Astronomers Studying What May Be The Most Powerful Supernova Ever Seen

Right now, astronomers are viewing a ball of hot gas billions of light years away that is radiating the energy of hundreds of billions of suns. At its heart is an object a little larger than 10 miles across.

magnetar

And astronomers are not entirely sure what it is.

If, as they suspect, the gas ball is the result of a supernova, then it’s the most powerful supernova ever seen.

In this week’s issue of the journal Science, they report that the object at the center could be a very rare type of star called a magnetar–but one so powerful that it pushes the energy limits allowed by physics.

An international team of professional and amateur astronomers spotted the possible supernova, now called ASASSN-15lh, when it first flared to life in June 2015.

Even in a discipline that regularly uses gigantic numbers to express size or distance, the case of this small but powerful mystery object in the center of the gas ball is so extreme that the team’s co-principal investigator, Krzysztof Stanek of The Ohio State University, turned to the movie This is Spinal Tap to find a way to describe it.

“If it really is a magnetar, it’s as if nature took everything we know about magnetars and turned it up to 11,” Stanek said. (For those not familiar with the comedy, the statement basically translates to “11 on a scale of 1 to 10.”)

The gas ball surrounding the object can’t be seen with the naked eye, because it’s 3.8 billion light years away. But it was spotted by the All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN, pronounced “assassin”) collaboration. Led by Ohio State, the project uses a cadre of small telescopes around the world to detect bright objects in our local universe.

Though ASAS-SN has discovered some 250 supernovae since the collaboration began in 2014, the explosion that powered ASASSN-15lh stands out for its sheer magnitude. It is 200 times more powerful than the average supernova, 570 billion times brighter than our sun, and 20 times brighter than all the stars in our Milky Way Galaxy combined.

“We have to ask, how is that even possible?” said Stanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State. “It takes a lot of energy to shine that bright, and that energy has to come from somewhere.”

“The honest answer is at this point that we do not know what could be the power source for ASASSN-15lh,” said Subo Dong, lead author of the Science paper and a Youth Qianren Research Professor of astronomy at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University.

He added that the discovery “may lead to new thinking and new observations of the whole class of superluminous supernova.”

Todd Thompson, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, offered one possible explanation. The supernova could have spawned an extremely rare type of star called a millisecond magnetar, a rapidly spinning and very dense star with a very strong magnetic field.

To shine so bright, this particular magnetar would also have to spin at least 1,000 times a second, and convert all that rotational energy to light with nearly 100 percent efficiency, Thompson explained. It would be the most extreme example of a magnetar that scientists believe to be physically possible.

“Given those constraints,” he said, “will we ever see anything more luminous than this? If it truly is a magnetar, then the answer is basically no.”

The Hubble Space Telescope will help settle the question later this year, in part because it will allow astronomers to see the host galaxy surrounding the object. If the team finds that the object lies in the very center of a large galaxy, then perhaps it’s not a magnetar at all, and the gas around it is not evidence of a supernova, but instead some unusual nuclear activity around a supermassive black hole.

If so, then its bright light could herald a completely new kind of event, said study co-author Christopher Kochanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State and the Ohio Eminent Scholar in Observational Cosmology. It would be something never before seen in the center of a galaxy.

Ohio State co-authors on the study include John Beacom, professor of physics and astronomy and director of the university’s Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics (CCAPP); graduate students Thomas Holoien, Jonathan Brown, A. Bianca Danilet and Gregory Simonian; and Ohio State alumni Ben Shappee, now at the Carnegie Observatories, and Jose Prieto, now at the Universidad Diego Portales and Millennium Institute of Astrophysics.

Other co-authors, including both professional and amateur astronomers, hail from Rutgers University, Las Campanas Observatory, Liverpool John Moores University, Coral Towers Observatory, Osservatorio Astrofisico di Catania, Observatoire de Strasbourg, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Morehead State University, Variable Star Observers League in Japan, The Virtual Telescope Project, Mt. Vernon Observatory, Universidad Andres Bello, Warsaw University and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

This work is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation and CCAPP. Additional support came from the Mt. Cuba Astronomical Foundation and private donations from retired Homewood Corp. CEO George Skestos and the Robert Martin Ayers Sciences Fund. ASAS-SN telescopes are hosted by the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network.

New theory of secondary inflation expands options for avoiding an excess of dark matter

Standard cosmology — that is, the Big Bang Theory with its early period of exponential growth known as inflation — is the prevailing scientific model for our universe, in which the entirety of space and time ballooned out from a very hot, very dense point into a homogeneous and ever-expanding vastness. This theory accounts for many of the physical phenomena we observe. But what if that’s not all there was to it?

dark matter

A new theory from physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and Stony Brook University, which will publish online on January 18 in Physical Review Letters, suggests a shorter secondary inflationary period that could account for the amount of dark matter estimated to exist throughout the cosmos.

“In general, a fundamental theory of nature can explain certain phenomena, but it may not always end up giving you the right amount of dark matter,” said Hooman Davoudiasl, group leader in the High-Energy Theory Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory and an author on the paper. “If you come up with too little dark matter, you can suggest another source, but having too much is a problem.”

Measuring the amount of dark matter in the universe is no easy task. It is dark after all, so it doesn’t interact in any significant way with ordinary matter. Nonetheless, gravitational effects of dark matter give scientists a good idea of how much of it is out there. The best estimates indicate that it makes up about a quarter of the mass-energy budget of the universe, while ordinary matter — which makes up the stars, our planet, and us — comprises just 5 percent. Dark matter is the dominant form of substance in the universe, which leads physicists to devise theories and experiments to explore its properties and understand how it originated.

Some theories that elegantly explain perplexing oddities in physics — for example, the inordinate weakness of gravity compared to other fundamental interactions such as the electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces — cannot be fully accepted because they predict more dark matter than empirical observations can support.

This new theory solves that problem. Davoudiasl and his colleagues add a step to the commonly accepted events at the inception of space and time.

In standard cosmology, the exponential expansion of the universe called cosmic inflation began perhaps as early as 10-35 seconds after the beginning of time — that’s a decimal point followed by 34 zeros before a 1. This explosive expansion of the entirety of space lasted mere fractions of a fraction of a second, eventually leading to a hot universe, followed by a cooling period that has continued until the present day. Then, when the universe was just seconds to minutes old — that is, cool enough — the formation of the lighter elements began. Between those milestones, there may have been other inflationary interludes, said Davoudiasl.

“They wouldn’t have been as grand or as violent as the initial one, but they could account for a dilution of dark matter,” he said.

In the beginning, when temperatures soared past billions of degrees in a relatively small volume of space, dark matter particles could run into each other and annihilate upon contact, transferring their energy into standard constituents of matter-particles like electrons and quarks. But as the universe continued to expand and cool, dark matter particles encountered one another far less often, and the annihilation rate couldn’t keep up with the expansion rate.

“At this point, the abundance of dark matter is now baked in the cake,” said Davoudiasl. “Remember, dark matter interacts very weakly. So, a significant annihilation rate cannot persist at lower temperatures. Self-annihilation of dark matter becomes inefficient quite early, and the amount of dark matter particles is frozen.”

However, the weaker the dark matter interactions, that is, the less efficient the annihilation, the higher the final abundance of dark matter particles would be. As experiments place ever more stringent constraints on the strength of dark matter interactions, there are some current theories that end up overestimating the quantity of dark matter in the universe. To bring theory into alignment with observations, Davoudiasl and his colleagues suggest that another inflationary period took place, powered by interactions in a “hidden sector” of physics. This second, milder, period of inflation, characterized by a rapid increase in volume, would dilute primordial particle abundances, potentially leaving the universe with the density of dark matter we observe today.

“It’s definitely not the standard cosmology, but you have to accept that the universe may not be governed by things in the standard way that we thought,” he said. “But we didn’t need to construct something complicated. We show how a simple model can achieve this short amount of inflation in the early universe and account for the amount of dark matter we believe is out there.”

Proving the theory is another thing entirely. Davoudiasl said there may be a way to look for at least the very feeblest of interactions between the hidden sector and ordinary matter.

“If this secondary inflationary period happened, it could be characterized by energies within the reach of experiments at accelerators such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider,” he said. Only time will tell if signs of a hidden sector show up in collisions within these colliders, or in other experimental facilities.

6.7 Magnitude Quake Hits India’s Northeast

A 6.7 magnitude earthquake hit India’s remote northeast region before dawn on Monday, killing at least four people, injuring more than 100 others and causing damage to several buildings.

earthquake_sign800x

The death and injuries were caused by falling debris in and around Imphal, the capital of Manipur state, police said.

The powerful tremor left large cracks in walls and a portion of a popular market building collapsed in the state capital. The area is dotted with small houses. There are few tall buildings in the region, although a newly constructed six-story building collapsed in Imphal, the police control room said.

India’s Meteorological Department said the epicenter of the quake was in Tamenglong region of Manipur state. It struck before dawn on Monday at a depth of 17 kilometers (about 10 miles) in the India-Myanmar border region.

Police officer L. Ragui said dozens of homes were slightly damaged in Tamenglong.

No deaths had been reported so far, but four people suffered injuries when a wall collapsed on them, Ragui said by the telephone.

Shangthon Kamei, a teacher in Tamenglong, said the earthquake rattled buildings.

“It lasted for around one minute. We were sleeping and were woken up by the earthquake,” he said.

Telephone and electricity connections were disrupted in some areas.

The epicenter of the earthquake was 35 kilometers (20 miles) northwest of Imphal. The area is remote with poor cellphone and Internet connections, and information about conditions outside of major cities may take time to emerge.

Nearly 90 members of the National Disaster Response Force, a specialized federal force for natural disasters, have left to check on remote areas, police said.

People panicked and rushed out of their homes in Gauhati, the capital of neighboring Assam state, as they felt massive shaking at least twice within 60 seconds.

In Imphal, residents said furniture was knocked over and books fell off shelves.

“The ground swayed for almost a minute, jolting people awake in their homes,” said one resident, Apem Arthur.

The tremors were also felt in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal state.

HAPPY NEW YEAR – 2016

To bring in the new year with our continued gratitude, we are adding another 25 Free six month ECM memberships. Just put “2016 Free Six Months” in the subject, and send to: ectv@earthlink.net and you will receive your Free membership within the next few days.

For those of you who are in the spirit of giving thanks, I would welcome any amount of support you wish to give. Psst, some will go to two beautiful children which they will find under the Christmas tree on Friday morning. Click Here

_______________________________

Enjoy ECMs ‘Holiday Season’ Special 
Save 35% On Our 1 Year Membership

christmas_holidays_v_blue_by_adni18

If banner is not working click here: http://bit.ly/1IheOn4

no paypal account needed


**We Are Always in Need of Supplemental Support – Thank You.

paypal donate_button_smhapp

If banner is not working click here: http://bit.ly/1GqtVVb

Auroral Mystery Solved: Auroras Caused by Charged Particles

I’m not sure what discovery warrants the title of ‘mystery’, but it was accepted and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. I guess we have all become aware that ECMs research is ahead of its time, but to frame it beyond mysteries is a bit exorbitant.

I am pretty sure all or most of you have been aware of my research on charged particles going as far back as 1998 when I published my first Equation. To think of this finding as new or mysterious, is well, mysterious.

equation_1998

Equation:
Sunspots → Solar Flares (charged particles) → Magnetic Field Shift → Shifting Ocean and Jet Stream Currents → Extreme Weather and Human Disruption (mitch battros 1998).

For years, scientists have contemplated what triggers the formation of auroral substorms and the sudden bursts of brightness. Appearing in the Journal of Geophysical Research, the current study overthrows existing theories about the mechanism behind this phenomenon.

aurora03

Auroras are dimly present throughout the night in polar regions, but sometimes these lights explode in brightness. Now Japanese scientists have unlocked the mystery behind this spectacle, known as auroral breakup.

Now Japanese scientists from the Kyoto-Kyushu research team has revealed that hot charged particles, or plasma, gather in near-Earth space just above the upper atmosphere of the polar region. This makes the plasma rotate creating a sudden electrical current above the polar regions.

magnetic_field

“This isn’t like anything that us space physicists had in mind,” said study author Yusuke Ebihara of Kyoto University….. ‘Okay, if you say so’. (writers satirical comment) Ebihara based the study on a supercomputer simulation program developed by Takashi Tanaka, professor emeritus at Kyushu University.

Auroras originate from plasma from the Sun, known as the solar wind. In the 1970s, scientists discovered that when this plasma approaches the Earth together with magnetic fields, it triggers a change in the Earth’s magnetic field lines on the dayside, and then on the night side. This information alone couldn’t explain how the fluttering lights emerge in the sky, however.

Scientists had come up with theories for separate parts of the process. Some suggested that acceleration of plasma from the reconnection of magnetic field lines caused auroral breakup. Others argued that the electrical current running near the Earth diverts a part of the electrical current into the ionosphere for some unknown reason, triggering the bright bursts of light. This theory was widely accepted because it offered an explanation for why upward-flowing currents emerged out of our planet. But the pieces of the puzzle didn’t quite fit well together.

Tanaka’s supercomputer simulation program, on the other hand, offers a logical explanation from start to finish.

“Previous theories tried to explain individual mechanisms like the reconnection of the magnetic field lines and the diversion of electrical currents, but there were contradictions when trying to explain the phenomena in its entirety,” said Ebihara. “What we needed all along was to look at the bigger picture.”

The current paper builds on earlier work by Ebihara and Tanaka about how the bursts emerge. This explores the succeeding processes, namely how the process expands into a large scale breakup.

The research also has the potential to alleviate hazardous problems associated with auroral breakups that can seriously disrupt satellites and power grids.

The Causes of Heating and Cooling of Earth’s Core and Climate Change

Ongoing studies supported by the NSF (National Science Foundation) indicate a connection between submarine troughs (rifts), Earth’s mantle, and Earth’s outer core. Furthermore, new research indicates the shifting of magnetic flux via Earth’s magnetic field, has a direct and symbiotic relationship to Earth’s outer core, mantle, lithosphere, and crust.

_new_equation-2012

As a living entity, Earth fights for its survival. If internal or external events begin to throw Earth out of balance i.e. orbital, tilt, or magnetic alignment – it begins to correct itself. When oceanic tectonic subductions occur, it cools the mantle and outer core. To balance this shift in temperatures, the Earth’s core increases heat and as a result releases what is known as “mantle plumes”. These plumes filled with super-heated liquid rock float up to the ocean bottom surface.

This action both cools the outer core and heats the oceans. As a result of heated oceans, we get tropical storms and various forms of extreme weather. When troughs, subduction zones, and rifts shift, as a result of convection, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes occur.

What makes this all work is the Earth’s magnetic field. Right now the magnetic field is weakening significantly. This will continue until it reaches zero point, at which time there will be a full magnetic reversal. Until this time, we will witness magnetic north bouncing in the northern hemisphere. Closer to the moments of a full reversal, we will see magnetic north drop down to/then below the equator.

As a result of a weakened magnetic field, larger amounts of radiation via charged particles such as solar flares, coronal mass ejections, gamma rays, and galactic cosmic rays – are more abundantly reaching Earth’s atmosphere and having a heightened reaction with Earth’s core layers. This is what causes looped reaction. Radiation heats the core layers, the outer core reacts by producing ‘mantle plumes’, which causes crustal fracturing, which then causes earthquakes, volcanoes, heated oceans – all of which cools the outer core.

This seemingly repeating loop will continue until the Earth will once again find its balance. Until then, we can expect naturally occurring earth changing events which will produce the loss of mass in some parts of the world, and emergence of mass in other parts. Maybe this is the time to change the things we can (attitude, environment, community, self, surroundings), one would be a fool not to apply themselves within their means – but then there is the time to loosen up a bit, know what is happening is just part of a process.

Just as the Earth, we humans can just keep on trucking, and maybe, just maybe, some will simply ‘enjoy-the-ride’.

Cryptochrome and Magnetic Sensing

Magnetic sensing is a type of sensory perception that has long been studied. Over the past 50 years, scientific studies have shown that a wide variety of living organisms have the ability to perceive magnetic fields and can use information from the Earth’s magnetic field in orientation behavior. Examples abound: salmon, sea turtles, spotted newts, lobsters, honeybees and perhaps us humans can all perceive and utilize geomagnetic field information.

cryptochrome

But perhaps the most well-studied example of animal magnetoreception is the case of migratory birds (e.g. European robins (Erithacus rubecula), silvereyes (Zosterops l. lateralis), garden warblers (Sylvia borin)), who use the Earth’s magnetic field, as well as a variety of other environmental cues, to find their way during migration.

The avian magnetic compass is a complex entity with many surprising properties. The basis for the magnetic sense is located in the eye of the bird, and furthermore, it is light-dependent, i.e., a bird can only sense the magnetic field if certain wavelengths of light are available. Specifically, many studies have shown that birds can only orient if blue light is present. The avian compass is also an inclination-only compass, meaning that it can sense changes in the inclination of magnetic field lines but is not sensitive to the polarity of the field lines. Under normal conditions, birds are sensitive to only a narrow band of magnetic field strengths around the geomagnetic field strength, but can orient at higher or lower magnetic field strengths given accommodation time.

A Radical-Pair-Based Avian Compass

Despite decades of study, the physical basis of the avian magnetic sense remains elusive. The two main models for avian magnetoreception are a magnetite-based model and a radical-pair-based model (for review see, e.g., Solov’yov, Schulten, Greiner, 2010). The former suggests that the compass has its foundation in small particles of magnetite located in the head of the bird. The latter idea is that the avian compass may be produced in a chemical reaction in the eye of the bird, involving the production of a radical pair. A radical pair, most generally, is a pair of molecules, each of which have an unpaired electron. If the radical pair is formed so that the spins on the two unpaired electrons in the system are entangled (i.e. they begin in a singlet or triplet state), and the reaction products are spin-dependent (i.e., there are distinct products for the cases where the radical pair system is in an overall singlet vs. triplet state), then there is an opportunity for an external magnetic field to affect the reaction by modulating the relative orientation of the electron spins.

How could a radical pair reaction lead to a magnetic compass sense? Suppose that the products of a radical pair reaction in the retina of a bird could in some way affect the sensitivity of light receptors in the eye, so that modulation of the reaction products by a magnetic field would lead to modulation of the bird’s visual sense, producing brighter or darker regions in the bird’s field of view. (The last supposition must be understood to be speculative; the particular way in which the radical pair mechanism interfaces with the bird’s perception is not well understood.)

When the bird moves its head, changing the angle between its head and the Earth’s magnetic field, the pattern of dark spots would move across its field of vision and it could use that pattern to orient itself with respect to the magnetic field. This idea is explored in detail by Ritz et al (see below). Interestingly, studies have shown that migratory birds exhibit a head-scanning behavior when using the magnetic field to orient that would be consistent with such a picture. Such a vision-based radical-pair-based model would explain several of the unique characteristics of the avian compass, e.g., that it is light-dependent, inclination-only, and linked with the eye of the bird. It is also consistent with experiments involving the effects of low-intensity radio frequency radiation on bird orientation, as suggested by Canfield et al.

The question remains as to where, physically, this radical pair reaction would take place. It has been suggested that the radical pair reaction linked to the avian compass arises in the protein cryptochrome. Cryptochrome is a signaling protein found in a wide variety of plants and animals, and is highly homologous to DNA photolyase. There is some evidence that retinal cryptochromes may be involved in the avian magnetic sense. Detailed analysis of cryptochrome as a transducer for the avian compass would require an atomic-resolution structure of the protein, and unfortunately, no structure of avian cryptochrome is currently available.

However, the structure of cryptochrome from a plant (Arabidopsis thaliana) is available, and the cryptochromes of plants and birds are structurally very similar. Recent experiments by Ahmad et al. (Ahmad, Galland, Ritz, Wiltschko and Wiltschko. Magnetic intensity affects cryptochrome-dependent responses in Arabidopsis thaliana. Planta 225, 615-624 (2007)) have shown that Arabidopsis seedlings exhibit a magnetic field effect. Processes involved with cryptochrome signaling (such as hypocotyl growth inhibition) are enhanced under a magnetic field of 5 G (as compared with an Earth-strength 0.5 G magnetic field).

Both photolyase and cryptochrome internally bind the chromophore flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD). In photolyase, the protein is brought to its active state via a light-induced photoreduction pathway involving a chain of three tryptophans. Studies suggest that cryptochrome also is activated by a similar photoreduction pathway.

However cryptochrome’s signalling state has a limited lifetime. Under aerobic conditions, the stable FADH molecule slowly reverts back to the initial FAD state as illustrated in Fig. 3. This process is not well understood and occurs on the millisecond time scale. The cryptochrome back-reaction attracted considerable attention recently due to indications that it may be the key link to avian magnetoreception. In the course of the back-reaction a radical pair is formed between flavin and an oxygen molecule.