Is The Universe Getting Younger?

Though the new figure might yet be “too old” to satisfy America’s staunchest far-right Creationists, is our universe much, much younger than it really is?

By: Ringo Bones

America’s staunchest far-right Creationist may be buying their time, just waiting for a scientific consensus proving that the entire universe began in 9 o’clock in the morning Greenwich Mean Time on the 23^rd of October 4004 BC. Even the Creationist US Secretary Of State Mike Pompeo was probably elated to hear that the universe could be 2 billion years younger than it actually is. Will it be a matter of time that the universe is proven to be only 6,000 years old to the delight of America’s far-right Creationists and white nationalists?

Scientists estimate the age of the universe by using the movement of stars to measure how fast it is expanding. If the universe is expanding faster, that means it got to its current size more quickly and therefore must be relatively younger. The expansion rate called the Hubble Constant makes for a fast moving – and younger – universe. The generally accepted age of the universe is 13.7 billion years based on a Hubble Constant of 70. But lately a team of astronomers from the Max Plank Institute led by Inh  Jee came up with a Hubble Constant of 82.4, which would put the age of the universe at around 11.4 billion years.

It is somewhat disconcerting that while our understanding of our universe has vastly increased during the past 50 years while that same understanding told us that the universe was much younger than what we knew before. Remember the time when the scientific consensus was that the whole universe is a little over 18 billion years old? Then by the latter half of the 1990s, when the prior discovery and / or conjecture of the concept of dark matter and dark energy a few years before has slashed the age of the universe to 13.8 billion years. And now it is only a little over 11 billion years old. Could the 6,000 year old age of the universe embraced by America’s far-right Creationists, white nationalists and Trump supporters be proven during Mike Pompeo’s lifetime?

First True Picture Of A Black Hole Captured: Astronomical Breakthrough?

Despite of the astronomical community’s over 200 year fascination of the concept, does the recent true picture ever captured of a black hole truly an astronomical breakthrough?

By: Ringo Bones

Maybe we should be thanking first Katie Bouman, a former computer science student at MIT, now at Cal Tech, who developed the sophisticated computer algorithm that made possible the first ever interferometer-based photograph of a black hole. Although it was entirely a team effort, the astronomical community’s fascination of these enigmatic astronomical objects that are commonly referred to as black holes dates back over 200 years.

Now largely forgotten many credit the English clergyman and polymath John Michell for theorizing the existence of black holes, which he then referred to as dark stars and he does it using only Newtonian Physics. During 1783, geologist John Michell wrote a letter to Henry Cavendish outlining the expected properties of dark stars that got published by The Royal Society in their 1784 volume. Michell calculated that that when the escape velocity at the surface of a star was equal to or greater than the speed of light, the generated light would be gravitationally trapped so that the star would not be visible to a distant astronomer. The Sun’s escape velocity = 1/500^th that of the speed of light, would a star with more than 500 times more massive than our Sun has an escape velocity greater than that of the speed of light and would therefore be invisible to nearby astronomers?

It was when Albert Einstein published his General Relativity when our modern understanding of black holes gained widespread popularity. Popular enough that many science fiction writers often used it in their action-adventure scenes. The black hole’s popularity to the general public gained more impetus back in 1964 during the discovery of Cygnus X-1, a strong X-ray source in the constellation Cygnus. His work on stars and how they could become black holes got Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar the 1983 Nobel Physics Prize.

The recent Event Horizon Telescope breakthrough image shows a halo of dust and gas, tracing the outline of a colossal black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, which is 55-million light years from Earth and about 6-billion times the mass of our Sun. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is composed of a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile – was made possible by the involvement of more than 200 scientists. The Event Horizon Telescope achieved the necessary resolution by combining data from the eight of the world’s leading radio observatories, including the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile and the South Pole Telescope, creating a virtual telescope akin to the size of planet Earth.

Despite of the renewed fascination of anyone interested in astronomy and theoretical physics, a number of science fiction writers and Hollywood visual special effects artists were a bit “underwhelmed” because the recently published “true pictures” of the super-massive black hole at the heart of the M 87 galaxy only confirms that their visual representation or artist’s rendering of black holes were right all along. Nonetheless, the resulting astrophysical data obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope may prove to be more useful than the iconic M 87 galaxy super-massive black hole image.

Is Asteroid Cruithne Earth’s Second Moon?

Although now dismissed as just one of the Earth’s 18,000 so-called mini-moons, is asteroid 3753 Cruithne just one of the most popular candidates for Earth’s “second moon”?

By: Ringo Bones

Some astronomers claim that asteroid 2016 HO₃ that was discovered back in April 27, 2016 is the best candidate for Earth’s so-called “second moon” because it is possibly the most stable quasi-satellite of Earth, asteroid 3753 Cruithne still remained very popular of the other 18,000 candidate asteroids that qualified to be Earth’s second moon. Even though all of them never truly orbit around the Earth like the Moon, it seems though that at the moment, asteroid 3753 Cruithne is the most popular candidate for Earth’s second moon.

The name Cruithne is from Old Irish reference to the early Picts, the asteroid was discovered back in October 10, 1986 by Duncan Waldron on a photographic plate taken with the UK Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, Coonabarabran, Australia. Although an earlier discovery of the asteroid back in 1983, when it was still designated as 1983 UH, is credited to Giovanni de Sanctis and Richard M. West of the European Southern Observatory in Chile. It was not until 1997 that asteroid 3753 Cruithne’s unusual orbit was determined by Paul Wiegert and Kimmo Innanen working at York University in Toronto and Seppo Mikkola working at the University of Turku in Finland.

As a Q-type Aten asteroid, 3753 Cruithne got the dubious designation of “Earth’s Second Moon” despite there are other 18,000 asteroids that are viable candidates for this category because it orbits around the Sun in 1:1 orbital resonance with Earth, making it a co-orbital object. Seen from the Earth’s surface, 3753 Cruithne seem to orbit around the Sun in a bean-shaped orbit that effectively describes a horseshoe that can change into a quasi-satellite orbit. Cruithne does not orbit Earth and at times it is on the other side of the Sun, placing Cruithne well outside of Earth’s Hill sphere. Cruithne’s orbit takes it inside the orbit of Mercury and outside the orbit of Mars. Cruithne orbits the Sun in about 1 year but it takes 770 years for the series to complete a horseshoe-shaped movement around the Earth.

At about 5-kilometers, or 3-miles, in diameter, asteroid 3753 Cruithne is far too small in size to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium to achieve a spherical shape. Its closest approach to Earth is 12-million kilometers, or 7 and a half million miles, approximately three times the separation between Earth and the Moon. From 1994 through 2015, Cruithne made its annual approach to Earth every November but it is far too small to be seen on the Earth’s surface at night via the naked eye. While the Moon’s surface gravity is about one-sixth that of Earth, on the surface of asteroid 3753 Cruithne, the surface gravity is probably one-one hundred thousandth that of Earth akin to what the Philae spacecraft experienced when it landed on the Comet 67P / Comet Churyumov - Gerasimenko back in 2014.