9 ms·

A Big Surprise from the Edge of the Solar System

435 points by cromulent 15y ago

Alex3917 15y ago
There is a Terence McKenna quote from the early 80's where he says that basically everything we know about the (largescale) universe comes from radio telescope data, and all the bits from all the data ever recorded have roughly the same amount of energy as a piece of cigarette ash falling about two feet. And this is what our entire understanding of the cosmos is based on. Not sure of the validity of the measure/comparison, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless. One does have to wonder though, if it's so obvious now why this phenomenon is happening then why didn't they predict it before seeing the data? Especially if we see the same thing in solar flares. It seems like it's generally a good idea to bet on the laziness of the universe, but beyond that anyone who pretends they know what's going on is probably full of shit. edit: The Terence McKenna quote is from this talk about his life: http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=1509 http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=1509 The talk in general is about his formative intellectual influences, and about why he finds psychedelic drugs to be intellectually interesting. He has another talk that's more about his views of physics, epistemology, and cosmology here: http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=297 http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=297 Perhaps my two all time favorite talks on any subject, albeit you need a high tolerance to ideas that are at times highly speculative. (And sometimes flat out wrong.)
- noarchy 15y ago
  There's a reason that he was on shows like Art Bell's. Not quite the guy I'd be quoting in a discussion of science.
  - Alex3917 15y ago
    "Not quite the guy I'd be quoting in a discussion of science." He didn't really believe in mainstream science though, and the fact that he's actually able to make a really intelligent and often convincing argument for his views is part of what makes him so interesting. He was definitely interested in a lot of fringe stuff as well, but he always has really good explanations for why we should take various things seriously. Certainly he had a lot of faults, and was needlessly sloppy or overenthusiastic in many cases, but overall he's got to be one of the most intellectually interesting people of the last couple hundred years.
    - gjm11 15y ago
      > one of the most intellectually interesting people of the last couple hundred years. So, that would be since about 1800. In science and mathematics, that would put him in competition with Gauss, Einstein, Darwin, Maxwell, Turing. In philosophy: Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein. Not to mention harder-to-pigeonhole people like, say, Goethe. You think he belongs in the same list as those guys? Really?
      - Alex3917 15y ago
        It wouldn't make sense to compare him to those guys because he mostly didn't come up with big theories of his own. He was just very well read in all of the above and used their ideas combined with science to call bullshit on mainstream ideas, figure out which questions were the most important, and speculate about the nature of the universe and the human condition. (Much like a modern day Socrates.) Depending on what you give him credit for I do ultimately think he may be able to hold his own with any of the above, not in terms of coming up with novel theories, but in terms of being able to see what's important and set the agenda for humanity for the next 500 years. But again like Socrates (perhaps Plato) he came up with a lot of bullshit too, so it's important not to throw critical thinking out the window.
        gjm11 15y ago
        Could you perhaps be more specific? I'm no McKenna expert, but so far as I can tell (1) calling bullshit on mainstream ideas, as such, is commonplace and does little to "set the agenda for humanity for the next 500 years" and (2) McKenna hasn't, in fact, provided any ideas we have any reason to think will stand us in better stead for the next 500 years than, say, the conventional wisdom would. So would you care to give some examples of what McKenna's said that will "set the agenda of humanity for the next 500 years" and explain your reasons for thinking they'll do so? (For the avoidance of doubt: (1) I am not claiming that the current conventional wisdom is in fact all we need for the next 500 years, just doubting whether what McKenna has to offer is any better; (2) I am not claiming that McKenna has had no good ideas or insights; perhaps he has, but so probably have any number of stoned undergraduates; what's useful is producing good ideas that can be identified as such and distinguished from the dross.)
- andrewcooke 15y ago
  your "if it's so obvious why didn't they predict it?" question is a result of the way that the article is written which, in turn, is a consequence of the dependency of nasa (and astronomy and space research in general) on public goodwill to motivate funding. this isn't so exciting, and it isn't so shocking. it's a standing joke in astronomy / astrophysics that magnetic fields are complicated and misunderstood. whenever something can't be explained it's attributed to tangled magnetic fields. so complexity in the magnetic field - this "foam" - would not be a great shock. i have a phd in astronomy. one reason i left the field (apart from the small matter of being a pretty crappy astronomer) was that i felt it was a fraud. sure, it wastes much less money than the arms program and, yes, we do have non-stick pans now, but everything you see from the field is presented in a sexed-up, over-sold, exaggerated way to get more funding.
  - colkassad 15y ago
    Wow. Astronomy has always been my dream job so this view is surprising to me. What areas do feel are most exaggerated? Is dark energy a bunch of crap for instance? EDIT: My last sentences sounds snarky in retrospect...I meant do you feel that something like dark energy is played up.
    - andrewcooke 15y ago
      well, my views are probably at one extreme of the spectrum. dark matter and dark energy are both real problems. my beef isn't with the facts, but how they are presented. for example, i am very skeptical that understanding those will have any major practical consequences (the argument being that they are only significant on astronomical scales - if they were somehow available / useful / practical at human scales then they would be much easier to study). the "poetic" value of "understanding our universe" is something separate, of course. most astronomers i know (and i know a lot - my partner is a prof at u chile; chile has a lot of telescopes) love what they do. the thing that they dislike most is the extreme pressure for jobs - there are many more grads and postdocs than there are permanent positions. if you're considering a career in astronomy i would weigh that much more than my (cranky) opinions on funding. (also, you realise that going observing is not sexy? you're sat in a room somewhere, surrounded by computers, with no windows and a bunch of engineers, so tired that you've got mouth ulcers, eating crap food to stay awake as nothing much happens for hours on end. and the meaning of your data won't be clear until you've done a year more of processing and analysis... :o) ps the most over-sold field currently is planets: very popular; very sexy ("human inhabitable" etc etc); largely pointless. the "dark" problems are at least physics, rather than stamp collecting.
- wil2k 15y ago
  Upvoted, if only for mentiong Terence McKenna. That man was such a great thinker and ponderer (not to mention his huge vocabulary!) Even though I don't agree with him on every idea, boy, do I wish there were more extremely out of the box thinkers like him around. :)
lotharbot 15y ago
This seems like a sort of analog to the way hurricanes sometimes spawn tornadoes. At the boundary where the relatively still external air/space meet the rapidly spinning air/magnetic field generator, you get some turbulent interactions. I would love to see the equations or programs they're using to model this.
iwwr 15y ago
Is magnetic reconnection an established phenomenon, i.e. verified in a lab or at least strongly theoretically founded?
- sanxiyn 15y ago
  Apparently it is: http://mrx.pppl.gov/ http://mrx.pppl.gov/
yxhuvud 15y ago
Boring. With that title, I was expecting a monolith!
click170 15y ago
TL;DR "The sun's magnetic field extends all the way to the edge of the solar system," explains Opher. "Because the sun spins, its magnetic field becomes twisted and wrinkled, a bit like a ballerina's skirt. Far, far away from the sun, where the Voyagers are now, the folds of the skirt bunch up."
- rcthompson 15y ago
  That's just the setup. The point is a little later: "The crowded folds of the skirt reorganize themselves, sometimes explosively, into foamy magnetic bubbles."
demallien 15y ago
Interesting. All of a sudden a deep space radio telescope seems like a good scientific mission. It would be a fascinating discovery if we poked our noses out of the heliosheath just to discover that all of the missing mass in the universe was to be found in cosmic rays that never reach the inner solar system.
- atakan_gurkan 15y ago
  We have good reason to believe that the missing mass cannot be baryonic or fast moving massive particles. This comes from the abundance of elements, so it is indirect but is consistent with other findings. Furthermore, those cosmic rays would radiate when decelerated. I think if there was substantial mass in cosmic rays, we would see this radiation (did not make a calculation though). Note that the estimate for the mass of dark matter is about ~5 times the normal matter.
yaix 15y ago
It would be great if we would send one or two such probes out per year, in different directions. We could find so many interesting things. There are currently only two.
- ars 15y ago
  It would be especially great if we could send one out of the plane of the ecliptic (i.e. out of the "top" of the sun rather than the "side").
  - atakan_gurkan 15y ago
    Unfortunately in this case we cannot use the slingshot effect.
    - rfrey 15y ago
      Why not? Doesn't gravity work in the Z coordinate? But seriously - is there a physical reason not to send a probe "over the top" of the sun and fling it up, rather that out? [Edit] Note to self. Always consult Wikipedia before opening your trap on HN. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingshot_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingshot_effect
      - scott_s 15y ago
        I suspect the energy requirements to do so would so large as to be impractical.
      - bobmoretti 15y ago
        The "slingshot effect" or gravity assist involves a vessel robbing angular momentum from a large body. If you launch a vessel towards a planet (so that you come near but don't collide with it), then in the reference frame of the planet your vessel will leave with the same velocity going away from the planet as the velocity of your approach. However, since the planet was moving with respect to the Sun, you will have gained or lost velocity with respect to the Sun, depending on whether your space craft approached from behind or in front of the moving planet. Typically in these assist maneuvers, you wait for a large planet to be a bit ahead of the Earth's orbit. You launch towards that planet, and the gravity assist accelerates the space probe. Some of that acceleration will be tangential (mostly useless to you) but some will be radial, increasing your velocity from the Sun. The Voyager probes took advantage of a once-in-every 180 year planetary alignment, with all of the outer planets mostly aligned. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_2_path.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_2_path.png for a good illustration. All the outer planets are traveling in a counter clockwise direction, and you can clearly see the outer planets accelerating Voyager 2 tangentially. It should be clear that there will be a radial component to that acceleration as well. I don't think you can use the Sun in these circumstances; it doesn't have any angular momentum for you to steal. Incidentally, the discovery of this method is sheer brilliance; without using gravity assists it would have taken prohibitively long and required a prohibitive amount of propellant to reach the outer planets.
mrleinad 15y ago
I always wondered why those pictures depicted the sun's magnetic field limits as so clean cut from the rest of the galaxy.. didn't seem natural.. Maybe I should have followed my science instincts and perform a career in physics instead of System's Engineering
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Shenglong 15y ago
Watching that video, I couldn't help but wonder what Sheldon Cooper would say. It's unfortunate that NASA needs to work towards this level of public appeal just to try and secure funding.
orofino 15y ago
This seems to be the problem with relying solely on the private sector space exploration. With shuttles there is opportunity for revenue, with revenue come investors, with investors we can make progress. However, where is the revenue opportunity from either of these probes? Without a body that can be truly altruistic about projects and the benefit they'll provide, certain projects may never have/or my never again, become a reality. This kind of news makes me truly excited about the future. We have concrete knowledge about so little in this universe, the future is ripe with possibility if we can just show a little foresight.
- jerf 15y ago
  Nobody is proposing relying solely on the private sector for space exploration. But we'll be far better off harnessing market forces to make space access cheap then letting NASA just do the minimum stuff it can do with the suddenly-cheap tools it has access to then we will ever be trying to make the unaccountable jobs-program government space program provide the access. That has demonstrably failed. How many more probes would we have if we cut NASA's budget in half but they could just buy rocket space instead of building and maintaining the Shuttle and ISS at umpty bumbkin billion dollars each?
alphadog 15y ago
Could this offer some protection from a gamma ray burst?
- gammarator 15y ago
  Gamma-ray bursts happen all the time, and aren't dangerous to us--the Earth's atmosphere absorbs all of the gamma-rays.
velutinous 15y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, at that distance isn't it possible to get some unreliable data. The discovery is huge, but I'm just wondering

435 points by cromulent 15y ago

There is a Terence McKenna quote from the early 80's where he says that basically everything we know about the (largescale) universe comes from radio telescope data, and all the bits from all the data ever recorded have roughly the same amount of energy as a piece of cigarette ash falling about two feet. And this is what our entire understanding of the cosmos is based on. Not sure of the validity of the measure/comparison, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless. One does have to wonder though, if it's so obvious now why this phenomenon is happening then why didn't they predict it before seeing the data? Especially if we see the same thing in solar flares. It seems like it's generally a good idea to bet on the laziness of the universe, but beyond that anyone who pretends they know what's going on is probably full of shit. edit: The Terence McKenna quote is from this talk about his life: http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=1509 http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=1509 The talk in general is about his formative intellectual influences, and about why he finds psychedelic drugs to be intellectually interesting. He has another talk that's more about his views of physics, epistemology, and cosmology here: http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=297 http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=297 Perhaps my two all time favorite talks on any subject, albeit you need a high tolerance to ideas that are at times highly speculative. (And sometimes flat out wrong.)

noarchy 15y ago
There's a reason that he was on shows like Art Bell's. Not quite the guy I'd be quoting in a discussion of science.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  "Not quite the guy I'd be quoting in a discussion of science." He didn't really believe in mainstream science though, and the fact that he's actually able to make a really intelligent and often convincing argument for his views is part of what makes him so interesting. He was definitely interested in a lot of fringe stuff as well, but he always has really good explanations for why we should take various things seriously. Certainly he had a lot of faults, and was needlessly sloppy or overenthusiastic in many cases, but overall he's got to be one of the most intellectually interesting people of the last couple hundred years.
  - gjm11 15y ago
    > one of the most intellectually interesting people of the last couple hundred years. So, that would be since about 1800. In science and mathematics, that would put him in competition with Gauss, Einstein, Darwin, Maxwell, Turing. In philosophy: Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein. Not to mention harder-to-pigeonhole people like, say, Goethe. You think he belongs in the same list as those guys? Really?
    - Alex3917 15y ago
      It wouldn't make sense to compare him to those guys because he mostly didn't come up with big theories of his own. He was just very well read in all of the above and used their ideas combined with science to call bullshit on mainstream ideas, figure out which questions were the most important, and speculate about the nature of the universe and the human condition. (Much like a modern day Socrates.) Depending on what you give him credit for I do ultimately think he may be able to hold his own with any of the above, not in terms of coming up with novel theories, but in terms of being able to see what's important and set the agenda for humanity for the next 500 years. But again like Socrates (perhaps Plato) he came up with a lot of bullshit too, so it's important not to throw critical thinking out the window.
      - gjm11 15y ago
        Could you perhaps be more specific? I'm no McKenna expert, but so far as I can tell (1) calling bullshit on mainstream ideas, as such, is commonplace and does little to "set the agenda for humanity for the next 500 years" and (2) McKenna hasn't, in fact, provided any ideas we have any reason to think will stand us in better stead for the next 500 years than, say, the conventional wisdom would. So would you care to give some examples of what McKenna's said that will "set the agenda of humanity for the next 500 years" and explain your reasons for thinking they'll do so? (For the avoidance of doubt: (1) I am not claiming that the current conventional wisdom is in fact all we need for the next 500 years, just doubting whether what McKenna has to offer is any better; (2) I am not claiming that McKenna has had no good ideas or insights; perhaps he has, but so probably have any number of stoned undergraduates; what's useful is producing good ideas that can be identified as such and distinguished from the dross.)
andrewcooke 15y ago
your "if it's so obvious why didn't they predict it?" question is a result of the way that the article is written which, in turn, is a consequence of the dependency of nasa (and astronomy and space research in general) on public goodwill to motivate funding. this isn't so exciting, and it isn't so shocking. it's a standing joke in astronomy / astrophysics that magnetic fields are complicated and misunderstood. whenever something can't be explained it's attributed to tangled magnetic fields. so complexity in the magnetic field - this "foam" - would not be a great shock. i have a phd in astronomy. one reason i left the field (apart from the small matter of being a pretty crappy astronomer) was that i felt it was a fraud. sure, it wastes much less money than the arms program and, yes, we do have non-stick pans now, but everything you see from the field is presented in a sexed-up, over-sold, exaggerated way to get more funding.
- colkassad 15y ago
  Wow. Astronomy has always been my dream job so this view is surprising to me. What areas do feel are most exaggerated? Is dark energy a bunch of crap for instance? EDIT: My last sentences sounds snarky in retrospect...I meant do you feel that something like dark energy is played up.
  - andrewcooke 15y ago
    well, my views are probably at one extreme of the spectrum. dark matter and dark energy are both real problems. my beef isn't with the facts, but how they are presented. for example, i am very skeptical that understanding those will have any major practical consequences (the argument being that they are only significant on astronomical scales - if they were somehow available / useful / practical at human scales then they would be much easier to study). the "poetic" value of "understanding our universe" is something separate, of course. most astronomers i know (and i know a lot - my partner is a prof at u chile; chile has a lot of telescopes) love what they do. the thing that they dislike most is the extreme pressure for jobs - there are many more grads and postdocs than there are permanent positions. if you're considering a career in astronomy i would weigh that much more than my (cranky) opinions on funding. (also, you realise that going observing is not sexy? you're sat in a room somewhere, surrounded by computers, with no windows and a bunch of engineers, so tired that you've got mouth ulcers, eating crap food to stay awake as nothing much happens for hours on end. and the meaning of your data won't be clear until you've done a year more of processing and analysis... :o) ps the most over-sold field currently is planets: very popular; very sexy ("human inhabitable" etc etc); largely pointless. the "dark" problems are at least physics, rather than stamp collecting.
wil2k 15y ago
Upvoted, if only for mentiong Terence McKenna. That man was such a great thinker and ponderer (not to mention his huge vocabulary!) Even though I don't agree with him on every idea, boy, do I wish there were more extremely out of the box thinkers like him around. :)

lotharbot 15y ago

This seems like a sort of analog to the way hurricanes sometimes spawn tornadoes. At the boundary where the relatively still external air/space meet the rapidly spinning air/magnetic field generator, you get some turbulent interactions. I would love to see the equations or programs they're using to model this.

iwwr 15y ago

Is magnetic reconnection an established phenomenon, i.e. verified in a lab or at least strongly theoretically founded?

sanxiyn 15y ago
Apparently it is: http://mrx.pppl.gov/ http://mrx.pppl.gov/

yxhuvud 15y ago

Boring. With that title, I was expecting a monolith!

click170 15y ago

TL;DR "The sun's magnetic field extends all the way to the edge of the solar system," explains Opher. "Because the sun spins, its magnetic field becomes twisted and wrinkled, a bit like a ballerina's skirt. Far, far away from the sun, where the Voyagers are now, the folds of the skirt bunch up."

rcthompson 15y ago
That's just the setup. The point is a little later: "The crowded folds of the skirt reorganize themselves, sometimes explosively, into foamy magnetic bubbles."

demallien 15y ago

Interesting. All of a sudden a deep space radio telescope seems like a good scientific mission. It would be a fascinating discovery if we poked our noses out of the heliosheath just to discover that all of the missing mass in the universe was to be found in cosmic rays that never reach the inner solar system.

atakan_gurkan 15y ago
We have good reason to believe that the missing mass cannot be baryonic or fast moving massive particles. This comes from the abundance of elements, so it is indirect but is consistent with other findings. Furthermore, those cosmic rays would radiate when decelerated. I think if there was substantial mass in cosmic rays, we would see this radiation (did not make a calculation though). Note that the estimate for the mass of dark matter is about ~5 times the normal matter.

yaix 15y ago

It would be great if we would send one or two such probes out per year, in different directions. We could find so many interesting things. There are currently only two.

ars 15y ago
It would be especially great if we could send one out of the plane of the ecliptic (i.e. out of the "top" of the sun rather than the "side").
- atakan_gurkan 15y ago
  Unfortunately in this case we cannot use the slingshot effect.
  - rfrey 15y ago
    Why not? Doesn't gravity work in the Z coordinate? But seriously - is there a physical reason not to send a probe "over the top" of the sun and fling it up, rather that out? [Edit] Note to self. Always consult Wikipedia before opening your trap on HN. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingshot_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingshot_effect
    - scott_s 15y ago
      I suspect the energy requirements to do so would so large as to be impractical.
    - bobmoretti 15y ago
      The "slingshot effect" or gravity assist involves a vessel robbing angular momentum from a large body. If you launch a vessel towards a planet (so that you come near but don't collide with it), then in the reference frame of the planet your vessel will leave with the same velocity going away from the planet as the velocity of your approach. However, since the planet was moving with respect to the Sun, you will have gained or lost velocity with respect to the Sun, depending on whether your space craft approached from behind or in front of the moving planet. Typically in these assist maneuvers, you wait for a large planet to be a bit ahead of the Earth's orbit. You launch towards that planet, and the gravity assist accelerates the space probe. Some of that acceleration will be tangential (mostly useless to you) but some will be radial, increasing your velocity from the Sun. The Voyager probes took advantage of a once-in-every 180 year planetary alignment, with all of the outer planets mostly aligned. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_2_path.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_2_path.png for a good illustration. All the outer planets are traveling in a counter clockwise direction, and you can clearly see the outer planets accelerating Voyager 2 tangentially. It should be clear that there will be a radial component to that acceleration as well. I don't think you can use the Sun in these circumstances; it doesn't have any angular momentum for you to steal. Incidentally, the discovery of this method is sheer brilliance; without using gravity assists it would have taken prohibitively long and required a prohibitive amount of propellant to reach the outer planets.

mrleinad 15y ago

I always wondered why those pictures depicted the sun's magnetic field limits as so clean cut from the rest of the galaxy.. didn't seem natural.. Maybe I should have followed my science instincts and perform a career in physics instead of System's Engineering

deleted 15y ago

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deleted 15y ago

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Shenglong 15y ago

Watching that video, I couldn't help but wonder what Sheldon Cooper would say. It's unfortunate that NASA needs to work towards this level of public appeal just to try and secure funding.

orofino 15y ago

This seems to be the problem with relying solely on the private sector space exploration. With shuttles there is opportunity for revenue, with revenue come investors, with investors we can make progress. However, where is the revenue opportunity from either of these probes? Without a body that can be truly altruistic about projects and the benefit they'll provide, certain projects may never have/or my never again, become a reality. This kind of news makes me truly excited about the future. We have concrete knowledge about so little in this universe, the future is ripe with possibility if we can just show a little foresight.

jerf 15y ago
Nobody is proposing relying solely on the private sector for space exploration. But we'll be far better off harnessing market forces to make space access cheap then letting NASA just do the minimum stuff it can do with the suddenly-cheap tools it has access to then we will ever be trying to make the unaccountable jobs-program government space program provide the access. That has demonstrably failed. How many more probes would we have if we cut NASA's budget in half but they could just buy rocket space instead of building and maintaining the Shuttle and ISS at umpty bumbkin billion dollars each?

alphadog 15y ago

Could this offer some protection from a gamma ray burst?

gammarator 15y ago
Gamma-ray bursts happen all the time, and aren't dangerous to us--the Earth's atmosphere absorbs all of the gamma-rays.

velutinous 15y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, at that distance isn't it possible to get some unreliable data. The discovery is huge, but I'm just wondering