The Mighty Hunter

 My new phone, a Google Pixel 6A (and no they aren't paying for me to write this article!) has a night shooting mode on it, the first phone I've had that can do this.

To my delight, I've found that this has enabled me to dabble in some very basic astrophotography now that I can record brighter stars in the results. 

There is one constellation that is an obvious target because of this, because it has a number of bright stars in a small area, and that is of course the mighty hunter, Orion. 

The most magnificent constellation visible to Northern Hemisphere viewers, it really is one of the few constellations that can be said to resemble what it is meant to represent. The main group of seven stars you can imagine forming his belted tunic, with a smaller group to the right resembling perhaps an arm raising a shield, while a group to the left could be an arm raising a sword or club. 

The stars you can see in this photo represent some of the largest and most luminous stars that can be seen in the night sky, most remarkable of them being the famous Betelgeuse, seen here at the top left. It is a red hypergiant star that is expected to go supernova in some point in the near future in cosmological terms - in other words, within a few thousand years. When it does go bang, it will be bright enough to see in daylight, and to read by at night. 

You can just about make out the orange tint in this photo. 

Rigel, at the opposite corner is brighter and a rather different star - it is a blue supergiant that also may go supernova, but much further into history. Between them is the belt, Alnilam, Alnitak and Mintaka, all very luminous too. Amazingly, beneath them you can just make out a faint fuzz that marks Orion's sword, the nebula Messier 43 where new stars are being formed. 

If you get a clear night, do take a look, although you might have to stay up late at the moment - I took this photo at about 4am!

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCRackeredNature 29.10.22

Black Holes and Revelations

I have now finished my superb Futurelearn online course on Gravity, and in the final week the subject of study has been Black Holes.

They are, as you might have expected, completely crazy places. Sadly, unlike the 1979 Disney movie "The Black Hole", they are not filled with lost souls being taken to hell while Maximillian Schell watches from atop a burning rock fused with his robot creation; also called Maximillian and BTW one of cinemas most memorable androids.

They are in actuality far stranger than that. What most folk would consider the "boundary" of a Black Hole, the Event Horizon beyond which light can no longer escape its clutches, is a baffling place where due to relativistic time dilation you can never see something cross the horizon, just see a last frozen image of it before it slowly fades from view. Nothing more can ever be known about anything that crosses this boundary.

Within the Event Horizon, time and space decide they are reversed. Space only points in one direction now, towards the singularity, the infinitely small centre of the black hole where all mass falls, and time can run anyway it wants, so indeed you might perhaps see your own back, and your own past and future, as you fall into the singularity.

Which you wouldn't be able to do, because if you hadn't already been fried by the tremendous amount of X and Gamma rays that are found around black holes, the spaghettification of your body by the intense gravitational field will be your unpleasantly stretched out fate.

Then there is information? Is it preserved in there to be slowly re-emitted by Hawking radiation, or does it imprint on the surface of the event horizon like a hologram? Or is it scrambled, or lost forever?

The concepts are mindblowing.

Si

All text copyright CreamCrackeredNature 03.12.15

Philosophizing at the Death of the Universe

I've just completed the fourth week of my excellent and highly thought provoking Futurelearn course "Gravity", and we've been discussing the supremely headscratchy topics of dark matter - matter that we wouldn't notice if we walked into a room stuffed with it despite the fact there's 5 times more of it than normal matter in the universe - and also dark energy, energy that drives the expansion of the universe, and forms nearly 70% of the Universe despite the fact we've never detected it.

Dark energy in particular is a concept to put your brain through a blender. It corresponds, it is theorised, to the vacuum energy permanently blazing away in space time, an energy produced when a particle and its anti matter equivalent are produced FROM NOTHING and then annihilate each other back into nothingness so fast that we can never possibly detect them.

At the quantum level, creating matter and energy from nothing is allowed. Providing it goes back into nothingness faster than fast can be, this is allowed. Whereas light and gravity act as a brake on the expansion of the universe, vacuum energy does the opposite. It sucks space-time away from itself. And it is doing so at a faster and faster rate.

The expansion of the Universe is accelerating. It will never stop, contract, fall back on itself in a big crunch. The Universe will go on forever.

This sounds fabulous, but it isn't really. It doesn't mean that life will go on forever. Space-time will expand forever, but the Universe will die. Fundamental particles like protons will all decay; the atoms that make up you and me, many of which were around at the time of the big bang, will all splutter out into massless ghosts. As the Universe expands faster and faster, we will see less and less of it as it disappears over a kind of cosmic horizon provided by the speed of light. The longest living stars, red dwarves, will eventually peter out and the universe will be dark and cold, apart from black holes spinning silently in the blackness. And even they too will waft away bit by bit, trillions upon trillions of years hence. No life. No light.

I find it distressing, from a philosophical point of view. In a sense, it means that life is pointless, no matter it does anywhere in the universe to improve itself, it is doomed to fail. There's no point to anything. We cannot defy the laws of particle decay.

Yet I still wonder what hope there could be for life? The only hope that I can see would be to start another universe, a universe with renewed matter and vigour, and leave our ageing protons behind and transfer to a new vessel, within the new universe. Shades of "Being John Malkovich", I realise! Anyone who knows how to start a Universe, your Nobel prize awaits.

Or we could hope that the multiverse theory of everything is correct, that our Universe is merely one of many universes floating around within an 11 dimensional membrane, occasionally triggering new Big Bangs when they brush up against themselves. Here, life could find a way of tunnelling from one universe into an other, or a newly created one, and continue to do so as energy potential runs out in each Universe it colonises on a timescale that makes eternity look like the blink of an eye.

For I do no want life to fizzle out, in a cold sweep of darkness' cloak.

Si

All text copyright CreamCrackeredNature 19.11.15

Tangled up in the Fabric of Space Time

I'm studying another Futurelearn online course, and it's a real brain killer.

All the Futurelearn courses I've done - and there have been ten of them on a variety of subjects - have been great, but none has been as thought provoking as this one. The debate on the comment threads has been of an extremely high level, and the chief educator, one Pierre Binetruy of the Diderot University in Paris, is an excellent lecturer with a bone dry sense of humour.

Such concepts as Galilean Frames of Reference, and Einstein's Special and General Theories of Relativity, have been covered in such a way that even a tired out working fellow such as myself can get to grips with them.

If only to a level that I can blag it in conversations at the pub with my friends.

Where am I really enjoying getting utterly lost is in the concept of "Space-Time". The favoured method for explaining how the universe expands is with the aid of an inflating balloon. Dots getting further apart as the balloon blows up represent galaxies moving apart from each other, the greater the distance between them, the greater the displacement. Within all this, phrases like "Imagine the surface of the balloon is the fabric of Space-Time."

We hear it again when the reason gravity works the way it does. "Imagine this mattress is the surface of Space-Time, and this brick is a large mass...see how things fall in towards it as Space-Time is distorted. If the mass is great enough, even light beams may appear to bend."

Aha, thinks I, Space-Time must be a physical thing if it can be distorted by masses, and post such in he discussions, only to be shot down - politely - by proper science people saying "Well, not really, it's not really a tangible thing, imagine it more of a terribly terribly terriblyterriblyterriblydifficultsciencemoresciencebrainbentbrainmangledbrainfried concept."

So I'm still left with my tangible Space-Time, a tight skin of rubber, or a wafting satin sheet drying in the breeze, smeling gloriously of pink bottle Lenor, before the wind blows it off the line and it wraps itself around me in super symmetric knots. Galaxies gathered along filaments, 23 dimensional superstrings.

N and P. The branes. The Eleventh Dimension that wraps the entire Universe round yet is closer to you than your own clothes. Harmonics in space. The vacuum that isn't a vacuum but rather spits out and reabsorbs energies as subly-sub atomic particles come into being for trillionths of seconds.

None of it is understandable. All of it as beautiful. Not beautiful as a bird or flower I might photograph of a summer's day, but the beauty of it being simply every damn thing there ever was or could be.

Enjoy this film of the universe from near, to farther than far can be.

Si

All text Copyright CreamCrackeredNature 05.11.15

What are your Favourite Stars?

A rather gossipy title, by my standards, but where I'm sitting at the moment, in a works canteen, there is little nature to enjoy, and the sky is the same battleship grey it has been all day. Green fields seem to emit a swampy vapour, and there is not a bird to be seen.

So, one is naturally drawn to contemplate the Universe. Well, I am, anyway.

As regular readers have probably realised, I tend to stargaze any clear night I can, either more serious sweeps with my binoculars, or a more relaxed, contemplative, naked eye observation. The night sky is endlessly fascinating to me, and I could talk of my love for Mu Cepheii, the deep red "Garnet Star" christened by Herschel or perhaps my endless hunting for the famed La Superba, Y Canum Venaticorum. This star is reputed to be the reddest thing in the entire sky, and my neck craning binocular searches are designed to prove to myself that this might be the case.

So far, I'm not convinced. The Garnet Star wins every time.

But in many ways, it is the seasons that define my life, not with any kind of Vivaldi-ish romanticism, but the rather more humdrum need to have a safe cycle to work in light conditions, without blizzard winds sweeping over roads darkly glistening with black ice. And to get to work without my agonised fingers dropping off with frostbite as if I was a foolish mountaineer.

So, it is the stars of early morning that catch my eye, the stars of summer that mark the commencement of spring when you can see them when you leave for work at 6am. So my most beloved stars are Vega, the metal blue guardian of warmer nights, and Antares, the low heart of the Scorpion, the constellation that stalks the horizon in a hopeless search for Orion placed safely by the gods on the other side of the heavens.

When I leave my home and can see both Vega, and Antares, I feel that the difficult months are over, and I will soon be chasing butterflies through the parks of Spring.

Si