‘Unexpected’ space traveler defies theories about origin of solar system

Solar system cartoon [NASA]

The theorised Oort Cloud in the outer solar system seems not to consist entirely of what was theorised to be there. This is described by one researcher as ‘a complete game changer’.
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Researchers from Western have shown that a fireball that originated at the edge of the solar system was likely made of rock, not ice, challenging long-held beliefs about how the solar system was formed, says Phys.org.

Just at the edge of our solar system and halfway to the nearest stars is a collection of icy objects sailing through space, known as the Oort Cloud.

Passing stars sometimes nudge these icy travelers towards the sun, and we see them as comets with long tails.

Scientists have yet to observe any objects in the Oort Cloud directly, but everything detected so far coming from its direction has been made of ice.

A New Paradigm for Solar Activity: The Extended Solar Cycle

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“It poses significant challenges to prevalent dynamo theories of the solar cycle.” — Indeed, but such theories were always speculative anyway.
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Spaceweather.com

Dec. 12, 2022: So you thought you knew the solar cycle? Think again. A new paper published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences confirms that there is more to solar activity than the well-known 11-year sunspot cycle. Data from Stanford University’s Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO) reveal two solar cycles happening at the same time, and neither is 11 years long.

“We call it ‘the Extended Solar Cycle,'” says lead author Scott McIntosh of NCAR. “There are two overlapping patterns of activity on the sun, each lasting about 17 years.”

Solar physicists have long suspected this might be true. References to “overlapping solar cycles” can be found in research literature as far back as 1903. A figure from the new Frontiers paper seems to clinch the case:

The top panel shows sunspot counts since 1976. The curve goes up and down every 11 years, which explains why everyone thinks the…

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Major Cryovolcanic Eruption on a Comet

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One of an average 7.3 outbursts a year according to Wikipedia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/29P/Schwassmann%E2%80%93Wachmann

Spaceweather.com

Nov. 25, 2022: The British Astronomical Association (BAA) is reporting a new outburst of cryovolcanic comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann. On Nov. 22nd, the comet’s nucleus suddenly brightened by more than 4 magnitudes–a sign that a major eruption was underway. Cryomagmatic debris is now expanding in a shell shaped like Pac-Man:

Cai Stoddard-Jones took the picture on Nov. 23rd using the Faulkes Telescope North in Hawaii. At the time, the shell was already more than 100,000 km in diameter.

The Pac-Man shape of the ejecta shows that this is not a uniform global eruption. Instead, it is coming from one or more discrete sources on the comet’s surface.

This fits a leading model of the comet developed by Dr. Richard Miles of the British Astronomical Association. Miles believes that 29P is festooned with ice volcanoes. There is no lava. The “magma” is a cold mixture of liquid hydrocarbons (e.g., CH4, C2H4, C2H6 and…

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Miyake event radiation deluges still unexplained as solar flare theory questioned

When they say ‘sudden’ they don’t mean short-lived. The report notes that ‘some of the events, unlike the brief flashes we recognize as solar flares, lasted for one or two years’. Only a handful of these so-called ‘cosmic barrages’ have occurred in the last 9000 years or so, according to the data.
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One of the events was 80 times more powerful than the strongest solar flare ever recorded, says LiveScience.

A series of sudden and colossal spikes in radiation levels across Earth’s history could have come from a series of unknown, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic cosmic events, a new study has revealed.

Named Miyake events after the lead author of the first study to describe them, the spikes occur roughly once every 1,000 years or so and are recorded as sudden increases in the radiocarbon levels of ancient tree rings.

The exact cause of the sudden deluges of radiation, which periodically transform an extra chunk of the atmosphere’s nitrogen into carbon sucked up by trees, remains unknown.

Powerful Gamma-Ray Burst Made Currents Flow in the Earth

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‘It came from a dusty galaxy 2.4 billion light years away’ – sounds like an old sci-fi movie!

Spaceweather.com

Oct. 17, 2022: Astronomers have never seen anything quite like it. On Oct. 9, 2022, Earth-orbiting satellites detected the strongest gamma-ray burst (GRB) in modern history: GRB221009A. How strong was it? It caused electrical currents to flow through the surface of our planet. Dr. Andrew Klekociuk in Tasmania recorded the effect using an Earth Probe Antenna:

Note: Data from STIX have been flipped (increasing counts go down) to ease comparison of the two waveforms. NWC is a VLF transmitter in Australia.

The blue curve is a signal from Klekociuk’s antenna, which was sensing VLF (very low frequency) currents in the soil at the time of the blast. The orange curve shows the gamma-ray burst recorded by the high-energy STIX telescope on Europe’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft, one of many spacecraft that detected the event. The waveforms are a nearly perfect match.

“I am a climate scientist at the…

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A New Form of Space Weather on Betelgeuse

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“We’re watching stellar evolution in real time.”

Spaceweather.com

August 12, 2022: You’ve heard of a CME, a “coronal mass ejection.” They happen all the time. A piece of the sun’s tenuous outer atmosphere (corona) blows off and sometimes hits Earth. Something far more terrible has happened to Betegeuse. The red giant star produced an SME, or “surface mass ejection.”

Above: An artist’s concept of an SME on Betelgeuse. Credit: Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI)

Astronomers believe that in 2019 a colossal piece of Betelgeuse’s surface blew off the star. The mass of the SME was 400 billion times greater than a CME or several times the mass of Earth’s Moon. Data from multiple telescopes, especially Hubble, suggest that a convective plume more than a million miles across bubbled up from deep inside the star, producing shocks and pulsations that blasted a chunk off the surface.

“We’ve never before seen such a huge mass ejection from the surface of a…

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The Sun Is Being Weird. It Could Be Because We’re Looking at It All Wrong

Solar flare erupting from a sunspot [image credit: space.com]

Who knew!? – asks ScienceAlert. The article links to an interesting new paper on solar cycles, which makes some predictions for the current SC 25 (see section 3.2: Forecasting Using the Solar Unit Cycle). One of those is that it should end in October 2031 ± 9 months, and the authors go on to suggest forthcoming NASA and ESA missions make it probable that ‘Cycle 25 will be the last solar activity cycle that is not fully understood.’
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Something weird is going on with the Sun.

So far, almost every day in 2022 it has erupted in flares and coronal mass ejections, some of which were the most powerful eruptions our star is capable of.

By itself, an erupting Sun is not weird. It erupts regularly as it goes through periods of high and low activity, in cycles that last roughly 11 years.

The current activity is significantly higher than the official NASA and NOAA predictions for the current solar cycle, and solar activity has consistently exceeded predictions as far back as September 2020.

But a solar scientist will tell you that even this isn’t all that weird.

Reply to Eschenbach’s Meander Through Sun and Wind

Over at WUWT, Willis has been up to his usual trick of mangling data in a vain attempt to discredit scientists who find strong links between the Sun’s variation and Earth’s weather and climatic patterns. This time it’s Le Mouel et al who get the treatment in his ‘analysis’ of their 2010 paper “Solar forcing of the semi‐annual variation of length‐of‐day”

As usual, Willis gets things upside down and then sets up a straw-man argument. He asks: “So … is there a correlation between sunspots and zonal wind speeds?” The answer to which is no, and the paper’s authors never claimed there was. However, as Fig 1 of Le Mouel et al’s paper shows, there is a strong anti-correlation between solar variation and the semi-annual variation of Length of Day (LOD) which is itself well correlated with changes in zonal wind speeds. For obvious reasons, Willis doesn’t show his readers Fig 1, reproduced here for your academic study.

Figure 1. Long‐term variations in the amplitude a of the semiannual oscillation in lod (in blue). A 4‐yr centered sliding
window is used. (a) Comparison of the semiannual amplitude of lod with the sunspot number WN (red); WN is both
reversed in sign and offset by one year (see text). (b) Comparison of the detrended semiannual amplitude of lod (blue) with
the sunspot number WN (red); WN is reversed in sign and offset by one year. (c) Comparison of the semiannual amplitude
of lod (blue) with galactic cosmic ray flux GCR (red); GCR is neither reversed in sign nor offset (see text).

Orbital resonance and the celestial origins of Earth’s climatic changes – Why Phi?

A year after I wrote the original ‘Why Phi’ post explaining my discovery of the Fibonacci sequence links between solar system orbits and planetary synodic periods here at the Talkshop in 2013, my time and effort got diverted into politics. The majority of ongoing research into this important topic has been furthered by my co-blogger Stuart ‘Oldbrew’ Graham. Over the last eight years he has published many articles here using the ‘Why Phi’ tag looking at various subsystems of planetary and solar interaction periodicities, resonances, and their relationships with well known climatic periodicities such as the De Vries, Hallstatt, Hale and Jose cycles, as well as exoplanetary systems exhibiting the same Fibonacci-resonant arrangements.

Recently, Stuart contacted me with news of a major breakthrough in his investigations. In the space of a few hours spent making his calculator hot, major pieces of the giant jigsaw had all come together and brought ‘the big picture’ into focus. In fact, so much progress has been made that we’re not going to try to put it all into a single post. Instead, we’ll provide an overview here, and follow it up with further articles getting into greater detail.

A Volcanic Comet Blows its Top

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But what kind of volcanoes? One researcher has a theory.

Spaceweather.com

Oct. 14, 2021: So you think you know what a comet is? Think again. Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann is challenging old ideas. Astronomers call it a comet, but, really, “giant space volcano” might be a better description. It’s a 60-km-wide ball of ice orbiting the Sun beyond Jupiter, and it appears to be one of the most volcanically active bodies in the entire Solar System.

Comet 29P just blew its top … again. In late September 2021, 29P erupted 4 times in quick succession, blowing shells of “cryomagma” into space. Arizona amateur astronomer Eliot Herman has been monitoring the debris:

“Initially it looked like a bright compact object,” says Herman. “Now the expanding cloud is 1.3 arcminutes wide (bigger than Jupiter) and sufficiently transparent for background stars to shine through.”

When this object was discovered in 1927, astronomers thought they had found a fairly run-of-the-mill comet, unusual mainly because it was trapped…

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‘Giant arc’ stretching 3.3 billion light-years across the cosmos shouldn’t exist

The Milky Way in the night sky over Black Rock Desert, Nevada [image credit: Steve Jurvetson / Wikipedia]

Not only that, but it’s likely ‘rotating on a scale never seen before’, says Phys.org. ‘How the angular momentum responsible for the rotation is generated in a cosmological context is one of the key unsolved problems of cosmology.’
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How big is too big? – asks Space.com.

A newly discovered crescent of galaxies spanning 3.3 billion light-years is among the largest known structures in the universe and challenges some of astronomers’ most basic assumptions about the cosmos.

The epic arrangement, called the Giant Arc, consists of galaxies, galactic clusters, and lots of gas and dust.

It is located 9.2 billion light-years away and stretches across roughly a 15th of the observable universe.

Einstein’s Eclipse

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Some real science to remember.

Spaceweather.com

March 22, 2021: On May 29, 1919, the Moon slid in front of the sun and forever altered our understanding of spacetime. It’s known as “Einstein’s Eclipse.” Using his newly-developed theory of relativity, the young German physicist predicted that the sun’s gravity should bend starlight–an effect which could only be seen during a total eclipse. More than 100 years later, Petr Horálek (ESO Photo Ambassador) and Miloslav Druckmüller (Brno University of Technology) have just released a stunning restoration of the photo that proved Einstein right:

The original picture was taken in May 1919 by astronomers Andrew Crommelin and Charles Rundle Davidson, who traveled from the Greenwich Observatory in London to the path of totality in Sobral, Brazil. They were part of a global expedition organized by Sir Arthur Eddington, who wanted to test Einstein’s strange ideas. Glass photographic plates from the expedition were typical of early 20th century astrophotography, colorless…

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Ned Nikolov: What Can NASA Planetary Data Tell Us about Drivers of Earth’s Climate?

Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. Has written to me with news of the presentations he made at this years AMS meeting. It’s vital we get people to understand the implications of the discoveries he and Karl Zeller have made. With our western governments jumping aboard the ‘Green New Deal’ and ‘NetZero’ bandwagons, we will need to work hard to rise awareness of viable alternative hypotheses for ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ which better explain the phenomena we can measure around us. Ned and Karl’s work should be given proper attention, because it strives for universality and general application of physics solar system wide, rather then treating Earth as a ‘special case’.

Two studies presented at the American Meteorological Society’s 34^th Conference on Climate Variability and Change in January 2021 employed a novel approach to identify the forcing of Earth’s climate at various time scales. The new method, never attempted in climate science before, relies on the fundamental premise that the laws of nature are invariant across spacetime.

Solar Cycle 25 update: Sun takes a post-minimum nap.

Data courtesy of Solen.info

Back in November it looked like solar cycle 25 was finally getting underway, with daily sunspot numbers peaking up to 80, and the 30 day Wolf number climbing over 30 in early December. Since then though, the Sun has relapsed into a low activity state.

This won’t come as any surprise to Talkshop followers, we’ve been saying that cycle 25 would be very low for most of the last decade. Our group research culminated in late 2013 with publication of Rick Salvador’s orbital resonance model in the journal ‘Pattern Recognition in Physics’. We provided an update on the validation of the model a while back, showing it has remained on track since publication.

The Canterbury Swarm and the Taurids

John Michael Godier: An exploration of the concept of the Canterbury meteor swarm and its links to the annual Taurid meteor shower and how these sometimes produce very large impacts on the moon and earth.

Another conversation with Roger Pielke Senior : What causes Earth’s Greenhouse Effect?

It’s always good to chat with Roger Pielke Senior. He’s informative, and more open minded than most climate scientists. Here’s a transcript of the conversation we just had on twitter.

 

Rog Tallbloke 

@RogTallbloke

 

Roger. Mt Everest summit winter avg -30C. Base camp -17C. Air pressure difference 20kPa. What really causes Earth’s ‘greenhouse effect’, 1% of water vapour + 0.04% CO2 or 100% of atmospheric MASS. Think man, think! CC @RogerAPielkeSr

 

Roger A. Pielke Sr

@RogerAPielkeSr

 

The LW radiative effect of CO2 and water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere is succinctly summarized in https://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2006/05/05/co2h2o/… and https://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2007/08/24/further-analysis-of-radiatve-forcing-by-norm-woods/…

 

 

Relative Roles of CO2 and Water Vapor in Radiative Forcing

In the second edition of our book “Cotton, W.R. and R.A. Pielke, 2007: Human impacts on weather and climate, Cambridge University Press, 330 pp”, we present a new analysis completed for…

pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com

 

 

Two interacting gas giants orbit sun-like star WASP-148

Super-WASP telescope site, La Palma [image credit: lapalma-island.com]

In nearly six years there are 247 b and 63 c orbits. Since 248:62 is 4:1, it can be seen why the observed ‘acceleration and deceleration’ of the planets might occur.
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Astronomers using the SuperWASP-North telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands, Spain, and the SOPHIE spectrograph at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence, France, have discovered two giant exoplanets circling the G-type dwarf star WASP-148, reports Science News.

WASP-148 is a slowly rotating, inactive G-dwarf star 809 light-years away in the constellation of Hercules.

Also known as TYC 3083-295-1 and 2MASS J16563135+4418095, the star has the same mass and radius as the Sun.

WASP-148 hosts a planetary system composed of at least two giant planets, WASP-148b and c.

Gerry Pease: Solar outlook

From looking at the 30 day Wolf number and NOAA sunspot number it looks like Solar Minimum could have been in December, 2019 but possibly as late as mid-March this year. 

 Coincidentally, there are peaks in barycentric solar torque (dL/dt, where L denotes the Sun’s angular momentum, ref https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03553v3) on March 19 and April 24, 2020: 

Solar gravitation puzzle

Browsing twitter recently I ran across this short video of a solar flare shot a few days ago.

The largest solar feature I've seen this minimum is raining Earth-sized gobs of plasma on the surface. Shot yesterday afternoon from my backyard, about an hour of activity sped up. #astrophotography #space #opteam pic.twitter.com/Y72I37zswR

— Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy) May 5, 2020

After asking for some clarification on frame rate I was really intrigued.

50 frames with 90 seconds between each

— Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy) May 6, 2020

Researchers discover a six-planet system with near 3:2 resonance

With orbit periods ranging from only 2-12 days, this must be one of the most compact multi-planet systems found so far.

Almost visible to the naked eye in the Draco constellation, the star HD 158259 has been observed for the last seven years by astronomers using the SOPHIE spectrograph, reports Phys.org.

This instrument, installed at the Haute-Provence Observatory in the South of France, acquired 300 measurements of the star.

The analysis of the data which was done by an international team led by researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), has resulted in the discovery that HD 158259 has six planetary companions: a “super-Earth” and five “mini-Neptunes.”

These planets display an exceptionally regular spacing, which hints at how the system may have formed.