Planet Earth structure

 

Earth, our home planet, is a world unlike any other. The third planet from the sun, Earth is the only place in the known universe confirmed to host life.

With a radius of 3,959 miles, Earth is the fifth largest planet in our solar system, and it's the only one known for sure to have liquid water on its surface. Earth is also unique in terms of monikers. Every other solar system planet was named for a Greek or Roman deity, but for at least a thousand years, some cultures have described our world using the Germanic word “earth,” which means simply “the ground.”

Our dance around the sun

Earth orbits the sun once every 365.25 days. Since our calendar years have only 365 days, we add an extra leap day every four years to account for the difference.

Though we can't feel it, Earth zooms through its orbit at an average velocity of 18.5 miles a second. During this circuit, our planet is an average of 93 million miles away from the sun, a distance that takes light about eight minutes to traverse. Astronomers define this distance as one astronomical unit (AU), a measure that serves as a handy cosmic yardstick.

Earth rotates on its axis every 23.9 hours, defining day and night for surface dwellers. This axis of rotation is tilted 23.4 degrees away from the plane of Earth's orbit around the sun, giving us seasons. Whichever hemisphere is tilted closer to the sun experiences summer, while the hemisphere tilted away gets winter. In the spring and fall, each hemisphere receives similar amounts of light. On two specific dates each year—called the equinoxes—both hemispheres get illuminated equally.

Many layers, many features

About 4.5 billion years ago, gravity coaxed Earth to form from the gaseous, dusty disk that surrounded our young sun. Over time, Earth's interior—which is made mostly of silicate rocks and metals—differentiated into four layers.

At the planet's heart lies the inner core, a solid sphere of iron and nickel that's 759 miles wide and as hot as 9,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The inner core is surrounded by the outer core, a 1,400-mile-thick band of iron and nickel fluids. Beyond the outer core lies the mantle, a 1,800-mile-thick layer of viscous molten rock on which Earth's outermost layer, the crust, rests. On land, the continental crust is an average of 19 miles thick, but the oceanic crust that forms the seafloor is thinner—about three miles thick—and denser.

Like Venus and Mars, Earth has mountains, valleys, and volcanoes. But unlike its rocky siblings, almost 70 percent of Earth's surface is covered in oceans of liquid water that average 2.5 miles deep. These bodies of water contain 97 percent of Earth's volcanoes and the mid-ocean ridge, a massive mountain range more than 40,000 miles long.

Earth's crust and upper mantle are divided into massive plates that grind against each other in slow motion. As these plates collide, tear apart, or slide past each other, they give rise to our very active geology. Earthquakes rumble as these plates snag and slip past each other. Many volcanoes form as seafloor crust smashes into and slides beneath continental crust. When plates of continental crust collide, mountain ranges such as the Himalaya are pushed toward the skies.

Protective fields and gases

Earth's atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, and one percent other gases such as carbon dioxide, water vapor, and argon. Much like a greenhouse, this blanket of gases absorbs and retains heat. On average, Earth's surface temperature is about 57 degrees Fahrenheit; without our atmosphere, it'd be zero degrees. In the last two centuries, humans have added enough greenhouse gases to the atmosphere to raise Earth's average temperature by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. This extra heat has altered Earth's weather patterns in many ways.

The atmosphere not only nourishes life on Earth, but it also protects it: It's thick enough that many meteorites burn up before impact from friction, and its gases—such as ozone—block DNA-damaging ultraviolet light from reaching the surface. But for all that our atmosphere does, it's surprisingly thin. Ninety percent of Earth's atmosphere lies within just 10 miles of the planet's surface.

We also enjoy protection from Earth's magnetic field, generated by our planet's rotation and its iron-nickel core. This teardrop-shaped field shields Earth from high-energy particles launched at us from the sun and elsewhere in the cosmos. But due to the field's structure, some particles get funneled to Earth's Poles and collide with our atmosphere, yielding aurorae, the natural fireworks show known by some as the northern lights.

Spaceship Earth

Earth is the planet we have the best opportunity to understand in detail—helping us see how other rocky planets behave, even those orbiting distant stars. As a result, scientists are increasingly monitoring Earth from space. NASA alone has dozens of missions dedicated to solving our planet's mysteries.

At the same time, telescopes are gazing outward to find other Earths. Thanks to instruments such as NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have found more than 3,800 planets orbiting other stars, some of which are about the size of Earth, and a handful of which orbit in the zones around their stars that are just the right temperature to be potentially habitable. Other missions, such as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, are poised to find even more.

 Source:National Geographic

 

 

Composition of Earth's Atmosphere, Human Body, Universe and Earth's Crust

Where is all the antimatter?

 

If you were to list the imperfections of the standard model – physicists’ remarkably successful description of matter and its interactions – pretty high up would have to be its prediction that we don’t exist.

According to the theory, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts at the big bang. By rights, they should have annihilated each other totally in the first second or so of the universe’s existence. The cosmos should be full of light and little else.

And yet here we are. So too are planets, stars and galaxies; all, as far as we can see, made exclusively out of matter. Reality 1, theory 0.

There are two plausible solutions to this existential mystery. First, there might be some subtle difference in the physics of matter and antimatter that left the early universe with a surplus of matter. While theory predicts that the antimatter world is a perfect reflection of our own, experiments have already found suspicious scratches in the mirror. In 1998, CERN experiments showed that one particular exotic particle, the kaon, turned into its antiparticle slightly more often than the reverse happened, creating a tiny imbalance between the two.

That lead was followed up by experiments at accelerators in California and Japan, which in 2001 uncovered a similar, more pronounced asymmetry among heavier cousins of the kaons known as B mesons. Once the LHC at CERN is back up and running later this year, its LHCb experiment will use a 4500-tonne detector to spy out billions of B mesons and pin down their secrets more exactly.

But LHCb won’t necessarily provide the final word on where all that antimatter went. “The effects seem too small to explain the large-scale asymmetry,” says Frank Close, a particle physicist at the University of Oxford.

The second plausible answer to the matter mystery is that annihilation was not total in those first few seconds: somehow, matter and antimatter managed to escape each other’s fatal grasp. Somewhere out there, in some mirror region of the cosmos, antimatter is lurking and has coalesced into anti-stars, anti-galaxies and maybe even anti-life.

“It’s not such a daft idea,” says Close. When a hot magnet cools, he points out, individual atoms can force their neighbours to align with magnetic fields, creating domains of magnetism pointing in different directions. A similar thing could have happened as the universe cooled after the big bang. “You might initially have a little extra matter over here and a little extra antimatter somewhere else,” he says. Those small differences could expand into large separate regions over time.

These antimatter domains, if they exist, are certainly not nearby. Annihilation at the borders between areas of stars and anti-stars would produce an unmistakable signature of high-energy gamma rays. If a whole anti-galaxy were to collide with a regular galaxy, the resulting annihilation would be of unimaginably colossal proportions. We haven’t seen any such sign, but then again there’s a lot of universe that we haven’t looked at yet – and whole regions of it that are too far away ever to see.

Finding anti-helium or other anti-atoms heavier than hydrogen would be concrete evidence for an anti-cosmos. It would imply that anti-stars are cooking up anti-atoms through nuclear fusion, just as regular stars fuse normal atoms.
 

Source:Newscientist

Read more: The five greatest mysteries of antimatter

 

 

New study sows doubt about the composition of 73 percent of our universe

 

Until now, researchers have believed that dark energy accounted for nearly 73 percent of the ever-accelerating, expanding universe.

For many years, this mechanism has been associated with the so-called cosmological constant, developed by Einstein in 1917, that refers to an unknown repellant cosmic power.

But because the cosmological constant—known as dark energy—cannot be measured directly, numerous researchers, including Einstein, have doubted its existence—without being able to suggest a viable alternative.

Until now. In a new study by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, a model was tested that replaces dark energy with a dark matter in the form of magnetic forces.

"If what we discovered is accurate, it would upend our belief that what we thought made up 70 percent of the universe does not actually exist. We have removed dark energy from the equation and added in a few more properties for dark matter. This appears to have the same effect upon the universe's expansion as dark energy," explains Steen Harle Hansen, an associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute's DARK Cosmology Centre.

The universe expands no differently without dark energy

The usual understanding of how the universe's energy is distributed is that it consists of five percent normal matter, 25 percent dark matter and 70 percent dark energy.

In the UCPH researchers' new model, the 25 percent share of dark matter is accorded special qualities that make the 70 percent of dark energy redundant.

"We don't know much about dark matter other than that it is a heavy and slow particle. But then we wondered—what if dark matter had some quality that was analogous to magnetism in it? We know that as normal particles move around, they create magnetism. And, magnets attract or repel other magnets—so what if that's what's going on in the universe? That this constant expansion of dark matter is occurring thanks to some sort of magnetic force?" asks Steen Hansen.

Computer model tests dark matter with a type of magnetic energy

Hansen's question served as the foundation for the new computer model, where researchers included everything that they know about the universe—including gravity, the speed of the universe's expansion and X, the unknown force that expands the universe.

"We developed a model that worked from the assumption that dark matter particles have a type of magnetic force and investigated what effect this force would have on the universe. It turns out that it would have exactly the same effect on the speed of the universe's expansion as we know from dark energy," explains Steen Hansen.

However, there remains much about this mechanism that has yet to be understood by the researchers.

And it all needs to be checked in better models that take more factors into consideration. As Hansen puts it:

"Honestly, our discovery may just be a coincidence. But if it isn't, it is truly incredible. It would change our understanding of the universe's composition and why it is expanding. As far as our current knowledge, our ideas about dark matter with a type of magnetic force and the idea about dark energy are equally wild. Only more detailed observations will determine which of these models is the more realistic. So, it will be incredibly exciting to retest our result. 

 

Source:Phys.org 

What would happen if the Earth stopped orbiting the sun?

 

White Hole

A white hole is a bizarre cosmic object which is intensely bright, and from which matter gushes rather than disappears. In other words, it’s the exact opposite of a black hole. But unlike black holes, there’s no consensus about whether white holes exist, or how they’d be formed.

They are predicted by Einstein’s theory of gravity, and are most often mentioned in the context of ‘wormholes’, in which a black hole acts as the entry point to a tunnel through space and time, ending in a white hole somewhere else in the Universe. But this is deeply controversial, because Einstein’s theory predicts the existence of a so-called singularity at the centre of black holes – a state of infinite gravity which would prevent anything from passing through to the white hole on the other side.

However, some theorists think that a combination of Einstein’s theory and quantum theory points to a new way of thinking about white holes. Instead of being the ‘exit’ from a wormhole, they may be a slow-motion replay of the formation of the original black hole.

 

 

The process starts when an old massive star collapses under its own weight and forms a black hole (see diagram, above). But then, quantum effects occurring around the surface of the black hole halt further collapse to a singularity, and instead begin to gradually turn the black hole into a white hole that’s spewing out the original star matter again. The process is mind-bendingly slow, though, so we may be in for a very long wait to find out if white holes really exist.

 

 

Quasar

Quasar, an astronomical object of very high luminosity found in the centres of some galaxies and powered by gas spiraling at high velocity into an extremely large black hole. The brightest quasars can outshine all of the stars in the galaxies in which they reside, which makes them visible even at distances of billions of light-years. Quasars are among the most distant and luminous objects known.

Six quasar host galaxies, as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.Shown are apparently normal, solitary galaxies (left), colliding galaxies (centre), and merging galaxies (right).

Photo AURA/STScI/NASA/JPL (NASA photo # STScI-PRC96-35a)

 

The term quasar derives from how these objects were originally discovered in the earliest radio surveys of the sky in the 1950s. Away from the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy, most radio sources were identified with otherwise normal-looking galaxies.

 

Read More 

Birth of inflationary universe

 

According to the inflationary scenario, in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second a mysterious antigravity force pushed the universe to expand much faster than originally thought. The inflationary period was incredibly explosive: the universe expanded at a speed far superior to that of light. (This does not constitute a violation of Einstein's claim that nothing can travel faster than light, since it is empty space that is expanding.)

In a fraction of a second, the universe expanded by an unimaginable factor, equal to 1050. To visualize the power of the inflationary phase, imagine rapidly inflating a balloon on which galaxies are painted on the surface. The universe we see, populated by stars and galaxies, is not located inside the balloon, but on its surface. Now draw a very small circle on the balloon. The latter represents the visible universe, that is, everything we can see with our telescopes. (For comparison, if the entire visible universe were as small as a subatomic particle, then the real universe would be much larger than the universe we see around us.) In other words, the inflationary expansion has been so intense to put whole regions of the universe, located beyond our visible universe, beyond our reach. In fact, the inflation was so huge that in our vicinity the balloon appears flat, a fact that the WMAP satellite has verified experimentally. Just as the Earth appears flat to us because our dimensions are small compared to its radius, the universe appears flat only because its curvature manifests itself on a much larger scale.

 

The extinction of the dinosaurs caused by a comet, the remains in a crater in Mexico

The thesis in new simulations conducted by the American University of Harvard. The demise of the giant reptiles, 65 million years ago, opened the way for the evolution of mammals 

It would not have been an asteroid, but a comet, that would have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. This is indicated by new simulations conducted by the American University of Harvard, the results of which are published in Scientific Reports. A fragment of this celestial body would have landed on Earth about 65 million years ago. The remains of the impact can be found in the Chicxulub crater, under the Yucatán peninsula, in Mexico.

According to the study authors, astrophysicists Avi Loeb and Amir Siraj, the comet originated from the sphere of debris at the edge of the Solar System, the Oort cloud, the cradle of comets. The celestial body was pushed off course by Jupiter's gravitational field during its orbit and projected towards the Sun.

 

Supermassive black holes are central “engines” powering the luminous hearts of galaxies.

 

 

The fact that black holes must exist results from Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. This describes gravity as the curvature of space and time. Black holes are an extreme example of the curving of space-time. An extreme amount of mass is concentrated within such a small region of space that not even light can escape the gravitational well. The outer limb of a black hole is referred to as event horizon. Anything that crosses this event horizon can no longer escape. As its name suggests, a black hole appears black to observers. Although these objects can be recognised and characterised by their gravitational interaction, they only become visible against a bright background and can cast a “shadow”. We have taken advantage of this fact.Supermassive black holes contain billions of solar masses and reside at the centres of all galaxies. Matter flows towards these gravitational wells and finally falls into it. Before the matter crosses the event horizon, an enormous amount of energy is released; this is converted into radiation. This process results in extreme luminosities of radio galaxies. The radio galaxy Messier 87 (M87), some 55 million light years away, was theorised to contain such a supermassive black hole – which is why it was selected as a target of observation. M87 also exhibits a prominent jet of relativistic plasma that can be traced back to the location of the black hole.

 

Source:Max Plank Institude