Stars, Including the Earth's Sun

[bbflatt]

The "m" stands for million, so 8 million miles from the center, 7.6 million from the "surface".

(edited to correct math, r=1/2d)

[Estiveo]

No the distance from the surface was in millions of miles.

As Parker Solar Probe later dipped to just 14.97 solar radii (6.4714 million miles) from the Sun’s surface, it passed through a feature in the corona called a pseudostreamer.

8 million miles from the surface, give or take, is the Alfvén break where the solar atmosphere becomes solar wind.

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

Put on lots of sunscreen!

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo ... uxbndlbing

Giant Sunspot Has Doubled in Size in 24 Hours and It's Pointed at Earth

Sunspots are dark areas on the sun's surface that are associated with intense bursts of radiation. They appear dark because they are cooler than other parts of the sun's surface.

Sunspots are relatively cool because they form over areas where the sun's magnetic fields are particularly strong—so strong that they prevent some heat within the sun from reaching its surface.

These tangled magnetic fields can sometimes suddenly reorganize themselves. When that happens, a sudden explosion of light and radiation is propelled away from the sun in the form of a solar flare.

The sunspot that has been growing in size recently is known as AR3038. Footage from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory on Sunday shows how the sunspot has evolved over the past day or so, twisting and contorting.

"Yesterday, sunspot AR3038 was big. Today, it's enormous," reads the SpaceWeather.com website. "The fast-growing sunspot has doubled in size in only 24 hours."

The magnetic field associated with the sunspot means it could potentially send an M-class solar flare at Earth—the second-strongest type. However, it is not known whether this will be the case.

[Gene Kooper]

TRL's post makes a reference to the Space Weather Website

A slight threadjack, as today's story below the large Sunspot "AR3038" article on the Space Weather website contains three odd images of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch. Those being a smoke ring over Illinois, a spiral galaxy image and an 8-scene mosaic of the heavens soon after the Falcon 9 launch.

Jerrod Wood, who videoed the "smoke ring, hypothesized, "I believe it shows the orbital insertion of the Globalstar FM15 satellite."

ETA: Fixed the link.-

[RVInit]

[AndyinPA]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/ ... lar-flare/

After a long period of relative slumber, the sun is waking up and sputtering with unrest. Experts say the start of the new “solar cycle” could be roaring in like a lion — with impacts possible here on Earth.

In just the past week, three X-class solar flares — the strongest bracket on the scale — have erupted on the sun’s surface. Solar flares are bursts of energy that travel at the speed of light, composed of electromagnetic radiation that can affect radio communications. None has been aiming toward Earth, but that could change in the weeks ahead.

The sudden flare-up of activity may also be a sign that experts grossly underestimated how busy Solar Cycle 25 — the current iteration of the sun’s magnetic rhythm — will be. A few bold solar physicists have deviated from the consensus expectations, calling instead for a spike of robust storminess on the sun in the years ahead. This new flurry shows those outliers may wind up being right.

[keith]

[RVInit]

[AndyinPA]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/ ... sun-nasa-/

Scientists and the public alike are in awe over a bizarre video that emerged of a vaporous-looking eddy of solar plasma swirling around the sun’s north pole. The footage was captured on Groundhog Day by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a satellite launched in 2010. Since then, it’s gone viral on social media.

It shows a tendril-like filament of solar material erupting into space. From there, however, some of that material appears to be captured — and is slingshotted 360 degrees around the high latitudes of the sun’s northern hemisphere.

[RTH10260]

James Webb telescope detects evidence of ancient ‘universe breaker’ galaxies
Huge systems appear to be far larger than was presumed possible so early after big bang, say scientists

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent
Wed 22 Feb 2023 17.05 GMT

The James Webb space telescope has detected what appear to be six massive ancient galaxies, which astronomers are calling “universe breakers” because their existence could upend current theories of cosmology.

The objects date to a time when the universe was just 3% of its current age and are far larger than was presumed possible for galaxies so early after the big bang. If confirmed, the findings would call into question scientists’ understanding of how the earliest galaxies formed.

“These objects are way more massive​ than anyone expected,” said Joel Leja, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a study co-author. “We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”

The observations come from the first dataset released from Nasa’s James Webb space telescope, which is equipped with infrared-sensing instruments capable of detecting light emitted by the most ancient stars and galaxies. While sifting through images, Dr Erica Nelson, of the University of Colorado Boulder, and a co-author, spotted a series of “fuzzy dots” that appeared unusually bright and unusually red.

Redness in astronomy is a proxy for age, because as light travels across the expanding universe it is stretched out, or red-shifted. These galaxies appeared to be roughly 13.5bn years old, placing them about 500m-700m years after the big bang.

These would not be the oldest galaxies observed by James Webb, which launched in December 2021. Last year, scientists spotted four galaxies that date to about 350m years after the big bang, but these were far smaller. Calculations suggest the latest galaxies harboured tens to hundreds of billions of sun-sized stars’ worth of mass, putting them on par with the Milky Way.

“It’s bananas,” said Nelson. “These galaxies should not have had time to form.”



https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... t-galaxies

[northland10]

I'm pretty sure it's Biden's fault. I'm waiting for Trump and is MAGA folks to explain how he had a much bigger, more beautifuller sun.

[RTH10260]

Off Topic

calls for...

► Show Spoiler

[RVInit]

I'm pretty sure it's Biden's fault. I'm waiting for Trump and is MAGA folks to explain how he had a much bigger, more beautifuller sun.

Off Topic

It probably goes without saying that this is extremely bad for Biden.

[Reality Check]

I follow the sunspot and solar activity cycle as an amateur radio operator. So far Cycle 25 has been a lot more active than predicted.

ises-solar-cycle-sunspot.png (134.45 KiB) Viewed 2371 times

[Foggy]

“These objects are way more massive​ than anyone expected,” said Joel Leja,

... whose last name can be rearranged to spell Jael, making him Joel Jael. If that's not suspicious, I just don't know.

While sifting through images, Dr Erica Nelson, of the University of Colorado Boulder, and a co-author, spotted a series of "fuzzy dots” that appeared unusually bright and unusually red.

Oh man, I could do that! I can spot unusually bright red fuzzy dots in a New York minute! I know exactly what they look like!

Redness in astronomy is a proxy for age ...

I have noticed that none of my freckles are becoming red-shifted, thereby proving that I am not old.

[Slarti the White]

James Webb telescope detects evidence of ancient ‘universe breaker’ galaxies
Huge systems appear to be far larger than was presumed possible so early after big bang, say scientists

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... t-galaxies

There is, of course, one simple solution to this problem: Ditch the Lambda-CDM model entirely.

Not only do you no longer have to come up with some explanation for these "universe breaker" galaxies, you can, too, also, stop worrying about a few other issues like:

1. The cause of the Hubble red shift -- we observe a correlation between apparent distance and redshift of distant objects which we assume means everything we can see is moving away from us. While this is certainly a plausible explanation, it's not the only possible one.
2. Justifying an extrapolation on the order of 10⁶⁰ from a single data point -- the Lambda-CDM model extrapolates from the current state of the universe (and the assumption that the Hubble shift is due to expansion) back to a point that is 5.39x10^-44s (the Planck time) after this extrapolation would predict a singularity, roughly 13.8 billion years ago. Or, in units of the Planck time, we are extrapolating by a factor of 8.1x10⁶⁰ from our current observations of the state of the universe. Which is a little beyond the range of prudence for an extrapolation, mathematically speaking.
3. Justifying the massive violation of the conservation of baryon number -- in every phenomenon we've observed to date, baryon number has been conserved. In the Lambda-CDM model, the universe started with a baryon number of zero and went to a baryon number of lots because... reasons. Or lack thereof. Anyway, it just did. So there.
4. Speculating about the dynamics of a quark soup (quark-gluon plasma) -- in the early part of the Lambda-CDM theory, temperatures were too (not also) hot for ordinary matter to exist, so we need a whole new set of physical laws to describe something that we have never (and likely can never) observe. While that might be fun at dinner parties (although not as fun as breaking the ice by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy, but respectable physicists {or cosmologists} don't get invited to those sorts of parties ), it really doesn't have a place in a scientific model.
5. Inflation -- while there is an easy explanation for inflation (it's Biden's fault, of course), that doesn't really help solve the "clumpiness" problem of the Lambda-CDM model, which says the the universe started out hot, dense, and homogeneous just under 14 billion years ago. Except that we don't see any evidence of homogeneity when we look around -- we see matter is grouped into hierarchies of structures with a lot of empty space between them... and these hierarchies keep getting bigger. To address this, cosmologists came up with the idea of inflation -- that for a brief period of time early on the universe expanded exponentially so that small inhomogeneities were able to grow into galactic super-clusters without having caused the universe to collapse into a bunch of black holes early on (which puts an upper bound on the size of any inhomogeneities). Easy peasey. Except we didn't stop discovering larger structures after inflation was added to the Lambda-CDM model, so it can't really explain the how the largest observed features of the universe came to be, nor is there (or can there be) any empirical evidence of for inflation. But every knows that epicycles are cool, m'Kay?
6. Dark matter -- In the late sixties, Vera Rubin started studying the gas and dust in the Andromeda galaxy and discovered that it was spinning too (still not also) fast. By Newton's law of gravitation, it should be tearing itself apart. Further observations of a wide range of galaxies showed the same thing. The solution? Add a bunch of matter that we just can't see in exactly the right places and proportions to make the theory fit observations. Neat! Dr. Rubin is often credited (especially after her death in 2016) as having "discovered dark matter" or "proved the existence of dark matter". Problem is that, by the end of her career, she didn't believe in it anymore. Because, if dark matter were a thing, she reckoned, we should have been able to find it. Instead, we've continued to build bigger and better particle accelerators that have completely failed to provide any empirical evidence for dark matter. Maybe they should ask Orly to come up with some zibits. But no matter (pardon the pun), the Lambda-CDM model says that 85% of the matter in the universe is dark matter -- because otherwise the theory doesn't really work. Which leads us to...
7. Dark energy {a spooky organ chord would seem to be appropriate here} -- Of course, we don't need to worry about the 85% of matter in the universe that we seem to have misplaced, since 68% of the total energy in the universe (according to Lambda-CDM anyway) is dark energy -- leaving 24% for dark matter and a mere 5% of the stuff that makes up the universe that we can see. Moreover, dark energy doesn't cause things to gravitationally collapse, it actually does the exact opposite, it makes the expansion of the universe speed up. Because of course it does. Otherwise, evidence of the expansion of the universe accelerating wouldn't have an explanation. There is absolutely no empirical evidence of dark energy, but it sounds cool, right?
8. Cosmic Microwave Background temperature/anisotropies -- In the Lambda-CDM model there should be an "echo" of the Big Bang, stretched out into the microwave range, but still detectable. Early Big Bang theorists did some calculations and found that this echo should be at a temperature (the relationship between temperature and frequencies of light is because of the concept of black box radiation, which is a thing that we know) of 5˚K... no, 28˚K... no, we were right the first time it was 5˚K and it should be isotropic. Of course when we actually built devices able to detect it, it turned out to be 2.7˚K with anisotropies. No worries, though, we can just adjust our model to account for that. After all, Thomas Jefferson* once said “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” The Lambda-CDM model goes up to 11... er, 6 free variables, enough to fit any inconvenient data you might find. Mostly.
9. Relative abundance of light elements -- One of the key predictions of the Big Bang is the relative abundance of light elements, something which depends on only a single parameter, the baryon to photon ratio. Thus you only "fit" to one value and the others are all determined. When we look at this, the abundance of hydrogen is dead on (the value we fit to), the abundance of helium is pretty close (yay!), and the abundance of lithium is... not so great. Can we get another few parameters?

But we can't just throw away the Big Bang, can we? It's nearly universally accepted and useful and considered to be a touchstone of scientific literacy -- won't somebody think about the children? How are they going to enjoy reruns of The Big Bang Theory if the Lambda-CDM model gets thrown on the scrapheap of scientific history along with phlogiston? And what about all of those cosmologists?

The truth is that the Big Bang is probably the most over-hyped scientific theory ever. In good science, theorists make predictions which are then experimentally tested and the results either show them to be false or support them. The Big Bang, on the other hand, has operated the other way around from the beginning. It was developed as an explanation for the Hubble shift and has been continually modified to account for new or more refined data over the years while cosmologists have spent enormous amounts of time (and grant money) refining ever more abstruse aspects of the theory that will likely never be able to be tested, let alone verified.

This has created an enormous amount of inertia and a huge perverse incentive to maintain the status quo. Developing alternate theories would require a great deal of time, money, and expertise, much of which would likely end up exploring what turned out to be dry wells. Not to mention that many, if not most, current cosmologists would find their entire body of work to have been rendered obsolete. And remember, those are exactly the people who conduct peer review for cosmological journals -- how many of them are going to take the time and energy to vet a paper that proposes an innovative paradigm that, if true, would end their career?

These are the perils of letting theory get too (too also not also) far ahead of experiment -- mistakes, large or small, get baked in and by the time some data comes along to contradict them there is a whole edifice of knowledge which is no longer salvageable. So the question now is what do cosmologists do with this new information? Do they go back an reconsider the notion that the Hubble redshift is due to the expansion of the universe? We now have the technology to test the hypothesis that redshift is simply a result of distance traveled within the solar system, but doing so would be expensive and could only falsify the Big Bang -- a failure to detect redshift within the system would only eliminate one other theory, not confirm any particular alternative. Or they could just add another epicycle to the Lambda-CDM model and hope that no more inconvenient evidence pops up for a while.

I suggest "G-d did it". It covers a multitude of sins and seems to work for the cintelligent designists.

* Yes, I know it was Von Neumann, what's your point?

[northland10]

Since my latest thing has been to add a song for various threads, I posted a piece called Stars by Ēriks Ešenvalds in the Music Free For All thread.

viewtopic.php?p=176503#p176503

[Foggy]

But we can't just throw away the Big Bang, can we? It's nearly universally accepted and useful and considered to be a touchstone of scientific literacy -- won't somebody think about the children?

It's the children who are trashing the theory, amirite? But hell, that's the exciting thing about science, is learning that we were all wrong about something.

What were those damn kids playing with that set off the Big Bang, anyway?

[RTH10260]

But we can't just throw away the Big Bang, can we? It's nearly universally accepted and useful and considered to be a touchstone of scientific literacy -- won't somebody think about the children?

It's the children who are trashing the theory, amirite? But hell, that's the exciting thing about science, is learning that we were all wrong about something.

What were those damn kids playing with that set off the Big Bang, anyway?

Tragic loss for the archaeologists - they got incinerated in the event - we will never know how they got their hands unto a tin of tannerite

[Slarti the White]

But we can't just throw away the Big Bang, can we? It's nearly universally accepted and useful and considered to be a touchstone of scientific literacy -- won't somebody think about the children?

It's the children who are trashing the theory, amirite? But hell, that's the exciting thing about science, is learning that we were all wrong about something.

What were those damn kids playing with that set off the Big Bang, anyway?

You're exactly right.

I was at a conference at Duke (a renal modeling all-star conference in honor of my advisor, who had just been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's) and before his talk, one of the speakers said something along the lines of "finding out that you are wrong is the best part about being a scientist, that's when you learn something.

I guess it isn't really the kids trashing the theory, it's those damn astronomers and their new-fangled telescope (it's probably a Jewish space laser too. also). All they have to do is take pretty pictures with the JWST and analyze them and they not only get published in respected astronomical journals, but in the popular press as well -- it doesn't matter to them what theories are supported or shot down by their research, their funding is secure regardless.

[RTH10260]

James Webb space telescope captures rare image of dying star
Picture released of star in Sagitta constellation on the cusp of going supernova

AP at Cape Canaveral
Wed 15 Mar 2023 19.05 GMT

The James Webb space telescope has captured the rare and fleeting phase of a star on the cusp of death.

The observation was among the first made by the telescope following its launch in late 2021, but the picture was not released until this week. Webb’s infrared eyes observed all the gas and dust flung into space by a huge, hot star 15,000 light years away. A light year is about 5.8tn miles.

Shimmering in purple like a cherry blossom, the cast-off material once comprised the star’s outer layer. The Hubble space telescope snapped a shot of the same transitioning star a few decades ago, but it appeared more like a fireball without the delicate details.

Such a transformation occurs only with some stars and normally is the last step before they explode, going supernova, according to scientists.

“We’ve never seen it like that before. It’s really exciting,” said Macarena Garcia Marin, a European Space Agency scientist who is part of the project.

This star in the constellation Sagitta, officially known as WR 124, is 30 times as big as our sun and already has shed enough material to account for 10 suns, according to Nasa.

The new photograph was released at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.




https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... -star-nasa

[RVInit]

Putting this here because of the discussion of Betelgeuse.

[RTH10260]

You mean they think it has happened and we can expect to see the effects real soon now

[RVInit]

You mean they think it has happened and we can expect to see the effects real soon now

Possibly, yes. That was interesting. I like this channel, she's very good at explaining things

[Sam the Centipede]

You mean they think it has happened and we can expect to see the effects real soon now

We need faster-than-light telescopes if we wish to see events that might have happened about 600 years ago!

C'mon technologists, don't let physics stop you!! Build them now!

I guess if a supernova emits a huge burst of tachyons (faster than light particles) then in principle one could detect those early enough as they would (I think?) be seen by usin in normalstuffworld as particles moving backwards in time. But do tachyons exist? I dunno, I'm not a physicist. It's a big ask to build a telescope that relies on non-existent particles. What would it look like? Some sort of focusing device (using what force?), then pass the focused tachyons through a denser medium to provoke the emission of Cherenkov radiation which could be measured with ordinary photoelectric detectors? Except the tachyons might be moving backwards - my head hurts!!