Appendix on Cosmology, Space & Earth - Mission Ignitionmissionignition.net/pfcn/Bulletins/Final...

“Final Call” – Science Appendix New Essays and Compendium from May 2014 through XXX 2014 _____________________________________________

Appendix on Cosmology, Space & Earth

http://www.pfcn.net/bulletins/final%20call-appendix-science-7.pdf

Contents:

• Introductory comments …page 3 • Fabric of “Reality” …page 4 • Existence Itself: Towards the Phenomenology of Massive Dissipative/Replicative

Structures …page 4 • The Cosmos Is Cracked …page 7 • A computer simulation of the universe shows that it may be filled with “defects in

spacetime” …page 8 • Laniakea: Our Home Supercluster of Galaxies …page 11 • A short video and commentary on Laniakea …p12 • The Cosmic Web - What does the universe look like at a VERY large scale? …p13 • Planet-X (again) Not one, but perhaps two or three giant “planet-like” objects "out

there"? …page 15 • Tracking Changes in the Galaxy – Preface …page 20 • The Polarized Milky Way …page 21 • “A Blue Bridge of Stars between Cluster Galaxies” …page 23 • Fermi Bubbles Defy Explanation …page 24 • “The Ophiuchus Superbubble: A Gigantic Eruption from the Inner Disk of the

Milky Way” …page 27 • “Supernova SN 2014J Explodes” …page 29 • Glimpses of a Huge Galaxy Formation …page 31 • Dead Galaxies Defy Galactic Formation Theories …page 34 • Simulations reveal an unusual death for ancient stars …page 38 • Detection Of Galactic Center Source G2 …page 41 • Star With Accretion Disc Embedded Inside A Knot Of Dust …page 43 • Swift X-ray October 2014 Observations of the Galactic Center …page 46 • Earth Changes and Planetary Inner Dynamics …page 48 • Earth’s Core …page 49 • Hawaiian Volcanism …page 50 • Magma in Earth's Mantle Forms Deeper Than Once Thought …page 51

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http://www.pfcn.net/bulletins/final%20call-appendix-science-7.pdf


• Unusual behaviour in Earth's inner core explained …page 51 • Growth of Earth's inner core may be precursor to magnetic reversal …page 54 • Compositional instability of Earth's solid inner core …page 58 • Anomalous splitting of core sensitive modes: a reevaluation of possible

interpretations …page 59 • Why Earth's Magnetic Field Is Wonky …page 62 • Earth's magnetic field could flip within a human lifetime …page 64 • Earth’s Iron Core is not ‘Rock Solid’ …page 67 • The Truth about Earth's Core? …page 67 • Earth's lower mantle chemistry breakthrough …page 69 • When the Hawaiian Islands Collapse and Fall Apart in Landslides …page 71 • Textbook Theory Behind Volcanoes May be Wrong …page 73 • “New insight into the temperature of deep Earth” …page 75 • Mantle updrafts and mechanisms of oceanic volcanism …page 77 • Earth as Source of Surface Water …page 78 • Vast ocean lays under Earth mantle, may be wellspring for world's oceans …page 79 • New evidence for oceans of water deep in the Earth …page 80 • Minimizing Predation and Consumption and Waste: An Interim Life Form? • …page 85 • Meet the electric life forms that live on pure energy …page 86 • Spark of life revisited thanks to electric bacteria …page 90 • On the Trail of Dark Energy: Physicists Propose Higgs Boson ‘Portal’ …page 91 • Casimir Effect …page 92

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http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2014/01/28/when-the-hawaii-islands-collapse-and-fall-apart-in-landslides/


Introductory comments: October 2014 Our work is all about point-of-view perspective –as defined by the general vibrational state of awareness that is doing the viewing. In short, you step outside of the box, outside the entire duality game that limits your awareness to proscribed choices that are themselves falsehoods. When the information is not aimed at reinforcing erroneous beliefs, space and earth science can provide glimpses into changes to the fabric of reality as well as planetary and galactic dynamics. Merely one way of expanding one’s sense of “reality”. Call it “plane of view”, as in vibrational plane of existence and consciousness. The bridging of a high vibrational plane perspective with a lower plane (as in human 3d density, for example) makes for a very “broad minded” state of awareness. Very. What might have seemed to the lower human-level perspective as a contradiction or conflict that requiring some material or intellectual resolution, no longer does. This allows seemingly mutually contradictory or duality tendencies to be embraced without the observer identifying with either perspective. And yet, one can shift their “point of view” –like going up or down in an elevator –to see the street level view or to ride it up as far as possible to get a higher level point of view which includes with it more degrees of freedom, thus it becomes exponentially expanded, not merely in an incrementally or linearly manner. This is also about letting go of attachments to various “presumptive errors” concerning the perceived nature of “reality”. For example, the human sciences are deluded with notions of the “speed of light” as a “constant” reference of measurement and that of notions of “time” which are purely derived from a human 3d density point of view projected out over cosmically small distances. Over recent years I have commented that the human sciences will eventually be detecting anomalies in the fabric of “ordinary reality” –both Earthly atomic materiality and farther reaching cosmological “reality”. Here I share a few recent examples from earth and space sciences and physics, many of were published only this year. Some of the insights suggested by these scientists and some of the computer representations are remarkably close to what some of been noticing through their higher level inner awareness.

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Fabric of “Reality” November 1, 2013 In 2013 when I was preparing the Concluding Essays series, I had thought to include a few discussions from the human sciences on the fabric of “material reality”. Over the years, I have stated that to expect new insights from those engaged in advanced science discovery that would be derivative indicators of spiritual energies. These would apply to near and far reaches of “space” and “time” as well as the sub-atomic and particle/wave levels of investigations. In recent years reports of instability in the decay rate of certain radioisotopes have been found with hints that solar or other space energies may be related. More recently there have been increasing reports of planets that exist without any solar system and more recent speculations that this may be more common than solar system planet dynamics. Related NES Forum links: http://www.newearthsummit.org/pfcn/Bulletins/Dissipation.pdf http://www.newearthsummit.org/pfcn/Bulletins/Dissipation-Appendix.pdf Main site links: http://www.pfcn.net/bulletins/Dissipation.pdf http://www.pfcn.net/bulletins/Dissipation-Appendix.pdf The first piece is a 26-page paper which for readers’ convenience was archived as a PDF as of October 2014 and a link placed here: www.pfcn.net/bulletins/The Phenomenology of Dissipative-Replicative Structures.pdf

-//- Existence Itself: Towards the Phenomenology of Massive Dissipative/Replicative Structures by David M. Keirsey (under evolution) Abstract Entities such as the Web, mankind, life, the earth, the solar system, the Milky way, and our universe are viewed as massive dissipative/replicative structures.

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http://www.newearthsummit.org/pfcn/Bulletins/Dissipation.pdf

http://www.newearthsummit.org/pfcn/Bulletins/Dissipation-Appendix.pdf

http://www.pfcn.net/bulletins/Dissipation.pdf

http://www.pfcn.net/bulletins/Dissipation-Appendix.pdf

http://www.pfcn.net/bulletins/The%20Phenomenology%20of%20Dissipative-Replicative%20Structures.pdf

http://edgeoforder.org/%23chaosorderscale


This paper will examine the structure and process of massive dissipative/ replicative structures. In addition, it will examine the concept of massive dissipative/replicative structures and what are the necessary issues in structuring the scientific understanding of the phenomena. The methodology of comparative complexity is suggested to help in the construction and analysis of scientific theories. Link to his webpage : http://edgeoforder.org/pofdisstruct.html Following are the initial lead-in paragraphs for section of this paper:

Chapter 1. Introduction The concept of the phenomenon of a dissipative structure has become an extremely useful concept in explaining how the world works. It appears that entities such as the Web, mankind, life, the earth, the solar system, the Milky way, and our universe are examples of this phenomenon [Prigogine97, Smolin97, Langton80]. On the other hand, the fact that all of these massive dissipative structures must also exhibit replicative properties, has been one major failing of modeling in the scientific enterprise.

This paper will examine the structure and process of massive dissipative/replicative structures. In addition, it will examine the concept of massive dissipative/replicative structures and what are the necessary issues in structuring the scientific understanding of the phenomena. Lastly, I will suggest a methodology that can help in the construction and analysis of scientific theories.

Dis -sipa -tive: dis- = apart, supare = to throw (to throw apart) Re -plica -tive: re = again, plicate = to fold (to refold) Structure: structura = a fitting together In particle physics, the word "dissipative" is not use extensively, for they assert that quantum structures are not dissipative. On the other hand, physics tells us there is some equivalence between mass and energy, and quantum structures can exchange energy and often "spontaneously emit" energy in the form of bosons. This use of the word "spontaneous" is analogous to the unjustified finesse in using the phrase "spontaneous generation" taken by pre-Pasteur scientists regarding life. The slight of hand in particle physicist's phrase "spontaneously emit or decay" alerts one to the fact that physical theories cannot explain the underlying process, except by a non-ontological satisfying mathematical operation (quantum mechanics) that mimics the behavior. Because of this, I will generalize the notion of "dissipation" to include the notion of "thermodynamic." That is, "thermodynamic" means to include "dissipative" of energy or matter - space and time. Since all physical systems are "thermodynamic," then all systems are "dissipative," including bosons and the universe. …

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http://edgeoforder.org/pofdisstruct.html


http://edgeoforder.org/bibliography2.html%23Prigogine97

http://edgeoforder.org/bibliography2.html%23Smolin97

http://edgeoforder.org/articles.html


Chapter 2. The Dilemma of Science Every scientist's given is another's analytic goal Susan Oyama When discussing the creation, evolution, and the underlying nature of long-term natural entities, there has been a gradual realization that using reductionistic methods and terminology has lead to an impasse in understanding. For example, the current crisis in quantum mechanics (the disconnect with relativity) has lead several researchers [Bohm93, Smolin97, Prigogine97, Rosen91] to question the underlying characterization. Particle physics has had to turn to cosmology and astrophysics to help in finding models of the creation and evolution of the microscopic entities based on the state of the entire universe. Also recently, the incompleteness of the neo-darwinian model of evolution has been exposed by questions posed by researchers, such as, Margulis and Lovelock on the relationship between the biosphere, the solar system, and life. The origin of life also seems shrouded in mystery, given that it is highly possible that the origin of life occurred within the depths of the earth's crust [Gold98], where biologists have little clue of the metabolic and genetic processes of these organisms. Finally, can the future of mankind be addressed without understanding the role of the Gaia [ Lovelock87] and Hypersea [McMenanim94] hypotheses and their connection to the future evolution of the Internet and our future mind children? On the other hand, scientific progress has been practically synonymous with the methodology of reductionism and the atomic hypothesis. If science is practically defined by the notions of "simplifying the problem" and analysis of the working of the parts of a system, then what techniques and methodologies are alternatives or additions to this most successful approach. …

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http://edgeoforder.org/bibliography.html%23Bohm93

http://edgeoforder.org/bibliography2.html%23Smolin97

http://edgeoforder.org/bibliography2.html%23Prigogine97

http://edgeoforder.org/bibliography2.html%23Rosen91


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0387985468/prometheusnemesiA/

http://edgeoforder.org/bibliography2.html%23Lovelock97

http://edgeoforder.org/bibliography2.html%23McMenanim94


The Cosmos Is Cracked A computer simulation of the universe shows that it may be filled with “defects in spacetime”(from Scientific American - Oct 2013) Article lead in: If the prospect of an ever-expanding universe that eventually stretches into a vast emptiness isn’t depressing enough, there’s this: the universe may have cracks in it. … Continued at link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cosmic-strings-cracked-cosmos Note: The image shown in the October 2013 Scientific American article is actually from January 30, 2008 – the date this image was released and was posted to the European Southern Observatory website. Link: http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0804a/ Why does it take more than 5 years to publish this piece in a mainstream science magazine? Sci Amer wants $500 (non-profit rate) to show the full article here and does not include the image. But then the image is not theirs. Caption from ESO web page: “Snapshot from a computer simulation of the formation of large-scale structures in the Universe, showing a patch of 100 million light-years and the resulting coherent motions of galaxies flowing towards the highest mass concentration in the centre. The snapshot refers to an epoch about 10 billion years back in time. The colour scale represents the mass density, with the highest density regions painted in red and the lowest in black. The tiny yellow lines describe the intensity and direction of the galaxy's velocities. Like compass needles, they map the infall pattern and measure the rate of growth of the central structure. This depends on the subtle balance between dark matter, dark energy and the expansion of the Universe. Astronomers can measure this effect using large survey of galaxies at different epochs in time, as shown by the new research.“ http://www.eso.org/public/usa/images/eso0804a/

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Credit: Klaus Dolag and equipment VIMOS-VLT Deep Survey

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cosmic-strings-cracked-cosmos

http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0804a/

http://www.eso.org/public/usa/images/eso0804a/


The Cosmos Is Cracked A computer simulation of the universe shows that it may be filled with “defects in spacetime” Oct 8, 2013 |By Clara Moskowitz If the prospect of an ever-expanding universe that eventually stretches into a vast emptiness isn’t depressing enough, there’s this: the universe may have cracks in it. Cracks, called cosmic strings, are topological defects in spacetime that might have formed when the universe was young. Experiments haven’t found any proof that cosmic strings are even out there, but that hasn’t stopped physicists from calculating how many strings we might expect there to be if, in fact, they turn out to exist after all. And it’s a lot: cosmic strings would produce at least a billion loops throughout the visible universe today, researchers report. “Cosmic strings are these filaments which wind and sneak throughout the universe,” says study co-author Benjamin Shlaer of Tufts University. They are essentially one-dimensional fault lines in space, made not of mass but pure energy. Some could be infinitely long, and all are almost impossibly thin, much narrower than a proton. Cosmic strings may have formed as the universe cooled after the big bang. Just as water undergoes a “phase transition” from liquid to solid when it freezes, the universe changed radically when it went through a transition from being extremely hot and dense in the instants just after the big bang to slightly cooler and more rarefied just a few fractions of a second later. According to a popular theory, in the hot and dense universe three of the four forces of nature (weak, strong and electromagnetic) were unified but in the cooler universe they separated. When this symmetry among the forces broke, it might have created topological defects in the form of strings, so named because they would be long, thin fissures in space. (Despite the similar names, cosmic strings may or may not be related to the strings predicted to make up fundamental particles in string theory .) These strings would have started off tangled and wrinkly when the universe was in its hot, dense state but would have stretched out over time as space itself expanded. This movement would cause some strings to cross others. “When they wind back on themselves they break so that the wrinkles snap off as closed loops, like little rubber bands.” The loops are what astronomers might be able to detect because they would oscillate, producing measurable ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. Shlaer and his colleagues created a numerical simulation of cosmic string loop formation and ran it on a supercomputer cluster at the university. The results told them how big loops are likely to be when they form, and by extrapolating, the researchers calculated the number and size of the loops that might exist in the universe at any given time. The results depend on how taut the strings are—a property determined by the temperature of the universe when they were formed. For a likely range of tensions, the

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=string-revival

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical-opalescence/2012/08/02/string-theory-in-26-seconds-video/


scientists calculated that billions of cosmic string loops could exist today. “The Tufts group has done a heroic job with the string simulations, and they pin down important features of the loop distribution critical for predicting gravitational-wave emission and their effects on millisecond pulsar timing,” says Tanmay Vachaspati, a physicist at Arizona State University in Tempe who wasn’t involved in the research. The new study gives observers a better idea of what to look for in the quest to find evidence of cosmic strings. The strings would create gravitational waves that could be detectable by elaborate wave-detecting facilities such as LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) in the U.S. or by studies of rapidly rotating stars called pulsars, which emit beacons of light with clockwork precision. If astronomers on Earth notice a change in the arrival time of light from pulsars, it could mean a gravitational wave has hit our planet. The fact that no evidence for gravitational waves has yet been found already eliminates the possibility of cosmic strings with a given range of tensions. Whether or not any cosmic strings exist is still an open question. If they are out there, now we know they would be abundant.

-//- END NOTES & GRAPHICS: Compare this with other recent super computer simulations which, to my various perspectives, illustrate with striking accuracy the interconnections of The All, the connecting circuits of Spiritual Intelligences which I came to know. -ASK (Below: This particular image shows how gas is distributed in the universe's most massive cluster of galaxies, which is called Cluster 001. Scientists are using this new simulation to create stunning images and video that help reveal many of the universe's most complex mysteries...and help us remember how beautiful the cosmos really is. This first one is "Bolshoi Fly-Through", which shows how dark matter shaped one particular corner of the universe. (Taken from video was developed by Anatoly Klypin and Joel Primack and visualized by Chris Henze of the NASA Ames Research Center.) Link: http://vimeo.com/21866269

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gravitational-wave-ligo

http://vimeo.com/21866269


A NASA press release offers some more information: http://io9.com/5846159/a-computer-simulation-of-the-universes-complete-14-billion+year-evolution

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http://io9.com/5846159/a-computer-simulation-of-the-universes-complete-14-billion+year-evolution

http://io9.com/5846159/a-computer-simulation-of-the-universes-complete-14-billion+year-evolution


Laniakea: Our Home Supercluster of Galaxies September 2014 http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html It is not only one of the largest structures known -- it is our “home”. The just-identified Laniakea Supercluster of galaxies contains thousands of galaxies that includes our Milky Way Galaxy, the Local Group of galaxies, and the entire nearby Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The colossal supercluster is shown in the above computer-generated visualization, where green areas are rich with white-dot galaxies and white lines indicate motion towards the supercluster center. An outline of Laniakea is given in orange, while the blue dot shows our location. Outside the orange line, galaxies flow into other galatic concentrations. The Laniakea Supercluster spans about 500 million light years and contains about 100,000 times the mass of our Milky Way Galaxy. The discoverers of Laniakea gave it a name that means "immense heaven" in Hawaiian.

Image Credit: R. Brent Tully (U. Hawaii) et al., SDvision, DP, CEA/Saclay

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http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laniakea

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080606.html


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group



https://public.nrao.edu/news/pressreleases/supercluster-gbt

https://public.nrao.edu/news/pressreleases/supercluster-gbt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No0omeHIxwo

http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0880

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014arXiv1409.0880T

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7516/full/nature13674.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language

http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/%7Etully/

http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7516/full/nature13674.html

http://www-centre-saclay.cea.fr/en


1) A short video and commentary on Laniakea:

(full screen and high resolution recommended): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No0omeHIxwo

2) And brief companion video with additional background: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7516/full/nature13674.html#videos A few comments for your consideration: These three presentations provide some of the most significant insights into structures of creation, the the limits of human science. (The third one is introduced below, following my brief remarks here.) They show some of most detailed models from humans of a portion of this universe – a super cluster of galaxies. As with much of the “space science” material included in this unusual Appendix to my final compilation, Hawaii-based space research centers were involved. The first two provide a more useful orientation to what I have referred to as one of various levels of spatial/creational “Void” (they identify and refer to a “local void” –not to be confused with the greater void in which this entire creation and creator are suspended) –and these provide a more intelligent point of view of what earth-centric humans refer to as zodiacal constellations. I also call your attention have noted their estimation of an irregular membrane like boundary layer; their identification of a great attractor that is drawing in portions of the supercluster of galaxies; and their definition of an apparent massive scale separation underway as their directional flow diagrams indicate. This third set of models in blue may look familiar since I used some of these illustrations in some of the issues of Global Awakening News and the A-List Updates. From my own varied perspectives, I would say that they clustering of galaxies along this web-like network is too tightly packed, except for those pockets of more densely arranged galactic structures. As one views The All, traveling through it, these appear far more distant from one another with longer lengths of these nerve fiber-like streams of conscious energy conduits. One of the parameters the researchers used was speed of light constants. To my greater knowing the humanly-defined speed of light is not a constant and superluminal speed is more the norm throughout the vastness of The All. Far “faster” than any human physics +can acknowledge –nearly instantaneous at times. Thus in all three of these amazing

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No0omeHIxwo

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7516/full/nature13674.html%23videos


models, there is far more distortion shown due to the mistaken presumption about the “speed of light”. –ASK

3) The Cosmic Web - What does the universe look like at a VERY large scale? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74IsySs3RGU

Uploaded on Nov 6, 2010

The Millennium Simulation featured in this clip was run in 2005 by the Virgo Consortium, an international group of astrophysicists from Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and the United States. A virtual cube of 2 billion light years on a side was "filled" with 10 billion "particles" whose evolution was computed using the physical laws expected to hold in the currently known cosmologies. The initial distribution of matter, that resembled the conditions present when the cosmic

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74IsySs3RGU


microwave background radiation was emitted (about 379,000 years after the universe began) was allowed to evolve, and the formation of galaxies and black holes in the simulation were recorded. After all the computing work was done (28 days, at a rate of 200 billion calculations per second) 20 million galaxies were formed in the initial space.

These galaxies and the dark matter around them formed web-like structures that resemble the shapes observed by the most recent data available in cosmic surveys, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Also very importantly: the simulation provided support for our current "standard model" of cosmology, the so called: Lambda Cold Dark Matter Model.

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Planet-X (again) Not one, but perhaps two or three giant “planet-like” objects "out there"? June 15, 2014

Note:

Over the years a few individuals I am aware of "remote-viewed" or psychically "seen" a very large, barely dull-red looking large planetoid object "out there in space" and have noted it appears to be getting closer.

It is interesting as well that this could fit with various notions of "Nibiru" originally popularized by Z Sitchin's translations of ancient writings.

Now it seems there is some indication that there may be two such bodies "out there" influencing this solar system and whatever else. And that these are considered "beyond reach" of human telescopes. (The Hubble space observatory as well?)

I mention this article at this time as something of passing interest, not as a distraction. These objects may well be found to be "of influence" to Earth by astronomers. Likely by that time, it will already by mostly "over and done with" here and will provide those remaining with the some impetus to pay attention to what has always been Present for them to consider and thus they encounter their own personal existential crisis.

This time, precipitated by something “material” and "external" that humans can do nothing about. In the larger scheme of things, this matters little since the breakdown and dissolution of the fallen creation zone will already be underway and these objects may come to be regarded as “localized instruments” of much greater changes.

-ASK

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Brown Dwarf? “Planet-X”? or “just another” Supernova? “While its mission did not involve a search for Planet X, the IRAS space observatory made headlines briefly in 1983 due to an "unknown object" that was at first described as "possibly as large as the giant planet Jupiter and possibly so close to Earth that it would be part of this Solar System". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_beyond_Neptune [ Note: the IRAS probe did manage to image something that seemed not to emit light. –ASK ]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_beyond_Neptune


On the left, the blue spherical shape was recorded in radio wavelengths in 1985 by the Very Large Array. The image on the right shows the same view taken in 2008. It is obvious that the object is larger, but critics say that this is not because the object is closer, but rather that the residual "shell" from the exploding star has advanced out from its origin. They note the shape is not spherical but consistent with the type of remnants usually seen with supernova. (from http://www.viewzone.com/browndwarf2.html )

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G1.9+0.3: The Remarkable Remains of a Recent Supernova http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2013/g19/

• G1.9+0.3 is the remains of the most recent supernova, in Earth's time frame, known to have occurred in the Milky Way.

• If gas and dust had not heavily obscured it, the explosion would have been visible from Earth just over a century ago.

• A new long Chandra observation - equivalent to over 11 days of time - reveals new details about the explosion.

• G1.9+0.3 is located about 28,000 light years from Earth near the center of the Milky Way.

• Astronomers estimate that a star explodes as a supernova in our Galaxy, on average, about twice per century. In 2008, a team of scientists announced they discovered the remains of a supernova that is the most recent, in Earth's time frame, known to have occurred in the Milky Way.

• The explosion would have been visible from Earth a little more than a hundred years ago if it had not been heavily obscured by dust and gas. Its likely location is about 28,000 light years from Earth near the center of the Milky Way. A long observation equivalent to more than 11 days of observations of its debris field, now known as the supernova remnant G1.9+0.3, with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is providing new details about this important event.

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http://www.viewzone.com/browndwarf2.html

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2013/g19/

http://chandra.harvard.edu/learn_snr.html

http://chandra.harvard.edu/xray_sources/milky_way.html

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/g19/animations.html


• The source of G1.9+0.3 was most likely a white dwarf star that underwent a

thermonuclear detonation and was destroyed after merging with another white dwarf, or pulling material from an orbiting companion star. This is a particular class of supernova explosions (known as Type Ia) that are used as distance indicators in cosmology because they are so consistent in brightness and incredibly luminous.

• The explosion ejected stellar debris at high velocities, creating the supernova remnant that is seen today by Chandra and other telescopes. This new image is a composite from Chandra where low-energy X-rays are red, intermediate energies are green and higher-energy ones are blue. Also shown are optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey, with appearing stars in white. The new Chandra data, obtained in 2011, reveal that G1.9+0.3 has several remarkable properties.

• The Chandra data show that most of the X-ray emission is "synchrotron radiation," produced by extremely energetic electrons accelerated in the rapidly expanding blast wave of the supernova. This emission gives information about the origin of cosmic rays - energetic particles that constantly strike the Earth's atmosphere - but not much information about Type Ia supernovas.

• In addition, some of the X-ray emission comes from elements produced in the supernova, providing clues to the nature of the explosion. The long Chandra observation was required to dig out those clues.

• Most Type Ia supernova remnants are symmetrical in shape, with debris evenly distributed in all directions. However, G1.9+0.3 exhibits an extremely asymmetric pattern. The strongest X-ray emission from elements like silicon, sulfur, and iron is found in the northern part of the remnant, giving an extremely asymmetric pattern.

• Another exceptional feature of this remnant is that iron, which is expected to form deep in the doomed star's interior and move relatively slowly, is found far from the center and is moving at extremely high speeds of over 3.8 million miles per hour. The iron is mixed with lighter elements expected to form further out in the star.

• Because of the uneven distribution of the remnant's debris and their extreme velocities, the researchers conclude that the original supernova explosion also had very unusual properties. That is, the explosion itself must have been highly non-uniform and unusually energetic.

• By comparing the properties of the remnant with theoretical models, the researchers found hints about the explosion mechanism. Their favorite concept for what happened in G1.9+0.3 is a "delayed detonation", where the explosion occurs in two different phases. First, nuclear reactions occur in a slowly expanding wavefront, producing iron and similar elements. The energy from these reactions causes the star to expand, changing its density and allowing a much faster-moving detonation front of nuclear reactions to occur.

• If the explosion were highly asymmetric, then there should be large variations in expansion rate in different parts of the remnant. These should be measurable with future observations with X-rays using Chandra and radio waves with the NSF's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array.

• Observations of G1.9+0.3 allow astronomers a special, close-up view of a young supernova remnant and its rapidly changing debris. Many of these changes are driven by the radioactive decay of elements ejected in the explosion. For example, a large amount of antimatter should have formed after the explosion by radioactive decay of cobalt. Based on the estimated mass of iron, which is formed by radioactive decay of

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http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/glossaryT.html%23type1_supernova

http://chandra.harvard.edu/xray_astro/xrays.html

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2007/g11/

http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/glossaryA.html%23antimatter


nickel to cobalt to iron, over a hundred million trillion (ie ten raised to the power of twenty) pounds of positrons, the antimatter counterpart to electrons, should have formed. However, nearly all of these positrons should have combined with electrons and been destroyed, so no direct observational signature of this antimatter should remain.

• A paper describing these results is available online and will be published in the July 1, 2013 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The first author is Kazimierz Borkowski of North Carolina State University (NCSU), in Raleigh, NC and his co-authors are Stephen Reynolds, also of NCSU; Una Hwang from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, MD; David Green from Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, UK; Robert Petre, also from GSFC; Kalyani Krishnamurthy from Duke University in Durham, NC and Rebecca Willett, also from Duke University.

• NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

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Two giant planets may cruise unseen beyond Pluto 11 June 2014 by Nicola Jenner http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25711-two-giant-planets-may-cruise-unseen-beyond-pluto.html?#.U53s2nlOVaS

The monsters are multiplying. Just months after astronomers announced hints of a giant "Planet X" lurking beyond Pluto, a team in Spain says there may actually be two supersized planets hiding in the outer reaches of our solar system.

When potential dwarf planet 2012 VP113 was discovered in March, it joined a handful of unusual rocky objects known to reside beyond the orbit of Pluto. These small objects have curiously aligned orbits, which hints that an unseen planet even further out is influencing their behaviour. Scientists calculated that this world would be about 10 times the mass of Earth and would orbit at roughly 250 times Earth's distance from the sun.

Now Carlos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain have taken another look at these distant bodies. As well as confirming their bizarre orbital alignment, the pair found additional puzzling patterns. Small groups of the objects have very similar orbital paths. Because they are not massive enough to be

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http://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.7399v1.pdf

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25711-two-giant-planets-may-cruise-unseen-beyond-pluto.html?%23.U53s2nlOVaS

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25711-two-giant-planets-may-cruise-unseen-beyond-pluto.html?%23.U53s2nlOVaS


tugging on each other, the researchers think the objects are being "shepherded" by a larger object in a pattern known as orbital resonance.

Planet shepherd For instance, we know that Neptune and Pluto are in orbital resonance – for every two orbits Pluto makes around the sun, Neptune makes three. Similarly, one group of small objects seems to be in lockstep with a much more distant, unseen planet. That world would have a mass between that of Mars and Saturn and would sit about 200 times Earth's distance from the sun.

Some of the smaller objects have very elongated orbits that would take them out to this distance. It is unusual for a large planet to orbit so close to other bodies unless it is dynamically tied to something else, so the researchers suggest that the large planet is itself in resonance with a more massive world at about 250 times the Earth-sun distance – just like the one predicted in the previous work.

Observing these putative planets will be tricky. The smaller bodies are on very elliptical orbits and were only spotted when they ventured closest to the sun. But the big planets would have roughly circular orbits and would be slow moving and dim, making them tough for current telescopes to see. "It's not at all surprising that they haven't been found yet," says Carlos.

"As there are only a few of these extremely distant objects known, it's hard to say anything definitive about the number or location of any distant planets," says Scott Sheppard at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, one of the discoverers of 2012 VP113. "However, in the near future we should have more objects to work with to help us determine the structure of the outer solar system." Reference: arxiv.org/abs/1406.0715

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Extreme trans-Neptunian objects and the Kozai mechanism: signaling the presence of trans-Plutonian planets?

Authors: C. de la Fuente Marcos, R. de la Fuente Marcos (Submitted on 3 Jun 2014) Abstract: The existence of an outer planet beyond Pluto has been a matter of debate for decades and the recent discovery of 2012 VP113 has just revived the interest for this controversial topic. This Sedna-like object has the most distant perihelion of any known minor planet and the value of its argument of perihelion is close to 0 degrees. This property appears to be shared by almost all known asteroids with semimajor axis greater than 150 au and perihelion greater than 30 au (the extreme trans-Neptunian

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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7429-gas-giants-credited-for-solar-system-formation.html

http://home.dtm.ciw.edu/users/sheppard/

http://home.dtm.ciw.edu/users/sheppard/


http://arxiv.org/find/astro-ph/1/au:+Marcos_C/0/1/0/all/0/1

http://arxiv.org/find/astro-ph/1/au:+Marcos_R/0/1/0/all/0/1


objects or ETNOs), and this fact has been interpreted as evidence for the existence of a super-Earth at 250 au. In this scenario, a population of stable asteroids may be shepherded by a distant, undiscovered planet larger than the Earth that keeps the value of their argument of perihelion librating around 0 degrees as a result of the Kozai mechanism. Here, we study the visibility of these ETNOs and confirm that the observed excess of objects reaching perihelion near the ascending node cannot be explained in terms of any observational biases. This excess must be a true feature of this population and its possible origin is explored in the framework of the Kozai effect. The analysis of several possible scenarios strongly suggest that at least two trans-Plutonian planets must exist. Link: arXiv:1406.0715v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version.

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Tracking Changes in the Galaxy August 14, 2014 Preface While the “superbubble” is “old” news, there continues to be of important scientific interest. The second article which follows this one is fairly recent and what got my attention were comments concerning the seeming absence of matter. From my varied perspectives, I take an interest in potential indicators of larger changes in local galactic and universe environments that could be indicators of larger changes filtering into 3d and therefore detected by technologies extending from the human 3d field of existence. One of these changes is the deletion of portions of extant creation of “The All”. Human science technology can barely measure the parameters of what humans regard as “the universe”. Within “The All” there are many structures and patterns, some which connect the entirety of The All, like super-cosmic nerve fibers and blood vessels that convey information and energy. –ASK

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http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.0715v1


The Polarized Milky Way May 15, 2014 by Stephan Smith https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2014/05/15/the-polarized-milky-way/

Polarized light from the Milky Way. Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration

Electromagnetic fields guide light in specific ways. The image above is from the Planck satellite, now defunct, that was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in May 2005, along with the Herschel Space Observatory, which also recently ended its mission.

According to ESA, Planck’s mission was broken into several objectives: to determine the large-scale properties of the Universe with high precision; to test theories of inflation; to search for primordial gravitational waves; to search for “defects” in space; to study the origin of the structures we see in the Universe; and to study our and other galaxies in the microwave.

Planck used its detectors to investigate polarized light coming from various locations in the Milky Way. According to a recent press release, small dust grains, said to be rotating at several million times per second, are constrained by magnetic fields that cause them to form field-aligned channels through which light is emitted. That causes the light to be polarized. However, could the information be relevant to another explanation that involves electrical activity?

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https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2014/05/15/the-polarized-milky-way/

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2010/arch10/100316planck.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5oWU6DlYs

https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/05/18/6517/

https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/05/18/6517/

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Planck/Planck_takes_magnetic_fingerprint_of_our_Galaxy

https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Milky_Way_s_magnetic_fingerprint.jpg


Data the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope revealed twin lobes of a gamma rays in an hourglass shape extending out beyond the Milky Way’s central bulge. Each structure measures approximately 65,000 light-years in diameter. The funnel-like formations are the unmistakable signature of Birkeland currents squeezing plasma and charged dust into z-pinch compression zones. The intense magnetic fields associated with Birkeland current filaments cause electrons to accelerate with velocities close to light speed. Those excited electrons emit synchrotron radiation, the principle source for gamma rays in space.

Electric Universe advocates have long known that “radio lobes” far above the poles of active galaxies are the signature of Birkeland currents that often resolve into braided filaments, while the spiral arms of some galaxies exhibit twisted strands of material extending from their cores.

All those filaments are Birkeland currents, but they represent only the visible portion of an entire circuit. As more data accumulates from an ever-increasing array of telescopes, such as Planck, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the Milky Way shares characteristics with the rest of its galactic family. A halo of stars, filamentary structures, lobes of radiation, a microwave “haze,” and other observed phenomena point to its electrical nature.

Rotating dust grains are not the most likely reason that Planck found polarized light. ESA refers to “magnetic fields” in its announcement, but for magnetic fields to exist, electric fields must also be present. It is an electromagnetic force, not merely a magnetic force that guides light waves. Provided that the Planck detectors actually saw what was reported, polarization in the Milky Way could be caused by the Zeeman effect.

The Zeeman effect is named for Pieter Zeeman, a Dutch physicist. It splits spectral lines in the presence of a magnetic field, and consists of triple or double splitting of the spectra. Based on the direction of detection, polarization of the split lines is different: circular polarization occurs in the longitudinal rotation for the two high and low bands of a triplet, while in the middle, or transverse band, light is polarized parallel to the magnetic field, and the other two bands are perpendicular.

Since the Milky Way is threaded with filaments of electromagnetic Birkeland currents, it could be that Planck is seeing polarization from the fields associated with them.

Stephen Smith

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http://vimeo.com/4505537

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0506/fornaxa_nrao_big.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/NGC_3079HST.jpg


“A Blue Bridge of Stars between Cluster Galaxies” [ When I saw this image with a luminous blue egg, it was quite suggestive of how I “see” some large cosmic structures –and it is as some of the more “micro”-cosmic structures look from afar as well as highly suggestive of the various scales of membranes I have commented on which enclosed various portions of this reality from Earth to galaxies, and eventually the entire fallen sector. -ASK ]

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Tremblay (ESO) et al.;

Acknowledgment: Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) - ESA/Hubble Collaboration

Explanation: Why is there a blue bridge of stars across the center of this galaxy cluster? First and foremost the cluster, designated SDSS J1531+3414, contains many large yellow elliptical galaxies. The cluster's center, as pictured above by the Hubble Space Telescope, is surrounded by many unusual, thin, and curving blue filaments that are actually galaxies far in the distance whose images have become magnified and elongated by the

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http://www.nasa.gov/

http://www.esa.int/

http://www.eso.org/%7Egtrembla/

http://www.eso.org/

http://heritage.stsci.edu/2014/26/bio/bio_primary.html

http://heritage.stsci.edu/

http://www.stsci.edu/

http://www.aura-astronomy.org/

http://www.spacetelescope.org/

http://heritage.stsci.edu/2014/26/index.html



http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/26/image/b/



gravitational lens effect of the massive cluster. More unusual, however, is a squiggly blue filament near the two large elliptical galaxies at the cluster center. Close inspection of the filament indicates that it is most likely a bridge created by tidal effects between the two merging central elliptical galaxies rather than a background galaxy with an image distorted by gravitational lensing. The knots in the bridge are condensation regions that glow blue from the light of massive young stars. The central cluster region will likely undergo continued study as its uniqueness makes it an interesting laboratory of star formation.

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Fermi bubbles defy explanation http://phys.org/news/2014-08-extensive-analysis-fermi-defy-explanation.html Aug 01, 2014

Also see this 9-minute talk with visuals from the EU/Thunderbolts project: Published on Sep 16, 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzhHysoeLYY For more than four years, NASA scientists have puzzled over mysterious structures in the Milky Way galaxy called Fermi Bubbles. The so-called bubbles reach for ten of thousands of light years above and below the galaxy. Both the structures enormous size and their emissions are presenting huge theoretical puzzles for astrophysicists. Dr. Tom Wilson discusses what plasma cosmology and the Electric Universe tell us about these phenomena.

This artist's representation shows the Fermi bubbles towering above and below the galaxy. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

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http://spacetelescope.org/news/heic1414/

http://spacetelescope.org/news/heic1414/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptical_galaxies

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/26/full/

http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=18005

http://www.cfhtlens.org/public/what-gravitational-lensing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeans_instability

http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/how-do-stars-form-and-evolve/

http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/how-do-stars-form-and-evolve/

http://phys.org/news/2014-08-extensive-analysis-fermi-defy-explanation.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzhHysoeLYY


(Phys.org) —Scientists from Stanford and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have analyzed more than four years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, along with data from other experiments, to create the most detailed portrait yet of two towering bubbles that stretch tens of thousands of light-years above and below our galaxy.

The bubbles, which shine most brightly in energetic gamma rays, were discovered almost four years ago by a team of Harvard astrophysicists led by Douglas Finkbeiner who combed through data from Fermi's main instrument, the Large Area Telescope.

The new portrait, described in a paper that has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, reveals several puzzling features, said Dmitry Malyshev, a postdoctoral researcher at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology who co-led on the analysis.

For example, the outlines of the bubbles are quite sharp, and the bubbles themselves glow in nearly uniform gamma rays over their colossal surfaces, like two 30,000-light-year-tall incandescent bulbs screwed into the center of the galaxy.

Their size is another puzzle. The farthest reaches of the Fermi bubbles boast some of the highest energy gamma rays, but there's no discernable cause for them that far from the galaxy.

Finally, although the parts of the bubbles closest to the galactic plane shine in microwaves as well as gamma rays, about two-thirds of the way out the microwaves fade and only gamma rays are detectable. Not only is this different from other galactic bubbles, but it makes the researchers' work that much more challenging, said Malyshev's co-lead, KIPAC postdoctoral researcher Anna Franckowiak.

"Since the Fermi bubbles have no known counterparts in other wavelengths in areas high above the galactic plane, all we have to go on for clues are the gamma rays themselves," she said.

What Blew The Bubbles?

Soon after the initial discovery theorists jumped in, offering several explanations for the bubbles' origins. For example, they could have been created by huge jets of accelerated matter blasting out from the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Or they could have been formed by a population of giant stars, born from the plentiful gas surrounding the black hole, all exploding as supernovae at roughly the same time.

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http://phys.org/tags/gamma+rays/


"There are several models that explain them, but none of the models is perfect," Malyshev said. "The bubbles are rather mysterious."

Creating the portrait wasn't easy.

"It's very tricky to model," said Franckowiak. "We had to remove all the foreground gamma-ray emissions from the data before we could clearly see the bubbles."

From the vantage point of most Earth-bound telescopes, all but the highest-energy gamma rays are completely screened out by our atmosphere. It wasn't until the era of orbiting gamma-ray observatories like Fermi that scientists discovered how common extra-terrestrial gamma rays really are. Pulsars, supermassive black holes in other galaxies and supernovae are all gamma rays point sources, like distant stars are point sources of visible light, and all those gamma rays had to be scrubbed from the Fermi data. Hardest to remove were the galactic diffuse emissions, a gamma ray fog that fills the galaxy from cosmic rays interacting with interstellar particles.

"Subtracting all those contributions didn't subtract the bubbles," Franckowiak said. "The bubbles do exist and their properties are robust." In other words, the bubbles don't disappear when other gamma-ray sources are pulled out of the Fermi data – in fact, they stand out quite clearly.

Franckowiak says more data is necessary before they can narrow down the origin of the bubbles any further.

"What would be very interesting would be to get a better view of them closer to the galactic center," she said, "but the galactic gamma ray emissions are so bright we'd need to get a lot better at being able to subtract them."

Fermi is continuing to gather the data Franckowiak wants, but for now, both researchers said, there are a lot of open questions.

Journal reference: Astrophysical Journal Provided by Stanford University

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http://phys.org/tags/energy+gamma+rays/

http://phys.org/tags/energy+gamma+rays/

http://phys.org/tags/bubbles/

http://phys.org/journals/astrophysical-journal/

http://phys.org/partners/stanford-university/

http://phys.org/partners/stanford-university/


“The Ophiuchus Superbubble: A Gigantic Eruption from the Inner Disk of the Milky Way” http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0610894 Yurii Pidopryhora (1 and 2), Felix J. Lockman (1), Joseph C. Shields (2) ((1) National Radio Astronomy Observatory, (2) Ohio University) (Submitted on 30 Oct 2006) http://images.nrao.edu/574 While studying extraplanar neutral hydrogen in the disk-halo transition of the inner Galaxy we have discovered what appears to be a huge superbubble centered around l ~ 30 deg, whose top extends to latitudes > 25 deg at a distance of about 7 kpc. It is detected in both HI and Halpha. Using the Green Bank Telescope of the NRAO, we have measured more than 220,000 HI spectra at 9' angular resolution in and around this structure. The total HI mass in the system is ~ 10^6 Msol and it has an equal mass in H+. The Plume of HI capping its top is 1.2 x 0.6 kpc in l and b and contains 3 x 10^4 Msol of HI. Despite its location, (the main section is 3.4 kpc above the Galactic plane) the kinematics of the Plume appears to be dominated by Galactic rotation, but with a lag of 27 km/s from corotation. At the base of this structure there are ``whiskers'' of HI several hundreds of pc wide, reaching more than 1 kpc into the halo; they have a vertical density structure suggesting that they are the bubble walls and have been created by sideways rather than upwards motion. They resemble the vertical dust lanes seen in NGC891. From a Kompaneets model of an expanding bubble, we estimate that the age of this system is ~ 30 Myr and its total energy content ~ 10^53 ergs. It may just now be at the stage where its expansion has ceased and the shell is beginning to undergo significant instabilities. This system offers an unprecedented opportunity to study a number of important phenomena at close range, including superbubble evolution, turbulence in an HI shell, and the magnitude of the ionizing flux above the Galactic disk. NRAO image description: A nearby superbubble recently discovered with the 100 m Green Bank Telescope (GBT) is shown as if we were able to see it with the naked eye in the night sky. A picture of the night sky taken from the NRAO Green Bank observatory site is overlaid by an optical image of the Milky Way and a false color image of the superbubble. All angular sizes and relative positions of the objects are real, bright stars were used to match the images together. In the bubble, blue color is neutral hydrogen detected by its 21 cm radio emission, red -- ionized hydrogen detected by its optical emission, white -- where there are matching amounts of both neutral and ionized hydrogen. On the left side of the horizon we see a silhouette of the 140-foot telescope and the brightly lit GBT. The part of the Milky Way shown in the image is about 1/6 of its total circumference. The area of it close to the GBT is the Galactic center. The wide dark lane sweeping across the lower side of the bubble is known as the Great Rift -- a stretch of cosmic dust blocking all the

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http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0610894

http://images.nrao.edu/574


light behind it including some of the superbubble's ionized hydrogen emission -- that is why we see a blue patch there. Above the right side of the horizon we see an arc of 5 stars -- part of Corona Australis constellation, above it -- the "head" and "pincers" of Scorpius, and still higher the base of Ophiuchus, the constellation in which most of the superbubble is located. If one wants to locate the superbubble's position in the sky, she/he should look for the Bull of Poniatowski asterism marking the very middle of the bubble. However even if our eyes were able to see 21 cm radio emission and were sensitive enough for the ionized hydrogen line, we still would not see this superbubble because it is hidden behind much brighter emission of closer Galactic gas. Only specially designed experiments with state-of-the-art astronomical equipment have allowed us to discover it. Such superbubbles are known to be blown by powerful stellar winds and supernovae occuring in star clusters in arms of both our and other spiral galaxies. It took approximately 30 million years and the energy of about 100 supernovae to create this one, which is more than 3 kpc high and is located about 7 kpc from the Sun and 4 kpc from the Galactic center. It is currently at the latest stages of its development, its expansion is stopped and its walls are starting to decompose. http://images.nrao.edu/574

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http://images.nrao.edu/574


“Supernova SN 2014J Explodes” http://www.nasa.gov/chandra/multimedia/supernova-sn2014j.html New data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has provided stringent constraints on the environment around one of the closest supernovas discovered in decades. The Chandra results provide insight into possible cause of the explosion, as described in our press release. On January 21, 2014, astronomers witnessed a supernova soon after it exploded in the Messier 82, or M82, galaxy. Telescopes across the globe and in space turned their attention to study this newly exploded star, including Chandra. Astronomers determined that this supernova, dubbed SN 2014J, belongs to a class of explosions called “Type Ia” supernovas. These supernovas are used as cosmic distance-markers and played a key role in the discovery of the Universe’s accelerated expansion, which has been attributed to the effects of dark energy. Scientists think that all Type Ia supernovas involve the detonation of a white dwarf. One important question is whether the fuse on the explosion is lit when the white dwarf pulls too much material from a companion star like the Sun, or when two white dwarf stars merge. This image contains Chandra data, where low, medium, and high-energy X-rays are red, green, and blue respectively. The boxes in the bottom of the image show close-up views of the region around the supernova in data taken prior to the explosion (left), as well as data gathered on February 3, 2014, after the supernova went off (right). The lack of the detection of X-rays detected by Chandra is an important clue for astronomers looking for the exact mechanism of how this star exploded. The non-detection of X-rays reveals that the region around the site of the supernova explosion is relatively devoid of material. This finding is a critical clue to the origin of the explosion. Astronomers expect that if a white dwarf exploded because it had been steadily collecting matter from a companion star prior to exploding, the mass transfer process would not be 100% efficient, and the white dwarf would be immersed in a cloud of gas.

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http://www.nasa.gov/chandra/multimedia/supernova-sn2014j.html

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/m82_1.jpg


If a significant amount of material were surrounding the doomed star, the blast wave generated by the supernova would have struck it by the time of the Chandra observation, producing a bright X-ray source. Since they do not detect any X-rays, the researchers determined that the region around SN 2014J is exceptionally clean. A viable candidate for the cause of SN 2014J must explain the relatively gas-free environment around the star prior to the explosion. One possibility is the merger of two white dwarf stars, in which case there might have been little mass transfer and pollution of the environment before the explosion. Another is that several smaller eruptions on the surface of the white dwarf cleared the region prior to the supernova. Further observations a few hundred days after the explosion could shed light on the amount of gas in a larger volume, and help decide between these and other scenarios. A paper describing these results was published in the July 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal and is available online. The first author is Raffaella Margutti from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, MA, and the co-authors are Jerod Parrent (CfA), Atish Kamble (CfA), Alicia Soderberg (CfA), Ryan Foley (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Dan Milisavljevic (CfA), Maria Drout (CfA), and Robert Kirshner (CfA). Image Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/R.Margutti et al

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Glimpses of a Huge Galaxy Formation August 27, 2014

Quote: … “Only the most powerful telescopes have the ability to look back far enough to gather this important insight. “It’s a formation process that can’t happen anymore,”… “The early universe could make these galaxies, but the modern universe can’t. ” … [! – ASK ]

Link: http://www.keckobservatory.org/recent/entry/keck_observatory_gives_astronomers_first_glimpse_of_monster_galaxy_formatio

Mauna Kea, Hawaii: After years of searching, Yale University astronomers have discovered a window into the early, violent formation of the nuclei of the Universe’s monster galaxies. After spotting a potential candidate with the 2.4-meter Hubble Space Telescope, the team of astronomers pointed the 10-meter Keck II telescope, operated by the W. M. Keck Observatory, to witness the turbulent, star-bursting galactic core forming millions of stars at a ferocious rate. The data collected during their five day run in Hawaii offers important clues about the galaxy’s development as it was 11 billion

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http://www.keckobservatory.org/recent/entry/keck_observatory_gives_astronomers_first_glimpse_of_monster_galaxy_formatio

http://www.keckobservatory.org/recent/entry/keck_observatory_gives_astronomers_first_glimpse_of_monster_galaxy_formatio


years ago — just 3 billion years after the Big Bang. The research is being published today in the journal Nature.

Galaxy formation theories have long suggested that monster elliptical galaxies form from the inside out, creating their dramatically star-studded central cores during early cosmic epochs. But scientists had never been able to observe this core construction — until now.

Only the most powerful telescopes have the ability to look back far enough to gather this important insight. “It’s a formation process that can’t happen anymore,” said Erica Nelson, Yale graduate student and lead author of the paper. “The early universe could make these galaxies, but the modern universe can’t. It was this hotter, more turbulent place — these were boiling cauldrons forging stars.”

After finding the candidate, officially named GOODS-N-774, with an infrared camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, team members flew to Hawaii on the night of January 11, 2014 and actually saw the formation process underway with the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSPEC) instrument installed on Keck Observatory's 10-meter Keck II telescope.

Informally, they began calling the GOODS-N-774 galaxy, “Sparky.” Using archival, far-infrared images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the ESA/NASA Herschel Space Observatory, the team found Sparky is producing 300 stars per year. By comparison, the Milky Way produces about 10 stars per year. While the tiny galaxy is only 6 percent the size of the Milky Way, it contains about twice as many stars.

Sparky’s rapid gas movement — predicted by the theorists — was the big tip-off that they found what they were looking for.

Observations from Keck Observatory showed the galaxy boasts the most rapidly orbiting gas clouds ever measured, the most definitive evidence that they were witnessing the core of a monster galaxy in formation. It was something the team had hoped to see for years, and when the telltale, broad-emission lines showed up on the Keck Observatory monitors, the mood in the room lit up.

“It's pretty rare to be at the telescope and know that you are getting something pretty striking,” van Dokkum said. “We could quickly see the signature we were looking for and could just tell it was going to be something spectacular.”

“Keck Observatory's NIRSPEC provided crucial information,” said Nelson. “The really important piece of evidence was the measurement of velocity dispersion. Without that data from Keck Observatory, it was hard to interpret what was going on.”

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The gas required to fuel star formation, along with swirling traces of metals, enshrouds the galaxy in thick dust, hiding it in visible light just like the Sun appears red and faint behind the smoke of a forest fire. The astronomers think that this barely visible galaxy may be representative of a much larger population of similar objects that are even more obscured by dust.

It was only by using infrared analysis and the most powerful telescopes in existence that the Yale team could confirm the exact nature of Sparky. The galaxy formed 11 billion years ago, and its star-forming gas has one of the highest ionized gas velocity dispersions ever measured.

“I think our discovery settles the question of whether this mode of building galaxies actually happened or not,” van Dokkum said. “The question now is, ‘How often did this occur?’ We suspect there are other galaxies like this that are even fainter in near-infrared wavelengths.”

Sparky may have a lot of company. “We suspect there are 100 times as many and we’re just missing them,” Nelson said.

The W. M. Keck Observatory operates the largest, most scientifically productive telescopes on Earth. The two, 10-meter optical/infrared telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea on the Island of Hawaii feature a suite of advanced instruments including imagers, multi-object spectrographs, high-resolution spectrographs, integral-field spectroscopy and world-leading laser guide star adaptive optics systems.NIRSPEC (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) is a unique, cross-dispersed echelle spectrograph that captures spectra of objects over a large range of infrared wavelengths at high spectral resolution. Built at the UCLA Infrared Laboratory by a team led by Prof. Ian McLean, the instrument is used for radial velocity studies of cool stars, abundance measurements of stars and their environs, planetary science, and many other scientific programs. A second mode provides low spectral resolution but high sensitivity and is popular for studies of distant galaxies and very cool low-mass stars. NIRSPEC can also be used with Keck II's adaptive optics (AO) system to combine the powers of the high spatial resolution of AO with the high spectral resolution of NIRSPEC.Keck Observatory is a private 501(c) 3 non-profit organization and a scientific partnership of the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA.

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Dead Galaxies Defy Galactic Formation Theories September 2005 by Maggie McKee http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7935#.VAuuIHl0xaR

The largest galaxies in 93 galactic clusters near the Milky Way stopped forming stars 13 billion years ago, a new study reveals. The stagnant behemoths appear to challenge the leading theory that such large objects grew up gradually over time from the merger of smaller objects. Black holes lurking at their centres may be responsible for the arrested development.

Astronomers using a 3.5-metre telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, US, and a 4-metre telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in La Serena, Chile, made the discovery after studying the spectra of about 4100 "red" galaxies within about a billion light years of the Milky Way. Red galaxies show few new stars, which tend to make galaxies appear blue.

The survey found that the largest galaxies had already stopped forming stars about 13 billion years ago, when the Universe was only about 700 million years old. Smaller galaxies, on the other hand, gave birth to their last stars more recently - between two billion and eight billion years ago.

Hierarchical clustering

"The largest galaxies in the Universe formed very early on and they have been coasting along without forming many new generations of stars," says team member Nicholas Suntzeff, based in La Serena, and associate director for science at the US National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Arizona. This goes against models of "hierarchical clustering".

"From hierarchical modelling, we would have expected to see more star formation later on and we didn't," says Suntzeff.

John Huchra, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, says the new research does pose questions for current theories. But he says "it doesn't mean the hierarchical picture is completely wrong, just that the merging process that formed the largest galaxies must have essentially finished 10 billion years ago".

And there may be a relatively straightforward explanation. Large galaxies probably have colossal black holes at their cores. Gas falling into these black holes soon after the

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galaxies were born may have spawned powerful outpourings of energy, creating what astronomers call "active" galaxies. This would have heated gas left over in the galaxies to tens of millions of degrees and allowed it to escape into space before it could condense into new stars

Curious behaviour

"I do believe that supermassive black holes are to blame for the fact that these galaxies all appear to be dead," says Lars Hernquist, an astronomer at the CfA.

The process may have been particularly speedy in the galaxies surveyed in this study. They all lie in 93 galactic clusters - crowded swarms of hundreds of galaxies. "Everything happens faster where there is more mass," Suntzeff told New Scientist.

The cluster galaxies probably formed stars, and lost their gas, more quickly than their counterparts in less dense regions. The Milky Way is still forming stars today: it only has a few dozen galactic neighbours in its so-called Local Group.

But Suntzeff says the discovery that even the universe's smaller galaxies are now dying also raises other, more philosophical questions. "Thinking not as an astronomer, I find this behaviour curious - we are living in a time in the universe when galaxies are dying out," he says. "Is it just coincidence? What is our future?"

The research, led by Jenica Nelan of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, US, will appear in the 10 September issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

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Companion Star to a Supernova? Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered a companion star to a rare type of supernova. The discovery confirms a long-held theory that the supernova, dubbed SN 1993J, occurred inside what is called a binary system, where two interacting stars caused a cosmic explosion. "This is like a crime scene, and we finally identified the robber," said Alex Filippenko, professor of astronomy at University of California (UC) at Berkeley. "The companion star stole a bunch of hydrogen before the primary star exploded." SN 1993J is an example of a Type IIb supernova, unusual stellar explosions that contains much less hydrogen than found in a typical supernova. Astronomers believe the companion star took most of the hydrogen surrounding the exploding main star and continued to burn as a super-hot helium star.

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“A binary system is likely required to lose the majority of the primary star’s hydrogen envelope prior to the explosion. The problem is that, to date, direct observations of the predicted binary companion star have been difficult to obtain since it is so faint relative to the supernova itself,” said lead researcher Ori Fox of UC Berkeley. SN 1993J resides in the Messier 81 galaxy, about 11 million light-years away in the direction of Ursa Major, the Great Bear constellation. Since its discovery 21 years ago, scientists have been looking for the companion star. Observations at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, suggested that the missing companion star radiated large amounts of ultraviolet (UV) light, but the area of the supernova was so crowded that scientists could not be sure they were measuring the right star. The team combined optical light data and Hubble’s UV light images to construct a spectrum that matched the predicted glow of a companion star, also known as the continuum emission. Scientists were only recently able to directly detect this light. “We were able to get that UV spectrum with Hubble. This conclusively shows that you have an excess of continuum emission in the UV, even after the light from other stars has been subtracted,” said Azalee Bostroem of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland. Astronomers estimate a supernova occurs once every second somewhere in the universe, yet they don’t fully understand how stars explode. Further research will help

This is an artist’s impression of supernova 1993J, which exploded in the galaxy M81. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have identified the blue helium-burning companion star, seen at the center of the expanding nebula of debris from the supernova.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Bacon (STScI)

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astronomers better understand the properties of this companion star and the different types of supernovae. The results of this study were published in the July 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope, while STScI conducts science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington. For images and more information about Hubble, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

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Simulations reveal an unusual death for ancient stars Sep 29, 2014 http://phys.org/news/2014-09-simulations-reveal-unusual-death-ancient.html

This image is a slice through the interior of a supermassive star of 55,500 solar masses along the axis of symmetry. It shows the inner helium core in which nuclear burning is converting helium to oxygen, powering various fluid instabilities (swirling lines). This "snapshot" from a CASTRO simulation shows one moment a day after the onset of the explosion, when the radius of the outer circle would be slightly larger than that of the orbit of the Earth around the sun. Visualizations were done in VisIT. Credit: Ken Chen, University of California at Santa Cruz

(Phys.org) —Certain primordial stars—those 55,000 and 56,000 times the mass of our Sun, or solar masses—may have died unusually. In death, these objects—among the Universe's first-generation of stars—would have exploded as supernovae and burned completely, leaving no remnant black hole behind. Astrophysicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and the University of Minnesota came to this conclusion after running a number of supercomputer simulations at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Minnesota Supercomputing Institute at the University of Minnesota. They relied extensively on CASTRO, a compressible astrophysics code developed at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (Berkeley Lab's) Computational Research Division (CRD). Their findings were recently published in Astrophysical Journal (ApJ).

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First-generation stars are especially interesting because they produced the first heavy elements, or chemical elements other than hydrogen and helium. In death, they sent their chemical creations into outer space, paving the way for subsequent generations of stars, solar systems and galaxies. With a greater understanding of how these first stars died, scientists hope to glean some insights about how the Universe, as we know it today, came to be. "We found that there is a narrow window where supermassive stars could explode completely instead of becoming a supermassive black hole—no one has ever found this mechanism before," says Ke-Jung Chen, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSC and lead author of the ApJ paper. "Without NERSC resources, it would have taken us a lot longer to reach this result. From a user perspective, the facility is run very efficiently and it is an extremely convenient place to do science." The Simulations: What's Going On? To model the life of a primordial supermassive star, Chen and his colleagues used a one-dimensional stellar evolution code called KEPLER. This code takes into account key processes like nuclear burning and stellar convection. And relevant for massive stars, photo-disintegration of elements, electron-positron pair production and special relativistic effects. The team also included general relativistic effects, which are important for stars above 1,000 solar masses. They found that primordial stars between 55,000 to 56,000 solar masses live about 1.69 million years before becoming unstable due to general relativistic effects and then start to collapse. As the star collapses, it begins to rapidly synthesize heavy elements like oxygen, neon, magnesium and silicon starting with helium in its core. This process releases more energy than the binding energy of the star, halting the collapse and causing a massive explosion: a supernova. To model the death mechanisms of these stars, Chen and his colleagues used CASTRO—a multidimensional compressible astrophysics code developed at Berkeley Lab by scientists Ann Almgren and John Bell. These simulations show that once collapse is reversed, Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities mix heavy elements produced in the star's final moments throughout the star itself. The researchers say that this mixing should create a distinct observational signature that could be detected by upcoming near-infrared experiments such as the European Space Agency's Euclid and NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope. Depending on the intensity of the supernovae, some supermassive stars could, when they explode, enrich their entire host galaxy and even some nearby galaxies with elements ranging from carbon to silicon. In some cases, supernova may even trigger a

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http://phys.org/tags/relativistic+effects/

http://phys.org/tags/heavy+elements/

http://phys.org/tags/stars/


burst of star formation in its host galaxy, which would make it visually distinct from other young galaxies. "My work involves studying the supernovae of very massive stars with new physical processes beyond hydrodynamics, so I've collaborated with Ann Almgren to adapt CASTRO for many different projects over the years," says Chen. "Before I run my simulations, I typically think about the physics I need to solve a particular problem. I then work with Ann to develop some code and incorporate it into CASTRO. It is a very efficient system." To visualize his data, Chen used an open source tool called VisIt, which was architected by Hank Childs, formerly a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab. "Most of the time I did my own visualizations, but when there were things that I needed to modify or customize I would shoot Hank an email and that was very helpful." Chen completed much of this work while he was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. He completed his Ph.D. in physics in 2013. Additional reference: http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/790/2/162 Abstract: The formation of supermassive Population III stars with masses 10,000 M ☉ in primeval galaxies in strong ultraviolet backgrounds at z ~ 15 may be the most viable pathway to the formation of supermassive black holes by z ~ 7. Most of these stars are expected to live for short times and then directly collapse to black holes, with little or no mass loss over their lives. However, we have now discovered that non-rotating primordial stars with masses close to 55,000 M ☉ can instead die as highly energetic thermonuclear supernovae powered by explosive helium burning, releasing up to 1055 erg, or about 10,000 times the energy of a Type Ia supernova. The explosion is triggered by the general relativistic contribution of thermal photons to gravity in the core of the star, which causes the core to contract and explosively burn. The energy release completely unbinds the star, leaving no compact remnant, and about half of the mass of the star is ejected into the early cosmos in the form of heavy elements. The explosion would be visible in the near infrared at z 20 to Euclid and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, perhaps signaling the birth of supermassive black hole seeds and the first quasars.

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of 93 E-mail: [email protected]


http://phys.org/tags/massive+stars/

http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/790/2/162


Detection of Galactic Center Source G2 May-October 2014 http://etheric.com/new-keck-telescope-observations-g2-cloud/ Note: I include this set of articles to help illustrate one of the processes with the local galactic space. “Superwaves” have been postulated to be cosmic-scale agents of enormous change. That these are regarded as super “waves” also has my attention as I continue to find indicators from 3d science of changes in the fabric of physical reality. Disclaimer: As always, my link here to LaViolette’s website is not to be construed as my agreement or support for his spiritual perspectives, nor for any websites that he may refer or link to. -ASK More science news from Hawaii… presented through Paul LaViolette … a group of U.S. astronomers posted a preprint of the results of Keck Observatory imaging of the G2 cloud which they did last March: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.1884.pdf This paper by Witzel, et al. describes several new things that were learned from these observations.

1) The G2 cloud definitely contains a star. 2) This star has a luminosity of 20 solar luminosities which implies that it has a mass of about twice the Sun’s mass. 3) They rule out the possibility that the star is a binary star system. 4) They find that the photosphere of the star has a diameter of 2 AU (astronomical units, the size of the Earth’s orbit. This is 100 times larger than the photosphere normally seen for a star of this luminosity, which they find puzzling. But over a year ago, in May 2013, I had predicted that stars at perhaps would have such an inflated size; see below. 5) They more accurately define the pericenter distance for the G2 cloud, determining its distance of closest approach to be 215 ± 30 AU. This is further out than the 144 AU previously estimated by Gillessen, et al. Witzel, et al. also find that at this distance of closest approach a 2 solar mass star within the G2 cloud should have a tidal radius of 1.3 AU. The 1 AU radius estimated for the G2 star’s photosphere is smaller than this tidal radius, which is consistent with the lack of evidence of tidal stripping. Although, the possibility still remains that tidal stripping will be observed at the time the star reaches its periapse distance. Whether it has already passed its orbital pericenter, though, is not known. 6) They conclude that the star will continue to follow its orbital path around the Galactic core and continue on out.

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In a May 2013 posting, G2 Cloud Predicted to Approach Twice as Close to GC, it was predicted that a star nearing its closest approach to the Galactic core would have a substantially inflated photosphere due to a number of reasons: a) energy added to the star due to tidal interactions with the Galactic core, b) energy added to the star due to cosmic ray heating of its atmosphere by the Galactic core’s cosmic ray flux, and c) internal genic energy production which itself depends on the value of the ambient gravity potential field, this field becoming increasingly negative as the star approaches its pericenter. At that time I estimated that a one solar mass star approaching within 130 AU of the Galactic core would have its luminosity boosted 37 fold to 37 solar luminosities. With the current determination of Witzel, et al. that the star will instead come within 215 AU when at its closest approach to the core, this luminosity estimate must be revised downward. Accordingly, a one solar mass star at a distance of 215 AU from the Galactic core will have a genic energy output reduced to only 60% of what was previously estimated and a cosmic ray heating input reduced to only 36% of what had been previously estimated. As a result a one solar mass star is estimated to have a total luminosity of 18.5 solar luminosities, which is close to what Witzel, et al. report for the G2 cloud star. Here we neglect the contribution to luminosity due to tidal heating effects which would be small by comparison. Previously I had estimated that due to its over luminosity the photosphere of a one solar mass star at pericenter would expand 4 fold to 4 solar radii. I was apparently being too conservative. Because here we see that even with a more modest luminosity increase to 18.5 solar luminosities (half of the earlier estimate) that the star’s photospheric radius expands to 1 AU, 54 fold larger, about like that of a star going through its red giant phase. Consequently, my earlier posting quite accurately estimated the luminosity observed for the G2 cloud star (once the pericenter distance is corrected for), but it underestimated its photospheric diameter. Indeed, my earlier suggestion that the star would attain a diameter of 4 solar radii, was actually just a rough guess. So, in view of the above discussion, the G2 cloud appears to contain a star of about one solar mass which is about 20 fold over luminous due to its passage close to the Galactic core, this excess luminosity causing its photosphere to expand approximately 200 fold to a radius of 1 AU. It is unlikely that a binary star is present, but the star’s association with a jovian sized planet cannot be ruled out. One criticism I have of the report by Witzel, et al. is that they still use the term “black hole” to refer to the galactic core. The black hole theory is dead now; see recent posting. Let’s put flowers on its grave. When referring to this supermassive celestial object, astronomers should now use the term I have been proposing for the past 30 years: “Mother star”, or supermassive galactic core.

- Paul LaViolette

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http://etheric.com/black-hole-hypothesis-stands-disproven-mainstream-physics/


Star With Accretion Disc Embedded Inside A Knot Of Dust Also, see earlier article on this with a graphical computer animation of accretion disc embedded inside a knot of dust. Link: http://etheric.com/g2-cloud-predicted-to-approach-twice-as-close-to-gc/

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Detection Of Galactic Center Source G2 At 3.8 Microns During Periapse Passage G. Witzel1, A. M. Ghez1, M. R. Morris1, B. N. Sitarski1, A. Boehle1, S. Naoz1, R. Campbell, E. E. Becklin, G. Canalizo, S. Chappell1, T. Do4, J. R. Lu, K. Matthews, L. Meyer, A. Stockton, P. Wizinowich, S.Yelda Accepted by ApJ Letters, 2014 October 14 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.1884.pdf ABSTRACT We report new observations of the Galactic Center source G2 from the W. M. Keck Observatory. G2 is a dusty red object associated with gas that shows tidal interactions as it nears closest approach with the Galaxy’s central black hole. Our observations, conducted as G2 passed through periapse, were designed to test the proposal that G2 is a 3 earth mass gas cloud. Such a cloud should be tidally disrupted during periapse passage. The data were obtained using the Keck II laser guide star adaptive optics system (LGSAO) and the facility near-infrared camera (NIRC2) through the K’ [2.1 μm] and L’ [3.8 μm] broadband filters. Several results emerge from these observations: 1) G2 has survived its closest approach to the black hole as a compact, unresolved source at L’; 2) G2’s L’ brightness measurements are consistent with those over the last decade; 3) G2’s motion continues to be consistent with a Keplerian model. These results rule out G2 as a pure gas cloud and imply that G2 has a central star. This star has a luminosity of _30 L⊙ and is surrounded by a large (_2.6 AU) optically thick dust shell. The differences between the L’ and Br- observations can be understood with a model in which L’ and Br- emission arises primarily from internal and external heating, respectively. We suggest that G2 is a binary star merger product and will ultimately appear similar to the B-stars that are tightly clustered around the black hole (the so-called S-star cluster). Subject headings: Galaxy: center — Techniques: photometric — Techniques: high angular resolution Posted May 16, 2014 http://etheric.com/computer-simulation-binary-star-g2-cloud-orbit/ P. LaViolette In a January 23rd Sphinx Stargate posting I had mentioned that there is an urgent need to do a computer simulation to investigate the trajectory of the G2 cloud stars in the case in which G2 might contain an embedded binary star system. This was needed to see what the orbit would be of the separated companion; i.e., whether or not a stripped off

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companion would strike the Galactic core. Well, early last month a group of Czech and German astronomers, Zajacek, Karas, and Eckart, posted a paper which is to appear in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics which investigated this situation. It discussed computer simulation results of the G2 cloud for three scenarios, the case where the cloud: a) contained no star, b) contained a solitary star, and c) contained a binary star. This third simulation, which is of particular interest to us, is discussed at the very end of their paper. I had written to all three on January 12th and 13th noting that if the G2 cloud contained an embedded binary star, there would be an increased threat for a core outburst, as in the case where a companion star or planet might be tidally stripped away and ultimately consumed by the core. I had also pointed out to them that, as of then, no simulation study had been performed of this case. Interestingly, they were among the majority that did not respond to my email. So, I will not know if they already were investigating the binary star scenario, or whether they had gotten the idea from my email and added this scenario in to their study. Their paper investigates the case in which the primary star has a mass of either 3 or 4 solar masses and the companion star has a mass of 1.4 solar masses. In both cases the binary system is assumed to follow the trajectory of the G2 cloud and to have a pericenter velocity equal to that estimated for the cloud (6000 – 7000 kilometers per second). Their simulation results showed that once the stars reached pericenter (~150 AU), the two began to separate from one another due to the action of the Galactic core’s tidal forces, and thereafter to continue away from the core following slightly different elliptical orbits. Consequently, the simulation showed that the companion would not follow a path that would take it spiraling in toward the core, as I had surmised in the January 23rd posting. In fact, according to Michal Zajacek, for this outcome to occur, a binary star would have to follow an orbit that would take it almost on a collision course with the core event horizon, or bring it within the critical radius where stars begin to break up due to core tidal forces (personal communication, May 10, 2014). This break-up distance would likely be closer than 80 AU to the core, since stars currently orbiting the Galactic center are not seen to have pericenters closer than this distance. So based on the simulation of Zajacek, et al., I believe that the risk of a G2 cloud binary star triggering a core outburst is highly unlikely if in fact the companion star has a mass of about one solar mass. However, as discussed in the previous posting, it is likely that the primary star is a white dwarf and if a companion is present that it is either a brown dwarf or planet. Zajacek, et al. did not model such cases of a low mass companion where “hydrodrag” forces exerted by the core’s wind become more important. That is, for cases where the companion is of low mass, the effects of the galactic core ionized gas wind and cosmic ray wind play a more important role and could possibly decelerate a rapidly moving body sufficiently to cause it to spiral in toward the core. Their simulation did show that gas and small dust particles making up the G2 cloud could be captured by the core if the core’s gas wind were sufficiently low. But they

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found that if the core’s gas wind was higher than 2800 km/s, G2’s gas and dust would be blown outward away from the core and would never make an entry. Since observation indicates that the core’s wind could indeed be this high, this would explain why the Swift telescope has seen no X-ray emission during the current pericenter passage period. As I had reported earlier, dust from the G2 cloud would likely be blown away from the core by the core’s wind and would not generate any X-ray emission. But larger sized debris would be too massive to be blown away, and it is possible that comet sized stellar companion bodies of 1 to 100 kilometers in diameter, and maybe even companions the size of the Earth, would be sufficiently small in mass as to have their orbital momentum overpowered by the decelerating effects of the core’s hydro drag effects. Until simulations of these smaller sized bodies are carried out, we must consider the possibility that such bodies could spiral inward and impact the core. If such material followed an inward spiral trajectory, the earliest possible arrival would be perhaps mid August provided that it followed a spiral similar to that depicted in the sketch below. If the spiral involved many orbitings of the core along a descending spiral path, then there would be a greater delay before energetic activity would be detected. (G2 cloud trajectory showing hypothetical path for both the primary star and smaller debris accreted due to hydrodynamic drag)

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http://etheric.com/galactic-core-still-calm-new-swift-data/ Things still look quiescent at the Galactic center as of October 5th. Just a slight up tick of activity today. Most likely the G2 cloud has passed its pericenter. But there have been no signs of enhanced activity other than the brief spike that occurred around September 10th. At this point we don’t know exactly where the G2 cloud is in

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relation to its Galactic core pericenter. This X-ray chart will be updated on an approximately weekly basis, unless there is an activity alert. At this point the general consensus of astronomers is that the G2 cloud contains at least one star, or possibly two. As stated before, the unanswered question is whether if the G2 cloud contains a star with a planetary system and if the Galactic core is able to tug comets or planets away from the parent star, whether hydrodrag effects of the core’s ion and cosmic ray wind will be sufficient to cause such bodies to spiral into the core and trigger energetic activity. This possibility has been explored in the May 19th posting. Currently, the chance that we will experience a superwave with a prompt cosmic ray impact of the solar system are substantially reduced. Based on what we know now, I don’t expect we will see any splitting of the G2 cloud because any planetary companion bodies would be too small to generate a separating cloud. The learning curve we have gone through in the past year as additional data has come out on the G2 cloud has given us quite a roller coaster ride, leading us once again to an uncertain immediate future. Keep in mind that we should always be prepared for the occurrence of any unexpected space weather event.

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Earth Changes September-October 2014 See “Final Call” – Dreams and visions: Earth’s Core Shifting? (Posted at NES:) http://newearthsummit.org/forum/index.php/topic,105.msg6414.html#msg6414 YouTube 4-minute presentation on geomagnetic pole reversals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn357zRnKxs&list=UUTiL1q9YbrVam5nP2xzFTWQ I also encourage readers to consider these two videos from the recent Electric Universe (EU) conference.

Michael Steinbacher: Catastrophist Geology | EU2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDbDMlEWIIY&index=24&list=PLwOAYhBuU3UfklHQ8Rb1sOzkSAw50fCfc

Published on Aug 25, 2014 The modern awareness that plasma composes most of the universe requires a reevaluation of theories dating from earlier times. Plasma is electrically active and employs forces that can be many times stronger than those of mechanical erosion and tectonics. One possible model envisions the globe enveloped in plasma discharges within the memory of humans. Material from space and from electrical erosion of the surface was suddenly sorted and deposited electrically to a great depth. Dust, sand, gravel, rocks, boulders, coal, and oil accumulated wherever there was dry land. Red-hot dust blown by electrically generated tornado-like winds built up strata in place: “plastered” against obstructions in a manner similar to welded material. Flooding filled the valleys between the mountains with sediments. Where electrical activity was strong enough, the loose material was lithified and even metamorphosed. In this presentation, the Four Corners region in the US is presented as an example.

Dr. Michael Clarage: Earth's Electric Environment | EU2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2W5jaxKlgU&list=PLwOAYhBuU3UfklHQ8Rb1sOzkSAw50fCfc&index=1

Published on Apr 2, 2014 Dr. Michael Clarage shares new observations of some of the complexities of the Earth's electrical environment. The Sun and Earth are connected in ways very similar to how man-made electrical equipment is connected. These similarities are examined in light of the idea of the entire solar system behaving as a vast electrical transforming apparatus.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn357zRnKxs&list=UUTiL1q9YbrVam5nP2xzFTWQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDbDMlEWIIY&index=24&list=PLwOAYhBuU3UfklHQ8Rb1sOzkSAw50fCfc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDbDMlEWIIY&index=24&list=PLwOAYhBuU3UfklHQ8Rb1sOzkSAw50fCfc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2W5jaxKlgU&list=PLwOAYhBuU3UfklHQ8Rb1sOzkSAw50fCfc&index=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2W5jaxKlgU&list=PLwOAYhBuU3UfklHQ8Rb1sOzkSAw50fCfc&index=1


Earth’s Core September 2014 A recent dream-vision sequence showed me what appeared like an uneven split of the earth’s core –a little like cellular mitosis, or two halved of the brain, etc. They seemed to jiggle around, like in a fluid plastic state. This is discussed further in “Final Call”. A quick Google search turned up a little background: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1996/08.15/PuttingaNewSpin.html The metallic core of our planet is spinning faster than the rest of it, according to evidence unearthed by Harvard geologists. And this hellishly hot core, almost as big as the moon, apparently is growing in size. "It's like a planet within a planet," says Adam Dziewonski, Baird Professor of Science. It's the first major finding about Earth since the 1960s, when geologists confirmed that continents and ocean bottoms drift across the planet's surface at a rate of less than an inch to about four inches a year. "You very seldom make planetary-scale discoveries like these," Dziewonski notes. The inner core itself was only discovered in 1936. Dziewonski and Freeman Gilbert of the University of California, San Diego, proved it was solid, rather than liquid, a scant 25 years ago. In 1986, Andrea Morelli, John Woodhouse, and Dziewonski, working at Harvard, found a strange unevenness, or anisotropy, in the inner core. Shock waves from earthquakes travel through it in a north-south direction faster than in other directions. Geologists attribute this to the crystalline structure that iron, its major ingredient, assumes under the intense pressure near Earth's center, more than a million pounds on every square inch. Two years ago, Dziewonski and research associate Wei-jia Su showed that the axis of symmetry of the iron tilts about 12 degrees from the north-south axis of its rotation. Dziewonski and Su located the asymmetry axis when they analyzed records from 15,722 earthquakes that sent shock waves through the inner core.

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And from http://www.sciencedaily.com/ : Magnetic Substorms May Sometimes Be Driven by Different Process Than Generally Thought Sep. 2, 2014 — Magnetic substorms, the disruptions in geomagnetic activity that cause brightening of aurora, may sometimes be driven by a different process than generally thought, a new study ... full story Scientists Probe Link Between Magnetic Polarity Reversal and Mantle Processes July 31, 2012 — Scientists have discovered that variations in the long-term reversal rate of the Earth's magnetic field may be caused by changes in heat flow from the Earth's core into the base of the Magnetic Field, Mantle Convection and Tectonics July 29, 2012 — On a time scale of tens to hundreds of millions of years, the geomagnetic field may be influenced by currents in the mantle. The frequent polarity reversals of Earth's magnetic field can also be Magnetic Pole Reversal Happens All the (Geologic) Time Nov. 30, 2011 — Scientists understand that Earth's magnetic field has flipped its polarity many times over the millennia. The answer, from the geologic and fossil records we have from hundreds of past magnetic Plate Tectonics May Control Reversals in Earth's Magnetic Field Oct. 21, 2011 — Earth's magnetic field has reversed many times at an irregular rate throughout its history. Long periods without reversal have been interspersed with eras of frequent reversals. What is the

-//- Hawaiian Volcanism http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/book/export/html/111

This review presents some of the current knowledge of volcanoes in Hawai'i. It was originally written for a NASA-sponsored workshop about Hawaiian volcanism. We hope that with this review you can gain a better understanding of the processes and landforms that are associated with Hawaiian volcanoes. Many of these processes and features can also be found at other basaltic volcanoes on Earth. Additionally, Kilauea and Mauna Loa and have also become the primary volcanoes used by planetary geologists as analogs for volcanoes on Mars and Venus.

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http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/book/export/html/111


The Hawaiian shield volcanoes are the largest volcanoes on earth (e.g. Peterson & Moore 1987) rising some 9 km above the ocean floor (see image), with volumes of 42,500 and 24,800 cubic kilometers (not counting subsidence) for Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, respectively. Kilauea is a relatively small bump on the flank of Mauna Loa with a volume of 19,400 cubic kilometers. This can be contrasted to an average of ~100 cubic kilometers for strato volcanoes such as Mount Saint Helens (Wood & Keinle 1990).

-//- Magma in Earth's Mantle Forms Deeper Than Once Thought http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=126475 "When rocks come from deep in the mantle to shallower depths, they cross . . . the solidus [boundary], where rocks begin to undergo partial melting and produce magmas," Dasgupta said. "Scientists knew the effect of a trace amount of carbon dioxide or water would lower this boundary, but our new estimation made it 150-180 kilometers deeper from the known depth of 70 kilometers," he said. "What we are now saying is that with just a trace of carbon dioxide in the mantle, melting can begin as deep as around 200 kilometers When we incorporate the effect of trace water, the magma generation depth becomes at least 250 kilometers."

-//- Unusual behaviour in Earth's inner core explained 11 March 2013 by Harriet Jarlett http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=1402 New research could help explain complex behaviour observed by scientist's in Earth's inner core. The study, by an international team of researchers from Leeds, London and California, shows that rocks could be circulating in the inner core which may explain the unusual behaviour of seismic waves passing through it.

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http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=1402


Observations of the inner core primarily come from seismology - studying the way waves generated during earthquakes move through the Earth. Seismic waves show different behaviour depending on which way and which hemisphere they pass through. Large differences in the time it takes these waves to travel through the inner core suggested to scientists that its structure might be more complex than previously thought. Many simple models were proposed to try to explain these differences but none of them were able to provide an explanation, this new research fills in some of the gaps. Being able to explain the complexities that the inner core exhibits is crucial to understanding how the deep Earth evolved. The growth of the inner core indirectly drives the motion in the outer core which in turn produces the Earth's magnetic field, so understanding the core is integral to understanding this phenomenon. The new study, published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests that differences in seismic wave behaviour may be caused by convection. Convection is the same process which means radiators can heat an entire room. As air near the radiator becomes warms it becomes less dense, this makes it rise and push the cool, denser air near the ceiling out of the way. The cool air is pushed near to the radiator where it warms, and the circulation continues. The same process happens inside the core. 'Slow cooling of the whole Earth is causing the liquid outer core to solidify from the bottom up, adding to the edges of the solid inner core. That material, at the top of the inner core, is denser than the material below,' says Dr Chris Davies, one of the authors of the study, from the University of Leeds, 'When you have dense material overlying light material the light material wants to rise and the dense wants to sink - making it unstable.' It is this instability which causes convection to occur. Some researchers assumed the inner core was hotter in the centre and that this change in temperature – from the centre to the edge – could also cause convection as the cool material at the edge wants to sink. But Davies says the convection is due to heavier, not cooler, material. 'We show the driving force of the convection is different to previous assumptions. Instead of the driving force being a difference in temperature, it's now a difference in composition.' Previous work showed the inner core should be able to transfer most of its heat by passing it through to the next layer by conduction - where the heat moves but the material doesn't. But this would mean there wasn't enough heat left to cause convection.

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So, many scientists were dubious about convection as an explanation for the behaviour of the seismic waves. 'Whilst previous work put a dampener on the convection argument, and it seemed convection wasn't enough to prove these seismic anomalies, we show that convection could be behind the striking inner core complexity we observe.' says Davies. 'We show that this mechanism is possible, in principle.' Inner core convection is a hot topic in deep Earth research at the moment and, while this study shows convection is possible in theory, the next stage is to know what this might look like in reality, using dynamic simulations. D. Gubbins, D. Alfè, C. J. Davies (2013) Compositional instability of earth's solid inner core Geophysical Research Letters DOI: 10.1002/grl.50186

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Growth of Earth's inner core may be a precursor to the magnetic reversal July 18, 2012 http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2012/07/18/growth-of-earths-inner-core-may-be-a-precursor-to-the-magnetic-reversal/ A new finding suggests that shifts in the geomagnetic field are connected to growth of the inner core. Peter Olson and Renaud Deguen of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, used numerical modelling to establish that the axis of Earth's magnetic field lies in the growing hemisphere. While one side of Earth's solid inner core grows slightly, the other half melts.

As the Earth spins, the molten iron inside churns and flows in a fairly stable manner for millennia. For some reason during geomagnetic reversal, some instability causes an interruption to the steady generation of a global magnetic field, causing it to flip-flop between the poles. In addition to the North-South dipole, there is a weaker magnetic field spread around the planet, probably generated in the outer core of the Earth. The magnetic field strength is currently experiencing a downward trend. Should the stronger dipole (north-south) field reduce below the magnetic field strength of this usually weaker, distributed field, a geomagnetic reversal is possible. Researchers speculate that rapid movements of the field's axis to the east in the last few hundred years may be a precursor to the north and south poles trading places. Earth's magnetic field reverses direction every few thousand years, and if it happened now, we would be exposed to solar winds capable of knocking out global

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http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2012/07/18/growth-of-earths-inner-core-may-be-a-precursor-to-the-magnetic-reversal/


communications and power grids. Seismic images of Earth’s inner core reveal an east–west dichotomy. This dichotomy has been interpreted as lopsided growth, with faster solidification on one hemisphere of the inner core boundary, and slower solidification and perhaps melting on the other. New study suggest a correlation between these shifts and reversals of Earth's magnetic field.

Bruce Buffett of the University of California, Berkeley, says the authors present an intriguing proof of concept with their model. Most of the time the Earth’s field is dominated by a geocentric axial dipole component, with normal and reversed polarities represented in essentially equal portions. Polarity reversals are the transitions between these two states. Excursions are possibly related phenomena. During an excursion the field departs substantially from a geocentric axial dipole for a few thousand years, then returns to its original polarity.

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The geomagnetic dipole moment has decreased by nearly 6% per century since first measured by Gauss in the 1840s. This is 10-20 times faster than the Ohmic decay rate of the fundamental mode dipole field in the core (upper left). The causes of this rapid decrease are the proliferation of reverse magnetic field on the core-mantle boundary, especially beneath the South Atlantic (upper right), and the advection of magnetic field from high to low latitudes by flow in the outer core (lower left). The combination of advection of magnetic field on the core-mantle boundary and radial diffusion of through the core-mantle boundary is weakening the dipole moment (lower right).

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The Earth’s field has alternated between periods of normal polarity, in which the direction of the field was the same as the present direction, and reverse polarity, in which the field was in the opposite direction. These periods are called chrons. The time spans of chrons are randomly distributed with most being between 0.1 and 1 million years. Most reversals are estimated to take between 1,000 and 10,000 years. The latest one, the Brunhes–Matuyama reversal, occurred 780,000 years ago. But brief disruptions that do not result in reversal are called geomagnetic excursions. Motion of the earth’s liquid core, the so-called geodynamo, generates its magnetic field. Gauthier Hulot of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris and his colleagues used satellite data recorded 20 years apart to track changes in this field. In two regions of the boundary between the earth’s core and the overlying mantle, the researchers detected a reversed magnetic field. In a section lying beneath the southern tip of Africa, the magnetic field points toward the center of the earth opposite to the dominant outward-pointing field of the Southern Hemisphere. And a second congregation of reversed-flux patches exists near the North Pole. Having modeled the growth and movement of these inverted-flux sections, they can now account for nearly the entire decrease in the main dipole field of the earth over the past 150 years.

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After some 400 years of relative stability, Earth’s North Magnetic Pole has moved nearly 1,100 kilometers out into the Arctic Ocean during the last century and at its present rate could move from northern Canada to Siberia within the next half-century. However, rapid movement of the magnetic pole doesn’t necessarily mean that our planet is going through a large-scale change that would result in the reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field. It may also be part of a normal oscillation. Calculations of the North Magnetic Pole’s location from historical records goes back only about 400 years, while polar observations trace back to John Ross in 1838 at the west coast of Boothia Peninsula. Some scientists point that the Northern Lights, which are triggered by the sun and fixed in position by the magnetic field, drift with the movement of the North Magnetic Pole and may soon be visible in more southerly parts of Siberia and Europe – and less so in northern Canada and Alaska. Source: Nature Geoscience, NewScientist, John Hopkins University, ScientificAmerican, Oregon State University. Featured image: Schematic illustration of Earth's magnetic field. Credit/Copyright: Peter Reid, The University of Edinburgh

-//- Compositional instability of Earth's solid inner core Gubbins D, Alfe D, Davies CJ https://scripps.ucsd.edu/biblio/compositional-instability-earths-solid-inner-core Abstract: All models that invoke convection to explain the observed seismic variations in Earth's inner core require unstable inner core stratification. Previous work has assumed that chemical effects are stabilizing and focused on thermal convection, but recent calculations indicate that the thermal conductivity at core temperatures and pressures is so large that the inner core must cool entirely by conduction. We examine partitioning of oxygen, sulfur, and silicon in binary iron alloys and show that inner core growth results in a variable light element concentration with time: oxygen concentration decreases, sulfur concentration decreases initially and increases later, and silicon produces a negligible effect to within the model errors. The result is a net destabilizing concentration gradient. Convective stability is measured by a Rayleigh number, which exceeds the critical value for reasonable estimates of the viscosity and diffusivity. Our results suggest that inner core convection models, including the recently proposed translational mode, can be viable candidates for explaining seismic results if the driving force is compositional.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1506

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22059-growth-of-earths-core-may-hint-at-magnetic-reversal.html?

http://www.jhu.edu/

http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2012/07/18/growth-of-earths-inner-core-may-be-a-precursor-to-the-magnetic-reversal/Motion%20of%20the%20earth%E2%80%99s%20liquid%20core,%20the%20so-called%20geodynamo,%20generates%20its%20magnetic%20field.%20Gauthier%20Hulot%20of%20the%20Institut%20de%20Physique%20du%20Globe%20de%20Paris%20and%20his%20colleagues%20used%20satellite%20data%20recorded%2020%20years%20apart%20to%20track%20changes%20in%20this%20field.%20In%20two%20regions%20of%20the%20boundary%20between%20the%20earth%E2%80%99s%20core%20and%20the%20overlying%20mantle,%20the%20researchers%20detected%20a%20reversed%20magnetic%20field.%20In%20a%20section%20lying%20beneath%20the%20southern%20tip%20of%20Africa,%20the%20magnetic%20field%20points%20toward%20the%20center%20of%20the%20earth%20opposite%20to%20the%20dominant%20outward-pointing%20field%20of%20the%20Southern%20Hemisphere.%20And%20a%20second%20congregation%20of%20reversed-flux%20patches%20exists%20near%20the%20North%20Pole.%20Having%20modeled%20the%20growth%20and%20movement%20of%20these%20inverted-flux%20sections,%20they%20can%20now%20account%20for%20nearly%20the%20entire%20decrease%20in%20the%20main%20dipole%20field%20of%20the%20earth%20over%20the%20past%20150%20years.

http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2012/07/18/growth-of-earths-inner-core-may-be-a-precursor-to-the-magnetic-reversal/oregonstate.edu/

https://scripps.ucsd.edu/biblio?f%5bauthor%5d=1221



https://scripps.ucsd.edu/biblio/compositional-instability-earths-solid-inner-core


Anomalous splitting of core sensitive modes: a reevaluation of possible interpretations B. Romanowicz and L. Bréger Introduction http://seismo.berkeley.edu/annual_report/ar98_99/node27.html Inner core anisotropy was proposed 13 years ago to explain two categories of intriguing observations: (1) faster propagation times for seismic body waves that travel through the inner core along paths quasi-parallel to the earth's rotation axis, than for those that travel on equatorial paths (Poupinet et al., 1983; Morelli et al., 1986), and (2) anomalous splitting of core-sensitive free oscillations (Masters and Gilbert, 1981; Woodhouse et al., 1986). These observations have been confirmed in many subsequent studies (e.g. Shearer, 1991; Creager, 1992; Vinnik et al., 1994; Su and Dziewonski, 1995) and models of inner core anisotropy have been progressively refined. These models were originally cast in terms of constant transverse isotropy with fast axis parallel to the earth's rotation axis, for which an interpretation in terms of alignment of hcp-Fe crystals was proposed. Over the years, inner core anisotropy models have become more complex. Depth dependence was introduced (Su and Dziewonski, 1995; Tromp, 1993) and more complex spatial dependence suggested (Li et al., 1991; Romanowicz et al., 1996; Durek and Romanowicz, 1999). Most recently, several studies have proposed even stronger departures from simple models of inner core anisotropy. An asymmetry in the anisotropy pattern was pointed out (Tanaka and Hamaguchi, 1997; Creager, 1999), with one "quasi-hemisphere" of the inner core anisotropic and the other not, and it has been argued that the top 100-200 km of the inner core may be isotropic and laterally varying (Song and Helmberger, 1998). Strong, small scale variation in the anisotropy along a highly anomalous path between the South Sandwich Islands and station COL in Alaska has also been documented (Creager, 1997). The necessity to modify the simple original model of constant anisotropy, and introduce significant complexity, has become quite clear. Moreover, we have recently proposed that an important contribution to the trend of travel time residuals, as a function of angle of the path with respect to the rotation axis, for PKP(AB)-PKP(DF) data, could come from strong heterogeneity in D" (Bréger et al., 1999a) and we proposed a possible trade-off between D" structure and inner core anisotropy in the interpretation of differential PKP travel time data (also PKP(BC)-PKP(DF), Bréger et al., 1999b). … Even if we accept an interpretation of PKP observations in terms of a complex inner core anisotropy model, some of the recent observations are in contradiction with the normal mode splitting observations. Indeed, since normal modes are primarily sensitive to even order structure, it is difficult to reconcile the hemispherical model (Tanaka and Hamaguchi, 1997; Creager, 1999) with the dominant zonal "C20" component of

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anomalous splitting observations. Likewise, since modes are primarily sensitive to the uppermost third of the inner core, their splitting becomes more difficult to explain in terms of anisotropy if there is an isotropic layer several hundred km thick at the top of the inner core (Durek and Romanowicz, 1999). Alternative interpretations for anomalous mode splitting have been proposed in terms of outer core heterogeneity (Ritzwoller et al., 1988; Widmer et al., 1992). In view of the recent controversies regarding the level and complexity of inner core anisotropy, we have decided to reexamine the issue of interpretation of anomalous mode splitting data. We are assisted in this process by the recent accumulation of high quality low frequency data, owing to the expansion of the global digital broadband network and the occurrence of several very large deep earthquakes, in particular the M8.2 Bolivia earthquake of June 9, 1994. Data Analysis We have assembled a spheroidal mode splitting dataset for 79 normal modes sensitive either primarily to structure in the mantle (42 modes) or both to structure in the mantle and in the core (37 modes). These data are tabulated in terms of measured splitting coefficients, as defined below, from three sources: measurements by Resovsky and Ritzwoller (1998) mostly for mantle modes, by He and Tromp (1996) for a combination of mantle and core modes, complemented by our own dataset, primarily for core modes (Durek and Romanowicz, 1999). Figure 22.1 shows a comparison of C20 measurements from the 3 sources considered, giving a sense of uncertainty on the splitting measurements. In most cases, agreement between different groups are excellent (also with measurements from Laske and Masters, personal communication). We have distinguished mantle modes (top panel) and modes with significant sensitivity to core structure (bottom panel). We classify the latter into "outer core" modes ("oc"), that are not sensitive to inner core structure, and two categories of "inner core" modes: (1) those with less than 4% sensitivity to inner core structure (modes 2S3-21S8, category "ic1") and (2) those with stronger sensitivity to inner core structure (modes 8S1-3S2, category "ic2"). Mode 3S2 has been assigned to category "ic2", only because it has significant sensitivity to S-velocity in the inner core. We will single out this particular mode, which exhibits the strongest anomalous splitting, the largest uncertainties in the measurements, as well as the largest sensitivity to inner core anisotropy. … Two observations are striking: for mantle modes, the predictions of SAW12D follow the data quite closely for all branches, although the amplitudes in the 0S and 1S branches are underpredicted. For core sensitive modes, we note, as previous authors, that the mantle model predicts practically no splitting for modes with any sensitivity to inner core structure, whereas the data consistently show a high level of splitting. This is

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referred to in the literature as "anomalous" splitting. We note that, except for mode 3S2, the level of splitting observed for modes in categories ic1 and ic2 is comparable, with a few modes exhibiting somewhat larger splitting in both datasets (2S3 and 6S3 in ic1 and 13S1, 13S2 in ic2). … The results of our study can be summarized as follows: (1) inner core anisotropy improves the overall fit to data compared to a model with aspherical structure restricted to the mantle; (2) when mode 3S2 is excluded from the dataset, simple models with heterogeneity in the outer core fit the data consistently better than simple inner core anisotropy models; (3) when mode 3S2 is included, overall residual variances are smallest or inner core anisotropy models. However, the splitting of 3S2 is fit at the expense of that of the 5S mantle mode branch, sensitive to P-velocity in the mantle. (4) outer core models are more stable and consistent with each other than inner core models, when different subsets of core modes are inverted (i.e. modes with small versus large sensitivity in the inner core).(5) Lateral heterogeneity in the mantle alone (in particular D") cannot consistently account for the splitting of all modes. Simple anisotropic models of the inner core are therefore not sufficient to simultaneously explain the splitting of spheroidal mantle and core modes, and a combination of deep mantle and outer core structure contributes significantly to the pattern of splitting. The outer core structure retrieved is consistent with either heterogeneity associated with the Taylor cylinder tangent to the earth's inner core, or the possible existence of a stagnant layer at the top of the outer core, enriched in light material. In the latter case, we conjecture that a small amount of shear could help reconcile the large splitting of 3S2 with that of other core and mantle modes. Such models deserve further investigation. References, etc.

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Why Earth's Magnetic Field Is Wonky Becky Oskin, OurAmazingPlanet Contributor | July 18, 2012 09:53am ET http://www.livescience.com/21668-why-earth-magnetic-field-wonky.html The solution to a long-standing puzzle, why magnetic north sits off the coast of Canada, rather than at the North Pole, may have been found in the strange, lopsided nature of Earth's inner core. The inner core is a ball of solid iron about 760 miles (1,220 kilometers) wide. It is surrounded by a liquid outer core (mostly iron and nickel), a rocky, viscous mantle layer and a thin, solid crust. As the inner core cools, crystallizing iron releases impurities, sending lighter molten material into the liquid outer core. This upwelling, combined with the Earth's rotation, drives convection, forcing the molten metal into whirling vortices. These vortices stretch and twist magnetic field lines, creating Earth’s magnetic field. Currently, the center of the field, called an axis, emerges in the Arctic Ocean west of Ellesmere Island, about 300 miles (500 kilometers) from the geographic North Pole. In the last decade, seismic waves from earthquakes revealed the inner core looks like a navel orange, bulging slightly more on its western half. Geoscientists recently explainedthe asymmetry by proposing a convective loop: The inner core might be crystallizing on one half and melting on the other. Peter Olson and Renaud Deguen, geophysicists at Johns Hopkins University, set out to test this theory, called translational instability. They ran numerical models simulating the forces that generate Earth’s magnetic field, and included a lopsided inner core. Olson and Deguen found that adding inner-core asymmetry shifted magnetic north away from the center of the Earth, into the cooling hemisphere. Convection was stronger there, as was the magnetic field. "The lopsided growth of the inner core makes convection in the outer core a little bit lopsided, and that then induces the geomagnetic field to have this lopsided or eccentric

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http://www.livescience.com/30430-earth-magnetosphere-magnetic-field.html

http://www.livescience.com/11362-north-south-poles-10-wild-differences.html

http://www.livescience.com/8409-earth-core-move.html

http://www.livescience.com/8409-earth-core-move.html


character too," Olson told OurAmazingPlanet. Olson and Deguen's research was detailed online July 1 in the journal Nature Geoscience. Geophysicist Bruce Buffett said Olson and Deguen’s research is intriguing, but there are still questions about the underlying theory. "It's an interesting result, but we don't know for sure the inner core is translating. The model does a good job at explaining some but not all of the features of the inner core," said Buffett, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the research. Olson points out that his numerical model offers a real-world proof of the theory. Magnetic particles trapped and aligned in rocks reveal that the magnetic north pole wandered around the Western Hemisphere over the past 10,000 years, and circled the Eastern Hemisphere before that — a result mirrored by the numerical test. Gathering a longer, more detailed record of the magnetic field's behavior, Olson said, could reveal whether the inner core acts as researchers predict. "The key question for interesting ideas like translational instability is, 'Can we test it?'" Olson said. "What we're doing is proposing a test, and we think it's a good test because people can go out and look for eccentricity in the rock record and that will either confirm or shoot down this idea." This article was provided by OurAmazingPlanet, a sister site to LiveScience.

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Earth's magnetic field could flip within a human lifetime October 14, 2014 - University of California – Berkeley http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141014170841.htm

Summary:

Earth's last magnetic reversal took place 786,000 years ago and happened very quickly, in less than 100 years -- roughly a human lifetime. The rapid flip, much faster than the thousands of years most geologists thought, comes as new measurements show the planet's magnetic field is weakening 10 times faster than normal and could drop to zero in a few thousand years.

The 'north pole' -- that is, the direction of magnetic north -- was reversed a million years ago. This map shows how, starting about 789,000 years ago, the north pole wandered around Antarctica for several thousand years before flipping 786,000 years ago to the orientation we know today, with the pole somewhere in the Arctic.

Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Berkeley Imagine the world waking up one morning to discover that all compasses pointed south instead of north. It's not as bizarre as it sounds. Earth's magnetic field has flipped -- though not overnight -- many times throughout the planet's history. Its dipole magnetic field, like that of a bar magnet, remains about the same intensity for thousands to millions of years, but for incompletely known reasons it occasionally weakens and, presumably over a few thousand years, reverses direction. Now, a new study by a team of scientists from Italy, France, Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrates that the last magnetic reversal 786,000 years ago actually happened very quickly, in less than 100 years -- roughly a human lifetime.

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"It's amazing how rapidly we see that reversal," said UC Berkeley graduate student Courtney Sprain. "The paleomagnetic data are very well done. This is one of the best records we have so far of what happens during a reversal and how quickly these reversals can happen." Sprain and Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and a UC Berkeley professor-in- residence of earth and planetary science, are coauthors of the study, which will be published in the November issue of Geophysical Journal International and is now available online. Flip could affect electrical grid, cancer rates The discovery comes as new evidence indicates that the intensity of Earth's magnetic field is decreasing 10 times faster than normal, leading some geophysicists to predict a reversal within a few thousand years. Though a magnetic reversal is a major planet-wide event driven by convection in Earth's iron core, there are no documented catastrophes associated with past reversals, despite much searching in the geologic and biologic record. Today, however, such a reversal could potentially wreak havoc with our electrical grid, generating currents that might take it down. And since Earth's magnetic field protects life from energetic particles from the sun and cosmic rays, both of which can cause genetic mutations, a weakening or temporary loss of the field before a permanent reversal could increase cancer rates. The danger to life would be even greater if flips were preceded by long periods of unstable magnetic behavior. "We should be thinking more about what the biologic effects would be," Renne said. Dating ash deposits from windward volcanoes The new finding is based on measurements of the magnetic field alignment in layers of ancient lake sediments now exposed in the Sulmona basin of the Apennine Mountains east of Rome, Italy. The lake sediments are interbedded with ash layers erupted from the Roman volcanic province, a large area of volcanoes upwind of the former lake that includes periodically erupting volcanoes near Sabatini, Vesuvius and the Alban Hills. Italian researchers led by Leonardo Sagnotti of Rome's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology measured the magnetic field directions frozen into the sediments as they accumulated at the bottom of the ancient lake. Sprain and Renne used argon-argon dating, a method widely used to determine the ages of rocks, whether they're thousands or billions of years old, to determine the age of ash layers above and below the sediment layer recording the last reversal. These dates were confirmed by their colleague and former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Sebastien

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Nomade of the Laboratory of Environmental and Climate Sciences in Gif-Sur-Yvette, France. Because the lake sediments were deposited at a high and steady rate over a 10,000-year period, the team was able to interpolate the date of the layer showing the magnetic reversal, called the Matuyama-Brunhes transition, at approximately 786,000 years ago. This date is far more precise than that from previous studies, which placed the reversal between 770,000 and 795,000 years ago. "What's incredible is that you go from reverse polarity to a field that is normal with essentially nothing in between, which means it had to have happened very quickly, probably in less than 100 years," said Renne. "We don't know whether the next reversal will occur as suddenly as this one did, but we also don't know that it won't." Unstable magnetic field preceded 180-degree flip Whether or not the new finding spells trouble for modern civilization, it likely will help researchers understand how and why Earth's magnetic field episodically reverses polarity, Renne said. The magnetic record the Italian-led team obtained shows that the sudden 180-degree flip of the field was preceded by a period of instability that spanned more than 6,000 years. The instability included two intervals of low magnetic field strength that lasted about 2,000 years each. Rapid changes in field orientations may have occurred within the first interval of low strength. The full magnetic polarity reversal -- that is, the final and very rapid flip to what the field is today -- happened toward the end of the most recent interval of low field strength. Renne is continuing his collaboration with the Italian-French team to correlate the lake record with past climate change. Renne and Sprain's work at the Berkeley Geochronology Center was supported by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.

Story Source: The above story is based on materials provided by University of California - Berkeley. The original article was written by Robert Sanders. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference: L. Sagnotti, G. Scardia, B. Giaccio, J. C. Liddicoat, S. Nomade, P. R. Renne, C. J. Sprain. Extremely rapid directional change during Matuyama-Brunhes geomagnetic polarity reversal. Geophysical Journal International, 2014; 199 (2): 1110 DOI: 10.1093/gji/ggu287

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http://www.berkeley.edu/

http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggu287


Earth’s Iron Core is not ‘Rock Solid’ May 2013 http://www.futurity.org/earths-iron-core-is-not-rock-solid Researchers squeezed iron at pressures as high as 3 million times that felt at sea level to recreate conditions at Earth’s center. The results suggest the core is uneven, grainy, and weak.

-//- http://www.space.com/23131-earth-magnetic-field-shift-explained.html Earth's magnetic field shields the planet from charged particles streaming from the sun, keeping it from becoming a barren, Mars-like rock. For more than 300 years, scientists have recorded a westward-drifting feature in the field that models have been unable to explain. Since the magnetic field shields Earth from harmful solar radiation, which could strip the planet of its protective atmosphere, it is important to understand how it changes and will change over time. [Earth's magnetic field is weakening overall and may undergo reversal in near future. During this reversal period, magnetic fields may become extremely low, approaching zero with chaotic interactions during the transition phase. –ASK]

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The Truth about Earth's Core? http://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/Phys-earth-core.html In fact, for at least the last 160 million years, as known from evidence preserved in the geological record, Earth's magnetic field has often reversed polarity. The story is told by tiny magnetic domains in layered basalts on land and on the spreading ocean floors, frozen in different orientations. Core spin isn't implicated, however. The solid inner core turns only once every 120 years or so, relative to the rest of the planet. No one knows the real reason for field reversals. [ The sun is the most likely suspect as its field influences the earth's field and the sun's field has been reversing polarity this year. –ASK ]

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http://www.space.com/23131-earth-magnetic-field-shift-explained.html

http://www.space.com/11187-earth-magnetic-field-solar-wind.html

http://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/Phys-earth-core.html


Glatzmaier has the best model for flow in the liquid core, which is very hard to do in 3-D," says Muller. "His simulation incidentally produced one rapid, spontaneous field reversal -- not surprising, but presumably reassuring to him, since his field-reversal theory is chaos theory." "There is a long literature on the association of asteroid/comet impacts and magnetic field reversals," Muller says. "The association of mass extinctions with impacts is well known, of course. And there is also an association of mass extinctions with flood basalts." But how could impacts lead to flood basalts -- outpourings of thin fluid lava covering vast areas? Muller surmised that a sufficiently powerful oblique impact would unleash a CMB avalanche big enough to strip a patch of the lower mantle bare of insulating sediments. Hot iron would heat the exposed mantle rapidly; within a few million years a plume of magma would rise to the crust and burst out in titanic eruptions. http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/HCV/mloa-eruptions.html [ And here, in a summary of the Launa Loa eruptions in Hawaii, there is mention of rapid "erosion" of ancient spatter cones by the unusually hot and fluid lava. I would suggest the spatter cone material was as much or more re-melted, as it would be mechanically "eroded". So an interesting note with regard to the sequence shown me in which crustal material would become dissolved by very hot lava flowing from deep under the crust. -ASK ].

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Earth's lower mantle chemistry breakthrough May 22, 2014 http://phys.org/news/2014-05-earth-mantle-chemistry-breakthrough.html#inlRlv

Breaking research news from a team of scientists led by Carnegie's Ho-kwang "Dave" Mao reveals that the composition of the Earth's lower mantle may be significantly different than previously thought. These results are to be published by Science. The lower mantle comprises 55 percent of the planet by volume and extends from 670 and 2900 kilometers in depth, as defined by the so-called transition zone (top) and the core-mantle boundary (below). Pressures in the lower mantle start at 237,000 times atmospheric pressure (24 gigapascals) and reach 1.3 million times atmospheric pressure (136 gigapascals) at the core-mantle boundary. The prevailing theory has been that the majority of the lower mantle is made up of a single ferromagnesian silicate mineral, commonly called perovskite (Mg,Fe)SiO3) defined through its chemistry and structure. It was thought that perovskite didn't change structure over the enormous range of pressures and temperatures spanning the lower mantle.

Recent experiments that simulate the conditions of the lower mantle using laser-heated diamond anvil cells, at pressures between 938,000 and 997,000 times atmospheric pressure (95 and 101 gigapascals) and temperatures between 3,500 and 3,860 degrees Fahrenheit (2,200 and 2,400 Kelvin), now reveal that iron bearing perovskite is, in fact, unstable in the lower mantle.

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http://phys.org/tags/atmospheric+pressure/


The team finds that the mineral disassociates into two phases one a magnesium silicate perovskite missing iron, which is represented by the Fe portion of the chemical formula, and a new mineral, that is iron-rich and hexagonal in structure, called the H-phase. Experiments confirm that this iron-rich H-phase is more stable than iron bearing perovskite, much to everyone's surprise. This means it is likely a prevalent and previously unknown species in the lower mantle. This may change our understanding of the deep Earth.

"We still don't fully understand the chemistry of the H-phase," said lead author Li Zhang, also of Carnegie. "But this finding indicates that all geodynamic models need to be reconsidered to take the H-phase into account. And there could be even more unidentified phases down there in the lower mantle as well, waiting to be identified."

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When the Hawaiian Islands collapse and fall apart in landslides January 28, 2014 by The Extinction Protocol http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2014/01/28/when-the-hawaii-islands-collapse-and-fall-apart-in-landslides/

January 28, 2014 – HAWAII - In our January Volcano Watch articles — Hawaii Island’s fifth annual Volcano Awareness Month — we are exploring important questions about how Hawaiian volcanoes work. Last week, we discussed how Hawaiian Islands grow; this week, we talk about how they fall apart. In 1964, irregular submarine topography north of Oahu and Molokai was identified in newly available maps of the sea floor made by the U.S. Navy. James Moore, then Scientist-in-Charge at the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, suggested that this odd bathymetry might reflect massive landslides originating from those islands. Moore’s interpretation was disputed for more than 20 years until comprehensive mapping of the sea floor around the entire state of Hawaii

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was completed in the late 1980s. It turned out that Moore was right. Large — even catastrophic — submarine landslide structures litter the sea floor around the Hawaiian Islands. In fact, 17 major landslides have been identified off the shores of the main Hawaiian Islands. Fortunately, these slides are exceedingly rare — occurring, on average, only once every 350,000 years. The largest landslides constitute significant portions of the islands from which they originated. Imagine if 10 percent of one of the islands suddenly collapsed into the ocean. Such an event would displace a huge amount of water and cause a large tsunami. Deposits of coral and sand have been found approximately 1,000 feet above sea level on several of the Hawaiian Islands. Catastrophic landslides are believed to have generated gigantic tsunami waves that washed ashore and left these deposits behind. Evidence across the Hawaiian Islands suggests that landslides occur during all stages of a volcano’s life. The submarine volcano Loihi — the youngest in the Hawaiian chain, located southeast of Hawaii Island — is characterized by a number of small landslides, even though the volcano hasn’t yet breached the surface of the ocean. On the other hand, large landslides from Oahu and Molokai clearly occurred well after the islands were established above sea level. We also know that not all landslides in Hawaii are catastrophic. The south flank of Kilauea is sliding continuously into the ocean at a rate of about 3 inches a year. This motion is punctuated by large, devastating earthquakes that can cause tens of feet of seaward motion in just a few seconds — as when the magnitude 7.7 temblor struck Hawaii Island in 1975 — as well as “slow earthquakes” that are associated with a few inches of seaward motion over the course of one to two days. Will Kilauea’s south flank ever collapse suddenly? Since the shape of the south flank indicates that the slide has been active for thousands of years, there is no reason to expect that its behavior will change any time soon. Although most evidence suggests that it will continue to sag gradually, this question remains open to interpretation. What, then, causes large landslides in Hawaii? Models suggest that magma pressure alone is not adequate to produce a massive landslide. One can imagine a scenario, however, in which a large eruption weakens an already unstable volcano, allowing gravity to pull the volcano apart. Future scientific research must focus on the mechanism for giant landslides in Hawaii, which represent a major, infrequent hazard. Since other volcanic islands — such as the Canaries and the Azores — are also subject to catastrophic collapse, lessons learned from the Hawaii example might be fruitfully applied to mitigating hazards for the benefit of citizens elsewhere around the world. Next week, our annual Volcano Awareness Month Volcano Watch series will conclude with an examination of questions related to volcano monitoring. -WHT

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http://westhawaiitoday.com/news/volcano-update/slip-sliding-away-disassembling-hawaiian-volcanoes


Textbook Theory Behind Volcanoes May be Wrong Sep 08, 2014 http://phys.org/news/2014-09-textbook-theory-volcanoes-wrong.html

In the typical textbook picture, volcanoes, such as those that are forming the Hawaiian islands, erupt when magma gushes out as narrow jets from deep inside Earth. But that picture is wrong, according to a new study from researchers at Caltech and the University of Miami in Florida. New seismology data are now confirming that such narrow jets don't actually exist, says Don Anderson, the Eleanor and John R. McMillian Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus, at Caltech. In fact, he adds, basic physics doesn't support the presence of these jets, called mantle plumes, and the new results corroborate those fundamental ideas.

"Mantle plumes have never had a sound physical or logical basis," Anderson says. "They are akin to Rudyard Kipling's 'Just So Stories' about how giraffes got their long necks."

Anderson and James Natland, a professor emeritus of marine geology and geophysics at the University of Miami, describe their analysis online in the September 8 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to current mantle-plume theory, Anderson explains, heat from Earth's core somehow generates narrow jets of hot magma that gush through the mantle and to the surface. The jets act as pipes that transfer heat from the core, and how exactly they're created isn't clear, he says. But they have been assumed to exist, originating near where the Earth's core meets the mantle, almost 3,000 kilometers underground—nearly halfway to the planet's center. The jets are theorized to be no more than about 300 kilometers wide, and when they reach the surface, they produce hot spots.

While the top of the mantle is a sort of fluid sludge, the uppermost layer is rigid rock, broken up into plates that float on the magma-bearing layers. Magma from the mantle beneath the plates bursts through the plate to create volcanoes. As the plates drift across the hot spots, a chain of volcanoes forms—such as the island chains of Hawaii and Samoa.

"Much of solid-Earth science for the past 20 years—and large amounts of money—have been spent looking for elusive narrow mantle plumes that wind their way upward through the mantle," Anderson says.

To look for the hypothetical plumes, researchers analyze global seismic activity. Everything from big quakes to tiny tremors sends seismic waves echoing through

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Earth's interior. The type of material that the waves pass through influences the properties of those waves, such as their speeds. By measuring those waves using hundreds of seismic stations installed on the surface, near places such as Hawaii, Iceland, and Yellowstone National Park, researchers can deduce whether there are narrow mantle plumes or whether volcanoes are simply created from magma that's absorbed in the sponge-like shallower mantle.

No one has been able to detect the predicted narrow plumes, although the evidence has not been conclusive. The jets could have simply been too thin to be seen, Anderson says. Very broad features beneath the surface have been interpreted as plumes or super-plumes, but, still, they're far too wide to be considered narrow jets.

But now, thanks in part to more seismic stations spaced closer together and improved theory, analysis of the planet's seismology is good enough to confirm that there are no narrow mantle plumes, Anderson and Natland say. Instead, data reveal that there are large, slow, upward-moving chunks of mantle a thousand kilometers wide.

In the mantle-plume theory, Anderson explains, the heat that is transferred upward via jets is balanced by the slower downward motion of cooled, broad, uniform chunks of mantle. The behavior is similar to that of a lava lamp, in which blobs of wax are heated from below and then rise before cooling and falling. But a fundamental problem with this picture is that lava lamps require electricity, he says, and that is an outside energy source that an isolated planet like Earth does not have.

The new measurements suggest that what is really happening is just the opposite: Instead of narrow jets, there are broad upwellings, which are balanced by narrow channels of sinking material called slabs. What is driving this motion is not heat from the core, but cooling at Earth's surface. In fact, Anderson says, the behavior is the regular mantle convection first proposed more than a century ago by Lord Kelvin. When material in the planet's crust cools, it sinks, displacing material deeper in the mantle and forcing it upward.

"What's new is incredibly simple: upwellings in the mantle are thousands of kilometers across," Anderson says. The formation of volcanoes then follows from plate tectonics—the theory of how Earth's plates move and behave. Magma, which is less dense than the surrounding mantle, rises until it reaches the bottom of the plates or fissures that run through them. Stresses in the plates, cracks, and other tectonic forces can squeeze the magma out, like how water is squeezed out of a sponge. That magma then erupts out of the surface as volcanoes. The magma comes from within the upper 200 kilometers of the mantle and not thousands of kilometers deep, as the mantle-plume theory suggests.

"This is a simple demonstration that volcanoes are the result of normal broad-scale convection and plate tectonics," Anderson says. He calls this theory "top-down

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tectonics," based on Kelvin's initial principles of mantle convection. In this picture, the engine behind Earth's interior processes is not heat from the core but cooling at the planet's surface. This cooling and plate tectonics drives mantle convection, the cooling of the core, and Earth's magnetic field. Volcanoes and cracks in the plate are simply side effects.

The results also have an important consequence for rock compositions—notably the ratios of certain isotopes, Natland says. According to the mantle-plume idea, the measured compositions derive from the mixing of material from reservoirs separated by thousands of kilometers in the upper and lower mantle. But if there are no mantle plumes, then all of that mixing must have happened within the upwellings and nearby mantle in Earth's top 1,000 kilometers.

The paper is titled "Mantle updrafts and mechanisms of oceanic volcanism."

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New insight into the temperature of deep Earth May 22, 2014 http://phys.org/news/2014-05-insight-temperature-deep-earth.html#inlRlv

Scientists from the Magma and Volcanoes Laboratory (CNRS) and the European Synchrotron, the ESRF, have recreated the extreme conditions 600 to 2900 km below the Earth's surface to investigate the melting of basalt in the oceanic tectonic plates. They exposed microscopic pieces of rock to these extreme pressures and temperatures while simultaneously studying their structure with the ESRF's extremely powerful X-ray beam. The results show that basalt produced on the ocean floor has a melting temperature lower than the peridotite which forms the Earth's mantle. Near the core-mantle boundary, where the temperature rises rapidly, the melting basalt produces liquids rich in silica (SiO2), which react rapidly with the mantle and indicate a speedy dissolution of the basalt back into the depths of the Earth. These experiments provide a new explanation for seismic anomalies at the base of the mantle while fixing its temperature in the region of 4000 K. The results are published in Science on the 23 May 2014.

The Earth is an active planet. The heat it contains is capable of inducing the mantle convection responsible for plate tectonics. This energy comes from the heat accumulated during the formation of our planet, the latent heat of crystallization of the inner core, and radioactive decay. The temperatures inside the Earth, however, are not well known.

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http://phys.org/news/2014-05-insight-temperature-deep-earth.html%23inlRlv

http://phys.org/tags/melting/

http://phys.org/tags/mantle+convection/

http://phys.org/tags/mantle+convection/

http://phys.org/tags/plate+tectonics/


Convection causes hot material to rise to the surface of the Earth and cold material to sink towards the core. Thus, when the ascending mantle begins to melt at the base of the oceanic ridges, the basalt flows along the surface to form what we call the oceanic crust. "Over the course of millennia the crust will then undergo subduction, its greater density causing it to sink into the mantle. This is why the Earth's continents are known to be several billion years old, while the oldest oceanic crust only dates back 165 million years" said Mohamed Mezouar, scientist at the ESRF.

The temperature at the core-mantle boundary (also known as the D" region) is thought to increase by more than 1000 degrees over a few hundred kilometers, which is significant compared to the temperature gradient across the rest of the mantle. Previous authors have suggested that this temperature rise could cause the partial melting of the mantle, but this hypothesis leaves a number of geophysical observations unexplained. Firstly, the anomalies in the propagation speed of seismic waves do not match those expected for a partial melting of the mantle, and secondly, the melting mantle should lead to the production of liquid pockets in the lowermost mantle, a phenomenon which has never been observed.

The team led by Professor Denis Andrault from the Université Blaise Pascal decided instead to study the melting point of basalt at high depths, and found that it was significantly lower than that of the mantle. The melting of sub-oceanic basalt piles could therefore be responsible for the previously unexplained seismic anomalies. The researchers also showed that the melting basalt generates a liquid rich in SiO2. As the mantle itself contains large quantities of MgO, the interaction of these liquids with the mantle is expected to produce a rapid reaction leading to the formation of the solid MgSiO3 perovskite. This would explain why no liquid pockets have been detected by seismologists in the deep mantle: any streams of liquid should rapidly re-solidify.

If it is indeed the basalt and not the mantle whose melting in the D"-region is responsible for the observed seismic anomalies, then the temperature at the core-mantle boundary must be between 3800 and 4150 Kelvin, between the melting points of basalt and the Earth's mantle. If this hypothesis is correct, this would be the most accurate determination of the temperature at the core-mantle boundary available today. "It could solve a long time controversy about the peculiar role of the core-mantle boundary in the dynamical properties of the Earth mantle, said Professor Denis Andrault. ''We know now that the cycle of crust formation at the mid-ocean ridges and crust dissolution in the lowermost mantle may have occured since plate tectonics were active on our planet'', he added.

More information: "Melting of subducted basalt at the core-mantle boundary," by D. Andrault et al. Science: www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/… 1126/science.1250466; Journal reference: Science

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http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1250466

http://phys.org/journals/science/


Mantle updrafts and mechanisms of oceanic volcanism Don L. Anderson and James H. Natland http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/09/05/1410229111

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Provided by California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Convection in an isolated planet is characterized by narrow downwellings and broad updrafts—consequences of Archimedes’ principle, the cooling required by the second law of thermodynamics, and the effect of compression on material properties. A mature cooling planet with a conductive low-viscosity core develops a thick insulating surface boundary layer with a thermal maximum, a subadiabatic interior, and a cooling highly conductive but thin boundary layer above the core. Parts of the surface layer sink into the interior, displacing older, colder material, which is entrained by spreading ridges. Magma characteristics of intraplate volcanoes are derived from within the upper boundary layer. Upper mantle features revealed by seismic tomography and that are apparently related to surface volcanoes are intrinsically broad and are not due to unresolved narrow jets. Their morphology, aspect ratio, inferred ascent rate, and temperature show that they are passively responding to downward fluxes, as appropriate for a cooling planet that is losing more heat through its surface than is being provided from its core or from radioactive heating. Response to doward flux is the inverse of the heat-pipe/mantle-plume mode of planetary cooling. Shear-driven melt extraction from the surface boundary layer explains volcanic provinces such as Yellowstone, Hawaii, and Samoa. Passive upwellings from deeper in the upper mantle feed ridges and near-ridge hotspots, and others interact with the sheared and metasomatized surface layer. Normal plate tectonic processes are responsible both for plate boundary and intraplate swells and volcanism.

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http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=Don+L.+Anderson&sortspec=date&submit=Submit

http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=James+H.+Natland&sortspec=date&submit=Submit

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/09/05/1410229111

http://phys.org/journals/proceedings-of-the-national-academy-of-sciences/

http://phys.org/partners/california-institute-of-technology/


Earth as Source of Surface Water June 13, 2014 http://newearthsummit.org/forum/index.php/topic,143.msg6416.html#msg6416 Preface I have long supported the concept that petroleum is primarily abiotic – the result of geochemical processes and not result of the ancient plant forests. It does not take multiple PhD’s in petroleum or geology to consider the likelihood of this. There are also plausible explanations of vast deposits of oil having space origins, how these come to so deep under the crust, has yet to be explained satisfactorily in my opinion. Recently, some have considered that materials originating “out in space” contribute water to the Earth’s atmosphere. Now there is discussion over the potential volume of water that is bound into the minerals of the Earth’s lithosphere. This earth-origin water can be suddenly released as steam or can be released slowly enough to form liquid reservoirs deep underground. Three things I find most interesting from this article: A: it suggests how the planetary corpus is the most likely source of the oceans; B: that this water-in-rock can be a factor in the future planetary-wide volcanism. Where there is a great deal of mineral-bound water that is heated to magma, surface eruptions tend to the most violent. When water is heated to high temperatures and is kept under the pressure, the result is the build-up of enormous kinetic potential; and C: underground reservoirs of water can also be thrust upwards due to crustal fracturing, thus becomes an additional source of global flooding during major earth earthchanges. This has been suggested in some tales of the ancient floods and the ancient “gods”. I find it more than a little “interesting” that various translations of some of the earliest writings describing the ancient global floods refer to water coming from under the earth. -Alex

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Vast ocean lays under Earth mantle, may be wellspring for world's oceans http://www.techtimes.com/articles/8474/20140613/earth-houses-400-miles-of-ocean-who-knew.htm By Jim Algar, Tech Times | June 13, 2:20 PM A reservoir of water lying deep under the Earth's surface may contain triple the volume of every one the world's oceans and may even be the "wellspring" source of them, U.S. researchers say. Although not in a liquid form most familiar to all of us -- it is instead bound within rocks deep in the Earth's mantle -- it likely represents the largest reservoir of water on Earth, scientists at the University of New Mexico and Northwestern University say. Writing in the journal Science, they report finding pockets of melted magma 400 miles underneath the North American continent that are likely signatures that water exists at those depths. Scientists have long questioned whether the mantle, the rocky, hot layer between the Earth's crust and its core, might contain water bound up and trapped within rare minerals. The new discovery is evidence water can be transported from the surface of the Earth to great depth by plate tectonics, the movement of continents and plates over the Earth's surface. "Geological processes on the Earth's surface, such as earthquakes or erupting volcanoes, are an expression of what is going on inside the Earth, out of our sight," says geophysicist and study co-author Steve Jacobsen at Northwestern. "I think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle, which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of our habitable planet." Movement and partial melting of rocks in the mantle's transition zone -- a region between the mantle's lower and upper layers from around 250 to 400 miles deep -- could allow water to become tightly bound to the minerals there, the researchers said. To test if the transition zone could be a possible deep water reservoir, the researchers used seismic waves recorded during earthquakes to analyze the structure of the mantle in the zone and to detect if melting is taking place as tectonics drives rocks ever deeper.

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http://www.techtimes.com/articles/8474/20140613/earth-houses-400-miles-of-ocean-who-knew.htm


"If we are seeing this melting, then there has to be this water in the transition zone," University of New Mexico seismologist Brandon Schmandt says. "Melting is just a mechanism of getting rid of the water," he says. If the surface water the Earth possesses today came from such degassing of molten rock, the researchers say, that's in contrast to the theory held by some scientists that water came to a young Earth by way of large, icy comets. It is of course the existence of liquid water on the surface of the Earth that makes our planet habitable and capable of supporting life, which is why its origin is of such interest to science. The latest findings are strong evidence of a process where water has long been cycling between deep interior reservoirs and the surface through the action of plate tectonics, the researchers say. "Scientists have been looking for this missing deep water for decades," Jacobsen says. And they may just have found it.

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New evidence for oceans of water deep in the Earth June 12, 2014 http://phys.org/news/2014-06-evidence-oceans-deep-earth.html#jCp Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico report evidence for potentially oceans worth of water deep beneath the United States. Though not in the familiar liquid form—the ingredients for water are bound up in rock deep in the Earth's mantle—the discovery may represent the planet's largest water reservoir The presence of liquid water on the surface is what makes our "blue planet" habitable, and scientists have long been trying to figure out just how much water may be cycling between Earth's surface and interior reservoirs through plate tectonics. Northwestern geophysicist Steve Jacobsen and University of New Mexico seismologist Brandon Schmandt have found deep pockets of magma located about 400 miles beneath North America, a likely signature of the presence of water at these depths. The discovery suggests water from the Earth's surface can be driven to such great depths by plate tectonics, eventually causing partial melting of the rocks found deep in the mantle.

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The findings, to be published June 13 in the journal Science, will aid scientists in understanding how the Earth formed, what its current composition and inner workings are and how much water is trapped in mantle rock. "Geological processes on the Earth's surface, such as earthquakes or erupting volcanoes, are an expression of what is going on inside the Earth, out of our sight," said Jacobsen, a co-author of the paper. "I think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle, which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of our habitable planet. Scientists have been looking for this missing deep water for decades." Scientists have long speculated that water is trapped in a rocky layer of the Earth's mantle located between the lower mantle and upper mantle, at depths between 250 miles and 410 miles. Jacobsen and Schmandt are the first to provide direct evidence that there may be water in this area of the mantle, known as the "transition zone," on a regional scale. The region extends across most of the interior of the United States. Schmandt, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of New Mexico, uses seismic waves from earthquakes to investigate the structure of the deep crust and mantle. Jacobsen, an associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, uses observations in the laboratory to make predictions about geophysical processes occurring far beyond our direct observation. The study combined Jacobsen's lab experiments in which he studies mantle rock under the simulated high pressures of 400 miles below the Earth's surface with Schmandt's observations using vast amounts of seismic data from the USArray, a dense network of more than 2,000 seismometers across the United States. Jacobsen's and Schmandt's findings converged to produce evidence that melting may occur about 400 miles deep in the Earth. H2O stored in mantle rocks, such as those containing the mineral ringwoodite, likely is the key to the process, the researchers said. Melting of rock at this depth is remarkable because most melting in the mantle occurs much shallower, in the upper 50 miles," said Schmandt, a co-author of the paper. "If there is a substantial amount of H2O in the transition zone, then some melting should take place in areas where there is flow into the lower mantle, and that is consistent with what we found." If just one percent of the weight of mantle rock located in the transition zone is H2O, that would be equivalent to nearly three times the amount of water in our oceans, the researchers said. This water is not in a form familiar to us—it is not liquid, ice or vapor. This fourth form is water trapped inside the molecular structure of the minerals in the mantle rock. The weight of 250 miles of solid rock creates such high pressure, along with temperatures

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above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, that a water molecule splits to form a hydroxyl radical (OH), which can be bound into a mineral's crystal structure. Schmandt and Jacobsen's findings build on a discovery reported in March in the journal Nature in which scientists discovered a piece of the mineral ringwoodite inside a diamond brought up from a depth of 400 miles by a volcano in Brazil. That tiny piece of ringwoodite—the only sample in existence from within the Earth—contained a surprising amount of water bound in solid form in the mineral. "Whether or not this unique sample is representative of the Earth's interior composition is not known, however," Jacobsen said. "Now we have found evidence for extensive melting beneath North America at the same depths corresponding to the dehydration of ringwoodite, which is exactly what has been happening in my experiments." For years, Jacobsen has been synthesizing ringwoodite, colored sapphire-like blue, in his Northwestern lab by reacting the green mineral olivine with water at high-pressure conditions. (The Earth's upper mantle is rich in olivine.) He found that more than one percent of the weight of the ringwoodite's crystal structure can consist of water—roughly the same amount of water as was found in the sample reported in the Nature paper. "The ringwoodite is like a sponge, soaking up water," Jacobsen said. "There is something very special about the crystal structure of ringwoodite that allows it to attract hydrogen and trap water. This mineral can contain a lot of water under conditions of the deep mantle." For the study reported in Science, Jacobsen subjected his synthesized ringwoodite to conditions around 400 miles below the Earth's surface and found it forms small amounts of partial melt when pushed to these conditions. He detected the melt in experiments conducted at the Advanced Photon Source of Argonne National Laboratory and at the National Synchrotron Light Source of Brookhaven National Laboratory. Jacobsen uses small gem diamonds as hard anvils to compress minerals to deep-Earth conditions. "Because the diamond windows are transparent, we can look into the high-pressure device and watch reactions occurring at conditions of the deep mantle," he said. "We used intense beams of X-rays, electrons and infrared light to study the chemical reactions taking place in the diamond cell." Jacobsen's findings produced the same evidence of partial melt, or magma, that Schmandt detected beneath North America using seismic waves. Because the deep mantle is beyond the direct observation of scientists, they use seismic waves—sound waves at different speeds—to image the interior of the Earth. "Seismic data from the USArray are giving us a clearer picture than ever before of the Earth's internal structure beneath North America," Schmandt said. "The melting we see appears to be driven by subduction—the downwelling of mantle material from the surface."

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http://phys.org/tags/upper+mantle/

http://phys.org/tags/crystal+structure/

http://phys.org/tags/deep+mantle/


The melting the researchers have detected is called dehydration melting. Rocks in the transition zone can hold a lot of H2O, but rocks in the top of the lower mantle can hold almost none. The water contained within ringwoodite in the transition zone is forced out when it goes deeper (into the lower mantle) and forms a higher-pressure mineral called silicate perovskite, which cannot absorb the water. This causes the rock at the boundary between the transition zone and lower mantle to partially melt. "When a rock with a lot of H2O moves from the transition zone to the lower mantle it needs to get rid of the H2O somehow, so it melts a little bit," Schmandt said. "This is called dehydration melting." "Once the water is released, much of it may become trapped there in the transition zone," Jacobsen added. Just a little bit of melt, about one percent, is detectible with the new array of seismometers aimed at this region of the mantle because the melt slows the speed of seismic waves, Schmandt said.

-//- Is there an ocean beneath our feet? Jan 27, 2014 http://phys.org/news/2014-01-ocean-beneath-feet.html#inlRlv Scientists at the University of Liverpool have shown that deep sea fault zones could transport much larger amounts of water from the Earth's oceans to the upper mantle than previously thought. Seismologists at Liverpool have estimated that over the age of the Earth, the Japan subduction zone alone could transport the equivalent of up to three and a half times the water of all the Earth's oceans to its mantle. Water is carried to the mantle by deep sea fault zones which penetrate the oceanic plate as it bends into the subduction zone. Subduction, where an oceanic tectonic plate is forced beneath another plate, causes large earthquakes such as the recent Tohoku earthquake, as well as many earthquakes that occur hundreds of kilometers below the Earth's surface. Using seismic modelling techniques the researchers analysed earthquakes which occurred more than 100 km below the Earth's surface in the Wadati-Benioff zone, a plane of Earthquakes that occur in the oceanic plate as it sinks deep into the mantle. Analysis of the seismic waves from these earthquakes shows that they occurred on 1 - 2 km wide fault zones with low seismic velocities. Seismic waves travel slower in these

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http://phys.org/tags/transition+zone/

http://phys.org/tags/transition+zone/


http://phys.org/news/2014-01-ocean-beneath-feet.html%23inlRlv


http://phys.org/tags/fault+zones/

http://phys.org/tags/oceanic+plate/


fault zones than in the rest of the subducting plate because the sea water that percolated through the faults reacted with the oceanic rocks to form serpentinite – a mineral that contains water. Some of the water carried to the mantle by these hydrated fault zones is released as the tectonic plate heats up. This water causes the mantle material to melt, causing volcanoes above the subduction zone such as those that form the Pacific 'ring of fire'. Some water is transported deeper into the mantle, and is stored in the deep Earth. "It has been known for a long time that subducting plates carry oceanic water to the mantle," said Tom Garth, a PhD student in the Earthquake Seismology research group led by Professor Rietbrock. "This water causes melting in the mantle, which leads to arc releasing some of the water back into the atmosphere. Part of the subducted water however is carried deeper into the mantle and may be stored there. "We found that fault zones that form in the deep oceanic trench offshore Northern Japan persist to depths of up to 150 km. These hydrated fault zones can carry large amounts of water, suggesting that subduction zones carry much more water from the ocean down to the mantle than has previously been suggested. This supports the theory that there are large amounts of water stored deep in the Earth. Understanding how much water is delivered to the mantle contributes to our knowledge of how the mantle convects and how it melts. This is important to understanding how plate tectonics began and how the continental crust was formed.

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http://phys.org/tags/subduction+zones/

http://phys.org/tags/water/


Minimizing Predation and Consumption and Waste An Interim Life Form? July 19, 2014 http://newearthsummit.org/forum/index.php/topic,1501.msg6440.html#msg6440 These days, there is very little in the human world to bother paying attention to or expending one’s energy on. However, I continue to keep an eye on certain things from the sciences as well as indicators from that “sphere of insanity” one could loosely term “human affairs”. And so an interesting science article is included here. Is this part of the “alien” terraforming process of Earth? Quite possibly. Has this phenomena been around a very long time on Earth? Possibly. Both could be true. (Bear in mind that it is only recently that the technology has been readily available for humans to conduct such direct observations.) But this is not why I share this here, rather it is that it is one example of how “3d organic life forms” do not need to consume gross matter in order to physically exist –and that it is one phenomena of many that are the basis for the irrelevancy of biological death due to entropic decay. I also refer readers to one of our four concluding essays: “The Queen of the Machine”. Given the environments on Earth where these bacteria can be found, they will likely one example of what would survive the physical cleansing of this planet. Do more complex life forms evolve from simpler ones? Yes, indeed. Is this the only way that complex life forms develop with the capacity for sentiency? No it is not. In other words, evolution through “natural” mutation and adaptation is not some absolute “law”. Beyond the public relations sound bites about medical and industrial applications, there is a keen interest by transhumanists to examine the possibilities presented here to create artificial organic life forms and to use their electrical capacity to enhance advanced computing technology that can house existing consciousness as well as to create organic artificial structures for other forms of consciousness, including but not limited to “artificial intelligences”. However and more importantly, it is that these critters demonstrate some of the principles by which electrical energy can be interfaced directly with the subtle energies of life forms, the subtle energy bodies, and brain-mind processes –as well as spiritual

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consciousness. Those bent upon serving the Darkness will use this for their purposes, those serving the Higher Light will consider how this could be used to serve otherwise. It is all about motive and intent, given whatever vibratory state consciousness is operating from. -Alex ARTICLE: Meet the electric life forms that live on pure energy 17:08 16 July 2014 by Catherine Brahic http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25894 Unlike any other life on Earth, these extraordinary bacteria use energy in its purest form – they eat and breathe electrons – and they are everywhere Associated video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j_gJ2teK5E Stick an electrode in the ground, pump electrons down it, and they will come: living cells that eat electricity. We have known bacteria to survive on a variety of energy sources, but none as weird as this. Think of Frankenstein's monster, brought to life by galvanic energy, except these "electric bacteria" are very real and are popping up all over the place. Unlike any other living thing on Earth, electric bacteria use energy in its purest form – naked electricity in the shape of electrons harvested from rocks and metals. We already knew about two types, Shewanella and Geobacter. Now, biologists are showing that they can entice many more out of rocks and marine mud by tempting them with a bit of electrical juice. Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind- boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity. That should not come as a complete surprise, says Kenneth Nealson at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. We know that life, when you boil it right down, is a flow of electrons: "You eat sugars that have excess electrons, and you breathe in oxygen that willingly takes them." Our cells break down the sugars, and the electrons flow through them in a complex set of chemical reactions until they are passed on to electron-hungry oxygen. In the process, cells make ATP, a molecule that acts as an energy storage unit for almost all living things. Moving electrons around is a key part of making ATP. "Life's

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j_gJ2teK5E

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827915.800-live-wires-the-electric-superorganism-under-your-feet.html



http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1003571


very clever," says Nealson. "It figures out how to suck electrons out of everything we eat and keep them under control." In most living things, the body packages the electrons up into molecules that can safely carry them through the cells until they are dumped on to oxygen. “That's the way we make all our energy and it's the same for every organism on this planet," says Nealson. "Electrons must flow in order for energy to be gained. This is why when someone suffocates another person they are dead within minutes. You have stopped the supply of oxygen, so the electrons can no longer flow." The discovery of electric bacteria shows that some very basic forms of life can do away with sugary middlemen and handle the energy in its purest form – electrons, harvested from the surface of minerals. "It is truly foreign, you know," says Nealson. "In a sense, alien." Nealson's team is one of a handful that is now growing these bacteria directly on electrodes, keeping them alive with electricity and nothing else – neither sugars nor any other kind of nutrient. The highly dangerous equivalent in humans, he says, would be for us to power up by shoving our fingers in a DC electrical socket. To grow these bacteria, the team collects sediment from the seabed, brings it back to the lab, and inserts electrodes into it. First they measure the natural voltage across the sediment, before applying a slightly different one. A slightly higher voltage offers an excess of electrons; a slightly lower voltage means the electrode will readily accept electrons from anything willing to pass them off. Bugs in the sediments can either "eat" electrons from the higher voltage, or "breathe" electrons on to the lower- voltage electrode, generating a current. That current is picked up by the researchers as a signal of the type of life they have captured. "Basically, the idea is to take sediment, stick electrodes inside and then ask 'OK, who likes this?'," says Nealson. Shocking breath At the Goldschmidt geoscience conference in Sacramento, California, last month, Shiue-lin Li of Nealson's lab presented results of experiments growing electricity breathers in sediment collected from Santa Catalina harbour in California. Yamini Jangir, also from the University of Southern California, presented separate experiments which grew electricity breathers collected from a well in Death Valley in the Mojave Desert in California.

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http://dornsife.usc.edu/labs/nealsonlab/members/


Over at the University of Minnesota in St Paul, Daniel Bond and his colleagues have published experiments showing that they could grow a type of bacteria that harvested electrons from an iron electrode (mBio, doi.org/tqg). That research, says Jangir's supervisor Moh El-Naggar, may be the most convincing example we have so far of electricity eaters grown on a supply of electrons with no added food. But Nealson says there is much more to come. His PhD student Annette Rowe has identified up to eight different kinds of bacteria that consume electricity. Those results are being submitted for publication. Nealson is particularly excited that Rowe has found so many types of electric bacteria, all very different to one another, and none of them anything like Shewanella or Geobacter. "This is huge. What it means is that there's a whole part of the microbial world that we don't know about." Discovering this hidden biosphere is precisely why Jangir and El-Naggar want to cultivate electric bacteria. "We're using electrodes to mimic their interactions," says El-Naggar. "Culturing the 'unculturables', if you will." The researchers plan to install a battery inside a gold mine in South Dakota to see what they can find living down there. NASA is also interested in things that live deep underground because such organisms often survive on very little energy and they may suggest modes of life in other parts of the solar system. Electric bacteria could have practical uses here on Earth, however, such as creating biomachines that do useful things like clean up sewage or contaminated groundwater while drawing their own power from their surroundings. Nealson calls them self-powered useful devices, or SPUDs. Practicality aside, another exciting prospect is to use electric bacteria to probe fundamental questions about life, such as what is the bare minimum of energy needed to maintain life. For that we need the next stage of experiments, says Yuri Gorby, a microbiologist at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York: bacteria should be grown not on a single electrode but between two. These bacteria would effectively eat electrons from one electrode, use them as a source of energy, and discard them on to the other electrode. Gorby believes bacterial cells that both eat and breathe electrons will soon be discovered. "An electric bacterium grown between two electrodes could maintain itself virtually forever," says Gorby. "If nothing is going to eat it or destroy it then, theoretically, we should be able to maintain that organism indefinitely."

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http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1013055

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229742.500-weird-organisms-emerge-from-the-deep-dark-biosphere.html

http://faculty.rpi.edu/node/1179


It may also be possible to vary the voltage applied to the electrodes, putting the energetic squeeze on cells to the point at which they are just doing the absolute minimum to stay alive. In this state, the cells may not be able to reproduce or grow, but they would still be able to run repairs on cell machinery. "For them, the work that energy does would be maintaining life – maintaining viability," says Gorby. How much juice do you need to keep a living electric bacterium going? Answer that question, and you've answered one of the most fundamental existential questions there is. This article appeared in print under the headline "The electricity eaters" Wire in the mud Electric bacteria come in all shapes and sizes. A few years ago, biologists discovered that some produce hair-like filaments that act as wires, ferrying electrons back and forth between the cells and their wider environment. They dubbed them microbial nanowires. Lars Peter Nielsen and his colleagues at Aarhus University in Denmark have found that tens of thousands of electric bacteria can join together to form daisy chains that carry electrons over several centimetres – a huge distance for a bacterium only 3 or 4 micrometres long. It means that bacteria living in, say, seabed mud where no oxygen penetrates, can access oxygen dissolved in the seawater simply by holding hands with their friends. Such bacteria are showing up everywhere we look, says Nielsen. One way to find out if you're in the presence of these electron munchers is to put clumps of dirt in a shallow dish full of water, and gently swirl it. The dirt should fall apart. If it doesn't, it's likely that cables made of bacteria are holding it together. Nielsen can spot the glimmer of the cables when he pulls soil apart and holds it up to sunlight (see video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j_gJ2teK5E ). Flexible biocables It's more than just a bit of fun. Early work shows that such cables conduct electricity about as well as the wires that connect your toaster to the mains. That could open up interesting research avenues involving flexible, lab-grown biocables.

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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428712.300-giant-living-power-cables-let-bacteria-respire.html



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j_gJ2teK5E


Spark of life revisited thanks to electric bacteria New Scientist 17 July 2014 Magazine issue 2978. In 1786, a student of Luigi Galvani's at the University of Bologna, Italy, was startled to find that a dead frog's leg kicked when he touched a scalpel to its sciatic nerve. Galvani worked out that the metallic implement had been charged with static electricity, which he took to be the agent that activated muscles in living animals. This idea – which Galvani termed "animal electricity" – went on to become highly influential. Most famously, Mary Shelley wondered if electricity could be used to reanimate the dead (though the lightning-bolt scene familiar from the Frankenstein movie didn't actually feature in Shelley's novel). We've long known that cells use ions dissolved in water to carry out a huge range of functions, from animating our brains to powering our bodies. Now we have found bacteria in the ground that eat electrons from minerals directly, and pass them back out, without the need for the sugars or oxygen that most life forms use to mediate the process (see "Meet the electric life forms that live on pure energy"). These bacteria seem to come in many varieties. There might even be some among the teeming bacterial hordes in your gut. And their discovery means we are on the verge of finding out just how little electricity fundamental life requires. Two hundred and twenty-eight years later, we are still feeling the kick of that frog's leg. This article appeared in print under the headline "Spark of life revisited" http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329781.600-spark-of-life-revisited-thanks-to-electric-bacteria.html#.U8skeHlOVaQ

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http://www.newscientist.com/issue/2978

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25894-meet-the-electric-life-forms-that-live-on-pure-energy.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329781.600-spark-of-life-revisited-thanks-to-electric-bacteria.html%23.U8skeHlOVaQ

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329781.600-spark-of-life-revisited-thanks-to-electric-bacteria.html%23.U8skeHlOVaQ


On the Trail of Dark Energy: Physicists Propose Higgs Boson ‘Portal’ Update 8-12-13 “Current observations of the universe show it is expanding at an accelerated rate. But this acceleration cannot be accounted for on the basis of matter alone. Putting energy in empty space produces a repulsive gravitational force opposing the attractive force produced by matter, including the dark matter that is inferred to dominate the mass of essentially all galaxies, but which doesn’t interact directly with light and, therefore, can only be estimated by its gravitational influence. Because of this phenomenon and because of what is observed in the universe, it is thought that such ‘dark energy’ contributes up to 70 percent of the total energy density in the universe, while observable matter contributes only 2 to 5 percent, with the remaining 25 percent or so coming from dark matter. The source of this dark energy and the reason its magnitude matches the inferred magnitude of the energy in empty space is not currently understood, making it one of the leading outstanding problems in particle physics today. “Our paper makes progress in one aspect of this problem,” said Krauss, a Foundation Professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics, and the director of the Origins Project at ASU. “Now that the Higgs boson has been discovered, it provides a possible ‘portal’ to physics at much higher energy scales through very small possible mixings and couplings to new scalar fields which may operate at these scales.” “We demonstrate that the simplest small mixing, related to the ratios of the scale at which electroweak physics operates, and a possible Grand Unified Scale, produces a possible contribution to the vacuum energy today of precisely the correct order of magnitude to account for the observed dark energy,” Krauss explained. “Our paper demonstrates that a very small energy scale can at least be naturally generated within the context of a very simple extension of the standard model of particle physics.”” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130810063645.htm

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Casimir Effect “The Casimir effect comes about because the universe at the smallest scales is filled with virtual particles leaping in and out of existence. When two metal plates are close together, the gap between them is so small that some of these particles cannot form. That creates an excess of virtual particles on the other sides of the plates which pushes them together.” https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/8dc2ed4cfd08

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“The All of Creation is calling all of Itself in to complete its own greater purposes.

This vastness is ‘home’, and each miniscule part of Itself has a

home within this vast home.”

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https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/8dc2ed4cfd08


Image: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap141007.html

From the Temple of the Sun to the Temple of the Moon Image Credit & Copyright: Dave Lane

Explanation: What connects the Sun to the Moon? Many answers have been given throughout history, but in the case of today's featured image, it appears to be the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. The 16-image panorama was taken in Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, USA where two sandstone monoliths -- the Temple of the Moon on the left and the Temple of the Sun on the right -- rise dramatically from the desert. Each natural monument stands about 100 meters tall and survives from the Jurassic period 160 million years ago. Even older are many of the stars and nebula that dot the celestial background, including the Andromeda Galaxy. Tomorrow the Earth will connect the Sun to the Moon by way of its shadow: a total lunar eclipse will be visible from many locations around the globe.

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mailto:%20david%20dot%20lane07%20at%20gmail%20dot%20com

http://www.univie.ac.at/voelkerkunde/apsis/aufi/folk/folk-v01.htm

http://mwmw.gsfc.nasa.gov/mmw_images.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Reef_National_Park

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Reef_National_Park

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah

http://www.nps.gov/care/planyourvisit/cathedralvalley.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UF7jr8R7UQ

http://www.nationalparklover.com/capitol_reef04.htm

http://www.nationalparklover.com/capitol_reef04.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic


http://earthsky.org/tonight/total-lunar-eclipse-blood-moon-hunters-moon-october-7-8-2014

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2014_lunar_eclipse%23mediaviewer/File:Visibility_Lunar_Eclipse_2014-10-08.png

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1410/mwSunToMoon_lane_1800.jpg

Appendix on Cosmology, Space & Earth - Mission Ignitionmissionignition.net/pfcn/Bulletins/Final...

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