New Theories and X-Rated Space Follies
Dec 13 at 6:06pm by Aileen
Quantum Iron in the Core, Killer ETs and Indecent Singularities
Researchers have recently discovered some new things about both our own planet’s core and our close encounters of the closest kind with extraterrestrial billard balls. Beginning here at home, geophysics researchers published a paper in Science reporting that Deep Earth Model Challenged by New Experiment.
Apparently the iron concentrated in the lower Earth mantle behaves quite differently than previous models predicted. Instead of finding a particular, thin “transition zone” at a certain depth where the temperature and pressure ‘flips’ the spin of electrons in Iron atoms to a paired state (a quantum effect that affects the density of the iron compounds), the experiments found a whole new region in the lower mantle where both high and low spin states coexist in the same crystal structure.
This continuous transition zone grew to a thickness of nearly 750 miles, comprising the entire region between the depths of 620 and 1,365 miles beneath the surface of the Earth.
Our Universe: Missing, Found, Then Missing Again
Nov 8 at 10:10pm by Aileen
Keeping Up With Astronomy’s Game of Hide-and-Seek
Big astrophysics science news this week that a Big Chunk of the Universe Is Missing - Again. This requires a little background for understanding how it is our universe can be so adept at playing hide-and-seek.
As much as 96% of the mass necessary to account for how our universe is observed to be has been missing for a long time. The mass is necessary to explain the gravity that holds galaxies together, but all the atomic matter we can see in planets, comets, asteroids, assorted space junk, stars and galaxies accounts for just 4% of it. In 1974 astronomer Vera Rubin discovered that instead of following a Newtonian scheme where Mercury travels faster around the sun than Neptune does, almost all stars rotating around a galaxy’s center - at any distance - all travel at the same speed.
There had to be some ‘extra’ source of gravity working in galaxies, but there wasn’t nearly enough mass to account for this anomaly. The choice was between gravity being variable (unthinkable!) or the existence of a great deal of extra mass that we couldn’t see. Scientists jumped on that answer in defense of Newtonian/Einsteinian gravity and gifted us with “Dark Matter.”
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