Space In General

Novalee
The case for a multi-verse


https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/03/15/this-is-why-the-multiverse-must-exist/

The Multiverse is an extremely controversial idea, but at its core it’s a very simple concept. Just as the Earth doesn’t occupy a special position in the Universe, nor does the Sun, the Milky Way, or any other location, the Multiverse goes a step farther and claims that there’s nothing special about the entire visible Universe.
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You must believe in the Multiverse, or you must believe in the Anthropic Principle - no other choice, is there?
 
Saw this on XKCD this morning:

m87_black_hole_size_comparison.png


Puts things in perspective nicely.
 
Can't believe I almost missed this. Falcon Heavy launch is GO and launching in 4 minutes.

Edit: Successful landing of all three boosters. 👍



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Dotini
Today Israel crashed on the moon.
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I was watching, and I heard them say, "...problem with the main engine," then later, "we have the main engine back on." My first thought was that if the main engine shut down during descent, the thing's gonna be coming down too fast, even if they did get it re-lit. It's basically a brake failure while diving late into turn 1! Sure enough, looking back at the video, the altitude telemetry reading was plummeting (like the lander...) just as he announced the engine was back on, then all the telemetry froze.

The other thing that was amazing to me was the attitude. Very quickly, everyone was upbeat, the folks were talking about the accomplishment of even getting there at all, nobody calling it a failure, even though it kinda sorta was. No big deal, we'll try it again! I would have thought there'd be a huge, visible disappointment, everyone pouting, hanging their heads, maybe even some crying. It had to be a crushing blow to get just there and have it pulled out from under you.
 
From today's edition of spaceweather.com:

EXPERTS PREDICT A LONG, DEEP SOLAR MINIMUM: If you like solar minimum, good news: It could last for years. That was one of the predictions issued last week by an international panel of experts who gathered at NOAA's annual Space Weather Workshop to forecast the next solar cycle. If the panel is correct, already-low sunspot counts will reach a nadir sometime between July 2019 and Sept 2020, followed by a slow recovery toward a new Solar Maximum in 2023-2026.

"We expect Solar Cycle 25 will be very similar to Cycle 24: another fairly weak maximum, preceded by a long, deep minimum," says panel co-chair Lisa Upton, a solar physicist with Space Systems Research Corp.



The solar cycle is like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between periods of high and low sunspot number every 11 years or so. Researchers have been tracking the cycle since it was discovered in the 19th century. Not all cycles are alike. Some are intense, with lots of sunspots and explosive solar flares; the Space Age began with a big booming solar maximum. Others are weak, such as the most recent, Solar Cycle 24, which peaked in 2012-2014 with relatively little action.

Researchers are still learning to predict the ebb and flow of solar activity. Forecasting techniques range from physical models of the sun's inner magnetic dynamo to statistical methods akin to those used by stock market analysts.

"We assessed ~61 predictions in the following categories: Climatology, Dynamo, Machine Learning/Neural Networks, Precursor Methods, Spectral/Statistical Methods, Surface Flux Transport, and Other," says Upton. "The majority agreed that Solar Cycle 25 would be very similar to Solar Cycle 24."

"Here," she says, "is a figure showing the last minimum and where we are with the current minimum."



"As you can see – we haven't quite reached the lowest levels of the last cycle – where we experienced several consecutive months with no sunspots. However, the panel expects that we should reach those levels [between now and the end of 2020]."

In recent years, the Internet has buzzed with the idea that a super-deep solar minimum such as the 70-year Maunder Minimum of the 17th century might cool the Earth, saving us from climate change. That's not what the panel is saying, however.

"There is no indication that we are currently approaching a Maunder-type minimum in solar activity," says Upton. Solar minimum will be deep, but not thatdeep.
 
Dotini
"There is no indication that we are currently approaching a Maunder-type minimum in solar activity," says Upton. Solar minimum will be deep, but not thatdeep.
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Really? Because it seems like there is. I wonder what they're basing that on.
 
Danoff
Really? Because it seems like there is. I wonder what they're basing that on.
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Good question. My supposition is...policy. Officially, science consensus has ratified and decreed anthropogenic CO2 global warming as established fact. The Maunder Minimum was a time of cooling, not warming. Climate science does not accept any solar cycles beyond that of 11 years, and you cannot have cooling at a time of warming. So old sunspot, ice core and and tree ring records must yield to the new ruling paradigm.
 
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UKMikey
When people start to argue with their own posts I'm normally ready step out of the conversation but

To me this just sounds like religion to say that there exists a civilisation sophisticated enough to build an artificial reality yet callous enough to make it as ****ty as this one.
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Thanks for your comment, and agreed, a conversation is more interesting than a soliloquy. As objectionable or difficult as this reality is, it is probably preferable to those lacking any life or even to the reality on Earth millions of years ago. So it becomes a challenge to us to explain our existence. Given our state of understanding of the cosmos and the subatomic worlds, we yet have wildly competing views from the boffins. My own view is that we have free will and a personal role in creating reality, which might tend to mitigate your angst and vitiate despised boffin option #3, or at least hurry your search for the red pill.
 
Dotini
Thanks for your comment, and agreed, a conversation is more interesting than a soliloquy. As objectionable or difficult as this reality is, it is probably preferable to those lacking any life or even to the reality on Earth millions of years ago. So it becomes a challenge to us to explain our existence. Given our state of understanding of the cosmos and the subatomic worlds, we yet have wildly competing views from the boffins. My own view is that we have free will and a personal role in creating reality, which might tend to mitigate your angst and vitiate despised boffin option #3, or at least hurry your search for the red pill.
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In an artificially created world where even the laws of physics are supposedly arbitrary, why are people living in slavery, trapped in abject poverty or crippled with debilitating diseases? It doesn't sound fair to me to blame such people for their predicaments. On the other hand if the creators of reality have taken a backseat Prime Directive hands-off stance towards their work and it's other people here on Earth who have a hand in causing their misfortune then perhaps my angst should be directed towards them instead.

It'd kind of make the Matrix hypothesis kind of meaningless, though, if the architects aren't going to visit us anytime soon or leave tangible evidence of their passing around for people to discover. They then might as well not exist, outside of some theoreticist's fevered imaginings.
 
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UKMikey
It'd kind of make the Matrix hypothesis kind of meaningless if the architects aren't going to visit us anytime soon or leave tangible evidence of their passing around for people to discover though. They might then not as well exist outside of some theoreticist's fevered imaginings.
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We're going way beyond the thread topic, but your questions are so good it demands further discussion. I'll address only one. What sort of sign, signal, symbol or message (short of a personal visit) would it take to persuade you that architects have operated on our reality? Maybe a message encoded in DNA? Or perhaps otherwise unexplainable anomalous signals encoded in the Earth, Moon and Sun? Perhaps, at the end of the day, Multiple (random) Universes is the easiest/best answer. If so, then you are very lucky, since no life is thought exist in almost all the other universes.
 
Dotini
We're going way beyond the thread topic, but your questions are so good it demands further discussion. I'll address only one. What sort of sign, signal, symbol or message (short of a personal visit) would it take to persuade you that architects have operated on our reality? Maybe a message encoded in DNA? Or perhaps otherwise unexplainable anomalous signals encoded in the Earth, Moon and Sun?
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Something that the programmers would know we'd understand. Maybe a registered trademark sign on the surface of Saturn or something.
 
UKMikey
Something that the programmers would know we'd understand. Maybe a registered trademark sign on the surface of Saturn or something.
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Suppose you looked through a telescope at Venus, and saw this:


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Personally, I would need more than that.
 
Here's a curious anomaly: The US gets more neutrons from outer space than any other country, courtesy of spaceweather.com:

NEUTRONS OVER THE USA: Want to experience space weather? Just step onboard an airplane. At typical cruising altitudes, cosmic rays from deep space penetrate the hulls of commercial jetliners, dosing passengers with levels of radiation comparable to dental X-rays. To measure this radiation, Spaceweather.com has been flying cosmic ray sensors onboard airplanes over 5 continents. Our latest results show something interesting about the continental USA.


Above: Neutrons detected during a flight from Portland to DC on April 9,2019.

On April 9th and 11th we flew neutron bubble chambers from Portland, Oregon, to Washington DC and back again. In the photo, above, each bubble was created by a cosmic ray neutron. Why measure neutrons? Studies show that neutrons can be ten times more effective at causing biological damage compared to X-rays and gamma-rays in the same energy range. Neutrons are so effective, they are used for cancer therapy, killing tumors better than other forms of radiation.

During these flights, we measured more than 20 uGy of neutron radiation--the equivalent of two panoramic dental X-rays. That's significant but not dangerous.

The interesting thing is how these values compare to other places we've flown. Our neutron chambers have traveled on 14 flights over North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Africa, with typical altitudes near 35,000 feet. So far, neutron dose rates have been highest in one place: the continental USA (CONUS).



In this histogram, flights over CONUS are color-coded red. Other parts of the world are blue. The distribution's red tail shows the tendency of US flights to "out-neutron" international flights. This may be a result of small-number statistics. If so, the anomaly could disappear when more data are added. Our neutron survey is continuing, so stay tuned.
 
I wonder if latitude contributes to that. Other high-density commercial flight areas are either higher latitudes in general (Europe) or lower (southeast Asia,) for the most part.
 
And then there's this. SpaceX was testing the engines on the DM1 Dragon capsule today and there was a major failure that will push back the in-flight abort test (this capsule was to be used in that test) and the first manned flight will likely slide to 2020. Nobody was injured.

Warning: potato cam.

 
R1600Turbo
And then there's this. SpaceX was testing the engines on the DM1 Dragon capsule today and there was a major failure that will push back the in-flight abort test (this capsule was to be used in that test) and the first manned flight will likely slide to 2020. Nobody was injured.

Warning: potato cam.

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A mere anomaly. Loud noises and stinking smoke is what rocketry is all about. It may not be exactly good, but it is salutary.

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From today's edition of spaceweather.com:

WHAT IS A GEOMAGNETIC JERK?: Earth's magnetic field is notoriously inconstant. The north pole itself has been wandering across the Arctic for centuries. Currently, it is racing from northern Canada toward Siberia on an unpredictable path that has prompted hurried updates to world magnetic models. And then there are the "geomagnetic jerks." Every 3 to 12 years, Earth's magnetic field suddenly accelerates in one direction or another, a phenomenon that has puzzled scientists since it was recognized in the late 1970s.


Above: The rate of change in vertical magnetic fields at the Honolulu observatory (blue) and in Earth's orbit (red). Sudden changes in the slope indicate geomagnetic jerks. [More]

The most recent jerk occurred in 2017 following a rapid-fire sequence of similar disturbances in 2008, 2011, and 2014. There is evidence for jerks going all the way back to 1901. Some are global, felt everywhere, while others are regional, spanning single continents or less. The unpredictability of jerks has complicated efforts to forecast geomagnetism.

A new study may solve the mystery. In a paper published on April 22nd in Nature Geoscience, Julien Aubert (Paris Institute of Earth Physics) and Christopher C. Finlay (Technical University of Denmark), describe how they created a computer model for geomagnetic jerks based on the physics of hydrodynamic waves in Earth's molten core. According to their model, jerks originate in rising blobs of metal that form deep inside our planet. These slow-moving blobs can take 25 years to rise to the top of the convection zone. As they buoy upwards, the blobs disrupt the normal flow of magnetic field-generating currents and, in turn, cause jerks. The model successfully reproduces the form and timing of recent events.

http://www.spaceweather.com
Above: A computer simulation of molten blobs floating up from Earth's core. Credit: Aubert and Finlay, Nature Geoscience (2018)

Geomagnetic jerks are just one aspect of Earth's magnetic variability. Globally, Earth's magnetic field has weakened by more than 10% since the 19th century with an even faster decline in the 2000s. Satellite data show the changes are uneven. According to CHAMP, Ørsted, and SWARM, the field has recently weakened by about 3.5% at high latitudes over North America, while it has strengthened about 2% over Asia. The region where the field is at its weakest – the South Atlantic Anomaly – has moved steadily westward and weakened further by about 2%.

At present, no one can predict these changes. However, Aubert and Finley's successful model of jerks suggests that a deeper understanding may be within reach. You can read their original research here.

Note: The name "jerk" was borrowed from dynamics, where it means the rate of change of the acceleration of a body--that is, the third derivative of its position with respect to time. Geomagnetic jerks are therefore the first derivative of magnetic acceleration.
 

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