Comet ISON Update 11/28/2013

I've been busy running a few online things about ISON, including a TV appearance on WTNH Ch8 show called CT Style, and have neglected my own blog... A few online updates at WXEdge.com:

1. 09/16 Tracking Comet ISON (Interview with Meteorologist Erika Martin)
2. 10/18 ISON Coming Into View (Interview with Meteorologist Erika Martin)
3. ISON Comes Alive

Here's a few updates on ISON! It's looking GOOD!

Both above images compliments of NASA's SOHO.

In the last few days, NASA and the proverbial ton of amateur astronomers have been keeping their collective eyes on ISON as it makes its “death” plunge toward the Sun. The above images are stills from a sequence of 97 shots taken by NASA’s SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) yesterday and today (Wed & Thurs). Note a few things:

1. ISON brightens drastically overnight! This is great news! It means the Sun is blowing off gases by sublimating ice and not just making ISON fall apart by shedding dirt and rocks. The indication here is that ISON is still intact and MAY make it all the way. He says with fingers crossed…
2. ISON’s double tail is evident! The brighter “upper” tail is dirt & dust falling off after the ice holding it in place is gone. The longer fainter tail is the ion tail caused by solar winds (high energy protons & electrons) smacking into the gases surrounding the comet, knocking electrons off these atoms, then as the electrons scramble to reform with these now positively charged gas molecules, they emit light by dropping back to their ground state.
3. In both images, solar CME’s are evident. In the first image, you can clearly see a Coronal Mass Ejection expanding downward. In the 2nd image, one is seen heading toward the seven o’clock position. Had one of these smacked ISON directly, it may have spelled an early doom.

This image is a composite of three observatories.

According to Dr. Phil Plait at BadAstronomy.com (personal friend and hero):

The picture above is a combination of three different views from space-based solar observatories taken at 16:45 UTC (11:45 EST) today [Wednesday 11/27/2013]. I’ll explain, but the important thing to note is that ISON looks intact, despite earlier worries, and is poised to put on quite a show. In the picture, the inner (orangish) circle is the disk of the Sun seen by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, observed in the far ultraviolet. It’s there to give you a sense of scale; mind you, the Sun is about 1.4 million km (860,000 miles) across. The red ring is from the NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, showing the space directly around the Sun. The streamers are from the solar wind, subatomic particles flung out by the Sun’s fierce magnetic field. The blue is also from SOHO, but shows a much larger area around the Sun (the black line to the upper right is an arm that holds a disk of metal used to block out the direct light from the Sun, allowing fainter objects to be seen).

Above image compliments of Damian Peach (UK Astrophotographer) & SpaceWeather.com

Want to watch ISON live today as it makes the perihelion trip? NASA is running a live Google+ hangout with real honest-ta-goodness scientists and live telescope views from around the world and space. Again, according to Phil Plait:

But you can watch the whole thing live, with me, and a pile of NASA scientists on Google+! NASA is holding a live video Hangout on G+ during ISON’s perihelion passage (peri = close, helion = Sun, so perihelion is the closest point in an object’s orbit to the Sun). The event is from 18:00 – 20:30 UTC (1:00 – 3:30 p.m. EST). There will be live feed from NASA’s SOHO Sun-observing satellite (that should be spectacular) and from the Kitt Peak Observatory solar telescope. Guests include astronomers C. Alex Young, W. Dean Pesnell, Karl Battams (who runs theSunGrazingComets feed on Twitter), and me! I’ll be on from 1:30 – 2:30 EST to talk about the comet, the Sun, and what we’ll be seeing on the screen. We’ll also be answering questions live from Twitter; ask away using the hashtags#ISON and #askNASA.

The NEW Kilogram...

I'll bet you are all safe and comfy in your home relaxing in front of your HD TV watching something semi-mindless about some human who is famous for some reason that no one can actually pinpoint. Well, there is a serious situation brewing in the world of metrology. Yep, you heard right! Metrologists are embroiled in a feverish battle over the definition of the kilogram! OH NOSE!

Metrology is the study of measurements. Yes, they measure measurements. Quick synopsis: Around 1889, the French set the SI (metric) system into being. It caused great consternation and more than one brain implosion. However, it was a working system that did not rely on some obscure King's body part sizes. Below is a chart of the original definitions versus today's definitions I made a few years back to show during the Intro Physics lessons.

Note the original definitions of Kg, m, and second. Well, obviously they don't work anymore. The meter can't trust the size of the earth to be a constant since the earth is dynamic and shifts, shakes, and burps constantly. The definition of the second is just as problematic. Even the rotation of the earth on it's own axis and revolution about the sun aren't as constant as one would hope. So, the meter is now well defined from the speed of light, one of the most well-defined physical constants we have, and the second is defined as a specific number of vibrations of a cesium atom, also a well-defined constant. Cool. Constant. Well-defined and reproducible in any real laboratory.

Now, the Kilogram. It's the problem child. The evil twin. The outcast. Notice it's original definition was based on water. Not a good idea since density of water changes due to altitude and temperature and other factors. The "new" definition is the mass of a platinum/iridium cylinder in a quadruple vacuum jar in a vault at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Sevres, France. Yeah, that's nice. Have a standard that is locked up and no one can touch it. Nice standard.

For many years, 30 or 40, scientists have been looking for a better way to define the standard unit of mass using similar comparisons like the new meter and second; based on unchanging physical constants. Well, looks like an answer has been found.

Seems the decision guys are taking two very different methods and AVERAGING the results and defining the kilogram as that exact number. Yep, seems arbitrary. Mathematicians are fine with the procedure, but physicists don't like it one bit. According to Nature Online: "Deciding to just average these two results would be perfectly proper mathematics, but it would not be science," says Michael Hart, a physicist at the University of Manchester, UK.

The two methods? METHOD #1: Quoting from Nature: ...a 'watt balance' — a sophisticated scale — weighs the kilogram using electric and magnetic fields. The mass measurement can then be used to define the kilogram in terms of Planck's constant, a number used in quantum mechanics.
METHOD #2: Again, quoting from Nature: ...involves counting the atoms in a sphere of crystalline silicon. That result can be used to redefine the kilogram in terms of Avogadro's Number, which relates an element's atomic mass to its bulk weight.

So, the decision guys are pitting Planck V. Avogadro. Taking the two results and averaging them doesn't sound very scienc-y to me, but what do I know...

HIGGS! FINALLY!

Image from Science Magazine Online
Click image to Enbiggenate

Well, it finally popped up; the elusive Higgs Boson. Just reported from CERN by two independent research teams comprised of a total of 3000 scientists and engineers! See: Science Daily and Science Magazine Online for details. The Official CERN Press Release is also cool reading.

For those of you not too terribly familiar with the importance of this find, or for my AP Kids who fell asleep in May, allow me some Fizzix Pontification. There is a model (sorta full set of theories and such that works) that explains the way matter is built, how it behaves, what it's made of, and all that particle physics stuff. It's called the Standard Model of Matter (or SM of Particle Physics if you want to sound more imposing at a party...). It's basically a large set of relationships between all those subatomic particles that make up everything we see, touch, feel, or otherwise can detect and we call matter. You can think of it as a recipe for matter and the Universe. A great place to start learning about this stuff is Berkeley Labs The Particle Adventure. A laymen's outline? Sure.

Courtesy CPEPweb.org (Contemporary Physics Ed Project)
Click image to Encloseupinate

All regular matter is made of only 12 Fermions (6 quarks and 6 leptons) and 4 Bosons (Force carriers). The Fermions are 3 "pairs" of each quarks and leptons. You may have heard of the quark somewhere along the line if you were paying attention in class. They make up what used to be called the Protons and Neutrons and a "zoo" of other subatomic particle. A proton is simply an AREA of space where 3 quarks, 2 "ups" and one "down" exist. The neutron is made of 3 quarks also, but 2 "downs" and one "up". The quark "pairs" are whimsically called up & down', charm & strange, and top & bottom. Leptons? Some of them are strange named things, but you have heard of the electron. It's one of the 6 leptons. Leptons are the electron, tau, and muon and their associated neutrinos (electron neutrino, tau neutrino, & the muon neutrino). [NOTE: This does not include Dark Matter! We have no frikkin' clue on what that stuff is yet...]

CPEPweb.org
Click image to Envestiginate

For all of the details included in the Standard Model to work, there HAD TO BE a reason for mass to exist. Believe it or not, even though we've known about all these particles and how they interact, we've never really had a good explanation of what actually caused a particle, and thereby a group of particles that make up an object, to have mass! Why do I have a mass of 110kg? Why is a quark more massive than an electron even though they are the same "size"? Well? WHY?

Enter English physicist, Peter Higgs. In 1964, he, along with a few others, devised a strange sounding things called "broken symmetry of the electroweak theory". Yeah, just saying that hurts, don't it? In it, he proposed this thing, a field, an invisible force field type thing, that had to permate all of space in order for a particle to actually have mass; otherwise, there was no reason for a particle like an electron to even have mass. Without this Higgs Field, an electron could just fly around at the speed of light and have no mass and be weird like. The Standard Model (which didn't really exist like it does today...) at the time had no explanation of why mass was mass. He further proposed that the Standard Model would be fine if there were a particle that "exuded" this invisible field, called the Higgs Field", and this predicted particle was dubbed the "Higgs Particle".

So, what does all this mean?

By the 80's this Higgs Particle had been mathematically shown to be a boson. Boson, besides being what I've called some of my bosses in the past, is the name given to a group of particles called the "force-carrier" particles. They include photons (EM carrier like light), gluons (hold quarks, therefore nuclei, together), and the Z and W Bosons. "Boson" is named after the Indian mathematical physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose, a contemporary of Einstein. Put these two names together and you get the familiar, but very misunderstood, Bose-Einstein Condensate; a topic for a later and much longer post. Bosons obey Bose-Einstein Statistics; meaning they CAN violate the Pauli Explusion Principle and occupy the same place at the same time and even have the exact same properties as each other; the same quantum state. "Regular" particles like the leptons and the protons and neutrons made from quarks must obey Fermi–Dirac Statistics where the Pauli Exclusion Principle holds power; they cannot ever occupy the same quantum states at the same time.

Here is a simple and great analogy from Dr. Matthew Bobrowsky, Physics Professor at University of Maryland:

In the 1960s, Peter Higgs and a few other scientists proposed that there’s an energy field throughout the universe. This energy field is now called the “Higgs field.” The reason Higgs proposed this field is that no one yet understood why some particles have more mass than others.

The energy field that Peter Higgs proposed would interact with particles to give them their mass. The idea is that massive particles interact strongly with the field, low-mass particles interact with the field only weakly, and massless particles don’t interact with the field at all.

A good analogy for this is to consider things moving through water. The water represents the Higgs field. Some things (like fish) move through water very easily. These would be like low-mass particles. Other things (like me) don’t move through the water easily; so these are like high-mass particles — high-mass because they interact a lot with the water (Higgs field).

The lightest sub-atomic particle is the electron, and the most massive is the top quark. Its mass is about 350,000 times the mass of the electron — about the mass of a tungston atom. Interestingly, the top quark is not more massive because it’s bigger. It’s actually believed to be the same (infinitesimal) size as the electron. What makes the top quark more massive than the electron is simply that it interacts more strongly with the Higgs field. Now, what you’ve been hearing about is not the Higgs field, but the Higgs boson. What’s the connection? The Higgs boson is the tiniest piece of the Higgs field, just like a single H₂O molecule is the tiniest piece of water. So in our previous water analogy, the Higgs boson is to the Higgs field as a single water molecule is to a large ocean of water. Just as water is made of countless individual molecules, the Higgs field is made of countless Higgs bosons.

CONCLUSION? So, this Higgs Field is an "invisible" energy field that permeates all of space that is caused by the presence of Higgs Bosons (the force carrier) and causes particles in it to have "heft" or mass. With it, the Standard Model is all happy and fuzzy... Yea...

WAY COOL Animated Video on the Higgs From CERN!

Via APOD.

Yet Another "Earth-Like" Planet Found... Yawn....

COOL, TOO KEWL! Earth-like planet found that MAY have been a larger hunk of rock that split up after an ugly encounter with it's star! As my Super-Hero colleague and close personal friend, The Tick, said, "Gravity is a harsh mistress..."

See: SPACE.COM for more info...

I'm still wrapping my head around CT Gov Malloy repealing the death penalty even though 67% of CT folks said it (repeal) was a bad thing... Sigh... Just when did our "representatives" become less than that...

AMATEUR Astronomer Finds Really Cool Nebula!

I saw this image of a newly discovered nebula a week or so ago. What I didn't know was that it was discovered back in January by an AMATEUR, not a PRO! That is SO KEWL!

According to Space.com and Sky & Telescope Mag, this "Soccer Ball" nebula "Kronberger 61, 'Kn 61' for short, is named after its discoverer, Austrian amateur astronomer Matthias Kronberger, who found the object after poring over data provided by the Digital Sky Survey. Kronberger and other amateur skywatchers were encouraged by professional astronomers to look specifically in the star field covered by Kepler [NASA's planet-seeking satellite]." It was found near Cygnus, The Swan, if that's interesting to you.

Ain't Astronomy grand!