Saturday, 23 February 2013

observational astronomy - Why is there a gap in this image of supernova discoveries?

The coordinate system in this image is RA and Dec. It is a coordinate system which uses the Earth's equator (projected onto the sky) as its midline.



The inverted U is the Milky Way. The Milky Way is full of dust and gas, and blocks our view of galaxies (and supernovae) behind it. There is enough dust in the plane of the galaxy to block our view in that direction. For example the galaxy IC 342 is one of the nearest galaxies, and would be brilliant if it were not close to the galactic plane. There may be other galaxies that are completely hidden.



Our galaxy's bulk not only hides supernovæ that are in other galaxies, it also hides most of the supernovæ that occur in the Milky Way

Friday, 22 February 2013

Missing Terms in Weinberg's treatment of perturbations on Newtonian Cosmology

I was reading Appendix F of Steven Weingberg's book "Cosmology". In this Appendix he works out the perturbations to a cosmological fluid described by non-relativistic hydrodynamics and Newtonian gravity.



It turns out that the first order perturbations satisfy,



$$
frac{partial delta rho }{partial t } + 3 H delta rho + H vec{X} cdot nabla delta rho + bar{rho} nabla cdot vec{v} = 0, qquad tag{1}
$$



$$
frac{partial delta vec{v}}{partial t } + H vec{X} cdot nabla delta vec{v} + H delta vec{v} = - nabla delta phi, qquad tag{2}
$$



$$
nabla^2 delta phi = 4pi G delta rho. qquad tag{3}
$$



Weinberg applies the following Fourier transform to these equations,



$$ f(vec{X},t) = int exp left( frac{i vec{q} cdot vec{X}}{a} right) f_{vec{q}}(t) mathrm{d}^3vec{q} $$,



where $f(vec{X},t)$ is a place holder for $delta vec{v}, delta rho, $ and $delta phi$.



The resulting equations he gets are,



$$
frac{mathrm d delta rho_{vec{q}}}{mathrm d t } + 3 H delta rho_{vec{q}} + frac{ibar{rho}}{a} vec{q} cdot delta vec{v}_{vec{q}} = 0 qquad tag{1'}$$



$$
frac{mathrm d delta vec{v}_{vec{q}}}{mathrm d t } + H delta vec{v}_{vec{q}} = -frac{i}{a} vec{q} delta phi_{vec{q}} qquad tag{2'}$$



$$
vec{q}^2 delta phi_{vec{q}} = -4pi G a^2 delta rho_{vec{q}} qquad tag{3'}$$.



For the most part these new equations can be obtained by making the substitution $nabla rightarrow i vec{q}/a$.




My question : There doesn't seem to be any terms in the transformed equations which correspond to the terms $ H vec{X} cdot nabla delta rho$ and $H vec{X} cdot nabla delta vec{v}$. Weinberg makes no comment about their absence. Is anyone aware of a legitimate mathematical reason for these terms to disappear in the transformed equations?

Can life survive on the equator of cooled and fast rotating white dwarf or neutron star?

I am going to attempt a weak answer, mods feel free to delete it, but I'm fairly certain I'm right.



Shortly - no. It's not possible. Even if you balance gravity and centrifugal force perfectly at ground level at the equator, they will very, very quickly become imbalanced as soon as you move north, south, or up from there. So quickly in fact that the gradients may be too big even for a human being not moving at all. Maybe if you're laying down, with your body oriented along the equator, but even then I think the gradients would be too big.



Maybe bacteria would survive, briefly.



I'm sure the math could be done quite easily to estimate the gradients. This is based entirely on intuition.

Thursday, 21 February 2013

black hole - Interstellar movie: What is the "portal" to the other galaxy?

Yes, it is a wormhole indeed. This has been indicated quite clearly in the movie as well, when Dr. Romily explains with a pen and paper to Dr. Cooper. The explanation goes like this :



Imagine a sheet of paper to be 2-D space, then a line joining two points on the sheet of paper is the shortest distance possible to reach that point, but if due to some disturbance, the space is bent ( achieved by folding the sheet of paper), you can pierce a hole in the sheet after aligning the two points together. That is a 2-D wormhole (which is a circle indeed). So what happens when you consider a 3-D wormhole? It becomes a sphere.



Now, you can see the other end of a 2-D wormhole (which is effectively the other hole in the sheet visible from the first hole, and one can see beyond the hole in the other direction as well). Same happens with the 3-D spherical wormhole where you can see to the other side of the wormhole as well.



Now, the means to bend spacetime : Space time can be bent by having a very big mass placed inside the space time (read Einstien's General Relativity ). So, it is safe to assume that the wormhole is a space time disturbance created due to a massive object, but it is not a blackhole.

Sunday, 17 February 2013

gravitational waves - What will eLISA be trying to observe?

The first observation is whether gravitation radiation exists as predicted by General Relativity. Evidence from observations of binary neutron stars says it does, but it remains a major unknown.



Gravitational astronomy will be more like listening than looking. Right now I can hear my kids playing upstairs. I can learn a lot about what they are doing just by noting that sound waves are passing, from a particular direction.



We would expect extreme gravitational events to produce particular wave forms, for example black hole mergers should make a "tone" that rises in pitch as the two event horizons merge at faster rates. Again we have lots of theory on this but if we can "hear" these events we can check if GR does correctly model gravity in these situation, or if there is something missing.



Most interesting would be if we do hear Black hole mergers, but they don't sound like what we have expected. That would mean that there is more to gravity than we understand, and would lead to new science.

Friday, 15 February 2013

solar system - If sun steals comets from other stars, then what is the primary source of comets?

It is likely that during the formation of most stars, comets are formed from the same gas and dust that the star and any planets it hosts were formed from. Extrapolating what we know and strongly believe about our own star, the Sun, it is likely that many or most stars have a cloud of comets around them analogous to our Oort-cloud (which hasn't been "proven," but is strongly suggested by observation of comets).



As stars orbit the galactic center, they pass by one another - sometimes extremely closely, sometimes not very close. During these encounters, the gravitational interactions will shake things up in the Oort-like clouds. In some cases, comets that are otherwise minding their own business, orbiting far from the star, will be kicked inward. Others will likely be ejected. Some of those ejected will eventually find themselves orbiting another star, and possibly falling inward for a close encounter with the star and any planets.



In the long run, it's likely that interstellar space is riddled with rogue comets. Many comets in our solar system may have come from there, and many of the comets formed around our sun have likely been flung off, in some cases to find new stars to orbit.

Tuesday, 12 February 2013

exoplanet - Is there any way a planet could form independent of a star?

Well you need to see the related question brown dwarfs and planets , because the answer to your question depends on how you define a planet.



If you demand that a "planet" has a rocky core then it seems very unlikely that a planet could form in isolation away from a parent star. The parent star is needed in order to differentiate the rocky material from the gas and allow it to condense.



On the other hand, if you wish to define a planet as simply an object below a certain mass (say the deuterium burning threshold at 13 Jupiter masses) then it seems very likely that such an object could form in isolation. They would be entirely gaseous, but there would be little to distinguish them from brown dwarfs at only slightly higher masses.



At present there are plenty of candidate "free-floating planetary mass" objects.
For example see Joergens et al. (2014); Liu et al. (2013); Zapatero-Osorio et al. (2000). Unless we have our understanding of the physics completely wrong, then it is likely that at least some of these are lower than 13 Jupiter masses. However, their origin remains unclear. It is possible they could all have formed around stars and then subsequently been ejected, but the presence of significant numbers of these objects in young star forming regions and the lack of $sim$10 Jupiter-mass objects orbiting stars, suggests that there is an alternative formation scenario that can produce such objects in isolation.



What could these formation scenarios be? These low-mass objects could just be an extension to lower masses of the fragementation process that forms stars; they could be ejected embryos that started their lives in multiple systems; they could be "failed" stellar cores that could not accrete more gas because of photoevaporation by nearby massive stars; or they could form by gravitational instability around stars with unusually massive disks and be ejected by a close encounter with another star. These possibilities are reviewed by Whitworth et al. (2006) and Chabrier et al. (2014), and are all still thought plausible to some extent.