Zodiacal Light

Looking east on a clear night, just before sunrise, a glow extends upward from the horizon. This light lingers, coexisting with the stars, before a brighter band of sky appears along the horizon, the Sun itself not far behind. Long exposure photography shows the phenomenon clearly, such as in the left side of the image below (the glow of the Milky Way galaxy is also visible on the right).

Astronomers first noticed the subtle first light, known as zodiacal light, centuries ago. In fact, identifying this phenomenon has been important to the practice of Islam. The fajr, or dawn prayer, is required before sunrise every day, but how long before? Unlike noon and sunset, the time of dawn is harder to pin down precisely.

The phenomenon of zodiacal light was significant enough to be named in the teachings of the Islamic prophet Muhammad: it was called "the false dawn", al-fajr al-kazib, to be distinguished from the later "true dawn", al-fajr as-sadiq. The latter time is widely accepted to be the correct one for the dawn prayer.

But what causes this light? In some ways, the cause is mundane: astronomers have long known that the glow originates from sunlight reflecting off of small dust particles in space. The long-narrow shape of the glow occurs because dust is not distributed uniformly throughout interplanetary space. Nearly all objects orbiting the Sun, from the largest planets to the smallest dust particles, cluster near a single plane, the plane of the Solar System. In our night sky, this plane appears as a line known as the ecliptic, along which the planets, Sun, and Moon travel. In turn, the constellations on the ecliptic are known as the zodiac. Voilà! Zodiacal light! Though most pronounced near the Sun at dawn, dim zodiacal light can be observed on a moonless night to follow the entire ecliptic.

However, this explanation merely raises another question. Where does the dust come from? Some debris comes from comets and asteroids, but some more evidence recently surfaced on this subject from an unlikely source.

On August 5, 2011, the NASA spacecraft Juno launched from Earth, the beginning of its five-year journey to Jupiter. Elsewhere on this blog, I've written in depth about Juno's mission and its many discoveries orbiting the Solar System's largest planet. However, the probe began gathering important data long before reaching its destination. Along its trajectory (pictured above*), Juno returned to Earth for a gravity assist to give it a boost to Jupiter. During its journey, scientists on the Juno team noticed something alarming: thousands of tiny streaks of light appeared on images of what should have been empty space!

Further analysis revealed that the streaks were tiny bits of debris knocked from Juno's solar panels, dislodged by microscopic dust particles impacting at high velocities. Unintentionally, the large solar panels of Juno became a interplanetary dust collector! Fortunately, the impacts were not large enough to cause damage detrimental to the mission, but they did reveal a surprising story.

In all, over 15,000 dust impact events were recorded, enough to measure in unprecendented detail the distribution throughout the inner Solar System. The figure above* (click to enlarge) shows the data. The top panel shows events on Juno's inbound stage from the farthest point of its first orbit (on the trajectory image, the point marked DSM or "Deep Space Manuever") to Earth flyby. The second shows impacts recorded outbound from Earth flyby through the asteroid belt, on its way to Jupiter. The horizontal axis measures distance from the Sun, while the black line indicates frequency of imapct events. For context, various significant distances and the distribution of asteroids (gray) in the asteroid belt are also included.

As a bonus, the outbound portion of the trajectory shown above was tilted from the ecliptic plane, while the inbound one lay within it (see again the trajectory image). Hence, we can clearly see that less impacts occur away from the plane of the Solar System. It is also clear that the impacts are reduced near Earth, since our planet's gravitational influence "clears its orbit" of dust. Nevertheless, it is the dust closest to us that causes most of the zodiacal light we observe.

In contrast, the vicinity of Mars appears riddled with dust, even more so than some parts of the asteroid belt! This was a great surprise, for it was expected most of the dust was from asteroids and that Mars would clear its orbit, just like Earth does. However, further data analysis confirmed that Mars must in fact be a major source of the dust that ultimately causes zodiacal light! There is much more to be discovered about this story: what mechanisms cause Mars to lose so much dust to space? Currently, the answer is not definitively known, though further space missions could provide clues. But after thousands of years of mystery, at least we now know that when we see that before-dawn glow, we have the red planet to thank.

Sources: https://www.al-islam.org/articles/al-fajr-sadiq-new-perspective-sayyid-muhammad-rizvi, https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/everything-you-need-to-know-zodiacal-light-or-false-dusk/, https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2020JE006509, https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/serendipitous-juno-detections-shatter-ideas-about-origin-of-zodiacal-light

*The last few figures in this post are from the paper "Distribution of Interplanetary Dust Detected by the Juno Spacecraft and Its Contribution to the Zodiacal Light" by J. Jorgensen et al.

The Gravitational Assist Maneuver

On October 7, 1959, the Soviet space probe Luna 3 passed over Asia and transmitted a handful of blurry black-and-white photos back to Earth. These were humanity's first glimpse of the Moon's far side (see below). The probe was launched on a circumlunar trajectory three days prior and its initial orbit about the Earth did not take it back on a path from which it could successfully relay its valuable data. However, Luna did not propel itself onto the necessary path. This groundbreaking probe was also the first to accomplish another feat: the gravitational assist.

Since 1959, spaceflight, especially interplanetary spaceflight, has relied upon gravity assists to reach destinations all over the Solar System. Apart from Luna 3, all other examples we will consider involve using gravity assists to change orbits around the Sun, rather than some other object (such as the Earth in the case of Luna 3). The basic principle is as follows: changing orbits around the Sun requires changing spacecraft velocity relative to the Sun, known as heliocentric velocity. Conventionally, this is done using thrusters aboard the craft itself (e.g. with chemical rockets; see ion propulsion for another example). However, onboard thrusters always require ejecting mass, and heavier rockets are much more difficult and costly to launch.

Gravity assists take advantage of planets' orbital velocity and gravitational influence to alter a spacecraft's heliocentric velocity. Take the diagram below, which shows a probe flying by the planet Jupiter.

Passing close to Jupiter puts our probe on a curved trajectory about the planet. Moreover, as it falls "downhill" into the gravity well of the giant planet, it picks up speed (as indicated by the longer arrows). This gain in speed is short-lived, however, because it loses kinetic energy climbing out of the well as it departs. As a result, though the velocity vector is pointed in a different direction than before, it seems we've made no progress in increasing our probe's speed.

But this is not true: all velocities in the above diagram are relative to Jupiter, i.e. measuring the rate at which an observer on Jupiter would see the spacecraft traveling. What matters for its orbit though, is heliocentric velocity.

Suppose that, with respect to the Sun, our planet has an initial orbital velocity toward the left. Then the total heliocentric speed can increase for our spacecraft if the velocity relative to the planet is rotated to line up more closely with the planetary velocity (as indicated by the addition of arrows in the above diagram). Two of the greatest outer Solar System missions in history relied on this principle: the Voyagers.

Both Voyager 1 and 2 made use of a gravity assist at Jupiter to accelerate them to Saturn, and Voyager 2 did the same to reach Uranus and Neptune. While a slight change in direction at each planet is visible in the above diagram, the following graph better captures Voyager 2's changes in speed.

The blue curve graphs the magnitude of Voyager 2's heliocentric velocity at various distances from the Sun along its journey. Note that at each flyby of a giant planet, the probe's speed sharply increased for a short time (as it plunged into the planet's gravity well) but also was higher after each flyby than before, with the exception of after its final encounter with Neptune. The other curve shown is the Solar System escape velocity, that is, the velocity required at a specified distance from the Sun to ultimately escape its gravitational influence. Remarkably, Voyager 2 did not even have sufficient velocity to escape the Solar System until after its first flyby with Jupiter! Without gravity assists, the spacecraft would not be headed toward interstellar space today.

As indicated by Voyager 2's encounter with Neptune, gravitational assists can also reduce a spacecraft's heliocentric velocity. This is necessary for certain missions to the inner Solar System; objects launched from the Earth do not simply fall toward the Sun - they have to lose the angular momentum they inherit from our own planet!

In October 2018, the European Space Agency spacecraft BepiColombo on a mission to orbit Mercury in 2025. See here for an animation of the probe's seven-year trajectory. If the probe had been launched directly toward Mercury, the additional velocity acquired from falling into the Sun's gravity well would have made orbit impossible. Instead, the mission trajectory incorporated two Venus flybys and six Mercury flybys, all to slow down the spacecraft without the use of too much thrust.

Finally, some space missions even use encounters with planets to leave the plane of the Solar System! The Ulysses spacecraft, launched in 1990, had the goal of studying the Sun. In particular, it aimed to measure the solar wind (the flow of charged particles) and magnetic field emanating from the Sun. Unlike previous missions, Ulysses had the opportunity to study the Sun from above its poles in an orbit that was inclined 80.2° to the plane of the Solar System. A vast majority of solar system missions remain in the nearly flat plane of the Sun's equator in which the planets lie.

To achieve this unusual orbit, the probe went all the way to Jupiter just to flyby the giant planet. Jupiter's large mass allowed for a more effective gravity assist and its distance from the Sun meant that the probe was traveling slower there and the maneuver required a smaller change in velocity. Ultimately, Ulysses made a great deal of new discoveries, including that the solar magnetic field "flips" every 11 years.

Faced with the difficulties of efficient Solar System navigation, numerous space missions have utilized creative solutions involving gravity assists to reach their targets, providing another example of the spectacular innovations necessary to explore worlds beyond our own.

Sources: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/luna-03/in-depth/, https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/basics/primer/, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228803791_Design_of_Lunar_Gravity_Assist_for_the_BepiColombo_Mission_to_Mercury, https://medium.com/teamindus/daring-gravity-assist-maneuvers-of-past-space-missions-411643cd3d55, https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/ulysses/in-depth/

The Casimir Effect

The idea of the electromagnetic field is essential to physics. Dating back to the work of James Clark Maxwell in the mid-1800s, the classical theory of electromagnetism posits the existence of certain electric and magnetic fields that permeate space. Mathematically, these fields assign vectors (arrows) to every point in space, and their values at various points determine how a charged particle moving in space would behave. For example, the magnetic field generated by a magnet exerts forces on other nearby magnetic objects. Crucially, the theory also explains light as an electromagnetic phenomenon: what we observe as visible light, radio waves, X-rays, etc. are "waves" in the electromagnetic field that propagate in space.

Maxwell's theory is still an essential backbone of physics today. Nevertheless, the introduction of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century introduced new aspects of electromagnetism. Perhaps most importantly, it was discovered that light comes in discrete units called photons and behaves in some ways both as a wave and a particle. Though electromagnetism on the human scale still behaves largely as the classical theory predicts, at small scales there are quantum effects to account for. Around the middle of the century, physicists Richard Feynman, Shinichiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and many others devised a new theory of quantum electrodynamics (or QED) that described how light and matter interact, even on quantum scales.

Naturally, QED predicted new phenomena that classical electromagnetism had not. One especially profound change was the idea of vacuum energy. For most purposes, "vacuum" is synonymous with "empty space". As is typical of quantum mechanics, however, a system is rarely considered to be in a single state, but rather in a superposition of many different states simultaneously. These different states can have different "weights" so that the system is "more" in one given state than another. This paradigm applies even to the vacuum. Certain pairs of particles may appear and disappear spontaneously in many of these states and even exchange photons. Some of the possible interactions are illustrated below with Feynman Diagrams.

In these diagrams, the loops represent the evanescent virtual particle pairs described above. Wavy lines represent the exchange of photons. Each of the six diagrams represents a possible vacuum interaction, and there are many more besides (infinitely many, in fact!). The takeaway is that the QED vacuum is not empty, but rather a "soup" of virtual particle interactions due to quantum fluctuations. Further, these interactions have energy, known as vacuum energy. This, at least, is the mathematical description. There are some curious aspects to this description, because the vacuum energy calculation in any finite volume yields a divergent series. In other words, there is theoretically an infinite amount of vacuum energy in any finite volume! Because of this, physicists devised a process called renormalization that cancels out these infinities in calculations describing the interaction of real particles. This process in fact gives results that have been confirmed by experiment. Nevertheless, it does not follow that the infinite vacuum energy exists in any "real" sense or is accessible to measurement. One possible way in which it is, however, is the Casimir Effect.

The setup of the Casimir effect involves two conducting metal plates placed parallel to one another. The fact that the plates are conducting is important because the electric field vanishes inside conducting materials. Now, the vacuum energy between the plates can be calculated as a sum over the possible wavelengths of the fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. However, unlike the free space vacuum, the possible wavelengths are limited by the size of the available space: the longest wavelength contributions to the vacuum energy do not occur between the plates (this is schematically illustrated in the image above). A careful subtraction of the vacuum energy density inside the plates from outside yields that there is more energy outside. Remarkably, this causes an attractive force between these plates known as the Casimir force. The force increases as the distance between plates is decreased. Precisely, the magnitude of the force F is proportional to 1/d⁴, where d is the distance between the plates. As a result, if the distance is halved, the force goes up by a factor of sixteen! The initial calculation of this effect was due to H.G.B Casimir in 1948.

Around 50 years after first being postulated, the effect was finally measured experimentally with significant precision. The primary issue was that for the Casimir force to be large enough to measure, the metal plates would have to be put very close to one another, less than 1 micrometer (0.001 mm). Even then, very sensitive instruments are necessary to measure the force. One landmark experiment took place in 1998. Due to the practical difficulty of maintaining two parallel plates very close to one another, this experiment utilized one metal plate and one metal sphere with a radius large compared to the separation (so that it would "look" like a flat plate close up). The authors of the experiment also added corrections to Casimir's original equation accounting for the sphere instead of the plane and the roughness of the metal surfaces (at the small distances of the experiment, microscopic bumps matter). They obtained the following data for the force as it varies with distance:

In the figure above, the squares indicate data points from the experiment and the curve is the theoretical model (including the corrections mentioned). The distance on the x-axis is in nanometers and the smallest distance measured was around 100 nm, hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair. Even at these minuscule distances, the force only reached a magnitude of about 1*10^-10 Newtons, a billion times smaller than the weight of a piece of paper. Nevertheless, the results confirmed the presence of the Casimir force to high accuracy.

The existence of the Casimir effect would seem to vindicate the rather strange predictions of QED with respect to the quantum vacuum, suggesting that it is indeed full of energy that can be tapped, if indirectly. However, others have argued that it is possible to derive the effect without reference to the energy of the vacuum, and therefore the experiment does not necessarily mean that vacuum energy is "real" in any meaningful way. Continued study into the existence of vacuum energy may help to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe since some mysterious "dark energy" is believed to be the source. In the mean time, the Casimir effect is an important experimental verification of QED and could someday see applications in nanotechnology, since the force would be relatively large on small scales.

Sources: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-casimir-effec/, https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0503158.pdf, The Quantum Vacuum: An Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics by Peter W. Milonni, http://web.mit.edu/kardar/www/research/seminars/PolymerForce/articles/PRL-Mohideen98.pdf

GW170817 and Multi-Messenger Astronomy Part 2

This is the second part of a two-part post. For the first part, see here.

The previous post described the gravitational wave event GW170817 (which took place on August 17, 2017) and how it was ultimately identified as a binary neutron star merger. In addition, it was associated with a gamma ray burst (designated GW170817) and imaged across the electromagnetic spectrum, an unprecedented and landmark event in the field of multi-messenger astronomy. Though it is intrinsically of interest to be able to both "see" (EM waves) and "hear" (gravitational waves) an astrophysical event, what are some other conclusions to be drawn from the merger?

One simple conclusion requires nothing more than a quick calculation, but verifies a foundational principle of physics that while almost universally assumed, had never been directly proven. This principle states that both electromagnetic waves and gravitational waves travel at the speed of light in a vacuum, about 3*10⁸ m/s. Recall that the merger is estimated to have taken place about 130 million light-years away. This means that both the gravitational wave signal and the gamma ray burst both took about 130 million years to travel from the source to detectors on Earth. Despite their long journey, they arrived within a few seconds of each other. Now, we cannot be certain exactly when the gamma ray burst was emitted, due to our incomplete understanding of how a binary neutron star merger would work. However, it is likely that the neutron stars must first collide (marking the end of the gravitational wave signal) before emitting a burst of gamma radiation. Moreover, this initial high-energy burst was estimated by most models to occur no more than a few minutes after the merger. Therefore, dividing the amount by which the signals could have drifted apart over their travel time, we obtain bounds on the "speed of gravity" relative to the speed of light. Even with conservative assumptions, these observations prove that the two speeds very likely differ by no more than one part in a trillion (0.0000000001%) and probably several orders of magnitude less than this. Theoretically, they are equal, but never before has this been measured with such incredible precision.

In a similar vein, the merger allowed other tests of various aspects of general relativity and field theory, such as the influence of gravitational waves on the propagation of electromagnetic field. The data all confirmed the current understanding of general relativity and set very tight bounds on possible deviations, better than those ever achieved in the past.

The detection of the merger also taught us about the very structure of neutron stars. Unlike black holes, which (to our knowledge) are effectively points of mass, neutron stars are on the order of a few miles across. Considering their mass (usually 1-2 solar masses), they are exceedingly dense, but nevertheless their physical size affects how the gravitational wave event unfolds. When the two objects get very close to one another, their mutual gravitational attraction is expected to cause tidal deformations, i.e. warping of their shape and mass distribution. In theory, information concerning the deformation is encoded in the measured waveforms.

The figure above (click to enlarge), while rather technical, gives some idea as to how exactly the gravitational wave data constrain the structure of the neutron star. The statement |χ| < 0.05 in the diagram indicates that the entire figure is made presupposing that the neutron stars were not spinning too fast (which our knowledge of neutron star systems suggests is a very reasonable assumption). The two axes measure the magnitude of two parameters Λ₁ and Λ₂ that measure how much the larger and the smaller neutron stars, respectively respond to tidal deformation. In other words, smaller values of the parameters (toward the lower left) mean denser and more compact neutron stars, as indicated. More on what these parameters actually mean can be found in the original paper here.

Next, the darker shades of blue represent values considered more likely given the shape of the gravitational wave signal. This is a probability distribution, and lighter shaded areas were not ruled out with certainty, but simply deemed less likely. The uncertainty in the original masses contributes to the uncertainty in this diagram. Finally, the gray shaded "stripes" indicate the predictions of several different theoretical models of neutron stars. These are distinguished by their different equations of state, which specify how mass, pressure, density, and other properties of neutron stars relate to one another. The varying predictions of these models show just how little was definitively known about neutron stars. Analysis of the merger event suggested that the "SLy" and "APR4" models were more accurate than the rest (at 50% confidence) and that the "MS1" and "MS1b" models are unlikely to be correct (with more than 90% confidence). No model was ruled out for sure, but the data above suggest that neutron stars are more compact than most models predicted.

The gamma ray burst that followed the merger also contained some information concerning how these mergers actually occur and the physics of when and why high-energy radiation is released. Notably, the gamma ray burst was a single short pulse (lasting under a second) with no discernible substructure. It was difficult to draw conclusions from this limited sample, but explaining the nature of the pulse and the delay may require a dense layer of ejecta from each of the neutron stars to momentarily impede electromagnetic radiation from the merger. It would take some time for gamma rays to penetrate this cloud of debris until they finally burst through.

Moreover, among the known population of gamma ray bursts, GW1701817A was relatively dim. This may have been due to the main "jets" of energy not being along our line of sight; most of the burst is hypothesized to have been released along the original axis of rotation of the two bodies. The discrepancy may in part have been due to observational bias, since brighter events are more likely to be observed. In such cases, the Earth likely was directly facing the angle of peak gamma ray emission. Detecting an event "off-center" elucidates somewhat the structure and extent of the these jets.

The image above (click to enlarge) was originally from this paper. It demonstrates schematically some different theories explaining the relative dimness of the gamma ray burst event and the structure of the jets along the axis of rotation. Earlier theories postulated a relatively uniform jet, as shown in the first scenario. If this is the case, our line of sight may have been outside the jet, but relativistic effects allowed us to see a smaller amount of the radiation. Other explanations postulate that the jet has some internal structure and "fades" with increasing angle from the axis (ii) or that the interaction of the jet with surrounding matter produces a secondary cocoon of radiation (iii). A final scenario is simply that this event was a few orders of magnitude dimmer than other known gamma ray bursts for some intrinsic reason, although the authors deem this unlikely.

Without the background information provided by the gravitational wave signal (the component masses of the merger, the timing of the merger, etc.), little of the above could be gleaned from the gamma ray signal. Nor would it be possible with only one of the two to conduct the precision tests of fundamental physics described earlier. These are examples of the power of multi-messenger astronomy. Having both an eye and an ear to the cosmos will continue to yield fundamental insights into the nature of our universe.

Sources: https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.161101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.05834.pdf, http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa91c9/pdf

GW170817 and Multi-messenger Astronomy

The first astronomers had only their own eyes as tools, and visible light was their only source of information. Recent instruments have broadened our sight to include all types of electromagnetic radiation, from radio waves to X-rays and gamma rays. Each part of the spectrum is suited to different types of observations and gave us incredible new insight into the cosmos. However, the second decade of the 21st century saw the advent of a fundamentally new kind of astronomy: the detection of gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves, as discussed in a previous post, are the "ripples" in spacetime that propagate in response to the acceleration of massive objects (stars, black holes, and the like). All objects with mass produce these waves, but the vast majority are far too small to detect. It was only with the advent of extremely sensitive instruments that the first detection of gravitational waves was made by LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) in 2015. This detection, and its immediate successors, were of binary black hole merger events, in which two black holes orbiting one another spiraled inwards and finally combined into a single, larger black hole. The last moments before merging brought exceptionally colossal objects (weighing perhaps dozens of solar masses) to great accelerations, the perfect recipe for producing strong gravitational waves detectible across the cosmos. However, these cataclysmic events were quite dark: little electromagnetic radiation was emitted, and no "visual" evidence for these events accompanied the wave signal. Something quite different occurred in 2017.

On August 17, 2017 at 12:41 UTC, the LIGO detectors at Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana and the Virgo gravitational wave detector in Italy simultaneously measured an event as shown above (click to enlarge). The two LIGO frequency-time diagrams clearly show a curve that increases in frequency before disappearing at time 0. This corresponds to two inspiraling objects orbiting one another faster and faster before merging finally occurs and the signal stops. In the Virgo diagram, the same line is not very visible, but further analysis of the data nevertheless expose the same signal from the noise. The gravitational wave event, designated GW170817, was genuine.

Having three detectors at different points on the Earth measure the event allowed a better triangulation of the location of the source than had occurred previously (when LIGO and Virgo were not simultaneously active).

The above figure shows a visualization of the celestial sphere (representing all possible directions in the sky from which the signal could have come) and locations from which the signal data suggest the signal originated. The green zone is the highest probability region taking all three instruments into account. This area is still 31 square degrees, quite large by astronomical standards. Fortunately, corroboration of the event came immediately from an entirely separate source.

The above figure (click to enlarge) shows at the bottom the same gravitational wave signal from before. The rest of the data come from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the International Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory, both satellites in Earth orbit. As their names suggest, they search the cosmos for astrophysical sources of high-energy gamma rays. In particular, they monitor the cosmos for gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), especially intense flashes of radiation that typically accompany only the most explosive events, such as supernovae. As the figure shows, less than two seconds after the gravitational wave signal stopped (indicated the merger of two orbiting objects), there was an elevated count of gamma rays in each detector across the different photon energy levels. The source of this burst is indicated by a reticle in the celestial sphere figure above, lying right within the estimated location of the merger! It appeared that this merger had an electromagnetic counterpart! Further, analysis of the gravitational waves indicated that the masses of the two objects were around 1.36-2.26 and 0.86-1.36 solar masses (these were the uncertainty ranges), respectively, not heavy enough for black holes. What was going on?

The conclusion drawn from these events was that the merger was not of black holes, but of neutron stars, compact remnants of large stars that were yet not massive enough to collapse into black holes. An artist's conception of a binary neutron star black hole merger is shown above. Following the initial identification of the event, countless telescopes around the world trained on the event the very same day after a notice was released around 13:00 UTC, hoping to observe more following the merger.

And they were not disappointed. Less than a day after the initial gamma ray burst had faded, the source began to appear at other frequencies, and remained bright for several weeks before fading. The above figure shows the Hubble image of the merger's host galaxy, NGC 4993. This galaxy is at a distance of roughly 130 million light-years, and even at this distance, the collision of the neutron stars was clearly visible against the billions of other stars. Finally, the chart below demonstrates just how well documented the event was:

Many different instruments took images in X-rays as well as ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and radio waves. The horizontal axis indicates the rough timeline of events (on a logarithmic scale) in each part of the electromagnetic spectrum, stretching from less than a day to several weeks after the merger. Several representative images of NGC 4993 and the source within are shown at bottom.

Without extensive collaboration within the astronomical community, collecting this wealth of data on this binary neutron star merger would not have been possible. This marked the first time in history that a single event was measured in both gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves, not to mention how thoroughly the merger was photographed across the spectrum. This coordinated observation is known as multi-messenger astronomy, and may have profound implications on our future understanding of the universe. Some of what we learned from the binary neutron star merger is discussed in the next post.

Note: Most of the figures above are taken from the open access papers detailing the discovery and analysis of the binary neutron star merger. For further reading on the event, links to these papers may be found in the sources below.

Sources: https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.161101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.05834.pdf, http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa91c9/pdf

Black Holes and Information

Black holes, with their extreme gravity and ability to profoundly warp space and time, are some of the most interesting objects in the universe. However, in at least one precisely defined way, they are also the least interesting.

According to general relativity, black holes are nearly featureless. Specifically, there is a result known as the "no-hair theorem" that states that stationary black holes have exactly three features that are externally observable: their mass, their electric charge, and their angular momentum (direction and magnitude of spin). There are no other attributes that distinguish them (these additional properties would be the "hair"). It follows that if two black holes are exactly identical in mass, charge, and angular momentum, there is no way, even in principle, to tell them apart from the outside.

This in and of itself is not a problem. As usual, problems arise when the principles of quantum mechanics are brought to bear in circumstances where both gravity and quantum phenomena play a large role. At the heart of the formalism of quantum mechanics is the Schrödinger equation, which governs the time-evolution of a system (at least between measurements). Fundamentally, the evolution may be computed both forwards and backwards in time. Therefore, at least the mathematical principles of quantum mechanics hold that information about a physical system cannot be "lost", that is, we may always deduce what happened in the past from the present. This argument does not take the measurement process into account, but it is believed that these processes do not destroy information either. Black holes provide some problems for this paradigm.

However, it may seem that information is lost all the time. If a book is burned, for example, everything that was written on its pages is beyond our ability to reconstruct. However, in principle, some omniscient being could look at the state of every particle of the burnt book and surrounding system and deduce how they must have been arranged. As a result, the omniscient being could say what was written in the book. The situation is rather different for black holes. If a book falls into a black hole, outside observers cannot recover the text on its pages, but this poses no problem for our omniscient being: complete knowledge of the state of all particles in the universe includes of course those on the interior of black holes as well as the exterior. The book may be beyond our reach, but its information is still conserved in the black hole interior.

The real problem became evident in 1974, when physicist Stephen Hawking argued for the existence of what is now known as Hawking radiation. This quantum mechanism allows black holes to shed mass over time, requiring a modification to the conventional wisdom that nothing ever escapes black holes.

The principles of quantum mechanics dictate that the "vacuum" of space is not truly empty. Transient so-called "virtual" particles may spring in and out of existence. Pairs of such particles may emerge from the vacuum (a pair with opposite charges, etc. is required to preserve conservation laws) for a very short time; due to the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, short-lived fluctuations in energy that would result from the creation of particles do not violate energy conservation. In the presence of very strong gravitational fields, such as those around a black hole, the resulting pairs of particles sometimes do not come back together and annihilate each other (as in the closed virtual pairs above). Instead, the pairs "break" and become real particles, taking with them some of the black hole's gravitational energy. When this occurs on the event horizon, one particle may form just outside and the other just inside, so that the one on the outside escapes to space. This particle emission is Hawking Radiation.

Theoretically, therefore, black holes have a way of shedding mass (through radiation) over time. Eventually, they completely "evaporate" into nothing! This process is extremely slow: black holes resulting from the collapse of stars may take tens of billions of years (more than the current age of the Universe!) to evaporate. Larger ones take still longer. Nevertheless, a theoretical puzzle remains: if the black hole evaporates and disappears, where did its stored information go? This is known as the black hole information paradox. The only particles actually emitted from the horizon were spontaneously produced from the vacuum, so it is not obvious how these could encode information. Alternatively, the information could all be released in some way at the moment the black hole evaporates. This runs into another problem, known as the Bekenstein bound.

The Bekenstein bound, named after physicist Jacob Bekenstein, is an upper limit on the amount of information that may be stored in a finite volume using finite energy. To see why this bound arises, consider a physical system as a rudimentary "computer" that stores binary information (i.e. strings of 1's and 0's). In order to store a five-digit string such as 10011, there need to be five "switches," each of which has an "up" position for 1 and a "down" position for 0. Considering all possible binary strings, there are therefore 2⁵ = 32 different physical states (positions of switches) for our five-digit string. This is a crude analogy, but it captures the basic gist: the Bekenstein bound comes about because a physical system of a certain size and energy can only occupy so many physical states, for quantum mechanical reasons. This bound is enormous; every rearrangement of atoms in the system, for example, would count as a state. Nevertheless, it is finite.

The mathematical statement of the bound gives the maximum number of bits, or the length of the longest binary sequence, that a physical system of mass m, expressed as a number of kilograms, and radius R, a number of meters, could store. It is I ≤ 2.5769*10⁴³ mR.

This is far, far greater than what any existing or foreseeable computer is capable of storing, and is therefore not relevant to current technology. However, it matters to black holes, because if they hold information to the moment of evaporation, the black hole will have shrunk to a minuscule size and must retain the same information that it had at its largest. This hypothesis addressing the black hole information paradox seems at odds with the Bekenstein bound.

In summary, there are many possible avenues for study in resolving the black hole information paradox, nearly all of which require the sacrifice of at least one physical principle. Perhaps information is not preserved over time, due to the "collapse" of the quantum wavefunction that occurs with measurement. Perhaps there is a way for Hawking radiation to carry information. Or possibly, there is a way around the Bekenstein bound for evaporating black holes. These possibilities, as well as more exotic ones, are current areas of study. Resolving the apparent paradoxes that arise in the most extreme of environments, where quantum mechanics and relativity collide, would greatly advance our understanding of the universe.

Sources: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v9/62, https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0508041.pdf, http://kiso.phys.se.tmu.ac.jp/thesis/m.h.kuwabara.pdf, https://plus.maths.org/content/bekenstein

Neutrinos and Their Detection 2

This is the second part of a two part post. For the first part, see here.

The discovery of neutrinos led to a rather startling realization concerning the omnipresence of these particles. Scientists have known since the early 20th century that stars such as the Sun generate energy through nuclear fusion, especially of hydrogen into helium. In addition to producing radiation that eventually leads to what we see as sunlight, every one of these reactions releases neutrinos. As a result, the Earth is continually bathed in a stream of neutrinos: every second, billions of neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of the Earth's surface. A vast, vast majority of these pass through the planet unimpeded and resume their course through space, just as discussed in the previous post. As we will see, studying the properties of these solar neutrinos later led to an revolutionary discovery.

In 1967, an experiment began that had much in common with many of the neutrino experiments to come. Known as the Homestake experiment after its location, the Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota, the main apparatus of the experiment was an 100,000 gallon tank of perchloroethylene (a common cleaning fluid) located deep underground, nearly a mile below the Earth's surface. The purpose of holding the experiment underground was to minimize the influence of cosmic rays, which would react with the perchloroethylene and produce experimental noise. Cosmic rays do not penetrate deep underground, however, while neutrinos do. The immense volume of liquid was necessary to obtain statistically significant data from the small rate of neutrino interactions. The number of argon atoms that were produced through the reaction was measured to determine how many reactions were occurring.

Simultaneously, physicists made theoretical calculations using knowledge of the Sun's composition, the process of nucleosynthesis, the Earth's distance from the Sun, and the size of the detector to estimate what the rate of interactions should have been. However, the results were not consistent with the data collected from the experiment. Generally, theoretical estimates were around three times as large as the actual results. Two-thirds of the expected reactions were missing! This disagreement became known as the "solar neutrino problem."

The models of the Sun were not at fault. In fact, the cause of the problem was an incorrect feature of the otherwise quite powerful Standard Model of Particle Physics, namely that neutrinos have mass. As far back as 1957, Italian physicist Bruno Pontecorvo considered the implications of neutrinos having mass.

He and others realized that neutrinos with mass would undergo what is known as neutrino oscillation when traveling through space. For example, an electron neutrino emitted from nuclear fusion would become a "mix" of all three flavors of neutrinos: electron, muon, and tau. When a solar neutrino reaches Earth and interacts with matter, it only has roughly a 1 in 3 chance of "deciding" to be an electron neutrino. This would explain the observed missing neutrinos, since the Homestake detector only accounts for electron neutrinos.

For the remainder of the 20th century, several more experiments were performed to investigate whether neutrino oscillation was in fact the solution to the solar neutrino problem. One experiment that was crucial in conclusively settling the matter was Super-Kamiokande, a neutrino observatory located in Japan. Like the Homestake experiment, it was located deep underground in a mine and consisted of a large volume of liquid (in this case, water).

When neutrinos interact with the water molecules in the detector, charged particles are produced that propagate through the chamber. These release radiation which is amplified and recorded by the photomultipliers that surround the water tank on every side. The number of photomultipliers allows a more detailed analysis of this radiation, yielding the energy and direction of origin for each neutrino interaction. It was this added precision that helped to resolve the solar neutrino problem: neutrinos indeed have mass and undergo oscillation. This discovery led to Japanese physicist Takaaki Kajita (who worked on the Super-Kamiokande detector as well as its predecessor the Kamiokande detector) sharing the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The exact masses of the different flavors of neutrinos are not yet known, nor do we completely understand why they have mass. However, despite the mysteries of particle physics that remain, further applications of neutrino detection continue in a different field: astronomy. The use of neutrinos to observe extraterrestrial objects is known as neutrino astronomy. In theory, if one could accurately measure the direction from which every neutrino arrives at Earth, the result would be an "image" of the sky highlighting neutrino sources. In reality, the scattering that occurs in detectors such as Super-Kamiokande when incoming particles hit and change direction limits angular resolution and so few interactions occur that there are insufficient samples to construct such an image. Only two extraterrestrial objects have ever been detected through neutrino emissions, in fact: the Sun, and a nearby supernova event, known as SN1987a after the year in which it took place. Theoretical calculations indicate that sufficiently bright supernovae may be located with reasonable accuracy using neutrino detectors in the future.

There is one major advantage to using neutrinos as opposed to light in making observations: neutrinos pass through nearly all matter unimpeded. The above discussion indicated that the Sun is a neutrino source. This is true, but not fully precise; the solar core is the source of the neutrinos, as it is where fusion occurs, and its radius is only about a quarter of the Sun's. There is no way to see the light emanating from the core because it interacts with other solar particles. However, we can see the core directly through neutrino imaging. In fact, the data from the Super Kamiokande experiment should be enough to approximate the radius in which certain fusion reactions take place. Future detectors could tell us even more about the Sun's interior.

Neutrino astronomy is still a nascent field and we do not yet know its full potential. Further understanding and detection of neutrinos will tell us more about the fundamental building blocks of matter, allow us to peer inside our own Sun, and measure distant supernovae.

Sources: http://www.sns.ias.edu/~jnb/SNviewgraphs/snviewgraphs.html, https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0410090v1.pdf, http://slideplayer.com/slide/776551/, https://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/raydavis/research.htm, https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0202058v3.pdf, https://j-parc.jp/Neutrino/en/intro-t2kexp.html, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1010.0118v3.pdf, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/through-neutrino-eyes/, https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9811350v1.pdf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.02558.pdf

Neutrinos and Their Detection

Neutrinos are a type of subatomic particle known both for their ubiquity and their disinclination to interact with other forms of matter. They have zero electric charge and very little mass even compared to other fundamental particles (though not none, more on this later) so they are not affected by electromagnetic forces and only slightly by gravity.

Since neutrinos are so elusive, it is not surprising that their existence was first surmised indirectly. In 1930, while studying a type of radioactive decay known as beta decay, physicist Wolfgang Pauli noticed a discrepancy. Through beta decay (shown above), a neutron is converted into a proton. This is a common process by which unstable atomic nuclei transmute into more stable ones. It was known that an electron was also released in this process. However, Pauli found that this left some momentum unaccounted for. As a result, he postulated the existence of a small, neutral particle (this properties eventually led to the name "neutrino"). The type emitted in this sort of decay is now known as an electron antineutrino (all the types will be enumerated below).

However, they were speculative for some decades before a direct detection occurred in 1956 in the Cowan-Reines Neutrino Experiment, named after physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines.

The experiment relied upon the fact that nuclear reactors were expected to release a large flux of electron antineutrinos during their operation, providing a concentrated source with which to experiment. The main apparatus of the experiment was a volume of water that electron antineutrinos emerging from the reactor would pass through. Occasionally, one would interact with a proton in the tank, producing a neutron and a positron (or anti-electron, denoted e⁺) through the reaction shown on the bottom left. This positron would quickly encounter an ordinary electron and the two would mutually annihilate to form gamma rays (γ). These gamma rays would then be picked up by scintillators around the water tanks. To increase the certainty that these gamma ray signatures in fact came from neutrinos, the experimenters added a second layer of detection by dissolving the chemical cadmium chloride (CdCl) in the water. The addition of a neutron (the other product of the initial reaction) to the common isotope Cd-108 creates an unstable state of Cd-109 which releases a gamma ray after a period of a handful of microseconds. Thus, the detection of two gamma rays simultaneously and then a third after a small delay would definitively indicate a neutrino interaction. The experiment was very successful and the rate of interactions, about three per hour, matched the theoretical prediction well. The neutrino had been discovered.

The Standard Model of particle physics predicted the existence of three "generations" of neutrinos corresponding to three types of particles called leptons.

The above diagram shows the three types of leptons and their corresponding neutrinos. In addition to this, every particle type has a corresponding antiparticle which in a way has the "opposite" properties (though some properties, such as mass, remain the same). The electron antineutrino discussed above is simply the antiparticle corresponding to the electron neutrino, for example. The discoveries of the others occurred at particle accelerators, where concentrated beams could be produced: the muon neutrino in 1962, and the tau neutrino in 2000. These results completed the expected roster of neutrino types under the Standard Model. In its original form, though, the Standard Model predicted that all neutrinos would have exactly zero mass. Note that this hypothesis (though later proved incorrect) is not disproven by the fact that neutrinos account for the "missing momentum" Pauli originally identified; massless particles, such as photons (particles of light), can still carry momentum and energy.

All of the neutrino physics described so far concerns artificially produced particles. However, these discoveries were only the beginning. Countless neutrinos also originate in the cosmos, motivating the area of neutrino astronomy. For more on this field and its value to both astronomy and particle physics, see the next post (coming January 22).

Sources: http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~larson/Webpage/neutrinos.html, http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/cowan.html, https://perimeterinstitute.ca/files/page/attachments/Elementary_Particles_Periodic_Table_large.jpghttp://www.scienceinschool.org/sites/default/files/articleContentImages/19/neutrinos/issue19neutrinos10_xl.jpg, http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/donut.html

More Evidence for Planet Nine

For the first post in this series, which explains the motivation for the Planet Nine hypothesis, click here.

The previous post touched on some ways in which the orbits of certain outer Solar System objects are similar. These may be quickly summarized in the following way: both the arguments and longitudes of the objects' perihelia are unusually clustered around certain values.

The above image shows numerous relevant parameters concerning the position of an orbit. In the case of orbits in the Solar System, the plane of reference is the plane of the Earth's orbit and the Sun, also known as the ecliptic. The reference direction often used for heliocentric objects is called the First Point of Aries, defined as the position of Earth's vernal equinox and so named for its location within the constellation Aries. The ones with which we are concerned here are the argument of periapsis ω (this is the general name for argument of perihelion to include non-heliocentric objects) and the longitude of the ascending node Ω. The sum of these two angles is called the longitude of perihelion because it measures the angle between the perihelion and the reference direction. In summary, the similarity in the arguments of perihelion indicates that the members of the relevant population of objects have similar orientations with respect to the plane of the Solar System, while the similarity in the longitudes indicates a clustering of these orbits in space.

A 2016 paper by Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown ran a statistical analysis of these parameters for the six most extreme known trans-Neptunian (beyond Neptune) objects. Since they were discovered by a number of distinct observational surveys, the possibility of observational bias was dismissed. The analysis found that the clustering of the objects had only a 0.007% probability of occurring by chance. This suggested that another explanation was in fact required for the phenomenon. Further simulations suggested that a Planet Nine could account for the observations, provided that it have the required heft: at least around 10 Earth masses (or, equivalently, 5000 Pluto masses). In comparison, all the previously known trans-Neptunian objects put together weighed much less than a single Earth mass.

Shortly afterward, more evidence for Planet Nine was discovered, using data from a surprising source: the Cassini space probe. Launched in 1997, this Saturn orbiter allowed the calculation of the position of Saturn over time to unprecedented precision. These were compared to an extremely precise gravitational model of the Solar System known as INPOP, which accounts for the gravitational influence of the Sun, the planets, and many asteroids. The model then outputs planetary ephemerides, namely positions of the planets at given times. A paper published in February 2016 by Agnès Fienga et al. experimented with adding a Planet Nine at different positions to the INPOP. If the residuals (differences in Saturn's position between the predictions of INPOP and the real measurements from Cassini) are increased, this rules out the existence of Planet Nine in this position. However, if they are decreased, then this is evidence in support of Planet Nine, since it would partially explain the observed discrepancy.

The results of the paper are summarized in the diagram above. They showed that Planet Nine of 10 Earth masses and a semi-major axis of 700 AU was ruled out by Cassini's data to be in the red zones (this increased the residuals). The pink zones correspond to areas that would be ruled out by further inclusion of Cassini's data (the paper only used the measurements through 2014). The green zone, however, is where a Planet Nine would decrease residuals, making the INPOP model a more accurate picture of the Solar System. Therefore, the paper found this to be the most likely zone to find Planet Nine (with the single most likely position indicated). The addition of a Planet Nine in the farther regions of its orbit would not produce significant perturbations, and thus this is labeled "uncertainty zone".

Further analysis fine-tuned the estimates of mass, eccentricity, semi-major axis, and other parameters for the supposed Planet Nine. With an array of increasingly large telescopes at their disposal, astronomers will soon be able to settle the Planet Nine hypothesis one way or the other, bringing new insight into the current structure and the formation of our Solar System.

Sources: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.05438v1.pdf, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_of_periapsis, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06116v3.pdf, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.05712.pdf

The Planet Nine Hypothesis

Beginning in the 1990s, advances in astronomy allowed the detection of many extrasolar planets, adding thousands of the number known within two decades. However, apart from the reclassification of Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006, the population of true planets in our Solar System did not change. Many, many other smaller objects were discovered, though.

Many of these smaller objects lay within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, or in the Kuiper Belt, just beyond Neptune's orbit. Eris, Haumea, and Makemake are other dwarf planets whose perihelia (closest approaches to the Sun) bring them within the Kuiper Belt, 30 to 50 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. However, an unusual object was discovered in 2003 whose orbital properties were quite different.

The object was later named Sedna and measures a little less than half the diameter of Pluto. Though the best images of it by telescopes are only a few pixels wide, it is clearly of a reddish color, nearly as red as Mars. The perihelion of this object was, at the time, the largest known in the Solar System, at 76 AU. However, it also has an extremely elongated orbit, bringing it to an aphelion (farthest point) of 936 AU! This orbit is shown in red above, compared to the orbits of the outer planets and Pluto (in pink). About a decade later, another object, provisionally designated 2012 VP113, was discovered with comparable orbital parameters, except with a slightly farther perihelion of 80 AU and an aphelion of 438 AU. The scarcity of known objects of this type is not only a consequence of their distance, however.

This scatterplot, published in a paper by astronomers Chadwick A. Trujillo and Scott S. Shephard, shows the perihelia and eccentricities (a measure of the "elongatedness" of an elliptical orbit; a perfect circle has an eccentricity of 0) of various objects outside Neptune's orbit. Curiously, there is a clear drop-off at around 50 AU, with only a few known objects beyond. Notably, there is also a gap between 55 and 75 AU. This gap is not only an artifact of our telescopes being insufficiently powerful: Sedna and 2012 VP113 were detected farther out, so if there were objects in this gap they should have been easier to find. The high eccentricity of Sedna and 2012 VP113, as well as the existence of this gap, aroused suspicion that a massive object may have gravitationally perturbed the trajectories of objects in this region, illustrated in the image below.

The same paper indicated another unusual feature of the population of these farthest known objects.

The horizontal direction indicates the semi-major axis of each object (yet another measure of the size of an orbit; however, it is closely related to the two discussed previously: it is simply the average of the perihelion and the aphelion). The vertical variable on the scatterplot is the argument of perihelion, which is simply the angular position around the orbit of the orbit's perihelion (relative to where it crosses the plane of the Solar System). All known objects whose semi-major axes exceed 150 AU have arguments of perihelion all clustered roughly around 0°. In the eight-planet Solar System model, this should not be the case: gravitational perturbations from the gas giants would randomize the arguments of perihelion over millions of years. However, a large planetary body orbiting well beyond the known planets could constrain the arguments of perihelion. This led to the hypothesis of a new planet, nicknamed Planet Nine.

The above image shows the orbits of many of the same objects represented by dots to the right of the black line in the scatterplot. Note how in addition to the clustering trend noted above, the perihelia are also all on the same side of the Sun. The figure also shows where Planet Nine would possibly orbit given the positioning of those objects. The story of the Planet Nine hypothesis continues in the next post.

Sources: http://home.dtm.ciw.edu/users/sheppard/pub/TrujilloSheppard2014.pdf, http://www.aoi.com.au/bcw1/Cosmic/Sedna-PIA05569-sml.jpg

Solar Sails

Solar sailing is a method of propulsion in space that utilizes solar radiation to accelerate a spacecraft, reducing the amount of fuel required for interplanetary missions.

The key to solar sailing is that light, though it has no mass, does have momentum! At first, this seems contradictory; the typical (Newtonian) definition of momentum that one first learns is that momentum equals mass times velocity, or p = mv (p denotes momentum). The mass m is simply a number indicating the quantity of matter in a given object, while p and v are vector quantities, having both magnitude and direction.

However, this definition of momentum is only approximate. Einstein's theory of special relativity holds that momentum, energy, and mass are all different aspects of a single quantity. The famous mass-energy equivalence E = mc² (c is the speed of light) captures part of this relation. However, this equation is actually a special form of a more general expression for energy:

where p is momentum and m₀ is the rest mass of an object (objects which are moving have additional mass and therefore additional energy by the mass energy relation). Photons, the particles of light, travel at the speed of light and are in fact never at rest. However, since objects with a nonzero rest mass can never reach the speed of light, it makes sense to classify photons as massless. Since m₀ = 0, the equation reduces to E = cp, or p = E/c. Furthermore, light has energy, so it must have momentum. Different frequencies of light have different energies so photons of greater frequencies (such as X-ray or gamma ray photons) have correspondingly greater momentum.

Considering ordinary molecules for a moment, the macroscopic phenomenon of pressure (for example air pressure) emerges from individual collisions of particles with a surface such as the surface of a balloon. The average force that air molecules colliding with a surface exert is the pressure on that surface. Moreover, each of these collisions involves a transfer of momentum: a particle bouncing from a surface reverses the direction of its momentum vector so by the conservation of momentum the deflecting object also experiences a change in momentum. A similar momentum transfer occurs when light impacts a surface, creating what it known as radiation pressure.

The reason we do not feel radiation pressure whenever we enter sunlight is simply because this pressure is minute relative to the other forces we feel, dwarfed even by the force of a single tissue resting on a surface. The atmospheric pressure at sea level, around 100 pascals (Pa), is over ten billion times greater than the radiation pressure on a perfectly reflecting surface in direct sunlight on Earth (around 10 μPa = 10^-5 Pa). Note that this phenomenon is distinct from what is called the solar wind, a term which refers to the stream of particles with mass constantly emanating from the Sun. These particles also exert a pressure when they collide with objects in space, but it is over a thousand times smaller than even the minute radiation pressure. Despite the apparent insignificance of radiation pressure, as in the case of ion propulsion, even small forces add to significant acceleration in space over time.

The concept of using radiation pressure as a means of propulsion is the foundation of the solar sail. Its design is simple: a large sheet of lightweight, reflective material surrounds the spacecraft payload (as in the artist's conception above). Notably, it is desirable for the sail material to reflect rather than absorb photons because this increases the acceleration of the sail.

The concept of a solar sail dates back to shortly after Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism was established in the 1860's in the works of Jules Verne. However, its first applications in spaceflight occurred almost 150 years later. Radiation pressure was used to save fuel in minor maneuvers on the MESSENGER mission and to compensate for a loss of maneuverability in the Kepler space telescope. However, the first true solar sail was IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun), a spacecraft launched by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in 2010 to demonstrate the technology.

IKAROS's solar sail measured 20 meters across the diagonal with a reflective film only 0.0075 mm thick that incorporated 0.025 mm thick solar cells to power the telemetry and steering instruments. The orange panels around the edges of the sail steered the craft by altering their reflectance with liquid crystal reflectors. For example, if one side of the sail were made more reflective then the opposite sides, the radiation forces would differ across the sail, causing it to rotate.

Launched on May 21, 2010, the IKAROS payload weighed only 310 kg and its cylindrical body measured on 1.6 meters in diameter and 0.8 meters in height. After reaching space, it followed the above procedure to release the sail (click to enlarge). By taking advantage of the centrifugal forces on four "tip masses" at each corner of the sail, the continually rotating apparatus can expand to full diameter and remain there without any rigid structure supporting the sail. The mission was a full success, demonstrating telemetry, propulsion, navigation, and attitude control for a solar sail.

Over the following years, NASA and the Planetary Society launched their own solar sails into Earth orbit for further testing demonstration of the technology, but IKAROS remained more significant as the first interplanetary solar sail. Once in space, craft employing solar sails do not have to carry any additional fuel, greatly reducing the amount of weight necessary for interplanetary missions. These sails may soon realize their potential as an inexpensive and efficient means of exploring the Solar System.

Sources: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/relmom.html, http://kaffee.50webs.com/Science/images/KTG.origin.of.pressure.gif, http://blazelabs.com/pics/reflabstrans.gif, http://global.jaxa.jp/activity/pr/brochure/files/sat28.pdf

The Detection of Gravitational Waves

For an introduction to gravitational waves, see here.

Before 2016, a nobel prize had already been rewarded for an observation that was consistent with, and seemed to confirm, the existence of gravitational waves. In 1974, Russell Hulse and Joesph Taylor discovered a very compact binary system of objects at a distance of 21,000 light years, consisting of two neutron stars orbiting one another. One of the bodies was also a pulsar, meaning that the radiation beams emitted from its poles periodically point toward Earth as it rotates. Since the rotation rate of a neutron star changes only very slowly over time, pulsars are fairly precise clocks. However, Hulse and Taylor detected that the pulses did not reach Earth precisely on time, but varied slightly from the expected arrival time. They were sometimes sooner, sometimes later in a regular pattern, indicating that the pulsar in question was in fact part of a binary system.

The above diagram depicts the binary system consisting of pulsar B1913+16 and its companion, another neutron star. No radiation from the companion has been observed on Earth, indicating that its poles oriented away from us. However, its presence can be inferred from the fact that the pulsar moves farther and closer to Earth in a short, regular period, indicating an orbit. The difference in arrival times is about 3 seconds, indicating that the orbit is about 3 light-seconds across. Further, the orbital period is 7.75 hours.

This discovery provided an excellent opportunity to confirm the predictions of general relativity: such a compact system with rapidly orbiting masses would radiate fairly large quantities of gravitational radiation. However, direct detection was well beyond 1970's technology. Instead, Taylor observed the pulsar system over a number of decades, and found the following:

Since the discovery of the pulsar, its orbital period had been decreasing very slowly, though steadily and measurably, by about 35 seconds over a timespan of 30 years. This is very little relative to the total period of 7.75 hours, but the data matched the predictions of general relativity almost precisely: as energy was lost to gravitational waves, the neutron stars gradually spiral inward toward one other as their orbits becoming shorter and shorter. This remarkable confirmation of a prediction of relativity won Hulse and Taylor the Noble Prize in physics in 1993.

And there the matter sat. Though detectors grew more and more advanced, no direct detections of gravitational waves were made for over 20 years. This all changed in 2015.

On September 14, 2015, at 09:50:45 UTC, shortly after LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) resumed activity following an upgrade, the two detectors in Washington State and Louisiana picked up a transient gravitational wave signal, the first ever observed by humankind. The announcement of the discovery was made several months later, on February 11, 2016.

The above image shows the signals recorded at Hanford, Washington (left) and Livingston, Louisiana (right). The signals are also superimposed on the right to demonstrate their similarity. The horizontal axis is time, measured relative to 09:50:45 UTC on that day. The reader may notice that the event was distinguishable from the surrounding noise in the detector for only about 0.05 seconds (the third row charts the residual noise after the theoretical waveform in the second row is subtracted out). The final row shows the rapid increase in gravitational wave amplitude during the event and the subsequent silence. The vertical dimension in the first several rows is the relative strain on the detectors, or the amount by which the different arms of LIGO were stretched or compressed by the ripples in spacetime. The scale for these axes measures strain by parts in 10^-21. This corresponds to extraordinarily minute changes in length: the 4 kilometer arms of the LIGO detector changed by only about 10^-18 meters, only about one thousandth the diameter of a proton!

The theoretical wave form above was a simulation of the event that generated the gravitational waves: the final in-spiraling and ultimate merging of two black holes. The increasing frequency and amplitude of the signals corresponds to the final moments of the collapsing system as the two black holes orbit faster and faster and tighter and tighter around one another before finally combining. Further, the signals at the two detectors were separated by 6.9 ms, smaller than the light travel time between the sites of 10 ms. The delay between the arrival times allows the direction of the source to be identified.

This image shows the region in the sky from which the signals likely originated. The colors indicate the confidence that the source lay within the indicated region: purple is the 90% confidence region and yellow the 50% confidence region. The uncertainty arises from the fact that there were two detectors, and not the three required for a full triangulation.

In addition to the location of the source, the analysis of the waveform yields more. The distance of the system was roughly 1.2 billion light-years, meaning that the merger that we are just now observing occurred over a billion years ago. The two black holes had respective masses of about 36 and 29 solar masses, while the final black hole after the merger weighed in at 62 solar masses. This corresponds to a loss of about 3 solar masses, which was all converted into energy released as gravitational waves as the holes merged. The magnitude of this cataclysm can scarcely be overstated: at its peak, the rate of energy release was an estimated 3.6x10⁴⁹ W, greater than the radiation emitted from all stars in the observable universe combined!

In addition to being a resounding confirmation of general relativity, the observation was the first truly direct detection of black holes: the fact that such massive objects came within hundreds of kilometers of one another indicates that they had extremely high densities, densities only possible in black holes. But while significant, cosmologists were already nearly certain that both gravitational waves and black holes existed. However, this discovery marks the opening of a brand new field of astronomy. Gravitational waves, which pass unimpeded through nearly anything over nearly any distance, allow us to "hear" cosmic events that we could not have detected before. In theory, these waves could allow us to observe the earliest stages of the universe, before it became transparent to electromagnetic radiation. In 2016, 100 years after Einstein predicted gravitational waves, we took the first step towards seeing the universe in a new way.

Sources: http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1989ApJ...345..434T&data_type=PDF_HIGH&whole_paper=YES&type=PRINTER&filetype=.pdf, https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102, http://resources.edb.gov.hk/physics/articlePic/InterestingTopics/BinaryStars_pic04E.gif