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I’ve seen some pretty incredible things using my eyes.. First off of course, is the stunning sight of a dark star filled sky, then there is the incredible sight of the Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million light years away. Planets too can of course be seen as they slowly move across the sky but it’s a little more unusual to see something that reminds us the Universe changes. Well, we have an opportunity  in just a few weeks time. The star T Corona Borealis (T CrB) will brighten about 1,500 times so it can be seen with the unaided eye. Miss it though and you will have to wait another 80 years!

It’s always exciting to see something new in the sky. It doesn’t happen all that often but when it does, well it’s definitely an opportunity to get out and enjoy the show. The event is a nova which translates from Latin meaning new. In astronomy, we talk of nova as a number of different phenomena which herald the appearance of something new which is visible in the sky. A supernova is a well known example marking a colossal stellar explosion.

In the case of TCrB it refers to a binary star system where a white dwarf star (the remains of a star like the Sun) is in orbit around another star. I should clarify that statement, they both orbit around a common centre of gravity. At a distance of 3,000 light years, it is one of the closest of its type and so when it goes into outburst, we will get to see it without  any telescope or binoculars, just the ‘Mark-1 eyeball.’ 

The process that leads to the sudden brightening is really quite fascinating. The white dwarf star is a much higher pull of gravity compared to its companion. As a result, it drags material from its stellar neighbour in a process known as accretion. Over time – and in the case of T CrB it takes about 80 years – hydrogen builds up on the white dwarf. The layer of hydrogen is heated up by the white dwarf causing it to heat to critically high temperatures, high enough to initiate hydrogen fusion. The layer of hydrogen detonates and gets ejected from the white dwarf in a brightly glowing, hot shell. Here on Earth, we see this as a sudden brightening of a previously rather inconspicuous star that would ordinarily need a telescope to see.

Nova are generally quite unpredictable, usually occurring once and often leading to the death of a star but in this case, it occurs every 80 years. We call this event a recurrent nova. Its outburst was first seen in 1866 by an astronomer called John Birmingham who, amusingly came from Ireland and not Birmingham. It was seen again in 1946 when there was a drop in brightness before the explosion and it is this drop in brightness that has just been observed over the last couple of months. 

This all points to the next nova event being imminent, perhaps just a month or two away so, if you like me, are keen to see this once in a lifetime event then it’s time to get your coat on and get outside. Unfortunately, because we don’t know exactly when it is going to occur the best approach is to simply become familiar with the sky in the region of the constellation Corona Borealis. 

Alphecca is the brightest star in a C-shaped pattern of stars: the constellation Corona Borealis. It’s near the bright star Arcturus on the sky’s dome. Credit: EarthSky

Thankfully, Corona Borealis is in a fairly ‘quiet’ part of the sky with not too many bright stars. To find it from where you are then use an app on a smartphone to locate Vega in Lyra and Arcturus in Bootes, Corona Borealis is approximately between the two and looks somewhat like a semicircle of stars. Get to know that part of the sky and become familiar with the stars visible to the naked eye. Keep watching over the weeks and months ahead (and of course keep an eye on Universe Today) and at some point soon, you will see a ‘new’ star appear just outside the semicircle. 

Good luck and clear skies. 

Source : Keep your eyes on the sky for a new star as “once in a lifetime” cosmic explosion looms

The post We’re Now Just Weeks Away from a Stellar Explosion You Can See With Your Own Eyes appeared first on Universe Today.

We live in a Universe studded with black holes. Countless stellar mass and supermassive ones exist in our galaxy and most others. It’s likely they existed as so-called “primordial” black holes in the earliest epochs of cosmic history. Yet, there seems to be a missing link category: intermediate-mass black holes (IMBH). Astronomers have searched for these rare beasts for years and there’s only one possible observation thanks to gravitational-wave data. So, where are they?

IMBH might be hidden away in the hearts of globular clusters. But, given the tightly packed nature of those compact collections of stars, how would we know if they contained any IMBH? Teams of researchers in Japan and China came up with a couple of ways to search them out. One is to look for fast-moving stars ejected from globular clusters. The other is to do simulations of collisions of stars in the hearts of newly forming clusters. Both methods may point the way to more IMBH discoveries.

What Are Intermediate-mass Black Holes?

These rare objects are pretty much what their name says: black holes with masses somewhere between their stellar-mass cousins and the supermassive behemoths at the hearts of galaxies. They can contain as little as a thousand times the mass of the Sun, which would be fairly “small”, up to maybe a million solar masses. Beyond that are the supermassive monsters with millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun. The IMBH don’t come from supernova explosions, since there’s no massive star big enough to collapse to produce an IMBH. The birth of an IMBH should involve multiple massive objects coalescing together. This makes them more like their big supermassive black hole siblings.

So, where would such a collisional event happen? It would help if you had a dense agglomeration of stars tightly packed together. That describes globular clusters to a T. They’re crowded with stars, and likely have a good collection of very massive ones. Those are the stars that explode as supernovae and collapse down to produce a stellar-mass black hole. If enough of them exist in the cluster, they could merge and create an IMBH. Another suggestion to create an IMBH is for massive stars to collide to create a single more-massive object.

Many globular clusters orbit the core of the Milky Way Galaxy. Some of the densest ones have millions of stars pulled together by gravity. The cluster Messier 15 (M15) is a good example. It contains more than 100,000 stars crammed into an area of space about 175 light-years across. If runaway star collisions or stellar-mass black hole mergers occurred in M15, that could be enough to create an IMBH.

Simulating Globular Clusters and Intermediate-Mass Black Hole Growth

Another idea is to explore the formation of globulars to see if it produces any clues to the origins and existence of IMBH. That’s what a team of scientists at the University of Tokyo did. They created advanced simulations of star cluster formation to see if massive-star collisions could occur and lead to the birth of IMBH. It’s not an easy task. Previous simulations suggested stellar winds would blow away the needed masses to create these missing black holes.

“Star cluster formation simulations were challenging because of the simulation cost,” said team leader Michiko Fujii. “We, for the first time, successfully performed numerical simulations of globular cluster formation, modeling individual stars. By resolving individual stars with a realistic mass for each, we could reconstruct the collisions of stars in a tightly packed environment. For these simulations, we have developed a novel simulation code, in which we could integrate millions of stars with high accuracy.”

A simulated star cluster forming in a giant molecular cloud. Could this visualization help astronomers understand the formation of intermediate-mass black holes in clusters? Courtesy: Takaaki Takeda (VASA Entertainment, Inc.)

The resulting simulation run showed that runaway collisions brought very massive stars together. These are perfect candidates to end up as IMBH candidates. “Our final goal is to simulate entire galaxies by resolving individual stars,” Fujii points to future research. “It is still difficult to simulate Milky Way-size galaxies by resolving individual stars using currently available supercomputers. However, it would be possible to simulate smaller galaxies such as dwarf galaxies. We also want to target the first clusters, star clusters formed in the early universe. First clusters are also places where IMBHs can be born.”

Runaway Stars and IMBH

Okay, so simulations show that such IMBH could be possible in the globular cluster environment, but what’s the physical proof they actually exist? No one has actually detected the collisions of stellar-mass black holes inside a cluster to create an IMBH. Nor have they seen stellar collisions that might create a monster object — although the Japanese simulations proved they can happen. The trick now is to observe both types of event. Until that happens, astronomers can figure out if IMBH exist through indirect means.

A Chinese research team, led by Yang Huang of the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently posted a paper about a high-velocity star fleeing the scene of a collision in the heart of Messier 15. The star, called J0731+3717, was ejected by an encounter with an intermediate-mass black hole embedded very close to the center of the cluster.

J0731+3717 got tossed out on its high-speed journey about 21 million years ago. The team examined its metallicity (that is, its ratios of hydrogen and heavier elements (called “metals” by astronomers)) and found that it matches the stars in M15. The rogue star moves away from the cluster at a velocity of about 550 kilometers per second and once “lived” at a distance of about 1 AU from the cluster’s core. The team analyzed those measurements and did reverse orbital calculations of that star (and others within 5 kpc of the Sun). Based on their calculations, they concluded the star had a too-close encounter with an intermediate-mass black hole containing about 100 solar masses.

The team suggests that this method be used to prove the existence of other IMBH in similar environments. They conclude their paper with a look at future observations to prove the concept. “With the increasing power of ongoing Gaia and large-scale spectroscopic surveys, we expect to discover dozens of cases within the 5kpc volume and ten times more within a 10kpc volume, which should shed light on the understanding of the evolutionary path from stellar-mass BHs to SMBHs.”

For More Information

Simulations Yield New Intermediate Mass Black Holes Recipe
Medium and Mighty: Intermediate-mass Black Holes Can Survive in Globular Clusters
A High-velocity Star Recently Ejected by an Intermediate-mass Black Hole in M15

The post Globular Clusters Should Contain More Intermediate-mass Black Holes appeared first on Universe Today.

The United States has enough biomass potential to produce 35 billion gallons per year of aviation biofuel by 2050, a new report confirms.

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Many of us feel that the world is going mad.  What used to be called “political correctness” is sweeping the country from the Left, and authoritarianism sweeping in from the right. On one hand we have the encampments and Ilhan Omar, on the other, Donald Trump.  Names like Audubon, Fisher, and Jefferson are being policed, as I pointed out in the last post, people are self-silencing on and off campus, students are celebrating the Houthis and even Hamas, DEI initiatives are promoting racial divisiveness and the instillation of guilt, people are calling for the defunding and even the elimination of the police, young people are cheering for the intifada all over the world, and so on.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a theory (or rather, borrows a theory) to explain all this, one that she lays out in a provocative article in the Free Press. No, it doesn’t mention religion, though she has suggested that Christianity is a way to fight what she sees as the dissolution of the West. Rather, here he describes what is happening in the West, suggests that it’s part of a deliberate four-stage plan (we’re at the end of stage 1), what those stages involve, and how we can stop it.

The article is surely worth reading, as her “stages” do fit nearly into a plan suggested by the journalist Yuri Bezmenov (1939-1993), who spied for Russia, defected to the West, and then described how the Soviet system took over Russia. It is the stages of that takeover (Bezmenov’s “Soviet subversion model”) into which Hirsi shoehorns the West’s own transformation.

You can read her take below, which is also archived archived here.  It sounds plausible enough, but I can’t quite buy it. Surely there are people who do seem to be calling for the dissolution of the West, but I can’t quite see the plotting she envisions, nor can I believe that the West is malleable enough to fall for it. Hirsi Ali seems to have been quite taken by Bezmenov and eager to apply his model to the West. You be the judge. Click to read

Hirsi Ali first limns the Western values that are endangered (quotes from hjer article are indented):

The West’s inheritance springs from a peculiar confluence of habits and customs that had been practiced for centuries before anyone branded them as “ideas.” But they are principles—radical ones—that have given us the most tolerant, free, and flourishing societies in all of human history.

Among these principles are the rule of law, a tradition of liberty, personal responsibility, a system of representative government, a toleration of difference, and a commitment to pluralism. Each of these ideas might have been extinguished in their infancy but for the grace of God and the force of their appeal.

. . . Right now, so many Western nations are under grave threat from the twin forces of cultural Marxism and an expansionist political Islam familiar to me from my youth.

Of course Hirsi Ali grew up in Somalia, which became authoritarian and didn’t adhere to these values, so she’s particularly sensitive to their erosion.

Here are the four stages of Western dissolution as outlined by Bezmenov; indented quotes are from Hirsi Ali:

Bezmenov described the subversion process as a complex model with four successive stages, a diagram of which I have provided. These are, in order: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and finally, normalization.

Hirsi Ali provides a handy chart (made by Bezmenov) of what will be affected by this process, but to me it looks a little like a Unabomber letter, and I’ll reproduce it below. Here are the stages and their expected duration, as well as the signs of the first stage that we’re in now (and nearing its end).

Demoralization

Demoralization is the first stage and requires the subverters’ greatest investment of time and resources. Bezmenov claims the process of demoralization can take between 10 to 30 years, because that is the amount of time it takes to educate a new generation.

The demoralization process targets three areas of society: its ideas, its structures, and its social institutions. The targeted institutions include religion, education, media, and culture. In each realm the old ways of thinking, the old heroes, are discredited. Those who believed in them come to doubt themselves and their ability to discern reality itself.

Think of the cynicism and selective truth-telling young Americans encounter in most classrooms. You know Jefferson owned slaves, right? You know Columbus killed millions? Again, never mind that Jefferson set us on the path to emancipation, or that Columbus knew nothing about epidemiology. A little learning, as the saying goes, is a dangerous thing.

. . .What else can explain the daily displays of moral panic attacks masquerading as righteous activism, from the destruction of artwork to self-immolation? As human life ceases to look inviolable, we might also expect measures like euthanasia to gain steam, not just to help end terminal anguish but to end all manner of non-debilitating hardship. It’s no surprise, then, that we are seeing movements speeding ahead for “assisted dying” in the U.S., UK, the Netherlands, Canada, France, Ireland, and the rest of the West.

Next, the fundamental structures of society—like the rule of law and social relations—are targeted. For example, demoralization in the rule of law would entail undermining our trust in legal institutions and eroding the basis for legal authority. This could be accomplished by presenting the justice system as corrupt or illegitimate and by sowing distrust in the mechanisms of law enforcement. Think of the movements to “defund the police” because of “systemic racism.” Or the conviction last week of the front-runner presidential candidate on 34 counts of obvious political charges.

This stage also includes, says Hirsi Ali, both euthanasia (assisted dying) the breakup of the traditional nuclear family, something she sees as a bulwark of Western values, and “the retrograde practice of polygamy” (now “polyamory”). DEI statements begin to curb academic freedom, and college students begin to feel that “resistance is justified”. This is usually couched as resistance to Israel, but Hirsi Ali says it’s also resistance to Western values. She’s not far wrong here, given that student protestors, in their authoritarian sureness, say that they’re out to “globalize the intifada”. This can be seen as the Islamist takeover of the West (“Turtle Island” as they call it.)

Destabilization

Destabilization is the next phase. This process is considerably shorter, taking anywhere between five months to two years. With demoralization now reaching its full maturity, society is increasingly paralyzed by harsh domestic turmoil across all sectors. Democratic politics take on the character of a vicious struggle for power. Factionalism takes hold. Economic relations degrade and collapse, obliterating the basis for bargaining. The social fabric frays, leading to mob rule. Society turns inward, leading to fear, isolationism, and the decline of the nation-state itself, leading to crisis.

It is important to understand that, at this stage, the process of subversion is largely self-propelled. What once required active involvement on the part of a subverter has now taken root and grows organically. Then, society ruptures all at once in a rolling series of crises as the full extent of the cancer manifests.

I’m not sure that we’re not at the beginning of this, but of course one could couch Trump’s campaign as part of the struggle for power. I’m not sure, however, if you can see this happening, or beginning to happen, in the rest of the West.

Finally, we have the two final stages:

Crisis and normalization

Bezemov says the “crisis” phase is supposed to last 2-6 months, and Hirsi Ali doesn’t mention it. That leads to “normalization”—presumably the Western acceptance of a new authoritarian set of values, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This stage is supposed to be indefinite:

Finally, says Bezmenov, a subverted society enters the normalization stage, which is when the subversive regime takes over, installing its ideology as the law of the land. By then, the enemy has totally conquered the target society—without ever firing a shot.

WHO IS DOING THIS?

Hirsi Ali says she can “discern at least three forces” producing this dissolution.

The first: American Marxists. This category includes old card-carrying communists, red-diaper baby socialists, antifa anarchists, and many of whom we now call woke. Though the Soviet Union collapsed decades ago, the Soviet worldview has found familiar proponents: young Americans and their professors. They are no longer advancing their cause merely through class struggle, but through the fusion of racial, class, and anticolonial struggles. Theirs is now a cultural communism; they lead subversion through the institutions with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the West.

The thundering socialists of the past (think of poor Bernie) seemed to earnestly care about the working class. Perhaps they did so naively, but at least they loved the poor. Does AOC? Rashida Tlaib? My former countrywoman, Ilhan Omar?

So this is largely the extreme Western Left.  And they will be allied with members of the next group, as indeed they have, at least on campus:

The second force is the radical Islamists, who are riding the coattails of the communists to power. A good example is the Muslim Brotherhood and its many tentacles. Of these tentacles, some are openly religious, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Students Association, each with chapters in nearly every American university. Other organizations don a secular mask, like the so-called Students for Justice in Palestine. These groups have become increasingly confident over the past months. Anti-Israel Muslim candidates recently won elected seats in countries like England, where imams talk openly about reestablishing the caliphate in Europe.

The question at hand is whether Marxists and Islamists can produce some kind of coherent society, for Islamism aims to convert the entire West to tenets of Islam, tenets that are very different from those of Marxists. If both groups are trying to destroy the West, they may succeed, but ultimately they’re working at cross purposes.

 Things become even weirder when you add in the third “subversive” force:

The third force is the Chinese Communist Party. The most obvious avenues through which the CCP has spread subversion in America is through its numerous Confucius Institutes. These organizations have been vehicles for Chinese espionage within major American academic institutions. Then there is TikTok, an addictive social media app controlled by the CCP, which presents Chinese children wholesome, educational content while wreaking havoc on American kids—polarizing them and feeding them anti-American propaganda.

In the end, then, and not necessarily consciously, the phases are being propelled by a mixture of American Marxists/Socialists, radical Islamists, and Chinese Communists.  In Hirsi Ali’s view, this combination will destroy Western values, but what kind of society will it produce? Does each group envision the same kind of endpoint?  Maybe that doesn’t matter; perhaps the groups just hate Western values and will fight it out for power after they’re gone.  Here’s the chart Hirsi Ali produces to show the process. She doesn’t mention it, nor that it was created not by her but by “Tomas Schuman”, a pseudonym for Bezemov himself.

How do we stop this? First, says Hirsi Ali, we need to “recognize the good activism from the bad”, and she says that “there is no easy way” to do this ave “pay attention to your gut and avoid being recruited by people for subversive causes. Even if we’re undergoing this dissolution, that doesn’t seem as hard as Hirsi Ali makes out.  Don’t support Hamas, Rashida Tlaib or DEI, don’t become an encamper, and, I guess, avoid all the pejorative forms of wokeness. I would add that you should speak up if you see Western (or “liberal”) values attacked.

What is happening? Speaking for myself, it’s not absolutely clear what Hirsi Ali is saying. Is she just describing only how Russia became communistic, or describing what’s really going on in the West? Are we going through these four stages in order?  I’m not sure. Is there collusion among the groups to destroy Western values? No, surely not, even if they have the same aim, for the society that each group aims for is very different.

In the end, all I can say is that Hirsi Ali correctly points out that many groups and many protesters are, in the end, bent on the destruction of Western values. But this has been said by many others; to name two, Hirsi Ali herself in her earlier works and Douglas Murray. And you’ll have encountered this idea before. To me the serious point of the article is nothing new (though recognizing the aims is important), and the new point—that we may be going through a Soviet-style transition to dictatorship and authoritarianism—is not very convincing.  The more I think about her article (it’s also on audio, but I haven’t listened to it, and the audio may be a bit different from the Free Press article.

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My two criteria for whether someone’s name should be removed from a society or building, or whether a statue should be taken down are, first, that the naming was done to honor the positive achievements of what the person did, and second, that the person’s life, as a whole, created a positive rather than a negative net effect on the world. If you can answer “yes” to the first one and “positive” to the second, the name should stay. It’s when these answers conflict that you have a problem and have to make a judgment call. And so it is with artist and naturalist John Jams Audubon.

There’s no doubt that the National Audubon Society, named after John James Audubon, the “father of American birding”, has been a positive force in conservation and getting people interested in our feathered friends. On the other hand, Audubon owned at least nine slaves and was a white supremacist.  This affects the second part of my judgment, and it’s hard to weigh the negative effects of owning slaves, which are substantial, against the net good of someone’s life, which in Audubon’s case includes the Society named after him.

The same conundrum applies to people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who owned many more slaves than did Audubon. Do we rename Washington, D.C. and the Jefferson memorial, and always qualify both of them when writing about them?  In general, my view is that the institutions and legacies of all of these men, recognizing their role as slave-holders, should remain, but of course any account of their accomplishments should be qualified, as slavery cannot be excused as “a practice of the times.” (There were abolitionists, who recognized its immorality from the get-go.)

The National Audubon Society has decided to keep its name, though some branches have renamed themselves. To me the renaming is more a performative than social-justice-improving action, since I doubt that the name Audubon has kept minorities out of birding. Yes, they are relatively few, but I attribute that to cultural differences or lack of access to the environment, not to Audubon’s name.  And I haven’t heard anyone assert that they’d gladly go into birding or join the Society if only it were renamed.

In the announcement from The Tucson Audubon Society sent in by reader Debi (below), it says that they are changing their name to become a “more inclusive and welcoming organization” and that the new name (not yet chosen) will “carry immense weight and signal our larger commitment to diversity, equity and access.”   They also think that the old name turned off minorities interested in birding: “We now recognize that this is a clear barrier for people who might otherwise become involved in or support or work.”  Really? How many such people do they know of?

Finally, though, they admit that few people outside the society really know about Audubon’s bad aspects; that outside their bubble the name Audubon has “little or no recognition.”

These two claims are mutually exclusive. You can’t say the name is keeping people out of birding because of Audubon’s legacy, while at the same time assert that few people outside the birding/conservation bubble know about Audubon’s life. (I’ve underline the claims in red below.)

At any rate, readers can weigh in here, but I think I agree with Debi when she added that this announcement, which she was sent, was “basically just more of the SOS (same old shit) that is driving us all batty.”  Yes, Audubon was a slaveholder, as were many people, some of them “fathers of our country,” but he left behind a legacy that was positive. I’d vote to keep the name on those grounds and on the grounds of historical continuity, and, like Debi, I’m tired of the constant drive to rename things under the misapprehension that this will substantially improve society. Yes, you can take the name “Hitler” off of stuff, but it’s no longer there anyway, and it seems time to stop trolling the lives of famous people, finding bits sufficiently bad to demonize them.  (The geneticist Ronald Fisher is one example of someone who has been unfairly canceled.)

Anyway, judge for yourself. Here’s the announcement that Debi sent.

Going deep into lunar rock could give us an opportunity to see if protons can decay into something else – a finding that could help us unify conflicting physics theories