The Turin Shroud is genuine…

Is the Turin Shroud genuine after all? From beyond the grave, a startling new claim | Mail Online.

Ray Rogers studied the Shroud intensively in the 1970s with the STURP team, then accepted it was a hoax after the 1988 carbon-dating pinned the sample area’s date to the late Middle Ages… Ray Rogers was too good a scientist to settle for a simple answer and in a recently discovered “death-bed” video, from just before his 2005 death from cancer, he discusses how chemical analysis of the sample area and the rest of the Shroud shows the chosen area was actually a patch dyed and invisibly rewoven into the rest of the cloth. Invisible reweaving was a well-known Medieval skill, so it’s not an ad hoc claim, but is instead a reasonable conclusion from other lines of evidence.

Simply – the carbon-dating was correct, but what was dated wasn’t the Shroud. Decay behaviour of the original material can be used to date its probably age range, and what Rogers found was an age of 1300-3000 years NOT the presumed 600-700 years.

So, is it Jesus on the Shroud? Can we ever know for sure?

Nuclear-to-Electrical Direct Energy Conversion

A Research Program Nuclear Energy Conversion [abstract].

An interesting research abstract which dangles the promise of 40% efficient direct energy conversion. Question is: what to do with the rest of the energy? Gets tricky in space. However space-probes using smaller amounts of Pu-238 for the same amount of power is a laudable goal, and with 40% efficiency space-probes would be able to use plasma propulsion for higher delta-vee missions.

A few years ago the ESA proposed a Pluto Orbiter…

Pluto Orbiter Mission at arXiv

Detailed paper at ESA

…which would also look for more data on the Pioneer Anomaly. The outward bound leg would take 18 years (2016-2034) which is an awfully long time. New Horizons will get there in half the time, but can’t stop unfortunately.

Personally I think an Orbiter to Pluto is more interesting than coasting for years looking for signs of the Pioneer Anomaly (which recently has had cold-water poured on it after data reanalysis) so instead of coasting I’d like to see a new POP design with beefier RTGs using Direct Conversion. Might get the trip time down to ~9 years then.

Video: Knights Templar hid the Shroud of Turin, says Vatican – Times Online

Video: Knights Templar hid the Shroud of Turin, says Vatican – Times Online.

Seems the historians were right after all. The Shroud of Turin really did exist prior to its supposed 14th Century revelation as a cunningly painted hoax (a claim never verified at the time) and thus it can’t be as young as the C-14 date derived for it from one sampling area. Seems that the sample area was actually a late Medieval patch, invisibly rewoven into the Shroud to repair some old damage.

Life in the OOC

The Opik-Oort Cloud, which I’ll dub the OOC (oo-cee), begins from the far reaches of the Scattered Disk and extends out to almost a light-year or so. The effective temperature of any object in the OOC is going to be low. But what interesting marker-posts are there on the way to the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background at 2.735 K – the very coldest anything can permanently get in this Universe)?

Hydrogen, in its two stable isotopes of protium and deuterium, first liquefies, then freezes from 38.35 K (@16.65 bar) downwards. The two are separate in their marker points by a few degrees and a few bar, which makes for ease of separation when they’re cold enough.

Protium, Hydrogen deuteride & Deuterium Marker Points
Marker Point Protium Hydrogen deuteride Deuterium
Critical Point 32.97 K @ 13.15 bar … K @ … bar 38.35 K @ 16.65 bar
Melting Point 14.01 K @ 1.01325 bar … K @ … bar 18.55 K @ 1.01325 bar
Boiling Point 20.28 K @ 1.01325 bar 22.13 K @ 1.01325 bar 23.67 K @ 1.01325 bar
Triple Point 13.8033 K @ 0.07042 bar 16.60 K @ 0.1237 bar 18.73 K @ 0.1715 bar

Protium is plain hydrogen (H2), hydrogen deuteride (HD) is a protium atom plus a deuterium, since hydrogen is found as a diatomic molecule almost always. And deuterium (D2) is the handy fusion fuel isotope.

Deuterium is the Sun’s main power source. In the Sun plain old ionised protium (i.e. protons) is first fused into deuterium in a weak-force interaction, which spits out a neutrino as one of the protons swallows an electron and becomes a neutron. This is a pretty low energy and low probability reaction. The Sun’s core has a low energy-making rate per unit mass, but there’s a LOT of it, so the output is huge.

Then the deuterium has two options – bang into a proton and make Helium-3 (3He) or bang into another deuterium and make helium-3 or tritium. That reaction, D + D, and the similar 3He + 3He reaction, make most of the energy of the Sun, and happen very quickly. In very low mass stars the core temperature is too low for quick 3He reactions, so it builds up until the core heats up a bit more over trillions of years.

Back to the OOC… according to some cosmogonic modelling, there may be several Mars to Earth mass planets out there, thrown outwards by the migration of Neptune and Uranus to their current orbits. Such planets would have retained their original hydrogen/helium atmospheres, and if they’ve sufficiently chilled to ambient, then lakes and seas of different hydrogen isotopes could well exist on them. Imagine the boon that such easy access to liquid deuterium or its ice would be. However one romantic vision – the Enzmann Starship – can’t be obtained. To recap, Robert Enzmann imagined huge starships using D-D fusion with the deuterium stored as a great big frozen ball and the starship attached. Problem is that frozen hydrogen isn’t hard. Instead it’s a soft solid, perhaps more like soft butter than the hard frozen water we typically call ‘ice’. No starship could push against the stuff and not sink into it…

Our Exploding Solar System

Tunguska Blast Caused By Exploding Comet.

Edward Drobyshevski – one possible spelling from Russian to English – is a space scientist with three main ideas…

(1) The planets, and everything else orbitting the Sun, formed from the ill-formed remains of a star-that-should-have-been i.e. proto-Jupiter.

(2) Ice can be electrolysed into hydrogen/oxygen by ambient plasma currents and explosive mixtures of hydrogen/oxygen can be trapped in the ice, to one day be explosively reunited, blasting off a moon’s icy crust to form short period comets.

(3) Dark Matter is Planck mass remnant black-holes with a charge of about 10 fundamental charge units i.e. they look like a very, very heavy nucleus.

…the article referenced above is based on number (2). It’s a sobering speculation, that the ice moons might potentially explode into a rain of comets, showering Earth with a Tunguska class impactor every day for years. Needless to say, but we should be very careful when exploring icy bodies in space, else they might erupt. The Deep Impact space probe, for example, showed signs of a chemical explosion adding significant amounts of energy to the impactor probe’s collision energy.

Drobyshevski’s work can be found in abstract, and often online, via NASA’s Astrophysical Database Service… Here …(you should see the size of the URL for that link.)

Dynamical warp drives… Super-Toasters!

[0904.0141] Semiclassical instability of dynamical warp drives.

In this Universe there seems to be a conspiracy between the quantum and the general relativistic regimes preventing one from curving space-time and zipping around Faster-than-Light. Some 15 years ago Miguel Alcubierre caught the attention of the physics and SF communities by proposing a warp-metric of space-time that allowed one to move around at speeds above lightspeed. Very quickly several arguments against this prospect were advanced, and almost as quickly several work-arounds past the difficulties were counter-proposed.

However, as the authors discuss, a somewhat more serious difficulty arises because of the horizons that the warp-metric creates. These horizons act just like black-hole Event Horizons and so they produce Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation is normally quite benign as most horizons are pretty large – for example, a collapsed star’s horizon is typically 10 km across. But in a warp-metric there are two horizons – forward and aft, contracting and expanding – and to produce them very thin shells of “negative energy” are needed. And because they’re so very thin (~10-35 metres) the Hawking temperature is very, very high – i.e. a large fraction of the Planck Temperature (1032 K.) Ouch!

All is not lost. If the space-warping horizons could be made thicker, then their temperature will be much, much lower. A metre wide and they’re cooler than the CMB. But how to do so??? Originally the warp-bubble walls were close together to create a negative energy density via the Casimir Effect. If we don’t create negative energy that way, then how?

On the bright side, the “Toaster effect” doesn’t occur when going slower than light. So “field drives” based on warping space-time are still OK, if you can make the negative energy to create a warp and you stay under ‘c’. So a “Star Trek” style impulse engine is still a possibility.

ET Go Home… Yikes!

Welcome On Planet Earth?.

A disquieting little essay about the motivations of interstellar travellers. They’ve built a billion ton spaceship, travelled for decades, and we’re going to assume they’ll let us have Planet Earth to ourselves? With fusion-powered gigawatt lasers they’d be essentially unstoppable – think Wells’ Heat-Ray backed by fast and smart electronics to target our fastest projectile weapons. As Bender put it so well, “We’re Boned!”

‘Consciousness signature’ discovered?

‘Consciousness signature’ discovered spanning the brain – health – 17 March 2009 – New Scientist.

A New Scientist report based on a PLoS article and naturally it has stirred up a hornet’s nest of heated discussion. Philosophically the mind is the last bastion of mystery in a world once populated by gods and spirits, now populated by… just us and other evolved “biological machines”.

Out of My Way, I’m a Gas Giant!

Asteroid belt mystery solved | COSMOS magazine.

One of the biggest surprises of the past 14 years of exoplanet discoveries is the extremely close orbits Gas Giants and Neptune-class planets are being found in. This has supported the once theoretical process of planet migration – when a planet increases or decreases its orbit in interaction with the planetesimal debris around it. Now migration is being used to predict where the natural space-junk is going to end-up and how long it will survive. Renu Maholtra and David Minton have simulated the migration of Jupiter and its effects on the Main Belt asteroids, discovering that a deadly spray of them was produced nearly 4 billion years ago. Fortunately for their theory this fits exactly what is known as the Late Heavy Bombardment.

The Solar System is a big place, but we’re huddled close to the Sun and we think we’re in the best bit. During the Great Migration that drew Jupiter inwards and flung Uranus and Neptune outwards, a multitude of small objects were propelled far from the Sun. Most numerous of these displaced icy planetesimals are the residents of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt and Opik-Oort Cloud. But, according to some models, there could be much larger objects amongst the flotsam and jetsam of Gas Giants jostling for stability. Alan Stern, former chief investigator of the New Horizons probe to Pluto, has opined that a thousand Pluto-like worlds, up to Mars-Earth in size, could be out there in the Far Dark Places. They might be easy to terraform than launching vessels off to other stars. Vast light-weight mirrors could provide them with heat-and-light from the distant Sun.