I took some shots of nature stuff on this morning’s dog walk, and a few good action shots at the last soccer game of the season. But honestly, the only thing anybody wants to see today is Halloween costumes, so here are the kids:
The Pip as Batman, SteelyKid as a ninja.
Cleverly, they both selected costumes that are predominantly black; we augmented these with glow-stick bracelets and flashlights while actually trick-or-treating, for improved visibility.
Putting these together required a good deal more GIMP work than I anticipated, because the raw shots for the two are at slightly different angles, so when I did the quick copy-and-paste thing, the mantel and bookshelves in the background were tilted at different angles on the different sides of the split frame, and that just made me twitch. So I had to go back and rotate both images slightly to square things up.
Right around one hour of trick-or-treating yielded roughly 2kg of candy. This didn’t remotely exhaust the possibilities in the neighborhood, just the stamina of the kids. With another year of training, I think we can easily break 5kg next year.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1k0V9NA
I took some shots of nature stuff on this morning’s dog walk, and a few good action shots at the last soccer game of the season. But honestly, the only thing anybody wants to see today is Halloween costumes, so here are the kids:
The Pip as Batman, SteelyKid as a ninja.
Cleverly, they both selected costumes that are predominantly black; we augmented these with glow-stick bracelets and flashlights while actually trick-or-treating, for improved visibility.
Putting these together required a good deal more GIMP work than I anticipated, because the raw shots for the two are at slightly different angles, so when I did the quick copy-and-paste thing, the mantel and bookshelves in the background were tilted at different angles on the different sides of the split frame, and that just made me twitch. So I had to go back and rotate both images slightly to square things up.
Right around one hour of trick-or-treating yielded roughly 2kg of candy. This didn’t remotely exhaust the possibilities in the neighborhood, just the stamina of the kids. With another year of training, I think we can easily break 5kg next year.
View larger. | 2015 TB145 captured using a 12″ S/C telescope and a Santa Barbara ST402ME camera, by Efrain Morales of the Astronomical Society of the Caribbean (SAC). Efrain’s images, combined to create this animation, show a lapse of 20 minutes. Images taken on October 30, 2015 at 0602 UTC from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico.
The object given an asteroid name – 2015 TB145 – which swept within 1.3 lunar distances of Earth earlier today (October 31, 2015) – is now believed to be a comet, according to observations by scientists using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. They say the object has likely shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the sun. The object passed at about 302,000 miles (486,000 km), on October 31 – the Halloween holiday here North America – at 1700 UTC (1 p.m. EDT, 10 a.m. PDT).
Radar images of the dead comet generated by the National Science Foundation’s 305-meter (1,000-foot) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico – found that it was bigger than estimates made before the close pass. The radar images from Arecibo show that the object is spherical in shape and approximately 2,000 feet (600 meters) in diameter and completes a rotation about once every five hours.
Boo! This image of the close-passing object on Halloween, 2015, clearly looks like a skull! It was generated using radar data collected by the National Science Foundation’s 1,000-foot (305-meter) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The radar image was taken on October 30, 2015. Image resolution is 25 feet (7.5 meters) per pixel. Image credit: NAIC-Arecibo/NSF
View larger. | A series of radar images via the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico.
Here’s a closer look at one of the Arecibo radar images, above.
View larger. | René Torres – of the Astronomical Society of the Caribbean (SAC) – captured this photo captured from Caguas, Puerto Rico. The asteroid is seen moving across a span of just 100 seconds (just over one-and-a-half minutes).
Object 2015 TB145 via Slooh.com, which offers live shows with expert hosts. 2015 TB145 is the tiny line near the middle. Because it came so close to Earth, it appears to be moving in front of the fixed background stars.
View larger. | Another image provided by Slooh.com, in the days before closest approach.
from EarthSky http://ift.tt/1kiOnT8
View larger. | 2015 TB145 captured using a 12″ S/C telescope and a Santa Barbara ST402ME camera, by Efrain Morales of the Astronomical Society of the Caribbean (SAC). Efrain’s images, combined to create this animation, show a lapse of 20 minutes. Images taken on October 30, 2015 at 0602 UTC from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico.
The object given an asteroid name – 2015 TB145 – which swept within 1.3 lunar distances of Earth earlier today (October 31, 2015) – is now believed to be a comet, according to observations by scientists using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. They say the object has likely shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the sun. The object passed at about 302,000 miles (486,000 km), on October 31 – the Halloween holiday here North America – at 1700 UTC (1 p.m. EDT, 10 a.m. PDT).
Radar images of the dead comet generated by the National Science Foundation’s 305-meter (1,000-foot) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico – found that it was bigger than estimates made before the close pass. The radar images from Arecibo show that the object is spherical in shape and approximately 2,000 feet (600 meters) in diameter and completes a rotation about once every five hours.
Boo! This image of the close-passing object on Halloween, 2015, clearly looks like a skull! It was generated using radar data collected by the National Science Foundation’s 1,000-foot (305-meter) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The radar image was taken on October 30, 2015. Image resolution is 25 feet (7.5 meters) per pixel. Image credit: NAIC-Arecibo/NSF
View larger. | A series of radar images via the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico.
Here’s a closer look at one of the Arecibo radar images, above.
View larger. | René Torres – of the Astronomical Society of the Caribbean (SAC) – captured this photo captured from Caguas, Puerto Rico. The asteroid is seen moving across a span of just 100 seconds (just over one-and-a-half minutes).
Object 2015 TB145 via Slooh.com, which offers live shows with expert hosts. 2015 TB145 is the tiny line near the middle. Because it came so close to Earth, it appears to be moving in front of the fixed background stars.
View larger. | Another image provided by Slooh.com, in the days before closest approach.
“As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d stay away.” -Hughes Mearns
Although every week at Starts With A Bang is special, there’s something extra special brewing here. Sure, we’ve got the “normal stuff” of the articles we’ve written:
But before we jump into your comments, there are a few awesome announcements:
1.) Our first Patreon-sponsored podcast is complete! If you’ve ever been curious about water on Mars, life on Mars, or — thanks to a great Q&A with our guest — where I think the next fundamental breakthrough will come from, have a listen here:
If you want to propose a topic for future podcasts, appear on our podcast or get early access to the completed product, consider supporting our endeavors on Patreon!
2.) It’s Halloween! While more pictures are coming, I have to give you all a preview. So you may remember a few years ago I very, very excitedly told you all about Axe Cop, which turned out to be one of the best surprise comics and TV shows I’ve ever found.
Well, Axe Cop imagined himself with different hair and mustache styles, and the best one is Axe Cop with crazy pizza hair and a super-curly beard and mustache with a robot ghost that lives inside. (The best one, that is, according to Axe Cop, and that’s the only one that matters.)
Well, folks…
Image credit: The Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club, via Instagram.
That’s your Halloween preview! More pictures coming (hopefully, and with much greater detail) tomorrow as part of our Weekend Diversion! And finally…
3.) Starts With A Bang is movin’ on up in the world! I’ve been guest-contributing at Forbes for a few months now, and they love what I’ve been doing there. In fact, they love it so much that I’m excited to announce my main blogging activities will switch over to there beginning on Monday!
Image credit: Forbes; screenshot from http://ift.tt/1GAyArz.
Things will be a little different: we’ll still do Mostly Mute Mondays (but we won’t explicitly call it that); we’ll still do Throwback Thursdays (but won’t explicitly call it that); we’ll still have weekly songs (but they’ll be part of our Comments of the Week); and our Weekend Diversions will likely switch over to be more weekend wonder about the Universe.
But there’s a saying that when you go to the dance, you dance with the one who brought you. That’s part of the reason why I haven’t left Scienceblogs (or you guys!) after landing here more than six years ago, and part of the reason why I’m going to stay on at Medium as well: it’s the only platform that still gives readers a completely ad-free experience, and I want to be able to keep that! So I’ll still be posting synopses here and running our weekly Comments of the Week, but now they’ll be expanded to include even more awesome stuff.
From Johan on what happens after the death of galaxies: “But what happens then? “
Well, there are two ways to look at it. One is to look at what we physically think is going to happen and at the other (unfavored) possibilities:
Favored: the Universe will continue to expand and cool until — with the exception of quantum motion — all thermal properties drop to absolute zero. Total energy is still conserved, and space and time continue for an eternity.
Disfavored: dark energy will increase in strength, leading to either the Big Rip or a rejuvenated (high-energy) Universe.
Disfavored: the expansion will reverse itself, leading to a Big Crunch or potentially a cyclic model.
Disfavored: the quantum vacuum will tunnel into a more stable state, leading to an ultra-weak version of a new Big Bang, potentially producing some sort of matter and/or radiation.
Image credit: NASA.
Or, the second way it to ask about a more personal perspective: what ultimately happens to us when the Universe comes to this ultimate end? Lucky for you, if that was what you meant, that’s the subject of our latest Ask Ethan! Enjoy thinking about it either way.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University), K. Noll (STScI), and J. Westphal (Caltech).
From Randall Griffin on galaxy mergers vs. dark energy: “Not sure how to square this discussion about the gravitational effects causing the Milky Way and Andromeda to merge with what I thought was still the accepted truth based on red shifts that all the stars are receding from one another and the universe is likely to expand forever.”
This is the cosmic struggle that takes place between everything pretty much always: the expansion of the Universe that works to drive everything apart, and the influence of gravity, that works to attract all masses towards one another. Given any sort of initial configuration, you can imagine the three possibilities that either gravity wins and things merge, the expansion wins and things recede from one another forever, or you’re right on the brink: the border between the two, and so your recession speed asymptotes to zero but you never merge back together.
So now, we come to our local group, dominated by the Milky Way and Andromeda.
What you might not realize — and this is a common misunderstanding — is that this struggle doesn’t just take place on a cosmic scale, where (thanks to dark energy) the expansion will definitely win. In addition, this struggle occurs between all the various structures in the Universe, including between individual stars, galaxies, groups and clusters.
In our particular case, gravity will win when it comes to all the stars in our galaxy, all the galaxies in our local group, and possibly a few galaxies in some nearby groups, but also possibly not on that last one. We became gravitationally bound to Andromeda before dark energy achieved the relative strength it did in the Universe, and that’s why we’ll remain bound to it forever, with an eventual merger occurring some 4 billion years in the future.
Image credit: E A Bell et al, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2015, via http://ift.tt/1MBCT42.
From Michael Kelsey on whether life-on-Earth originated with Earth: “In fact, there *ARE* non-biological processes which fractionate isotopes (that is the technical term for what’s going on). For the specific case of 12C/13C fractionation, there are “several” non-biological process which can produce this signature (see, for example, the news article in Science magazine, http://ift.tt/1kkAJz9), including iron-based catalysis of hydrocarbons from carbon monoxide (http://ift.tt/1LITNQC, although the Wiki article does not mention isotopic fractionation).”
From MobiusKlein, referencing the original (journal) article: “There are considerable limitations of basing any inference regarding early Earth on a single zircon containing primary carbonaceous inclusions. Instead, we see this contribution as demonstrating the feasibility of perhaps the only approach that could lead to establishing a Hadean carbon isotope record.”
It’s important to note that this isn’t a slam-dunk; this is evidence that supports an earlier start to life-on-Earth than we’d previously had evidence for, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that this is organic carbon. As Sinisa Lazarek noted, we found molecular oxygen on the comet Rosetta is orbiting, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s some sort of photosynthetic process happening on the comet to produce it.
It means that it’s a possibility, and perhaps even probable, but that like with all science, we need more evidence, and we need to be able to more definitively exclude alternative explanations. It’s a process, and we’re getting there, but we still have a ways to go.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
From Michael Hutson on panspermia: “What advantage does the panspermia hypothesis have over a terrestrial origin of life for explaining abiogenesis?”
The trite answer is “none,” since at some point, you need to go from non-life to life, as that’s the literal definition of abiogenesis, and that had to happen at some point in the Universe. I suppose it might not matter much whether that happened on Earth or before Earth to some, but it matters a whole lot to me. You see, life as we know it here on Earth is complicated.
It takes a very large number of DNA base pairs to make what we know as even the simplest living organism, and that form of “life” has proven thus far uncreatable in laboratory conditions from raw ingredients. But perhaps, if we accept the hypothesis that there are far simpler “living” organisms than anything we’ve ever found on Earth, and that what we see today is far more advanced and evolved (and hence, more able to out-compete the simpler ones), that means that life is not only more ubiquitous than we presently think, but that all Earth-life as we know it is just one thread that’s branched off from a common tapestry that the entire galaxy or Universe shares when it comes to living creatures.
That’s the attractiveness, at least to me, of the panspermia hypothesis.
From Janko on the stability of matter against decay: “And could it decay into a hypothetical positive charged “dark matter particle” instead? Is it possible? Could this particle have a baryon number?”
This is pretty unlikely, and I’ll tell you why. Assuming you don’t necessarily mean electric charge or color charge, yes, it’s possible that a by-product of say, proton decay could be a dark matter particle. Neutrinos, for example, are by-products of most theoretical pathways of proton decay, they have mass (and so, therefore, are a form of dark matter), and they have a weak hypercharge. But the dark matter that it would decay into wouldn’t in any realistic model have very much to do with the dark matter that dominates our Universe, which must be cold and have an extremely small (much smaller than neutrinos, for example) interaction cross-section.
The baryon number question is tricky, and while Michael Kelsey gave a great answer:
“DM almost certainly can’t have baryon number. If it did, then it would be included in our calculations of the photon/baryon ratio after the hot Big Bang. But it isn’t (which is one of the lines of evidence for the 5-to-1 discrepancy!).
Having said that, most models of baryogenesis introduce additional symmetries to the Standard Model which lead to both lepton (L) non-conservation and baryon (B) non-conservation, but leaves L-B as a conserved quantity. If the DM is implicated in baryogenesis (as some models propose), then it could carry L-B as a good quantum number.”
I’ll point out that there are plenty of theoretical particles that carry both lepton and baryon number (leptoquarks, the X and Y bosons from Grand Unified Theories), but they are generally both high-mass, and that the low-mass ones (like the light quarks) all have something else along with them: a color charge. Is it possible to have baryon number without a QCD interaction? Maybe, but if so, it’s nothing we have any evidence for, nor a successful theoretical framework for.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons users Alchemist-hp (http://ift.tt/1bcWzg0) + Richard Bartz with focus stack.
And finally, one last quickie from Michael Hutson: “Just what is the longest decay time we’ve experimentally observed?”
For any isotope of an element, as stated by other commenters, we’ve observed Tellurium-128. For the most stable isotope of any element, that would be Bismuth (shown above). Bismuth is interesting — as we’ve written about before — in that we once thought it was the heaviest stable element in the Universe. If you have a periodic table from about 2002 or earlier, it will tell you that Bismuth, at element 83, is the heaviest non-radioactive element. But if your periodic table was made from around 2003 or onwards, it says that Lead, element 82, is the heaviest non-radioactive element, because Bismuth decays with a half-life of 1.9 × 10^19 years. This is over a billion times as large as the present age of the Universe!
So what does this mean? It likely means that of the isotopes and elements we’ve observed, there are almost certainly a great many that we’ve observed to be stable that are not truly stable on long enough timescales. How many elements are radioactive given 10^50 years? Or 10^100, or 10^1000? All of them? At some level, there’s only so much we can learn with the Universe we have available to us, and this avenue of taking large collections of atoms and looking for a decay has its own limitations. The limit of what we’ve ever observed is just the beginning of what’s out there.
Thanks for a great week, and may your Halloween be fantastic!
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1PceQNH
“As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d stay away.” -Hughes Mearns
Although every week at Starts With A Bang is special, there’s something extra special brewing here. Sure, we’ve got the “normal stuff” of the articles we’ve written:
But before we jump into your comments, there are a few awesome announcements:
1.) Our first Patreon-sponsored podcast is complete! If you’ve ever been curious about water on Mars, life on Mars, or — thanks to a great Q&A with our guest — where I think the next fundamental breakthrough will come from, have a listen here:
If you want to propose a topic for future podcasts, appear on our podcast or get early access to the completed product, consider supporting our endeavors on Patreon!
2.) It’s Halloween! While more pictures are coming, I have to give you all a preview. So you may remember a few years ago I very, very excitedly told you all about Axe Cop, which turned out to be one of the best surprise comics and TV shows I’ve ever found.
Well, Axe Cop imagined himself with different hair and mustache styles, and the best one is Axe Cop with crazy pizza hair and a super-curly beard and mustache with a robot ghost that lives inside. (The best one, that is, according to Axe Cop, and that’s the only one that matters.)
Well, folks…
Image credit: The Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club, via Instagram.
That’s your Halloween preview! More pictures coming (hopefully, and with much greater detail) tomorrow as part of our Weekend Diversion! And finally…
3.) Starts With A Bang is movin’ on up in the world! I’ve been guest-contributing at Forbes for a few months now, and they love what I’ve been doing there. In fact, they love it so much that I’m excited to announce my main blogging activities will switch over to there beginning on Monday!
Image credit: Forbes; screenshot from http://ift.tt/1GAyArz.
Things will be a little different: we’ll still do Mostly Mute Mondays (but we won’t explicitly call it that); we’ll still do Throwback Thursdays (but won’t explicitly call it that); we’ll still have weekly songs (but they’ll be part of our Comments of the Week); and our Weekend Diversions will likely switch over to be more weekend wonder about the Universe.
But there’s a saying that when you go to the dance, you dance with the one who brought you. That’s part of the reason why I haven’t left Scienceblogs (or you guys!) after landing here more than six years ago, and part of the reason why I’m going to stay on at Medium as well: it’s the only platform that still gives readers a completely ad-free experience, and I want to be able to keep that! So I’ll still be posting synopses here and running our weekly Comments of the Week, but now they’ll be expanded to include even more awesome stuff.
From Johan on what happens after the death of galaxies: “But what happens then? “
Well, there are two ways to look at it. One is to look at what we physically think is going to happen and at the other (unfavored) possibilities:
Favored: the Universe will continue to expand and cool until — with the exception of quantum motion — all thermal properties drop to absolute zero. Total energy is still conserved, and space and time continue for an eternity.
Disfavored: dark energy will increase in strength, leading to either the Big Rip or a rejuvenated (high-energy) Universe.
Disfavored: the expansion will reverse itself, leading to a Big Crunch or potentially a cyclic model.
Disfavored: the quantum vacuum will tunnel into a more stable state, leading to an ultra-weak version of a new Big Bang, potentially producing some sort of matter and/or radiation.
Image credit: NASA.
Or, the second way it to ask about a more personal perspective: what ultimately happens to us when the Universe comes to this ultimate end? Lucky for you, if that was what you meant, that’s the subject of our latest Ask Ethan! Enjoy thinking about it either way.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University), K. Noll (STScI), and J. Westphal (Caltech).
From Randall Griffin on galaxy mergers vs. dark energy: “Not sure how to square this discussion about the gravitational effects causing the Milky Way and Andromeda to merge with what I thought was still the accepted truth based on red shifts that all the stars are receding from one another and the universe is likely to expand forever.”
This is the cosmic struggle that takes place between everything pretty much always: the expansion of the Universe that works to drive everything apart, and the influence of gravity, that works to attract all masses towards one another. Given any sort of initial configuration, you can imagine the three possibilities that either gravity wins and things merge, the expansion wins and things recede from one another forever, or you’re right on the brink: the border between the two, and so your recession speed asymptotes to zero but you never merge back together.
So now, we come to our local group, dominated by the Milky Way and Andromeda.
What you might not realize — and this is a common misunderstanding — is that this struggle doesn’t just take place on a cosmic scale, where (thanks to dark energy) the expansion will definitely win. In addition, this struggle occurs between all the various structures in the Universe, including between individual stars, galaxies, groups and clusters.
In our particular case, gravity will win when it comes to all the stars in our galaxy, all the galaxies in our local group, and possibly a few galaxies in some nearby groups, but also possibly not on that last one. We became gravitationally bound to Andromeda before dark energy achieved the relative strength it did in the Universe, and that’s why we’ll remain bound to it forever, with an eventual merger occurring some 4 billion years in the future.
Image credit: E A Bell et al, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2015, via http://ift.tt/1MBCT42.
From Michael Kelsey on whether life-on-Earth originated with Earth: “In fact, there *ARE* non-biological processes which fractionate isotopes (that is the technical term for what’s going on). For the specific case of 12C/13C fractionation, there are “several” non-biological process which can produce this signature (see, for example, the news article in Science magazine, http://ift.tt/1kkAJz9), including iron-based catalysis of hydrocarbons from carbon monoxide (http://ift.tt/1LITNQC, although the Wiki article does not mention isotopic fractionation).”
From MobiusKlein, referencing the original (journal) article: “There are considerable limitations of basing any inference regarding early Earth on a single zircon containing primary carbonaceous inclusions. Instead, we see this contribution as demonstrating the feasibility of perhaps the only approach that could lead to establishing a Hadean carbon isotope record.”
It’s important to note that this isn’t a slam-dunk; this is evidence that supports an earlier start to life-on-Earth than we’d previously had evidence for, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that this is organic carbon. As Sinisa Lazarek noted, we found molecular oxygen on the comet Rosetta is orbiting, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s some sort of photosynthetic process happening on the comet to produce it.
It means that it’s a possibility, and perhaps even probable, but that like with all science, we need more evidence, and we need to be able to more definitively exclude alternative explanations. It’s a process, and we’re getting there, but we still have a ways to go.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
From Michael Hutson on panspermia: “What advantage does the panspermia hypothesis have over a terrestrial origin of life for explaining abiogenesis?”
The trite answer is “none,” since at some point, you need to go from non-life to life, as that’s the literal definition of abiogenesis, and that had to happen at some point in the Universe. I suppose it might not matter much whether that happened on Earth or before Earth to some, but it matters a whole lot to me. You see, life as we know it here on Earth is complicated.
It takes a very large number of DNA base pairs to make what we know as even the simplest living organism, and that form of “life” has proven thus far uncreatable in laboratory conditions from raw ingredients. But perhaps, if we accept the hypothesis that there are far simpler “living” organisms than anything we’ve ever found on Earth, and that what we see today is far more advanced and evolved (and hence, more able to out-compete the simpler ones), that means that life is not only more ubiquitous than we presently think, but that all Earth-life as we know it is just one thread that’s branched off from a common tapestry that the entire galaxy or Universe shares when it comes to living creatures.
That’s the attractiveness, at least to me, of the panspermia hypothesis.
From Janko on the stability of matter against decay: “And could it decay into a hypothetical positive charged “dark matter particle” instead? Is it possible? Could this particle have a baryon number?”
This is pretty unlikely, and I’ll tell you why. Assuming you don’t necessarily mean electric charge or color charge, yes, it’s possible that a by-product of say, proton decay could be a dark matter particle. Neutrinos, for example, are by-products of most theoretical pathways of proton decay, they have mass (and so, therefore, are a form of dark matter), and they have a weak hypercharge. But the dark matter that it would decay into wouldn’t in any realistic model have very much to do with the dark matter that dominates our Universe, which must be cold and have an extremely small (much smaller than neutrinos, for example) interaction cross-section.
The baryon number question is tricky, and while Michael Kelsey gave a great answer:
“DM almost certainly can’t have baryon number. If it did, then it would be included in our calculations of the photon/baryon ratio after the hot Big Bang. But it isn’t (which is one of the lines of evidence for the 5-to-1 discrepancy!).
Having said that, most models of baryogenesis introduce additional symmetries to the Standard Model which lead to both lepton (L) non-conservation and baryon (B) non-conservation, but leaves L-B as a conserved quantity. If the DM is implicated in baryogenesis (as some models propose), then it could carry L-B as a good quantum number.”
I’ll point out that there are plenty of theoretical particles that carry both lepton and baryon number (leptoquarks, the X and Y bosons from Grand Unified Theories), but they are generally both high-mass, and that the low-mass ones (like the light quarks) all have something else along with them: a color charge. Is it possible to have baryon number without a QCD interaction? Maybe, but if so, it’s nothing we have any evidence for, nor a successful theoretical framework for.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons users Alchemist-hp (http://ift.tt/1bcWzg0) + Richard Bartz with focus stack.
And finally, one last quickie from Michael Hutson: “Just what is the longest decay time we’ve experimentally observed?”
For any isotope of an element, as stated by other commenters, we’ve observed Tellurium-128. For the most stable isotope of any element, that would be Bismuth (shown above). Bismuth is interesting — as we’ve written about before — in that we once thought it was the heaviest stable element in the Universe. If you have a periodic table from about 2002 or earlier, it will tell you that Bismuth, at element 83, is the heaviest non-radioactive element. But if your periodic table was made from around 2003 or onwards, it says that Lead, element 82, is the heaviest non-radioactive element, because Bismuth decays with a half-life of 1.9 × 10^19 years. This is over a billion times as large as the present age of the Universe!
So what does this mean? It likely means that of the isotopes and elements we’ve observed, there are almost certainly a great many that we’ve observed to be stable that are not truly stable on long enough timescales. How many elements are radioactive given 10^50 years? Or 10^100, or 10^1000? All of them? At some level, there’s only so much we can learn with the Universe we have available to us, and this avenue of taking large collections of atoms and looking for a decay has its own limitations. The limit of what we’ve ever observed is just the beginning of what’s out there.
Thanks for a great week, and may your Halloween be fantastic!
Desperate to hold on to the “pause” that never happened in global warming, David Whitehose has penned a piece for the Global Warming Policy Foundation(GWPF). What he really shows is that it’s a very bad year indeed for the GWPF.
He objects to this graph:
It shows global temperature year-to-date (using data from NOAA) for 2015 (that’s the one way at the top) compared to the same for the next six hottest years on record. David Whitehouse doesn’t like that — because it shows, in graphic terms, how much hotter this year has been than its predecessor, and just how likely it is that 2015 will be the new #1 hottest. A fact which even David Whitehouse admits.
His “argument” is that the “pause” (the one that never happened) hasn’t ended, mainly because not every month this year so far has been the hottest on record. To make that argument, he switches from NOAA data to NASA data. He also points out that only 5 of 9 months (so far this year) have been hotter than the same month last year (he doesn’t bother with “by how much”). He also blames the record-breaking year-to-date (in NOAA and NASA data, and HadCRUT4 to boot) on the current el Nino. It’s true that el Nino years tend to be hotter … which is why 1998 was so hot, and why deniers usually start their “no warming since” graphs with 1998. Finally, he emphasizes that there’s uncertainty in global temperature, of about 0.1 deg.C.
Which is funny, because when deniers were in “full pause mode” (the pause that never happened) they didn’t talk about uncertainty. And yes, they started their “pause” meme with 1998 and because of 1998 being such a hot year.
What’s also funny is the “not the hottest month every month” argument. Suppose you played a baseball game — nine innings — and in the first inning you only scored th 2nd-most runs in league first-inning history, in the second inning you only scored the 2nd-most runs in league second-inning history, etc. etc. After nine innings, you’ve scored the most total runs in one game in league history. But that’s worthless; I guess, according to David Whitehouse, your offensive scoring is in a “pause” (you know, the one that never happened).
What’s not funny is David Whitehouse simply denying the truth:
Despite this extensive research taking place Peter Hannam continues in his article with a very out-of-date comment. “For years, climate change sceptics relied on a spike in global temperatures that occurred during the monster 1997-98 El Nino to say the world had stopped warming because later years struggled to set a higher mark even as greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise.” This myth has been addressed so many times. The year 1998 and its strong El Nino has nothing to do with the pause. Neither “climate sceptics” nor climate scientists would fall for such an obvious aspect of the data, but it seems journalists still do!
Au contraire. Fake skeptics (a.k.a. deniers, a.k.a. climate anti-vaxxers) exploit the 1998 el Nino, have for years. And climate “skeptics” fall for it all the time.
As for the whole el Nino thing, it looks like we’ve got a strong one going on right now. The last time we had such a big one was 1998. Were those years so hot onlybecause of the el Nino? Let’s compare the two directly (2015 isn’t complete, so I’ve plotted year-to-date):
Both of the big el Nino years were hotter than nearby years. But they weren’t just hot because of el Nino, they were hot because of global warming. That’s why this year is so much hotter than the 1998 monster el Nino. That’s why 2005, 2007, 2010, 2014 all broke the 1998 record in spite of 1998 being a monsterel Nino. Because there is no “pause.” It never happened.
You can see the same thing with NASA data (again, 2015 is year-to-date):
He closes with this utterly nonsensical non-sequitur:
What the data is showing us is that over the past 15 years or so there has been little underlying change with El Ninos elevating the temperature a little and La Ninas reducing them. Is what is happening to global annual average surface temperatures all that surprising?
Surprising? Of course not. Because the globe is warming. Because of us. As for the “pause” that David Whitehouse and the GWPF so desperately cling to — it never happened.
Help us do science! we’ve teamed up with researcher Paige Brown Jarreau to create a survey of Skeptical Science readers. By participating, you’ll be helping me improve SkS and contributing to SCIENCE on blog readership. You will also get FREE science art from Paige's Photography for participating, as well as a chance to win a t-shirt and other perks! It should only take 10-15 minutes to complete. You can find the survey here: http://bit.ly/mysciblogreaders. For completing the survey, readers will be entered into a drawing for a $50.00 Amazon gift card, as well as for other prizes (i.e. t-shirts).
Desperate to hold on to the “pause” that never happened in global warming, David Whitehose has penned a piece for the Global Warming Policy Foundation(GWPF). What he really shows is that it’s a very bad year indeed for the GWPF.
He objects to this graph:
It shows global temperature year-to-date (using data from NOAA) for 2015 (that’s the one way at the top) compared to the same for the next six hottest years on record. David Whitehouse doesn’t like that — because it shows, in graphic terms, how much hotter this year has been than its predecessor, and just how likely it is that 2015 will be the new #1 hottest. A fact which even David Whitehouse admits.
His “argument” is that the “pause” (the one that never happened) hasn’t ended, mainly because not every month this year so far has been the hottest on record. To make that argument, he switches from NOAA data to NASA data. He also points out that only 5 of 9 months (so far this year) have been hotter than the same month last year (he doesn’t bother with “by how much”). He also blames the record-breaking year-to-date (in NOAA and NASA data, and HadCRUT4 to boot) on the current el Nino. It’s true that el Nino years tend to be hotter … which is why 1998 was so hot, and why deniers usually start their “no warming since” graphs with 1998. Finally, he emphasizes that there’s uncertainty in global temperature, of about 0.1 deg.C.
Which is funny, because when deniers were in “full pause mode” (the pause that never happened) they didn’t talk about uncertainty. And yes, they started their “pause” meme with 1998 and because of 1998 being such a hot year.
What’s also funny is the “not the hottest month every month” argument. Suppose you played a baseball game — nine innings — and in the first inning you only scored th 2nd-most runs in league first-inning history, in the second inning you only scored the 2nd-most runs in league second-inning history, etc. etc. After nine innings, you’ve scored the most total runs in one game in league history. But that’s worthless; I guess, according to David Whitehouse, your offensive scoring is in a “pause” (you know, the one that never happened).
What’s not funny is David Whitehouse simply denying the truth:
Despite this extensive research taking place Peter Hannam continues in his article with a very out-of-date comment. “For years, climate change sceptics relied on a spike in global temperatures that occurred during the monster 1997-98 El Nino to say the world had stopped warming because later years struggled to set a higher mark even as greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise.” This myth has been addressed so many times. The year 1998 and its strong El Nino has nothing to do with the pause. Neither “climate sceptics” nor climate scientists would fall for such an obvious aspect of the data, but it seems journalists still do!
Au contraire. Fake skeptics (a.k.a. deniers, a.k.a. climate anti-vaxxers) exploit the 1998 el Nino, have for years. And climate “skeptics” fall for it all the time.
As for the whole el Nino thing, it looks like we’ve got a strong one going on right now. The last time we had such a big one was 1998. Were those years so hot onlybecause of the el Nino? Let’s compare the two directly (2015 isn’t complete, so I’ve plotted year-to-date):
Both of the big el Nino years were hotter than nearby years. But they weren’t just hot because of el Nino, they were hot because of global warming. That’s why this year is so much hotter than the 1998 monster el Nino. That’s why 2005, 2007, 2010, 2014 all broke the 1998 record in spite of 1998 being a monsterel Nino. Because there is no “pause.” It never happened.
You can see the same thing with NASA data (again, 2015 is year-to-date):
He closes with this utterly nonsensical non-sequitur:
What the data is showing us is that over the past 15 years or so there has been little underlying change with El Ninos elevating the temperature a little and La Ninas reducing them. Is what is happening to global annual average surface temperatures all that surprising?
Surprising? Of course not. Because the globe is warming. Because of us. As for the “pause” that David Whitehouse and the GWPF so desperately cling to — it never happened.
Help us do science! we’ve teamed up with researcher Paige Brown Jarreau to create a survey of Skeptical Science readers. By participating, you’ll be helping me improve SkS and contributing to SCIENCE on blog readership. You will also get FREE science art from Paige's Photography for participating, as well as a chance to win a t-shirt and other perks! It should only take 10-15 minutes to complete. You can find the survey here: http://bit.ly/mysciblogreaders. For completing the survey, readers will be entered into a drawing for a $50.00 Amazon gift card, as well as for other prizes (i.e. t-shirts).
Janet Leigh belts one out during the famous shower scene in "Psycho."
Ben Guarino writes about the mysteries of screaming for Inverse. Below is an excerpt:
"We scream when we're excited or happy; we scream when we're fearful or in pain; we scream when we are exasperated; we scream when we're charging into battle; we scream during sex. But we rarely stop to wonder what those screams, even the ones that erupt from us, signify or if they can be differentiated. Emory University psychologist Harold Gouzoules thinks in those terms, but despite being probably the world's foremost expert on screaming, he doesn't speak in absolutes. For decades, Gouzoules studied screams in macaques and other nonhuman primates. He's only worked with Homo sapiens for three years and answers to even the most basic research questions remain elusive."
Janet Leigh belts one out during the famous shower scene in "Psycho."
Ben Guarino writes about the mysteries of screaming for Inverse. Below is an excerpt:
"We scream when we're excited or happy; we scream when we're fearful or in pain; we scream when we are exasperated; we scream when we're charging into battle; we scream during sex. But we rarely stop to wonder what those screams, even the ones that erupt from us, signify or if they can be differentiated. Emory University psychologist Harold Gouzoules thinks in those terms, but despite being probably the world's foremost expert on screaming, he doesn't speak in absolutes. For decades, Gouzoules studied screams in macaques and other nonhuman primates. He's only worked with Homo sapiens for three years and answers to even the most basic research questions remain elusive."
“End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.” –J.R.R. Tolkien
There’s a realization we all face at some point in our lives: that not only are we going to someday have our lives come to an end, but that everything that exists in the Universe will cease to be in its current form. All life will wither away, the last stars will burn out, the galaxies themselves will be driven apart from one another, the individual stars and planets will be ejected, and even the black holes left over will decay away into pure, cold radiation.
Image credit: XMM-Newton, ESA, NASA.
When all this passes away, what will be left? The fabric of space and time itself, which contains the entire Universe, and all the energy that’s ever been a part of it. None of that goes away, and all of it has the cosmic memory of whatever you did imprinted on it forever.
Image credit: Chris Kotsiopoulos, via http://ift.tt/1jZlOud.
“End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.” –J.R.R. Tolkien
There’s a realization we all face at some point in our lives: that not only are we going to someday have our lives come to an end, but that everything that exists in the Universe will cease to be in its current form. All life will wither away, the last stars will burn out, the galaxies themselves will be driven apart from one another, the individual stars and planets will be ejected, and even the black holes left over will decay away into pure, cold radiation.
Image credit: XMM-Newton, ESA, NASA.
When all this passes away, what will be left? The fabric of space and time itself, which contains the entire Universe, and all the energy that’s ever been a part of it. None of that goes away, and all of it has the cosmic memory of whatever you did imprinted on it forever.
Image credit: Chris Kotsiopoulos, via http://ift.tt/1jZlOud.
