Brandon Q. Morris's Blog, page 6

Proxima Rising: New planet found near Proxima Centauri

Hm, the protagonists of my book “Proxima Rising” must have overlooked this: Around the star Proxima Centauri, which is closest to Earth, there are apparently even three planets orbiting. Already known were the planet Proxima b, about the size of Earth, on which Marchenko, Adam and Eve land in the novel, and which orbits its star once every eleven days in the habitable zone, as well as the planet candidate Proxima c, a mini-Neptune of seven times Earth’s mass, which is in a five-year orbit around...

Comfortable Mars travel by hibernation?

Imagine that you are first fed well for two weeks. Cakes, steaks, whatever you like – until you have gained at least ten kilograms. After that, you go to sleep. Your body temperature is lowered, and with it your basal metabolic rate. You slumber in your cool cave, surrounded on all sides by water containers, like a bear, until you are awakened again after three months. You have lost the excess weight. But you have also lost hardly any muscle mass, unlike if you had been forced to lie down for th...

Did a deadly poison lead to life on earth?

Compounds between carbon and nitrogen are called cyanides. The carbon atom is triple-bonded to the nitrogen atom. It therefore has one valence left to become hydrocyanic acid with hydrogen, for example, or potassium cyanide (“cyanide”) with potassium. These are usually highly toxic. however, there are more complex molecules in which the cyanide is so tightly bound that it is no longer toxic. For example, the additive E536 (potassium hexacyanidoferrate(II)) is approved as a food additive.

Cyanide...

How warm was the universe 880 million years after the Big Bang?

13.8 billion years ago, the universe was hotter than hot. Then it expanded and cooled down – to 2.725 Kelvin today, the temperature of the cosmic background radiation. From the moment the cosmic background radiation was released until today, the universe has expanded by a factor of about 1100. The cosmic background radiation, which originally had a temperature of about 3000 Kelvin and whose thermal radiation thus looked at that time as similar as the light of a halogen lamp, cooled down by the s...

Earth has a new companion – and why that’s exciting

Don’t worry: this story is not about the imminent destruction of Earth again. On the contrary: asteroids like 2020 XL5, discovered in 2020, are exciting because they could provide insights into Earth’s early past. 2020 XL5 is a so-called Trojan, as astronomers confirm now in the science magazine Nature (the assumption existed already before): An asteroid which accompanies Earth in its orbit.

If one considers only the system from sun and planet, there are several places, at which the attractive f...

Is there a highest temperature?

It cannot get colder than -273.15 degrees Celsius (0 Kelvin, -459,67 Fahrenheit). The reason physics gives for this is that temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of particles, i.e. it tells us something about how fast they are moving. When all motion stops, we have reached the minimum of the temperature scale, which by definition is 0. But is there also a highest temperature? One could assume that, because there is not only a minimum speed (0), but also a maximum speed (the speed of lig...

X(3872): A mysterious particle from the early days of the universe

At the very beginning of the universe, it was still very, very hot. At that time, matter did not consist of the particles we know today, such as protons or neutrons. If it becomes too hot for these particles (generally called hadrons), they start to boil and decompose into their components, like water becomes steam. For this it must be at least 1.7 trillion Kelvin (3 trillion Fahrenheit) hot, the so-called Hagedorn temperature. The particles which then float in the soup, the plasma, are on the o...

How a false vacuum could lead to the destruction of the universe

When physicists at CERN discovered the Higgs boson in 2012 with the help of the Large Hadron Collider, they not only confirmed the last important building block of the Standard Model of elementary particle physics, which explains how particles acquire their mass (through the Higgs field, through which they move as through a viscous mass). In the process, they also measured the weight of the Higgs particle, which is 125GeV (giga-electron volts). And this is not just a number: It means that our un...

Mimas has an ocean under the surface too

Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Titan have one, as do Jupiter’s moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa and the dwarf planet Pluto: a liquid ocean beneath their icy surfaces. Perhaps the same is true of Saturn’s moon Mimas, as a Southwest Research Institute scientist suspects. Dr. Alyssa Rhoden, a specialist in the geophysics of icy satellites, actually set out to prove that Saturn’s tiny, innermost moon is a frozen, inert satellite. Instead, she found evidence that the moon also has a liquid inner oce...

How many black holes are there in the universe?

A lot. If a star is heavy enough (i.e., it is still at least 2.5 solar masses after its supernova), then it continues to collapse until a black hole forms. Such stellar-sized black holes have been forming for quite some time, and more and more are forming. How many are there already? This intriguing question has been addressed by Alex Sicilia, a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Lapi and Dr. Lumen Boco of Italy’s Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati. In a first paper...