Mysterious Quasars

Mysterious Quasars

The Word “quasar” is acronym for “quasi-stellar radio source”. After it became clear that not all of them were powerful radio sources, they were called QSO’s (for “quasi-stellar objects”). Because they are star-like in appearance, they were naturally thought to be stars within our own galaxy. But spectroscopic observations of their red shift show them likely to be immense distances away.

The quasars seem to partake vigorously in the expansion of the universe, some receding from us at more than 90 percent the speed of light. If they are very far, they must be intrinsically extremely bright to be visible over such distances; some are as bright as a thousand supernovae exploding at once.

In considering the quasars, we confront profound mysteries. Image: © Elena

Just as for Cyg X-1, their rapid fluctuations show their enormous brightness to be confined to a very small volume, in this case less than the size of the solar system. Some remarkable process must be responsible for the vast outpouring of energy in a quasar. Among the proposed explanations are the following: 

1) quasars are monster versions of pulsars, with a rapidly rotating supermassive core connected to a strong magnetic field; 2) quasars are due to multiple collisions of millions of stars densely packed into the galactic core, tearing away the outer layers and exposing to full view the billion-degree temperatures of the interiors of massive stars; 3) quasars are galaxies in which the stars are so densely packed that a supernova explosion in one will rip away the outer layers of another and make it a supernova, producing a stellar chain reaction; 4) quasars are powered by the violent mutual annihilation of matter and antimatter preserved in the quasar until now; 5) a quasar is the energy released when gas and dust and stars fall into an immense black hole in the core of such a galaxy, perhaps itself the product of ages of collision and coalescence of smaller black holes; 6) quasars are “white holes”, the other side of black holes, a funneling and eventual emergence into view of matter pouring into a multitude of black holes in other parts of the universe, or even in other universes.

Whatever the cause of a quasar explosion, one thing seems clear: such a violent event must produce untold havoc. In every quasar explosion millions of worlds – some with life and the intelligence to understand what is happening – may be utterly destroyed.

The study of galaxies reveals a universal order and beauty, but it also shows us chaotic violence on a scale hitherto undreamed of. That we live in a universe which permits life is remarkable. That we live in one which destroys galaxies and stars and worlds is also remarkable. The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures we are.

Symmetry of the Universe

Symmetry of the Universe

Something puzzling is there in the Cosmos. Observations with a sensitive radio antenna carried near the top of the Earth’s atmosphere in a U-2 aircraft have shown that the background radiation is, to first approximation, just as intense in all directions, as if the fireball of the Big Bang expanded quite uniformly, an origin of the Universe with a very precise symmetry. But the background radiation, when examined to finer precision, proves to be imperfectly symmetrical. There is a small systematic effect that could be understood if the entire Milky Way Galaxy, and presumably other members of the Local Group of galaxies, were streaking toward the Virgo cluster of Galaxies at more that a million miles an hour (600 km per second).

At such a rate, we will reach it in ten billion years, and extragalactic astronomy will then be a great deal easier. In fact, the Virgo cluster of galaxies is already the richest collection of galaxies known, replete with spirals and ellipticals and irregulars, a jewel box in the sky.

If there were time when our Universe didn’t exist, where then God comes from? (Quotations from Meg Jorgensen). Image : Princess on Purple Magic Horse, Fantasy Art © Elena

But why should we be rushing toward it? George Smoot and his colleagues, who made these high-altitudes observations, suggest that the Milky Was is being gravitationally dragged toward the center of the Virgo cluster; that the cluster has many more galaxies than have been detected heretofore; and, most startling, that the cluster is of immense proportions, stretching across one or two billion light years of space.

In the lifetime of the universe there has apparently not been enough time for an initial gravitational nonuniformity to collect the amount of mass that seems to reside in the Virgo supercluster. Thus George Smoot is tempted to conclude that the Big Bang was much less uniform than his other observations suggest, that the original distribution of matter in the universe was very lumpy (some little lumpiness is to be expected, and indeed even needed to understand the condensation of galaxies; but a lumpiness on this scale is a surprise). Perhaps the paradox can be resolved by imagining two or more nearly simultaneous Big Bangs.

If the general picture of an expanding universe and a Big Bang is correct, we must then confront still more difficult questions. What were conditions like at the time of the Big Bang? What happened before that? Was there a tiny universe, devoid of all matter, and then the matter suddenly created from nothing? How does that happen? In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we which courageously to pursue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question. Or, if we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?

Why Do the Galaxies Flee Us?

Why Do the Galaxies Flee Us?

We know that the light from a galaxy is the sum of the light emitted by the billions of stars within it. As the light leaves theses stars, certain frequencies or colors are absorbed by the atoms in the stars’ outermost layers. The resulting lines permit us to tell that stars millions of light-years away contain the same chemical elements as our Sun and the nearby stars. The spectra of all the distant galaxies are red-shifted and, still more startling, the more distant the galaxy is, the more red-shifted is its spectral lines.

The most obvious explanation of the red shift is in terms of the Doppler effect: the galaxies are receding from us; the more distant the galaxy the greater its speed of recession.

But why should the galaxies be fleeing us? Could there be something special about our location in the universe, as if the Milky Way had performed some inadvertent but offensive act in the social life of galaxies? It seems much more likely that the universe itself is expanding, carrying the galaxies with it. Astronomers Humason and Hubbly discovered the Big Bang – if not the origin of the universe then at least its most recent incarnation.

Why do the galaxies flee us? Don’t they like us, our behaviour and how we smell? (Quotations from Meg Jorgensen). Image: Nebulae © Elena

Thus, almost all of modern cosmology – and especially the idea of an expanding universe and a Big Bang – is based on the idea that the red shift of distant galaxies is a Doppler effect and arises from their speed or recession.

But there are other kinds of red shift in nature. There is, for example, the gravitational red shift, in which the light leaving an intense gravitational field has to do so much work to escape that it loses energy during the journey, the process perceived by a distant observer as a shift of the escaping light to longer wavelengths and redder colors. Since we think there may be massive black holes as the centers of some galaxies, this is a conceivable explanation of their red shifts.

However, the particular spectral lines observed are often characteristic of very thin, diffuse gas, and not the astonishingly high density that must prevail near black holes. Or the red shift might be a Doppler effect due not to the general expansion of the universe but rather to a more modest and local galactic explosion. But then we should expect as many explosion fragments traveling toward us away from us, as many blue shifts as red shifts. What we actually see, however, is almost exclusively red shifts no matter what distant objects beyond the Local Group we point our telescopes to.

There is nevertheless a nagging suspicion among some astronomers that all may not be right with the deduction, from the red shifts of galaxies via the Dopller effect, that the universe is expanding.

Neutrinos

Neutrinos

The conversion of hydrogen into helium in the center of the Sun not only accounts for the Sun’s brightness in photos of visible light; it also produces a radiance or a more mysterious and ghostly kind: the Sun glows faintly in neutrinos, which, like photons, weigh nothing and travel at the speed of light. But neutrinos are not photons. They are not a kind of light. Neutrinos, like protons, electrons and neutrons, carry an intrinsic angular momentum, or spin, while protons have no spin at all. Matter is transparent to neutrinos, which pass almost effortlessly through the Earth and through the Sun. Only a tiny fraction of them is stopped by the intervening matter. As I look up at the Sun for a second, a billion neutrinos pass through my eyeball. Of course, they are not stopped at the retina as ordinary photons but they continue unmolested through the back of my head. The curious part is that if at night I look down at the ground, toward the place where the Sun would be (if the Earth were not in the way), almost exactly the same number of solar neutrinos pass through my eyeball, pouring through an interposed Earth which is as transparent to neutrinos as a pane of clear glass is to visible light.

If our knowledge of the solar interior is as complete as we think, and if we also understand the nuclear physics that makes neutrinos, then we should be able to calculate with fair accuracy how many solar neutrinos we should receive in a given area – such as my eyeball – in a given unit of time, such as a second. Experimental confirmation of the calculation is much more difficult.

Nuclear fusion is eating the stars from inside. Image: © Elena

Since neutrinos pass directly through the Earth, we cannot catch a given one. But for a vast number of neutrinos, a small fraction will interact with matter and in the appropriate circumstances might be detected. Neutrinos can on rare occasion convert protons and neutrons. To detect the predicted solar neutrino flux, you need an immense amount of chlorine, so American physicists have poured a huge quantity of cleaning fluid into the Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota. The chlorine is microchemically swept for the newly produced argon. The more argon found, the more neutrinos inferred. These experiments imply that the Sun is dimmer in neutrinos than the calculations predict.

There is a real and unsolved mystery here. The low solar neutrino flux probably does not put our view of stellar nucleosynthesis in jeopardy. But it surely means something important. Proposed explanations range from the hypothesis that neutrinos fall to pieces during their passage between the Sun and the Earth to the idea that the nuclear fires in the solar interior are temporarily banked, sunlight being generated in our time partly by slow gravitational contraction. But neutrino astronomy is very new. For the moment we stand amazed at having created a tool that can peer directly into the blazing heart of the Sun. As the sensitivity of the neutrino telescope improves, it may become possible to prove nuclear fusion in the deep interiors of the nearby stars.

When Stars Raise From the Ashes

When Stars Raise From the Ashes

Hydrogen fusion cannot continue forever: in the Sun or any other star, there is only so much hydrogen fuel in its hot interior. The fate of a star, the end of its life cycle, depends very much on its initial mass. If, after whatever matter it has lost to space, a star retains two or three times the mass of the Sun, it ends its life cycle in a startlingly different mode than the Sun. But the Sun’s fate is spectacular enough. When the central hydrogen has all reacted to form helium, five or six billion years from now, the zone of hydrogen fusion will slowly migrate outward, an expanding shell of thermonuclear reactions, until it reaches the place where the temperatures are less than about ten million degrees. The hydrogen fusion will shut itself off. Meanwhile the self -gravity of the Sun will force a renewed contraction of its helium-rich core and a further increase in its interior temperatures and pressures. The helium nuclei will be jammed together still more tightly, so much so that they begin to stick together, the hooks of their short-range nuclear forces becoming engaged despite the mutual electrical repulsion. The ash will become fuel, and the Sun will be triggered into a second round of fusion reactions.

This process will generate the elements carbon and oxygen and provide additional energy for the Sun to continue shining for a limited time. A star is a phoenix, destined to rise for a time from its own ashes. Stars more massive than the Sun achieve higher central temperatures and pressures to their late evolutionary stages. They are able to rise more than once from their ashes, using carbon and oxygen as fuel for synthesizing still heavier elements.

A star is a phoenix destined to rise for a time from its own ashes. Image: © Elena

Under the combined influence of hydrogen fusion in a thin shell far from the solar interior and the high temperature helium fusion in the core, the Sun will undergo a major change: its exterior will expand and cool. The Sun will become a red giant star, its visible surface so far from its interior that the gravity at its surface grows feeble, its atmosphere expanding into space in a kind of stellar gale. When the Sun, ruddy and bloated, becomes a red giant, it will envelop and devour the planets Mercury and Venus – and probably the Earth as well. The inner solar system will then reside within the Sun.

Billions of years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth. Thereafter the Sun will slowly become red and distended, presiding over an Earth sweltering even at the poles. The Arctic and Antarctic icecaps will melt, flooding the coasts of the world. The high oceanic temperatures will release more water vapor into the air, increasing cloudiness, shielding the Earth from sunlight and delaying the end a little. But solar evolution is inexorable. Eventually the oceans will boil, the atmosphere will evaporate away to space and a catastrophe of the most immense proportions imaginable will overtake our planet.