Our science guru keeps up with all the latest news just for you
Well, the kids are back in school, and we’re about half way through Summer, so it must be time for another Research Roundup!
Parker Solar Probe
The biggest science news of the summer is the launch (just days ago) of the Parker Solar Probe. Unlike previous missions to the Sun, which orbit our star from a relatively safe distance, the Parker Solar Probe is actually going to dive into the Sun’s atmosphere and study it directly!
Over the next several years, the Parker Solar Probe will use a series of gravity assists from Venus to slow down and get closer and closer to the Sun. (It has to slow down because, when it leaves the Earth, it’s got the same orbital velocity. This means it will remain in the same basic orbit if it doesn’t burn off some of that speed.)
But, that same change in orbit will put it on a new path around the Sun, one in which it picks up a lot of speed. Eventually, it will be the fastest moving object ever created by humans, with a speed of about 430,000 miles per hour. (Which is about 125 miles per second! Imagine driving to Atlanta in one second.)
And, as I said, it’s going to get close to the Sun, really close. At its closest point, it will be just 3.83 million miles from the Sun. That’s inside the orbit of Mercury, and about seven times closer than any previous mission. At that distance, it will be exposed to more heat and radiation than any other probe before it.
To survive, it’s been outfitted with a special, 4.5-inch thick heat shield made of a carbon-composite material. This can withstand temperatures up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, and will keep the probe’s instruments at a constant 89 degrees, even at closest approach.
The point of the whole mission is to study the Sun’s corona and solar wind. This should help us understand why the Sun’s corona is hotter than its surface, and, hopefully, help us better predict the coronal mass ejections that occasionally shoot towards the Earth. (Which could destroy our technological infrastructure if a really big one was to hit us.)
Plus, with any luck, we’ll get some spectacular new images of Venus too!
Sound Waves…Curve Up?
Have you ever seen a cartoon where the echo of a voice or sound is shown as floating upwards? Well, a new theoretical model claims that this might be closer to the truth than was previously suspected.
A trio of researchers at Columbia University published a paper in July where they conclude that, sound waves, rather than being “just” vibrations in a medium, actually have gravitational mass. In fact, they have negative gravitational mass. So, as sound waves move, they actually drift upwards!
At this point, this is all just theoretical, as the mass of these waves is calculated as being far too small for current technology to actually detect. But, the paper also lays out some experimental setups that could possibly detect them in the not too distant future.
(Also, the paper is so new that it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. But, it’s caused quite a stir with its TL;DR conclusion of “Sound is basically Anti-Gravity!”, so it should get picked apart fairly quickly.)
Living On Mars? Not So Fast.
We end this roundup with some sad news. New research has shown that there is a strong possibility that Mars doesn’t contain enough Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in either it’s polar caps or beneath its surface for us to effectively Terraform it for future human habitation.
Simply put, there’s not enough CO2 stored there to warm the place up enough so that liquid water (and people) can exist on the surface. Currently, Mars’ atmospheric pressure is 0.6 percent that of Earth’s. Current data suggests that, even if we dug up all the CO2 trapped on Mars and pumped it into the atmosphere, it would raise the pressure to just 6.9 percent of Earth’s. That’s nowhere near enough to sustain water, or people.
However, I have an idea for a possible solution: The atmosphere of Venus is almost entirely CO2, and there’s entirely too much of it. So, why not transport some of that CO2 from Venus to Mars and get two new planets for the price of one? It would be a massive project, for sure, but, it could give us two new places for Humanity to call home.
Steven W. Disbrow is the proprietor of “Improv Chattanooga” on the South Side of town. He also creates e-commerce systems and reads comic books when he’s not on stage acting like a fool.