TheCosmic Ballet

Cool YouTube Astronomy video of Earth and Jupiter in their cosmic rotational orbital dance

more about "TheCosmic Ballet", posted with vodpod

1859 Solar Flare – Wired Science

From Wired Science — an interesting article about a huge solar flare in 1859.

Telegraphs Ran on Electric Air in Crazy 1859 Magnetic Storm

• By Alexis Madrigal
• September 2, 2009 

On Sept. 2, 1859, at the telegraph office at No. 31 State Street in Boston at 9:30 a.m., the operators’ lines were overflowing with current, so they unplugged the batteries connected to their machines, and kept working using just the electricity coursing through the air.

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In the wee hours of that night, the most brilliant auroras ever recorded had broken out across the skies of the Earth. People in Havana and Florida reported seeing them. The New York Times ran a 3,000 word feature recording the colorful event in purple prose.

“With this a beautiful tint of pink finally mingled. The clouds of this color were most abundant to the northeast and northwest of the zenith,” the Times wrote. “There they shot across one another, intermingling and deepening until the sky was painfully lurid. There was no figure the imagination could not find portrayed by these instantaneous flashes.”

As if what was happening in the heavens wasn’t enough, the communications infrastructure just beginning to stretch along the eastern seaboard was going haywire from all the electromagnetism.

“We observed the influence upon the lines at the time of commencing business — 8 o’clock — and it continued so strong up to 9 1/2 as to prevent any business from being done, excepting by throwing off the batteries at each end of the line and working by the atmospheric current entirely!” the astonished telegraph operators of Boston wrote in a statement that appeared in The New York Times later that week.

The Boston operator told his Portland, Maine counterpart, “Mine is also disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?” Portland responded, “Better than with our batteries on,” before finally concluding with Yankee pluck, “Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?”

In terms of the relationship between the Earth and its star, it is probably the weirdest 24-hours on record. People struggled to explain what had happened.

NASA’s David Hathaway, a solar astronomer, said that people in the solar community were beginning to understand that there was a relationship between events on the sun and magnetism on Earth. But that knowledge was not widely disseminated.

Another theory held that auroras were actually atmospheric phenomena, that is to say, weather of a particular type. Proof of various sorts was offered. Auroras apparently had a sound, “the noise of crepitation,” or crackling, that marked them as Earth-bound phenomena. Even weirder explanations arose, like meteorologist Ebenezer Miriam’s hilariously quacky quote in The New York Times.

“The Aurora (electricity discharged from the craters of volcanoes) either dissolves in the atmosphere, and is thus diffused through space or concentrated into a gelatineus[sic] substance forming meteors, called shooting stars,” Miriam wrote. “These meteors dissolve rapidly in atmospheric air, but sometimes reach the earth before dissolving, and resemble thin starch.”

But some scientists were on the right track. Eighteen hours before the storm hit, Richard Carrington, a young but well-respected British astronomer, had been making his daily sunspot observations when he saw two brilliant spots of light. We know now that what he was seeing was the heating up of the surface of the sun beyond its standard fusion-powered temperature of about 5,500 degrees Celsius. The energy to do so came from a magnetic explosion as a distended part of the sun’s magnetic field snapped and reconnected.

“They give off the energy equivalent of about 10 million atomic bombs in the matter of an hour or two,” Hathaway said. “[The 1859] one was special, and it was noticed because it was a white light flare. It actually heated up the surface of the sun well enough to light up the sun.”

Though back then Carrington didn’t know what he was looking at, five years of staring at the sun had taught him that what he was seeing was unprecedented. When in the wee hours of the next night, the skies all over the globe began turning brilliant colors, Carrington knew he was on to something.

“I think that it represents a tipping point in astronomy because for the first time, astronomers had concrete evidence that a force other than gravity could communicate itself across 93 million miles of space,” said Stuart Clark, author of the book The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began.

Still, it would be decades before the scientific theory would catch up with the observations. British heavyweights like Lord Kelvin opined that the sun could never deliver the level of energy that had been observed on Earth. Understanding what was happening without understanding how the sun worked or the nature of particles was not exactly easy.

“It’s a great example of where theory and observation don’t match up,” Clark said. “The scientific establishment tends to believe the theory, but it’s usually the other way around, and the observations are correct. You have to build up a critical mass of observations to shift the scientific theory.”

Over time, more and more observations did shift the theory, and the sun was held properly responsible for geomagnetic storms. The technological lesson that electrical equipment could be disturbed was largely forgotten, though.

When a geomagnetic storm hits the Earth, it shakes the Earth’s magnetosphere. As the magnetized plasma pushes the Earth’s magnetic field lines around, currents flow. Those currents have their own magnetic fields and soon, down at the ground, strong electromagnetic forces are in play. In other words, your telegraph can run on “auroral current.”

Geomagnetic storms, though, can have less benign impacts. On August 4, 1972, a Bell Telephone line running from Chicago to San Francisco got knocked out. Bell Labs researchers wanted to find out why, and their findings led them right back to 1859 and the auroral current.

Louis Lanzerotti, now an engineering professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, went digging in the Bell Labs library for similar events and explanations. Along with field research, the history became the core of a new approach to building more robust electrical systems.

“We did all this analysis and wrote this paper in ‘74 for the Bell Systems Technical Journal,” Lanzerotti said. “And it really made a helluva of a difference in Bell Systems. They redesigned their power systems.”

The fight to secure the Earth’s technical systems from geomagnetic anomalies continues. Late last year, the National Academies of Science put out a report on severe space weather events. If a storm even approaching 1859 levels were to happen again, they concluded the damage could range upwards of a $1 trillion, largely because of disruptions to the electrical grid.

The data on how often huge storms occur is scarce. Ice cores are the main evidence we have outside human historical documents. Charged particles can interact with nitrogen in the atmosphere, creating nitrides. The increased concentration of those molecules can be detected by looking at ice cores, which act like a logbook of the atmosphere at a given time. Over the last 500 years of this data, the 1859 event was twice as big as anything else.

Even so, the sun remains a bit of a mystery, particularly these tremendously energetic events. Scientists like Hathaway are able to describe why one geomagnetic storm might be bigger than another based on the details of how it arose, but they are hard pressed to predict when or why a freakishly large storm might arise.

Scientific understanding of how the sun impacts the Earth and its tech-heavy humans isn’t complete, but at least we know when it got its start: the early hours of September 2, 1859.

“It’s at that point we realize that these celestial objects affected our technologies and the way we wanted to live our lives,” Stuart said.

And it turns out, our burning hot star still does.

Image: TRACE/NASA

Magnetic Field Art

I loved this from the “Evil Mad Scientist” site.  While the results of this particular experimental trial were not entirely satisfactory, the whole concept was fun and interesting to consider.  Take a look at a most interesting “comment” I found associated with this post.  For those who have not checked out their site, do so — and bookmark it   I have added it to my Google reader.

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Impractical idea: Iron filing nail polish

Some time ago we came across a subtle magnetic nail polish. It had fine magnetic dust in it, and could record the local magnetic field profile at the time that the polish dried.

But hey, why can’t you do this with full-on iron filings? So, for our own bold and impractical take on this concept, we tried mixing genuine iron filings with nail polish (clear, in this case). Mix well, paint on, hold finger over (large) magnet while it dries. Don’t even think about trying to fit those spiky fingertips into gloves.

Results? So-so. The particles aligned with the field and solidified, but have more clumping than we’d like to see.

Maybe slightly finer particles would have been better. Much better would be if we found a good way to work with ferrofluid that could be hardened, or perhaps a version of magnetic viewing film that could be painted onto surfaces. Or maybe, if our version above were redone with RTV silicone, the particles could wiggle around in the presence of an external field.

We leave these important questions to higher minds than our own.

Contributed by: Windell on Friday, August 07 2009 @ 08:43 PM PDT, in EMSL Projects
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Here is the comment:

only a tad off subject, but an idea similar to this has been done by body modification artist Steve Haworth who implanted a small powerful magnet encapsulated in PTFE material into the tip of his left ring finger.
a few people in the modification community have followed suit, and along with Steve, have all reported a new human sense of magnetic fields.
Steve has been quoted as saying “I love putting my finger near an electrical socket and feeling the magnetic impulses flow”
I’ve personally spoken to one person who has undergone this type of procedure, and he reports that he can walk into a room and instantly sense all the magnetic fields emitted from objects in that room simply by holding his hand over the object

Magnetic Implants have been in the works for quite a few years in the mod culture, and have yet to be perfected as the encapsulation material has a tendency to breakdown after a couple years, or even months, thus exposing the raw magnet to the flesh.

Reports of this type of implant can be found all around the internet, but is most famously covered on BMEzine.com (as that is where Steve first announced a successful implant).

Duke Physics News

Fire Meets Ice
Superhot And Supercold Remarkably Similar In The ‘Fermion’ World

July 22nd, 2009

By Monte Basgall

Trapping and cooling a microscopic clump of gas and then suddenly releasing it would normally result in the gas rapidly expanding outward in all directions, like a spherical bubble.

A small blob of Lithium-6 gas, chilled ultracold by a laser light trap, does an unexpected thing when the trap is released.

But what if it doesn’t? When a result doesn’t turn out as anticipated, nature may be revealing its secrets. And when the result also sheds light on Big Scientific Questions that weren’t even part of the experiment, researchers sit up and pay even closer attention.

That’s what’s been happening since Duke physicist John Thomas did this experiment with lithium-6. The key was using only light to chill the gas to almost absolute zero and adding the right amount of magnetic energy, a combination pioneered in Thomas’s lab.
Duke Video-Thomas Talks

Instead of expanding evenly, the gas blob took the shape of a cigar standing on its tip. It then morphed asymmetrically within milliseconds into “this funny flow that stood still in one direction but expanded rapidly in the other,” recalls Thomas, an expert on the physics of ultracold temperatures and the university’s Fritz London Professor of Physics.

The stand-up stogie didn’t grow any taller, as Thomas noted with the aid of a microscope and time-freezing camera. But it bulged topsy-turvily in the middle, swelling into a kind of melon shape that shifted the overall orientation from vertical to horizontal.

In a much-cited report published in the Nov. 13, 2002 issue of the journal Science, Thomas’s research group suggested this phenomena pointed to a never-before-observed form of group behavior among this kind of gas’s frigid atoms.

It’s a condition that might help explain important phenomena that have been difficult to study, such as the flow of electrons in high-temperature superconductors, or the tightly bound nuclear matter in neutron stars, they said.Subsequent reports in Science and other journals firmed up the notion that the gas could be exhibiting the coordinated flow of a special kind of superfluidity — a strange liquid state in which very cold substances seem to move so effortlessly that nothing can stop them, in some cases even climbing walls.

At about the same time, researchers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) were getting intriguing results from their attempts to recreate the dawn of creation’s first white-hot microseconds. They did so by smashing together gold atoms propelled to nearly light speed, producing temperatures 150,000 times hotter than the sun’s interior within a time interval too fleet to measure.

This big bash at RHIC was supposed to liberate quarks — the fundamental units of all matter — from the gluons that normally hold them together, creating a hyper-energized gas called a quark-gluon plasma.

Using statistics and simulations to visualize what could not be seen, scientists discovered the plasma actually acts like a superhot fluid. And it behaves a lot like Thomas’s frozen cigars and melons. Both exhibit what the scientists called an “elliptic flow,” ballooning preferentially in only one direction. Thomas calls this “anisotropic expansion.”The Big Chill | Initial cooling: Six red lasers converge on a ball of lithium-6 gas, gently forcing its atoms to slow their motions, effectively cooling them to 150 millionths of a degree above absolute zero. (Final cooling) The red lasers are shut off, leaving a single infrared laser (green) focused on the atoms. Adjusting the IR laser’s intensity makes some atoms collide and evaporate, chilling the remainder to just 50 billionths of one degree. A magnetic field (blue arrows) then tunes the atoms’ energy levels to make the gas ball football-shaped. | Modified, by permission, from American Scientist | Illustration by Tom DunneSoon illustrations from Thomas’s journal reports on the cold temperature experiment were being displayed at quark-gluon symposia — literally bridging the gap separating the very coldest from the very hot.

Further research suggested that although the systems exist at opposite extremes of temperature, both behave like “nearly perfect” fluids, flowing with practically no impeding viscosity.

Theorists involved in superstring physics have taken notice of this remarkable convergence. Some have begun using their complicated mathematical tools to bridge quantum mechanics and general relativity and explain why Thomas’s supercold world bears similarities to the superhot. Already some of their calculations have yielded insights.

“RHIC’s system is at about 2 trillion degrees, while we’re typically at one-tenth of a microdegree above absolute zero — 19 orders of magnitude difference in temperature!” Thomas says. In terms of density, “there is also about 25 orders of magnitude difference between theirs and ours.”

And yet, Thomas, the experts on quark-gluon plasma and string theorists came together in a single session at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago to describe “the surprising confluence of such different physics fields as a sort of perfect storm,” according to the magazine Science News.

To have a system that connects cold, condensed gases to high-temperature superconductors and neutron stars and then to quark-gluon matter and even string theory is pretty amazing,” Thomas said.

Various researchers are still exploring what these very different phenomena might have in common. But Thomas said the special behavior of his Lithium-6 gas is related to the nature of its atoms.

Lithium-6 is among many atomic isotopes classified as “fermions.” Greta Garbos of the atomic world because they “vant to be alone,” fermions are loners compared to their chummier alter-ego counterpart atoms, the “bosons.”

The key is the state of their “spins,” an electromagnetic trait that all fundamental particles possess. Fermions have an “odd” spin of 1/2, which means they cannot share the same energy states with each other. Bosons, on the other hand, actually prefer getting together. Previously only certain boson type atoms were known to exhibit the group behavior of superfluidity.

Protons, neutrons and electrons — the constituents of atoms — are fermions, too. Were it not for their mutual repulsions, “we would collapse,” says Duke theoretical physicist Berndt Mueller. “We’re made up of positively charged nuclei and negative charged electrons, which should attract,” he explains. “But those are also all fermions, so they try to keep away from each other.”

Thomas’s experiments test the limits of this repulsion by making fermions very cold. Cooled to 50 billionths of a degree above absolute zero and influenced by the weird principles of quantum mechanics, the atoms’ spheres of influence balloon to an incredible large millionths of a meter. They also crowd up as closely as nature allows.

His group was the first to both chill fermions low enough with laser beams and also trick them into behaving for a short time like they’re part of one big molecule. Turning up a magnetic field to just the right level makes them want to collide and pair up into what he calls a “strongly interacting system.” It’s their exceptional interactivity that produces the exploding-cigar effect and also makes his fermions flow like a nearly perfect fluid. They enter a realm known as “universal behavior,” where they emulate traits of other very different systems.That’s why scientists are now using strongly interactive fermions to model how high-temperature superconductors work.

“You can test the theory,” Thomas says. “It’s easier using our gas because it’s a very controlled system.”Universally behaving fermions also let researchers model microscopic properties within the densest of nuclear matter – something not readily tested on a distant neutron star.

Monte Basgall is a Senior Science Writer in Duke News and Communications.

The DUML Open House

Last Saturday — wow, has it been a week already? — the Duke Marine Lab hosted an open house and invited folks from the community in to see what we do. This provided a great opportunity to pull out a few of our physics demos and some lab equipment. I decided to run three stations, a hair-raising Van de Graaff generator, a torque and angular momentum stool and bicycle wheel, and an EKG station.

EKG

Bob reaches a high potential

We had a great time interacting with the community and I want to thank my daughter, Nada, Natalie and Nate [NaNaNa...] for helping to explain the physics at the various stations.

Final

final
A great group of students is currently taking this final exam. I imagine they will do well, as they have generally worked hard and performed on the previous exams and various tasks — a sharp and delightful group of physheads!

One student from Penn, needs a copy of the final to show the folks up there and since Dr. Brown makes old exam problems available for review and study, I do not violate any honor code by posting this final. I will miss this group of “laser cat” loving, quote happy, skateboard riding, young men and women. They are not only sharp, but quite entertaining. Dr. Brown does an excellent job of holding up a rigorous academic standard while still creating and maintaining a fun and relaxed learning environment. Well, the sighs from test takers continues for a little longer — but relief and a sense of accomplishment is in sight for these physheads

Sidewalk Power

During our discussion of AC power, we digressed a bit into alternate sources of energy to supply the work required to generate electrical power. One interesting idea is to gather the work-energy in urban areas as people walk along specially designed sidewalks.

Sidewalk Power

A number of other creative ideas can be explored on the site from which the above picture was captured.
http://www.popsci.com/futurecity/plan.html

Another site with some relevant information: http://www.core77.com/blog/technology/power_walking_10096.asp

Maxwell’s Equations

Our physics 54 class has now been introduced to all four of Maxwell’s equations. We do not have Maxwell’s correction to Ampere’s Law yet, but man we are close. Our current version of these really beautiful equations:
Gauss’s Law for Electricity

Gauss’s Law for Magnetism[experimentally -- no magnetic monopoles]

Ampere’s Law [not yet fixed]

Faraday’s Law [the negative sign indicates Lenz' Law]

Maxwell's Equations in a proper setting

Ideal Scientific Equipment

We are often discussing “ideal” or “ACME” [think of Wile E Coyote and Road Runner] equipment in class and you may be wondering where one gets such specialized equipment. Well here is a link to THE source – beware – some of it is rather pricey.

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/ideal/ideal.htm

Ten Tremendous Telescopes

Dr. Brown reviewed Gauss’s Law for magnetism and introduced Ampere’s Law today. He mentioned that Maxwell got his name attached to four beautiful equations by adding a very important correction to Ampere’s Law. This correction paves the way to the understanding a bit about electromagnetic radiation [we will envision light as momentum and energy carried in electromagnetic field in the direction of the Poynting vector] — Let there be light Anyway, I happened upon this Scientific American Web Feature and thought it relevant to share with my physheads.

Scientific American

Feature – July 14, 2009
Historic telescopes through the ages, from Galileo to the 21st century

By Saswato R. Das

Sometime in late June or July 1609, Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei constructed his first spyglass—a simple contraption of lenses at the ends of a tube. The previous year in The Hague, a Dutchman named Hans Lipperhey had filed for a patent on the device, but it was Galileo who would go on to make it famous.

By the summer of 1609, Galileo, then a professor of mathematics in Padua, Italy, had managed to make a working model. His simple telescope would set off a revolution in the human understanding of the cosmos. He first used it to observe the moon and see the shadows cast by its mountains and craters; he went on to catalogue sunspots; and he discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter—Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto—that are now known as the Galilean moons in his honor.

Taken together, these observations would allow Galileo to support the Copernican view of the universe and not the Earth-centric view espoused by the church and by most educated men of the time. Galileo’s discoveries would help supplant Ptolemaic astronomy, the vastly complicated and erroneous theory of celestial mechanics that had held sway for 1,400 years. (It has the dubious distinction of being among the longest-lived theories in science.)

In the centuries since Galileo first built his telescope, there have been huge improvements in the science, optics and technology behind the instrument. Today’s state-of-the-art, Earth-based telescopes are mammoth structures, with flexible mirrors 10 meters across—devices that would have been completely unimaginable to Galileo and his immediate successors. Some of our clearest views of space have come from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, a technological wonder that continues to provide ever-improving glimpses into the universe nearly 20 years after its deployment. On the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s spyglass, we take a look at some historic telescopes through the ages:

Slide Show: 10 Telescopes That Changed Our View of the Universe