Will There Be An Increase In Annular Solar Eclipses?

Though currently relatively rare, will there be an increase of occurrences of annular solar eclipses in the future?

By: Ringo Bones 

When it comes to total solar eclipses, annular solar eclipses offer little, if any, importance to earthbound astronomers despite of its relative rarity in occurrence. I mean when was the last time an annular solar eclipse made headline news or was used to verify an astrophysical hypothesis? And the only well-photographed annular solar eclipsed was the one that occurred over the North African desert back in December 1955. But believe it or not, annular solar eclipses could occur more frequently in the future because the Earth’s Moon is moving farther away from us. 

Ever since its formation and held in orbit, our Moon had been moving farther away from us because the tidal friction it caused is slowing down planet earth’s rotation for several billion years. Currently, the Moon is orbiting 240,000 miles or 384,400 away from us and when it was newly formed, it was actually 10 times closer and a day on Earth only lasted 2 to 3 hours. But back then, the Earth was rotating faster and the tides were more than a thousand feet high according to unearthed geological evidences. But over time, tidal friction caused by the Moon orbiting the Earth slowed the planet’s rotation to what it is today – 24 hours. 

Ever since the Apollo 11 astronauts installed that quartz retro-reflector on the Moon back in July 20, 1969 that allowed precise laser measurements of the Earth-Moon distance down to the nearest fractions of an inch or millimeter, we have known for sometime now that the Moon is moving away from us at a rate of 2 to 3 centimeters per year. And it is only a matter of time that when a total solar eclipse occurs, the Moon is now too far away from the Earth’s surface to fully cover the Sun – thus the increased frequency of annular solar eclipses. 

Faster Than Light Astronomy: The Future Of Astronomy?

Even though research on the subject is still on the fringes of mainstream science but will natural phenomena that carries information faster than the speed of light be the future of astronomy?

By: Ringo Bones 

Many a scientist who criticize SETI – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence – using radio waves as a “dead end” because the 186,000 miles-per-second is just too slow for practical interstellar, never mind intergalactic, communications seems to be currently ignored by the mainstream global scientific community. And so are those who are currently investigating into superluminar phenomena in nature that allows data and information propagation across free space faster than the 186,000 miles-per-second / 400,000 kilometers-per-second speed limit of the speed of light. But if a naturally occurring phenomena – or an intelligently cleaver coaxing of it – that allows data transfer and communication faster-than-the-speed-of light not just represent the future of SETI but also of all branches of astronomy as well? 

Hints of a faster-than-light data communications that might occur naturally has not only been speculated but also inferred in scientific investigations ever since physicist began exploring the limits of Albert Einstein’s General Relativity when it was published back in 1916. Astrophysicists during the early 1970s had uncovered – based on data suggested by the Standard Model quantum mechanics particle accelerator results at that time – that during the few seconds after the Big Bang, the universe might have expanded many times faster-than-light, perhaps even sever billion times faster, but most of them point to a faster-than-light hyperinflation expansion space of the early universe several seconds old despite current particle accelerators are still not powerful enough to replicate such conditions. 

Mainstream astronomy’s most exotic – I.e. weirdest telescopes / astronomical instruments have hinted superluminar / faster-than-light phenomena since their operation. Various neutrino detectors that are buried a couple of miles beneath the surface of our planet has since shown that supernova neutrinos often arrive before the light of the star undergoing supernova explosion. Case in point is the Supernova 1987A that was seen back in 1987 whose neutrinos from the supernova’s Large Magellanic Cloud location arrived to Earth 3 hours before optical telescopes saw the supernova back in February 23, 1987 because shockwaves from stars going supernova travel 10,000 times slower than the neutrinos before the shockwave blows the entire star despite neutrinos still travelling at 186,000 miles per second. 

Speaking of other exotic / weird astronomical instruments that suggest the existence of superluminar / faster-than-light propagation of information in free space, the LIGO – which stands for Laser Interferometer Gravity-Wave Observatory, the National Science Foundation’s current most ambitious – and NSF’s current most expensive science experiment at 367-million US dollars (2002 dollars) has since been upgraded after it failed to detect any gravitational waves during its operation from 2002 to 2010. The upgraded super-LIGO is slated to detect concrete evidence of gravitational waves produced by very energetic astronomical phenomena – like the ones produced via the collision between two neutron stars or the collision of two black holes – as predicted by Albert Einstein’s General Relativity when it was published back in 1916. But does LIGO’s failure to detect gravity waves borne of mainstream astrophysics’ assumption that the force of gravity propagates across the cosmos at 186,000 miles per second – i.e. the speed of light? 

During the early 1970s, a US Naval Observatory associate professor Thomas Van Flandern performed a calculation which he later published in “Physics Letters A” titled “The Speed of Gravity – What Experiments Say” which demonstrated that the force of gravity propagated at least 20-billion times faster than the speed of light and may propagate instantaneously across the universe. Given that Prof. Stephen Hawking had noted in his A Brief History of Time that the force of gravity propagates at the speed of light across the universe, does the discrepancy between the two warrants a more thorough investigation of naturally occurring superluminar / faster-than-light phenomena? 

 Is mainstream science in general – at present – extremely skeptical when it comes to conducting experiments / research / reexaminations of empirical evidences of natural phenomena suggesting the existence of faster-than-light information and signal propagation across free space? Well, currenly accepted ones suggesting the existence of faster-than-light information / data propagation, like Albert Einstein’s Quantum Entanglement in which he nicknamed as the “spooky action at a distance”, Quantum Tunnelling, the EPR Experiment Paradox – i.e. the Albert Einstein Boris Podolsky Nathan Rosen Experiment Paradox – all date back from the 1930s and more recent experiments suggesting the existence of superluminar phenomena that warrant further investigation seems to be quickly swept under the rug by mainstream science. 

If proven to be true, superluminar phenomena / faster-than-light phenomena which could form the basis for Superluminar Astronomy / Faster-Than-Light Astronomy could well revolutionize the science of astronomy as we know it. Not just by changing our overall picture of the universe but also having the ability to control robotic spacecraft on distant planets as if they were just a few miles away using a data transfer / signal transfer method faster than the speed of light. Imagine being able to control those robotic rovers on Mars without the 20-minute delay due to the 186,000 miles-per-second speed limit of the speed of light which takes radio waves as much as 20 minutes to reach the surface of the planet Mars; Or being able to finally join the “Cosmic Internet” that allowed the free sharing ideas of intelligent beings across the universe using signals that allow the transfer of information and signals several billion times faster than the speed of light across the vast emptiness of interstellar space. 

The New Horizons Spacecraft: One Giant Leap For Robotic Space Exploration?

Despite their limitations in comparison to human space explorers, is the New Horizon spacecraft demonstrates the best of our current robotic spacecraft ability?

By: Ringo Bones 

Despite of the post Cold War austere fiscal environment at NASA, the recent successes demonstrated by the New Horizons spacecraft currently taking our clearest snapshots of Pluto so far can be quite inspiring to anyone interested in astronomy and space exploration as a whole. Given the spacecraft’s recent accomplishment despite being built on a “relatively” shoestring budget of 700 million US dollars is no mean feat indeed. 

When NASA’s task-masters at Capitol Hill green lit the New Horizons program back in 2001 and the four year timetable on the construction of the craft for its scheduled launched at the beginning of 2006 are just one of the miracles successfully pulled off by the New Horizons spacecraft. If the funding and launch timetable was delayed to several weeks after the International Astronomical Union declared that Pluto is no longer a planet, the “princes” at Capitol Hill would probably had scrapped the funding of the New Horizons program. In honor of Pluto’s discoverer, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, Tombaugh’s ashes was taken onboard as payload on the New Horizons spacecraft so that he can achieve the closest physically possible of actually visiting Pluto first hand. 

Due to its distance and small size, the world’s astronomical community have virtually little interest on the planet Pluto that between the cataloguing of the planet via “old school” astronomical photographic plates by Clyde Tombaugh in the 1930s and astronomer Carl Lampland in the 1950s, the actual location of Pluto’s orbit could be in error by as much as 62,000 miles. It was only after 1990 that the global astronomical community’s orbital data accuracy on Pluto became on par of that of the planets Uranus and Neptune. It is only understandably so due to Pluto’s remoteness at over 3 billion miles away from planet Earth and since Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto in 1930, astronomers here on Earth had only “witnessed” about 1/3 of its almost 250-year orbit around our Sun.  

The recent New Horizons spacecraft’s successful 8,000 mile “close flyby” would not have happened without the due diligence of one of the New Horizons program’s co investigator Dr. Marc Buie due to a lack of usefully accurate data on Pluto’s orbit and actual distance from the Sun. By 2012, the New Horizon’s team was concerned on the lack of accurate orbital data on the planet Pluto that Dr. Buie actually did his own legwork at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in order to reexamine around 1,000 of astronomical photographic plates of Pluto taken by Clyde Tombaugh and Carl Lampland during 1930 to 1950. The new computational data acquired by Dr. Buie became very indispensible in programming the New Horizon’s spacecraft’s trajectory so that when it encounters Pluto by July 2015, it will be within 8,000 miles – as opposed to 62,000 miles away. 

Due to its destination’s remoteness from the Sun where the ambient strength of sunlight is only 1/1000^th found here on Earth, the use of solar panels is out of the question in the New Horizons spacecraft. Instead, it uses a plutonium-239 powered thermoelectric reactor similar to that used in the Voyager spacecraft to power its systems. Due to Pluto’s remoteness, it took nine and a half years for New Horizons to reach its Pluto flyby despite travelling 1 million miles a day at 51,000 miles per hour. 

Hubble Space Telescope’s 25th Anniversary

Even though it is slated to be retired in five years time, is there still life left in the Hubble Space telescope?

By: Ringo Bones

Since its launch into low earth orbit by the Space Shuttle Discovery back in April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has proven itself to be the proverbial “little telescope that could”. Freed from the inherent turbulence of the earth’s atmosphere by placing it in orbital space, the Hubble Space Telescope has the potential to be far better than any earthbound telescope that has come before. But for its entire 25-year lifespan is not totally free from controversy.

When it was found out that its primary mirror was misshapen – as in light rays hitting the mirror’s edge is reflected differently in comparison to the light rays hitting the center of the mirror by as much as one-thirteenth the thickness of the human hair which significantly affected its performance when looking at distant galaxies tens of millions of light-years away. The mainstream press dubbed it the 2-billion dollar blunder upon hearing the news and some folks – most of them your right-wing conservative types – are the ones voicing the loudest criticisms of the fledgling space telescope.

For all intents and purposes, Reagan era “conservative” America may have something to do on why the misshapen main mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope was overlooked and was only found out after it was sent into space. Perkin Elmer – the Hubble Space Telescope’s main mirror contractor – wasn’t allowed to verify if they’ve ground the mirror accurate enough using the test jig at the then Lockheed Aircraft Corporation (before they merged with the famed cruise missile manufacturer Martin Marietta). Given that it was still the height of the Cold War, Hubble’s main mirror never got the opportunity for troubleshooting in an optical test jig at Lockheed where they test the main mirrors of NSA’s 1980s era Keyhole Reconnaissance Satellites for fears that the then Soviet Union might know the optical capabilities of the 1980s era U.S. spy satellites – thus the “blunder” that got overlooked. But given that the main mirror was misshapen in such a precise manner, folks at NASA managed to device a “contact lens” to correct the Hubble Space Telescope’s misshapen main mirror – at a fraction of the total cost of the space telescope.

With a Space Shuttle flight to fix the Hubble back in December 2, 1993, a team of NASA astronauts led by Story Musgrave managed to install the “contact lens package” – as in the COSTAR corrective optics module - to fix the Hubble. The mission was totally worth it when in July 16, 1994 the Hubble Space Telescope managed to give humanity a “ringside seat” to the crash of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 to the planet Jupiter. Then came the “Hubble Deep Field” series of images and a host of other images that forever changed the science of astronomy.

But the Hubble Space Telescope is truly the “space based telescope that could”. As in the Hubble consumes as much power as a household electric clothes drier and its “jitter spec” is of 0.007 arc-second accuracy – in layman’s terms it is like pointing a hand-held laser pointer on the top of the Washington Monument and keep it steady enough to aim at a dime on top of the Empire State Building while keeping it steady enough to keep the laser point or spot aimed squarely at Roosevelt’s profile on the said dime. Another "weird fact" is that the mechanical parts of the Hubble Space Telescope is lubricated by sperm whale oil given that during the mid 1980s - during the time period of the famed telescope's construction phase at Lockheed - it was the only lubricant available at the time that wouldn't seize up in the weightlessness and extreme temperature swings of outer space conditions.

Since the late 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope has been slated for replacement. The James Webb Space Telescope which will be placed over a million miles away from earth. If its specs can be trusted, the James Webb Space Telescope has the potential to detect any earth-like planet within 10,000 light-years. And despite its age and scores of upgrades later, it seems that the Hubble Space Telescope’s “imminent” retirement 5 years from now is not yet certain given that it was originally designed to last for only 15 years.

Will The Dawn Spacecraft Uncover Something New From Ceres?

Given it is still a virtually unexplored part of out Solar System, will the Dawn spacecraft uncover something new from Ceres? 

By: Ringo Bones 

 Since its launch in 2007, there has been scant press coverage on the Dawn spacecraft and its intended destination – a region in our Solar System that lie between the planets Mars and Jupiter called the asteroid belt. Besides some Earth like asteroids fictionalized in the first season of The Twilight Zone, it seems that the asteroid belt is an out of sight out of mind part of our Solar System. Fortunately, the recent pictures sent by the Dawn spacecraft has slightly peaked everyone’s interest of these so-called “dwarf planets” – as they are now called by the International Astronomical Union – that reside in the asteroid belt. 

As of Friday, March 6, 2015, the Dawn spacecraft entered the orbit of Ceres. According to the mission’s chief engineer Marc Rayman at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the 473-million US dollar mission says: “It went exactly the way we expected. Dawn gently, elegantly slid into Ceres’ gravitational embrace.” 

Ceres is the second and final stop for Dawn, a robotic spacecraft that was launched in 2007 on a voyage to the main asteroid belt, a zone between Mars and Jupiter that’s littered with rocky leftovers that dates back from the formation of the Sun and the planets some 4.5 billion years ago. Dawn will spend 16 months photographing the icy surface of Ceres. Dawn previously spent a year at Vesta – the only “dwarf planet” of the asteroid belt that can occasionally seen with the naked eye from the Earth’s surface, exploring the asteroid’s surface and sending back stunning close-ups of its lumpy surface before cruising onto the Texas-sized Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. 

The 4.8 billion kilometer trip was made possible by Dawn’s ion propulsion engines which provide a gentle yet constant acceleration and are more efficient than chemical-based rocket thrusters. As Dawn approaches Ceres, it beamed back the best pictures ever taken of the “dwarf planet”. Some puzzling images revealed a pair of shiny patches inside a crater – signs of possible ice or salt – which is something that can’t be seen by earthbound telescopes. Marc Rayman says that the Dawn spacecraft is currently in Ceres’ shadows and won’t take new pictures until it emerges in April, he said. 

Since its discovery in the evening of January 1, 1801 by the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, Ceres has intrigued generations of astronomers. Ceres measures 965-kilometers (600 miles) in diameter and is named after the Roman goddess of agriculture and harvest. It was initially called a planet before it was demoted into an asteroid and more recently classified as a “dwarf planet”. Like true blue planets, dwarf planets are spherical in shape because their size or mass generates enough gravitation for it to attain hydrostatic equilibrium and thus attaining a spherical shape unlike the smaller oddly-shaped asteroids. 

The Rosetta Probe: The Little Spacecraft That Could?

Launched from earth over a decade ago to rendezvous with a comet more than half a billion miles away from earth, is the Rosetta Probe the little robotic spacecraft that could? 

By: Ringo Bones 

When it was launched off the Arianne spaceport in French Guiana back in March 2, 2004, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta Probe with a mission to rendezvous with a comet more 10 years later could for all intents and purposes pass muster as a mission to the unknown. The craft was placed in a decade long hibernation once it escaped the bonds of earth’s gravity and was reactivated earlier this year. It gained headline news status and attention of the major news networks when it successfully caught up to and orbited around Comet 67P - also known as Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko - during the middle of November 2014. Although once it – more or less – successfully landed the Philae Lander on the surface of Comet 67P back in November 15, 2014 did the Rosetta Space Probe became the little spacecraft that could. 

The major unavoidable hazard of launching space-probes on long-duration space missions is that when they arrive at their destinations, they will inevitably be using what was the state-of-the-art technology at the time of their launch date. The Rosetta Probe’s 4-megapixel Osiris camera – although very state-of-the-art back when it was designed and built back in 2003 – is somewhat quaint by comparison to the built in cameras used on entry level mobile smart-phone cameras circa 2014, except the Rosetta Probe’s mere 4-megapixel camera – though lacking in resolution in comparison to contemporary consumer counterparts – can see portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that the latest i-Phone can’t with quantum efficiencies better than Ronald Reagan era Keyhole reconnaissance satellites. 

Although it was the Philae Lander that eventually became the star of the show when it successfully landed on the surface of Comet 67P despite a “shaky” bouncy landing due to the failure of deployment of the beryllium-copper harpoons supposedly used to anchor the Lander on the surface of the comet because the gravitational pull on the surface of Comet 67P is 100,000 times less than that on the earth’s surface. The washing machine sized Philae Lander – which weighs 100-kilograms on the earth’s surface – only weighs 1 gram on the surface of Comet 67P thus the necessity of the beryllium-copper harpoons needed to anchor the Lander firmly on the comet’s surface. 

Even though Professor Derrick Pitts – chief astronomer of the Franklin Institute – was concerned when the Philae Lander bounced off into a dark part / shadowy cliff of the surface of the Comet 67P which it can’t use its solar photovoltaic panels to power its instruments in analyzing the composition of the comet, the Lander had enough juice in its on-board reserve batteries to do a series of scientific analysis of the comet and sent the valuable data back to earth before losing power and reverting to sleep mode. Preliminary analysis of the data sent by the Philae Lander has shown that it has detected a wealth of organic compounds on the comet’s surface near the landing zone. And it is also worth mentioning that at the distance between Comet 67P / Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko and earth, radio signals sent from the Philae Lander - even moving at 186,000 miles per second or 300,000 kilometers per second - takes almost an hour to arrive to the satellite telemetry sites tuned in to the Lander here on earth.

Cosmic Diamond: The Universe’s Largest Uncut Diamond?

It might be the ultimate jeweler’s dream here on planet Earth to work on such sized stone, but is the cosmic diamond the Universe’s largest uncut piece of diamond? 

Given that diamonds are just an allotropic form of low impurity carbon whose atoms are arranged differently than ordinary carbon that makes them one of the hardest naturally formed materials, are there conditions elsewhere in the cosmos that would allow the creation of the Universe’s largest chunk of uncut diamond? Fortunately, there is such a place. 

These are called cosmic diamonds and astrophysicists had long theorized their existence since humanity had figured out the working principles behind how stars work and how they are created, live out their lives and eventually die. Cosmic diamonds are an ultra compressed crystal of carbon believed to lie in the core of a white dwarf star as an end product that resulted after a main-sequence star’s helium burning phase. It is a whole, uncut diamond – likely spherical in shape – and could be thousands of miles in diameter, easily making it one of the largest uncut pieces of diamonds in the Universe. Given the physical conditions we currently know that prevail in the core of white dwarf stars, cosmic diamonds could have a wholly different atomic and molecular structure in comparison to the diamonds we are familiar with that are formed by planet Earth’s geological processes. 

Despite the financial and scientific interests fueling our curiosity of cosmic diamonds, at present, we can only study them from afar via our sensitive astronomical spectroscopic instruments because on average, the nearest white dwarf stars are tens to hundreds of light-years away from us. And given out current space travel technology, we won’t be able to reach one and make a sample return mission using robotic spacecraft within a practical human timescale. A round-trip mission to Alpha Centauri using our current space travel technology could take at least a little over 1-million years for a sample return mission.