NASA's Van Allen Probes Spot an Impenetrable Barrier in Space | Hacker News Reader

NASA's Van Allen Probes Spot an Impenetrable Barrier in Space

nasa.gov

135 pointsjedp38 comments

It's amazing how much they look like electron orbitals. . . . Sometimes its seems like the reason we see nature reuse the same patterns is not from any physical mechanism but simply because math only has so many "shapes." I am perpetually in awe at this mysterious order to our universe.

Also: if these belts block high-energy electrons, can they teach us to build a force field that does the same? And can that solve the problem of fast-moving spacecraft being destroyed by the first spec of dust they encounter? Or of radiation killing the crew?

What if the only way to protect life against cosmic radiation is to build a planet-sized spacecraft?

Another question due to my weak grasp of modern physics: to a fast-moving spacecraft, are all electrons "high energy"?

>build a planet-sized spacecraft //

We have one of those already, just need to work on the propulsion and life-support systems.

And we're back to the stories of Liu Cixin again:

http://www.pornokitsch.com/2012/07/underground-reading-the-w...

Hmm, that sounds very similar to this 2006 sci-fi novel: http://www.amazon.com/Cusp-Robert-A-Metzger/dp/0441013015

It reads like William Gibson reimagined by Michael Bay but I ended being entertained despite myself.

Oh wow, yes, definitely some overlap there! Judging purely from the blurb on Amazon, i'd say that the stories at least have rather different styles - Clarke-Baxter-style grand-scale hard SF vs Walter Jon Williams-style cyberpunk-tinged space opera.

You may already know this, but in your observation about "math having only so many shapes" has been explored in some depth. There is a wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_in_nature

but I first learned about it from the book, "Patterns in Nature", by Peter S. Stevens (http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Nature-Peter-S-Stevens/dp/031...), which was recommended to me by a noted poet.

There is a similar, but less mathematical and pretty old book called Artforms of Nature by Ernst Haeckel (1904) [1]. It’s in the public domain.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur

I'm glad that page linked to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesco_broccoli

The first time I saw it in a store here in Italy I got all excited and started staring at it up close.

My daughter loves that stuff. I was pleased.

> to a fast-moving spacecraft, are all electrons "high energy"?

Define fast. Electrons get to relativistic-ish speeds in the hundred of kilovolts-ish range. If you look at the specs for a x-ray tube thats a pretty intense / hard to shield x-ray source, not like those wimpy tens of kilovolt xrays from a CRT that don't even make it thru the glass.

So if you're going fast enough for relativity to be an issue, smacking a stationary electron is going to hurt and be a pain to shield, so yeah, all electrons are high energy. On the other hand what we puny humans currently think is a fast spacecraft, is going to be a rounding error compared to solar winds and just random stuff out there, so in a different way, all the electrons that matter are high energy compared to our actual deployed slow spacecraft, sorta.

The observation of the similarity between electron orbitals and various astronomical phenomena is one that's made fairly frequently.

My first recollection was during a high-school session to a local university for a science and physics colloquium for high-school students, over a quarter century ago. We were seeing slides of steller objects, and one showed as I recall a galaxy with high-energy jets radiating from both poles. One of the bright kids in the group (ergo, not myself) noted the electron orbital similarity.

Perhaps it's the chagrin at not having noted that myself which has made me highly aware of the symmetry since. But yes, there's an economy of patterns in the Universe. At least at some levels.

It's a very simple shape. Things that rotate tend to have toroidal features. And the details are all different.

We know how to build a force field that does the same, it's a magnet. The problem is that it does not protect against neutron radiation.

I wonder if I'll be attacked for saying this. Here goes. We always find these kinds of shapes because they are the shapes that appear through fluid mechanics. Space is a fluid, too. In a fluid, we have vortices (in the form of whirlpools, tornados, etc) because they allow material and energy to be moved much more efficiently than any of the other structures we don't tend to see in stable systems.

would you disagree with the idea that there are a lot of good ways of describing something, that are true for many cases but very wrong for others?

I don't know what you have in mind. In order for me, or anyone else who bases his/her judgement on fact, to give you an answer which you'll be able to recognize as right, you'll need to point out a concrete problem or question that contains facts that can be independently verified, rather than something abstract and hypothetical.

> In a fluid, we have vortices... because they allow material and energy to be moved much more efficiently than any of the other structures we don't tend to see in stable systems.

As a Physicist, I am wary of making such statements since they put the cart before the horse ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology ). I'd be more comfortable saying "In a fluid, we have vortices... as a consequence of the movement of material and energy."

In your case I'm assuming it's just a turn of phrase, but there are some hypotheses which actually attribute abstract "goals" to nature, without providing any explanation in terms of mechanical processes; for example http://www.lawofmaximumentropyproduction.com

In constrast, Darwin explained the theory of evolution using the mechanical process of natural selection. The principle of least action can be explained either physically, using quantum interference (eg. in optics), or mathematically, due to the mixture of inductive steps with deductive ones.

In constrast, the existence of vortices in fluids because of their efficiency would be like claiming crater lakes can't exist because water flows downhill.

Electrostatic forces keep the surface of a liquid as taut as they can. Undisturbed, and notwithstanding internal vibrations, a spherical droplet of liquid will tend to stay in a sphere because not to do so would require an additional expenditure of energy, that is, in order to counteract those electrostatic forces. So the way I used the term efficient before is in the same way as how it's less costly in energy expenditure, i.e. more efficient, for a droplet to stay spherical. It's the same reasoning behind a number of other things we find in physics. So I'm not convinced that my statement about efficiency leading to appearance of natural structures is incorrect -- maybe more so a difference in how such an observation is commonly phrased.

I was only commenting on the goal-attributing phrasing you'd used, not the Physics.

Compare your electrostatic sphere example to my crater-lake example: lakes at a high gravitational potential are inefficient, it's less costly for the water to flow up the sides of a crater and down into the ocean. The reason that doesn't happen is because there is no mechanism for it to do so. If we look at liquid helium, there is a mechanism which allows it (the Onnes Effect) so it does happen.

> Electrostatic forces keep the surface of a liquid as taut as they can

Yes, but the interesting part of the sentence is "as they can"; we can't just assume that a liquid's surface will be at minimal energy, since that would allow us to solve NP-complete problems with soap bubbles ( www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf ) :)

Well there is actually a very electrical and magnetic basis for many of the features and configurations we see in space and in star systems. There is a whole memmetic category heading known as Electric Universe, which although unfortunately contributed to by many crackpots, a very interesting and rational framework for understanding on at least a very basic level the 'why' and 'how' of what we observe in space. (why and how specific patterns or shapes are observed)

Here's a fantastic first part of a video series (long but very educational and interesting; not solid science but not devoid of facts either): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EPlyiW-xGI

If you downvoted I'm not angry but I would appreciate transparency about what you think about the role of electricity and magnetism in the Universe at large. I tried to distinguish my comment from naive ideology by cautioning that I am not comfortable with the level of scientific rigor used under the 'umbrella' of Electric Universe studies but that I find the cognitive paths they use to be on a track that probably leads to rigorous scientific experiments and provable/disprovable theories. I find it a good philosophical framework, far better than, say, Greek Astrology...

There is a website associated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory which offers a tour of the more solidly grounded Plasma Universe ideas:

http://plasmauniverse.info

On the books and journals page are shamelessly listed at least two titles which would be considered heretical by most mainstream space scientists: Eric Lerner's The Big Bang Never Happened and Don Scott's Electric Sky. The former critiques (still) problematical aspects of Lambda-CDM physical cosmology, while the latter explores such ideas as phenomenon like pulsars being essentially electrical in nature (not gravitational) and stars being powered by external electric currents rather than internal nuclear reactions.

Will such "crazy" theories ever make it into mainstream research institutions? Maybe... maybe not... but I'm glad that some serious-minded scientists are willing to buck orthodoxy and risk ridicule in order to explore interesting alternative theories.

I'd urge anyone to read the wikipedia page [1] before seriously engaging with the "electric universe", the proposals of which, such as cosmic electrical currents being more important than gravity in galaxy structure (~35 mins into that video, just from scanning through), are not consistent with modern observations and are less effective than mainstream theories in explaining them.

The statement "Well there is actually a very electrical and magnetic basis for many of the features and configurations we see in space and in star systems" is highly controversial and pretty unsupported, beyond things like jets and planetary magnetic fields.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cosmology

An electron is just a miniature plaque with Carl Sagan's signature on it.

The title is a bit hyperbolic. The article shows how the Van Allen belts constitute a "nearly impenetrable" barrier preventing "ultra-fast electrons" from approaching the earth.

Yeah -- from the sound of the title, you'd think they'd discovered this thing:

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Galactic_barrier

In fairness, the article is almost as bad as the title. It isn't even clear at first that they are taking about belt electrons rather than cosmic-ray electrons, which have many orders of magnitude higher energy.

The gist of the article seems to be, "The sharpness of the outer edge of the inner Van Allen belt is due to scattering of high-energy belt electrons off cold plasma surrounding the Earth" but it's really difficult to tell.

I find that the more we know about this planet that keeps us safe, a large moon to keep asteroids away and tectonics hot, a mass just enough to keep an atmosphere around us and a spinning iron core to provide "impenetrable barriers", the more I learn of this the less I think Fermi found a paradox and just that it's hard for life to stay alive in this universe.

Life finds a way.

It's the day before turkey day, you don't deserve the negative links, even if it was a cheap comment, as you made me think of that ma's laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS9D6w1GzGY

Also, is laughter a conserved 'shape' in nature, and what is the shape space of nature anyways, is it restricted to the 4 dimensions we inhabit in a way?

Well there's Venus and Mars, both planets could have been much like Earth except both somehow ended up without that impenetrable barrier they probably had billions of years ago.

Three possibly habitable planets in one solar system, 1 out of 3 still habitable even after 4+ billion years, that's not bad.

Here is a related article that discusses removing the Van Allen belts:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/hacking-the-...

Moron here. So what are the ramifications of this? Does it inhibit our ability to observe the universe? Dare I ask, does this offer any protection from anything nasty the universe might send our way?

This certainly seems like something we need to duplicate for spaceships, to more safely travel to mars and beyond.

I don't know much about the dangers of these particles on the human body. I'm going to assume any environment different to the one on earth poses great risk.

Electromagnetic aspects of the "Gaia" hypothesis?

glass sky theory anyone?

Space ship passes through it = not impenetrable

Clearly it's possible to escape Earth orbit, but would point out that the Van Allen belts have been used by conspiracy theorists to 'prove' that the moon landings were faked.

> Impenetrable Barrier in Spac

Gee, then, how'd various spacecraft get through it?

Ah, now that I read the details, it's a "nearly impenetrable barrier" to electrons. Okay, now not so amazing! No need to call Captain Kirk!

Such titles are called "click bait" or some such, right?

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