Dr. Bortrum
12/30/2020
Here and Way Out There
CHAPTER 116 I'm Back!
Remember me? For a couple of decades I've been writing a column for this Web site, stocksandnews.com, initially once a week, then once a month. However, as I approached my 93rd birthday (which occurred on December 28) in the midst of this horrible pandemic, I found myself totally ignoring my issues of the journals Science, Scientific American and Discover magazine piled up on my desk, in the bathroom or in my computer completely unread, indeed not even opened! I have found myself watching way too much news and also watching Johnny Carson and Carol Burnett shows on TV, the comedy on these shows helping to offset the plethora of bad news. Actually, in the show I watched last night, Johnny Carson talked about Watergate in his monolog and how Nixon was being ordered by the judge to turn over a bunch of tapes.
One thing I have not ignored is space related events. In my last column back in August, I discussed the SpaceX mission carrying two astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Since then, another SpaceX launch carried four astronauts to the ISS. It looks like we really will be able to stop relying on the Russians to ferry our astronauts. In another SpaceX event the end result was different, ending in a spectacular explosion! In this case however, there were no passengers involved and an explosion was not unexpected. The occasion was a test of the futuristic Starship spacecraft SpaceX is working on to carry astronauts to Mars. It appears the flight was considered a success despite the explosion in that during the flight various maneuvers were accomplished as planned . The explosion occurred because the craft was going too fast on landing.
Next month (February) will be a significant month for space enthusiasts. NASA's Perseverance spacecraft is scheduled to land on Mars and begin its main mission, to dig up samples of Mars soil to see if there are any signs of long ago life on the planet. Unfortunately, according to an email press release from NASA/JPL the samples from the Perseverance mission will not be returned to Earth until 2030. I won't be around to find out if evidence of life was detected. I hope to be around to see if the helicopter on board Perseverance will actually be able to fly on Mars.
There's been a lot going on in the field of space stuff recently. For example, a most unlikely venue for finding life is fellow planet Venus, With temperatures in the range of hundreds of degrees on its surface , there is no water and any life as we know it would be burned to a crisp. Yet, some months ago, there was an article somewhere saying that scientists had observed a chemical in the atmosphere of Venus that here on Earth would be indicative of life. At least here the compound is only found to be formed where life exists. Should this be for real, any life on Venus would have to exist in the far reaches of the planet's atmosphere where temperatures are very much lower than on the surface. I don't expect any NASA missions will explore that possibility in my lifetime.
Less controversial was a finding I first noted in an article by Marcia Dunn in the October 27 issue of our newspaper The Star-Ledger on a NASA report in the journal Nature Astronomy that there's more water on the Moon than we thought. Over 15,000 square miles of the Moon is capable of trapping frozen water. Assuming the water can be accessed and converted to liquid this would make things considerably more likely we can set up some kind of outpost for prolonged missions on the lunar surface. The article in The Star-Ledger had a statement that perplexed me. "The lead researcher, Casey Honniball, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said at a news conference that she wanted to make it clear that the Sofia study had not found puddles on the moon. Rather the identified hydrogen and oxygen molecules are so far apart, they are neither in liquid or solid form, she noted." Obviously, I have to pursue this further. If the molecules are far apart, how can they be water? This may be more controversial than I thought.
A frequent topic in my columns has been the findings of planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, so-called exoplanets. Since the first detection of an exoplanet back in 1992, thousands of exoplanets have been identified and, indeed, astronomers now estimate there are many billions of them in our Milky Way galaxy. What about other galaxies? These galaxies are so far away that it's hard enough to identify individual stars, let alone planets orbiting the stars. In an article I found in my email from Discover magazine, it seems that Roseanne Di Stefano at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues may have found what they propose is a planet orbiting a binary pair of objects in the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy some 23 million light years away from us here on Earth.
How could they possibly detect a planet that far away? It has to do with the nature of that binary pair and an event that happened on September 20, 2012, and the researchers now going over the data from the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory pointed in that direction that day. The pair is/was either a black hole or a neutron star that was/is gobbling up a massive nearby star at a rapid rate. The result is a huge emission of X-rays, brighter than the Sun in all wavelengths. Furthermore, the neutron star or black hole is, relatively speaking, tiny. So much so that a planet the size of Saturn could completely eclipse the star. What happened that day in 2012 is that the X-ray light suddenly went out for 3 hours and then reappeared.
There are other possible explanations for a dimming of the X-ray light but the researchers say an eclipse by a planet is the most likely. There's apparently a lot more data to examine and you can be sure it will be looked at thoroughly. Back in 2012 they were not looking for such short term events, I assume not thinking they could see an eclipse if it occurred. However one tiny star gobbling up another was probably not on their radar in those days.
Well, this has been a year like no other and 2021 promises more of the same but with hope the vaccines will mean a semblance of normality will be in place by this time next year. And maybe old Bortrum will recover some of his enthusiasm for science.
Happy New Year!
Allen F. Bortrum
