Fierce stellar black hole

Pick of the pics

A fierce stellar black hole

To get this X-ray image, to be published in Nature tomorrow, NASA’s Chandra satellite stared at a galaxy 13 million light-years away in the Sculptor Constellation for a total of 14 hours. The tartan pattern of pixels is a symptom of the great distance. A stellar black hole, or microquasar, seen location-wise in blue (X-rays of 2-8 keV), is throwing out two huge jets of hot gas reaching to the yellow-red hot-spots (X-rays of lesser energy). The contour lines are for emissions from hydrogen atoms measured by the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Other observations by the European Southern Observatory help to confirm that we’re seeing an exceptionally massive and greedy microquasar shedding much of its energy in the form of long jets of hot gas. From one jet end to the other is about 300 parsecs or 1000 light-years – roughly the distance from the Solar System to the bright stars of Orion.

Nigel Calder comments: Apologies for two brief “Pick of the pics” in a row. I’ve been busy with writing unrelated to this blog.

Reference

Manfred W. Pakull, Roberto Soria and Christian Motch, “A 300 parsec long jet-inflated bubble around a powerful microquasar in the galaxy NGC 7793”, Nature, 466, pp. 209–212, 8 July 2010. The text of the paper is available here: http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1028/eso1028.pdf

About The Cloud Mystery

About The Cloud Mystery

Since 1998 the Danish film producer/director Lars Oxfeldt Mortensen has filmed the work of Henrik Svensmark and his team repeatedly, even when no programme was in production, to build up a remarkable historical record of discovery in progress. Svensmark has appeared in two resulting Mortensen TV programmes:

• The Climate Conflict, about the role of the Sun in climate change, 2001
• The Cloud Mystery, about the effect of cosmic rays on clouds and climatic history, 2008. (Nigel Calder was script consultant.)

Mortensen Film’s description of The Cloud Mystery

Svensmark views low clouds from a mountain in Tenerife

‘Our clouds take their orders from the stars,’ says the Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark. That’s the amazing and provocative discovery reported here. Most experts thought the idea was crazy.

The film records ten years of effort by the small team in Copenhagen that, in the end, solved the mystery of how the Galaxy and the Sun interfere in our everyday weather.

It’s provocative because Dr Svensmark’s revelations challenge the belief of most climate theorists that carbon dioxide has been the main driver of global warming. As a result he has faced never-ending opposition.

But strong support for the cosmic view of climate change comes from astronomer Nir Shaviv and geologist Jan Veizer. In the film they tell how the Galaxy has governed the Earth’s ever-changing climate over 500 million years.

The Cloud Mystery is aimed at a wide audience. Astonishing pictures from our Galaxy, the Sun, and cloud formations are mixed with spectacular animations to simplify the science. Comments by astronomers, geologists and climate experts convey their sense of adventure, and give scientific weight to the discoveries presented. The audience is taken on a trip around the world, where scientists from Denmark, Israel, Canada, the USA, and Norway contribute to this exciting story.

Linking all the discoveries is the non-stop rain of cosmic rays – energetic particles from exploded stars that battle with the Sun’s magnetic field to reach the Earth. Central in the story is an experiment in a Copenhagen basement. It showed how cosmic rays help to make chemical specks in the air on which water drops condense to make clouds.

The story concludes that clouds are the main driver of climate change on Earth.

The documentary follows Henrik Svensmark in his struggle to find the physical evidence of a celestial climate driver. The film demonstrates that science can be a rough place to be if you are in opposition to the established “truth”.

The Cloud Mystery (52-minutes) was co-produced with Arte France and has been distributed for broadcasting to eleven countries: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Israel and Iran. Efforts to place it with a UK broadcaster have been unsuccessful so far.

Latest broadcasts: 2 April 2010 Germany ARTE 21:45 France ARTE 22:05

Buy The Cloud Mystery DVD : http://thecloudmystery.com/The_Cloud_Mystery/Get_the_DVD.html

Preview clip http://thecloudmystery.com/The_Cloud_Mystery/Introduction.html

Some scenes in the film can be see on ClimateClips http://climateclips.com/

The Cloud Mystery website http://thecloudmystery.coml

Mortensen Film website, with contact details http://mortensenfilm.dk/

Mortensen’s ClimateClips http://climateclips.com/

Nutshell

The Svensmark hypothesis in a nutshell

Illustration from Svensmark, “The Adventurous Journey of Spaceship Earth” DTU Yearbook 2009

• Cosmic rays, high-energy particles raining down from exploded stars, knock electrons out of air molecules.
  
• The electrons help clusters of sulphuric acid and water molecules to form, which can grow into cloud condensation nuclei – seeds on which water droplets form to make clouds.
• Low clouds made with liquid water droplets cool the Earth’s surface.
• Variations in the Sun’s magnetic activity alter the influx of cosmic rays to the Earth.
• When the Sun is lazy, magnetically speaking, there are more cosmic rays and more low clouds, and the world is cooler.
• When the Sun is active fewer cosmic rays reach the Earth and, with fewer low clouds, the world warms up.
• The Sun became unusually active during the 20th Century and as a result “global warming” occurred.
• Recently (2006-2010) the Sun has been unusually lazy and “global warming” seems to have gone into reverse, as expected by the Svensmark hypothesis.
• Coolings and warmings of around 2 deg. C have occurred repeatedly over the past 10,000 years, as the Sun’s activity and the cosmic ray influx have varied.
• Over many millions of year, much larger variations of up to 10 deg. C occur as the Sun and Earth, travelling through the Galaxy, visit regions with more or fewer exploding stars.

For objections to the Svensmark hypothesis and answers to them, see Falsification tests

Nigel Calder

Sequence

The Svensmark hypothesis

Sequence of discoveries

The connection between cosmic rays and the cloud cover observed by satellites was announced at a space science meeting in 1996 and published in the following year (Henrik Svensmark & Eigil Friis-Christensen 1997). The report’s title called the discovery the “missing link” because it solved a big puzzle for climate researchers, as to how the Sun could exert an impact on climate that empirically exceeded by a wide margin the effect of variations in solar brightness measured by satellites.

Svensmark and Shaviv explain

Henrik Svensmark and Nir Shaviv explain their ideas about cosmic rays and climate in one of Lars Oxfeldt Mortensen’s ClimateClips

http://climateclips.com/archives/271