If Mars has all that rust, where did the oxygen come from? We call Mars the “Red Planet” because it has iron oxide – LOTS of it. Where did it come from? Scientists believe both Earth and Mars got most of its surface iron oxides from meteor bombardment about 4 billion years ago. Why does Mars have so much more of it?

BBC has done interesting documentaries on stromatolites, large living bacterial beach “rock” formations we can still see and investigate in Australia. According to this theory, these cyanobacteria use a primitive photosynthesis to generate Earth’s earliest oxygen. This started oxidizing particulate meteorite iron dust suspended in the oceans, converting it to rust, which settled to the ocean bed and was sequestered there. When free iron particles were essentially used up, oxygen could then start accumulating in our atmosphere … paving the way for higher Earth life forms.

Mars seems once to have had copious water. Could it have also had cyanobacteria? Is that how Mars got all its iron oxide?

Well, according to another theory I found on starryskies.com, Martian oceans simply rusted all that meteoric iron away. Of course, if this is the full explanation, we don’t need the stromatolite theory at all to account for iron oxides on either planet.

I found a third theory on BioEd Online. It suggests the answer is not that simple. Researchers have been able to show that Earth’s powerful gravitational field generates enough pressure and heat to melt iron oxide, in effect smelting oxygen out of it, and allowing it to sink into the molten core. Theoretical calculations show smaller Mars could not have generated the required compressional pressures. This would account for Earth’s huge liquid iron core and the powerful dynamo generating our planet’s magnetic field, in turn protecting our atmosphere from the solar radiation that we expect blasted most of the unprotected Martian atmosphere away.

If all goes well, our new robotic explorer Curiosity will safely descend to the Martian surface at 1:31 a.m. Monday Aug. 6 EDT (0531 GMT) – about 10:30PM Sunday night, Pacific time. Facebook has a Curiosity page, and NASA/JPL will have a “live” feed on UStream’s Curiosity Cam. Curiosity will not broadcast photos until it finishes all its own internal checks. The first photos will be black and white, with color plates following on later transmissions.  Remember, there’s currently a 14 minute radio signal delay between Mars and Earth.

I plan to try to stay up to see if the mission is successful. As for our iron oxide questions, it often turns out in science there is not just one “right” contributory answer. It will be interesting to see what mysteries Curiosity can solve.

The scientific news itself went “viral,” being picked up on BBC, The New York Times, Huffington and elsewhere that I can recall, as well as in the scientific journals. The Sky & Telescope article is much more oriented toward readers who are already familiar with cosmological objects and distances. It can be picked up at this link.

You can also read the PBS transcript of Ifill’s interview with Chung-Pei Ma. Ma is professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. She appeared visibly constrained by the problem of how to explain these concepts to a general viewing television audience.

But the item here concerns Gwen’s question to Chung-Pei Ma. Presumably Gwen had done her homework and knew the answer, but most viewers might not:

Ma tried to explain, in lay terms, why not. Breaking this question apart, the salient components of a better answer would be:

• how far out do the effects of these monster black holes reach?
• how far away are we now?
• how long in years could an approach to within their spheres of gravitational influence take?

Facts:

• Both galaxies in question are about 300 million light years away.
• “For NGC 3842’s central monster, the team found a mass between 7 and 13 billion Suns; for NGC 4889 the range is much bigger: 6 to 37 billion solar masses” [Sky & Telescope].
•  In other words, each black hole’s estimated bulk suggested it had already swallowed the mass equivalent of an entire “ordinary” galaxy.
• The “event horizon” of each black hole – the boundary inside of which even light cannot escape the black hole’s unimaginable gravitational field – is estimated at around 3 to 5 solar system diameters.
• Our Solar System has a diameter of about 0.001 light year. To put this into some kind of perspective, our Milky Way galaxy has a diameter of about 100,000 light years.

Discussion:

• So, our Milky Way (which has a large black hole of its own) is about 3,000 Milky Way diameters away from NGC 3842 and NGC 4889.
• Looking at the second illustration in the Sky & Telescope article, and the companion text, it appears that only the the motion of stars within 1,000 light years of their black holes NGC 3842 and NGC 4889 are affected by the nearby dark monsters.
• We are 300,000 times further way than that.

Devil’s Advocate:

But … but … supposing some cataclysmic upheaval were to propel our solar system, or our planet, toward those monster black holes? How long might it take for them to tear us apart? How fast could an “object” like us move in that direction?

Obviously, we’d have to move really fast.

• Let’s disregard the fact that any catastrophic event powerful enough to do that would also undoubtedly shred Earth to dust, if not elemental gases.
• A supernova explosion of our Sun might propel an expanding sphere of gases and dust outward at 11 million miles an hour, though it’s a fact our Sun is way too small to go supernova.
• According to a Stanford article  “THE MYSTERY OF THE FASTEST MOVING STAR STILL PUZZLING,” they mention a candidate speed in this question: “How do you accelerate 2.7 octillion tons (27 followed by 26 zeros) from a standstill to over 1,800 kilometers per second, about one- half of one percent of the speed of light? That could be as fast as 4 million miles per hour.”

So, even at the catastrophic speed of one percent of the speed of light (give or take), hurtling straight toward either of those two monster black holes, it would take us something like 30,000 million years to reach a destination 300 million light years distant. The universe is currently 13.7 billion years old. Cosmologists think it might be good for another 10 or 20 billion years or so before perishing in fire, or ice, or whatever.

In short: since 30,000 million years is 30 billion years, the universe may not even exist by the time a battered Earth arrives at NGC 3842 and NGC 4889 at the improbably high speed of only one percent of the speed of light. Any slower than that, we’d never arrive, nor would there be any destination to arrive to. I don’t think we have to worry about it too much.

I updated my time and distance spreadsheet on my November 10, 2010 Astronomy posting “Interstellar Time and Distance.” This came about thanks to a reader question about distances and times from the Orion Nebula (M42). That calculation has enough steps that I fluffed them on my PC calculator. So I redid the spreadsheet, adding Neptune and Orion M42 to the range. For good measure, and comparison of the vast difference between interstellar and intergalactic travel distances, I also added the Andromeda Galaxy (M31).

If Pioneer kept chugging along at 132,000 miles per hour to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, it wouldn’t get there for almost 30,000 years. Scientists think we may attain higher speeds around 0.1% of the speed of light within the next century. This might enable future space travelers to get to the Orion Nebula in only 1.2 million years. Better stick to Alpha Centauri at 3,900 years, which will be do-able, though at enormous energy, construction and human cost.

If a colonization team left now for Alpha Centauri, and another left in year 2111, the second team would probably arrive about 26,000 years before the slower first team!

But you’re thinking, “we’ll have Star Wars technology by then.” Unless we discover real live Wormholes and figure out how to survive that transit and predict the destination, travel at even 10% of the speed of light would get us to Alpha Centauri in about 42 years. That would be nice, but it’s still pure science fiction.

Light from our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda Galaxy, takes 2.5 million years to get here. There’s absolutely no use in even speculating: we’d need at least 25 million years travel time to get there!

Best we just spread more marmalade on the breakfast toast and ponder how we’ll get through the 2012 elections …

You can download stunning images daily in a choice of image sizes.

Below: “The Cassini spacecraft observed three of Saturn’s moons set against the darkened night side of the planet in this image from April 2011.” NASA. Pictured are Rhea, Enceladus and Dione.

link: view here

I have to be careful in framing my criticism of the real question posed here, since I lack any credible qualifications for judging questions of quantum mechanics. What I submit instead is that the “definition” of reality does not fall within the jurisdiction of the laws of quantum mechanics (whatever those turn out to be), any more than the glorious majesty of Half Dome or the Grand Canyon falls within the jurisdiction of the traffic court division of the Superior Court of California, County of Kern.

To my thinking, the question as framed is meaningless. Is the Empire State Building incandescent or fluorescent? How many angels can sit on the head of a pin?

Discussion: “Reality” is not a subset or category of something bigger. When we say “a cat is a carnivorous animal that eats Meow Mix” we define the cat as an example or instance of some higher order category, an animal. The old philosophical fallacy of trying to “define reality” is explained in the necessity of referencing a higher order concept of which “reality” would have to be an instance. There are none. Never mind your hypothetical sets of multiple possible universes and “bubble universes.” If they’re “really” out there, they’re real, therefore part of reality.

At the risk of pandering to the obvious, by definition there is nothing more all-encompassing than reality.

The question in question was originally posed by the Foundation Questions Institute for its third essay contest. You can read the scientific approaches to the “question” here:

• Scientific American article: read article
• First Prize essay: view pdf

I found Jarmo Makela’s prizewinning essay interesting and literarily clever and entertaining right up until page 4:

I’m not saying the physicists featured in the Sciam topic really meant to “define reality.” They are bright folks. The philosophical question “is reality digital?” sounds ever so much more satisfyingly grandiose than our poor old dirt mechanic version: “is a quantum state digital, or analog, or can it be both?” Hey Vern, the latter kinda resembles the old photon wave vs. particle controversy, don’t it?

To a quantum physicist, or even to the occasional lay person, fundamental insights can be gained by examining properties of the building blocks of matter. So are those building blocks granular or amorphous? Well, to begin with, through which end of the telescope are we looking? Why must we always assume the nature of matter is to be revealed in the small picture?

As long as we’re asking stoopid questions, is nature revealed in the particle or in The Cloud? Assuming we ever do figure out the fundamental nature of matter, who’ll get first credit? The particle physicists, or the astronomers? My prediction: both.

A question “are subatomic particles essentially digital or analog?” is a far cry from trying to defining reality itself in terms of one or more of its literally infinite attributes.

I’m saying that the best we can do in answering questions about the nature of reality is to examine specific examples, take our measurements, analyze them, and report on our findings. You can approximate any analog process with digital slices – that’s part of our Isaac Newton legacy – and I believe that, on a quantum level, you can even show all analog processes are actually macro averages of discrete yes-no-maybe events. But reality isn’t just a process, it’s a head-scratcher. If you’ll pardon us for saying so, reality’s ever so much more.

Happily, Wikipedia has provided in-depth answers for Beetle, Sarge and Zero. Check out these two links:

• List of nearest stars
• Interstellar travel

As it happens, I had been musing about the same question. I know the numbers, but can’t wrap my head around the calculations. For questions like “how long to Alpha Centauri”, I need a spreadsheet:

The Moon and Sun are included only to give an idea of scale here. My spreadsheet is compressed to fit on this page. Distances: Proxima Centauri 4.23, Barnard’s Star 5.96, Sirius 8.58, Gliese-581 20.3 light years.

Speeds: Earth orbital velocity is a puny 18-24,000 miles per hour. Pioneer was accelerated by Jupiter to an escape velocity of 132,000 miles per hour before leaving the solar system in 1995 — at a distance of 6.5 billion km from Earth. At that distance, its radio signal took 6 hours to reach Earth.

Scientists believe that speeds of one-one thousandth of the speed of light ( .001 c) are attainable with current technology, probably ion engines, though it would take such low-thrust propulsion systems decades to accelerate to those velocities. In the next century or so, it is thought newer technology might allow us velocities approaching .01 c.

Even so, the spreadsheet makes it crystal clear that travel to even the very closest star, Proxima Centauri, would require sending a massive vehicle with support for suspended animation or multiple generations of space travelers. At a million miles an hour, a one-way trip would take over 3,900 years; at 9.2 million miles an hour, several human lifetimes. It would take radio signals from those travelers up to 4 years to reach us, but no one alive on Earth at launch time would ever live to hear whether the mission arrived successfully. A return trip, if any, would double travel time.

Speeds of one-tenth light speed are still in the realm of science fiction. Even then, travel beyond Sirius, say a visit to the nearby Orion Nebula (1,344 light years distant), would take over 12,000 years, one way. We could pedal around the globe infinitely faster on a kiddie tricycle. It seems clear we’ll never get to cross the street or leave the neighborhood without the hyper-drives of Hollywood’s Star Wars.

History Channel ran an interesting Pluto retrospective last night. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a frequent science and astrophysics master of ceremonies on TV science shows, and director of Manhattan’s Hayden Planetarium, among other accomplishments. Dr. Tyson gained popular notoriety by supporting demotion of Pluto to “dwarf planet” status (2006), and, as planetarium director, being one of the first to remove the 9th “planet” from the gargantuan solar system exhibit.

Dr. Tyson back-pedaled a bit. The “definition” of celestial objects has changed radically over the centuries as new data are discovered, it’s changing now, and will change again and again in the future. To most of us, Pluto remains a “planet”, no matter what they say. Nobody cares that the “10th” dwarf planet, Quaoar, is actually bigger than Pluto.

What’s all the flap about?

Reviewing the arguments,

• It’s tiny – smaller than Earth’s Moon
• But it does orbit the Sun (elliptically)
• But it is round, and it has not just one moon, but several.
• But it’s in the Kuiper Belt, and doesn’t have the gravitational oomph to carve a clear-path orbit for itself amidst all that orbiting space debris.

Lost Continent of Atlantis

Here’s another case of “everybody’s heard about it, but nobody knows what it is”.The legend or myth of Atlantis goes back at least as far as Plato, who wrote of an earlier civilization which would date to about 9600 BC by modern accounting, if it existed at all.

In our little thought experiment, suppose for a moment scientists and scholars were somehow able to agree that such a land actually existed at the site of the destroyed supervolcano island Santorini (the Wikipedia article includes a dramatic satellite photograph that’s food for thought. We also posted our own article about the site in My Notes).

The thought experiment goes like this: if Atlantis were actually the original island Santorini, before it was blasted into the stratosphere, was Atlantis ever really lost?

Or, was it redefined?

Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930, putting to bed astronomy’s mathematical speculation about a mysterious “Planet X”.

We’re going to Pluto in 2015 – at least, that’s when NASA’s unmanned New Horizon spacecraft should arrive there. New Horizons has already passed Jupiter. And, astronomers have discovered over 473 confirmed “exoplanet” detections – planets orbiting other stars in the Milky Way. As equipment and technique continues to improve, new data is pouring in almost daily.

This new data will ultimately redefine how we look at “planets”, and, probably, how we define them.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.” — Romeo and Juliet | Act II, Scene II

In modern parlance, Pluto “is what it is”. The semantic lexicon of astrophysics does need to be redefined with expansion of the knowledge base, of course, but the objects being described don’t change a bit.

Who can forget the old kids’ mnemonic for the names and order of solar system planets?

Men very easily make jugs serve useful needs, period.

Chabot Space Science Center (Oakland, California)
Pluto, Wikipedia
Enough Already, Summitlake.com Astronomy

The annual “Two Moons on Aug 27th” Mars e-mail is circulating again. Alas, the myth is another internet hoax, a best fit for the “liar liar pants on fire” category. Amateur astronomers already know this. This year, for the benefit of everybody else, we do our best to explain why.

A picture is worth a thousand words. See: http://www.astronomy.org.gg/hoax.htm

The photo above is also true to my own experience, as I’ll narrate below.

Wikipedia on the “Mars Hoax” (emphasis mine):

Although nearly all of the claims made in the e-mail are true, the hoax stemmed from a misinterpretation of the third sentence of the second paragraph which states that “At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye”. The message was often quoted with a line break in the middle of this sentence, leading some readers to mistakenly believe that Mars would “look as large as a full moon to the naked eye” when, in reality, this only applies when a telescope with a 75-power magnification is used. This is the most likely source of misinterpretation.

We will never, EVER see a sight even remotely like the faked “two moons” e-mail image from Earth (or from anywhere else in the solar system). And 2010 is not even a particularly good year for telescopic viewing of Mars.

We already had Mars’ 2010 “closest approach” in January . Most non-astronomer citizens never would have noticed it. Phoenix and Bay area residents would probably be unable to see it with the naked eye unless it was an exceptionally clear night.

We actually have mathematical “closest approaches” every other year or so (Mars takes 687 Earth “days” to orbit the sun). Obviously, since both planets orbit the sun, there is always going to be some “closest” distance as the Earth swings round past Mars. That distance is not the same each year because the orbits if the two planets are not quite concentric, but elliptical — not quite perfect circles. Mars’ orbit is quite eccentric for a planet – about 9% longer on the long axis compared to the short dimension.

In 2003, we had the celebrated closest Mars approach “in 60,000 years”. Astronomers would have noticed Mars having an apparent diameter of almost twice its “farthest distance”. This difference doesn’t become readily apparent without a telescope of at least 6″ diameter.

The angular size of the Moon is about 1/2 degree (30 ARC MINUTES). By coincidence our Sun is of the same apparent diameter, which is why we can have perfect lunar eclipses. NASA confirms the angular size of Mars varies from a minimum of 3.4 ARC SECONDS to a maximum of 25.1 ARC SECONDS.

An arc second is 1/60 of an arc minute. Mars never stood a chance of looking close in size to the Moon!

From University of Wisconsin:

Even at its closest approaches Mars seldom appears larger than 26 arc seconds, or about 1/69 the apparent size of the moon.

Some sources compare this to the apparent size of a penny at 500 feet.

We all know from experience the Moon NEVER looks about the size of a penny at 500 feet. The Moon might look more like the size of a basketball at 100 feet. So how could Mars ever look like it was almost the same size? It can’t.

If that isn’t bad enough for backyard astronomers, more math (groan) conspires against us too. Remember that the area of a circle is proportional to the square of the radius. So, a planet of radius 1/2 will only display 1/4 the surface detail of a planet of radius 1, all other things being equal. A planet of radius 1/60 can, at best, display 1/3600 the surface detail of the larger one — not counting the distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere!

The 2003 Mars approach was a HUGE disappointment to Bob and me, and we (I) wasted a good deal of money trying to be ready to photograph this highly publicized event.

As actually viewed with the naked eye in 2003, it was hard to tell whether any kind of “disk” of Mars could be made out at all, or if Mars was just a really bright reddish point-source star like Aldebaran. With eye to our telescope eyepiece, we were barely able to see Mars’ polar icecap, but that was all. Bob and I tried to photograph Mars through the 8″ telescope with an expensive SLR camera body, without much success as we were inexperienced in photographing the night sky. Bob did the best job, holding up a “Brownie point and shoot” to the telescope eyepiece.

Our photo looked about like a penny at 500 feet. Copper-red, no surface detail visible at all. Unless you blow up the image (below), Mars looks like a little red dot in a huge black frame. This photo has been published here before. For a better color photo (looks like black-and-white), see also our Mars Elusive post (9-17-2003).

The next “good” year for viewing Mars will be 2014, and it won’t get as good as 2003 again during our lifetimes.

Alex