Antigravics

Important paper on cosmic body formation

http://www.cosmogeology.ge/chapter-28.htm

>> Isotope analyses of meteorites, the Earth, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, the solar wind, and solar flares over the past 45 years indicate that fresh, poorly-mixed; SGN (spiral galaxy nucleus) spot masses formed the solar planetary system. >>


>> Massive iron meteorites retained isotopic anomalies from the SGN spot’s nuclear reactions that made the stable isotopes of molybdenum [55, 56]. These isotopes include 92Mo from the p-process, 96Mo from the s-process, 100Mo from the r-process, and other isotopes from a mix of nucleosynthesis reactions [57].

High precision mass spectrometry showed that these Mo isotopes never completely mixed after SGN spot nucleosynthesis, even in the massive objects thought to be highly differentiated iron meteorites. Recent analyses at Harvard [58] and Cal Tech [59] have confirmed Mo isotope anomalies in ordinary iron meteorites.

These findings confirm the suggestion [46, 53, 54] that iron meteorites, and the cores of the terrestrial planets, likely formed directly from iron-rich SGN spots, rather than by geochemical differentiation and extraction of iron from an interstellar cloud.

Linked chemical and isotopic heterogeneities in meteorites, to be discussed below, offered the first compelling evidence that heterogeneous SGN spot masses formed the entire solar system, injecting into the interstellar space from equator of the SGN. >>>

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=voy ... s-lopsided

>> Hurtling through space 31 years after its launch, the Voyager 2 spacecraft has sent back the most detailed view yet of the shock wave that marks the thinning of the solar wind, the charged particles streaming from the sun.

Researchers say the crossing confirms that the heliosphere—the region swept out by the solar wind—is actually lopsided, perhaps due to a tilted magnetic field in local interstellar space.

The shock wave, or heliospheric termination shock, occurs when the supersonic wind thins to the point that it can no longer rebuff the denser haze of charged particles flowing through interstellar space. Instead, the solar wind suddenly collapses in on itself.

Researchers say the phenomenon is sort of like the edge of a stream of tap water after it hits the sink [see image]. Solar wind is swept along by the sun's magnetic field, which means it cascades like a fluid instead of crashing like billiard balls.

Data from Voyager 2, described in a series of papers today in Nature, show that the craft entered the termination shock on August 31, 2007, at a distance from the sun of about eight billion miles (13 billion kilometers) and crossed it the next day.

That's 10 percent closer to the sun than when the craft's sister ship, Voyager 1, passed through the same shock wave in late 2004 heading outbound from the solar system in a different direction.

That far from the sun, the density of solar wind is, at most, a couple of protons and electrons per gallon, astrophysicist J.R. Jokipii of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson says. "It's almost impossible to measure. You have to give it to these experimenters," he says.

Voyager 2 will now follow its twin into the heliosheath, the region of slower-moving wind beyond the termination shock.

Besides confirming earlier research that hinted at the lopsided heliosphere, the crossing provides new details, including the energy and speed of the solar wind, that Voyager 1 could not pick up because its plasma detection instrument had stopped functioning.

According to the new data, the wind downstream of the shock was cooler and faster moving than researchers had anticipated. The interpretation, says Jokippi, who wrote an editorial accompanying the Nature reports, is that the solar wind is imparting energy to neutral atoms from the interstellar gas and causing them to ionize.

These "pickup" ions are then accelerated to speeds of hundreds of miles (kilometers) per second, exerting a strong effect on the structure of the shock, he says.

The twin Voyager craft set out for deep space in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, but after their primary mission was completed, they kept on going. In 10 to 20 years after reaching the termination shock, NASA expects the craft to cross the heliopause, the outer edge of the heliosheath.

That would mean they have exited the solar system and entered the interstellar medium. NASA engineers estimate that both probes' plutonium power packs have the potential to keep them broadcasting data until 2025. >>>

http://www.physorg.com/news136041939.html

>> Until now, a prevailing view in the astrophysical community has been that galactic magnetic fields gradually increased over cosmic time up to their present strengths and that in the nascent universe, magnetic fields were initially very weak. Astrophysicists explain this gradual growth of magnetism over time with the large-scale "galactic dynamo" model.

The letter in the current issue of Nature extends a parallel, larger study by Kronberg et al. of early magnetic fields from the March 2008 edition of The Astrophysical Journal. That study, whose contributors also included LANL colleagues David Higdon and Margaret Short, relied mostly on Faraday rotation measures (RM) taken at radio wavelengths, beyond what is visible to the human eye.

By measuring how far the radio waves were pulled toward the red end of the spectrum-known as "redshift"-Kronberg and his colleagues homed in on the location of magnetic fields in the distant universe.

Their measurements at optical wavelengths of more than 70 quasars were combined with the RM data Kronberg has been collecting for more than 25 years - data based on accurate radio RM measurements from several of the world's most powerful radio telescopes, including the Very Large Array near Soccoro, New Mexico, and the 100-meter dish in Effelsberg, Germany.

"It was thought that, looking back in the past, earlier galaxies would not have generated much magnetic field," Kronberg said. "The results of this study show that the magnetic fields within Milky Way-like galaxies have been every bit as strong over the last two-thirds of the Universe's age as they are now-and possibly even stronger then."

Serving as a looking glass into the past, the powerful telescope at the European Southern Observatory, adding to the radio RM data, allowed the scientists to make observations of high magnetic fields between 8 billion and 9 billion years ago for 70 intervening galaxies whose faint optical absorption spectra revealed them as "normal" galaxies. That means that several billion years before the existence of our own sun, and within only a few billion years of the Big Bang, ancient galaxies were exerting the tug of these strong magnetic fields.

This research suggests that the magnetic fields in galaxies did not arise due to a slow, large-scale dynamo effect, which would have taken 5 billion to 10 billion years to reach their current measured levels. "There must be some other explanation for a much quicker and earlier amplification of galactic magnetic fields," Kronberg said. "From the time when the first stars and galaxies formed, their magnetic fields have probably have been amplified by very fast dynamos. One good possibility is that it happened in the explosive outflows that were driven by supernovae, and possibly even black holes in the very earliest generations of galaxies."

This realization brings a new focus on the broader question of how galaxies form. Instead of the commonly held view that magnetic fields have little relevance to the genesis of new galaxies, it now appears that they are indeed important players. If so, strong magnetic fields a long time ago are one of the essential ingredients that explain the very existence of our galaxy and others like it.

Provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory >>>

http://www.physorg.com/news137248802.html

>> A University of Utah study is shedding light on an important, unsolved physics problem: the relationship between chaos theory - which is based on 300-year-old Newtonian physics - and the modern theory of quantum mechanics.

The study demonstrated a fundamental new property - what appears to be chaotic behavior in a quantum system - in the magnetic "spins" within the nuclei or centers of atoms of frozen xenon, which normally is a gas and has been tested for making medical images of lungs.

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The new study - published in the Aug. 8 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters - was led by Brian Saam, an associate professor of physics and associate dean of the University of Utah's College of Science.

Quantum mechanics - which describes the behavior of molecules, atoms electrons and other subatomic particles - "plays a key role in understanding how electronics work, how all sorts of interesting materials behave, how light behaves during communication by optical fibers," Saam says.

"When you look at all the technology governed by quantum physics, it's not unreasonable to assume that if one can apply chaos theory in a meaningful way to quantum systems, that will provide new insights, new technology, new solutions to problems not yet known."

Just as atomic nuclei and their orbiting electrons can have electrical charges, they also have another property known as "spin." The spin within an atomic nucleus or electron is like a spinning bar magnet that points either up or down.

Saam and graduate student Steven Morgan zapped xenon atoms with a strong magnetic field, laser beam and radio-wave pulse so the nuclear spins were aligned in four different configurations in four samples of frozen xenon, each containing about 100 billion billion atoms [billion twice is correct].

Despite differing initial configurations, the "dances" of the xenon spins evolved so they eventually were in sync with each other, as measured by nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR. That took a few thousandths of a second - something physicists seriously call "long-time behavior."

"This type of common behavior has been a signature of classically chaotic (Newtonian) systems, mostly studied using a computer, but it never had been observed in an experimental system that only can be described by quantum mechanics," Saam says.

As an analogy, imagine billions of people in a huge, unfamiliar city. They start walking around in different places and directions, with little conversation among them. Yet, eventually, they all end up walking in the same direction.

Such behavior in nuclear spins had been predicted in 2005 by the study's third author, physicist Boris Fine of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Fine had made the prediction by adapting chaos theory to quantum theory.

The evolution of disorder into order by the xenon atoms' nuclear spins is a signature of chaos theory, which, contrary to the popular notion, does not imply complete disorder. Instead, chaos theory describes how weather, certain chemical reactions, planetary orbits, subatomic particles and other dynamic systems change over time, with the changes often highly sensitive to starting conditions.

"When you have a [chaotic] system that is characterized by extreme randomness, it paradoxically can produce ordered behavior after a certain amount of time," says Saam. "There is strong evidence that is happening here in our experiment."

The sensitivity to starting conditions is known popularly as "the butterfly effect," based on the fanciful example that a butterfly flapping its wings in South America might set off subtle atmospheric changes that eventually build into a tornado in Texas.

Saam says chaos theory can make predictions about extremely complex motions of many particles that are interacting with each other. The mathematical notion of chaos first was described in the 1890s. Chaos theory was developed in the 1960s, based on classical physics developed in the late 1600s by Sir Isaac Newton. Classical physics says the motion, speed and location of any particle at any time can be determined precisely.

In contrast, quantum mechanics holds that "when things get atom small, our notions of being able to put a specific particle in a specific place with a specific speed at a specific time become blurry," Saam says. So a particle's speed and location is a matter of probability, and "the probability is the reality."

Technically, spin is the intrinsic angular momentum of a particle - a concept so difficult to explain in lay terms that physicists usually use the bar magnet analogy.

A nonmagnetic material normally has random spins in the nuclei of its atoms - half the spins are up and half are down, so the net spin is zero. But magnetic fields can be applied so that the spins are aligned - with more up than down, or vice versa.

Physicists can measure the alignment or "polarization" of the spins using NMR's strong magnetic field. Nuclear spins also are used medically: When a patient lies within a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device's large magnet, the spins within atoms in the body generate electrical signals that are used to make images of body tissues. Doctors are testing xenon as a way to enhance MRI images of the lungs.

Saam and colleagues used xenon because its spins can be aligned relatively easily.

In each experiment, Saam and Morgan used a magnetic field and a laser to align or "hyperpolarize" the spins in a sample of about 100 billion billion xenon gas atoms so a majority of the spins either were aligned "up" or "down." Then, they froze the gas into a solid at a temperature of 321 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

Then they applied a radio wave pulse, which "flips" the spins so they all are perpendicular to the magnetic field instead of parallel to it. That makes them start circling around the magnetic field axis like spinning tops.

In this manner, the physicists created four frozen xenon samples. Within each sample, the spins were aligned, but different radio pulses were used to make the initial alignment or configuration of the spins different from one sample to the next.

The scientists then used NMR to watch the spins decay or fade over thousandths of a second.

"Although they are held in place in the crystal structure, the spins can interact with each other and change the direction in which they're pointed in much the same way that magnets interact with each other when brought close together," Saam says.

The initial configuration of spins in each xenon sample evolved in extremely complicated ways due to the presence of billions of interacting spins, and each sample rapidly "lost its memory" of where it started. Such behavior has been known for 60 years.

The surprise was that while each sample's initial NMR signal was radically different from the other, they displayed "identical long-time behavior," says Saam.

"Somehow despite the fact these spins have very complicated interactions with each other and started out in completely different orientations, they end up all moving in the same way after several milliseconds," he says. "That's never been seen before in a quantum mechanical system. These guys are dancing together."

Saam says the technical achievement was that the huge amount of polarization made it possible for NMR to measure an extremely weak spin signal - only one-thousandth as strong as the original signal by the time the samples appeared to behave chaotically.

Provided by University of Utah >>>

http://www.physorg.com/news139154071.html



>> Oxygen is constantly leaking out of Earth’s atmosphere and into space. Now, ESA’s formation-flying quartet of satellites, Cluster, has discovered the physical mechanism that is driving the escape. It turns out that the Earth’s own magnetic field is accelerating the oxygen away.

The new work uses data collected by Cluster from 2001 to 2003. During this time, Cluster amassed information about beams of electrically charged oxygen atoms, known as ions, flowing outwards from the polar regions into space. Cluster also measured the strength and direction of the Earth’s magnetic field whenever the beams were present.

Hans Nilsson, Swedish Institute of Space Physics, headed a team of space scientists who analysed the data. They discovered that the oxygen ions were being accelerated by changes in the direction of the magnetic field. “It is a bit like a sling-shot effect,” says Nilsson.

Having all four Cluster spacecraft was essential to the analysis because it gave astronomers a way to measure the strength and direction of the magnetic field over a wide area. “Cluster allowed us to measure the gradient of the magnetic field and see how it was changing direction with time,” says Nilsson.

Before the space age, scientists believed that Earth’s magnetic field was filled only with particles from the solar wind, the constant sleet of particles that escapes from the Sun. They thought this formed a large cushion that protected the Earth’s atmosphere from direct interaction with the solar wind.

“We are beginning to realise just how many interactions can take place between the solar wind and the atmosphere,” says Nilsson. Energetic particles from the solar wind can be channelled along the magnetic field lines and, when these impact the atmosphere of the Earth, they can produce aurorae. This occurs over the poles of Earth. The same interactions provide the oxygen ions with enough energy to accelerate out of the atmosphere and reach the Earth’s magnetic environment.

The Cluster data were captured over the poles with the satellites flying at an altitude of anywhere between 30,000 and 64,000 kilometres. Measurements taken by earlier satellites during the 1980s and 1990s showed that the escaping ions were travelling faster the higher they were observed. This implied that some sort of acceleration mechanism was involved and several possibilities were proposed. Thanks to this new Cluster study, the mechanism accounting for most of the acceleration has now been identified.

At present, the escape of oxygen is nothing to worry about. Compared to the Earth’s stock of the life-supporting gas, the amount escaping is negligible. However, in the far future when the Sun begins to heat up in old age, the balance might change and the oxygen escape may become significant. “We can only predict these future changes if we understand the mechanisms involved,” says Nilsson.

For now, Cluster will continue collecting data and providing new insights into the complex magnetic environment surrounding our planet.

An assessment of the role of the centrifugal acceleration mechanism in high altitude polar cap oxygen ion outflow by H. Nilsson, M. Waara, O. Marghitu, M. Yamauchi, R. Lundin, H. Rème, J-A. Sauvaud, I. Dandouras, E. Lucek, L. M. Kistler, B. Klecker, C. W. Carlson, M. B. Bavassano-Cattaneo, and A. Korth, is published in the journal Annales Geophysicae, 26, 145-157, 2008.

Provided by ESA >>

http://www.physorg.com/news140965197.html

>> A new analysis of dust from the comet Wild 2, collected in 2004 by NASA's Stardust mission, has revealed an oxygen isotope signature that suggests an unexpected mingling of rocky material between the center and edges of the solar system. Despite the comet's birth in the icy reaches of outer space beyond Pluto, tiny crystals collected from its halo appear to have been forged in the hotter interior, much closer to the sun.

The result, reported in the Sept. 19 issue of the journal Science by researchers from Japan, NASA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, counters the idea that the material that formed the solar system billions of years ago has remained trapped in orbits around the sun. Instead, the new study suggests that cosmic material from asteroid belts between Mars and Jupiter can migrate outward in the solar system and mix with the more primitive materials found at the fringes.

"Observations from this sample are changing our previous thinking and expectations about how the solar system formed," says UW-Madison geologist Noriko Kita, an author of the paper. >>

>> To their surprise, they found oxygen isotope ratios in the comet crystals that are similar to asteroids and even the sun itself. Since these samples more closely resemble meteorites than the primitive, low-temperature materials expected in the outer reaches of the solar system, their analysis suggests that heat-processed particles may have been transported outward in the young solar system. >>>

http://www.physorg.com/news141650469.html

>> The Apollo Moon missions of 1969-1972 all share a dirty secret. "The major issue the Apollo astronauts pointed out was dust, dust, dust," says Professor Larry Taylor, Director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee. Fine as flour and rough as sandpaper, Moon dust caused 'lunar hay fever,' problems with space suits, and dust storms in the crew cabin upon returning to space.

Taylor and other scientists will present their research on lunar dust at the "Living on a Dusty Moon" session on Thursday, 9 October 2008, at the Joint Meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA), Soil Science Society of America (SSSA), American Society of Agronomy (ASA), Crop Science Society of America (CSSA), and Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies (GCAGS) in Houston, Texas, USA. NASA will use these findings to plan a safer manned mission to the Moon in 2018. Taylor will also deliver a Pardee Keynote Session talk on Sunday, 5 October 2008 entitled "Formation and Evolution of Lunar Soil from An Apollo Perspective."

The trouble with moon dust stems from the strange properties of lunar soil. The powdery grey dirt is formed by micrometeorite impacts which pulverize local rocks into fine particles. The energy from these collisions melts the dirt into vapor that cools and condenses on soil particles, coating them in a glassy shell.

These particles can wreak havoc on space suits and other equipment. During the Apollo 17 mission, for example, crewmembers Harrison "Jack" Schmitt and Gene Cernan had trouble moving their arms during moonwalks because dust had gummed up the joints. "The dust was so abrasive that it actually wore through three layers of Kevlar-like material on Jack's boot," Taylor says.

To make matters worse, lunar dust suffers from a terrible case of static cling. UV rays drive electrons out of lunar dust by day, while the solar wind bombards it with electrons by night. Cleaning the resulting charged particles with wet-wipes only makes them cling harder to camera lenses and helmet visors. Mian Abbas of the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama, will discuss electrostatic charging on the moon and how dust circulates in lunar skies.

Luckily, lunar dust is also susceptible to magnets. Tiny specks of metallic iron (Fe0) are embedded in each dust particle's glassy shell. Taylor has designed a magnetic filter to pull dust from the air, as well as a "dust sucker" that uses magnets in place of a vacuum. He has also discovered that microwaves melt lunar soil in less time than it takes to boil a cup of tea. He envisions a vehicle that could microwave lunar surfaces into roads and landing pads as it drives, and a device to melt soil over lunar modules to provide insulation against space radiation. The heating process can also produce oxygen for breathing.

But the same specks of iron that could make moon dust manageable also pose a potential threat to human health, according to Bonnie Cooper at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "Those tiny blebs of pure iron we see on the surface of lunar grains are likely to be released from the outside edges of the particle in the lungs and enter the bloodstream," she says. Preliminary studies suggest that the inhalation of lunar dust may pose a health hazard, possibly including iron toxicity. Members of NASA's Lunar Airborne Dust Toxicity Advisory Group, Cooper, Taylor, and colleagues are studying how moon dust affects the respiratory system. They plan to set a lunar dust exposure standard by 2010, in time for NASA engineers to design a safer and cleaner trip to the Moon. >>>

>> The ionosphere is defined by atmospheric effects on radiowave propagation as a result of the presence and variation in concentration of free electrons in the atmosphere.

D-region is about 35 to 55 miles (60 - 90 km) in altitude but disappears at night.
E-region is about 55 to 90 miles (90 - 140 km) in altitude.
F-region is above 90 miles (140 km) in atitude. During the day it has two regions known as the F1-region from about 90 to 115 miles (140 to 180 km) altitude and the F2-region in which the concentration of electrons peaks in the altitude range of 150 to 300 miles (around 250 to 500 km). Most recent map of the Height of Maximum (hmF2). The ionosphere above the peak electron concentration is usually referred to as the Topside Ionosphere.>>

>> The plasmasphere is not really spherical but a doughnut-shaped region (a torus) with the hole aligned with Earth's magnetic axis. [In this case the use of the suffix -sphere is more in the figurative sense of a "sphere of influence".] The Earth's plasmasphere is made of just that, a plasma, the fourth state of matter. This plasma is composed mostly of hydrogen ions (protons) and electrons. It has a very sharp edge called the plasmapause. The outer edge of this doughnut over the equator is usually some 4 to 6 Earth radii from the center of the Earth or 12,000-20,000 miles (19,000-32,000 km) above the surface. The plasmasphere is essentially an extension of the ionosphere. Inside of the plasmapause, geomagnetic field lines rotate with the Earth. The inner edge of the plasmasphere is taken as the altitude at which protons replace oxygen as the dominant species in the ionospheric plasma which usually occurs at about 600 miles (1000 km) altitude. The plasmasphere can also be considered to be a structure within the magnetosphere. >>

The Schumann Resonance.... magnetic waves, rotating

"In a light beam, the flow of light through space is similar to water flowing in a river. Although it often flows in a straight line - out of a torch, laser pointer, etc - light can also flow in whirls and eddies, forming lines in space called 'optical vortices'.

"Along these lines, or optical vortices, the intensity of the light is zero (black). The light all around us is filled with these dark lines, even though we can't see them".
http://www.physorg.com/news182957628.html

http://www.physorg.com/news185451423.html

>> Scientists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator at the U.S. DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory, report the first hints of profound symmetry transformations in the hot soup of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons produced in RHIC's most energetic collisions. In particular, the new results, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, suggest that "bubbles" formed within this hot soup may internally disobey the so-called "mirror symmetry" that normally characterizes the interactions of quarks and gluons.

"RHIC's collisions of heavy nuclei at nearly light speed are designed to re-create, on a tiny scale, the conditions of the early universe. These new results thus suggest that RHIC may have a unique opportunity to test in the laboratory some crucial features of symmetry-altering bubbles speculated to have played important roles in the evolution of the infant universe," said Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven's Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear and Particle Physics, who oversees research at RHIC.

VIDEO..... at site, showing asymmetrical vortices

Physicists have predicted an increasing probability of finding such bubbles, or local regions, of "broken" symmetry at extreme temperatures near transitions from one phase of matter to another. According to the predictions, the matter inside these bubbles would exhibit different symmetries — or behavior under certain simple transformations of space, time, and particle types — than the surrounding matter. In addition to the symmetry violations probed at RHIC, scientists have postulated that analogous symmetry-altering bubbles created at an even earlier time in the universe helped to establish the preference for matter over antimatter in our world.

RHIC's most energetic collisions create the kind of extreme conditions that might be just right for producing such local regions of altered symmetry: A temperature of several trillion degrees Celsius, or about 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun, and a transition to a new phase of nuclear matter known as quark-gluon plasma. Furthermore, as the colliding nuclei pass near each other, they produce an ultra-strong magnetic field that facilitates detecting effects of the altered symmetry.

Now, early data from RHIC's STAR detector hint at a violation in what is known as mirror symmetry, or parity. This rule of symmetry suggests that events should occur in exactly the same way whether seen directly or in a mirror, with no directional dependence. But STAR has observed an asymmetric charge separation in particles emerging from all but the most head-on collisions at RHIC: The observations suggest that positively charged quarks may prefer to emerge parallel to the magnetic field in a given collision event, while negatively charged quarks prefer to emerge in the opposite direction. Because this preference would appear reversed if the situation were reflected through a mirror, it appears to violate mirror symmetry.

"In all previous studies of systems governed by the strong force among quarks and gluons, it has been found to very high precision that events and their mirror reflections occur at exactly the same rate, with no directional dependence," Vigdor said. "So this observation at STAR is truly intriguing."

At RHIC, the parity-violating bubbles are formed in a random way, possibly with oppositely oriented charge separation in bubbles at different locations. Averaged over many events there would appear to be no parity violation, even though there were violations locally in each event. Although allowed by quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the underlying theory that describes the strong nuclear force, such local strong parity violation has never been detected directly.

"The key to observing the effect in high-energy nuclear collisions is to study correlations among the particles emerging from the collision," said Nu Xu of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the spokesperson for the STAR collaboration.

The theory suggests that particles with the same sign of electric charge should tend to be emitted from such local parity-violating regions in the same direction, either both parallel, or both anti-parallel, to the magnetic field arising in the collision, whereas unlike-sign particles should be emitted in opposite directions.

"We have observed a correlation among emitted charged particles of the predicted type, with the degree of directional preference increasing as the collisions vary from head-on to more grazing," Xu said.

STAR data also suggest the local breaking of another form of symmetry, known as charge-parity, or CP, invariance. According to this fundamental physics principle, when energy is converted to mass or vice-versa according to Einstein's famous E=mc2 equation, equal numbers of particles and oppositely charged antiparticles must be created or annihilated. If CP symmetry had not been broken at some very early time in the evolution of our universe, the particles and antiparticles created in equal numbers in the Big Bang would subsequently have annihilated one another in pairs, leaving no matter to form the stars, planets, and people that now populate our world.

While some small violations of CP symmetry have been found in previous laboratory experiments, those violations are far too weak to account for the amount of matter remaining in the universe today. Likewise, the signs of possible local CP violation at STAR cannot explain the global predominance of matter in today's world, but they may offer insight into how such symmetry violations occur.

"The features observed at STAR are qualitatively consistent with predictions of symmetry-breaking domains in hot quark matter," said Vigdor. "Confirmation of this effect and understanding how these domains of broken symmetry form at RHIC may help scientists understand some of the most fundamental puzzles of the universe, and will be a subject of intense study in future RHIC experiments."

"For example," he said, "we will want to see if the signal disappears, as predicted, at lower collision energies, where the produced matter is no longer hot enough to make the transition to the quark-gluon plasma phase. These future studies will further check the early work, will test more mundane possible explanations for the observed effects, and will explore a wide range of related phenomena." >>>

>> New results unexpectedly show that many exoplanets actually orbit at a large angle to their star's spin axis

The discovery of nine new transiting exoplanets is announced today at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting. When these new results were combined with earlier observations of transiting exoplanets astronomers were surprised to find that six out of a larger sample of 27 were found to be orbiting in the opposite direction to the rotation of their host star -- the exact reverse of what is seen in our own solar system.

"This is a real bomb we are dropping into the field of exoplanets," says Amaury Triaud, a PhD student at the Geneva Observatory who, with Andrew Cameron and Didier Queloz, leads a major part of the observational campaign.

Planets are thought to form in the disc of gas and dust encircling a young star. This proto-planetary disc rotates in the same direction as the star itself, and up to now it was expected that planets that form from the disc would all orbit in more or less the same plane, and that they would move along their orbits in the same direction as the star's rotation. This is the case for the planets in the Solar System.

After the initial detection of the nine new exoplanets with the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP), the team of astronomers used the HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-metre ESO telescope at the La Silla observatory in Chile, along with data from the Swiss Euler telescope, also at La Silla, and data from other telescopes to confirm the discoveries and characterise the transiting exoplanets found in both the new and older surveys. The current count of known exoplanets is 452.

Surprisingly, when the team combined the new data with older observations they found that more than half of all the hot Jupiters studied have orbits that are misaligned with the rotation axis of their parent stars. They even found that six exoplanets in this extended study (of which two are new discoveries) have retrograde motion: they orbit their star in the "wrong" direction.

Hot Jupiters are planets orbiting other stars that have masses similar to, or greater than, that of Jupiter, but that orbit their parent stars much more closely than any of the planets in our own Solar System. Because they are both large and close they are easier to detect from their gravitational effect on their stars and also more likely to transit the disc of the star. Most of the first exoplanets to be found were of this class.

"The new results really challenge the conventional wisdom that planets should always orbit in the same direction as their stars spin," says Andrew Cameron of the University of St Andrews, who presented the new results at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2010) in Glasgow this week.

In the 15 years since the first hot Jupiters were discovered, their origin has been a puzzle. These are planets with masses similar to or greater than that of Jupiter, but that orbit very close to their suns. The cores of giant planets are thought to form from a mix of rock and ice particles found only in the cold outer reaches of planetary systems. Hot Jupiters must therefore form far from their star and subsequently migrate inwards to orbits much closer to the parent star. Many astronomers believed this was due to gravitational interactions with the disc of dust from which they formed. This scenario takes place over a few million years and results in an orbit aligned with the rotation axis of the parent star. It would also allow Earth-like rocky planets to form subsequently, but unfortunately it cannot account for the new observations.

To account for the new retrograde exoplanets an alternative migration theory suggests that the proximity of hot Jupiters to their stars is not due to interactions with the dust disc at all, but to a slower evolution process involving a gravitational tug-of-war with more distant planetary or stellar companions over hundreds of millions of years. After these disturbances have bounced a giant exoplanet into a tilted and elongated orbit it would suffer tidal friction, losing energy every time it swung close to the star. It would eventually become parked in a near circular, but randomly tilted, orbit close to the star. "A dramatic side-effect of this process is that it would wipe out any other smaller Earth-like planet in these systems," says Didier Queloz of Geneva Observatory.

Two of the newly discovered retrograde planets have already been found to have more distant, massive companions that could potentially be the cause of the upset. These new results will trigger an intensive search for additional bodies in other planetary systems.

http://www.physorg.com/news190361973.html

>> A team of physicists led by a professor at UC San Diego has pinpointed the location of a long lost light reflector left on the lunar surface by the Soviet Union nearly 40 years ago that many scientists had unsuccessfully searched for and never expected would be found.

The French-built laser reflector was sent aboard the unmanned Luna 17 mission, which landed on the Moon November 17, 1970, releasing a robotic rover that roamed the lunar surface and carried the missing laser reflector. The Soviet lander and its rover, called Lunokhod 1, were last heard from on September 14, 1971.

“No one had seen the reflector since 1971,” said Tom Murphy, an associate professor of physics at UCSD. He heads a team of scientists engaged in a long-term effort to look for deviations of Einstein’s theory of general relativity by measuring the shape of the lunar orbit to within an accuracy of one millimeter, or about the thickness of a paperclip. This is accomplished by timing the reflections of pulses of laser light from reflectors left on the Moon by Apollo astronauts and turning the timing measurement into a distance.

“We routinely use the three hardy reflectors placed on the Moon by the Apollo 11, 14 and 15 missions,” said Murphy, “and occasionally the Soviet-landed Lunokhod 2 reflector -- though it does not work well enough to use when illuminated by sunlight. But we yearned to find Lunokhod 1.”

Three reflectors are required to lock down the orientation of the Moon. A fourth adds information about tidal distortion of the Moon, and a fifth enhances that information.

“Lunokhod 1, by virtue of its location, would provide the best leverage for understanding the liquid lunar core, and for producing an accurate estimate of the position of the center of the Moon -- which is of paramount importance in mapping out the orbit and putting Einstein’s gravity to a test,” said Murphy.

Murphy said his team had occasionally looked for the Lunokhod 1 reflector over the last two years, but faced tall odds against finding it until recently. The breakthrough came last month when the high-resolution camera on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, obtained images of the landing site. The camera team, led by Mark Robinson at Arizona State University, identified the rover as a sunlit speck on the image -- miles from where Murphy and his team had been searching. But until now the existence of the reflector or its precise location was unknown.


(Soviet Rover) The Soviet Lunokhod rovers were about 2.3 meters long and 1.5 meters tall.

“It turns out we were searching around a position miles from the rover,” said Murphy. “We could only search one football-field-sized region at a time. The recent images from LRO, together with laser altimetry of the surface, provided coordinates within 100 meters, and then we were in business and only had to wait for time on the telescope in good observing conditions.”

On April 22, his team sent pulses of laser light from the 3.5 meter telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, zeroing in on the target coordinates provided by the LRO images. Murphy, together with Russet McMillan of the Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, NM, and UCSD physics graduate student Eric Michelsen found the long lost Lunokhod 1 reflector and pinpointed its distance from Earth to within one centimeter. They then made a second observation less than 30 minutes later that allowed the team to triangulate the reflector’s latitude and longitude on the Moon, in other words its exact spot on the Moon, to within 10 meters -- ”not bad for a half-hour’s work,” said Murphy. In the coming months, he estimates it will be possible to establish the reflector’s coordinates to better than one-centimeter precision.

The return signal from the reflector was measured by Murphy’s team as a collection of individual particles, or photons, of laser light.

“We quickly verified the signal to be real and found it to be surprisingly bright: at least five times brighter than the other Soviet reflector, on the Lunokhod 2 rover, to which we routinely send laser pulses,” Murphy said. “The best signal we’ve seen from Lunokhod 2 in several years of effort is 750 return photons, but we got about 2,000 photons from Lunokhod 1 on our first try. It’s got a lot to say after almost 40 years of silence.”


A retroreflector is a set of three mirrors, each at a perpendicular angle to the others, that will reflect light directly back in the direction from which it came. Credit: Solar Physics/Montana State University

The discovery of the Soviet reflector came as a surprise, because scientists had actively searched for it for nearly four decades without success. Many scientists had speculated that the Lunokhod 1 rover might have fallen into a crater or parked badly, with its reflector not facing the Earth, which would have prevented it from being located by laser pulses.

“Not only now do we know that Lunokhod 1 is there, we also know that it is parked perfectly so that its reflector faces Earth,” said Murphy. “In fact, the signal is so surprisingly strong that the rover could not be in anything but a level parking spot with its last commanded roll on the lunar surface deliberately oriented toward the Earth.”

Murphy and his colleagues found in a study they published this month that lunar dust may be obscuring the reflectors on the Moon. His team found that the laser light they bounce off reflectors on the Moon is fainter than expected and dims even more whenever the Moon is full.

“Near full Moon, the strength of the returning light decreases by a factor of ten,” he adds. “We need to understand what is causing this if we are contemplating putting additional scientific equipment on the Moon. Finding the Lunokhod 1 reflector will add important clues to this study.”

Studying the Moon is important to astrobiologists because our nearest celestial neighbor can have a profound influence on the Earth and our biosphere. For instance, many scientists believe that the Moon effects the tides of Earth's oceans.

http://www.physorg.com/news191604289.html

The weak equivalence principle (WEP) - which states that all bodies fall at the same rate in a gravitational field, regardless of structure or composition - is one of the key postulates of general relativity. Tests have shown that the WEP is accurate to within one part in 10 trillion, or an uncertainty of 10-13 of the acceleration of gravity.

>> An adrift Intelsat satellite that stopped communicating with its ground controllers last month remains out of control and has begun moving eastward along the geostationary arc, raising the threat of interference with other satellites in its path, Intelsat and other industry officials said.

In what industry officials called an unprecedented event, Intelsat's Galaxy 15 communications satellite has remained fully "on," with its C-band telecommunications payload still functioning even as it has left its assigned orbital slot of 133 degrees west longitude 36,000 kilometers over the equator.

Galaxy 15 stopped responding to ground controllers on April 5. The satellite's manufacturer, Orbital Sciences Corp. of Virginia, has said an intense solar storm in early April may be to blame. It was launched into space in 2005.

The first satellite likely to face signal interference problems from the adrift Galaxy 15 is the AMC-11 C-band satellite owned by SES of Luxembourg and stationed at 131 degrees west, just two degrees away from Galaxy 15's starting position.

Rob Bednarek, chief executive of the SES World Skies division, which operates AMC-11, said Intelsat and SES have been meeting since April 5 to coordinate how to minimize the Galaxy 15 impact on AMC-11's media customers. [Spot satellites from Earth.]

In an interview Friday, Bednarek said that while it remains unclear whether SES World Skies will be able to avoid a signal interference problem as Galaxy 15 enters the AMC-11 orbital territory, the company has benefited from full disclosure on the part of Intelsat, SES's biggest competitor.

"The cooperation with them really has been very good," Bednarek said. "We all realize that we could be in the same position tomorrow. We are neighbors in space."

Alan Young, chief technology officer at SES World Skies, said the company's best estimate is that Galaxy 15 will enter AMC-11's neighborhood — meaning one-half of one degree distant — May 23. It will continue traveling at its own pace through the AMC-11 slot, exiting on the east around June 7.

Young said the period of May 31 to June 1 is going to be the riskiest time for AMC-11 customers as SES World Skies seeks to maneuver AMC-11 to the maximum extent possible out of the Galaxy 15 track while at the same time maintaining links with the company's AMC-11 customers.

Tobias Nassif, Intelsat's vice president for satellite operations and engineering, said Friday that the company, in concert with Galaxy 15 manufacturer Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., has sent between 150,000 and 200,000 commands to the satellite in the nearly four weeks since the satellite stopped sending or responding to commands.

These communication attempts, the equivalent of mild wake-up calls to return Galaxy 15 to service, have had no effect. As it moved all Galaxy 15 customers onto Galaxy 12, which was pulled into service from another orbital location, Intelsat at first focused on recovering Galaxy 15 to regular service.

On May 3, Intelsat will play what as of Friday appeared to be its last card by blasting Galaxy 15 with a more powerful signal intended not to salvage the satellite, but to force it into a complete shutdown.

That attempt will last about 30 minutes. It will not be repeated, both because a second attempt is viewed as unnecessary — the treatment works or it does not — and because sending out powerful radio frequency signals carries the risk of interfering with other satellites in the area.

Even if the May 3 action succeeds, Galaxy 15 will remain a problem as it continues to wander the geostationary arc. But it is a problem that satellite operators know how to deal with.

Industry experts say there are several dozen spacecraft, sometimes called "zombiesats," that for various reasons were not removed from the geostationary highway before failing completely.

Depending on their position at the time of failure, these satellites tend to migrate toward one of two libration points, at 105 degrees west and 75 degrees east. (quantum gravity)

Figures compiled by XL Insurance of New York, an underwriter of space risks, say that more than 160 satellites are gathered at these two points, which Bednarek described as the orbital equivalent of valleys.

"Unfortunately for us, we were downhill from Galaxy 15 as it rolls toward" the 105 degrees west libration point, Bednarek said.

Satellites like Galaxy 15 and AMC-11 are so-called "bent-pipe" designs that receive signals from the ground, amplify them on board and redistribute them to customers' ground antennas. Emptied of its customers — except one, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which uses an L-band payload on Galaxy 15 to guide aircraft landings — Galaxy 15 is no longer broadcasting. But its electronics payload is ready to capture and rebroadcast signals it receives that are intended for other spacecraft.

Young said that both SES and Intelsat are fortunate in this case because their two satellites' customers are mainly media companies using fairly large antennas to communicate with the satellites. During the period of maximum danger for AMC-11, SES expects to be able to reroute customer signals to SES-operated teleports with still-larger antennas to maintain communications links.

Nassif said Intelsat and Orbital Sciences have solicited outside opinions from other satellite manufacturers on possible maneuvers that might return Galaxy 15 to control or force it to shut down.

"The fact is that this is the first major anomaly on an Orbital-built satellite," Nassif said. "Other manufacturers have been through problems and might have something to suggest to us."

Because nothing like this has happened before, Intelsat remains uncertain as to when Galaxy 15, as its Earth sensor realizes it is no longer in the desired position, might lose its Earth-pointing capability. That would lead to its solar arrays losing their lock on the sun. Within hours, the satellite's batteries would discharge and the spacecraft would shut down on its own.

While cautioning that the company is revising its most-likely-scenario thinking almost on a daily basis as it gets input from Orbital Sciences and others, Nassif said the current estimate is that Galaxy 15 will lose Earth pointing by late July or early August.

As luck would have it, that timetable would mean the only other satellites in Galaxy 15's C-band frequency that face interference issues are owned by Intelsat.

After it leaves the vicinity of AMC-11, Galaxy 15 is expected to approach Intelsat's Galaxy 13 satellite, at 127 degrees west, around July 13. On July 30, it will enter into the Galaxy 14 satellite's orbital territory at 125 degrees west before heading toward Galaxy 18 at 123 degrees in mid-August.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20100503/ ... spacecraft

SEEING WET SOILS AND SALTY WATER