Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton

by Theodore R. Frimet

void

a bizzaro essay

I wrote a bizzaro essay. And am afraid to post it anywhere, other than here.

Of course, an AI program at Google will savage me. And commit my drooling words to become a permanent fixture in its latent subconsciousness. How sad for the AI.

You, my friends, will not be quite so affected. What follows is not ramble. It was a predetermined effort to let you know how my mind actually ticks. And it looks like I am missing a few seconds!

As there is some Astronomy mentioned, I leave it to you now, as I post it for your eventual perusal.

Here it is.

THE VOID.
When I was a child, perhaps at the age of four or five, I was reading aloud. My older sister asked me to read silently to myself. I had only recently mastered the audition of words. I asked, “how do you do that”? She replied, “there is a voice in your head, use it”. No longer being bound to the words on the page, I began to enter the world of stream of consciousness.

There are players. And then there are actors. Can I bring players and actors together? I don’t know. I do know how to write a list. And like the rest of us, I also know how to leave the task, undone.

There comes a time to reconcile the information one gathers over a lifetime. With the benefit of friends, and acquaintances, one or more of us can make certainties out of the uncertain. There is a lot of head space and timing (1) between all things described in our Universe. What follows is information overload for most sentient beings. I did, however, manage to make it a short list.

When did our Universe cease to exist? To be more precise, if not accurate, when I say ‘our’, I mean not ‘our’ in the exclusive anthropoetic (2) sense.

I predetermine this inclusionary question to incorporate the all-seeing, all-knowing, and ever obstinate Universe that pervades the senses. And yes, this goes beyond the five percent or less of what is normal. Dark matter and energy never quite acquiesces to being measurable by our meager means. Besides, it is the new Void.

THE LIST.
Dark Matter — 27%. Nothing known except, maybe it is the bulwark and framework that supports our brethren guts of creation.

Dark Energy — 68%. Another nothing known. A second maybe that pervasively and without our understanding pushes the space between space.

Normal Matter — 5%. Ok. What is normal? This question has no business appearing in what you currently perceive to be a metaphysical work.

Black Hole — Thank you Stephen Hawking for letting me be brief.

Earth — see Douglas Adams.

Worm Hole — never going to read, or see that phrase appear anywhere here, in this tome.

Blazar — nasty business about gamma ray bursters and hoping that we never cross the line of sight. Too late. Already happened.

Magnetar — more nasty business. With a star quake expect monstrous results and devastation throughout all interstellar mass. See Vonnegut. Maybe not see Vonnegut. His was a time-quake.

SuperNova — not your mothers’ Nova.

Monkeys — a room full of them, with typewriters. Responsible for this essay, and nothing else.

I choose to keep the monkeys on a short leash. Just kidding. I would never use a leash on a monkey. That would be contrary to all design and be contemptuous of the natural order of things.

What is natural about any order, you ask? For starters, hold the monkey. Any monkey. We end up with fauna and flora of our biological predecessor getting into our DNA trace.

Empirically speaking, there is more to an epigenetic digress than meets the eye. Behold a whole room full of Monkeys tapping out the eventual complete works of Shakespeare on their keyboards! This leaves no doubt that your chromatin will be pervaded with that good old monkey flavor. Call it random walk intelligence.

Too much random and not enough intelligence?

Yes. I remember now. It was my sister. Years later you are reading my thoughts. And none of this is being read, “out loud”. Shhhhh.

Look. A break between paragraphs. Something is lurking behind the eyes of the beholder. He is taking a breath. Now he takes a leap of faith, backwards in the list. That would be the list we started out with. It meant nothing in particular, and was given in no spectacular literary order. A pause. Let’s move on, shall we?

We should have kept those monkeys on a leash, I tell you. They were up to no good. They typed out what happens to space-time waves as they pulsate outward from a SuperNova. The churning of space-time envelops the modicum of momentum. It had those monkeys in a flurry of ramble! They made no further sense as they typed away. The monkeys scrambled to make order out of the missing time. They would fail, as they hadn’t invented the next idea. Nowhere would the universe give up its secret of time envelopment. It was a firewall. Would someone please check on those monkeys?

Within the room, a managing monkey gets called into existence. If you look, microscopically at this conundrum, you will see the quantum chatter for yourself. The monkey leadership style is running them all to ruinous defeat. In the end, this supervised ending had preceded their beginning.

The universe is pervaded with this nonsense. Here and again, the monkeys never get their fair shake to write Shakespeare.

Let us split hairs. Why? Because it is better than splitting monkeys. You enter into the room full of monkeys. You and only you are affected by their biomes. All without the benefit of a really good shower, and a second cup of coffee. It results in your becoming inseparably combined with monkey instinct. Maybe that didn’t need to happen? Too late. You already spilt a hair. This is much better than splitting monkeys.

Pause. How does one use the word time, and then define it in a sentence using the word, time? That is a mockery of all things, literary! Must be the monkey supervisor. Please fire the supervisor, and hire a couple more monkeys. The newcomers, though, need to be kept on a short leash. Only for a short period of time. A period, by the way, looks like this: “.” No worries. Time is an illusion. There will be no actual leash-time. Period.

Next month: How the monkeys are related to Magnetars, and why there is a Void where our Universe used to be. Same Bat time, same Bat channel. Quick. Someone enlist an army of bats to cross the channel. Note to self. Replace the monkeys with bats. Never mind. That would never work.

A critical bibliographical guide for the curious and perplexed:

1. Head space and timing. A method of preparing a 50 calibre machine gun for correct and reliable use in the Army.
2. Anthropoetic – my contribution to the English language. First used here: https://princetonastronomy.wordpress.com/2018/07/28/blazing-saddles/

by Theodore R Frimet

The March of the Monkeys

Cassini crashed the party

After writing the Void, I came to the conclusion that it did not service the mindset of the Amateur Astronomy community, one IOTA. So be it my surprise when I decided to catch up with a couple of issues of Science, the journal from AAAS, and read about Saturn. The introductory article written by Keith T. Smith (1) was inspiring to help me focus on a few of my favorite things. Smith composes a thought list on the magnetic field, an inner radiation belt, solid grains falling from the rings to the planet, and Saturns atmospheric composition.

How amazing is it to find out, that during the course of self study, with dingy little sensors and an Arduino, that the budding Amateur may have some working knowledge of how a magnetometer might be employed. Cassini was no shrinking violet, here. Her fluxgate magnetometer measured Saturn’s magnetic field, with fierce resolution. In cooperation with her onboard star cameras and gyroscopes, a vector analysis inferred the magnetic field structure. We confirmed the north-south asymmetry of Saturns magnetic field. The implication of author M.K. Dougherty (2) are the presence of strong zonal flows. All signs express a growing knowledge of the planets deep dynamo.

Nothing like a good cup of coffee to wake you up, on a chilly November morning! And like the best of latte tasters – know that Saturn and her rings gets a daily dose of energetic protons, located between the planets surface, and her rings. Despite the inner radiation belt, being limited by the atmosphere, an astounding measurement of proton energy is demonstrated and bounded by 25 MeV to the giga-electron volt range (3). A reduced intensity, within the inner area, attributes itself to the presence of ring dust. Matter always seems to get in the way! To me, it would appear that having knowledge of energetic protons, we have a new utility to measure what could be the waxing and waning of inner belt stability. Just my 2 cents.

L. Lamy (4) introduces us to the sounds of Saturn. It is reminiscent of using a radio receiver to listen to Jovial sounds. However, here, we are briefed on the necessity to have close proximity to make accurate measurement, to understand how low-frequency radiation is generated. And Cassini had arrived to be on site, to do just that! Sampling the 10 to 20 kHz bandwidth, a correlation to coincident ultraviolet (UV) auroral oval was accomplished while observations were made by the Hubble Space Telescope. The main conclusion reached was that low frequency emissions are strongly time variable. Perhaps the next time we probe Saturn, with a bent on UV, we could “tune in” to the low frequency source to accompany the imaging?

Manna from Heaven. Ring Rain! How more eloquent to say that there are grains of dust falling, from the rings of Saturn, into her atmosphere? H.-W. Hsu (5) introduces us, to the grand finale mission of 2017. The 22 transits between this planet and her innermost D ring had us analyzing the dust. The tool employed is called the cosmic dust analyzer. The estimate is “a few tons of nanometer sized ejecta is produced each second across the main rings”. (ibid) Wonders of wonders that science is, we are told that the two grain types are known as water ice and silicate. Having confirmed the constituents of Ring Rain, we continue to be left with educated guesses on the ring erosion process. However, the ratio of dust grains does vary 1:11 to 1:2 with latitude. Between the ejecta velocity, and the offset magnetic fields, it encourages me to hunt for a visual on the phenomenon.

At my last public outreach for the year, for our parent organization, UACNJ, a question was posed on how we know the composition of exoplanetary atmospheres. I quickly summarized for our guest. We initially detected “wobble” as a Jupiter sized planet passed in front of her main star. And that as the light passed thru this hot Jupiter, we could measure the spectrum of light. From this measurement, it provides us clues as to the inherent chemical composition of the exo-planets atmosphere. Herein, though, J.H. Waite (6), reminds us that we study Saturn’s atmosphere, in situ! We learn that the primary tool for this job is called the Cassini Ion Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS). It took measurements of the upper atmosphere, and within the rings. The INMS detected an abundance of Hydrogen (H2) at all altitudes. Methane, ammonia, molecular nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide were all observed along with water from the rings. Fragments from organic nanoparticles were observed. The impact of any organic material probably denigrated upon collection within the INMS chamber. Hence, only organic fragments were recorded due to high velocity impact. Cassini was no slouch, as she vaulted through her mission end at a velocity in the neighborhood of 31 km s-1. Evidence abounds pointing to a molecular soup of volatiles and organic fragments. It doesn’t take a leap of faith, to suggest that the chemistry of Saturns rings doesn’t stay localized, and contributes to the chemistry of the planets atmosphere.

We dove off the deep end, within the rings of Saturn, and crashed into her veiled atmosphere. All for the mix of scientific measurement, discovery and to maintain an even keel on Planetary Protection. There is, of course, much data that needs to be gone through. Perhaps we as Amateurs can stay abreast of the developments, as Cassini’s last dive, continues to present to us a treasure trove of information on Saturn.

References:

1. Smith, K. T. (2018). Diving within saturn’s rings. Science, 362(6410), 44-45.
2. M.K. Dougherty et al., Science 362 eaat5434 (2018). DOI 10.1126/science.aat5434
3. E. Rousssos et al., Science 362, eeat1962 (2018). DOI 10.1126/science.aat1962
4. L. Lamu et al., Science 362, eaat2027 (2018). DOI: 10.1126/science.aat2027
5. H.-W. Hsu et al., Science 362, eaat3185 (2018). DOI: 10.1126/science.aat3185
6. J.H. Waite Jr. et al., Science 362, eaat2382 (2018). DOI: 10.1126/science.aat2382