becoming harder and harder to get for party balloons, because it has other uses, like in MRI machines, and people are starting to refuse to sell it to people who will just let it get away.]

So Earth kept none of its stock of hydrogen…it probably never accumulated that much to begin with. (I think it’s still an open question where all our water came from–there are two plausible possibilities and it might be both of them.)

Jupiter and Saturn though? They had no problem hanging on to their hydrogen and helium. And in fact, that increased the mass of the planets, which caused them to attract more gas, which increased the mass further…a sort of runaway effect. (And Jupiter is so massive that now, it could orbit at Earth’s distance and still keep its hydrogen, simply because it’s so much more massive and its escape velocity much higher than Earth’s.)

We knew all of this, certainly, by 1992. And it colored our expectations of what we’d find out there if we ever did manage to detect extrasolar planets. Small, light bodies close to the star, big massive ones further away. Those, of course have the most effect on their parent star (which is the only thing we can observe), but they move slowly.

Next week, I go into how astronomers look for exoplanets.

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 !!!

Happy New Year!

I’ll wear both the pessimist and optimist hats.

Pessimist first.

Remember how we thought 2021 couldn’t get worse and got disabused of that idea in only six days?

(Yeah well we sort of stepped into that burning bag of bearded dragon poo.)

A friend of mine, who could be a bit of a wiseass at times (and pessimism was part of his schtick), would tell me something sometimes when I was a bit bummed out about something that had just happened.

And it bears remembering, especially with the usurpatious vacuum skull still in the White House:

“It’s never so bad that it can’t get worse.”

OK, on the optimist side. OK, this is cautious optimism, rather than full frontal unicorns and rainbows optimism, but here it is:

I think both the pessimist side and the optimist side can agree this will be a very eventful year. But if things actually work well in November, even a horrific year might contain the seeds of a reversal of fortune.

Let’s go back to 1979. Carter. Malaise. Soviets surging all over the world. 50 Americans held hostage by a bunch of neolithic barbarians.

The man, I think, might actually have meant well. (I was more certain of that a few years ago than I am today.) But he was not competent in that job.

But then, irony of ironies, there was this song. If you do NOT like 1970s/1980s Swedish popular music, skip the next video. Otherwise, the gratuitous fireworks display ends at 57 seconds and the music starts shortly thereafter.

Note the video is set in 1979 New Year’s eve and they actually ask what it will be like in 1989/90.

Quite a bit different, thanks to Ronaldus Magnus! We went from Jimmy Carter Malaise to seven years of economic growth and The Wall coming down! Unimaginable in 1979!

But, we did have to get through the highest misery index ever in 1980, first.

And we have to get through 2022. Which will likely make 1980 look like child’s play. Let’s just hope it doesn’t make 2021 look like child’s play, too.

The Chinese Should Think Before Wiping Us Out As Sometimes They Need Us To Solve Their Problems For Them

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.

“No Chemicals”

A detailed analysis of the contents of His Fraudulency’s skull was performed.

Absolutely no chemicals found!

(That one’s for you, Gail!)

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).

James Webb Space Telescope Update

JWST deployed both booms on the 31st. The first one took quite a long time because some of the sensors that were supposed to show the cover unfurled weren’t working right.

So here’s what it looks like now.

Over the course of the weekend the sheets will be separated and tensioned, at which point the sun shield will be fully functional and the JWST should really start to cool off (though they have been heating things up to ensure they will deploy properly). -370 F is the goal temperature though it will take weeks to get there.

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 $1810.20
Silver $22.96
Platinum $981.00
Palladium $2036.00
Rhodium $14,975.00

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

Gold $1830.80
Silver $23.40
Platinum $973.00
Palladium $1995
Rhodium $15,300

Now THIS is a little more like it!!!

Let’s see if “they” manage to push it down again. Palladium actually went down sixty bucks Friday, it was over 2000 bucks earlier.

More On Time

(Please note, this is not titled “Moron Time.” We’ve had quite enough moron time, thankyouverymuch.)

[And speaking of morons, I somehow posted the original of this on January 1 of last year…I thought I had checked that but it did somehow goof up the time of day and I had to fix that…it probably took that opportunity to “correct” my year.]

Happy New Year!!!

It’s New Year’s Day. It’s an arbitrarily picked day, based (somewhat) on Ancient Roman (and Pre-Christian) practice. And a suitable day for more information on our calendar.

The Year

Last time I told the story of Julius Caesar’s reform of 45 BCE, and how it ended the practice of entire intercalary months–months added every now and again to keep the calendar roughly lined up with the seasons. This had had to be done because months were true to their origin back then, matching the phases of the moon. But 12 of these “moonths” didn’t make up a year, not really, and thirteen of them was too much. The Jewish calendar has the same issue; they have to add entire months fairly often.

Julius Caesar made the twelve months longer, and set things up to add a leap day every four years to account for the fractional day over 365 in the tropical year. It wasn’t quite right; I told that story last year.

But that calendar has come directly down to us with only the minor adjustment made originally in 1582 by order of Pope Gregory XIII, and eventually adopted by Protestant and Orthodox countries, and it’s pretty much either official worldwide, or well known.

The months and days of the month set by Julius Caesar seem set almost in concrete; only one lasting change has been made to them in the last two thousand years (even if that change wasn’t done at the same time everywhere).

But the numbering of the years–and even the choice of when the year should begin–has changed a lot.

When Caesar was in charge, the calendar year was generally identified by who was consul at the time, which makes modern historians’ lives a bit of a pain, but we do have a fairly detailed list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_consuls and they can generally figure things out.

That list starts in 509 BC because that is when, according to tradition, the last of the seven Roman kings was overthrown and the Roman Republic was established. And the emperors (starting with Octavian/Augustus) kept the office around but they were the real power.

The Romans, however, did sometimes think in terms of something called Ab Urbe Condita, essentially since the founding of the city of Rome, and that was in 753 BCE. Therefore AUC 753 was 1 BCE, and AUC 754 was 1 CE. Were we still using that numbering, 2022 would be AUC 2775.

[Note, by the way, there was no year Zero. 1 BCE was followed directly by 1 CE. Which makes “how many years between” arithmetic a bit hazardous when computing between dates either side of that line. Astronomers, who sometimes have to “backtrack” such things, do use a zero year, then negative numbers, so their year 0 is 1 BCE, -1 is 2 BCE, etc. Archaeologists tend to use “Before Present” but “Present” turns out to be roughly 1950–they fell prey to institutionalizing a “present” by accident (they probably didn’t expect to use “BP” forever) in exactly the same way that “modern” no longer means “modern” because people named a specific time the modern period and we have moved past it, so we sometimes find ourselves using strange terms like “post modern” that shouldn’t be meaningful without a time machine.]

Early Christians actually did not use AD dating. The AD dating schema was first put forward by Dionysius Exiguus in 525. Before that the most commonly used schema was the Diocletian Era used in an old Easter table; he (understandably) didn’t want to commemorate Diocletian, who had instituted the last and worst persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. (The Diocletian era was, in any case, mostly used in the East.)

The year that is now known as AD 1 (or 1 CE), was almost certainly not the birth year of Jesus. Matthew indicates it was in the time of King Herod (Mt 2:1), who kicked the bucket in 4 BCE. Luke indicates that the census requiring Mary and Joseph to go to Bethlehem occurred while Quirinius was governor of Syria (Lk 2:2) though he talks about other early events happening under Herod. Quirinius became governor in 6 CE. Absent some major historical discovery these two times don’t even overlap; neither includes 1 CE. But it’s certainly close to the right year. Whether it’s close enough for non government work is, I suppose, moot. We’re not likely to change our year numbers right now.

Which is not to say that it hasn’t happened.

The Eastern Orthodox Church and Byzantine Empire used “Anno Mundi,” year of the world. By attempting to fix Year One to be the year of creation, they sidestepped all issues with negative numbers, missing zero years, and so on. So they got hold of their Bibles, laid out a chronology, and fixed creation at 5509 years before Jesus was born. However, they did not at first agree with Exiguus’s dating of when Jesus was born. Their year 1 A.M. is September 1, 5509 BCE through August 31, 5508 BCE. Note their year began (and within the church organization still does begin) on September 1. September 1, of 2021 (i.e., last September) began the year 7530 A.M.

By the way, it’s technically not quite kosher to give a date like that, because the calendar didn’t exist yet on that date–if anything the prior mess of a Roman Republican calendar should be used–if anyone can figure out how it would have worked that year. So they’ll often qualify things by referring to the proleptic Julian calendar; i.e., they extend the Julian calendar back to that date. (In this particular case, remember that it’s not our current Gregorian calendar.)

(Russia switched from this calendar to a January 1 start of the New Year in 1700 CE; they also began to use the AD numbering at that time…but they were still on the Julian Calendar so they were off from the Gregorian calendar by 11 days, then 12 days in the 1800s, then 13 days during the 1900s before and during the ‘October’ Revolution–which happened in November by the Gregorian calendar. The commies switched in 1918, trying to shed the past–they even considered switching Russian to the Latin alphabet.)

You may think that 5509 BCE sounds wrong. It certainly does disagree with the usual Bible-based dating used by many churches here in the United States, which is based on Archbishop Ussher’s (1581-1626) chronology which fixes creation at about 6 PM, on the 22nd of October, 4004 BCE (by the proleptic Julian calendar). This is the chronology most often used by fundamentalists in the US.

That’s a difference of over 1500 years. It’s really difficult to construct an unambiguous chronology from the Old Testament.

I alluded to some disagreement over what date the year started; Russia used September 1 until 1700, one of Peter the Great’s many reforms, the Eastern Orthodox church still uses it internally, but that wasn’t the only difference between past practice and today’s practice. Up until 1752, England (and her colonies, which would include US (as in U.S.) at the time) was on the old Julian calendar; until that time, March 25 was the start of the new year. Not even the beginning of a month! March 24, 1751 was followed the next day by March 25, 1752. In September of that year, things were set to the current January 1 practice; also September 2, 1752 was followed by September 14, 1752; England dropped 11 days there to get in sync with the Gregorian calendar and would follow it from then forward.

If George Washington had had a birth certificate, it would have read 11 February, 1731 (Julian date); unlike many he changed his birthday to 22 February, in other words following the Gregorian calendar, and the year is now given as 1732 to be consistent with a January 1 start-of-year.

There was confusion as to which European gets the credit for ‘discovering’ South America for similar reasons of confusion between countries who didn’t start the year at the same time.

And nothing would astonish me more than to hear that’s a complete list.

What day to call the New Year, is fundamentally an arbitrary decision. But a date has to be chosen and abided by, and today is that date. So get used to writing and typing 2022.

Julian Dates

“Julian Date” means two distinct things. Usually, it’s just a day number within the year. February 3rd, for instance is Julian date 34. It runs all the way up to 365 or 366.

But there’s a different Julian Date used by astronomers. A 365.25 day year is awkward to deal with sometimes, so they’ll sometimes compute the time between two events in number of days. A “day” they can get a handle on; it’s 86,400 seconds and a second is quite thoroughly defined. So they’ll (for instance) compute the period of a planet in days.

Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) proposed a scheme where days would be sequentially numbered from a start time, then continue counting upward forever. This became the Julian date, named after his father Julius Scaliger. He first suggested it in 1583.

Scaliger chose the day January 1, 4713 BCE as his start date. It was satisfactorily far back in time that negative numbers wouldn’t be referenced often. Why that particular year? It was a leap year, the first year of a solar cycle of 28 years, the first year of a lunar cycle of 19 years, and the first year of an indiction cycle of 15 years. The solar cycle is simply the repeat period of the Julian calendar, the lunar cycle was named such because the moon would undergo the same phases on the same days, every 19 years, and the indiction cycle was an ancient Roman period at the beginning of which taxes would be reassessed. These cycles could be run backward in time, and 4713 BC was the most recent year when all three cycles were in their first year. (Being a leap year was implicit in being the start year of a solar cycle.)

This is, by the way, according to the proleptic Julian calendar, not the proleptic Gregorian calendar.

Astronomers still number their days this way. Their day starts at noon (logical, because that way an overnight period, when they’d be observing, didn’t have a day break in it), so noon, January 1, 4713 BCE was the start of Julian Day 0. (In the Gregorian calendar, this would have been November 24, 4714 BCE.) Scaliger wasn’t familiar with time zones, but the modern definition of this specifies Universal Time (essentially the time at Greenwich without Daylight Saving Time; it’s seven hours ahead of Mountain Standard Time).

And if my arithmetic is right, this post will go “live” on 2459580, almost three quarters of the way into that date; so at 7 AM ET, it will be 2459581. TIme of day is handled as a decimal fraction, so midnight UTC is Julian day [whatever it is].5.

In another common usage, we use a “modified Julian date” that starts at midnight, UT (not noon) and drops the 2,400,000 in front and just goes with 59581. So the Modified Julian Date is the Julian Date minus 2,400,000.5. This will work for another century or so then we’ll have to either restart it at 0 or just start dealing with six digit numbers. It’s handy for computers that might not have the precision to show a seven digit number with multiple digits of precision after the decimal point; we save two digits that way. (This is less of an issue today, with 64 bit computers, than it was with 32 bit computers.)

The following link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day gives a lot more information including a way to compute the Julian day for any “regular” date.

Holocene Dating

As an aside, someone came up with an idea called the “Holocene Epoch.” The idea was to simply add ten thousand to all years, so that this would be 12,022. 1 CE becomes 10,001, and 1 BCE becomes 10,000. The idea is not to try to find the beginning of the world, but at least all of human history, almost back to the first buildings that survive, would at least have a positive year number attached to it. And 10,000 BCE is very nearly the start of the present geological epoch, the Holocene, roughly corresponding to the end of the last glaciation, hence the name “Holocene.” (That epoch actually began [best estimate] 11,650 years “Before Present” which makes it 11,722 years ago right now, not 12022 years ago. A three hundred year glitch.)

Yeah, that won’t ever happen.

Leap Weeks?

And on a very different topic. File this one under “won’t ever freaking happen” but I include it because you might find it amusing.

Because, as I’ve pointed out, the shape of our calendar–the configuration and sizes of months–has only undergone one slight adjustment in the last 2000 years. I don’t take this seriously–but I find it amusing.

Many are unhappy with the fact that each year “looks” different. January 1 starts on a different day of the week from one year to the next, that of course throws every other date off as well as compared to the first year. Normally, it’s a one day shift, but if a leap day is in between, it’s two days. It sets up a cycle where you can safely use a calendar that’s 28 (or 56) years old, if you want…but don’t go back past 1900 with this. The real cycle is a 400 year cycle before the pattern repeats.

That’s kind of annoying, in some cases it’s really annoying, but we live with it. However some people have suggested reforming the calendar so it won’t happen. But it’s a bit of a challenge, especially now that there’s an ISO scheme that numbers the weeks within the year; this has to adapt to those weeks that straddle years.

And this is because 365 does not divide by 7, there’s a remainder of 1.

Many would-be reformers say this can be handled quite easily: simply have one day (two in a leap year) that do not have a day of the week assigned to them.

OK, I imagine many readers of this would go find the pitchforks and torches (OK, firearms) if this were adopted, because of course it’d throw your church services off; the Sabbath would either have to move around the week, or it wouldn’t be a seven day metronome any more. (It rather messes with the fourth commandment.)

And you’d have a lot of company from both Jews and Muslims.

So it’s not going to happen.

But someone did come up with an interesting alternative. Get rid of leap day. Have leap week. Start January on (say) Monday. The year ends on a Sunday, 364 (yes FOUR) days later. Very soon, though, in order to align with the seasons, you add an entire week at the end of December (371 days), so that way the next year is lined back up with the seasons, but the year still starts on a Monday. The advantage is that the calendar is the same from year to year (an extra week can go at the end of December with an asterisk next to it), and churches, synagogues and mosques would not be disrupted.

This is the Hanke/Henry calendar. It also changes the lengths of some months so that each quarter is 91 days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanke%E2%80%93Henry_Permanent_Calendar

http://hankehenryontime.com/html/qanda.html

OK, it’s at least somewhat clever and thinking-out-of-the-box. But these guys also advocate for everyone on earth using Universal time (i.e., Greenwich time) and that, I think, is ridiculous. It would solve nothing because it will still be midnight in some places while it’s 3PM in others. Worse, the sun would rise here in Colorado at 2PM in December. Almost everywhere on Earth, things would be about that ridiculous. And it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of having to worry about someone else’s time zone, It just changes it to having to know how out of whack their clocks are compared to yours. You’d still have to wonder whether someone was up when making a long distance call, and you wouldn’t be able to look at the time where they were for a clue. [As far as time of day goes, our situation today is pretty optimal. For applications where time synchronization between continents is needed, we have UTC. For everything else our clocks match the time of day pretty well…or only fairly well during daylight saving time.]

The rule for computing leap years actually depends, crazily, on what day of the week the (presumably abandoned) Gregorian calendar begins.

It’s one of those “interesting idea, but no way” types of things, just like the Holocene Era is.

The Day

Enough about years, but there’s a bit more to add about days.

Last week, I posted a graph called “the equation of time.” This one:

It’s the difference between what you sundial says, and what your watch says. (And that assumes you have your watch set to mean solar time for your longitude, which since the advent of time zones, is generally not true. But let’s say you live at precisely 75, 90, 105, or 120 W longitude (or any other longitude that divides by 50). That’s nearly true for me, I live at a bit above 104 W longitude.)

Because your watch is designed to move at a constant rate–whether it actually does so is another matter, and back in the day of mechanical watches there was some correlation between the cost of the watch and how well it did so. But the sundial directly registers the sun…which doesn’t move at a constant rate. So the watch (hopefully) moves at an “average” of the sun’s rate, “mean Solar time.”

[Nowadays even a crappy watch often gets corrected by listening to the “atomic clock” but watch out when that fails…I’ve known two “this is an atomic watch” braggarts to be off the correct time by minutes; but my 1996-purchased Citizen Navihawk keeps plugging away, sometimes even after the computer in it resets.]

The differences are due to two factors: the ecliptic is inclined to the celestial equator, and Earth’s orbit about the sun is elliptical. That elliptical orbit results in the earth travelling faster closer to the sun (Kepler’s second law), which means when the earth is closer to the sun, it has to rotate further to bring the sun to the meridian, more than 24 hours since the last time the sun crossed the meridian.

If noon-to-noon is more than twenty four hours, then, if you’re using a good watch and are monitoring a sundial, you will see it. The watch will be faster (compared to the sundial) the next day as compared to today, because it will get to noon faster than the sun’s shadow will.

In other words, you’re at a time of the year when that squiggly red line is sloping upward, the watch is becoming faster and faster.

As it happens Earth is closest to the sun on about January 6, and the line is really steep there.

During the weeks before and after that time, the time of sunset is changing. You’d expect it to be earliest on December 21, because that is after all the shortest daytime of the year because its the solstice.

But it’s actually earliest a week before that. Check any “sunrise and sunset” table. It doesn’t matter for where, honestly, since you’re looking for the earliest sunset, but the effect is much easier to see the further north the table is for. (And of course this flip-flops in the Southern hemisphere).

So if you’re thinking (like Aubergine said on Sunday) that you’re already “feeling” longer days by the solstice on the 21st, you’re not quite right, but the sun is already setting later by the 21st–the random chart I grabbed showed a two minute difference. (Sunrise is also later but basically forgotten by sunset. In fact sunrise will continue to come later and later all the way through the end of the month and possibly beyond…the chart stops there.)

Another way to visualize this…as well as something else…is a figure called the analemma.

Unlike the previous figure, the horizontal axis/direction shows how far ahead or back of the sundial a watch would be. And this time the vertical axis usually shows how far the sun is north or south of the celestial equator, its declintion. (But in this case it shows how far above the southern horizon in London, though it does show the equator line, labeled φ). So an analemma gives you two pieces of information graphically, but you have to hunt for the date you want on the figure 8.

This has a real meaning. People with a lot of patience and attention to detail will sometimes photograph the sun at the same time each day (or every couple of weeks), from the same spot with the camera pointed precisely the same way each day, and you can see it forming a figure 8 in the sky.

[I had to download from Wikipoo, edit (and shrink), save as a jpg, and upload. Taking one for the team…]

It’s an almost perfect figure 8. If aphelion, the closest approach to the sun, actually fell on the winter solstice, it probably would be. This will happen sometime in the future: the equinoxes and solstices, after all, are moving along Earth’s orbit and if I understand right, we’re heading towards that situation. Give it about a thousand years.

For some reason that graph up above really exaggerated the horizontal direction. The photo, by contrast might look familiar to you as that figure eight that gets printed over the southeastern Pacific ocean on some globes. (There is almost no dry land there so it’s a safe place to print things like that.) Well, now you know what it’s for!

I decided to see what would happen with other configurations. The easiest way to do that is to look up the analemmas for other planets in our solar system, where aphelion is nowhere near a solstice or equinox.

Mars has a very similar axial tilt to that of Earth. Its orbit is more elliptical, though, and so we have:

And in fact here are analemmas and equations of time for all of the other planets, and Pluto. Figure 8s are fairly common it turns out, but just as common is some sort of lopsided quasi-egg-like shape. Saturn appears to be a figure 8 with a very small northern loop.

Well, that’s all for this week. Now I am really going to have to think hard about what to do for next week, other than, of course a JWST update.

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 !!!