DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
Otherworldly Power in our Universe
Things That Go Bump in the Universe: How Astronomers Decode Cosmic Chaos
C. Renee James, 2023
Despite a title that leaves much to be desired, C. Renee James's latest is an extraordinarily interesting and valuable book. James is a professor of physics and astronomy at Sam Houston State University. She has a great interest in cosmic phenomena that explode with unfathomable energy such as supernovae and neutron stars, and phenomena such as gamma ray bursts, quasars, gravitational waves whose energy seems beyond description except through mathematical formulas that cannot be imagined, at least by me.
James reminds readers that a hundred years ago astronomers were still debating whether there were galaxies outside the Milky Way. Currently, powerful telescopes and computers have generated data on a half billion galaxies ( out of 100-200 billion galaxies in the observable universe), and astronomers and cosmologists have developed a good understanding of many cosmic phenomena which mystified scientists for many decades. James has provided a discussion of new technologies that have transformed human understanding of the cosmos during the past century, and she also describes how astronomers in multiple observatories around the world have worked together to find and track phenomena such as gravitational waves. James offers an outstanding discussion of advances in astronomy, one of the most impressive scientific success stories in human history. Furthermore, given the powerful new telescopes that have been deployed around the world and the vast increase in computing power, this is a story that is only getting started. The telescopes and the computers that operate them are generating so much new information that astronomers and cosmologists are faced with difficult choices how to assimilate all this data and guide their inquiries. James recounts a conversation with an astronomer who wonders whether, in the near future, there will be any need for astronomers to staff observatories, as supercomputers increasingly take over the day- to- day work of astronomy.
For may years the number of supernovae (i.e., massive stars at least 9 times the mass of our sun which explode at the end of their "lives" due to gravitational collapse), described in historical records was a low number. In some centuries there was no mention of a supernovae explosion visible in the heavens. In one recent year, astronomers and their powerful telescopes identified 20,000 supernovae's! Astronomers have developed complex typologies of supernovae based on this large sample. One astronomer, Tamara Davis, interviewed by James estimates that astronomers have good data for about 1500 supernovae.
To understand James' discussion of energetic cosmic phenomena, it's necessary to describe a measure of energy developed by the physicist, Hans Bethe, commonly referred to as 'foe.'
James asserts: "The Sun ... will steadily generate a grand total of 1.2 bethes ( i.e. foes) of energy over its 10-billion- year lifetime." Imagine (if you can) the following: "The most luminous quasar ( i.e., "an active galactic nuclei powered by a black hole) is home not just to a supermassive black hole, but to an ultramassive black hole, weighing in at 12 billion times the mass of the sun. ... it glows with the energy of 400 trillion suns (not a misprint). That's over 100 foes per day, every day, until the whirlpool feeding it runs dry." In other words, one quasar at almost the maximum observable distance from Earth -- 13 billion light years - has generated almost 100 times the energy of our sun's entire eventual 10 billion year existence in one day, and then the next day, etc. After this 'believe it or not' piece of information, it's a bit of a letdown to read about a gamma ray burst that in a split second generated more energy than our sun generates in 150,000 years.
James offers many tasty cosmological tidbits along the way, including a description of the Big Bang:
"Somewhere between birth ( of the universe) and a hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth ( not a misprint) second later ... (10-32) ) our universe ballooned to trillions upon trillions of times its original size ..."
I have difficulty coming to grips with the idea that cosmologists in our civilization believe they understand what occurred at a trillion of a trillionth of a second during the Big Bang. There is no creation myth that has ever come close to the fantastic story told by modern cosmologists. I'm not saying they're wrong, but this is exceptional confidence in a theory that can never be based (in principle) on observation.
Still, there is some humility expressed by James' informants. She quotes the physicist Simon Johnston, "At the moment, only about 4% of the universe is baryons. You know, the stuff that we're made out of ... But of that 4%, we see only about half. And I'm not talking about dark matter."
James asserts that dark matter, which makes up about 27% of the universe (but 80% of the gravitating matter), "has been precisely measured and modeled, but not seen."
One of the best chapters in James' book is about the search for gravitational waves, which required a different type of telescope, as well as theoretical advances to understand what would be an unmistakable sign of a gravitational wave. This search finally paid off in 2015 when gravitational waves were detected that emanated from the collision of two black holes more than a billion light years from Earth. "Peeling the signal (of the gravitational wave) from the noise required ten supercomputers to perform an analysis that would have taken a regular desktop computer 5,000 years to complete." The supercomputers were looking for signs of a gravitational wave that would have "distorted Earth had it been a perfect sphere by just a few trillionths of a millimeter." Reese continues with the following amazing bit of information: "This is not to say GW150914 was a dud. During the collision it blasted out 5,000 foes of energy .. as gravitational waves. In other words, in a fraction of a second, this single event expelled more energy in gravitational waves than the total emitted energy of
Every
Single
Star
In
The
Observable
Universe.
"But this event created no light, no neutrinos, no cosmic rays. Just gravitational waves straining against the obstinacy of spacetime."
-- Dee Wilson