Tag Archives: Space

The Possibility of Time Travel

Posted on November 12, 2016 by | Leave a comment

Time travel has always been a fascination of humanity. The idea of peering into our future or exploring the past is a captivating one. As a consequence, time travel plays a large role in science fiction and many of the genres famous films are centered around time travel: Back to the Future, Planet of the Apes (1968), Minority Report, 12 Monkeys, Looper, and The Terminator. Even Charles Dickens featured time travel in his novella, A Christmas Carol (1843) .

Is time travel possible today? Yes! At least that’s what the people at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation would have you believe. Alcor sells the idea of time travel by means of cryonics, a process in which a person is frozen after death to preserve their body so that, in the far future, advanced technology can revive them. Cryonics have been a subject of scientific skepticism, due in large to the unproven technology which has yet to reanimate anybody. In fact, here in British Columbia is it illegal to sell your body for preservation by cryonics.

Max More presentation.

Max More. Credit to null0 on flickr (2006)

Despite this, preservation by cryonics has been around since the 1960s  and is commercially available today. Cryonics markets immortality and makes people like Max More, the President of Alcor, $200,000 per person on top of subscription fees.

 

 

Cryonics was addressed on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

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Albert Einstein. Credit to ebravolosada on flickr

Time travel is possible in another way, using Einstein’s theories of relativity.
Special relativity states that time passes more slowly for objects moving at a greater velocity relative to the observer. Einstein’s theories are not strictly theoretical; his ideas of time dilation have been experimentally proven. Humans have already achieved time travel like this. For example, after spending 342 days in the international space station, astronaut Scott Kelly has aged about 8.6 milliseconds less than his twin brother. This is because the ISS orbits around the Earth at approximately 7658 m/s relative to the surface.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity sates that time slows down in strong gravitational fields. The possibilities of this type of time travel are expressed well in the movie Interstellar when astronauts explore a planet with an orbit close to a supermassive black hole.

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The methods of time travel that I have described focused on traveling to the future. This is because traveling to the past seems less plausible and more difficult to accomplish. According to the theory of relativity, an object would need to move faster than light to move backwards in time, a feat that would require an infinite amount of energy. In addition, Stephen Hawking suggested that the absence of visitors from the future gives evidence against the existence of backward time travel.

-Kevin O’Connor (Nov. 12, 2016)

 

Reference

Interstellar Science: ‘That’s Relativity’. The Huffington Post. 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-bennett/interstellar-science-that_b_6130228.html (accessed Nov. 12, 2016)

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Diamonds In the Sky

Posted on November 7, 2016 by | Leave a comment

As you may have already realized, living in Vancouver means it’s gloomy, cold, and wet 10 out of the 12 months each year. As a Vancouverite, an umbrella is an essential item to take with you when leaving your house.  But imagine, one day you’re walking down the street and a giant, sparkling diamond falls from the sky and lands right before you. How is this possible? Is it… raining diamonds?!

This is quite impossible on planet Earth, however, it may be the case for our gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, and ice giants, Uranus and Neptune. Study shows that the atmosphere of these distant planets are filled with methane gas, a gas molecule with the molecular formula CH4, and have the ideal conditions for diamond formation. However, the proportions of methane gas in Jupiter’s and Saturn’s atmosphere is significantly lower than Uranus’s and Neptune’s atmosphere.

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Saturn Source: Flickr

Despite this difference in methane availability, spacecraft Cassini has reported sightings of lightning storms in the upper atmospheric region of Saturn. The presence of lightning can break up methane gas into soot (the carbon source for diamonds); similar storms are apparent on Jupiter.  As soot sinks deeper into the atmosphere, pressure also increases. The increase in pressure converts soot into graphite. Once graphite is made, it continues to fall deeper and deeper towards the planet’s core; with increasing temperature and pressure, diamonds are formed!

However, as the solid diamonds fall closer to the core of Jupiter and Saturn, the temperature also increases dramatically to approximately 12 000⁰K. This temperature is well above the melting point of diamonds, approximately 3800⁰K, thus creating a sea of diamond liquid. Albeit, the temperature on Uranus and Neptune is much cooler in comparison. As a result, diamonds formed in these planets stay in their solid state.

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Diamond in its solid state Source: Flickr

The possible size of these diamonds formed also vary. Just like rain, when the diamonds fall deeper into the atmosphere, they are capable of growth. When falling, some of the precious gems can grow so large that they can be classified as “diamond-bergs” (the size of an iceberg!).

Before you get all excited and wowed by this, I must say that is indeed not a fact. Unfortunately, this is only a theory from NASA and their scientists from observing the conditions and properties of these planets. We can only infer since we are restricted with the ability to travel to either Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus or Neptune to formally further investigate this research topic. Perhaps one day, technology will be advanced enough for us to send robots, or maybe even humans farther than Mars and investigate extraterrestrial phenomena and their precious secrets held within.

A video of how diamonds are formed on Earth:

-Katrina Lim

Resources:

  1. National Geographic. Diamonds stud the atmospheres of Saturn and Jupiter. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131009-diamonds-saturn-jupiter-planet-science-space/ (accessed Nov. 5th 2016)
  2. Cassini: unlocking Saturn’s secrets. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassini/planet.html (accessed Nov 5th 2016)

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What Colour Is Pluto?

Posted on October 22, 2016 by | 3 comments

On July 14, 2015, after nearly 10 years and three billion miles traveled though our solar system, NASA’s New Horizons space probe made history when it performed the first flyby of Pluto and captured the most detailed pictures of the dwarf planet to date.

Since then, New Horizons has been transmitting data back to Earth, providing planetary scientists with incredible discoveries. Among these discoveries is Pluto’s colour.

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New Horizons’ view of Pluto, courtesy of NASA (link)

Seen clearly above, Pluto is reddish brown. This is remarkable considering that when picturing Pluto, we often imagine an icy-blue, rock world.

This marks Pluto as the second red planet in our solar system, next to Mars. However, unlike Mars, Pluto’s colour is not the result of iron oxide. Instead, Pluto is red due to the formation of complex organic molecules called tholins.

Tholins are composed of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, and while they do not form naturally here on Earth, they have been found on many icy bodies in the outer Solar System, including Neptune’s moon Triton, and Saturn’s moon Titan.

The formation of tholins is believed to be the product of ultraviolet light driving a reaction between methane (CH4) and nitrogen gas (N2) in the planet’s thin atmosphere. The resulting tholins then fall to Pluto’s surface, giving it a reddish appearance.

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The Hörst Laboratory has synthesised tholins. Credit to Chao He, Xinting Yu, Sydney Riemer, and Sarah Hörst of Johns Hopkins University.

The structure of tholins is undefined. The term was coined by Dr. Sagan and Dr. Khare in their 1979 paper when a new term was required to describe the varying organic products created by subjecting gases abundant on Titan to ultraviolet light [3]. In their paper, they define tholin to be “complex organic solids formed by the interaction of energy”. [3].

To give a more ralatable explanation, planetary Scientist Dr Sarah Hörst – who has made studying tholins part of her research – compares the word ‘tholin’ to ‘salad’ as both are nonspecific and describe “a mixture of a number of different compounds and spans a fairly broad range of materials” [4].

As for the New Horizons space craft, it will continue to push further into the Kuiper Belt where its next scheduled destination is 2014 MU69 in January, 2019.

– Kevin O’Connor

References

  1. NASA’s Three-Billion-Mile Journey to Pluto Reaches Historic Encounter. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasas-three-billion-mile-journey-to-pluto-reaches-historic-encounter (access October 22, 2016).
  2. Pluto: The ‘Other’ Red Planet. http://www.nasa.gov/nh/pluto-the-other-red-planet (access October 22, 2016).
  3. Sagan, C.; Khare, B. Tholins: organic chemistry of interstellar grains and gas. Nature, 1979, 277
  4. What in the world(s) are tholins? http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2015/0722-what-in-the-worlds-are-tholins.html (access October 22, 2016).

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