From Oumuamua to Wormholes: Curiosities of space

The Handmaid's Tale, Putin-led putsch hasn't won yet!  We're still an amazing, scientific civilization on the verge of Star Trek levels of wisdom and expansion. Of course that frightens them, so let's start with some BIG time...

What will likely happen in a few billion years, when our Milky Way galaxy merges with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy? Both galaxies host supermassive black holes at their center, which will eventually smash together and merge into one larger black hole. A team analyzed 96 galaxies with X-Ray luminous cores observed with the Keck telescope and 385 galaxies from the Hubble archive. Their results suggest that more than 17 percent of these galaxies host a pair of black holes at their center, which are locked in the late stages of spiraling ever closer together before merging into a single, ultra-massive black hole. When they do merge... um... look out.

A pair of stars about 8000 light years from Earth are both Wolf-Rayets... precursors to supernovae... but also with so much angular momentum that the system is the first known candidate in the Milky Way to produce a dangerous gamma-ray burst, among the most energetic events in the universe, when it explodes and dies.  Look at an amazing image of the spiraling dust cloud. 

== Excellent journalism about a wild “sci fi” theory on wormholes ==

I've seldom seen a better example of science reporting about an esoteric and fascinating and perhaps cosmically important new physical theory:

"... a paper that reported the first traversable wormhole that doesn’t require the insertion of exotic material to stay open. Instead, according to Ping Gao and Daniel Jafferis of Harvard University and Aron Wall of Stanford University, the repulsive negative energy in the wormhole’s throat can be generated from the outside by a special quantum connection between the pair of black holes that form the wormhole’s two mouths. 

"When the black holes are connected in the right way, something tossed into one will shimmy along the wormhole and, following certain events in the outside universe, exit the second. Remarkably, Gao, Jafferis and Wall noticed that their scenario is mathematically equivalent to a process called quantum teleportation, which is key to quantum cryptography and can be demonstrated in laboratory experiments."

John Preskill, a black hole and quantum gravity expert at Caltech, says the new traversable wormhole comes as a surprise, with implications for the black hole information paradox and black hole interiors. “What I really like,” he said, “is that an observer can enter the black hole and then escape to tell about what she saw.” This suggests that black hole interiors really exist, he explained, and that what goes in must come out.

It's way too early for us sci fi guys to shout "I told you so!" And these traversable wormholes still (probably) don't violate time or causality. Still, the explanatory journalism here is almost as amazing as the theory Natalie Wolchover describes so well.

== ‘Oumuamua… oh, my! ==

Abraham Loeb, is is chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University, and hence falls into a special category of scientists — those who are so widely respected and institutionally safe that they can choose: either become a staid, establishment defender-of-standard-paradigms, or else use that invulnerability to poke at ideas at the fringe, that might harm the career of someone less august. Alas that the public doesn’t know how prevalent these Invulnerable Paradigm Pokers (IPPs) in the latter category can be. I’ve known iconoclasts like Richard Feynman and Murray Gell Mann, and worked for one of the top Nobel-Laureate crackpots, Hannes Alfven. Hence I am unsurprised to see Loeb publishing a series of papers about our recent interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua, suggesting “Six Strange Facts about our First (known) Interstellar Guest.”

For those wondering where ‘Oumuamua came from, the answer is weird. It appears to have been almost motionless, relative to the Local Standard of Rest (LSR) or average movement of stars in our vicinity. “

The relative motion between `Oumuamua and the Sun reflects the motion of the Sun relative to the LSR. "`Oumuamua is like a buoy sitting at rest on the surface of the ocean, with the Solar System running into it like a fast ship. Could there be an array of buoys that serves as a network of relay stations or road posts, defining the average Galactic frame of reference in interstellar space?” Loeb speculated. 

(Wow. A kindred spirit, this IPP. The only only clade who feel as free to speculate is we science fiction authors. And what a slander foxites and other spew, when they portray scientists as "conformists" clinging to standard theories!  Our species has never produced more competitive people.)

Of course Loeb mentions the strange trait of elongation, that led some to suggest the tumbling guest has a cigar-like length/width ratio from 5 to 10. That did catch the public imagination. Though Loeb and others now suggest a pancake like shape, or possibly even a flat plane, like a sail.

Infrared readings from ‘Oumuamua’s close passage by the sun suggest it reflected away most of the  heat that poured over it, suggesting a rather shiny surface.

Much has been made of the measured acceleration or course deviation the object endured, on its way out of our inner solar system. The standard hypothesis is that ‘Oumuamua experienced outgassing thrust, which we have observed altering the trajectories of many comets. But can this happen without formation of a comet’s traditional coma and tails? Back when I did my doctoral work on cometary outgassing, I showed how an elderly comet might be coated by insulating layers that alter the amount and timing of sublimation of underlying volatiles which could explain the delay in outgassing. Loeb asserts that the observed trajectory change could only have happened if “at least a tenth of its mass evaporated. “If so, wow. But I’d like to see that assertion examined. This part has me really skeptical.

Some of the anomalous traits that Loeb ascribes to ‘Oumuamua might have resulted from the surface of normal cometary dust having been baked and polymerized by interstellar UV and cosmic radiation across billions of years. Such a polymerized surface might open like a FLAP and allow a gas jet that's both directional and almost free of dust

Loeb goes on to give some support to the notion that this was an interstellar light sail. Indeed, my novel EXISTENCE proposes a galaxy almost chock-full of such things, either active or defunct! 

There are some other “unusual traits,” but they are statistical appraisals of likelihood of orbital characteristics, and hence poor grist for a sensationalist (?) site and audience like this one. In any event, this paper is brand new, circulating only in manuscript. So you will have to wait a bit to get your hands on it, yourselves. Alas?

== Are there geological traces of stupid? ==

There have long been arguments over whether we can be sure there were never previous civilizations on Earth.  I’ve long dismissed the idea for many reasons.

First -- unless our descendants scrape away the dross and dump it into subduction trenches (as I depict in Brightness Reef), our cities will be glaring beacons – rich, layered ore deposits – that stand out billions (yes, billions) of years from now. Of course a previous sophont race – or failed colony - might have had only a few cities and our core samples just happen to have missed them.

While ignoring that clue, this article by Adam Frank sifts others, like the veneer of plastic we’re spreading everywhere, which ought to be traceable for many tens of millions of years, or anomalous Nitrogen ratios from our sudden spike in fertilizer use. While we’ve wisely avoided spewing much radioactive fallout across the countryside, some small traces are detectable e.g. in Jimmy Carter’s urine (another story) and an earlier tech society might have been more foolish.

The article focuses in on the chief effect we’re having, causing this era to be inarguably the Anthropocene… our effects upon both species extinctions and the climate. “If a civilization uses fossil fuels, the climate change they trigger can lead to a large decrease in ocean oxygen levels.” 

We’re already seeing ocean acidification. (Use those two words on your mad uncles and any member of the Denialist Cult. Dare them to go to the beach to measure it with you; their cult needs to be aggressively confronted, for your children’s sake.)  If global warming causes a runaway “blurp” of methane hydrates from the seabed and tundra, then we could be in real trouble. BIG trouble…

…but not as much trouble as every Republican who helped perpetrate this disaster. Their names, face, addresses are all on record, yes even the location of the top lords' Patagonian hideaways. And the “liberal” society that now protects them is the number one thing they seem bent on tearing down.

It's all right. Today's posting was just a sampling of work being done by real geniuses, and not the self-declared "stable" kind. And those who think they can re-establish feudalism without being noticed -- or opposed vigorously -- by folks who know genetic engineering, chemistry, epidemiology, cybernetics, nuclear fission and the rest... those folks are proving which category of delusion they occupy.