Prometheus Close Up

Can Black Holes exist hidden within small bodies. Mathematically, the answer is yes. From time to time this blog has wondered about Black Holes within our solar system. Our Cassini spacecraft has captured the closest views yet of Saturn's moon Prometheus. Prometheus and Pandora are called shepherd moons because they appear to hold F Ring in place.

At one time the Rings were thought to exist inside a mathematical "Roche Limit." Outside this limit moons could form, and inside they would break up tidally to form Ring fragments. Prometheus has a density of barely 0.27 g/cc, barely 1/4 that of liquid water. It is odd that objects with a density less than liquid exist inside the Roche Limit, within which liquid objects are not supposed to exist at all.

Prometheus leaves big gaps in the F Ring, causing particles to spiral toward the moon in tight strands. The spiralling strands are indicators of a magnetic field. Presence of a magnetic field from a tiny moon would be indication of a singularity. If Prometheus' 10^17 kg mass contained a 10^11 kg singularity, the moon would not collapse. Presence of a singularity would hold Prometheus together within Roche's Limit. The singularity would rotate within Prometheus, powering a magnetic field. There is far more in the Universe than meets the eye.

Water Fountain

Happy Thanksgiving in the US! I've been shopping for a water fountain to put in the new home, so today's news is aprropriate.

This blog has made many reports on Enceladus, Saturn's mysterious moon with its South polar hot spot. In today's issue of NATURE, a team led by Candice Hansen of JPL reports that particles ejected from the hot spot reach speeds of 2100 km/hr, twice the speed of sound. Hansen's team concludes that the fountain is liquid. As seeen in the video, Earth geysers are also made of water. This is another indicator that Enceladus is home to liquid and possibly life.

Back in December 007, Jennifer Meyer's AGU talk asserted that Enceladus' 6.0 GW internal heat can not be accounted for by tidal forces. The conventional estimate from tidal heating is only 0.12 GW. The old hypothesis or "radioactive decay" does not work for these icy moons. Why is Enceladus warm enough for life, and why is the heat concentrated at the pole? The little moon's interior is an excellent place to find a Black Hole.

Humans fear Black Holes as they once feared cats and dogs, yet a tiny Hole within Enceladus may have created conditions for life. Our planet and even the Sun may not have formed without the influence of Black Holes. One could still be with us today, warming Earth's core and generating the magnetic field that protects us from Space radiation. On future Thanksgiving days, perhaps we should be thankful for Black Holes.

The Day in Saturn

Estimated length of Saturn's day has been revised down to 10 hours 32 minutes. Finding the rotation period of a gas planet is quite difficult. The most recent Cassini estimate last year was 15 minutes longer. This measurement directly affects estimated wind speeds. With the longer estimate, winds appeared to travel hundreds of miles per hour in the same direction around the planet. The shorter day means that winds are much slower and travel both East and West. This corresponds with observations of East-West winds on Jupiter.

Previously in Hot Gas we saw that Saturn's jet streams are driven by rotating eddies originating deep within the atmosphere. Photo below was taken August 31. Transit of Mimas, 397 kilometres in diameter, shows how huge Saturn's spiral storms are. The new estimate of Saturn's day will be published in the September 7 issue of NATURE.

UPDATE: As we have seen before, scientists are not sure how planets began forming. Since the time of Pierre Laplace, most theories involve the Solar System condensing from a disk-shaped cloud of gas. Small planetesimals would have formed from gas particles. However, particles colliding at orbital velocity will not stick together gravitationally unless they have the mass of mountains. Something else is needed to start planet formation.

Scientists believe that the Big Bang created billions of tiny Black Holes. A typical Primordial singularity would have the mass of a mountain yet be smaller than a proton. If a few of these tiny holes collided with a gas cloud, they would immediately attract matter. These singulartiies were far too tiny to suck everything up or even burn hot as a star, but the tiny amount they did eat would generate a large amount of radiation. Eventually there would be a ball of matter with a hot centre, an infant planet. The Black Hole would still be there at the planet's centre.

Saturn and gas giant planets give off far more radiation than they receive from the Sun. This heat powers the many storms seen in the atmosphere. Saturn also has a strong magnetic field creating polar auroras and a mysterious hexagon. Both internal heat and the magnetic field could be produced by a hidden Black Hole. There is far more in the Universe than meets the eye.

This week Universe Today hosts the Carnival of Space!

Strange Phenomenon Orbiting Saturn

A mysterious clump of charged particles has been found orbiting Saturn. At the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, astrophysicists from John Hopkins University presented this Cassini data. The donut of charged particles surrounding Saturn is bent out of shape. Some mysterious influence is affecting the ring current.

Planets with magnetic fields can trap charged particles to form electrified clouds. Earth's ring current appears during solar flares. As we saw months ago, the moon Enceladus keeps Saturn's vicinity supplied with charged particles. The ring current can bend Saturn's magnetic field.

The biggest mystery is a "clump" of charged particles. This phenomenon is between 485,000 and 1,000,000 kilometers from the surface. It orbits synchronously with the planet every 10 hours and 47 minutes. Astronomers are at a loss to explain its origin.

We can do some math here. A synchronous orbit with Saturn would be 529,000 km above the surface, right in the middle of the phenomenon. Extra particle velocity would push the clump into an oblong shape. Whatever the source of charged particles, it forms a natural synchronous satellite. This would be a good place to look for a Black Hole.

Update from Potsdam: Using our Keck II telescope atop Mauna Kea, astronomers have captured the first glare-free images of Uranus' rings. Their findings will appear in the August 24 issue of Nature. Data shows that the rings change. The innermost zeta ring has moved several thousand miles closer to Uranus than when it was first discovered. Though the narrow rings should require "shepherd moons" to keep them in place, few such moons have been seen. This might be another place to look for unseen objects. ESO Press Release

The Clumps Discovered

Cassini has discovered that Saturn's B Ring is made of tightly bound clumps of particles that are constantly colliding. Originally it was thought that the Rings were uniform clouds of small particles. This caused the mass of the system to be underestimated. The Rings may be 2-3 times as massive as previously thought. Particles in the B Ring must spend most of their time in clumps or moving from one clump to another.

Kea has posted yet another excellent picture of the Rings. Below we see Atlas orbiting outside A Ring, with tiny moon Daphnis inside the Keeler Gap. Daphnis is a bigger clump which keeps the Gap open. Since the Rings have many tiny gaps, this blog long ago predicted that the rings were full of massive objects. There is much more here than meets the eye.

H.G Wells' Invisible Man was finally discovered by tracks he left in snow. Saturn's Rings are literally a field of ice in which the tracks of invisible objects can be seen. If our Solar System contains tiny Black Holes, this is a good place to look. Presence of singularities would explain how these clumps form in the first place. The Rings show conditions similiar to our Solar System's formation. Singularities may be the key to how Earth and the planets were created.

Good News: Perturbing the Peace

Prometheus perturbing Saturn's braided F Ring. This moon and others exist inside the "Roche Limit." It was once thought that this marked a demarcation line within which moons would be torn apart. Prometheus has one of the lowest densities of a solar system object, just 0.47 g/cm^3. That is less than 1/2 the density of liquid water. It is very odd that objects with less density than liquid should exist inside the Roche Limit, within which liquid objects are not supposed to exist.

Shepherd moons Prometheus and Pandora orbit on opposite sides of the Ring. These little moons could harbour something very dense within their cores. If Prometheus' 10^17 kg mass contained a 10^11 kg singularity, the moon would not be sucked up. Presence of a singularity would hold Prometheus together and also account for a magnetic field. The magnetic field of Prometheus has not been detected, but it will be.

Having followed this blog for nearly a year, you will be pleased to hear that a paper about GM=tc^3 has been accepted for publication by a major journal. This means a lot of work preparing illustrations and copyrights. It will lead to more publications, for other editors have been waiting for a major journal to take the lead. Publishing allows 49,000 subscribers to read a paper, far more than the audiences at conferences. Spreading a simple idea will not require so much travel.

On another subject, at the end of this month I hope to reveal a technology that will make human spaceflight safer, easier and far more comfortable.

In Planck Units: M = t

Refer to Kea's blog for a spectacular photo of the "Great Hexagon of Saturn." Again our Cassini spacecraft has discovered something that old science can't explain. As we have seen, there is more going on inside the planet than meets the eye. This includes an immense magnetic field and polar jets of charged particles, exactly as produced by a Black Hole.

The Northern jet is composed of electrons which spiral tightly around the magnetic field lines. The Southern jet is made of heavier ions, which travel around to the North and follow field lines back in. Earth's Van Allen belts work the same way, with concentric lanes of positive and negative particles travelling in opposite directions. At Saturn's North Pole, the incoming positive stream crowds in on the outgoing negative stream. As nature shows us with the honeycomb, the best way to crowd things together is in hexagons.

Our unit systems are mostly based upon some earthly measure, like the distance a man can reach. Physicists often prefer to use a system based upon some fundamental property of nature. This has led some to use units based upon the "constants" h and c. While Planck units provide a universal system of measurement, they are misleading if you think h and c are constant!

Above are the Planck units of length, time, and mass. As readers of the papers know, speed of light c is proportional with t to the -1/3 power. Since most measurements indicate that the product hc is a constant, Planck value h must be inversely proportional with c, t to the 1/3 power. The behaviour of h is similiar to the solution of a random-walk problem. Some of the Planck units are therefore changing.

The Planck length is actually increasing by t to the 2/3 power. Scale R of the Universe, horizon distance, scale of magnetic fields and even the Schwarzhild radius of a Black Hole increase at exactly the same rate. All these radii increase in a way more logical than the humans who struggle to understand it.

The Planck time turns out to be proportional to the observer's time. If you were a tiny cosmologist at time of 10^{-43} seconds, Planck time would still appear to be 10^{60} times smaller. Hopefully by the time the Universe is 13.7 billion years old you will figure this out. Dr. Lieu (who was at the London conference) found experimentally in a paper (ApJ 585, L77) from 2003 that this "Planck time" is an illusion.

Back when I was enjoying The Blue Mountains, someone noticed that "The Equation" in Planck units is just:

M/M_pl = t/t_pl

Mass of the Universe divided by Planck mass is equal to age of the Universe divided by Planck time. Both sides of the equation are now dimensionless numbers, and both are constant.

Using Planck units, you can write this in even simpler form:

M = t

This must be the simplest equation ever! It is amazing that humans haven't figured this one out yet. Personally I prefer not to use Planck units because they can be so misleading.

The "M = t" was noticed recently by a very well-known blogger. I will not give his name, for he has a "bad boy" image to maintain. Though he has a reputation as the biggest skeptic, he has slowly come over to our side. He may be telling the Harvard string theory group that we are on to something. It would be easy to get angry with others, but there is great value in patience.

Jupiter and Galileo's Moons

This amazing photo of Jupiter was taken from Saturn! On February 8, 2007 Jupiter was 1.8 billion kilometres from our Cassini spacecraft. Two of the Galilean satellites are visible. When Galileo turned his telescope to the skies, he was amazed to discover Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto circling Jupiter. This provided evidence of objects circling something other than Earth, in defiance of Ptolemy's cosmology. Scientists of the time literally refused to peer in the telescope for fear of upsetting their world view.

“Here at Padua,” Galileo complained in a letter to Kepler, "is the principal professor of philosophy whom I have repeatedly and urgently requested to look at the moon and planets through my glass, which he pertinaciously refuses to do. Why are you not here? Whart shouts of laughter we should have at this glorious folly! And to hear the professor of philosophy at Pisa labouring before the Grand Duke with logical arguments, as if with magical incantations, to charm the new planets out of the sky.”

(Thanks Nigel, for reminding me of this quote, which I used part of in January 11 post.)

If that professor were alive today his magical incantations would no doubt include "dark energy" or whatever is fashionable and safe. He would try to prevent Galileo from speaking, publishing, or even having his observations considered. Unlike this writer, Galileo did not complete a university degree. That fact would be cited against him by today's elitists.

Despite his gap in formal education, Galileo was a fair scientist. He was willing to adjust his theories in accordance with new observations. His book "Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems" gave equal time to opposing ideas. Some sinister folks spread rumour that the "Simplicio" character was a vague parody of the Pope. (Did they use e-mail?) Galileo was tried, forced to recant, and imprisoned for the last ten years of his life.

Below is a closer Cassini image of Jupiter, taken January 15, 2001 as the spacecraft completed its close flyby. Galilean moon Io is visible as a tiny crescent to the left. Four centuries later moons orbit planets and planets orbit the Sun just as Galileo believed. All follow elliptical orbits as Galileo's friend Kepler discovered. All follow paths controlled by Newton's gravity. The treatment given to Galileo is very relevant today.

Enceladus and the Rings

For 2 months Cassini has been in a high-inclination orbit around Saturn, allowing views of the polar regions. This photo from January 17 shows the moon Enceladus orbiting with the Rings. The moon's orbit is within the tenuous E Ring. Eruptions from the polar "hot spot" resupply this Ring. If they were not replenished, the Rings would dissipate within 100,000 years. There must be other sources maintaining the other Rings.

Saturn's Rings show conditions similiar to the solar system's formation. They are full of unexplained phenomena--the Enceladus hot spot, spokes believed caused by electromagnetic discharges, even cone-shaped jets of radiation issuing from the Rings. These phenomena could be explained by the presence of singularities. This would be an excellent place to search.