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The Solar Oxygen Crisis
Astrophysicist writes "The Astrophysical Journal this week published an article about the abundance of oxygen in the Sun. Oxygen is the third most abundant atom in the universe, behind hydrogen and helium. Most of the hydrogen and helium was formed in the Big Bang, which means that oxygen is the element most frequently produced by nuclear fusion reactions in the interior of the stars. The solar abundance of oxygen, which is key in astrophysics because of its use as a calibration reference for other objects, was thought to be well established since the 80s. However, recent evidence indicates that it has been overestimated by almost a factor of two. A revision of the solar oxygen abundance would have a cascading effect on other important elements, such as carbon, nitrogen and neon, whose abundance is only known relative to that of oxygen. In addition to the impact on the chemical composition of many stars, models of solar interior may require some reworking in order to be consistent with the new data."
That amount of oxygen is just under the amount needed to create a stable atmosphere for human life on the sun.
I guess there's always Mercury.
Pity that's just abstract. I'd like to read a little more on this.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
This takes my breath away!
Before being swallowed by a red giant then? Or is amount of Helium proportionally larger?
While I can see how this may involve the need to change some parts of the theories of how a star works I'm not sure I see how, either here or in the referenced paper in the Astrophysical Journal, this qualifies as a "crisis". In essence they're saying that the results of their current observations indicate that previous theories need to be modified. How is this is a crisis?
You can find the full article of this at the Astrophysics Preprint server. See here.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
Damn those revisionist scientists! Can't they just leave the sun alone?! Changing the oxygen content of stars sounds like it's dangerous!
and I thought my cascading errors were bad!
Wait for it...3, 2, 1:
We will now see a bunch of programmers and geeks try to display their scientific understandings and fail miserably. Usually because they read a chapter or 2 of Hawkings, or they know how to spell Fiene...Feinama...that really cool and funny fizicist...phyzi...fiscis...you know, someone who studies how the Universe works.
I think we'd be better off sharing bio-diesel recipes and gossiping about our favorite TV series that are due for cancellation.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I think they are saying now that we know this, the sun will decide to burn out. Sounds like a crisis to me. I think the only solution is to put the sun in a large enough box so as no energy escapes, so it will never burn out as long as we keep the box shut. What is the worst that could do?
Since when does needing to rethink a few scientific models, and go back and gather some data again now that we know we might have measured wrong constitue a crisis?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I thought it was gonna be something else Bush and Rove were at fault for.
Headline:
Sun has less Oxygen that thought, women and children hit hardest.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Most of the hydrogen and helium was formed in the Big Bang, which means that oxygen is the element most frequently produced by nuclear fusion reactions in the interior of the stars.
The latter doesn't necessarily follow from the former. Helium abundance got a headstart due to the big bang, but I believe that helium is also the element most frequently produced by nuclear fusion.
Can we please reserve the term "crisis" for events where lives are at stake, and not when some astrophysicists are going to need to re-compute some scientific models?
The paper. (TFA has a link to the ApJ version, but it tells me that I have an institutional subscription, which presumably means that those outside of academia do not.)
Maybe, someone can clue in eveyone else on exactly how fundamental less oxygen is to particular theories? Do any of them just seem like crap now, or can all the numbers just be slashed to make the same point?
I'd type more, but I'm already feeling like a highschool student transcibing my thoughts into a stream of consciousness journal. Offending single digit percentages of the population or less seems safe.
Is there any risk that, due to this miscalculation, that the sun might explode (or worse?!)
Reckless scientists!! You ruined everything.
Too bad we can't just fly up to the sun and take a sample, eh?
Ah man funny post. Mod parent up.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
The general consensus for decades has been that the solar interior and its basic nuclear chemistry was pretty well understood. This finding, if it holds up, will affect virtually all solar physics relative to our own solar system and much, perhaps most, of the physics we imagine going on in remote stars. For instance, the solar neutrino problem (not seeing enough of the right kinds of neutrinoes here on earth) may be strongly affected by this - we thought there was a "neutrino problem" precisely because we were extremely confident we knew the processes in the sun to high precision. This means everything has to be looked at, again, in regard to solar neutrinoes, and most other aspects of solar physics. As large a disagreement from previous results as this means we really don't understand the sun as well as we previously thought - your model is not just a few per cent off, but is off by multiples......
Yet more evidence that Solar Warming is really happening. Before you know it, the solar polar ice caps will melt, covering the entire surface of the sun to a depth of 23 feet and extinguishing its flames. Then we're completely screwed.
I can see why the article calls this a "crisis." Scoff at your own peril.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
* Global Cooling is going to lead to another Ice Age! Wait...that was 30 years ago... Now it's GLOBAL WARMING IS GOING TO GET US!!!
* Electromagnetic Radiation Causes Cancer! Don't live near power lines!! Wait...that was 20 years ago... Now it's BUY THESE MAGNETIC BRACELETS AND MATRESS PADS! MAGNETISM LEADS TO HEALTH AND PROSPERITY!
I am always reminded of the cartoon characters that run off a cliff, but they don't fall until they notice they aren't standing on anything. Maybe now that we notice this, the universe will implode or something. I hope not, at least until the end of the weekend - I hate it when my weekends get cut short.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
This is not a new issue in astrophysics, and has been floating since 2004. There are two basic ways to measure the abundances. One is by looking at hte oscillations in the sun, and using those to probe the solar interior. This is called "helioseismology", since it is very similar to the way seismologists figure out the structure and composition of hte earth, by observing seismic waves.
The other way is to take a spectrum of the sun (which is really just the solar photosphere -- the outer layers, or "atmosphere"). To interpret the spectra, one needs a model, which is used to derive the abundance (how much oxygen there is).
Now...until recently the models used for deriving abundances were simple 1-dimensional models, which made some assumptions (such as "local thermodynamic equilibrium") and include some fudge factors to account for the fact that you're solving a 3-d problem in 1-d.
The oxygen problem arises when you use accurate, 3-D models, which don't make the LTE assumption mentioned above -- called non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE). When one compares the abundances from the 3d NLTE models with what is expected from the helioseismology predictions, the discrepancy arises.
Others have posted the link to the full journal article on the pre-print server (here). The introduction of this paper is a pretty good summary of the problem, albeit intended for a scientific audience.
Faulty logic there; in fact, helium is by far the element most frequently produced by nuclear fusion in stars. Just because a boatload of helium was produced in the Big Bang itself does not mean that more oxygen than helium is produced in stars.
This table would seem to support the #3 status.
SOL Macrosystems released a statement today about a cascade error in it's Ox2 processing core... more at 11.
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't.
As a result of the crisis, membership in the Church of Solar Oxygen has dropped dramatically, with church leaders fearing a splintering of the faithful into rival factions.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
Quick! Everyone hold your breath before the oxygen runs out!
You are only talking about the relative mass index of the atoms, which is not necessarily the same as their relative abundances. IAAPStudent and my formation about this is limited, but here's what I know:
H is the most abundant, being by definition a single proton.
He is the second most abundant, most of it having been formed during the big bang (2 protons, 2 neutrons).
The next one in the chain, however, is not Li or even Be as one might think - the most massive stars use He to create carbon - through a few different pathways using a few intermediary, unstable nucleis - while Li, Be and Bo are generally byproducts of the disintegration of some of those unstable nucleis, making them actually rarer than C itself.
What I don't know is why O is third while C isn't - I'd guess this is because most of the C is then used to create oxygen in another fusion chain involving C and He, whose rate is relatively quick considering only 2 nuclei are involved. However, C itself is a product of a long chain involving 3 He and many intermediary steps, which makes sure that the reaction rate is slow. Thus, a few stars (that aren't massive enough to continue the chain) will stop at carbon production, but all of the more massive stars will gobble up the carbon as soon as it is created to use it to fusion He and C into O.
Are you retarded? That's the order of the elements in the periodic table (alternatively the order of the elements in terms of increasing atomic mass). Just because an element has a lower atomic mass doesnt mean it has to be more abundant in the universe.
There should be a rule that only people who have completed grade 10 science should be allowed to post on slashdot.
I imagine you could prove just about anything by appending that to the end of every paper.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Of course it's a crisis! The United States must immediately launch a mission to Sun crewed by Hollywood stereotypes to drop a nuclear missile into the sun to restore the oxygen balance. Of course a nuclear missile couldn't do that, that's why they have to fly through a narrow gulley around the equator and drop the missle into a special hole.
Algor doesn't like abundances of ANY naturally occurring atmospheric compounds.
This is going to make him VERY upset.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
We've been doing astrophysics for, what, 100 years?
How much hubris do these people have to be extremely confident that they well understand something that they can't even directly study?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Astrophysicists revised their recently published research. After giving the instruments a good whack, the oxygen readings came back in agreement with previous findings.
Have gnu, will travel.
"uhhhh, yeah, the...umm... the model that we've been using is somewhat wrong."
"Really, by what, part of a percent or so?"
"Yeah, um, actually it's more like a factor of 2 or so"
*Other person stares in disbelief*
"What?!"
"But we're sure we're right now... unless we're wrong again..."
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
... "See! Science is wrong! It can't answer all your questions! It can't tell you why you're here! Give up your Science nonsense, accept Jesus Christ as your saviour and be Born Again!"
(this is not a
Mod the parent up. It's called the triple alpha sequence (process)... and has been written about since the 50's.
i plealph.html for more light reading.
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/energy/tr
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
This is gibberish. Neutrinos in the sun come from pp and ppp chain reactions involving Hydrogen. and on the fraction-of-a-fraction-of-a-percent level Helium. Oxygen doesn't even enter into it.
Meanwhile nobody has ever claimed any more precision than a factor of two or so when it comes to the abundance of such an absolutely rare (relatively abundant but absolutely rare) beast as Oxygen. Lang's "Astrophysical Formulae" quotes sources from the early seventies with a number of 8.79 (table 29) and then other sources employing other methods for a value of 8.85 (table 38). The difference between these numbers means one oxygen atom every 1412 Hydrogen atoms vs. 1 Oxygen atom every 1621 Hydrogen atoms.
We're futzing around in the percent-of-a-percent region of the solar composition here.
So there's a new article proclaiming they have some new measurement which gives the two results that span a range of 0.3dex from 8.63 to 8.93, conveniently bracketing these values that have been around for decades. And somehow that is supposed to change our understanding of the nuclear chemistry of the sun in some fundamental way?
Yes, there's a factor of two or so of uncertainty floating around that nobody ever denied when it comes to the abundance of an element that constitutes less than one tenth of a percent of the number of atoms in the sun.
And the Anonymous crackpots imagine this somehow indicates hubris on the part of the scientists? Because they are only sure about 99.9% of the sun and admit that there's uncertainty at the fourth friggin decimal?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Maybe Michael Jackson could send his hyperbaric chamber up to help with the "crisis" ??!!?? :-)
I'm way not qualified and into this, and haven't read TFA (sue me), but call me bored and wanting to ask a question:
Could this imply that the gross mass of the universe overestimated, thereby reducing the huge amount of 'unknown matter' (or dark matter, or whatever it is) ?
Regards,
Koos
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes it does make sense. Li, Be, and B are all unstable at the temperatures at the core of a sun. Lithium with an amu of 6 literally falls apart extremely quickly inside a sun. At any rate, 3He, 7Li, 6Li Be and B are actually formed by spallation of other elements due to cosmic ray collisions. As another reply states go here: http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/energy/tri plealph.html
After Carbon is formed alpha particles fuse with the Carbon, Oxygen, Neon and so on, until Iron is formed, note that all along this path no odd number elements are formed. Iron is at the dead bottom of the nuclear energy potential graph. This means that it actually takes energy to fuse Helium with Iron to make Nickel. Where do Nickel and all the other odd numbered elements aside from Li and B come from? Well since it takes energy to make Nickel, when a super giant star undergoes a supernova at the end of its life there is plenty of energy to go around. When a supernova occurs the implosion and subsequent explosion leaves lots of energy to form Nickel, Uranium and Tungsten for example. Add a few odd protons fusions and you get the odd numbered elements too. The event of a supernova is really the only way you can form the oddball elements by fusion. Nuclear decay can also produce oddball elements, those elements with masses above Iron or that are odd numbered, but the vast majority of the oddball elements are produced by fusion during a supernova. This is probably the reason why odd numbered elements are 10 times less abundant than the adjacent even numbered elements.
As an aside, (and oh boy is this offtopic) all elements have chemical properties that make them concentrate under certain conditions that from what I have seen really only exist or at least used to exist on only Earth. This is why I find the concept of mining asteroids pretty absurd. While there are three types of asteroids (carbonaceous, stony and iron-nickel), they are all pretty undifferentiated and there is little or no concentration of economically useful elements, like for instance Aluminum. We have all the iron we will ever need in Precambrian iron reefs that dot every continent and there is very little call for more carbon, or for that matter chunks of undifferentiated basalt. Mining Mars *may* make sense, but all it appears to be made of is basalt or mechanically weathered basalt, but little to no *chemically* weathered basalt.
The problem is one of sorting and concentration. Chemical sorting can occur from running water, cooling magma, or other ways. Running water at different acidities and oxidation states is how some elements are sorted. This is important and neither of these has occurred on an asteroid and very little has probably occurred on Mars. The concentration of an element is what is important. Without a rare element, like Aluminum, being concentrated by several times from its percentage of natural occurance, the cost of refining Aluminum from an asteroid would be several times more than it would be to just mine it from terrestrial Aluminum ore. Suppose someone told you that there was five tons of Gold distributed evenly in a big block of Iron, it would be worthwhile to obtain the Gold if the block was only ten tons, but if the block was 10,000,000,000 tons one would just walk away, it would never be worthwhile to refine the Gold. The point is that unless someone finds an asteroid that is made purely of gold, be sure to ask how they intend on removing all of the impurities from the asteroid and how their method is going to be cost effective versus preexisting terrestrial methods. Most discussions on asteroid mining don't seem to acknowledge this point at all.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
I suppose this will change Carbon Dating calculations on eharmony also?
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Why doesn't somebody just drill down into the star and find out once and for all, rather than all this guessing. Get Hollywood to make a movie of you doing it, and you'll probably cover all the expenses in the process.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What if we recalculate the age of the Sun based on these new figures and it shows the Sun got created 5000 years ago . Then it would mean the Christians were right all along and all the fossil evidence was just props put in by God to puzzle the puny humans. See it IS a crisis ;)
**Life is too short to be serious**
Great anti-science troll, you managed to mix peer-reviewed science and politically inspired urban myths with a gross underestimate the age of magnectic healing scams. It's sheer trollish brilliance, none of it is on topic or adds anything new. Little wonder it was modded incitefull....wait...insightfull...WTF?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
My knowitall astrophysics teacher must be breaking out in a cold sweat by now.
Actually, Earth might not be swallowed up when the sun turns into a red giant. The sun will expand to over 1 AU, but that will take several billion years; meanwhile Earth's orbit is slowly drifting outward. By the time the sun expands, Earth might be out at the distance of Jupiter or so.
Don't quote me on this. I don't have any real source; I just read it on How to destroy the Earth.
What? "How to destroy the earth" isn't a real source now?!
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
It's a personal crisis for all the scientists and publishers who have to go back and change their numbers, then re-interpret the results. There's a trickle-down effect to changing your hard-coded constants.
I hope it doesn't suck as much as this crisis.