WIMPs versus WIZs, Weakly Interacting Zombies

WIMPs are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, the hope of particle physicists. WIMPs have not been observed yet (in 2023). Particle physicists hope that some sort of WIMPs, as yet unknown, are what Dark Matter is made of. But maybe Dark Matter is made of WIZs, Weakly Interacting Zombies. (as SQPR holds: in SQPR, large scale quantum collapse leaves a mass-energy residue… Those weakly interacting zombies…)  

Dark Matter has been a riddle for a century (a Swiss from Caltech, Zwicky suggested it first). That there is something cosmically flouting the laws of known physics is blatant, and for all to see (if one has a telescope). Two-thirds of spiral galaxies are barred, including our own giant Milky Way. The bar moves rigidly, obviously, and this is an obvious contradiction with having a lot of mass at the center [1]. Either gravity fails (as MOND has it) or there is a lot of mystery mass  (Dark Matter) away from the center.

I had the pleasure over the weekend to talk with David Schlegel from LBL, one of the most cited US physicists. He studies dark energy, dark matter, and fundamental physics.

Here are some key points of our exchange which I think are the most important:

1. David firmly believes in WIMPs. He believes not all the “phase space” has been studied and the particle accelerators will find WIMPs in areas not yet surveyed… “within a decade”. 
2. David agrees that Dark Matter (DM) can’t be explained by neutrinos, because neutrinos don’t stay in place.  
3. David does not believe MOND (MOdified Newton Dynamics is a potential explanation for DM “anymore”. Not in the “last ten years”. So I asked him if it was because of the Bullet Cluster and similar situations, and he said yes. Too many of these. I told him I NEVER believed in MOND, because it looked too ad hoc. David retorted that everything is ad hoc (in science)… So he got on the receiving end of an ad hoc versus logical-principled approach to science. I gave the example of Kepler (ad hoc) versus Newton… In truth, though, even Kepler was not ad hoc, in the sense that he made a deliberate “war on Mars” (which had been launched by Kepler’s mentor Tycho).
4. I pointed out the philosophical difficulty of having as we have in the Big Bang model now TWO inflation mechanisms, one observational (Dark Energy, demonstrated first at Berkeley LBL cosmology and astrophysics group), the other a theoretical necessity to make the Big Bang theory work. That made him smile nervously. He said that after all they are perhaps the same (Wait! What? That’s what SQPR holds). David also said that it would all be figured out in detail within ten years: traces of cosmic inflation should be found… or then, well, inflation would be disproven.

For once I was polite and guarded, in part because I had filled my weekly quota for new enemies earlier that day. I didn’t insist on Big Bang Trouble,

that those early enormous galaxies with old red giant stars contradicted LCDM… I didn’t point out that, without cosmic inflation, the Big Bang model doesn’t work. I didn’t point out that finding a WIMP candidate is only part of the story, and not the most important part… Most crucially, one needs to explain why the Dark Matter is where it is. SQPR, which is a geometric mass-energy theory, does this effortlessly.

All this tells me that core official, ultra expert cosmology is putting all its hope in WIMPS, and keeps on being ultra-confident of the Big Bang religion.

Never mind that the most recent space telescope is apparently verifying a stunning prediction of SQPR, namely huge very old galaxies (and they should be poor in Dark Matter).

Cosmology? One more dimension in which the next decade is going to be fascinating…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] centrifugal acceleration is ~ vv/d (v being the speed of the orbiting object, d its distance to center of the rotation) gravity is ~ 1/dd. Equating both, we get: vv = 1/d, or v is the square root of the inverse of the distance. So v should diminish as one gets away from the center…. But the bar is rigid… and that means that the speed v is proportional to the distance d. So the discrepancy is d^3/2!   

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[2] David Shelgel makes the largest two-dimensional and three-dimensional maps of the universe, which are important tools for cosmology and for studying dark energy, dark matter, and fundamental physics. David is the principal investigator (PI) for the BOSS project on the Sloan Telescope, which has made a three-dimensional map of 1.5 million galaxies and measures the size scale of the Universe to 1% precision (http://www.sdss.org/sdss-surveys/boss/)

David is project scientist for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (https://desi.lbl.gov). When it began operations in 2018, it constructed a three-dimensional map of tens of millions of galaxies spanning the local universe to 10 billion light years. Such devices built in collaboration with Lausanne’s EPFL use 5,000  actuators that harness Swiss high tech high precision know-how inherited from watch making.

Big Bang Big Trouble: More Galaxies Than Available Gas? Quantum Way Out: SQPR!

Distant galaxies seem to be far more massive than expected by today’s Bigbangers (sneakily pejorative neologism!). To the point of impossibility! The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spotted galaxies with masses up to 100 billion times that of the sun that must have formed faster than current models can explain (by comparison our giant Milky Way is 15 times more massive, 1.5 trillion solar masses).

By studying a small patch of sky, with the JWST, Swede physicist Ivo Labbé at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia and colleagues measured the distances to six massive galaxies using their cosmic redshift. Ivo Labbé’s galaxies are (now) all around 30 billion light years away. According to the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Big Bang model, those galaxies formed within 700 million years of the big bang, so 13 billion years ago.

Objects further from our Milky Way galaxy group  move away from us ever more quickly, the further they are from the expansion of the universe. Said expansion was discovered by a number of astronomers more than a century ago, including the famous Edwin Hubble, a greedy lawyer turned astronomer and according to some, an expert plagiarist, who used the world’s most powerful telescope (at the time)… besides earlier discoveries from several European astronomers (Reynolds, Lemaitre, etc.)

Distant galaxies appear redder than nearby galactic clusters because the light waves coming from them are literally stretched by cosmic expansion [1]… (This cosmic shift shows that each photon of light is nonlocal, by the way. If, as Einstein suggested in 1905 a photon was just a point, it would not stretch, hey.)  

“I would have guessed that galaxies like this would not exist this early in the universe,” says Pieter van Dokkum at Yale University (Connecticut), part of the research team. That is because the galaxies all had masses at least 10 billion times the mass of the sun, with one weighing in at 100 billion solar masses. From LCDM models of galactic evolution, we would expect galaxies as young as these to be relatively low-mass, without many stars at all, and then they would grow over time until they became more like our own Milky Way galaxy, which a mass of about a trillion solar masses.

Indeed in the Big Bang LCDM model, galaxies grow around cores of Dark Matter, present from the start. In LCDM massive  elliptical galaxies take much time to grow to their mass through fusion of smaller galaxies. Low-mass galaxies form first, and then the star-forming galaxies merge as they crash into each other. A contemporary elliptical must contain stars that formed over many billion years ago in the merger precursors. But observed, real elliptical galaxies formed very fast, and very early. They appear to have been the first galaxies to have emerged after the Big Bang, forming from the single collapse of a giant post-Big-Bang gas cloud.

These young galaxies observed by the JWST in 2022 are more massive and more compact than expected than the LCDM Big Bang. “What could be going on is that the centers of galaxies form very early, earlier than we thought, then the rest of the galaxy builds up around them,” says van Dokkum (this is exactly what SQPR predicts). “I suspect that we’re looking at not finished products, but beginnings that happened very quickly.”

“If all of this holds up with further investigation, then we are looking at having to rethink some of the early history of galaxy formation,” says Andrew Pontzen at University College London.

Further investigation is crucial. That follow-up will consist of detailed observations and analysis of the galaxies’ light spectra with JWST, which van Dokkum says could take about a year. Stealthily the mood is propagating that if these findings do hold up, it may be a problem for our understanding of the universe more generally, not just galaxy formation. “It was pointed out to us after we submitted the paper that there wasn’t actually enough gas in the universe at that point to form [as many massive galaxies as this study suggests] – and that was a bit of a shocker,” says Labbé. “If you form these monsters, and they contain more stars than the available gas in the universe, that’s a bit of a problem.” Indeed, one may say so. LCDM is vulnerable, because it’s a very steep pyramid of hypotheses. Remove one, and the whole thing collapses.

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In the 1930s Swiss Caltech astronomer genius Fritz Zwicky discovered that the outer stars of galaxies were rotating at the same speed as the inner ones. Assuming that mot of the mass was in their stars, galaxies violated the fundamental Third Law (1618) of Johann Kepler, which states that in a rotational system held together by gravitational attraction, the objects furthest from the center revolve more slowly than those closer in (the square of the period is proportional to the cube of the radius). For example, Mercury revolves around the Sun in 88 days, the Earth in 365, Jupiter in seven years, and Pluto in 90,520 days!

To have the outer stars of galaxies rotate as fast as the inner ones is as outrageous as if Pluto revolved around the Sun in 88 days, over a thousand times faster than it actually does. Galaxies rotate like solid plates! The matter is beautifully exhibited by galaxies with a bar in the middle: the bar moves as a solid straight mass! Then it was found galaxies in clusters moved as fast as they should if the mass of the clusters were ten times greater than it actually seem to be (to evaluate .

The solution to this is the Dark Matter Hypothesis (DMH); a mysterious still-unknown gravitational mass holding all the stars in its grip. One thing that DMH, by itself, does not explain is why the Dark Matter is where it is, in particular places and often segregated from normal matter. For example why is Dark Matter in the suburbs of giant spiral galaxies rather than in the center? That, once installed somewhere, Dark Matter wouls stay there (say in orbit around the center of a galaxy at a particular distance) is not surprising, because Dark Matter doesn’t interact much, except gravitationally (otherwise we would see it!)

So it’s not just Dark Matter that is needed, but also explaining why Dark Matter is positioned where it is (a conventional explanation with ions held in particular places by electromagnetic fields is imaginable; that’s what some Italians proposed; we will see what specialists say, 

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TIME FOR SUB QUANTUM REALITY?

Sub Quantum Physical Reality (SQPR) assumes that the Quantum Waves used to compute in Quantum Physics are “real”: “real” means that the Quantum Waves are not just knowledge waves, they carry an energy-momentum of their own which can be torn to shred when they collapse to form “particles” when the waves are spread over too great a distance. The leftover, non-”particle” debris is Dark Matter.

SQPR weakens field carrier bosons over cosmic distances, while creating a hidden thermodynamics which pushes space away, causing the appearance of Dark Energy, inflating the universe.

Bohr, when presented to alternatives of Quantum Mechanics, simply said: “the difficulty is that they are not crazy enough”. SQPR should be crazy enough: instead of holding the universe together only with Henri Poincaré’s constancy of the velocity of light, it gets subtle about it, and the true architecture of the cosmos is from the superluminal entanglements of the Quantum Interaction. 

Having already one reason for cosmic expansion, SQPR does away with standard Big Bang cosmic inflation, while keeping Dark Energy (DE is observed; Cosmic Inflation during the big Bang is just a hypothesis to make the Big Bang work) … And thus the universe is much older than it looks. So giant elliptical galaxies had plenty of time to appear, from giant gas clouds collapsing.  The geometry of a giant elliptical galaxy is not favorable to the apparition of Dark Matter, because the mean free path of a particle is below the exponential radius of the Quantum Interaction.

The apparition of spiral galaxies comes from a combination of gravitation and conservation of angular momentum. According to SQPR, the spiral geometry is favorable to the apparition of Dark Matter. Hence the accelerating expansion of the universe as spirals appeared.

SQPR goes far, explains a lot, by supposing little, and what’s supposed is very natural. LCDM may well prove to have been a collective hallucination (those who may feel I am too confrontational are invited to look at cosmic inflation, a completely ad hoc hypothesis… needed for the basic Big Bang theory, so even more basic than LCDM).

In the great scientific revolutions, the preceding paradigm is found barking at the wrong tree, and it was not even a bush…

Patrice Ayme

How compact galaxies grow in the SQPR model: Dark Matter tends to appear where the collapse free entanglement radius is greater than the SQPR exponential function (technical differential geometry allusion)… in other words, on the outskirts of the compact galaxy, which then tends to expand in that Dark Matter belt, both from the inside, out, and from the outside, in:

Big Bang Trouble: Old, Distant Galaxies Are Huge Monsters

Big Bang theory was predicting the most ancient galaxies to be tiny… But the new space telescope can see them, and some are huge…  

The Big Bang theory in its modern incarnation, LCDM, Lambda Cold Dark Matter, consists of a chain of nested hypotheses with attending “tooth fairies” to make it work [1]. Now there is precision cosmology, and many results, say of the CBR (Cosmic Background Radiation) fit the data exquisitely… Maybe all too well: That reminds me of Ptolemaic astronomy, when all was perfect (astronomer and count Tycho found the cheating only 15 centuries later…) I am of the opinion that there is a possible different mechanism to produce CBR (so not just redshift from expansion but also from a tired light effect coming from cosmically sized Quantum Interactions; Zwicky, the discoverer of Dark Matter also suggested “tired light”, that’s generally considered to be wrong, but Zwicky suggested no mechanism; SQPR does). 

Some of these hypotheses of the Big Bang are quite out of this world. For example, the Big Bang, even without LCDM, has to grow space at one hundred billion trillion times the speed of light (10^23 c). 

The LCDM model makes very specific predictions. So early galaxies are supposed to be small and disorganized… However, in truth… Instead we are seeing instead large, well-organized galaxies, which should not be there so early after the BB. The haggard majority of astronomers has to admit that some important ingredient in LCDM is missing, or something is wrong entirely. I propose the latter, on a truly cosmic scale.

“Lambda” comes from Einstein. It was a cheat factor Einstein introduced to explain that the universe was static: it neither collapsed nor expanded. However, within a few years the universe was found to be expanding. Einstein called Lambda “it’s biggest mistake”… because otherwise he would have “predicted” the expansion (silly boy). So “Lambda” was viewed with horror and consternation, as the poster boy of ad hoc hypotheses, for seventy years, until around 2000 CE when it was found, by studying super novas as distant candles, that the cosmic expansion accelerated, so “Lambda” had to be plugged back into the General Relativity equation, which now basically reads as follows: 

Curvature + Lambda = Energy-Momentum  

So then Eistein’s biggest error became another Einstein insight…. (My view of Einstein’s biggest error is that it is much  bigger than that: his assumption of point-like “particles”… which is increasingly disproven by the most recent experiment, not just my opinion. The field is moving so fast, I didn’t write about these yet.)

The Dark Matter problem is that gravity as the inverse square law doesn’t seem to work in view of the apparent repartition of matter around galaxies and galactic clusters…

The inverse square law for gravitation was proposed in 1645 by the French astronomer Ismaël Boulliau (aka Bullialdus). The law was demonstrate by Newton when he deduced from it Kepler’s laws. The 1/dd behavior of gravity is also the first approximation of General Relativity, GR, the modern (1916) theory of gravitation of Einstein and his colleagues (Hilbert, Besso, etc.). So if 1/dd falls, so does GR.

However, confronted to this Dark Matter problem all over, some then tried the oldest and most basic method of science: if it doesn’t fit, you must that quit! When confronted with a mystery, one tends to go to the simplest explanation. In the case of “Dark Matter” that would be neutrinos or a similar new type of particle, say from supersymmetry, interacting very little with ordinary matter. But particle physicists found no such particles. They are still searching.

Periodically some scientists, typically Italian, located below Gran Sasso (the great stone.), proclaim they have solved the problem… But they are found to be wrong. Gran Sasso experiments should be funded, but Italian science has a funding crisis, so is prone to enthusiastic claims to justify said funding… Most recently Italians claim they found (again) all the Dark Matter, and it was all ions, and there were too many of them… (I would be naturally very disappointed if they were right…)

Neglecting this Italian distraction, the next logical possibility is to modify gravity to fit the apparent rotation curves of galaxies. This sort of method is curve fitting, it has a glorious past: Kepler did it…within a generation or so Kepler laws were (more or less) deducted from the inverse square law and the basic laws of mechanics by Newton and company. So modifying gravity should not be taken lightly. Our GPS works with GR…

Modifying gravity ad hoc is called MOND: MOdified Newtonian Dynamics.  A first problem here is that Ismael Boulliau (Bullialdus) has a little reasoning for the 1/dd law, namely that would be the natural decrease over a distance d, of the density of particles. Boulliau made the explicit analogy of graviation with light (if it consisted of particles). Some may object that Boulliau’s work is rather trivial. Maybe, but it’s way better than no fundamental reason at all, as in MOND.

Moreover, Bouillau may well have been right, in light of Planck’s Quantum hypothesis, which makes light into particles (or at least packets of energy, an idea reinforced by Einstein in 1905)… So Bouillau contradicts MOND with a reason all the better, that it is very simple…

If there are no Dark Matter particles, and modifying gravity doesn’t work the next and only step is to modify Quantum Physics, and that is what Sub Quantum Physical Reality (SQPR) does. It turns out that SQPR changes cosmology on a vast scale. No more “tooth fairies” and a cascade of ad hoc hypotheses… Patrice Ayme The universe is lyrical in the most gigantic way:

Distant galaxies as seen by the JWST in 2022…

[1] As astrophysicist and cosmologist Stacy McGaugh, a MOND partisan, puts it: “Bear in mind that there are many forms of feedback. That one word [feedback] upon which our entire cosmology has become dependent is not a single auxiliary hypothesis. It is more like a Russian nesting doll of multiple tooth fairies, one inside another. Imagining that these different, complicated effects must necessarily add up to just the right outcome is dangerous: anything we get wrong we can just blame on some unknown imperfection in the feedback prescription. .. This is like putting a bandage on an amputation and pretending like the treatment is complete.

The universe is weirder than we know, and perhaps weirder than we can know. This provides boundless opportunity for self-delusion.

Surprises: Equatorial Martian Ice, Huge Molten (?) Core In Mars…

The most surprising discovery in the recent exploration of the Solar System is the presence of water and ice on so many planets and satellites. We knew there was much water on Mars.. at least, at the poles. Latest surprise: how much ice seems to be present at the equator of Mars. Now Mars’ equator has nearly temperate temperatures, and much more exploitable solar power (as long as there is machinery to clean the panels!)  

NASA’s InSight lander French made and operated seismometer recorded a magnitude 4 marsquake Dec. 24, 2021. That seismometer is the main feature of Insight. France’s Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument to NASA, with the principal investigator at IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris)

The cause of that quake? A meteoroid strike, perhaps the biggest seen on Mars since NASA began exploring. 

Completely unexpected and amazing, the meteoroid excavated boulder-size chunks of ice. Now this all happened close to the Martian equator — a discovery with joyous implications for future colonization plans.

Preceding impact craters on Mars had shown blue material in it, presumed to be water ice. But it’s not sure. The latest impact clearly shows what seems to be blocks of exploded ice laying on the surface. The crater is 150 meters across:

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spotted a new, yawning crater. The impact, in a region called Amazonis Planitia, blasted a crater roughly 492 feet (150 meters) across and 70 feet (21 meters) deep. Some of the ejecta thrown by the impact flew as far as 23 miles (37 kilometers) away.

The meteoroid is estimated to have spanned 16 to 39 feet (5 to 12 meters) — small enough that it would have burned up and exploded in Earth’s atmosphere…. but not in Mars’ thin atmosphere, which is just 1% as dense as our planet’s. Mars corresponds to altitude 21 kilometers on Earth

InSight has seen its power drastically decline in recent months due to dust settling on its solar panels. This crucial French seismoter will be left to freeze, an icy reminder that solar power goes only that far. NASA has finally understood that it has to go back to nuclear power: the latest robot there is nuclear power, and the fabrication of nuclear power sources has been relaunched… After decades of nuclear abandonement…. 

Some pseudo-ecologists will scoff, reading that having no nuclear power killed InSight. However, given enough time, the French seismograph could have elucidated this. For example the impact above is the first time surface marsquake waves were detected. Surface waves provide with a wealth of information, because they are material and frequency dependent… As I am writing these lines InSight is dying. RIP.

The solar system would be quickly conquered if we had a compact energy source, such as portable thermonuclear fire. It would enable fast travel and great habitability works

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InSight studies the planet’s crust, mantle, and core, thanks to seismic waves. It has revealed the size, depth, and composition of Mars’ inner layers. Since landing in November 2018, InSight has detected 1,318 marsquakes, including several caused by smaller meteoroid impacts.

December 2021’s impact was the first observed to have surface waves — the kind of seismic wave that ripples along the top of a planet’s crust. 

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Mars crust is thinner than expected and may have up to three sub-layers. The crust goes as deep as 23 miles (37 kilometers) if there are three sub-layers.

Beneath that is the mantle, which extends 969 miles (1,560 kilometers) below the surface —twice as deep as on Earth. This could be because there is now only one continental plate on Mars, in contrast to Earth with its seven large mobile plates, within which water plays a key lubrificating role. At 650 kilometers deep on Earth, water disappears and the rock changes…. The thick lithosphere fits with the model of Mars as a ‘one-plate planet.

At the heart of Mars is the presumably molten core, which has a radius of 1,137 miles (1,830 kilometers). This is huge and surprising. It took hundreds of years to measure Earth’s core; after the Apollo missions, it took them 40 years to measure the Moon’s core. InSight took just two years to measure Mars’ core.

Because the core radius is large, the density of the core must be relatively low. Thus the core must contain a large proportion of lighter elements in addition to iron and nickel. These include sulphur, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen, in unexpectedly large proportion. So the composition of the entire planet is not yet fully understood. Nonetheless, so far, investigations confirm that the core is liquid… even if Mars no longer has a magnetic field (perhaps because the core didn’t have enough iron).

Why such a big molten core? According to yours truly, nuclear reactions contribute to core formation. As Mars is much smaller than Earth, if such was not the case, Mar’s core would have long solidified. So the InSight’e result demonstrates my theory.

Planetary cores are crucial to questions of habitability of planets. Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs) caused several mass extinctions on Earth. They happen on the average every 15 million years, but vary in intensity. Two very large LIPs occurring together would probably destroy life on Earth, and Venus’ life and habitability may have succumbed to a LIP, 700 million years ago. 

The disappearance of dinosaurs seems to have been caused by the Deccan/Reunion plume LIP, with maybe the added contribution of the Yucatan bolide as the last straw.

Studying the Solar System turns out to be surprisingly rich. William Shatner, who played commander of the Enterprise in the famous series Star Trek, ascended a bit into space recently.  Shatner got shattered… By what he saw, namely, nothing.

Shatner: …”things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”

Well Shatner didn’t look at what is right: water everywhere… Once we have colossal compact energy, that is, controlled thermonuclear fusion, we will be able to zoom fast between worlds we will create, we humanity, full of life, some by digging inside, others, why not, by living on the surface in reconstituted atmospheres… 

LIPs on Venus and related implications for life in the galaxy, and Earth, will be for another essay…

Patrice Ayme  

P/S: LIPs = Large Igneous Provinces, or how life could (have) become extinct on Earth, and how Venus, from balmy Eden, became a runaway greenhouse…

How Fake Anglo-Saxon Mental Supremacy Was Established: Gross Lies. The Case Of Newton Turned Into God

Authorities want to make us believe that the spiritual ancestors of today’s rulers invented everything. Often they are even the genetic ancestors, but that is besides the point: by extolling imaginary predecessors, Anglo-Saxon supremacists have installed an aura of supremacy… for the systems of thought they installed and rule with, enabling them to reign effortlessly.

Now this is deep and systematic. Even Anglo-Saxon intellectuals who pretend to be against the system are part of the plot. An easy hint is who feeds and powers them: if it is the establishment, and the establishment likes them, that’s a warning sign.

Most of the world’s top historical minds who contributed to most of humanity’s mental progress got serious difficulties with the establishment, because new ideas threaten old oligarchies always: if what was always known is suddenly found to be wrong… what about the ruling establishment? Could possibly be the ruling establishment wrong too? This is why the genuine geniuses of creative thinking always smell of Lucifer, Lux-ferre, light carrying… As far as public opinion is concerned.

Socrates’ execution is famous, but just earlier Aspasia’s son had been executed (Aspasia was the philosopher telling Pericles what to say), so would be Demosthenes (fleeing Macedonian henchmen), Archimedes assassinated by a Roman soldier (for doing geometry in the sand), Hypatia (raped, flayed and dragged alive until dead, courtesy of the local Christians), or Boetius… And so were executed or terrified most Muslim intellectuals… Not to mention countless French intellectuals in the early Sixteenth Century, Bruno (burned alive in 1600 CE for suggesting exoplanets and solar systems around stars), Kepler (his mom was tried for witchcraft), Galileo and Descartes fleeing France (just for reasoning in public, after inventing algebraic geometry), and so on. Yes, the examples extend all the way to the Twentieth Century.

Most of these top thinkers had this in common: they had unusual careers, typically outside of the mainstream, and they lived dangerously. Because of this, they are often belittled to this day: little thinkers paid by the establishment tend to have resentment towards the great minds who had the courage to discover the bulk of human knowledge, because great minds are not small employees.

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Kepler’s work was necessary for Newton to contribute to human understanding. But Kepler’s work, on the face of it, was much harder than Newton’s. By the way, Kepler thought gravitation went as the inverse of the distance. The true law is the square of that. That was found by Bullaldius. All astronomers had an intuitive understanding, originating with Buridan’s explicit texts, that the gravitational force, in combination with the laws of motion, gave planetary orbits. The idea was published by 1350 CE. Newton proved most of the detailed mathematical reasoning (but arguably not all, he missed what came to be known as “Gauss theorem”… Although he tried to prove it). Great, but not the end all be all, as White Anglo-Saxon Supremacists pretend…

Richard Dawkins FRS (Fellow Royal Society), FRSL is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. He just penned the following opinion, typical of white Anglo-Saxon supremacists:

Richard Dawkins, @RichardDawkins

“In 1665 Cambridge University closed because of plague. Isaac Newton retreated to rural Lincolnshire. During his 2 years in lockdown he worked out calculus, the true meaning of colour, gravitation, planetary orbits & the 3 Laws of Motion. Will 2020 be someone’s Annus Mirabilis?”

That statement of Dawkins sounds innocent enough: everybody agrees Newton invented everything he is famous for, and that’s a lot, as described by Dawkins. Yeah, except that most of what is attributed to Newton was actually not discovered by Newton. It is propaganda, to make us believe a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) was this unfathomable genius. That is done by attributing to him centuries of discoveries, and turning the history of humanity into systemic racism.

Indeed, Newton didn’t invent calculus: Fermat did. (at most Newton invented a geometric way to solve some problems of calculus pertaining to orbits; using geometry to solve calculus problems was inaugurated by Buridan’s students… in the 1300s…).

And Newton didn’t find the second law of motion (which implies the first): Buridan did, three centuries before Newton (nowadays some Anglo-Saxons recognize that the law was known before Newton). The gravitation law was from French astronomer Bullaldius/Boulliau, Newton said it himself. And planetary orbits were Kepler’s great work, with his three law of planetary orbits!

So what did Newton do? Mostly he tried to prove that the law of motions plus the gravitation force as the inverse square of the distance implied Kepler’s laws. That’s great, but not of the order of Descartes’ Algebraic Geometry, or Fermat’s Calculus. To add insult to injury the notation of Leibnitz for calculus is used to this day… while Newton’s geometric calculus is ignored (that may be a mistake…) Newton and Leibnitz had a quarrel about this…

To establish their model of civilization, the English  propaganda has know no bounds: Sir Francis Drake, a great explorer, savior of England when confronting the Great Armada, was also a corsair mandated by the Queen, and a slave trader operating slave ships for profit. Not just that, but that plutocrat was one of the original “West Country men” who devastated Ireland. That mood and methods were then exported to America, where they established systemic racism as jurisprudence.

And central to propaganda was to establish English mental supremacy, for the entire planet to be awed by. As the great rival was France, the other Western superpower of the Middle Ages, many French discoveries were attributed to Englishmen. An example is Emilie Du Chatelet, who discovered and demonstrated energy… thus rising above Newton, who confused energy and momentum (discovered circa 1340 CE by Buridan; momentum is mv, energy is 1/2 mvv). This is a case of sexism hobbling civilization.

Another case is Denis Papin. Papin, who was a French physicist who trained with the best minds of his day, was a university professor of engineering. Papin fabricated the first powerful steam engine, and one capable of propelling a boat. After Papin’s death, Watt was born, and Watt, an inventor out of many, perfected the steam engine. So the unit of power is called a Watt because many people in England spent a lot of time trying (and succeeding) to steal Papin’s invention: the efforts of thieves should not go to waste. In the latest twist, British propaganda now calls Papin a British scientist… in truth Papin’s boat was built in Germany where he was professor, and, after steaming a hundred miles was destroyed by monks, who are professionals in fighting Lucifer…

An even more spectacular case is Lamarck, who published his establishment of the theory of evolution (from studying mollusk fossils with a microscope, for decades), before Darwin was born. Napoleon, and the Christian churches hated Lamarck, who was outlawed in english universities (Lyell and Darwin had to go to Scotland to be taught Lamarck’s discoveries). To this day, the disdain for Lamarck is a duty shared by those who want to teach in Anglo-Saxon universities, otherwise one would be called a charlatan.

Those who want to fight systemic racism have learned recently that they are made to revere false idols. Yes, and it did not happen by accident, but by intelligent design.

Simplicius: OK, as usual, you evoked some of the great minds and things we Anglo-Saxons tend to have never heard of: Buridan, Fermat, Papin, Du Châtelet, Lamarck… All French. And then Algebraic Geometry, Energy…

PA: Descartes invented how to describe geometry algebraically. Then Fermat developed Calculus, all the way to showing differentiation and integration were inverse to each other… As far as so many of the deepest thinkers being French, that comes from two things: First, France, or more exactly the Francia of the Franks was the creator of Europe (named by the Franks). Both Germany (by 800 CE) and Britain (1066) were Frankish creations. In either case, slavery was made unlawful. Second, France had three times the population of England. 

The case of Du Châtelet should be famous: here is a woman and she establishes what is perhaps the most important concept in physics. Buridan: momentum. Du Châtelet: energy. Sorry, but Newton’s discoveries pale in comparison (by the way, she died young, from childbirth; had she lived longer her contributions may have been even more amazing; she was an excellent philosopher of science).

Simplicius: Why would we, simple folks, care about who established the great scientific advances? Somebody did. So what?

PA: Which societies advance human understanding is crucial. Most do not, most of the time. We want to save humanity, going forward, and that means discovering what makes us more intelligent. Moreover in the case of England versus France, I detailed the fact that their colonization models in America were different. The French approach was governmental, and determined not to force the Natives. The English model was that of the “West Country Men”, as refined in England: exterminate, maximize profits.

Simplicius: What does who invented what have to do with how colonization was performed?

PA: The “West Country Men” model weaponized systemic racism. Racism is the idea that some human beings are biologically superior to others. By attributing all the discoveries to Englishmen, the Englishman is established as a higher species, or at least one which invents everything. In particular, the British plutocracy invented the most superior system of thought pertaining to civilization. So the “West Country Men” mentality, keen to line alleyways with Irish skulls, came to rule America. A practical consequence was the eradication of the Indians. 

Simplicius: Is not that all so yesterday? 

PA: Far from it. The mentality that greed and higher profits should rule is itself ruling, because it has ruled for four centuries, and penetrated the institutions. Trump came along and said: ‘Down with profits in China, bring back the jobs!’ The establishment, which uses the maximization of profits as its most superior moral principle, hated him for it. They hated him for it to the point they started to degrade the political process. An example is Biden calling Trump an “arsonist”, while it is the Obama-Biden administration which developed fracking, and was very loud about it. 

Claiming England had a superior model of civilization in its civilization relative to France (let alone Spain or Portugal) is claiming that the world should go on with that system of civilization… which is the dominant system of civilization, worldwide. The real situation is of course very complex. For example at this point the Brexiter Boris Johnson is applying old French like methods… While the European Union is officially led by greed is right, that is the “West Country Men” way… with the caveat that the COVID pandemic has proven that old fashion governmentalism, the French way, as practiced successfully by China… saves lives. So maybe then, Trump was right all along, and both France and Germany have decided to operate the same U turn towards more industrialization, planning and self sufficiency. 

Simplicius: OK, please, I have a headache! Let’s stop here! So then your point is that, by extolling Englishmen as great geniuses, when in fact they are not as great as that, one extolls English plutocracy and its systems of thought, moods and mentality, and that this is bad for civilization and the planet, promoting systemic racism, among other things. Got it.   

PA: It also distorts the refined history of systems of thought. And that’s not neglectable, because it teaches us how humanity learned to think better.  

Simplicius: Once again I don’t understand why correct attribution of the origins of systems of thought are relevant to the common person.

PA: It works this way: thinkers such as Dawkins go to school and are conditioned to believe the greatest minds are Anglo-Saxon. So they are naturally inclined to believe anything Anglo-Saxon is mentally superior, and this is what they teach in turn to the intellectual class of reporters, lawyers, doctors, engineers, CEOs, boards of directors, etc.

Those who want to fight systemic racism have learned recently that they are made to revere false idols. Yes, and it did not happen by accident, but by intelligent design. And yes it starts with the apparently innocent divinization of  Sir Francis Drake, Isaac Newton, or James Watt…

There is no innocence in the world of logic, contrarily to repute…

Patrice Ayme

 

Space Colonization For Real. And Why Humanity Needs It, To Keep On Being Human.

It’s fashionable among intellectuals of the lesser sort to spite technology. Of course, that’s perfectly idiotic, hypocritical, and base: they would not even exist without the technology and the capability to use it, which our ancestors developed, already millions of years ago… As a species. Yes, the arrogant thinker, thinking where no thought has been thought before, on which all of civilization rests, is a direct biological creation of exponentiating technology. That, and apple pie.

Arrogance is great, as long as it bears fruit, such as thoughts the commons find astounding,and one could not have had them otherwise. . But arrogance for the sake of denial bears no fruit.

Water at the poles of the Moon, where it condensates in perpetual shadows. (Artist representation).

What’s the spatial bodies we can hope to colonize? Well, it used to look real hard. If one had to lift water from Earth to space… We didn’t have the capability of launching all this water cheaply enough.

Friend Stephen Jones observed:

“Mars is our only potential candidate to colonize. Beyond our own solar system? Nope. We will never reach another solar system.”

Well, indeed, we need water, and lots of energy. Fifty years ago, it looked as if there was only one planet with water in the Solar System: Earth. Now we have found so much that we have to demonstrate life did NOT evolve out there in the Solar System. The same is true, even more so, with exoplanets. 

Now we know that Mars, Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede, Pluto… have lots of water. Europa may have more than Earth (we don’t know how deep its ocean is). Some asteroids, comets, the poles of Mercury have water. It’s also very likely that the Moon water is usable. The largest asteroid, a spherical dwarf planet, Ceres, is a water rich body, with eruption of brine in several places. Once we have water, all we need is energy to make livable quarters. NASA is fully aware of all this.

Ceres is an ocean world where water and ammonia reacted with silicate rocks. As the ocean froze, salts and other telltale minerals concentrated into deposits that are now exposed in many locations across the surface. The Dawn spacecraft, which orbited it ever closer, also found organics in several locations on Ceres’ surface.

Altogether, Ceres seems to be approximately 40% or 50% water by volume, compared to 0.1% for Earth, and 73% rock by mass. So no more lifting water up there in space: it’s there already. We just need to get there, with lots of (nuclear) energy…

And how to get there? Well Elon Musk’s SpaceX has landed one particular rocket six times already (crushing down the price to orbit: it would take just one million dollars to repair and refurbish tat rocket, SpaceX says…). His Starship is supposed to be as reusable as an helicopter (revolutionizing point to point transport on Earth, no doubt) [1]. 

But the ultimate grail is portable thermonuclear fusion… Give us this, oh Lord, and the galaxy is ours… Nobody knows is that is feasible: the Sun is not big by accident. Thermonuclear fusion works better, the bigger the reactor. we are trying to do in a room what a gigantic Brown Dwarf can barely achieve. And Red Dwarf stars are eminently unstable… 

IF portable fusion is feasible, we will conquer the entire Solar System, and missions to proximal stars are imaginable, if we master hibernation (all sorts of rodents do it, after all…)

The philosophical question is why bother? 

Why to conquer space? The answer is simple: because it raises the bar of our understanding.  

An example? NASA just announced that its perpetually deferred new space telescope the James Webb, will be launched even later than last forecast (Fall 2021 now). Why? It’s immensely complex. To fit inside the fairing of the Ariane V rocket (or any rocket), it has to be folded. The mirror system and the solar shield enfold themselves in 180 different operations… This has to work 100% on 180 operations, as the telescope will be at the L1 Lagrangian point, where Earth and Sun gravitational attractions balance each other, 600,000 kilometers away, twice the distance of the Moon.  

So this telescope is perhaps the most complex machine ever. It uses several new and finicky technologies… And so it is throughout space exploration. New tech, all over. Mastering space forces us to master those technologies. We are in a debate with space, and it teaches us a lot, this demanding master.

Look at the blackouts and fires in California: both are all about energy management. Yes, there was not enough energy to take care of the forests. Now there is not enough energy to fight fires burning into groves of 3,000 year old trees. Space teaches us to optimize energy management… in particular of creating, and using energy as efficiently as possible.

Space forces tech to go higher, better. And only new tech will save us, the Earth, and our high mental and spiritual standards… 

Space is not a luxury, it’s not just a refuge from disaster, or reality. It is the future, because humanity is a force that goes. Up.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Supporting Elon Musk directly and indirectly, I was against: it looked like a case of celebritism. Now I am happy to report I was in error (as I already said). Supporting Elon Musk with beaucoup dollars is actually the best thing Barack Obama ever did. What characterizes Musk is the boldness of vision, the “ALL HOPE AHEAD!” attitude, what Charles Quint called :”PLUS OULTRE!”

Musk’s Starship, if he gets it to work, will revolutionize transportation (the Pentagon is going to be very interested). If there is no will to reach much higher, there is no way to change much deeper, this is true all over. If there is no will for a different, better world, there is no way, and there is not even any thought going that way. Instead, the “Inch’Allah” way rules all… Suivez la direction de mon regard…

Is Intelligence The Definition Of Quantum Life? … Spatial Consequences…

IS LIFE, QUANTUM VERSION, CLEVER ENOUGH TO CREATE WHAT WE CAN’T? Yet? 

Obviously… As humanity gets beaten up by COVID 19, one may want to ponder how clever life is. Is COVID 19 a clever answer? To a question which was not asked enough? Do you, humanity, have enough decency to be clever enough to survive? What about space? How does life survives that? OK, it’s not exactly booming in Antarctica’s Dry Valleys. 

There are two aspects, contradicting each other, one disfavorable to life, the other favorable, which may not have been given enough weight in evaluating Advanced Intelligence in space. First the situation of Earth is special, very stable, in part from having a large Moon (compare with Mars’ wild rotation axis tumbling, with super winters, and super summers). Plus, the solar system is historically stable: no supernova exploded real close in the last 4 billion years. Many are the disasters possible, out there in space.

Disaster land: Scott, who discovered them, called Antarctica Dry Valleys the “valleys of death”. Katabatic winds regularly reach 300 kilometers per hour, and more, all the way down them… This is only 1,300 kilometers from the South Pole…

Red Dwarves, which are both most frequent and most unstable, are a case in point, with huge flares, Coronal Mass Ejections. They may be OK for human colonization, but biological evolution to multicellular level, is something else.

40 BILLION EARTHS? Yes & NO.

However, and in the other direction, it is likely that biological evolution is in great part a Quantum Process. Basically, to put it bluntly, the Quantum is intelligent (think about the interference pattern from the double slit: how does the photon know where to go? More prosaically, electrons find, Quantum Mechanically, the lowest energy solutions, as if they were little sorcerers: if that’s not clever, what is? This is used crucially in life forms extracting energy from the sun).

The delicate architecture of DNA is Quantum-sensitive to environmental conditions: if things change inside a cell, DNA can change in a selection-of-the fittest DNA. A process quicker than the selection of the fittest species, and which will appear as clever telenomic adaptation harnessing necessity beyond chance. 

So Quantum biology may be clever enough to survive in conditions which look impossible to us… Or even to be created in impossible conditions (think Red Dwarves).

The most sinister interpretation of the Fermi Paradox is not that civilizations don’t last. It is that they are in hiding, because it’s a jungle out there. That’s the Dark Forest theme found in many science fiction novels. Exploring Earth, Mars, Europa, Enceladus, and the closest star systems, should throw light on the subject. It’s possible that life is stuck at a very primitive level, all over. Indeed we don’t know how life evolved on Earth, thus, how likely the different steps… Quantum Computers should help with lowest energy solutions to find those probabilities…

The Antarctic Dry Valleys are basically deprived of life. However, there is some.

Researchers have discovered that Antarctica Dry Valleys are home to a variety of extremophiles (organisms that live in extreme environments). Among them are lichen and mosses, communities of microbes (including cyanobacteria), and nematodes (microscopic worms). Researchers continue to find and study these and other organisms and their adaptations, which allow them to survive in one of the most punishing environments on the planet. A natural question is: how well would they do on Mars? For that matter, is there life on the summit of Mount Everest? Everest has bare rock expanses, not far from the summit, in conditions reminiscent of the Dry Valleys. Now, of course the highest atmospheric pressure on Mars corresponds to 28,000 meters on Earth… (it’s at the lowest point of Mars geoid, 8,200 meters below it… A more subtle observation is that they may not have had enough space and time, and stable enough an environment to evolve…

Life is smart. Maybe that’s its definition. How smart? Our own expansion away from Earth will help us figure it out…

Patrice Ayme

Dark Black Hole Next Door

HR 6819, is a double star system, about 1,000 light-years away, or roughly 9.5 thousand, million, million kilometers, in the Constellation Telescopium. On the scale of the galaxy, it’s next door. Usually Black Holes are detected by the sparks of material furiously accelerated as it falls towards the hole (“Accretion” BH). Copious X-rays are emitted. However, this phenomenon arises typically when two stars are in close orbit, one goes supernova, then implode into a Black Hole, and material keeps transferring from the other star towards the hole.

If the stars are far enough, and one collapses into a Black Hole, there is no reason for a transfer of material. The Black Hole arises because, to our knowledge, gravity will overwhelm any force we know of, if there is enough mass M in a tight enclosure. Notice the “if”. In truth we are not absolutely sure that Black Hole equation, passed a point will behave as General Relativity supposes, because we could only be sure if we are sure we have all of physics figured out. Highly unlikely…

A basic trick used all over astronomy to evaluate the masses of stars and planets, as long as something rotates around them. Gravitational constant has been put equal to unity, to simplify.

But one thing that is clear, and it was already clear to Laplace in the Eighteenth Century, if there is enough mass concentrated, particles of light won’t come out. Laplace waxed lyrical on the subject, until he realized that, thanks to Young’s and others’ work, it looked like light was, after all, a wave, not a particle as Laplace had assumed, following Newton. It was clear how to hold a particle down, with a concentrated mass… But not a wave. So Laplace, assuming now light was a wave, removed Black Holes from late editions of his book!  We can see that the wave-particle perplexity was already causing trouble centuries ago…

The HR 6819 Black Hole can be characterized from its interaction with the two stars of HR 6819 – one that orbits the hole, and the other that orbits this inner pair.

HR 6819 can be seen with just the naked eye from the southern sky. No telescope or binoculars are needed. The 2.2m telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile reveals the inner of the two visible stars to be orbiting an unseen object every 40 days.

Considering the speed of the orbiting star, and its radius, the invisible object is found to be around four solar masses, more than twice the mass at which a Black Hole is unavoidable in a dark object (a star can have up to hundreds of times the mass of the Sun, but only because raging thermonuclear fire keeps it inflated).

Stars at the end of their lives with a bit more than 1.4 solar masses will implode the Black Hole way. Some think there maybe 10^8 of them in the Milky Way… Which has an area of roughly 10^10 light years… this makes it likely there are other really black Black Holes of the same type closer than that…

Patrice Ayme

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From the source:

A naked-eye triple system with a nonaccreting black hole in the inner binary^⋆,⋆⋆

Th. Rivinius¹, D. Baade², P. Hadrava³, M. Heida² and R. Klement⁴ Received: 25 March 2020 Accepted: 22 April 2020.

Abstract:

Several dozen optical echelle spectra demonstrate that HR 6819 is a hierarchical triple. A classical Be star is in a wide orbit with an unconstrained period around an inner 40 d binary consisting of a B3 III star and an unseen companion in a circular orbit. The radial-velocity semi-amplitude of 61.3 km s⁻¹ of the inner star and its minimum (probable) mass of 5.0 M_⊙ (6.3 ± 0.7 M_⊙) imply a mass of the unseen object of ≥4.2 M_⊙ (≥5.0 ± 0.4 M_⊙), that is, a black hole (BH). The spectroscopic time series is stunningly similar to observations of LB-1. A similar triple-star architecture of LB-1 would reduce the mass of the BH in LB-1 from ∼70 M_⊙ to a level more typical of Galactic stellar remnant BHs. The BH in HR 6819 probably is the closest known BH to the Sun, and together with LB-1, suggests a population of quiet BHs. Its embedment in a hierarchical triple structure may be of interest for models of merging double BHs or BH + neutron star binaries. Other triple stars with an outer Be star but without BH are identified; through stripping, such systems may become a source of single Be stars.

Exit Big Bang? The Universe Is Anisotropic!

Of few things truly certain we are, but of many things most falsely speak…

Astronomers assumed for decades, without any proof, that the Universe was expanding at the same rate in all directions: it was simpler that way (after all some hanger-ons were claiming they were present during the “First Three Minutes”!… and thus became very famous…). A new study based on data from ESA’s XMM-Newton, NASA’s Chandra and the German-led ROSAT X-ray observatories suggests this key premise of cosmology might be wrong.

The Universe in simplified glory. However… Not as simple as expected! The blue areas expand more slowly than expected, the yellow areas faster. In isotropy, the image would be monochromatic red. Credit: © Konstantinos Nikolaos Migkas, Uni Bonn/Astronomy & Astrophysics. And the differences are not small: thirty percent! (30%!)

The isotropy hypothesis says that the Universe has, despite some local differences, the same properties in each direction on the large scale. The hypothesis has been supported by observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). An alleged direct remnant of the Big Bang, the CMB would reflect the state of the Universe as it was in its infancy, at only 380 000 years of age. The CMB’s uniform distribution in the sky suggested that in those early days the Universe must have been expanding at the same rate in all directions.

If this would still be true in more recent times, the speed of galactic clusters should average out. But significant differences were observed.

The astronomers used X-ray temperature measurements of the extremely hot gas that pervades the clusters and compared the data with how bright the clusters appear in the sky. Clusters of the same temperature and located at a similar distance should appear similarly bright. But that is not what the astronomers observed.

Clusters with the same properties, with similar temperatures, appeared to be less bright than expected in one direction of the sky, and brighter than expected in another direction. The difference was quite significant, around 30 percent. These differences are not random but have a clear pattern depending on the direction in which we observed in the sky.

Before challenging the widely accepted status quo ante, the cosmology model known as LCDM, which provides the basis for estimating the cluster distances, other possible explanations were looked at. Perhaps, there could be undetected gas or dust clouds obscuring the view and making clusters in a certain area appear dimmer. The data, however, do not support this scenario. Nor does it support that the distribution of clusters is affected by bulk flows, large-scale motions of matter caused by the gravitational pull of extremely massive structures such as large cluster groups.

The authors speculate that this uneven effect on cosmic expansion might be caused by Dark Energy, the mysterious component of the cosmos which accounts for the majority—around 69% – of its overall energy. Very little is known about dark energy today, except that it appears to have been accelerating the expansion of the Universe in the past few billion years.

Meanwhile, lots of things will have to be recomputed… And the flow of surprises from heavens doesn’t stop here… A Milky way sized Dark Matter galaxy would have been discovered…

Patrice Ayme

Sun, Violent Stars, And Their Superflares

In the Chinese blockbuster movie “Wandering Earth“, the Sun goes red giant, and then Jupiter has a gravity spike (as the Earth swings by). Could it happen? According to today’s official physics, no. According to my own Sub Quantic Physics Reality (SQPR), yes. [1] Established scientists may smirk. However, smirking by established scientists or thinkers about imaginable science or thinking, all too often just exhibit their limited understanding of their own lack of understanding, and, or, imagination. 

A problem for our future conquest of the galaxy is that most stars are unstable Red Dwarves. I have argued it means we should be able to find lots of planets with very primitive life, as the most sophisticated type of life would be periodically eradicated. The past is hard to predict… except now we can look at it, with powerful telescopes… and read it.

Stars explode. Stars do also plenty of smaller, more sustainable flares and conflagrations…. The mass extinction level kill radius of a supernova (above) is at least ten light years. But to kill life in a solar system, a star can do, with much smaller explosions: the Earth is only 8 light minutes from the Sun…

When US astronauts went to the Moon, they found traces of a scorching superflare… so dreadful an idea, nobody evokes it anymore…

Studies by the US Kepler space telescope of  solar-type (G-type main-sequence), combined with Apache Point Observatory (APO) 3.5 m telescope spectroscopic observations and the European space telescope show that stars as old and sedate as the sun undergo “superflares”. Working from a sample of about 90,000 Sun-like stars, the researchers identified more than 1,000 superflares from about 300 stars.

The researchers thought these stars would be  rotating rapidly. Quickly spinning stars tend to have strong magnetic fields that easily get tangled up, bunching up, which is thought to kick off flares. However, a fast spin is apparently not a requirement for strong eruptions. Combining their brightness data with radius estimates from the Gaia satellite, the researchers were able to determine how fast their flaring stars were spinning. As expected, stars that rotate once every few days had superflares about 20 times as powerful as more slowly spinning stars like the Sun, which rotates about once every 25 days. However, Sun-like stars were still seen producing hazardous superflares.

A superflare could destroy lots of electronic on Earth (and adversely affect space explorers). Thus, the Sun has to be studied much more.

In September 1859, a solar flare sent a wave of charged particles washing over our planet. It triggered one of the most powerful geomagnetic storms ever recorded: the Carrington Event. As the particles slammed into Earth’s protective magnetic field, they triggered beautiful aurorae that stretched as far south as Hawaii and Cuba. But the Carrington Event didn’t just produce pretty lights in the sky. It also wreaked havoc on telegraph networks spread across North America and Europe. In fact, there are reports of the cosmically overcharged telegraph lines starting fires and shocking telegraph operators during the event.

Explosive activity on sun-like stars is tied to their age, and their rotation. The older, and the slower the rotation, the less explosive. Superflares with energies 5 × 10^34 erg occur on old, slowly rotating Sun-like stars (P rot ~ 25 days) approximately once every 2000–3000 yr, while young, rapidly rotating stars with P rot ~ a few days have superflares up to 10^36 erg.

That would mean energies 500 times that of the Carrington event… which was only 10^32 ergs… and would still be devastating today…[2]

In any case, constant disasters out there in space is my solution to the “Fermi Paradox” (evoking the aliens, “Where is everybody?”, joked Enrico, once at breakfast in the 1950s…)

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/40-billion-earths-yes-no/

And the more we look, the more we see how true that seems…

Philosophically speaking, that implies life on Earth we are busy destroying is much more of a miracle than is generally felt: watch all the plastic, all over, all the fossil fuels burned, etc…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] In SQPR, Dark Matter can be lumpy (also an experimental fact). Also, it influences inertia and other forces, including gravity (hence Dark Energy). So crossing a Dark Matter lump may affect all forces. A gravity spike inside the Sun would cause high mass nuclides to fuse, as happen in Red Giant, or Supernovas…

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[2] Most powerful supernova found: 10^ 45 ergs per second, or 10^ 38 watts, or 30 times the energy of the entire giant Milky Way (which is larger than Andromeda). So the most powerful flares are a billion times less powerful… But they tend to be directed in a particular direction… Mars lost its atmosphere from solar flares…