Unlikely, unless you've got a coal powered power station in your back garden.... Or solar panels on your roof like........
Ah, so we are talking about those domestic turbines that kick in around 7 mph and lock out around 35 mph producing enough to power a whole house at around 13 mph. Not really that many around I would have thought.
Physicists find signs of four-neutron nucleus Potential existence of ‘tetraneutron’ defies theoretical expectations BY ANDREW GRANT 5:08PM, FEBRUARY 8, 2016 please log in to view this image NO PROTONS ALLOWED The collision of two varieties of helium nuclei at a Japanese lab produced beryllium nuclei and tetraneutrons, nuclei with four neutrons but no protons. This illustration depicts the number of protons and neutrons but not their actual positions within each nucleus. SOURCE: APS; CREDIT: J. HIRSHFELD please log in to view this image EMail please log in to view this image Twitter please log in to view this image Facebook please log in to view this image Reddit please log in to view this image Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE The suspected discovery of an atomic nucleus with four neutrons but no protons has physicists scratching their heads. If confirmed by further experiments, this “tetraneutron” would be the first example of an uncharged nucleus, something that many theorists say should not exist. “It would be something of a sensation,” says Peter Schuck, a nuclear theorist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France who was not involved in the work. Details on the tetraneutron appear in the Feb. 5 Physical Review Letters. Researchers spotted the signature of tetraneutrons at RIKEN in Wako, Japan, after firing a beam of neutron-rich helium nuclei (two protons, six neutrons) at a liquid composed of the most common form of helium (two protons, two neutrons). Occasionally, the reaction produced beryllium nuclei with four protons and four neutrons, leaving four neutrons missing in action. Although the scientists could not see the other product directly, its properties fit the description of a clumped neutron quartet. The four-neutron nuclei lasted about a billionth of a trillionth of a second before decaying into other particles. Physicists will need to see more detections before agreeing that tetraneutrons exist, though Schuck says this study offers better evidence than several past claims. Tetraneutrons are puzzling because neutrons should not cluster unless there are protons too. Theorists would probably have to propose some kind of interneutron force to explain the exotic nuclei, Schuck says.
These protons are like my Valentine's - they don't exist, and that's a scientific fackt. (Unless I fix her puncture).
Support grows for a return to ice giants Uranus and Neptune The solar system's two most distant worlds may be ready to give up their secrets BY CHRISTOPHER CROCKETT 6:30AM, FEBRUARY 10, 2016 please log in to view this image THE OTHER BLUE PLANETS Uranus (left) and Neptune (right) have not been visited since Voyager 2 sped by in the late 1980s. Many researchers argue that it’s time to go back. BOTH: JPL-CALTECH/NASA Magazine issue: Vol. 189, No. 4, February 20, 2016, p. 24 please log in to view this image EMail please log in to view this image Twitter please log in to view this image Facebook please log in to view this image Reddit please log in to view this image Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE In the cold periphery of the solar system, two enigmatic sentinels saunter around the sun. One circuit along their vast orbits takes on the order of a century. Seasons are measured in decades. At such great distances from Earth, these worlds give up their secrets slowly. While every other planet in our solar system has been repeatedly poked and prodded by orbiters and landers, Neptune and Uranus, save a brief tour in the 1980s, remain largely unexplored. Thirty years ago, the Voyager 2 spacecraft tore past Uranus, then flew by Neptune less than four years later. These quick sojourns introduced scientists to two planets that had been vague blue splotches in their telescopes. In the years since, bigger and better instruments have teased out a bit more information and revealed a few surprises. But there’s only so much planetary scientists can learn from a couple billion kilometers away. That’s why researchers in both the United States and Europe think it’s time to go back to Uranus or Neptune — the solar system’s “ice giants.” Unlike the show-stopping flyby of Pluto in 2015, a new mission to one of the blue worlds would have more time to take in the view. In August, NASA’s Jim Green gave engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., one year to figure out what it would take to put a spacecraft in orbit around Uranus or Neptune. These worlds are “an important frontier,” says Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. “We really don’t know much about them.” New rocket designs and recent exoplanet discoveries have made the ice giants more accessible and more relevant than ever. “This is a really exciting time for us to be able to study them,” he says. The ice giants aren’t frozen orbs; they’re actually quite gassy. But Uranus and Neptune have a lot of water, ammonia and methane, which astronomers refer to as ices, whether the compounds are frozen or not. Jupiter and Saturn, by comparison, are mostly hydrogen and helium, which remain gases at nearly any temperature. The inner planets are relatively tiny balls of rock. Story continues after slideshow please log in to view this image please log in to view this image As Voyager 2 departed Uranus for Neptune, the spacecraft turned around and snapped this picture of a crescent Uranus on January 25, 1986. The blue-green hue comes from reflected sunlight filtered through methane in the planet’s atmosphere. JPL-CALTECH/NASA please log in to view this image Storms and bands appear in the atmosphere of Uranus in these false-color infrared images of the sideways planet taken at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii in 2014. Uranus’ dark rings appear red because of the color balance used in combining images taken at three infrared wavelengths. L. SROMOVSKY/UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON, W. M. KECK OBSERVATORY please log in to view this image White clouds dance around Neptune’s Great Dark Spot, a storm roughly the size of Earth, in this August 23, 1989, picture from Voyager 2. The spot had vanished by the time the Hubble Space Telescope got a look in 1994. Other spots have since come and gone, as well. JPL-CALTECH/NASA please log in to view this image Neptune looms behind its largest moon Triton (bottom) in this parting shot of the two crescent worlds taken by Voyager 2 three days after its closest approach to the planet. The spacecraft has been silently sailing toward interstellar space ever since. JPL-CALTECH/NASA please log in to view this image Scheduled to debut in 2018, NASA’s next-generation heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System (illustrated), might be able to shave several years off a journey to either Uranus or Neptune. In its most powerful configuration, it will generate 9.2 million pounds of thrust at liftoff — 20 percent more thrust than the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts toward the moon in 1969. MARSHALL SPACE FLIGHT CENTER/NASA Astronomers have learned a lot in the three decades since Voyager. Researchers now know that as the giant planets jockeyed for position more than 4 billion years ago, Uranus and Neptune helped create the Kuiper belt, the ring of icy debris that is home to many comets. And when Voyager 2 departed Neptune in 1989, astronomers knew only of the planets that orbit the sun. Since then, researchers have cataloged about 2,000 planets around other stars, and the Kepler space telescope has shown that the most common type is the size of Uranus and Neptune. Ice giants, or something like them, might be the most popular type of planet in the galaxy. “We barely understand the two in our own backyard, and we’re finding so many around other stars,” says Candice Hansen, a planetary scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz. “How do we interpret these planets around other stars if we barely know our own?” A closer look Uranus and Neptune are the only planets (sorry, Pluto) in the solar system to be discovered since the invention of the telescope (for hints of a new planet, see SN: 2/20/16, p. 6); the others have been known since antiquity. William Herschel stumbled upon Uranus in 1781; astronomer Johann Galle spotted Neptune in 1846, almost exactly where mathematicians Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams predicted an eighth planet should be. Story continues after graphic arrived at Uranus on January 24, 1986, it was greeted by a bland world. The aquamarine cloud deck showed very little activity, earning Uranus a nickname of “the boring planet.” Voyager did pick up an unusually complex magnetic field and a few new rings. The spacecraft also got a good look at the planet’s posse of icy moons, including Miranda, a strange satellite that looks like someone smashed it apart and then hastily glued it back together. Three years and seven months later, Voyager 2 soared over the north pole of Neptune, where it found a much more vibrant planet. The royal blue atmosphere churned with storms, and a blemish nicknamed the Great Dark Spot reminded scientists of the colossal red storm on Jupiter. Voyager clocked clouds on Neptune moving at more than 2,000 kilometers per hour — the fastest recorded winds in the solar system. On Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, cryovolcanoes erupted over pitted terrains, hinting at geologic engines churning inside. But many mysteries remain that are challenging if not impossible to wrestle with from Earth. Uranus gives off very little heat, while the more distant Neptune is by comparison a planet-sized furnace. Magnetic fields emanating from both worlds are unlike those seen at other planets: The fields are significantly tilted from the spin axes and appear to be generated far from either planet’s core. Neptune’s rings clump together into arcs while the ones around Uranus possibly reach down into its atmosphere. Half of the real estate among Uranus’ moons remains uncharted. please log in to view this image Storms (bright spots) erupt in 2014 on normally sleepy Uranus, seen in these infrared images from the Keck Observatory. BOTH: IMKE DE PATER (UC BERKELEY), LARRY SROMOVSKY AND PAT FRY (U. WISCONSIN), HEIDI HAMMEL (AURA)/KECK OBSERVATORY The Voyagers transformed astronomers’ view of the ice giants and did so with instruments built in the 1970s. Both Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977, the same year as the first mass-produced Apple computer (the Apple II) and the Atari 2600 video game system. “That’s the technology we used to explore the ice giants,” Hammel says. “If we put my iPhone on a spacecraft and sent it out there, we’d have better image quality.” Since then, premier observatories such as the Keck telescopes in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope in low Earth orbit have pushed beyond Voyager’s legacy. They’ve picked up rumblings from Uranus, which seems to be waking up. As southern summer on Uranus gave way to fall in the mid-2000s, storms appeared and the atmosphere looked more like Neptune’s. “Our idea of a boring blue ball probably wasn’t quite correct,” says Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. But sophisticated telescopes have their limits. “Getting images of the planets is nowhere near enough,” says Leigh Fletcher, a planetary scientist at the University of Oxford. “To understand the physics and the chemistry, you need to be there.” Go big or go home In 2010, researchers in Europe tried to persuade the European Space Agency to pursue a Uranus orbiter as a “medium-class” mission, at a cost of roughly 500 million euros. That failed bid was followed by an opportunity in 2013 for a more comprehensive “large-class” — or 1 billion euro — mission, and a 2014 request for medium-class mission ideas. ESA ranked the ice giant proposals high every time, but not high enough to be funded. The agency will issue another call for medium-class missions this spring, but it’s a tough sell, Fletcher says. One problem for Europe is that it doesn’t have access to the nuclear energy needed for travel so far from the sun, where solar panels are useless. NASA, however, is funding production of plutonium-238, a radioactive element whose heat, once transformed into electricity, can power a remote spacecraft. “The whole landscape would change if there was a strong push from NASA to fly one of these missions,” Fletcher says. Fletcher and his European colleagues just might get their wish. In 2011, the U.S. planetary science community ranked Mars, Europa and Uranus as the top priorities in the coming decade for a NASA flagship, its biggest (and most costly) mission class (SN: 4/9/11, p. 16). Plans for Mars and Europa are under way. By September, JPL will present NASA with some ideas for an ice giant flagship including details on what the space agency needs to invest in to accomplish its science goals. What exactly that science entails depends on which ice giant the spacecraft visits. Each planet has appeal. Because Uranus is knocked over on its side, its seasons are extreme; the poles see 42-year stretches of continual sunlight followed by equally long periods of darkness. That makes Uranus a great testing ground for ideas about how planets work, Fletcher says, by seeing how these theories hold up on a sideways planet. Point for Uranus. please log in to view this image DISTANT FAMILIES The rings and moons of Uranus (left) glow in a 2002 image from the Very Large Telescope. A horde of satellites orbit Neptune (right) in an illustration based on Hubble Space Telescope images taken one Neptune year (164 Earth years) after the planet’s discovery. LEFT: EUROPEAN SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY; RIGHT: NASA, ESA, Z. LEVAY/STSCI On the other hand, maybe Uranus is a little too weird. Neptune might be the better target for understanding how a typical ice giant behaves, which is important for understanding many of the planets orbiting other stars. Voyager 2 already showed that Neptune’s atmosphere is churning with storms, offering plenty of fascinating details to pore over. Uranus, though starting to stir, is relatively sedate. Point for Neptune. When it comes to the moons, the situation is reversed. “If we go to Neptune, we’ll see a normal planet but not normal satellites,” says Mark Hofstadter, a planetary scientist at JPL. “If we go to Uranus, we’ll see an oddball planet but normal satellites.” Uranus has five major moons and 22 diminutive ones. Researchers suspect that these are the planet’s original satellites and might be a good example of what forms around an ice giant. Because the entire system — planet, rings and moons — is tipped over, Voyager 2 was able to see only one hemisphere of each moon. An entire half of the system remains hidden. “The satellites are really terra incognita,” Fletcher says. Point: Uranus. But Neptune has Triton, a crown jewel of the outer solar system. “It’s a fascinating frozen paradise,” Hansen says. Like Saturn’s moon Enceladus (SN: 12/26/15, p. 23), Triton has erupting geysers, possibly linked to a subsurface ocean. The surface has been remodeled in the last 10 million years or so, which is pretty recent by solar system standards and hints at active geology. Point: Neptune. please log in to view this image EXOTIC MOONS Neptune's largest moon Triton (top) is an actively changing world and a distant cousin of Pluto. Miranda (bottom), a satellite of Uranus, harbors a hodge-podge of terrains and the tallest known cliff -- roughly 20 kilometers -- in the solar system. FROM TOP: JPL-CALTECH/NASA, USGS; JPL-CALTECH/NASA Triton is also not native to Neptune. The moon, which orbits in the opposite direction of Neptune’s rotation, was probably pilfered from the Kuiper belt, the field of frozen fossils where Pluto lives. “It’s a cousin to Pluto,” Hammel says. “Pluto and Triton are a wonderful matched pair to do comparative studies.” Double points for Neptune. Both planets are such enigmas that a mission to one or the other will have plenty to teach planetary scientists. “Most folks would be happy to go to either one,” Simon says. The decision is more likely to come down to logistics: “What’s the sweet-spot mission that gets you the most science for your dollar.” Getting to the ice giants won’t be easy. A spacecraft needs roughly a decade just to get to its destination. There are ways to shorten the trip such as getting a gravity kick from Jupiter or Saturn, but that depends on the planets being in the right place at the right time. All things being equal, Uranus is closer and therefore easier (and cheaper) to get to. But if there’s a trajectory that grabs an assist from Jupiter or Saturn, Neptune might be the better bet. NASA’s Space Launch System, a powerful rocket scheduled to debut in late 2018, could shake things up. “It’s the largest rocket that this world has ever produced,” Green says. “It has incredible oomph for getting anything into space very fast.” A spacecraft launched atop the SLS might need only a few years to reach an ice giant. Shortening the interplanetary cruise saves time and money, but the faster the spacecraft goes, the harder it must hit the brakes at journey’s end. “You have to throw off one of your science instruments to carry the extra fuel to slow down,” Hofstadter says. One solution is a daredevil maneuver known as “aerocapture,” where the planet’s atmosphere does most of the work. The spacecraft has to plow through the atmosphere deep enough to slow down but not so deep that it burns up. Some missions closer to home have used a gentler version of aerocapture to tweak trajectories. No one has used it for orbit insertion. JPL’s task this year will be to evaluate those risks and explore mission options for each planet. “Both have stories to tell,” Hansen says. “You can’t go wrong — either one would be revolutionary.” The New Horizons mission to Pluto showed what can be learned by flying a 21st century spacecraft past an unexplored world (SN: 12/26/15, p. 16). Researchers had a good idea of what might be waiting for them, but the reality exceeded expectations. “Pluto is a fabulous example of wherever we look, we discover amazing new things,” Fletcher says. “The frontier now lies out at the ice giants.”
LIGO makes gravitational wave announcement Thursday Ripples in space time predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity 100 years ago CBC News Posted: Feb 10, 2016 5:00 PM ET Last Updated: Feb 10, 2016 11:02 PM ET please log in to view this image Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time that Albert Einstein's theory of general relatively predicted would be produced by massive phenomena such as neutron stars colliding. (NASA) 1318 shares please log in to view this image Facebook please log in to view this image Twitter please log in to view this image Reddit please log in to view this image Google please log in to view this image Share please log in to view this image Email Related Stories Gravitational waves: Why they're such a big deal Einstein's general theory of relativity at 100: 5 great things it brought External Links LIGO news release (Note: CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external links.) Following weeks of rumours that gravitational waves have finally been discovered, scientists are set to make an announcement Thursday morning. Scientists with the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which includes some Canadians, will provide an update on the search for gravitational waves at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, LIGO announced earlier this week. The event will be webcast live from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Gravitational waves: Why they're a big deal Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time that Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted would be produced by massive phenomena such as neutron stars or black holes colliding. please log in to view this image From left to right, University of Toronto's LIGO team members Harald Pfeiffer, Heather Fong and Prayush Kumar. ( Diana Tyszko/University of Toronto) Such events don't normally give off light and can't be detected using normal telescopes, so observing their gravitational waves would allow scientists to study things that have never been seen before. It would also tell physicists whether Einstein's general theory of relativity is really correct. please log in to view this image U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has two detectors - one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana (above). (LIGO) The theory turned 100 years old this year. And despite decades of searching, gravitational waves have not yet been officially detected. Einstein's general theory of relativity at 100: 5 great things it brought But rumours have been heating up that LIGO has finally seen something. Twitter posts about that from Arizona State University theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, who is not part of the LIGO collaboration, caused a huge buzz on the internet in January. Since then, many people have been waiting for an official announcement from LIGO. The Canadian Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Toronto helped make the software used to analyze the data and look for gravity waves. please log in to view this image Gravitational waves are detected by LIGO through their effect on test masses like this one. (LIGO) The experiment aims to detect gravitational waves by measuring their effect on test masses suspended in two L-shaped detectors about 3,200 kilometres apart. Passing gravitational waves are expected to decrease the distance between the test masses in one arm of the L, while increasing it in the other. A real gravitational wave should be detected by both detectors.
Quirks & Quarks Blog Spark Photo Galleries Einstein's general theory of relativity at 100: 5 great things it brought Black holes, GPS, warp speed and more were products of his elegant equations By Emily Chung, CBC News Posted: Nov 25, 2015 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Nov 26, 2015 3:19 PM ET please log in to view this image Albert Einstein finished presenting his ground-breaking theory to the scientific world at the Prussian Academy of Sciences exactly 100 years ago today. (Associated Press) 1973 shares please log in to view this image Facebook please log in to view this image Twitter please log in to view this image Reddit please log in to view this image Google please log in to view this image Share please log in to view this image Email Related Stories Watch: Einstein's general theory of relativity examined, 100 years later Happy Birthday to Space-Time - The Perfect Theory Albert Einstein's personal letters up for auction Albert Einstein's hobbies and those of 9 other physicists revealed Wormholes, warp speed, space-time anomalies — science fiction wouldn't be the same without Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. And in the real world, we would probably also notice a few things missing from our lives. The German-born physicist finished presenting his groundbreaking theory to the scientific world at the Prussian Academy of Sciences exactly 100 years ago today. It was a simple, elegant set of equations that described space-time as a stretchy, flexible fabric, and gravity as deformations in space-time rather than a "force." The math itself is complicated, says Pedro Ferreira, author of The Perfect Theory, a new book about general relativity. "But when you are able to figure out how to solve it, you figure out incredible things," he told Bob McDonald, host of CBC's Quirks & Quarks, in a recent interview. "We are still mining this theory for what it's going to tell us." Here are some of the most amazing things that have come out of it so far. 1. Black holes One of the weirdest mind-bending phenomena hiding in Einstein's new theory was one of the first discovered — by a soldier fighting on the Russian Front of the First World War. Karl Schwarzschild was a German astronomer who read Einstein's paper on the battlefield in 1915. Inspired, he decided to solve the equations for the warped space-time produced by a spherical body such as the sun. please log in to view this image Black holes like the one in this artist's impression were one of the first theoretical discoveries in Einstein's theory of general relativity, but real black holes weren't discovered until more than a decade after Einstein's death in 1955. He sent the solution to Einstein, who liked it, but was skeptical of one aspect – Schwarzchild's solution showed that a small spherical object with a lot of mass would warp space-time so much that it would swallow and trap anything that came close, including light itself. The phenomenon was later named a black hole. Black hole breaks records, swallows up scientific theory "Einstein didn't believe these things existed," Ferreira said. Instead, he thought it was a "mathematical artifact." Schwarzchild died in 1916, and real black holes weren't seen until more than a decade after Einstein's death in 1955. But they've starred in science fiction and captivated astronomers now for nearly a century. 2. The Big Bang It's no big deal – just the prevailing theory about how the universe began. Two scientists who studied Einstein's theory in the 1920s realized that his equations showed that the universe should be expanding, and if you went back far enough, the universe would get smaller and smaller until you hit a moment now called the Big Bang. UBC's SPIDER telescope launches seeking Big Bang's light patterns As with black holes, the idea was so weird that Einstein didn't believe it. He came up with a "cosmological constant" to stick in his equations to stop the universe's expansion from mathematically happening. He finally realized he was wrong after American astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that distant galaxies are moving away from us. 3. GPS Admittedly, a gadget that shows your position on maps and tells you where to turn isn't as cool as black holes and the Big Bang. But so far, it's the only practical, everyday use of general relativity. How, exactly? Well, the theory shows that the stronger gravity is, the slower time goes, says physicist Damian Pope, part of a public education team at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont. "It's not something you notice with the naked eye in your daily life," he said. But time is an important variable that GPS satellites use to triangulate your location. And if you're orbiting 20,000 kilometres above the Earth's surface, as they are, the weaker gravity at that distance can throw things off by 500 trillionths of a second each second. "GPS is such a precise technology that it actually needs to correct for that," Pope said. Otherwise "you'd be off by 10 kilometres every day." And you can probably imagine how useful GPS would be if that were the case. 4. Wormholes and warp speed General relativity is a treasure trove of ideas that have enriched science fiction for decades. please log in to view this image In Star Trek, warp speed is also based on general relativity – starships can exceed the speed of light when space-time expands behind the starship and compresses in front of it. (Luke MacGregor/Reuters) Take wormholes – a popular form of transportation for fictional space explorers and a consequence of general relativity's stretchy space-time. "That kind of flexibility allows you in theory to kind of bend space so much that you actually get really a shortcut between different parts of the universe, potentially even opposite parts of the universe," Pope said. In Star Trek, warp speed is also based on general relativity – starships can exceed the speed of light when space-time expands behind the starship and compresses in front of it. Both these ideas originated with theoretical physicists studying relativity, and exploring such ideas help us better understand the theory, Pope says. "Unfortunately, space is incredibly difficult to bend and warp to our will with the means that we have," he said. 5. Gravitational lensing There's one more very useful tool that's come out of general relativity – for scientists. It's called gravitational lensing. "The basic idea is that the sun, a galaxy — any big celestial body — actually bends light that travels near it," Pope said. "Think of it like a magnifying glass." Distant star baby boom captured by huge new telescope That allows scientists to study objects in the distant universe that they couldn't otherwise see clearly, and even some things they can't see at all – dark matter, for example. But that matter still has mass, and therefore gravitational effects, Pope added. "Gravitational lensing has been really, really important to figuring out all this stuff that's out there in the universe," he said.
