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.

Strange visitors from beyond...

Oumuamua surprises! The first confirmed and clearly observed visitor from interstellar space has everyone agog. 

Instruments like ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile show that this unique object - traveling through space for millions of years - appears to be a dark, reddish, highly-elongated rocky or high-metal content object. It varies dramatically in brightness by a factor of ten as it spins on its axis every 7.3 hours. About ten times as long as it is wide, Oumuamua exhibits a complex, convoluted shape... So let me guide you through some aspects of this new scientific wonder.

1) Breakthrough Listen used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to aim SETI instruments at Oumuamua, the interstellar asteroid visitor that - (sorry) shows every sign of being just a rock.  And so, despite its weird - even spaceship-like elongated (cigar-ish) profile - is probably not a giant space-probe, like Arthur C. Clarke (who turned 100 December 17) depicted in Rendezvous With Rama. Or Greg Bear’s even more spectacular Thistledown, from his novel Eon.

Still, I have to wonder… have the SETI guys aimed their scopes also at the direction Oumuamua came from? And where (after a hyperbolic swing past our sun) it’s now going? Might our sun have been a swing-by course correction?

2) Note that this won’t be the last! Our instrumentalities have improved so much that we should be spotting more such interstellar visitors from now on, perhaps yearly!  And yes, you are a member of a great, scientific civilization that does stuff like this!

3) At first, astronomers were shocked to see no signs of a comet-like tail from outgassing, as Oumuamua swung past the sun. Theory suggests that the vast majority of small objects flung from planetary systems should be icy.

But the latest findings suggest water might be trapped under a thick, carbon-rich coating on its surface. The way that 'Oumuamua reflects sunlight and found it similar to icy objects from our own Solar System that are covered with a dry crust. Perhaps carbon rich molecules fused by long exposure to interstellar ultraviolet.

Saving ego for last, let me point out that this model - icy small bodies accumulating layers of insulating dust that choke off outgassing over time, happens to be - in the words of a Monty Python character - “mine.”

My own doctoral work at UCSD, way back in 1981, first laid down the theory and simulations of accumulated dust layers or mantles on comets and other bodies, eventually putting them to 'sleep.'

My scientific work has been sparse, as I pursued a wide variety of careers. But a few of my hits might merit remembering.

== More space news ==

My friend William Schopf of UCLA found what he claimed to be the oldest known example of life on Earth, dated back 3.5 billion years. Some doubted the objects, were found in 1982 at the Apex Chert, a rock formation in Western Australia, were actually bacteria and microbes. Since then, technology has improved. Schopf and his colleague were able to connect specific carbon-isotope ratios to specific fossil shapes—essentially, enabling them to identify a handful of different ancient living beings. After analyzing the microfossils individually, they identified five species, concluding that two were photosynthesizers, two were methane-consuming organisms, and one produced methane. Wow.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host of the TV series “Closer To Truth” gets to ask deep questions of some pretty deep minds. I was privileged to be interviewed for: How should we approach the question of 'are we alone?' "David Brin walks through the logic, along with Jill Tarter, Frank Drake, Francisco Ayala, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrum and others. "

The Planetary Society (I'm on the Advisory Board) is running a contest for Haikus About Space! Here's one - translated from the original dolphin-Trinary:

Oceans everywhere!

Ice roof sheltered, life…

…may fill the cosmos.

A newly discovered pair of massive black holes, orbiting each other very closely in just 80 or so days, has been discovered in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. Preliminary estimates suggest the pair will collide and merge into one black hole “in as little as 350 years or as much as 360,000 years.” When that happens, the show (especially in gravitational radiation) should be very impressive.   (Hm, well, on more careful reading…  we’re seeing them through Andromeda. They may be 2.6 billion light-years behind (1000 times farther away than the Andromeda Galaxy! Still a great show... but somewhat less dazzling.)

A “zombie” star that appears to have gone supernova… and survived.  Perhaps even several times. Really weird.

A new planet in the neighborhood! In 71,000 years, it will become our closest neighbor, and Ross 128 will be the closest temperate planet.

Meanwhile… preliminary evidence for a second planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. I’m a little doubtful.

In 1975, the USSR actually fired a cannon from an orbiting space station. Forty years later, we finally get a good look at this gun. 

Cosmic-ray muon radiography allows us to visualize the interiors of large, stony objects. Researchers report using it to study the known and potentially unknown voids in the Great Pyramid in a non-invasive way. They report the discovery of a large void (with a cross section similar to the Grand Gallery and a length of 30 m minimum) above the Grand Gallery, which constitutes the first major inner structure found in the Great Pyramid since the 19th century. At NASA NIAC we funded a study to use this method to map the interiors of asteroids. Wow. 

The first and only cat sent into space – Felicette – was sent up by France in 1963. 

A cool new telescope company has a Kickstarter. Skip the expensive and complex secondary optics and use the prime focus to do images digitally.  Alas,  in fact, their imitation of Newtonian optics for viewing is silly. Skip to a VR goggles method. Contact me, I know exactly how to do it and who can implement!

Another player!  Spaceflight startup Vector — which specializes in micro-rockets — plans to launch its first orbit-bound vehicles from Virginia in mid-2018.  The Vector-R is a four-story-high vehicle that can loft satellites weighing up to 145 pounds into lower Earth orbit. The other vehicle is the Vector-H, which is larger, and capable of carrying 350 pounds to LEO.  They hope for hundreds of launches per year.

== Nukes in Space ==

Interesting developments in space nuclear power: “NASA is developing reactors for spacecraft propulsion and for a planetary power source, with the goal of having both available for a crewed mission to Mars sometime in the 2030s. But although the agency is advancing a reactor technology that uses low-enriched uranium (LEU), containing less than 20% of 235U for propulsion, its planetary power source, known as Kilopower, utilizes weapons-grade uranium enriched to 90% or more 235U.

“Nonproliferation advocacy organizations have objected to the use of highly enriched uranium (HEU, material containing 20% or more 235U); they say an LEU design, although it would require more time to develop, would be feasible and consistent with US policy.”

Solar energy’s attractiveness is reduced on the Red Planet  because the solar flux reaching Mars is much less than Earth’s and varies greatly depending on the season and geographic position. In addition, Martian dust storms can last for months. Although solar flux on the Moon is comparable to that received on Earth, nonpolar missions would experience a long lunar night period of half a month, which would require massive energy storage.

There is also testing of a nuclear rocket.