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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Oxygen is a by-product of nuclear fusion in some stars. Hydrogen is burnt to helium in the main-sequence part of a star's life, helium is burnt to carbon in the red giant phase, and after that there are a sequence of short-lived reactions that only take place in the larger stars, in which carbon is burnt oxygen and oxygen is burnt to a whole bunch of things.
The nuclear physics of all this is well understood, so if the amount of oxygen in the Sun is less than we'd anticipated then that means we've got something wrong about how we understand the insides of stars, about the pressures and temperatures that hold there. It might mean that fewer stars ever get around to producing oxygen, or perhaps that more stars make it all the way to burning it up again, or it might tell us there was something unusual about the nebula our own sun came from. It means, basically, that there's some interesting astrophysics waiting to be done, and that's enough to make astrophysicists very happy :-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
You mean something along the lines of a Dyson Sphere?
^_^
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.
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.
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.
It actually impacts a lot of theories, and definitely, just 'slashing some numbers' like a wal-mart price rollback is not all tht people should expect.
Fred Hoyle's work would be the most obvious. Hoyle was the first physicist to model nucleosynthesis in stars (1948).* His theory there still seems sound (or the math behind it does, and the US, the British, and the former Soviet Union all spent more money testing some of that math than on all other scientific research ever funded by those governments, put together), and one implication is that Oxygen and all the other heavier elements, were produced almost exclusively in stars, not in the big bang. The current age of the sun, and it's projected lifespan, are both based partly on putting the mis-measured amount of Oxygen into Hoyle's equations.
Hoyle is also known for having proposed a lot of rather odd theories later in his career, including some revised steady state theories, panspermia hypothisi, and so on. Some of those are based partly on his earlier math, and it's at least possible that this discovery will make some of the 'nutbar' Hoyle ideas less 'nutbar'. Hoyle's theories are even cited by some as real, solidly scientific proof of intelligent design. The impact there, whether it's real science or misinterpretation, would doubtless be phenominal, even (eu)catastropic.
* There's actually a number of others involved, people such as Fowler, Chandrasekhar, the Alpher/Bethe/Gamow gang, and still others - I'm simplfying a bit in giving Sir Fred all the credit.
Anyway, the sun may be less far along it's lifespan than we thought, possibly farther from the Helium Flash/red giant stage. (It still just about has to be about 5 billion years old, because independant geologic evidence suggests the earth is about 4.5 billion years old itself). So if the sun, and presumably related stars age more slowly than thought, then this possibly changes both supernova abundance and predicted spectrum and mass ratio numbers, and we have used those numbers to estimate the distance to distant galaxies, and the overall size and age of the universe.
It's even quite possible that this change in Oxygen numbers means our estimates of the mass of the universe, it's age, and so on are all skewed, and super-novae may happen less frequently so that will also reduce our accuracy of measurement and mean it will take us longer to get enough new data to check the new predictions to the same accuracy as the ones we now doubt. Thus, this news not only predicts we may have to revise a lot of figures, but that it will be a bit harder to do it right than it appeared the first time.
All the 'new physics bits', i.e. 'dark matter', 'dark energy', etc. all need refigured if the age and mass of the universe get refigured significantly. Some of them may be superfluous. Some new ideas may be needed. Yes, this could just possibly be that big (although it may well be much less significant in the end).
Who is John Cabal?
Less oxygen around than we thought.. What process rapidly consumes oxygen? Hydrogen&Oxygen fuel cells used in rockets. Who recently flew into space? Microsoft billionaire Simonyi. What is produced in the reaction? Water vapor. What does water vapor in the atmosphere do? Act as a greenhouse gas and cause global warming. What will be one of the effects of global warming? Many more third world refugees. Who benefits from there being more third world refugees? Providers of technology for the OLPC project. Which company recently became part of the project? Microsoft!
.. So not worth it.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Don't worry, we'll just blame it on the USA. They didn't sign the Kyoto protocol and now look at the mess we've got.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
Actually, the abstract is all I need to see - they employ two techniques that yield results that differ from each other by 0.3dex yet they claim confidence limits on their measurements of 0.1dex.
At that point we can file that under "some dudes PhD thesis" and forget about it.
Incidentily, the best measurement of local cosmic abundances comes from cosmic rays, not from observations of the sun. They are so sensitive, that we can see the difference in abundance between elements with even or odd numbers of nuclei (which are minutely different in stability if you throw enough quantum mechanics at it).
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Why do laymen who have never even taken an introductory astro-101 class imagine they're qualified to second-guess the result of other poeple's life's work?
What you write up there is utter rubbish. Pop-II models do not age significantly different from Pop-I models even though they contain many orders of magnitude less oxygen. Because (surprise, surprise) the main-sequence life span of a star is governed by Hydrogen. Heavier elements do not figure in at all untill the very last phases after hydrogen has been exhausted except in the case of stars many times more massive than the sun.
As it turns out the sun is not many times more massive than the sun.
If the abundance of C, N or O had any particularly interesting effect on the main-sequence time of stellar models, then we could compare the models with the observations and derive the abundances from that. Because there's a metric shitload of main sequence stars out there. And one is right here close by, ready to be studied.
Where do people get the idea that a revision of the solar composition at the level of a percent-of-a-percent would have any particularly interesting effects on our stellar models? Especially if these values have always been known to be uncertain?
And this new value certainly isn't going to convince anybody to change the books. It's just yet-one-more in a pool of dozens, nay, probably hundreds of measurements; all of which when taken together and tested against each other and corroborated against the observational data produce something like a scientific consensus if and only if they manage to stand these tests.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
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**
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.