Massive Solar Storms Potentially Deadly to Life on Earth

 On September 1, 1859, a solar storm of unprecedented power struck Earth. The large burst of electromagnetic energy sent huge voltage surging through telegraph wires, the only means of long-distance communication at that time. It caused sparking and in some cases melting of the wires. Telegraph equipment throughout Europe and North America became useless; some stations even caught fire. Known as the Carrington event, this is still the most powerful solar storm that ever hit our planet in recorded history.

Coronal Mass Ejection event. Credit NASA and Goddard Spaceflight center

On March 13, 1989, a smaller but still significant solar storm struck. It overwhelmed electrical power stations in eastern Canada, leaving 6 million people without electricity. It even melted power transformers in New Jersey. This event carried a fraction of the energy of the Carrington event, but it showed how vulnerable modern technology is to such solar storms. 

If a solar storm like that responsible for the Carrington event hit us today, damage to Earth’s electrical generation and distribution systems could take weeks or longer to fix. The loss of satellites would disrupt communications and financial systems. Even internet connections would be lost until all the damage could be repaired. Replacing damaged satellites of all kinds would take many years.

A more massive solar storm struck Earth 14,300 years ago. Scientists discovered it by studying tree rings which showed a huge spike in a single year. They discovered a huge spike in radioactive carbon in a single year in tree rings. This radiocarbon data corresponds to an increase in beryllium, a marker of solar activity, found in glacier ice in Greenland from the same timeframe. The energy of this storm dwarfed that of the Carrington event.

Solar storm. Credit NASA

"Extreme solar storms could have huge impacts on Earth,” said Tim Heaton, co-author of the tree-ring study. “Such super storms could permanently damage the transformers in our electricity grids, resulting in huge and widespread blackouts lasting months."

NASA uses multiple spacecraft that constantly monitor the sun looking for solar storms. They analyze these events and, in the case of a civilization-ending solar storm, NASA scientists believe that they could give the planet about 30 minutes' notice before a potentially devastating solar storm hits.

Thirty minutes warning to the end of technology, however briefly, that everything in our lives depends on. Such an event would bring civilization to its knees.

 

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. After publishing it there, I post that same column to my blog page.

This is reprinted with permission from the Oklahoman and www.Oklahoman.com.

 

Our Closest Black Holes

 The Cosmic Zoo contains some really strange beasts. Stars that are fifty times larger than our sun with surface temperatures above 100,000 degrees, compared to our sun’s temperature of a measly 10,000 degrees. Tiny stars with less than a tenth the mass of our sun and surface temperatures cooler than lava. Supernovae that can outshine an entire galaxy. Neutron stars, large stars that collapsed down to the size of a small city, so dense that a teaspoonful can weigh millions of tons.

Perhaps the weirdest celestial inhabitants are black holes. These form from the remains of giant stars at least 25 times the mass of our sun. They warp space and time in their vicinity. They can devour entire stars and shoot our death rays of energy that can easily destroy a planet with a direct hit.

Fortunately, there are no black holes close to us. At least that we know of. But you can easily spot the resting place of the closest black holes to us.

Stars are born in star clusters, typically a hundred or more at a time. We can identify a few dozen stars born with our sun four and a half billion years ago. All star clusters form lots of small stars, a moderate number of average stars around the size of our sun, and only a few very large stars. Large stars burn out quickly and, if large enough, form black holes.

Photograph of Hyades star cluster in Taurus with the bright star Aldebaran in the lower left. Credit Maurice Toet

The closest star cluster to us is the Hyades star cluster. It sits in the constellation of Taurus, the Bull. It makes the face of the bull with the bright star Aldebaran marking one of the bull’s eyes. The Hyades cluster is only 150 light years away, practically in our backyard as stellar distances go.

The constellations around the Hyades star cluster. It is visible near the eastern horizon at 11:00 p.m. in October, but high in the sky in early February evenings. Map produced using Night Vision star mapping software.

A research team led by Stefano Torniamenti from the University of Padua in Italy studied the distribution and dynamics of stars in the Hyades star cluster. “Our simulations can only simultaneously match the mass and size of the Hyades if some black holes are present at the center of the cluster today,” Torniamenti said.

That’s not surprising. Astronomer Simon Zwart of the University of Cambridge studies the dynamics of star clusters. Though not involved in the new study, he says “Every open cluster older than some 5 million years and containing over 1,000 stars is expected to host a few black holes.”

Taurus is highest in the sky in late winter and early spring but is visible around 11:30 p.m. in the eastern sky. The black holes themselves are invisible, but you can easily spy their home star cluster. 

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. After it is published there, I post that same column to my blog page.

 This is reprinted with permission from the Oklahoman and www.Oklahoman.com.

Surf's Up! In a BIG Way!

 As stars go, our sun is rather average in size. The smallest stars, called red dwarf stars, can be less than one-tenth the mass of our sun. The largest stars are fifty times our sun’s mass or more. Most stars are not single, like our sun. NASA estimates that more than half of all stars have one or more partners, where two or more stars are in orbit around each other. Some astronomers calculate that as many as 85% of stars in the universe are in multiple star systems.

Sometimes stars in a double star system can orbit quite close to each other. That can cause some strange effects.

When you hear the words tides and waves, you probably picture an ocean beach, perhaps with surfers. On Earth, our tides are caused by the gravitational pull of the Moon. But our tides are rather gentle, with the ocean’s edge slowly creeping up and down the beach twice a day.

If two stars orbiting each other come close together, each can pull tides on its companion. If those stars are really large, they can pull big tides. 

Stars orbiting close together can pull large tides on each other. Credit NASA, JPL

Astronomers describe a binary system in which the two stars have elongated orbits as “heartbeat stars.” Because of their orbits, the distance between the stars can vary dramatically. When the two stars are closest, they can cause huge tidal forces on each other, which causes large, regular brightness changes in the stars, such as a heartbeat might do on an electrocardiogram.

A heartbeat star (center of each image). Credit: NASA ESA CSA I. Labbé Swinburne University Of Technology Image Processing

One such binary star was first detected in the 1990s during a project known as MACHO which stands for Massive Compact Halo Objects. The ‘smaller’ star is ten times as massive as our sun, while the larger one is 35 times as massive as our sun and 24 times wider than our sun. The tidal force between them doesn’t just create gently moving tides as on Earth. The smaller star pulls tides on the larger star so hard it creates waves 3 times taller than the diameter of our sun.

"Each crash of the star's towering tidal waves releases enough energy to disintegrate our entire planet several hundred times over," says astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who studied the binary pair. "These are really big waves." The smaller star also makes tidal waves, but, being smaller, the waves on its surface are much smaller.

The energy of these gargantuan tides causes the two stars to slowly spiral closer together. Eventually, they will crash into each other and merge into one even larger star. The star system sits in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of your Milky Way 160,000 light years away. Too bad, as that collision would be a dramatic sight if it were closer.

Surfers may be desirous of such waves, but they would need to use a lot of sunscreen. The surface temperature of such stars can easily exceed 37 million degrees.

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. After it is published there, I post that same column to my blog page.

 This is reprinted with permission from the Oklahoman and www.Oklahoman.com.

Children’s Book authors/Editors I Admire – Karen Cioffi

 I have been writing for about as long as I can remember. My first writing effort spawned from some large, yellow-colored sheets of paper I found deep in one of my grandma’s many closets. I knew I had to do something with them, so I decided to write a comic book. The protagonist (although I didn’t know that word at eight years old) was a potato transformed into an intelligent being when he was accidentally dropped onto some nuclear waste (isn’t that how all superheroes are created?). I cleverly named him Otapot, an anagram of potato.

This is Otapot, as drawn by my 8-year-old self.

 

Unfortunately, I no longer have those two comic books, but I can say this for sure: I would have benefitted from a good editor.

 I had a short story accepted for my high school senior anthology, and I became hooked on writing. I wrote stories, articles, and even attempted a novel or two, but I couldn’t sell anything.

 Fast forward several decades. I met, fell in love with, and married my wife, Rocksye. She came with a three-year-old son, an introverted and shy child. I decided to write a story to help him overcome his shyness. Eventually, I submitted it to 4RV Publishing as a picture book where it was accepted and published as Why Am I Me? After all those years spent writing sci-fi short stories and never-finished novels for adults, I finally found my writing legs – writing for children.

 That first book came pretty easy. 4RV does extensive editing with their authors, but they suggested only a few changes to it. When I wrote and submitted my second book Kimmy Finds Her Key to the publisher, they assigned Karen Cioffi as my editor. Her edits and advice proved to be a major boost in my children’s writing career. I learned things from her about writing for children that my limited career in writing hadn’t taught me. And even now, after all these years of writing for children, I read her children’s writing blog, “Karen Cioffi Writing for Children” at https://karencioffiwritingforchildren. It’s a great place to start if you want to learn about writing books for children.

Karen is an attractive woman, but she prefers this picture of herself. I guess it’s from her love of writing for children.

I write picture books, so I have read all of Karen’s picture books published with 4RV Publishing (4rvpublishing.com). She has a series of books about kids who defend our environment called “The Adventures of Planet Man.” There are currently four books in the series. She also has a children’s chapter book, Walking Through Walls. She is currently working on a sequel to this book, but she spends so much writing time on her blogs that the sequel is coming along much more slowly than she’d prefer. She also has two books aimed at helping children’s book writers become better at their craft, How to Write A Children’s Fiction Book and an e-book titled How do you Plan a Children’s Story? All of her children’s books can be purchased through the 4RV bookstore (http://www.4rvpublishing.com/karen-cioffi.html) or from her children’s book web page at https://karencioffiwritingforchildren.com/karens-books/.

 Karen is also a children’s book ghostwriter, helping other children’s book writers realize their own dreams. So, as she says, she’s working on five children’s books. She is also writing two more books on writing for children and marketing your books.

 Writers are also readers. Karen reads articles, blogs, and books on marketing, self-publishing writing, and, recently, on the use of AI in writing “to keep up with what’s going on.” She didn’t specify how many, but I imagine she reads a fair number of children’s books. She laments that she hasn’t read a novel in years.

 Karen was my editor years ago, but the lessons I learned from her in making my book the best it could have stuck with me, lessons about story structure, characters, appropriate language for kids, how to get into a child’s point of view, what to put in the story, and (just as important) what isn’t needed in the story. To this day, when I talk to people who tell me they want to write a children’s book, I still repeat her writing words of wisdom. Thank you, Karen, for making me the best children’s writer I can be.

Life on Venus? New Evidence Supports the Idea

 In late 2020, a group of scientists led by Jane Greaves at Cardiff University in Wales, U.K., reported finding the gas phosphine (PH3) in the clouds of Venus. This surprised many scientists. On Earth, phosphine has two known sources: a product of microbial decay of organic material or produced in a lab. The surface of Venus bakes at nearly 900 degrees. Thick clouds of sulfuric acid surround the planet. Scientists believe such conditions completely precluded the possibility of life on Venus.

Scientists argued that the discovery must be a mistake, and other researchers who looked for phosphine in Venus’ clouds could not immediately reproduce the discovery. A March 2021 study by Rakesh Mogul of Cal Poly Pomona did find phosphine there.

Still, the controversy raged among scientists. Even if phosphine did occur in the clouds of Venus, detractors said, there must be a geochemical process that creates it that did not involve living organisms.

Venus, credit NASA

Some scientists claim that volcanoes might be a source of phosphine on Venus, which is known to have active volcanoes. Sulfur dioxide in the clouds of Venus comes from volcanoes, but as Greaves says, “The amount of phosphine doesn’t change that much across the various observations. As a comparison, sulfur dioxide, which is believed to be related to volcanism on Venus, can vary wildly, more than 10 times from year to year, or even shorter timescales.”

By comparison, the phosphine varies only by a factor or two. “It is not really variable, and I think that’s important in the context of interpretations,” said Greaves. She adds that the observations come from multiple telescopes, making the observations more robust. As Greaves said, “We now have five detections over the last few years, from three different sets of instruments, and from many methods of processing the data. We’re getting a clue here that there is some steady source (of phosphine).”

As compelling as these observations are, there is still doubt in the minds of many scientists. Follow-up studies are needed, but finding even microbial life elsewhere would be a huge discovery.

 

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. After it is published there, I post that same column to my blog page.

 This is reprinted with permission from the Oklahoman and www.Oklahoman.com.

Chemical Critical for Life as We Know it Found on Saturn's Moon

 All life on Earth is related. It all uses the same molecules. The genetic information of every organism on Earth is carried by DNA. All life is powered by adenosine triphosphate, ATP. All of our planet’s life forms require six specific elements to live: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Biologists use the mnemonic CHNOPS, the first letter of the six elements.

All life on Earth also requires water. It also requires a proper temperature range, although some extreme forms of life can tolerate temperatures we humans can’t. In any search for extraterrestrial life that is at all similar to life on Earth, we need to find these chemicals and conditions.

That’s not to say life can’t be based on other chemicals and conditions, but we might not be able to immediately recognize such life, especially if it only exists in microbial form.

NASA searches for life on Mars. Those scientists follow the mantra “Follow the water.” While water may be absolutely critical, it is not the only resource we need to look for.

Earthly life could not exist without the CHNOPS elements. Phosphorus is critical for life as we know it, but it’s scarce in the universe. And, most of the phosphorus on Earth exists in the form of phosphates, a chemical that is insoluble in water and unable to react with organic molecules. Life on Earth wouldn’t be possible without other more reactive forms of phosphorus.

It turns out that when lightning strikes on Earth, it forms fulgurite. Fulgurite contains a mineral called schreibersite, an alloy of iron, nickel, and phosphorus. This is a form of phosphorus that can be utilized by organic chemicals.

Astronomers, led by Frank Postberg of the Freie Universitat Berlin, recently announced the discovery of organically available phosphorus in a new location, the moon Enceladus orbiting Saturn. A few years ago, the scientific world was shocked by the discovery of plums of water shooting off of this tiny moon. This water contained organic molecules and spurred discussion of Enceladus as a possible home for extraterrestrial life. In their paper, the astronomers say that Enceladus’ water plumes contain “a high availability of dissolved phosphorus, which is thus extremely unlikely to be a limiting factor in the survival of putative life on Enceladus.”

Saturn’s Moon Enceladus with water plumes, credit NASA, JPL, and Cal Tech

That is science-speak for saying that one of the best hopes of finding life elsewhere in our solar system just got better.  

 

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. After it is published there, I post that same column to my blog page.

 This is reprinted by permission from the Oklahoman and www.Oklahoman.com.

Saturn is the New King of Moons.

 Fifty years ago, astronomers knew of 12 moons orbiting Jupiter and 11 circling Saturn. That made sense to astronomers. Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system and had the strongest gravitational pull of any of the planets, so it seemed logical that it would have more moons. Jupiter orbits the sun at the outer edge of the asteroid belt, so it has many opportunities to steal some as moons. Most astronomers assumed that we would eventually find even more Jovian moons as telescopes and digital cameras improved and as we developed spacecraft to explore the planes in detail.

Over the years, these new techniques did allow astronomers to find more moons of both planets. Over the years, the two planets flip-flopped back and forth as to which possessed the most moons. 

Jupiter possesses four moons that are among the largest in our solar system. They were first seen by Galileo in 1610. He was the first person known to have pointed a telescope into the night sky. Those four moons are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. All four are visible in any amateur telescope or even a good pair of binoculars. Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system. Jupiter’s other three Galilean moons are all among the 6 largest moons of our solar system. 

Jupiter and some of its moons. Credit JPL and NASA

In 1655, astronomer Christiaan Huygens discovered Titan orbiting Saturn. Titan is the second largest moon of our solar system, and the only moon with a thick atmosphere, half again thicker than our own atmosphere.

With the development of larger and larger ground-based telescopes and more advanced cameras, both planets were found to have many more moons. As the space age opened, craft like Voyager 1 and 2, Juno, which orbited Jupiter, and Cassini, which orbited Saturn, we discovered even more around each planet.

As of February of this year, astronomers added 12 more moons to Jupiter. Jupiter was known to have 95 moons. Saturn trailed with 83 moons. Those numbers are a far cry from what we knew in 1973. Jupiter was again the king of moons, as most astronomers expected it would be. Jupiter’s lead wouldn’t last long.

Saturn and some of its moons. Credit JPL and NASA

Last month, astronomers announced the discovery of 62 previously unknown moons around Saturn, bringing its current total to 145. The recent discoveries around both giant planets are quite small, as moons go, or else we’d have discovered them some time ago.

That’s a lot of moons, far more than any astronomer would have guessed 50 years ago. But I doubt we are done discovering moons around either planet. And it’s likely the two ice giant planets, Uranus, currently known to have 27 moons, and Neptune, with 14 moons, will eventually be discovered to have many more moons, too.

  

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. After it is published there, I post that same column to my blog page.

 This is reprinted with permission from the Oklahoman and www.Oklahoman.com.