The Solar Oxygen Crisis 158
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."
Hard luck (Score:4, Funny)
I guess there's always Mercury.
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Re:Hard luck (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hard luck (Score:4, Funny)
Now, I know what you're thinking:
'Duh. That's stupid. Its way too hot'
Yes. But only if you go in the daytime
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"Invade the Sun!"
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The damn thing crashed my firefox with noscript on linux!
The Christians are right!!!! (Score:3, Funny)
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I'd rather live on Mercury. The sun has other problems beside a lack of Oxygen. Shooting jets of superheated plasma come to mind.
Too much Mercury will drive you insane.
And we already have shooting jets here - though I know people on the receiving end of those would rather live on Mercury.. but hasn't anyone woken up to the real implications here... if there's less O2 on the Sun.. does that mean we've grossly over-calculated the amount of oxygen on the Earth? Oh no!! I can't breeeeaaaaathe...
Re:Hard luck (Score:4, Funny)
-matthew
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[Jumps around frantically] Ouch! ouch! ouch! ouch!
Thank you folks. I'll be here all week. Please try the veal....
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Only a Abstract? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Only a Abstract? (Score:5, Funny)
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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 n
Re:Only a Abstract? (Score:4, Funny)
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Goodness (Score:5, Funny)
I guess Earth will be around for a little longer (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I guess Earth will be around for a little longe (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't quote me on this. I don't have any real source; I just read it on How to destroy the Earth [qntm.org].
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Crisis? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Believe the science.
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The evidence for dark matter is based on other observations, like the way disk galaxy's rotate. In order to reproduce those observations, dark matter is required.
The estimate of the total amount of mass in various phases (e.g. stars, co
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No, it is in order to protect existing theories about the origin and age of the Universe. Dark matter and energy are not needed if those long held theories are thrown out. That of course is unthinkable. There is no problem in observing the way galaxies rotate. The problem is interpreting these movements in the light of existing assumptions. One such baseless assumption (belief) is that all of the "constants" of physics have indeed been always consta
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If the sun only has another thousand years instead of another billion, that is a pretty substantial crisis for example.
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I believe this is a process known as "science".
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Full Article (Score:5, Informative)
Damn those.. (Score:2, Redundant)
I can finally feel good about myself! (Score:5, Funny)
Cue the /. Pseudo Scientists (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Cue the /. Pseudo Scientists (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Fein, man, be a killjoy! :)
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All this is from his autobiography, a good read for all of geekdom, though to the OP's point it does make us feel way smarter than we really are.
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Some of us actually have a Physics degree; and a few are lucky enough to actually work in the field.
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Re:Cue the /. Pseudo Scientists (Score:4, Funny)
The angle of the dangle is directionally proportionate to the heat of the meat and inversely proportionate to the sag of the bag. This is relevant, because the quintessential measure of man's cosmic purpose, and the understanding that comes of each discovery and revelation, is dwarfed by the new questions that then arise. In conclusion, one can conclude, that the effects on the world of physics are far-reaching but, in a closing statement, by nature, never insurmountable.
Crisis? (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Because you need a story about a crisis if you want to make the front page of slashdot :)"
Actually, its a clever slashvertisement to convince everyone that, now that the oxygen is running out, we have to stock up on "Perri-Air" brand oxygen. http://www.girlontheright.com/perriair.jpg [girlontheright.com]
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Because the next step is to misinterpret what the story is saying, and then blame somebody. It goes like this: "Oh no, the sun is running out of oxygen. This is clearly caused by heavy industry on Earth." See? Crisis.
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Actually, the solar crisis is caused by light industry.
But you know, why don't we just invade the sun? If we don't fight the photons there then we'll have to fight them here at home.
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The sun is holding more than 99% of the entire energy reserves of the solar system (to say nothing of its oxygen reserves). Clearly it furthers our interests to gain a solid foothold in the region, in order to maintain our influence and control over the energy that is currently radiated to the world. And with all that energy, and oxygen, we're dealing with a star that can really fin
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Oh no! Scientists may have to earn their grants!
Reminds me of a passage out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [scribd.com]:
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Oh, is *that* all. (Score:3, Funny)
Headline:
Sun has less Oxygen that thought, women and children hit hardest.
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This time you can arguably blame Scott McNealy though...
WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE! (Score:4, Interesting)
The point of this kind of tounge-in-cheek hyperbole is to get people thinking about problems in a more creative, out-of-the-box way, and lead them toward solutions. The Ultraviolet Catastrophe led directly to Planck's quantum hypothesis -- which I don't think he even took as a serious solution at the time. But, it took that kind of wacky idea to get people over the hump of classical theory.
I think that the Solar Oxygen Crisis people are trying to do something similar.
Thad Beier
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Get the paper here (Score:2)
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Too bad... (Score:2)
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Solar warming (Score:5, Funny)
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.
*Crisis* (Score:2)
When I read things like this ... (Score:3, Funny)
How the solar oxygen abundance is derived (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [arxiv.org]). The introduction of this paper is a pretty good summary of the problem, albeit intended for a scientific audience.
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There is a potential solution floating for some time: increase the abundance of neon. The neon abundance cannot be reliably inferred from spectra, and thus could well be higher than usually assumed. Lowering t
Most frequently produced... (Score:2)
Faulty logic there; in fact, helium is by far the element most frequently produced by nuclear fusion in stars. Just because a boatload of helium was produced in the Big Bang itself does not mean that more oxygen than helium is produced in stars
In related news (Score:2, Funny)
EMERGENCY! (Score:2)
No it doesn't (Score:2)
Conclusions revised (Score:2)
Just Drill Down and Find Out (Score:2)
Re:Connective Content... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [astrophysi...ctator.com].
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 :-)
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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 thos
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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,[...]
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 b
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I don't know, why do people who have never learned elementary politeness post so much on slashdot?
Why do they make irrational assumptions about other people's credentials without being in a forum where they can declare, verifiably, their own?
"As it turns out the sun is not many times more massive than the sun."
Marvelous - take something the other person
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I don't know, why do people who have never learned elementary politeness post so much on slashdot?
You mean people like yourself, who find nothing inappropriate about puking lies and ignorant insults at those who've actually taken the time to do their homework? You tell me.
Why do they make irrational assumptions about other people's credentials
Only mentally retarded morons like yourself give a hoot about credentials. I, for one, couldn't care less about credentials. Qualification (and the lack thereof) are something that is easily communicated in everything someone writes, though.
Let's rephrase that a little. As recently as eight years ago, the consensus among the international community wouldn't require that exception.
No, let's not rephrase anything, because your claim is false. Plain, simple false. It has
Re:We thought we understood the solar interior wel (Score:2)
We've been doing astrophysics for, what, 100 years?
How much hubris do these people have to be extremely confident that they well understand something that they can't even directly study?
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"uhhhh, yeah, the...umm... the model that we've been using is somewhat wrong."
"Really, by what, part of a percent or so?"
"Yeah, um, actually it's more like a factor of 2 or so"
*Other person stares in disbelief*
"What?!"
"But we're sure we're right now... unless we're wrong again..."
Re:We thought we understood the solar interior wel (Score:2)
The general consensus for decades has been that the solar interior and its basic nuclear chemistry was pretty well understood. This finding, if it holds up, will affect virtually all solar physics relative to our own solar system and much, perhaps most, of the physics we imagine going on in remote stars. For instance, the solar neutrino problem (not seeing enough of the right kinds of neutrinoes here on earth) may be strongly affected by this [...]
This is gibberish. Neutrinos in the sun come from pp and ppp chain reactions involving Hydrogen. and on the fraction-of-a-fraction-of-a-percent level Helium. Oxygen doesn't even enter into it.
Meanwhile nobody has ever claimed any more precision than a factor of two or so when it comes to the abundance of such an absolutely rare (relatively abundant but absolutely rare) beast as Oxygen. Lang's "Astrophysical Formulae" quotes sources from the early seventies with a number of 8.79 (table 29) and then other
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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 d
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After Carbon is formed alpha particles fuse with the Carbon, Oxygen, Neon and so on, until Iron is formed, note that a
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sigh, do you relize you are a product of marketing and as such have forgotten how to think for yourself?
Global cooling was NEVER seriously considered among scientists, and was created to sell magazines.
"* Electromagnetic Radiation Causes Cancer! "
again, no scientific body says that.
Don't confuse science* with marketing that exploits fears.
*I do doubt you would recognize science if it bit you on the ass, but one can always hope.
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30 years ago, scientists were concerned about "The Greenhouse Effect" which is now better known as Global Warming.
These days, well, it's quite obvious to anyone with a THERMOMETER that the earth is warming. How much, and why, may be debatable, but nobody with any sense suggests anything is cooling.
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Dismissing global warming by itself is getting sillier and sillier. I mean, there was a South Atlantic hurricane a few years ago and it's the only
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Best anti-science troll. Ever! (Score:2)
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Now go read TFA.