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Astronomers Solve Magnetic Fields Mystery
An anonymous reader writes "It is a long-standing and unsolved mystery why 80% of all planetary nebulae are not spherical. Theories suggest that magnetic fields play a role in shaping planetary nebulae. A team of astronomers from Germany has now discovered the first direct clue that magnetic fields might indeed create these remarkable shapes. Planetary nebulae are expanding gas shells that are ejected by Sun-like stars at the end of their lifetimes."
If 80% aren't spherical one must ask why the other 20% are NOT.
"The First Direct Clue" While this may seem monumental, there will be many, many more clues and each will most likely lead the researches to a completely different conclusion.
And as usual, when one mystery is solved another springs forward to take its place. So it goes until we determine intelligent design really was behind everything to begin with after all. :)
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Now explain why the magnetic fields are shaped that way. :-)
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insert sig here,here, and here
[clip] has now discovered the first direct clue that magnetic fields might indeed create these remarkable shapes
When pushed for an explanation of why the crab nebula was so different, one scientist responded with a huff and withdrew into his basement office.
In other news...
A couple in the Hamptons has asked the same group of scientists to determine why socks dissapear in the dryer. Film at eleven.
Is it the magnetic fields also that makes it so in a nebula, a part of it can look more red than another. Let's say in one part of a nebula, the field is stronger and more matter/gas is attracted within that field (if thats how it works.) would that then create all the variations of whichever color that the star creates depending on how and how much gas is spreaded throughout the field?
I have to say it's nice to see magnetic fields getting more praise than usual! All my professors tell me is "magnetic fields aren't important and blah blah blah so don't worry or care about them" ... then again I'm currently majoring in Electrical Engineering. :)
It will be great to see what else unfolds in terms of the importance magnetic fields play in the structure of the universe!
Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...
Has anyone noticed a pattern in scientific achievement?
If you mean did the Chinese have a working sundial before the western world was formed, thus getting points on the board long ago,...yes, I see a pattern.
Museum guy: Because you touch yourself at night!
Give it time. All those smart kiddies have to grow up first. And all our dunces have to as well. Unless your suggesting this disparity in raw ability not in favor of the west existed 50 - 75 years ago to the extent that it does now.
Plasma physicists have been saying this for a long time.
I'm confused. The title suggests they've solved the mystery, but didn't they just find a huge clue? I mean, I can't come upon a murder, find a footprint, and say I finished. There's much more to it than that. Yes, this is a huge step, but no, everything isn't "solved." In fact, they could be completely wrong...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Whatever would iron have to do with this? This is about plasma movement in a magnetic field. Or did you think star explosions ejected nice, neutral iron atoms? Here's a clue: the magnetic moment of iron is caused by its outer electrons.
What I've always wondered is why the orbits of objects as parts of galaxies, solar systems, or even planet/moon systems pretty much share a common plane. And then, even the rotation of the bodies themselves also line up for the most part.
Why don't they all rotate and orbit in any direction they want?
Does gravity just even this all out over time when the objects pass near each other?
Ask astronomers again in a couple of months if they all agree if the morphology of planetary nebulae is solved by the magnetic field alone.
It's cool that they had done POLARIMETRIC measurement of these objects (that's far more dead than UV spectroscopy), however. Especially there is a star like Eta Carinae which seems to have a weaker magnetic field and its bi-polar structure is being driven by its stellar wind alone.
Basic breakthroughs in science are both uncommon and the result of a few abnormally smart people.
The assesments of math skills in highschool students is measuring the state of the masses, not the ability of the elite.
Perhaps Taiwan panders to the needs of the many to the detriment of the uber-smart too much, but then again perhaps America goes too far in the other direction.
Also, I would be careful about claiming the compassion card for a country where welfare and social support are dirty words.
(IANA astromoner, just a physicist)
You have to consider where they got the angular momentum to begin with:
A solar system isn't a bunch of objects that happen to be in the same place. It was originally a gas cloud (perhaps a nebula), which had a little bit of rotation (from whatever source: nova, magnetic fields, or the like). The gas particles, while very dilute from our standards, still interact enough to equalize their (average) velocities. As it collapses, conservation of angular momentum makes it spin faster, until it's dense enough for objects (asteroids, planets, sun) to condense. And since they all condensed out of that same cloud, they're all approximately aligned to the same orbital plane that the original cloud had. (The same explanation applies to why the axes of rotation are also mostly aligned.)
Moderate up all the posts above.
It's about angular momentum and it's a hotly debated field of study in astronomy (not much in astrophysics).
"Also, I would be careful about claiming the compassion card for a country where welfare and social support are dirty words."
yeah, well first of all, West != America.
Secondly, if you are trying to imply that welfare and social support are dirty words in America, umm get a grip, they aren't. The US has welfare and social support programs for the people that need them, not for the lazy.
It wasn't that long ago that scientists thought the world was flat, the stars were fixed in the sky, and everything revolved around the Earth....I wonder how stupid scientists will think we are 2000 years from now...
Firstly:
"West != America."
To quote the grandparent:
"Americans in particular are outstanding on the social sciences, compassion, and good citizenry"
Secondly:
"The US has welfare and social support programs for the people that need them, not for the lazy"
If everyone is such a good citizen, why would you need to check for laziness before being compassionate?
I saw a lot of posts here "you can't say this because somebody did that". And as other posts mentioned you cannot compare large scale 'skills' against an isolated incident(this one) to draw you conclusion.
However, lucky for you somebody has already done the research and his data suggest exactly what you conjecture. If you take all the discoveries and advances in human acheivement, and you tally them all up with the type of society that borne them. You see that the societies that produce the greatest quantity of human advances are catholic and prodestant societies.
A lot of people do not like this conclusion, so they attempt to attack the motivations for making the argument. However the data remains facts and one cannot change the facts. They also say things like "how can one value acheivement X over Y", Murray explains it all and even when the cards are stacked against him his data comes out on top.
Murray's other book addresses the issue of your test scores point. However, a lot of people do not like the conclusions brought by the data in this book either. Feel free to read, but don't talk about the stuff in polite conversation, people get reeeeeeaally angry.
- "Never let a computer tell me shit." - DelTron Zero
Because ummm everyone isnt a good citizen?
Thus the name 'Crab Nebula'? I see now, thanks for clearing that up.
You sir are a typical dumb idiot, exactly the kind that is destroying the Wikipedia through not deferring to authority despite your ignorance, as per a recent Slashdot story. If you don't know something, why do you feel the need to cast doubt on those who do?
The poster was right, the Crab is a supernova remnant. "The supernova was noted on July 4, 1054 A.D. by Chinese astronomers, and was about four times brighter than Venus, or about mag -6. According to the records, it was visible in daylight for 23 days, and 653 days to the naked eye in the night sky."
If you knew anything at all about astronomy you'd know that you can't conclude anything from the naming of astronomical objects, since they are often named long before their physical nature is known.
Four words:
Correlation.
Is.
Not.
Causation.
Have a nice day...
I, for one, welcome our new space-time continum warping magnetic field overlords.
From Publishers Weekly
Co-author with the late Richard Herrnstein of the neo-racialist book The Bell Curve, Murray returns with a mammoth solo investigation that is less likely to spur controversy than provoke a simple "so what?" The book attempts to demonstrate, through the use of basic statistical methods such as regression analysis, that Europeans have overwhelmingly dominated accomplishment in the arts and sciences since about 1400. To this end, he has assembled a laundry list of people and events from various reference texts, and generated numerous graphs and rankings of genius figures: is Beethoven "more important" than Bach? Leonardo Da Vinci than Michelangelo? A major problem with this approach-beyond equating "importance" with the number of times an artist or work is referenced in texts-is that the reference texts used as data sources do not themselves seem free of cultural bias or chauvinism: without asking "important to whom," the Western-centric data are a self-fulfilling prophecy. Another problem is that other, less affluent cultures may have had many plundered or lost works, or may not have a tradition of naming writers and other luminaries-or keeping track of and promoting their works through secondary material. Further, plenty of attention is lavished on forms such as painting but comparatively little to architecture or to non-Western forms of music. The book's cursory treatment of Africa (outside of Egypt) also leaves more to be desired. Murray claims to have corrected for these factors, and finds that Western culture still dominates "accomplishment" either way. The chapters describing achievement at the book's beginning are, at many points, well-written and informative, but they end up clouded with the latter part of the book's numerical hubris and grand pronouncements.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Besides, even if one ignores the self-fulfilling nature of the data, it seems far more likely (advancements mostly coming from heretics, and all) that if there really is correlation, it would be the hatred of church dogma that spurned scientific advancements by and large.
For a good discussion of the games Murray and others have played with the numbers see "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould. The "facts" in Murray's books are about as solid as the "facts" in polictical shout shows.
"Nebulae" --- hahahahah
It's not surprising, I have seen people saying "viri" for plural of virus. More even idiotic, because virus is fourth declination word, it means, the nominative plural form is "VIRUS" and not "VIRI"!! Viri comes from vir, which is related to man, that's where the word "virile" comes from.
Sun like stars do not explode into planetary nebulae. As far as I recall, small stars, like Sun, will expand into "red giants", then shrink to "white dwarfs" and eventually cool down to be the "brown dwarfs". Never exploding...
People called Romani they go the house?
Not to mention gunpowder, eyeglasses, paper, and a lot of other innovations modern society would not function without. In fact, China was doing quite well in the "technologically advanced civilizations of the planet" club until a Mongol hell-bent on revenge showed up and wiped a sizable fraction of the worlds population off the map.
Everything is magnetic, even my personality!
(Redundant, off topic, and has little or nothing to do with the article but why not!)
to my superficial observation, the nebulae look remarkably similair to giant CELLs.
has anyone ever tried comparing Nebulae to EMBRYO development?
embryonic cosmology -- just like you don't explain the movement
of a compass needle out of the surrounding totality,
can we find any connections between Nebulae
and the processes of embryology?
best regards,
j.
ah, go ahead, mod me down...
i know i'm wasting karma with such a ridiculous idea.
nobody wants to hear anything really new.
Once upon a time there was a telescope operator who was very nervous and when rain clouds threatened Paranal one night her nervousness turned to panic and she could not break from her very long closing script and just close the damn doors no matter the state of the system and hundreds of gallons of rain fell onto the eight meter collecting surface and washed through the central hole in the mirror and down filling the large yellow camera the size of four refrigerators mounted below. That instrument lovingly refered to on Cerror Paranal as The Yellow Submarine is FORS1--the one that intercepted the photons that caused you to read this today.
I had always wondered about this when looking at nebulae like Eta Carinae or the Cat's Eye Nebula (google them if you want pictures, I'm not finding a link for you). I believe both of those are actually supernova remnants, not planetary nebulae, but it still fascinated me that neither was symmetrical. For lack of any better explanation, I assumed it was largely due to differences in gravitational forces in different directions. Still, I didn't expect that alone to be sufficient to explain why Eta Carinae appears in some wavelengths as two seperate, spherical lobes. Perhaps magnetic fields contribute to these cases, as well.
For a good discussion of the games Murray and others have played with the numbers see "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould. The "facts" in Murray's books are about as solid as the "facts" in polictical shout shows.
I have not read Mr Gould and will put him on my list. However, if you had read the Bell Curve you would know that in the book Murray and Co. include a list of common attacks people would use on their book. They systematically go through and detail how even in the cases propsed their analysis is still correct.
It appears as though Gould tries to discredit IQ measurment in general. But from the breif it seems he has his own aspirations:
"engaging prose dissects the motivations behind those who would judge intelligence, and hence worth, by cranial size, convolutions, or score on extremely narrow test"
Attacking ones motivations still does not refute their position. Also, I would be interested in seeing how Gould proposes we explain the mental capacity difference between a retarded person and a small child.
- "Never let a computer tell me shit." - DelTron Zero
Err, well. According to the filing system in my brain, virus comes from, rather unsurprisingly, the latin word, errr... virus - (mainly meaning poison) BTW - those of us who pluralise virus that way tend to pluralise it to virii, which is not the same as viri. As to WHY we use Latin? Errm, because it's cool?
"The Galileo Seven". Somebody nominate G. Roddenberry for a (posthumous) Nobel Prize in physics!
check this site out for great astronomy pics. planetary nebulae, galaxies, emission nebulae, comets, etc..... http://willmclaughlin.astrodigitals.com/
i can't think of a witty signature, so i won't try.
..."It Just Evolved".
There are many, many physical situations in which Intelligent Design is easily the top Ockham's Razor candidate.
But thanks for yet another example of argument from ridicule. <sarcasm>We really, really needed another one of those</sarcasm>
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Once you saw off the God section and park it to one side, you are free to discuss more kinds of design possibilities than would otherwise be acceptable, and also to ask the "everything is an accident" team to bisect their own question, "Did everything happen at random - because there is no God?"
Once you saw off the materialism section of that question and park it to one side, you are free to explore possibilities which might otherwise raise "you're a creationist!" witch-hunts and scorn such as the one exemplified so clearly in the parent and great-grandparent posts.
The fear of being branded a religious nutter has had a widespread chilling effect on a lot of novel primary science. A very few stubbornly principled people have decided that, ridicule or no, they have to follow their conscience, but they are rare birds indeed, archaeopteryx-like in their singularity.
For the vast majority, even the unwritten requirement to include flights of fancy about what evolution may have achieved or brainless organisms may have "decided" to do in otherwise sober scientific reporting - to demonstrate one's religious commitment to materialism, rather than to seriously illuminate any technical point - undermines the authority of the data and uses up space and effort which would be better dedicated to actual research.
On top of that, who knows how much research has been self-censored or mis-reported for fear of charges of heresy and the consequent burning of a career at the academic stake?
Here, it seems that you're demonstrating a will to be one of the Ignatius Loyolas of the holy cult of Materialism. Is there such a thing as The Materialist Oath?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There's lots of fucking in the States too. That doesn't mean you necessarily mention it in public. It's a dirty word... you have to be careful to find people who share your worldview before you do.
Welfare is a curse in the states. "Welfare bums", "the welfare neighborhood", etc.
with gravity alone you can explain why the nebula would form a disk. The total angular momentum in the system is such-and-such so over long periods of time the interactions of the particles will form a rotating disk with the same angular momentum. The real question is why they don't always have cylendrical symmetry.
Gould doesn't ever deny that intelligence exists or that varys from person to person, he takes a close look at the notion that most of what we call intelligence can be expressed as a single number. The first IQ test was developed by Binet to diagnose mental problems in children and he explictly rejected the idea that the test could serve as a measuring tool to determine intelligence in an entire population. Early 20th century American researchers developed some statistical tools (factor analysis) and claimed that the principle component that comes out of this is intelligence and is valid for everyone. But mathematically there isn't any reason to favor covering the most variance in the principle component as opposed to spreading it out over more components. In fact, there were big fights when some researchers did just that and claimed that intelligence was multidimensional (ie, there was verbal, spatial, etc). The mathematics can't decide it because the different views are mathematically the same. At least in Gould's telling, despite a number of attempts, there never was any biology or other independent evidence to decide it. He makes the undebatable point that just because you can calculate a principle component doesn't mean that component can be identified with something real. So to meet Gould's objections, Murray would have to either show solid evidence that there is a reason to choose single dimensional intelligence over multidimensional or show that that distinction makes no difference to the analysis. Note that Bell Curve appeared about 10 years after Mismeasure of Man, so there is certainly no reason for Murray to not know of that argument.
You can read Murray's responses to the issues Gould raises here
- "Never let a computer tell me shit." - DelTron Zero
Thanks for the link. If this is the best response he can come up with (I'm thinking specifically of the statistical questions) I'm glad I didn't waste my money on his book.
Wow, thanks for posting the ICR oath. It really gives an idea of the way these people operate.
Can you even conceive of a serious/mainstream scientific institute having an unchangeable statement of doctrine which must be sworn by all new hires? A medical school which asks students to swear that influenza is caused by unfortunate conjunctions of stars, and not to think of proposing any alternative?
The very idea of swearing a list of assertions of fact which cannot be altered is by definition antiscientific.
Being an electrical engineer, the difference between the circular and parabolic nebulae would seem a difference between positive and negative. It could be different stages of the decline. It would seem to me that if the remains of the star continue to get more dense (supposedly light can't escape), more electrons could be gathered. The hyperbolic ones would be in the process of the nebulae being sucked slowly back to the dense mass. The parts that lost electrons would be drawn closer while pushing away the more negative outer ones that haven't lost electrons yet. The ones that aren't dense enough to pull more electons in gravitational wise would remain of a global nature.
Now, when are they going to figure out gravity. In fact, it would be nice if they could figure out how that attract/push-away magnetic thing works. It's strange that the two phenomenons seem to be unrelated. While we're at it, why do light and electricity have approximately the same velocity?
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
Just to make sure that both sides of the argument start off on the same page...
Underpinning every theory are axioms. The key axiom of materialism is that matter exists (either always, temporarily, or in a recurring fashion) in a form which allows it to randomly recombine over the course of a few billion years to produce space and hydrogen, which coalesces to produce stars and planets. These in turn must possess the properties which allow them, over the course of a billion or so years, to produce protozoa, petunias, puppies and philosophers. These properties must exist from the start, in either actual or latent form. Are we agreed on that?
The key axiom of Intelligent Design is that either this assemblage which became matter and finally life arrived with a designer, or a designer built it from scratch, which in turn implies that the designer either always existed or was supplied from an external source. Still OK?
At first it might appear that the matter plus designer postulate fails Ockham's Razor because it looks like the materialist axiom plus a designer. This simplistic surface view of the comparison ignores the ability to displace uncannily precise universal requirements (mathematically, the term is "impossibly precise") for material properties into the designer, allowing a much broader range of properties for any starting material.
The designer-makes-matter postulate simply displaces all of the required specificity into the designer, and any specificity in the universe at large simply derives from said designer. Mathematically, this would make the requirements much more manageable, but it is intellectually disturbing because it smacks too much of a magic wand, like the carefully-unexplained antigravity or warpdrives trotted out by sci-fi authors to make their stories workable.
However, at the end of this dissection, an embarrassing observation remains: by themselves, none of these postulates is on an overview scale any better than another. They all require axiomatic starting conditions which we cannot directly measure, only infer, and they all end up with a complex and very specific end condition. This is the precise fate which awaits the "panspermia" theories.
The devil, as they say, is in the details. <digression>Wherever someone says this, I think of Maxwell's Demon. Cute concept, and a great pity that it cannot work.</digression>
Adopting one PoV to the exclusion of the others can handicap your science quite a bit. I'm sure your aware of the classic examples of this, like J Harlan Bretz, but fewer people are aware of what can happen if you decouple your theology from your earth-history at a different point. No, I'm not seriously proposing Senapathy's theory as workable, but it does have the mathematical advantage over either uniformitarianism or punk-eek, and seriously exploring the ramifications of it or scenarios tangential to it might be scientifically fruitful.
The point I'm orbiting with that little example is: considering the available menu of alternatives to be completely explored is as much blind dogma as the countless volumes of papal Canon Law. If you can accept that, then you're well on your way to understanding why it is so counter-productive to dismiss ID principally because it is heresy according to your own canon. Or to put it more bluntly, because it worries you.
If you are to dismiss it at all, it should be dismissed on far less emotive grounds, and you should take care that the baby stays when the bathwater goes. In particular, when you can satisfactorily explain the existence of universal conditions so singularly appropriate to life as we know it (no, the anthropic principle cuts no ice here, it's a statistical abomination), you'll be in a position to demand satisfac
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You misrepresent ID if you uphold "a period of time" as being a long time, since some ID proponents argue that many of the macro changes are only possible in an instant, in which case what's the big difference between a macro change and an in-toto design?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing