Clues to the deep, cosmic past... and other wonders out there!

I'm heading soon to Boston for the Symposium of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts program, or NIAC, which funds the most speculative proposals that are just this side of plausible. (Open to the public if you RSVP or you can livestream.)

Meanwhile, let's peer a bit farther... in space and time.....

First a brief look at twelve futuristic space exploration concepts being pursued by NASA, many of them via the NIAC program - including laser powered spaceflight and blimps for Mars!

Titan, seen without the haze! Revealed by thirteen years of Cassini orbiter observations in three infrared bands, synthesized into a globe. One of the things I am most proud and excited about, that we've accomplished together in an amazing civilization!

Then there is the haze of the super-dust storm enveloping Mars. Ala, we may have heard the last from Opportunity. (I helped name the probe.)

 “With Pluto now firmly in its rearview mirror, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is steadily chugging towards Ultima Thule, a Kuiper Belt object located, on average, about 44 AU from the Sun. It took an actual photograph of a 19-mile-wide (30-kilometer) object located 100 million miles away from the spacecraft and 4 billion miles (6.5 billion kilometers) from Earth the most distant ever taken.” New Horizons will zoom past Ultima Thule on January 1, 2019, just half an hour after the ball drops in Times Square. And yes, your civilization is doing this.

Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene: an interesting paper appraises the feedback looks that keep the Earth from runaway into either glacial or hothouse eras.

 == Understanding the cosmos ==

Scientists analyzing the rare, luminous event called “STEVE” – a shimmering upper-atmosphere ribbon in the far-northern sky – now think it is quite different from the more regularly-seen aurora, which are caused by oxygen and nitrogen atoms fluorescing when struck by accelerated particles from the solar wind. (I guided a "Northern Lights" expedition, last March, in Arctic Finland.)

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), has commenced its hunt for alien worlds around the 200,000 brightest stars. Unlike the Kepler mission, this one will scan most of the sky, possibly multiplying by an order of magnitude the 2600 confirmed and 5000 likely exoplanet discoveries made by Kepler. And hot news!  As I post this, they've announced TESS's first planetary find!

Earth appears to attract… hold… then lose a small number of “mini-moons” or Near Earth Asteroids at intervals. "Minimoons can provide interesting science and technology testbeds in near-Earth space," and to verify whether varieties of great wealth might be accessible from these tumbling space rocks. Efforts to get samples to assay those resources have been undermined by this administration, whose supporters have sunk investments in Earthly mines and who thus prefer we spend our sparse exploration funds repeating Apollo landings on a dusty/useless plain. (Oh and on spandex Space Force uniforms. And the liposuction necessary to wear them.) And no, except for some polar ice we should save for future lunar cities, there's nothing we know to be of value on that plain of razor, lung-harmful dust.

A meteor exploded with 2.1 kilotons of force about 40 kilometers above Thule U.S. Air Force base in Greenland.  The silence from the Air Force is a wee bit disturbing… though in fact, this sort of thing happens annually somewhere across the globe and is one reason I back the B612 Foundation’s work to characterize and find ways to deal with the threat.

Too cool.  Each time I look at this time-lapse of stars orbiting the black hole at the center of the galaxy, I go “gosh.”

That’s a lie. Sometimes I go Wow or Dang! Or “I’m as proud as heck that I helped pay for that.”

China has built a big brother to Arecibo, now the biggest telescope in the world, and has added an “astronomy tourism town” nearby. At a time when support for US science has plummeted, it’s important for humanity that scientific boldness be taken up somewhere. 

“It’s especially important since the National Science Foundation has recently cratered funding to both Arecibo and Green Bank observatories, the United States’ most significant single-dish radio telescopes. While they remain open, they have to seek private project money, meaning chunks of time are no longer available for astronomers’ proposals.” It’s expected the Chinese FAST radio scope will “ find thousands of new pulsars (as of July 2018, they had already found more than 40), and do detailed studies of hydrogen inside the galaxy and in the wider universe, among numerous other worthy scientific goals.”

== Re-ionization and clues to the deep past ==

Piecing together clues, we are getting a timeline of the early eras of our particular – and peculiar – cosmos.  In order that they occurred, it appears that…

1) There was an initial “bang” – perhaps seeded by a quantum fluctuation, or else a ripple in a multiverse, or a black hole collapse “somewhere(when) else,” or… I have fun with all of these concepts, in various stories.

2) Then, almost instantaneously, there came “inflation.” It’s not proved – there are problems – I’ve talked to both promoters like Andrei Linde and clever concocters of alternatives, like Roger Penrose. But for now, the standard notion is that there was a period (lasting fractions of a picosecond) when the bang’s bubble expanded at much faster than light speed. (Don’t shout; Einstein allows space, itself, to do that, while matter is forbidden.) This would smear out the heat just right to explain the CMB or cosmic microwave background radiation we observe.

3) Inflation stops and the expansion then occurs more like an explosion, extremely energetic but at sub-light rates. We are blind to this era, because the hot universe was ionized -- loose protons and electrons absorbed all radiation, re-radiating it and re-absorbing, erasing all patterns, until…

4) … things cooled enough that atoms started forming from protons and electrons a few hundred thousand years (estimated 138,000) after the Big Bang. The resulting neutral gas clumped, creating stars, but also allowing a lot of photons to cut loose and never be re-absorbed until their travels ended 13.8 billion years later, after redshift stretching, by hitting our microwave detectors today. This is called the Curtain. We see nothing earlier… though we had hopes of detecting the inflationary era when my friend Brian Keating saw hopeful signs in polarization of the background radiation. (See his new best-seller “Losing the Nobel Prize.”)

5) We see only a little of the radiation released after the Curtain, because those first stars seem to have been of the large variety that… explode. A dazzling fireworks display of supernovae burst within a few million years, spewing ultraviolet that ripped electrons from protons again, “re-ionizing” most of the matter, making the universe mostly light-absorbing and dark, again.

6) That pulse of supernovae also shoved matter around into filamentary structures typified by what’s called “The Great Wall” in intergalactic space, triggering the formation of a second wave of galaxies. And so, there may have been two, separate waves of galactic formation…

…and scientists now claim to see signs of this in the tiny, satellite galaxies  - some red and old and some newer/brighter – that surround our own Milky Way.

“The most widely accepted model says that galaxies are actually visible gas and dust coalescing inside larger haloes of a yet-to-be explained kind of mass called dark matter. Galaxies began forming with the first stars, but during the re-ionization period, astronomers think that temperatures rose too high, halting further galactic growth. Only at some later period, when large-enough dark matter halos coalesced, would the galaxy formation process pick up again. Maybe, thought the researchers, the satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky Way could provide a signal of this re-ionization era. Small, dimmer satellites would have formed before the period, and brighter, larger galaxies would have formed afterward, with a gap in the middle representing re-ionization.”

Wow. In other words, the dim red halo galaxies may be remnants of the universe’s earliest days… kind of like the place I call the “Shallow Cluster” in my novel Startide Rising. A concept that I explore more deeply in Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore and the grand conclusion Heaven's Reach!

Speculation has its place, as there grows an ever-larger realm of overlap between science and fiction. And you... you who made it this far in shared fascination... you are citizens of this wonder.

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Addendum:
On September 27 only, my 3rd novel (and one of the most-fun) THE PRACTICE EFFECT will briefly be on sale for Kindle for $1.99! through Bookbub and Low Price promotions. Don't miss your chance!