Tag: Big Bang

Science & Space Highlights 2013

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Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
– Sir Fred Hoyle

Science & Space Highlights 2013

My favourite daily newspaper (excellent as it is free too 🙂 ) is The Metro which I read on weekdays on my early morning commute to work.  Ben Gilliland produces an interesting , humorous & easy to understand updates and topics in the science world. Here are the highlights of 2013.

IT IS the start of a new year; 2013 is behind us and all eyes are looking towards the year ahead. It is a time to cast out the old and welcome in the new. But before we push 2013 into our collective wheelie bins to fester with turkey bones, congealed gravy and unrealised dreams, let us take one final look at the year on whose shoulders 2014 will stand. Like one of those chocolate selection boxes that are ubiquitous to the festive season, 2013 was a year packed with tasty morsels of sciencey goodness. We have reviewed the pictorial insert and (avoiding the whisky liqueur centres) selected a few of our favourites… [*The decision to run with a 2013 retrospective was in no way influenced by the author’s desire for two weeks off during the Christmas period. The fact that this piece could be prepared in advance is entirely coincidental]

  Thanks to Nasa’s Kepler space observatory, 2013 was a bumper year for exoplanets. On January 2, a study by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) revealed that the Milky Way contains at least one planet for every star – meaning that our galaxy is home to at least 100-400 billion exoplanets (although there is likely to be many more). Just five days later, another report, from astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, estimated that there are ‘at least 17 billion’ Earth-sized exoplanets in the Milky Way. On November 4, a study from the University of California (also based on Kepler data) reported that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting within the ‘habitable zone’ of their host stars (the region around a star where conditions make the existence of liquid water possible). Of that number, the report estimated that as many as 11billion may be orbiting Sun-like stars – with the nearest such planet located just 12 light-years away.

Launched in 2009 along with the Herschel space telescope, the European Space Agency’s Planck cosmology probe was designed to map the Universe’s first light – the radiation after-glow of the Big Bang. On March 21, the mission’s all-sky map of this a Space was released. The exquisitely-detailed map revealed the tiny temperature variations that were present when the Universe was just 380,000 years old. Although they vary by less than a hundred millionth of a degree, these fluctuations in the density and temperature of the young Universe would form the seeds of the stars and galaxies that inhabit the cosmos today. Planck’s results confirmed many aspects of ‘Big Bang’ theory – including so-called ‘cosmic inflation’ (a period of exponential expansion thought to have occurred in the first fraction of a second of the Universe’s existence). It revealed the Universe to be slightly older than previously though (by about 80million years) and that it contains a little less of the mysterious dark energy (68.3%) thought to be driving the expansion of the cosmos and a little more of the ninja-like dark matter (26.8%) that interacts with the cosmos through gravity alone and a little more of the ordinary matter (4.9%) that makes up you, me and the stars and planets.
Farewell Planck

On October 3, after more than four years of sky mapping, the last of Planck’s instruments ran out the helium coolant they needed to operate. Six days later, the craft was moved out its operating position and placed into a ‘graveyard orbit’ around the Sun. Finally, on October 21, Planck was given the command to power down for good.

On April 29, another iconic ESA spacecraft, the Herschel Space Observatory, exhausted the last of its 2,300-litre supply of liquid helium coolant – marking the end of more than three years of stunning observations. Designed to see the Universe in the dust-piercing far-infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, Herschel gave us stunning images of the intricate networks of gas and dust from which stars are born. It identified star-forming regions in the most distant galaxies – revealing that, even in the early Universe, stars were formed at prodigious rates. In all, Herschel made over 35,000 scientific observations and collected more that 25,000 hours-worth of science data.


If you’ve been following the progress of Nasa’s veteran space probe, Voyager 1, you may have noticed that it seems to have ‘left the Solar System’ more than once. In September, Nasa announced that, on August 25, the craft had at last (for certain this time) become the first man-made object to leave the Solar System behind and pass into interstellar space. Launched in 1977 for a ‘grand tour’ of the planets, Voyager 1 covered an astonishing 19 billion km (about 121 Astronomical Units, or AU) of space before it passed beyond the reach of the solar wind and departed the Solar System. Of course, another definition would put the edge of the Solar System at the point where the Sun’s gravitational influence ends – a distance of about 63,200 AU – meaning Voyager won’t truly leave for another 17,000 years or so. If mankind is ever going to colonise Mars, we’ll need a steady supply of water.

On September 26, Nasa announced that their Curiosity rover had detected ‘abundant, easily accessible’ water in the Martian soil. The robotic explorer had found that the red surface of Mars contains about two per cent water by weight – meaning that future colonists could (in theory) extract about a litre of water from every cubic foot of Martian dirt. Then, in December, a study of images taken by Nasa‘s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was released that hinted that there might still be liquid water flowing near the Red Planet’s equator. The images showed dark lines, called ‘recurring slope lineae’, which might be formed when water ice at high altitudes melted during the Martian summer and flowed down hill.

The Sun powers our existence here on Earth through the energy released by nuclear fusion in its core and it has long been a dream that we will one day recreate this process here on Earth. On October 7, scientists at the National Ignition Facility in California announced that they had taken a significant step towards that dream. Using a technique called ‘Inertial Confinement Fusion’, they zapped a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel with the combined might of 192 laser beams – heating it 100 million degrees and initiating fusion. Significantly, for the first time, the reaction liberated more energy than was needed to initiate it. The amount of energy was tiny, but it showed that cheap, clean, fusion energy might one day be a reality.

Neutrinos are virtually massless particles that flood the cosmos, but have no electric charge so pass through the Universe (and through stars, planet and you) oblivious to, and unaffected by their surroundings. On November 22, scientists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an ice-entombed telescope in Antarctica, said they had detected high-energy neutrinos from beyond the Solar System for the first time. The neutrino’s ability to pass through space unsullied by their surroundings means that, unlike the electromagnetic radiation most telescopes look for, none of the information they carry is lost or corrupted. The discovery has been hailed by astronomers as opening up a ‘new era of astronomy’.

A mission that could revolutionise our knowledge about our home galaxy was launched on December 19. One of the most ambitious space-charting missions ever conceived, ESA’s Gaia space craft will map the precise location, composition, brightness and age of a billion stars. It’s near-billion pixel camera (the most powerful ever flown into space) will create an ultra-precise 3D map of our corner of the Milky Way. By pinpointing the position and motions of the stars, the map can be used to chart how the Milky Way is evolving (by fast-forwarding their motions) and how it first evolved (by rewinding them).

Stuff and Dust of Us – Supernova Creation

Astronomy Science & Technology

 

Tremendous amounts of dust (red) were detected in the centre of the supernova, within the outer shockwave (blue)

Tremendous amounts of dust (red) were detected in the centre of the supernova, within                     the outer shockwave (blue)

Stuff and Dust of Us – Supernova Creation

Striking images of a young supernova abundant with fresh dust at the centre, have been captured by a telescope in the Chilean desert.

Supernova dust2

It is the first time astronomers have witnessed the genesis of the grains which formed galaxies in the early universe.

The pictures were captured by the Alma (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) radio telescope.

Alma (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope

Alma (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope

They were revealed at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

They will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

It is generally known now that our star the sun, our solar system, planets like our home earth and ultimately us originate  from dust grains forged in the crucible of a massive dying star called a supernova. A supernova is the biggest known explosion in nature after the Big Bang which created our universe. Such is the tremendous heat and power produced all the known elements  that make us up are created.

Space & the  universe is full of tiny solid particles we can call space dust. We can see so called dark dust lanes  in our  Milky Way  galaxy  along with  beautiful clouds in  pictures from the Hubble  and other telescopes

Dust from dead stars more so supernovae  form  dust clouds particles of dust clumps/coalesces  together  driven by static electricity attraction then gravity as  mass of these clumps increases after attracting more and more smaller clumps.   At the centre of the the clump a proto-star forms under immense pressure until nuclear fusion is triggered. Spinning and orbiting this new star  star further clumps of dust coalesce in to the planets, moons and, asteroids  debris that makes up our solar system.  Although we know this dust exists throughout the universe and galaxies, there was no firm evidence of where it actually originated from.

In today’s universe, it largely forms around dying stars as they burn out. But these fading giants were not around at the dawn of the universe.

“It’s the same problem as we have in my house – there’s a lot of dust and we don’t know where it comes from. Space is quite a messy place,” quipped Remy Indebetouw, an astronomer with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

“So we took one of the most technologically advanced telescopes ever – Alma – and tried to find out how dust formed in the early universe.”

“Supernovas have long been thought to be the creators – the bright factories that burst out building blocks for galaxies. But catching one in the act is far from easy.

“And even when we do spot a supernova cloaked in a dusty plume, there’s the old chicken-egg problem: how do we know that the cloud wasn’t there first?”

‘Not a nuisance’
To settle the argument, a team of astronomers from the UK and US used Alma to observe the glowing remains of 1987A, the closest recently observed supernova, 168,000 light-years from Earth.

They predicted that, as the gas cooled after the explosion, solid molecules would form in the centre from atoms of oxygen, carbon, and silicon bonded together.

Earlier observations of 1987A with the infrared telescope Herschel had only detected a small amount of hot dust.

But thanks to the power of the Alma radio telescope array, which stretches out over the Atacama desert, it took only 20 minutes to capture the evidence on camera.

“And all of that matter – the red area you see at the centre of the picture – was there in the core of the star before it exploded.That’s the exciting thing.

“People think of dust as a nuisance – something that gets in your way. But it turns out it’s pretty important and essential in creation.”

While supernovae signal the destruction of stars, they are also the source of new material and energy, says Dr Jacco van Loon of Keele University, a co-author on the study.

“Our lives would be very different without the chemical elements that were synthesised in supernovae throughout history,” he said.

“Grains are incredibly difficult to make in the vast emptiness of space. And if supernovae indeed make lots of them, this has very important and positive consequences for the eventual formation of the Sun and the Earth.”

 

 

 

Big Bang, Black Holes & Mutliverses

Astronomy Blogs Science & Technology

 

My interest in Astronomy covers all aspects of this very large topic 😉

One of the largest if not the largest question to be asked in nature is where did it all begin: space the universe, galaxies, stars, planets and us?

Here is an interesting article that to briefly explains the big question and latest theorised answer.

 Big Bang theorists ask  ‘what came before the Big Bang?’. The standard answer is that there was nothing at all. 

 

Normally we are quite comfortable with the idea of ‘nothing’. We are conditioned by experience to think of nothing as being an absence of something within a given area, but if space itself was created in the Big Bang, there can’t be ‘nothing’ because there’s nowhere to put the ‘something’ that doesn’t exist. Asking what came before the Big Bang is equally meaningless because ‘time’ was created along with space – you can’t have a ‘before’ because time didn’t exist.

For a species that experiences the world by interacting with time and space, that’s a slightly uncomfortable, brain-blending concept.

Luckily (depending on your point of view) there are physicists who believe that, far from being the beginning of all things, the Big Bang was just the moment our Universe burst from the womb of a parent universe – just one offspring of a much larger multiverse.

The idea that our Universe is just one of countless others might seem (at best) incredible and (at worst) delusional, but remember this: we once thought our planet was unique; then we thought our solar system was unique and, after that, we thought our galaxy was unique – is it such a stretch to imagine that our Universe isn’t as unique as we like to believe?

One of the problems with our Universe being ‘the’ Universe is that it seems a little too perfect. It is a Universe where the laws of physics are perfectly tuned for the creation of stars, galaxies, planets and life – if just one aspect of those laws was different, then the Universe as we know it wouldn’t exist.

It is the same problem we once had with our planet. Looked at in isolation, the Earth seems to have been perfectly ‘designed’ for the creation of life – just the right distance from just the right sort of star with just the right atmosphere and just the right sort of magnetic field (and so on). Of course we now know that there are countless other planets out there where conditions aren’t perfect and where life doesn’t exist. We were just the winners in the planetary lottery.

The multiverse would solve the problem of our ‘perfect’ Universe in the same way. Just as the Earth won the planetary lottery, our Universe won the cosmological lottery. It seems ‘perfect’ because the conditions within it allowed us to evolve and marvel at its perfection. But there are countless other universes where conditions weren’t just right.

You can compare it a game of cards. If you were allowed to pull just one card from the deck, the chances of pulling out the card you were looking for is quite small, but, if you were allowed to go through the whole deck, its discovery becomes inevitable. The same applies to the multiverse, with infinite permutations of the laws of physics available, it is inevitable that one would be perfect for life.

In many ways, a multiverse is a more comfortable concept to get to grips with than a perfect universe born from the void. Of course, eventually you have to ask where the first of these ancestor universe’s came from and you are right back where you started – brain-blend.

Muliverse

Douglas Adams – Author

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Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
– Douglas Adams
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The answer to the great question of Life, the Universe and Everything is … forty two.
– Douglas Adams
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.
– Douglas Adams

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Douglas Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was I think a brilliant & creative writer, he is known as a humourist and dramatist.  He is most famous for his so-called ‘trilogy’ of five books!  The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy  (HHGTTG).

HHGTTG started as a popular  BBC radio series in 1987, Adams then expanded the story of hapless human Arthur Dent’s bizarre  adventures in space and time with a motley crew of aliens and  a paranoid android,  into series of best-selling books, over 15 million copies so far have been sold. The HHGTTG was made into a TV series in 1981, stage shows, DC (Superman) Comics ran the trilogy and a movie was finally made in 2005, after Adams’s death. The movie did reasonably well and in DVD format,  however we wonder what Douglas would have thought of the movie adaptation from his creation.

HHGTTG cleverly surreal and played around with philosophy, the meaning of life, Big Bang, End of the Universe, aliens, space travel, rock stars , real astronomical stars and of course hitch hiking!

Please read the books or listen to the recorded original radio series of which I think were the best iterations of the stories.

The wikipedia entry expands on HHGTTG

Adams also appeared in cult comedy Monty Pythons Flying Circus and he was a script writer and Editor for the BBC classic sci fi  series Dr Who.

After HHGTTG, Adams created Dirk Gently an eccentric ‘Oxbridge’ educated  private detective, who ran the ‘Holistic Detective Agency’, Dirk believed that all things and events were interconnected somehow making a complete bigger ‘picture’ (Holism), and tracing these interconnections would help Dirk  solve any case he was presented with.

The Dirk Gently character from the books were made into a BBC radio and TV series, sadly the BBC recently cut funding for a third TV series, just when it was getting popular 🙁

Adams died suddenly aged 49 when his fame was growing, he will be sadly missed for his original and unique thinking.

HHGTTG has built up a cult following.

As a tribute to Douglas, on 25 May each year since his passing,  fans around the universe proudly carry a towel in his honour. They also take pictures of themselves with their towels and post it everywhere on the net. Some fans gather to celebrate the event. Towel day is an act of love, and love is always better when you’re not a poor individual sitting on your own, alone. On this day, you’re also welcome to drink six pints of bitter and eat some peanuts (at lunchtime if possible). (you need to read the book to understand this!)

BUT WHY A TOWEL?

Serious hitchhikers on long travels must carry a towel

Let’s quote here The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy?

“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is clearly a man to be reckoned with”.

– Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Life in the Universe: Intelligent Design and Panspermia Theories

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 Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
– Sir Arthur Eddington

Bombardment of  our planet from space in it’s eary history,  could organic material have hitched a ride to a primitive Earth?

It is now certain that the universe was created around 14 billion years ago via the Big Bang,  the ultimate explosion in nature which spewed out early elements such as hydrogen which is the prime element of all the stars in the universe which later became synthesised into other elements as the  stars evolved billions of years later in the expanding universe.
Our own solar system and planet Earth formed around 5 billion years ago. Earth and life being nurtured  relied  on the necessary  higher elements in chemistry’s periodic table that were forged into existence under conditions of enormous pressure and temperature created by the rare (second only to the Big Bang in size and power)  explosion(supernova) of a nearby massive star billions of years before the creation of our solar system.
Whether there was intelligent design behind the creation of our universe is a debate always raging  between the ians, ics and ists -theologians, agnostics, atheists, scientists and physicists. What became before the Big Bang is a void in our knowledge  with various learned theories vying to fill it.
Sir Fred Hoyle an eminent British scientist who worked at the frontiers of astronomy and theoretical physics published in 1983 a well-illustrated popular book for non-scientists called ‘The intelligent Universe’   in which he challenged  the whole idea that life originated and evolved on Earth and replaced it by ‘intelligent cosmic control’
In relation to the heavy element carbon so important to life and created in supernovae he said in the book
“Would you not say to yourself, “Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule?” Of course you would. . . . A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question“.
Hoyle proposed also another theory now becoming widely accepted that life on the newly forming earth was in all likely seeded by organic molecules or organisms contained in space debris such as meteorites and comets that collided with the primitive earth billions of years ago when such bombardments were common.   These compounds or bacteria,  helped kick start life  after arriving on earth and mixing with existing organic compounds, fermenting in the primordial soup where life ultimately originated .

Panspermia theory life seeded on planets from space

This hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by  meteoroids comets, asteroids planetoids etc., is called Panspermia.
Panspermia proposes that life forms that can survive the effects of space. Such organisms/bacteria that can survive in the harsh conditions of space or places on earth are known as  extremophiles. Extremophiles could have  become trapped in debris that is ejected into space after collisions between planets that harbour life,  Bacteria may travel dormant for an extended amount of time before colliding randomly with other planets or intermingling with protoplanetary disks or evolving planets If the conditions are ideal on a new planet’s surface such as having liquid water or the compounds to sustain life, the bacteria become active and the process of evolution begins. Panspermia is not meant to demonstrate how life began, just the catalyst that may cause creation.

Intelligent universe: Structure of  a brain micrometre across (left) and computerised structure of the universe                                                               Billions of Light Years across  (right) Note the similarities -Thought provoking!