THE STAR THE NEWSLETTER OF THE MOUNT CUBA ASTRONOMICAL GROUP VOL. 3 NUM. 5

CONTACT US AT DAVE GROSKI [email protected]

OR HANK BOUCHELLE [email protected] 302-983-7830

OUR PROGRAMS ARE HELD THE SECOND TUESDAY OF EACH MONTH AT 7:30 P.M. UNLESS INDICATED OTHERWISE MOUNT CUBA ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORY 1610 HILLSIDE MILL ROAD GREENVILLE, DE FOR DIRECTIONS PLEASE VISIT www.mountcuba.org

PLEASE SEND ALL PHOTOS AND ARTICLES TO [email protected]

1 NEXT MEETING TUESDAY JANUARY 13, 7:30 p.m.

Greetings and Introductions Dave Groski The Sky Calendar – January 2015 Hank Bouchelle Program Hands-On Astronomy The us of models to make astronomy more compelling.

DECEMBERS MEETING REVIEW:

For the MCAG’s December meeting, we were invited to the A. I. DuPont Middle School for a presentation of there Spitz Model A3P Planetarium. It was originally installed in July of 1962 and was used consistently until the early 1990’s when water damage knocked it out of commission. After that, the room was used as a storage area.

It was rediscovered it in the Fall of 2012 by Jerome Hill a Science teacher at the middle school. With the help of Dave Groski, Hank Bouchelle and several students from the

2 school the room and the machine were put back into working order. There was a rededication of the Planetarium in 2013. Since then, it has been used not only by the students at the school but has hosted many visitors not only from the Red Clay School District but from other districts as well.

The top right photo is of Jerome Hill as he was giving us a brief on the history of the project. The lower left photo shows Ed Mc Grath and several students from the A. I. High School. Mr. McGrath is the Director or Science for the Red Clay District.

We from the MCAG take our hats off to all those involved in the restoration of this wonderful teaching aid.

OBSERVATIONS FROM THE CONFORTABLE CHAIR Hank Bouchelle Co-Chair MCAG

The MCAG has field trip!

The MCAG now has a field trip under its belt and those who missed our December meeting at the A.I. DuPont Planetarium missed something special. When Jerry Hill, an eighth-grade science teacher, discovered a planetarium within A. I. and languishing under rock and mineral collections, ancient textbooks, and unneeded textbooks, he immediately began to lobby for funds to refurbish it and make it useful once again. The effort gained momentum when Dave Groski found damaged circuits in the planetarium’s control panel, repaired the faults, and coaxed the projector into operation for the first time in decades.

The facility is now a gem and waiting for its first student audience. I ran the Colonial School District’s planetarium and its astronomy/earth and space science programs. I know how effective a planetarium can be. We are all looking forward to future visits. A bonus in the course of the evening was pizza and other goodies.

This month’s MCAG program features some of the materials, devices, and activities that can help make solid and real topics in astronomy and astronomical phenomena. I have accumulated many lessons and activities in my 60 years of teaching and learning. There are many that I wish I could take credit for. Teachers, grandparents and parents should try to attend.

Phenomona

Astronomical Data by Hank Bouchelle

One certainty in this life is that from time to time the study of astronomy requires us to consult a data table. And equally certain is that such a table will cause one’s eyes to lose focus for varying lengths of time. However, if we are persistent, ordered information can make sense in spite of us. Furthermore, aggregated data offers an opportunity for a larger and more complete

3 understanding. A data table can reveal trends or patterns that can be as fascinating as they are insightful. In the past, we have studied sunrise/sunset tables to draw attention to the way that, near a vernal or autumnal equinox, the length of daylight may wax or wane by several minutes each day, but near the solstices, the length may remain the same for a week or two. (See http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.php) The Sun moves along an imaginary circle visible to us only as the position of the Sun at any particular time. At the time of the winter solstice, we can see only the uppermost portion of this circle. The Sun stays low as it crosses the sky. Conversely, the situation is reversed in summer. The Sun is higher at noon. The location of the rising Sun is now in the northeast.is quite has moved well. At noon on the summer solstice we can see much more of the lower portion of the circle. And the position of the circle that the Sun rcle, the Sun’s path, near the winter solstice. The Sun rises near the southeast, stays relatively close to the horizon, and sets near the southwest. Near the summer solstice larger arcs of the circle move the locations of the rising and setting Sun much further north, to approximately the northeast and northwest, and higher across the sky. An aside: Earth’s rotation causes celestial objects in the sky to move toward the west. A complete circle has 360 degrees. Earth requires 24 hours to complete its 360- degree rotation. we can expect the Sun (and Moon) to cross the sky at a rate of (360 degrees divided by 24 hours = ) 15 degrees/hour. If we convert this hour to minutes (60 minutes divided by 15 degrees) we see that the Sun travels one degree every four minutes. The Sun is ½ degree in diameter. If we use a small mirror to create an image of the Sun on a vertical surface, and draw a circle around it, the image will move completely out of the circle in two minutes.)

ASTRONOMICAL TERMS AND NAMES OF THE MONTH:

The Mission of the Mt. Cuba Astronomy Group is to increase knowledge and expand awareness of the science of astronomy and related technologies.

When reading the articles in the STAR, you will come across various terms and names of objects you may not be familiar with. Therefore, in each edition of the STAR, we will review terms as well as objects related to Astronomy and related technologies. These topics are presented on a level that the general public can appreciate. super symmetry

In particle physics, super symmetry (SUSY) is a proposed extension of space-time symmetry that relates two basic classes of elementary particles: bosons, which have an integer-valued spin, and fermions, which have a half-integer spin.[1] Each particle from one group is associated with a particle from the other, called its super partner, whose spin differs by a half-integer. In a theory with perfectly unbroken super symmetry, each pair of super partners shares the same mass and internal quantum numbers besides spin - for example, a "selectron" (super partner electron) would be a boson version of the electron, and would have the same mass energy and thus be equally easy to find in the lab. However, since no super partners have been observed yet, super symmetry must be a spontaneously broken symmetry if it exists. If super symmetry is a true symmetry of

4 nature, it would explain many mysterious features of particle physics and would help solve paradoxes such as the cosmological constant problem. The Minimal Super symmetric Standard Model is one of the best studied candidates for physics beyond the Standard Model. asterism

In astronomy, an asterism is a pattern of stars recognized on Earth's night sky. It may form part of an official constellation, or be composed of stars from more than one. Like constellations, asterisms are in most cases composed of stars which, while they are visible in the same general direction, are not physically related, often being at significantly different distances from Earth. The mostly simple shapes and few stars make these patterns easy to identify, and thus particularly useful to those learning to familiarize themselves with the night sky.

Photon

A photon is an elementary particle, the quantum of light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation. It is the force carrier for the electromagnetic force, even when static via virtual photons. The effects of this force are easily observable at both the microscopic and macroscopic level, because the photon has zero rest mass; this allows long distance interactions. Like all elementary particles, photons are currently best explained by quantum mechanics and exhibit wave–particle duality, exhibiting properties of both waves and particles. For example, a single photon may be refracted by a lens or exhibit wave interference with itself, but also act as a particle giving a definite result when its position is measured.

Outgassing

Outgassing (sometimes called offgassing, particularly when in reference to indoor air quality) is the release of a gas that was dissolved, trapped, frozen or absorbed in some material.[1] Outgassing can include sublimation and evaporation which are phase transitions of a substance into a gas, as well as desorption, seepage from cracks or internal volumes and gaseous products of slow chemical reactions. Boiling is generally thought of as a separate phenomenon from outgassing because it consists of a phase transition of a liquid into a vapor made of the same substance.

Desorption

Desorption is a phenomenon whereby a substance is released from or through a surface. The process is the opposite of sorption (that is, either adsorption or absorption). This occurs in a system being in the state of sorption equilibrium between bulk phase (fluid, i.e. gas or liquid solution) and an adsorbing surface (solid or boundary separating two fluids). When the concentration (or pressure) of substance in the bulk phase is lowered, some of the sorbed substance changes to the bulk state.

5 In chemistry, especially chromatography, desorption is the ability for a chemical to move with the mobile phase. The more a chemical desorbs, the less likely it will adsorb, thus instead of sticking to the stationary phase, the chemical moves up with the solvent front.

In chemical separation processes, stripping is also referred to as desorption as one component of a liquid stream moves by mass transfer into a vapor phase through the liquid-vapor interface.

After adsorption, the adsorbed chemical will remain on the substrate nearly indefinitely, provided the temperature remains low. However, as the temperature rises, so does the likelihood of desorption occurring. The general equation for the rate of desorption is:

, where is the rate constant for desorption, is the concentration of the adsorbed material, and is the kinetic order of desorption.

Usually, the order of the desorption can be predicted by the number of elementary steps involved:

Atomic or simple molecular desorption will typically be a first-order process (i.e. a simple molecule on the surface of the substrate desorbs into a gaseous form).

Recombinative molecular desorption will generally be a second-order process (i.e. two hydrogen atoms on the surface desorb and form a gaseous H2 molecule).

The rate constant may be expressed in the form

where is the "attempt frequency" (often the Greek letter ), the chance of the adsorbed molecule overcoming its potential barrier to desorption, is the activation energy of desorption, is the Boltzmann constant, and is the temperature.

6 CONSTELLATION ORIAN:

Orion is a prominent constellation located on the celestial equator and visible throughout the world. It is one of the most conspicuous and recognizable constellations in the night sky. It was named after Orion, a hunter in Greek mythology. Its brightest stars are Rigel (Beta Orionis) and Betelgeuse (Alpha Orionis), a blue-white and a red supergiant.

The Belt of Orian.

Orion's Belt or the Belt of Orion, also known as the Three Kings is an asterism in the constellation Orion. It consists of the three bright stars Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka.

Looking for Orion's Belt in the night sky is the easiest way to locate Orion in the sky. The stars are more or less evenly spaced in a straight line, and so can be visualized as the belt of the hunter's clothing. They are best visible in the early night sky during the Northern Winter/Southern Summer, in particular the month of January at around 9.00 pm.

Other Major Stars of Orian.

Betelgeuse, alternatively by its Bayer designation Alpha Orionis, is a massive M-type red supergiant star nearing the end of its life. When it explodes it will even be visible during the day. It is the second brightest star in Orion, and is a semiregular variable star. It serves as the "right shoulder" of the hunter it represents (assuming that he is facing the observer), and is the eighth brightest star in the night sky.

7 Rigel, which is also known as Beta Orionis, is a B-type blue supergiant that is the sixth brightest star in the night sky. Similar to Betelgeuse, Rigel is fusing heavy elements in its core and will pass its supergiant stage soon (on an astronomical timescale), either collapsing in the case of a supernova or shedding its outer layers and turning into a white dwarf. It serves as the left foot of Orion, the hunter.

Saiph was designated Kappa Orionis by Bayer, and serves as Orion's right foot. It is of a similar distance and size to Rigel, but appears much fainter, as its hot surface temperature (46,000 °F or 26,000 °C) causes it to emit most of its light in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum.

8 FROM THE WORLD OF ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS:

Researchers detect possible signal from dark .

A massive cluster of yellowish , seemingly caught in a red and blue spider web of eerily distorted background galaxies, makes for a spellbinding picture from the new Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-12-dark.html#jCp

Could there finally be tangible evidence for the existence of in the ? After sifting through reams of X-ray data, scientists in EPFL's Laboratory of Particle Physics and Cosmology (LPPC) and Leiden University believe they could have identified the signal of a particle of dark matter. This substance, which up to now has been purely hypothetical, is run by none of the standard models of physics other than through the gravitational force.

When physicists study the dynamics of galaxies and the movement of stars, they are confronted with a mystery. If they only take visible matter into account, their equations simply don't add up: the elements that can be observed are not sufficient to explain the rotation of objects and the existing gravitational forces. There is something missing. From this they deduced that there must be an invisible kind of matter that does not interact with light, but does, as a whole, interact by means of the gravitational force. Called "dark matter", this substance appears to make up at least 80% of the Universe.

Andromeda and Perseus revisited

Two groups have recently announced that they have detected the much sought after signal. One of them, led by EPFL scientists Oleg Ruchayskiy and Alexey Boyarsky, also a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, found it by analyzing X-rays emitted by two celestial objects - the Perseus cluster and the Andromeda galaxy. After having collected thousands of signals from the ESA's XMM-Newton telescope and

9 eliminated all those coming from known particles and atoms, they detected an anomaly that, even considering the possibility of instrument or measurement error, caught their attention.

The signal appears in the X-ray spectrum as a weak, atypical photon emission that could not be attributed to any known form of matter. Above all, "the signal's distribution within the galaxy corresponds exactly to what we were expecting with dark matter, that is, concentrated and intense in the center of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges," explains Ruchayskiy. "With the goal of verifying our findings, we then looked at data from our own galaxy, the , and made the same observations," says Boyarsky.

A new era

The signal comes from a very rare event in the Universe: a photon emitted due to the destruction of a hypothetical particle, possibly a "". If the discovery is confirmed, it will open up new avenues of research in particle physics. Apart from that, "It could usher in a new era in astronomy," says Ruchayskiy. "Confirmation of this discovery may lead to construction of new telescopes specially designed for studying the signals from dark matter particles", adds Boyarsky. "We will know where to look in order to trace dark structures in space and will be able to reconstruct how the Universe has formed."

Credit: phys.org

Modified theory of dark matter

10 Dark matter is an aspect of the universe we still don't fully understand. We have lots of evidence pointing to its existence (as I outlined in a series of posts a while back), and the best evidence we have points toward a specific type of matter known as (CDM). One big downside is that we have yet to find any direct detection of dark matter particles. In fact, many of the likely candidates for dark matter have been all but eliminated. Another is that cold dark matter doesn't agree with our observations of dwarf galaxies. Now a new paper presents a solution to the second problem that might even help with the first.

The main problem with dwarf galaxies is that there are fewer of them around spiral galaxies than dark matter predicts. When we do dark matter computer simulations, the results always have more dwarf galaxies than we observe. This has been taken to mean that either the simulations are somehow flawed, or dark matter isn't the complete solution we've thought. This new work looks at a modified version of dark matter, and how it effects these kinds of computer simulations.

Normally, it is assumed that dark matter doesn't interact with light directly at all. This means we can see its gravitational effects, but we don't see anything such as absorption lines and the like, which we observe with regular matter. The reason for this is that dark matter makes up the majority of matter in the universe. About 90% of the mass in our own Milky Way consists of dark matter. If it interacted much with light, then we would have seen its effects on light by now. This new work proposes that dark matter does interact with light, but only very, very slightly.

Now you might think that if dark matter interacts so slightly with light that we don't see its effect, then it certainly can't differ that much from standard dark matter, but the team showed that this very small effect can build up over time, so that modern galaxies have fewer dwarf satellites, just as we observe. You can see this in the image above. The top left image is standard dark matter model, with too many satellite dwarf galaxies. The top right is a model that solves the problem but doesn't agree with other observations. The bottom left is this new, light interacting dark matter model, and the bottom right is what happens when you make the light interaction too strong and get no dwarf galaxies.

So by modifying dark matter to include slight interactions with light, the predictions match dwarf galaxy observations. It should be noted that just because this modification works, that doesn't mean it is the solution. Tweak theories are weak theories, as I've said before. This type of dark matter could also affect other things such as large scale structure, and this would need to be studied before we could be confident about this particular model. But the work does show that dark matter models can address some of the known problems with dark matter.

11 Dark matter could be seen in GPS time glitches.

By Hal Hodson

GPS has a new job. It does a great job of telling us our location, but the network of hyper-accurate clocks in space could get a fix on something far more elusive: dark matter.

Dark matter makes up 80 per cent of the universe's matter but scarcely interacts with ordinary matter. A novel particle is the most popular candidate, but Andrei Derevianko at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Maxim Pospelov at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada propose that kinks or cracks in the quantum fields that permeate the universe could be the culprit.

If they are right, fundamental properties such as the mass of an electron or the strength of electromagnetic fields would change at the kinks. "The effect is essentially locally modifying fundamental constants," Derevianko says. Clocks would be affected too, measuring time slightly differently as a result.

Unique signature

That's where GPS comes in. The network of satellites is about 50,000 kilometres in diameter, and is travelling through space – along with the entire solar system – at about 300 kilometres a second. So any time shift when the solar system passes through a cosmic kink will take a maximum of 170 seconds to move across network.

Other things could perturb GPS timekeeping, but only a signal from dark matter would have that signature, say Derevianko and Pospelov.

Derevianko is already mining 15 years' worth of GPS timing data for dark matter's fingerprints. If he doesn't find anything, he plans to continue the search using the Network for European Accurate Time and Frequency Transfer (NEAT-FT), a network of ground-based atomic clocks that is under construction in Europe. Each of these clocks is far more sensitive than a satellite clock.

If the cosmic kink idea is right, we could also search for dark matter using pulsars, the rapidly spinning corpses of stars that exploded as supernovae. Pulsars emit beams of electromagnetic radiation that hit Earth with periods that can be more precise than our best clocks. "There's a tantalising hint from pulsar data," says Derevianko. "These are like atomic clocks, highly regular."

Pulsar quakes

Sometimes pulsars shiver in "star quakes", the causes of which are unknown. Earlier this year, Victor Flambaum at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, suggested that kinks of dark matter could be responsible. "When a topological defect

12 passes through a pulsar, its mass, radius and internal structure may be altered, resulting in a pulsar 'quake'," Flambaum wrote.

If dark matter is nothing more than cosmic kinks, it could give some people a new thing to grumble about. "I hear these stories about people getting lost using GPS," Derevianko says. "Now they could have another excuse: maybe it was dark matter that caused them to lose their way."

Journal reference: Nature Physics,

We are all aware that a coin has two sides. Please read on.

New Doubt About Dark Matter

Tantalizing ‘signals’ from a handful of recent high-energy searches for dark matter are more likely the product of conventional astrophysics than the first tentative detections of the universe’s missing mass, say skeptical astrophysicists.

“A decade ago, no [one] would make these claims without first checking and re-checking that it couldn’t be from some normal astrophysical source,” Stacy McGaugh, an astrophysicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, told Forbes. “Nowadays, the attitude seems to be that if you don’t immediately recognize what it is, it must be dark matter; [with] no penalty for ‘crying wolf’ over and over again.”

Even so, the theoretical stakes remain high.

That’s because for the better part of a century, cosmological “cold dark matter” has been needed to explain the gravitational dynamics of much of the cosmos’ visible matter; including the rotation rates of massive galaxies like our own.

“By a very large margin, the matter we do see directly in galaxies does not produce enough gravity to hold the galaxies together; dark matter is invoked to provide the extra gravity needed,” Mordehai Milgrom, a physicist at Israel’s Weizmann Institute, told Forbes. That is, Milgrom says, if the standard laws of physics are used to calculate gravity as we know it.

And because non-baryonic (or exotic) dark matter is theorized to only interact with normal matter primarily via gravity, dark matter’s detection has inherently been problematic. Even so, most cosmologists accept the idea that normal dark matter may make up as much as 85 percent of the universe’s missing mass.

The need to invoke dark matter at all stems either from the product of unseen exotic particles that lie well beyond the ken of known physics or is the result of new physics in which gravity behaves differently on the largest scales. Neither scenario is easily tested.

13 For decades, however, experimental physicists have used both laboratory and astronomical observations from ground and space to search for this missing component.

One of the most recent, as noted this month in the journal Physical Review Letters, involves x-ray emissions from both the Perseus galaxy cluster and the nearby Andromeda galaxy.

Using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton telescope, researchers from Switzerland’s EPFL Laboratory of Particle Physics and Cosmology and Leiden University in The Netherlands report that this observed excess of x-ray photons may represent signals of decay by sterile neutrinos. That is, heretofore unverified, hypothetical dark matter particles.

“We have been searching for such a signal since 2005,” Alexey Boyarsky, a professor of physics at Leiden University and the paper’s lead author, told Forbes. “The signal is at the lowest range of experimental sensitivity, and if it were easy to find, we would have found it long ago.”

Boyarsky points out that among the models that are consistent with the dark matter interpretation of this signal, the sterile neutrino is probably the simplest and one of the most natural. Such a particle, he says, can interact with normal matter only via quantum mechanical “mixing” with ordinary neutrinos.

Therefore, says Boyarsky, it is very hard to “catch.”

MIT physicist Paolo Zuccon counters that the sterile neutrino’s existence has also not been proven. “They guess its mass; they guess its properties; and, in particular, how it decays,” said Zuccon told Forbes. “All in all, this claim seems a little weak.”

Or as McGaugh puts it: “Based on those data, I would not claim to have detected anything. This looks like a classic case of the over-interpretation of noisy astronomical data.”

However, Zuccon himself has been involved in searches for this stealthy matter, using a spectrometer mounted on the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS).

Zuccon and colleagues analyzed two and a half years of data from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), the ISS particle detector that recorded a flux of millions of cosmic rays from all over the galaxy. They found an excess of positrons (antiparticles of electrons) at energies of around 8 gigaelectron-volts (GeV) which the researchers say fits some dark matter models.

“But we are not yet in the position to discriminate between the dark matter hypothesis and an astrophysical source [such as] pulsars,” said Zuccon, who is involved with the AMS search. “Only more data from AMS and/or from other measurements will allow an answer.”

14 But as reported by Nature News earlier this month, ESA’s Planck telescope failed to find the imprint of similar positron excesses in the Cosmic Microwave Background, which logically should have been seen if dark matter particles were also colliding and annihilating at comparable rates in the primordial universe.

McGaugh says in the case of the MIT positron signals, the possible signature of dark matter would correspond to an upper energetic limit on the dark matter particle’s actual decay.

“If they see a [energetic] sharp edge like that which corresponds to a plausible dark matter particle, then I’ll get very interested,” said McGaugh. “Until then, they’ve got nothing that can’t be better understood as astrophysical.”

Searchers have also long invoked our Milky Way’s dense galactic center as a dark matter haven. Earlier this year, researchers used publicly available data gleaned from NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope to identify an excess of high-energy gamma rays from our galactic center.

The galactic center region has been studied in increasing detail and the case for there being a gamma-ray signal from annihilation of dark matter particles has strengthened considerably, Dan Hooper, an astrophysicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., told Forbes.

Independent verification of dark matter signals, says Hooper, would include detecting gamma-rays from dwarf spheroidal galaxies; excess anti-protons; gamma-rays from nearby dark matter-dominated galactic sub-halos; dark matter particles in underground experiments; or producing them at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But he also concedes that the same excess might be explained equally well by phenomena related to pulsars or a cosmic ray outburst.

“Until both known and un-anticipated astrophysical sources are excluded as reasons for the observed signal, claims about it being due to dark matter are exaggerated at best,” said McGaugh.

As for Boyarsky and colleagues?

Boyarsky notes that his team has acquired more time on the XMM telescope in 2015. And if that doesn’t work, Boyarsky says that likely by mid-2016, Japan’s planned Astro-H x- ray telescope should be able to reacquire his team’s observed x-ray emissions and determine if they are actually due to dark matter.

Dark matter theory persists in part because in cosmic large scale structure, its unseen presence seems to shape the makeup of clusters and superclusters of galaxies along filaments of the cosmic web. Thus, again, without invoking dark matter or alternative theories of gravity, such structure is hard to explain.

15 “This sanguine attitude has been around a long time,” said McGaugh. “Every five years for the past twenty years, I have heard the confident declaration ‘in five years, we’ll know what dark matter is.’ Obviously, that’s never happened.”

Should we stop looking?

Milgrom says detection efforts should continue in earnest; to simply make it clear that dark matter is not there.

When will there be a clear tipping point away from dark matter theory?

“For some, it will never happen,” said Milgrom, who made that shift years ago, when he proposed Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) — an alternative theory of gravity which alleviates the need for dark matter.

Years ago there was essentially just one “robust” dark matter candidate, namely WIMPs (Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles), says Milgrom. And because WIMPs failed to show up at the Large Hadron Collider and in direct-detection experiments, he says, there is now a whole host of very different dark matter candidates on the table.

As Milgrom hints, whole generations of cosmologists have invested such time, energy, and vast sums of money into identifying this elusive matter that dreams of its existence are likely to die hard.

Is Gobbling Dark Matter, and Slowing Universe's Expansion?

Astronomers using galaxy images like this one from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to study the effects, and nature, mysterious dark energy.

Dark energy appears to be devouring dark matter and slowing the expansion of the cosmos, a new study suggests.

16 Dark matter makes up the backbone of the universe, and there is five times as much of it in the universe as regular matter that makes up the visible objects in the universe like planets and stars. Physicists have yet to directly detect dark matter and no one knows what it's made of. Scientists can only tell that it exists from its gravitational pull on regular matter. Now, the new research suggests that dark matter might be slowly disappearing before physicists have even caught a glimpse of it.

The culprit behind dark matter's disappearance, dark energy, makes up almost 70 percent of the universe. It's a force that works opposite gravity and physicists believe it is stretching the cosmos and making the universe continually expand.

Both dark matter and dark energy are poorly understood. That makes working with either very difficult, David Wands, director of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth in England, told Space.com. Wands and the team of researchers are proposing a new model for how dark energy interacts with dark matter and the rest of the universe.

"If the dark energy is growing and dark matter is evaporating we will end up with a big, empty, boring Universe with almost nothing in it," Wands said in a statement

That's because dark matter provides a framework for things like galaxies and planets to form. The new findings suggest that framework is disappearing and slowing the growth of the universe.

A new model for the expanding cosmos

The reigning model right now is called the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model, and it suggests that there is a constant amount of dark energy known as the "cosmological constant." The model supports the idea that the universe has been expanding since the and its expansion is fueled by dark energy

Einstein originally came up with the cosmological constant to make his equations reflect the idea that the universe is static and staying the same size. Later on, when evidence started piling up that the universe is expanding, Einstein called the cosmological constant his "biggest blunder." However, physicists resurrected the idea when they realized that it could account for the huge amount of dark energy in the universe.

While previous studies have supported the cosmological constant model, there is evidence that the new data does not fit the model well. For example, the Planck satellite is measuring cosmic microwave background— a remnant of radiation left over from the Big Bang. But the data from the satellite doesn't match up perfectly with the cosmological constant model. In fact, much of the new data collected by this satellite and other experiments that measure how the universe is expanding seem to support a model that includes some kind of interaction between dark energy and dark matter, Wands said.

17 The new model that Wands and the team has proposed is one where the amount of dark energy is growing as it eats away at dark matter.

Is dark matter really disappearing?

Physicists have known for a while that data from Planck and other experiments doesn't match with the cosmological constant model, said Mikhail Medvedev, a professor of plasma astrophysics and space physics at the University of Kansas who was not involved with the research. Dark matter decaying into dark energy could explain why the data doesn't fit, but it's only one possible explanation, he said.

"This is a hint — not a solid result yet — that should stimulate further observational studies," Medvedev said. "It may happen to be real, but it may well go away."

Wands said the model needs to be tested against more data. The model also doesn't predict that dark energy will suddenly swallow the entire universe. The interaction that the researchers describe is only between dark energy and dark matter, not regular matter.

"This interaction is in the dark sector only," Wands said. "It's a bit of math that we don't care so much about because it's not the stuff that we're made of, so it's not threatening to us."

Dark Matter Signal May Have Been Found In Mysterious X-Ray Data

After a decades-long search, astronomers may finally have found the first sign of dark matter. That's the invisible substance that scientists believe makes up the bulk of our universe, since visible matter accounts for only about 20 percent of our universe's mass.

While scientists can observe dark matter indirectly by looking at its gravitational effects on visible matter, they have struggled to come up with tangible evidence that proves the stuff exists--until now.

18 This week, a team of researchers from France and the Netherlands announced that they may have detected the signal of decaying dark matter particles.

For the research, the team analyzed the x-rays emitted from two celestial objects: the Perseus galaxy cluster, an array of galaxies located approximately 250 million light years from Earth, and our "sister" galaxy Andromeda, which is approximately 2.5 million light years away. The researchers looked at data collected by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton telescope and spotted a mysterious "anomaly" that could not have been emitted by any known atom or particle.

The same strange x-ray spike was also detected by a research team at Harvard in June, who announced they had spotted the emission in data from 70 different galaxy clusters.

"This tiny (several hundred extra photons) excess has been interpreted as originating from very rare decays of dark matter particles," Dr. Alexey Boyarsky, a professor of astronomy and physics at Leiden University in the Netherlands and the lead researcher for the new study, told The Huffington Post in an email. "Although the signal is very weak, it has passed several 'sanity checks' that one expects from a decaying dark matter signal."

For instance, the researchers say the signal was more concentrated in the center and weak at the edges of Andromeda and the Perseus cluster, which corresponds to what they expected. Boyarsky added that the team has now found a signal at the same wave length coming from our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

Boyarsky and his team believe the signal comes from the decay of a dark matter particle, possibly a "sterile neutrino," which is a hypothetical particle believed to be 1/100th the size of an electron.

"Confirmation of this discovery may lead to construction of new telescopes specially designed for studying the signals from dark matter particles," Boyarsky said in a written statement. "We will know where to look in order to trace dark structures in space and will be able to reconstruct how the Universe has formed."

POINTS OF INTEREST:

19 On February 23 and 24, people from around the country will descend on Washington, D.C. to support space exploration. Will you be one of them? The Space Exploration Alliance, of which The Planetary Society is part, is organizing a "legislative blitz," where we meet with as many members of Congress as possible in two days. Since this is a broad alliance, we are focusing on the importance of space exploration: humans to Mars, robotic reconnaissance of the planets, space telescopes, the Moon. We want to convince Congress that an enlightened society should invest a small part of its wealth into the daring pursuit that is the exploration of space. There is an early registration discount that expires on January 9. It's only $25 per adult or $10 per student. Never gone to Congress before? Don't worry—we provide training, materials, and connect you with experienced volunteers. We also have evening social hours to relax, compare notes, and talk space. You'll be surprised how much fun you'll have. After next week, the cost to register increases, so don't delay. The registration fee pays for materials and room expenses; we do not profit from this event. Also, you can choose to participate in both days or any single day, depending on your schedule. I will be there as the Society's Director of Advocacy. If you can join us (or know someone who can) make sure to sign up soon so we can work to arrange as many meetings as possible. Thank you, and please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions. More information about the Space Exploration Alliance and the blitz is on their website. Sincerely, Casey Dreier Director of Advocacy The Planetary Society

What Happened Before The Big Bang Started The Universe? By Brian Koberlein, Universe Today

Astronomers are pretty sure what happened after the Big Bang, but what came before? What are the leading theories for the causes of the Big Bang?

About 13.8 billion years ago the Universe started with a bang, kicked the doors in, brought fancy cheeses and a bag of ice, spiked the punch bowl and invited the new neighbors over for all-nighter to encompass all all-nighters from that point forward.

But what happened before that?

What was going on before the Big Bang? Usually, we tell the story of the Universe by starting at the Big Bang and then talking about what happened after. Similarly and completely opposite to how astronomers view the Universe… by standing in the present and looking backwards.

From here, the furthest we can look back is to the cosmic microwave background, which is about 380,000 years after the big bang.

20 NASA/WMAP Science Team The Cosmic Microwave Background is as far back as we can see.

Before that we couldn't hope to see a thing, the Universe was just too hot and dense to be transparent. Like pea soup. Soup made of delicious face burning high energy everything.

In traditional stupid earth-bound no-Tardis life unsatisfactory fashion, we can't actually observe the origin of the Universe from our place in time and space.

Damn you… place in time and space.

Fortunately, the thinky types have come up with some ideas, and they're all one part crazy, one part mind bendy, and 100% bananas. The first idea is that it all began as a kind of quantum fluctuation that inflated to our present universe.

NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 TeamHubble eXtreme Deep Fieldmulti

Something very, very subtle expanding over time resulting in, as an accidental byproduct, our existence. The alternate idea is that our universe began within a black hole of an older universe.

I'm gonna let you think about that one. Just let your brain simmer there.

There was universe "here", that isn't our universe, then that universe became a black hole… and from that black hole formed us and EVERYTHING around us. Literally,

21 everything around us. In every direction we look, and even the stuff we just assume to be out there.

Here's another one. We see particles popping into existence here in our Universe. What if, after an immense amount of time, a whole Universe's worth of particles all popped into existence at the same time. Seriously… an immense amount of time, with lots and lots of "almost" that didn't make the cut.

Your browser does not support the video tag. HD Universe Channel We could be just one universe in a vast multiverse.

More recently, the BICEP2 team observed what may be evidence of inflation in the early Universe.

Like any claim of this gravity, the result is hotly debated. If the idea of inflation is correct, it is possible that our universe is part of a much larger multiverse. And the most popular form would produce a kind of eternal inflation, where universes are springing up all the time.

Ours would just happen to be one of them.

It is also possible that asking what came before the big bang is much like asking what is north of the North Pole. What looks like a beginning in need of a cause may just be due to our own perspective. We like to think of effects always having a cause, but the Universe might be an exception. The Universe might simply be. Because.

You tell us. What was going on before the party started? Let us know in the comments below.

And if you like what you see, come check out our Patreon page and find out how you can get these videos early while helping us bring you more great content!

Could the Dwarf Planet Ceres Support Life?

SAN FRANCISCO — A NASA probe is about to get the first up-close look at a potentially habitable alien world.

In March 2015, NASA's Dawn spacecraft will arrive in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is a relatively warm and wet body that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the Jovian moon Europa and the Saturn satellite Enceladus, both of which may be capable of supporting life as we know it, some researchers say.

"I don't think Ceres is less interesting in terms of astrobiology than other potentially habitable worlds," Jian-Yang Li, of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona,

22 said Thursday (Dec. 18) during a talk here at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. [Photos: The Dwarf Planet Ceres]

Life as we know it requires three main ingredients, Li said: liquid water, an energy source and certain chemical building blocks (namely, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogren, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur).

The dwarf planet Ceres — which is about 590 miles (950 kilometers) wide — is thought to have a lot of water, based on its low overall density (2.09 grams per cubic centimeter; compared to 5.5 g/cubic cm for Earth). Ceres is likely a differentiated body with a rocky core and a mantle comprised of water ice, researchers say, and water-bearing minerals have been detected on its surface.

Indeed, water appears to make up about 40 percent of Ceres' volume, Li said.

"Ceres is actually the largest water reservoir in the inner solar system other than the Earth," he said. However, it's unclear at the moment how much, if any, of this water is liquid, he added.

As far as energy goes, Ceres has access to a decent amount via solar heating, since the dwarf planet lies just 2.8 astronomical units (AU) from the sun, Li said. (One AU is the distance between Earth and the sun — about 93 million miles, or 150 million km). Europa and Enceladus are much farther away from our star — 5.2 and 9 AU, respectively.

Both Europa and Enceladus possess stores of internal heat, which is generated by tidal forces. This heat keeps the ice-covered moons' subsurface oceans of liquid water from freezing up, and also drives the eruption of water-vapor plumes on Enceladus (and probably Europa as well; researchers announced last year that NASA's Hubble Space Telescope spotted water vapor erupting from the Jupiter moon in December 2012).

Intriguingly, scientists announced the discovery of water-vapor emission from Ceres — which may also possess a subsurface ocean — earlier this year.

Ceres' plumes may or may not be evidence of internal heat, Li said. For example, they may result when water ice near Ceres' surface is heated by sunlight and warms enough to sublimate into space.

"Right now, we just don't know much about the outgassing on Ceres," Li said.

Dawn should help bring Ceres into much clearer focus when it reaches the dwarf planet this spring. The spacecraft, which orbited the huge asteroid Vesta from July 2011 through September 2012, will map Ceres' surface in detail and beam home a great deal of information about the body's geology and thermal conditions before the scheduled end of its prime mission in July 2015.

23 Ground-based instruments should also play a role in unveiling Ceres. For example, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA — a huge system of radio dishes in Chile — has the ability to probe deeper than Dawn, going into Ceres' subsurface and shedding more light on the dwarf planet's composition and thermal properties, Li said.

"This is highly complementary to the Dawn mission," he said.

Ceres' relative proximity to Earth also makes it an attractive target for future space missions, Li added.

WEB SITES OF INTEREST:

Space Exploration Society

JANUARY SKY:

Mercury Close to Venus Thursday–Monday, Jan. 8–12, dusk. Mercury will be within one degree of Venus for five days, making it easy to spot in evening twilight. Mars is also visible higher in the sky.

Saturn and the Moon Friday, Jan. 16, 1 hour before sunrise. Saturn will be close to the slender waning crescent moon, just before sunrise Tuesday morning.

Double Shadow Transit on Jupiter Friday, Jan. 16, 10:51–11:59 p.m. EST. The shadows of Io and Europa will fall simultaneously on Jupiter.

Neptune and Mars Monday, Jan. 19, dusk. Neptune and Mars will pass within 15 arc minutes of each other, a rare planetary conjunction.

Double and Triple Shadow Transit on Jupiter Friday–Saturday, Jan. 23–24, 11:35 p.m.–03:00 a.m. EST. The shadows of Io, Europa, and Callisto will fall simultaneously on Jupiter; this is an extremely rare event, which will not occur again until 2032.

Venus, January 2015 Venus is an “evening star” in the southwestern sky just after sunset.

Mercury, January 2015 Mercury is well placed in the evening sky close to Venus.

Mars Mars spends most of the month in Aquarius, low in the southwestern sky after sunset.

24 Jupiter Jupiter now rises in the early evening in the constellation Leo, and shines brightly in the southern sky the rest of the night. The current series of double shadow transits culminates in a triple shadow transit on the night of January 24.

Saturn Saturn moves from Libra into Scorpius on Jan. 17 the southeastern morning sky.

PUBLIC NIGHTS AT MCAO:

The general public is invited to visit the Observatory where programs are presented on Monday evenings at 8:00 pm. These include discussions and illustrated talks on astronomy; planetarium programs; and offer the opportunity to view the planets, moon, and other objects through the telescope, weather permitting. Due to limited parking and seating at the Observatory, admission is by reservation only. For more specific information, visit the Mount Cuba Astronomical Observatory web site. mountcuba.org

If you know of anyone who is interested in Astronomy or someone who would like to learn more, please do not hesitate to extend an invitation to them to attend our meetings. If they have an interest in joining, our application is below.

Mount Cuba Astronomical Group Membership Form

The Mission of the Mt. Cuba Astronomy Group is to increase knowledge and expand awareness of the science of astronomy and related technologies. Benefits include:

Monthly newsletter that includes details about the groups activities and articles on astronomy as well as other related subjects.

Monthly programs on subjects and topics of astronomical interest.

Free or discounted subscriptions to astronomy related publications.

Free registration to MCAG workshops and classes.

Mention Mount Cuba Astronomical Group and receive a 5% discount at Manor Books in New Castle (http://www.yelp.com/biz/manor-used-books-New Castle)

25

Name______

Email Address______

Home Address______

Phone (optional)______

Mail to: Carolyn Stankiewicz Mount Cuba Astronomical Observatory 1610 Hillside Mill Road Greenville, DE 19807

26