Giant Bubbles of Hot, Hot Gas!
No, not Ted Kennedy, Jack Murtha, and John Kerry.
These are in space, all around Earth, actually:
Astronomers found the activity up where Earth’s magnetic field meets a constant stream of particles flowing out from the sun.
While space is commonly called a vacuum, in fact there is gas everywhere, albeit not as dense as the air you breathe.
The newfound bubbles are technically called density holes. In them, gas density is 10 times lower. The gas in the bubbles is 18,000,000 Fahrenheit (10,000,000 Celsius) instead of the 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit of the surrounding hot gas, which is known as plasma.
The bubbles were found in data collected by the European Space Agency’s Cluster mission, a flotilla of four spacecraft. Researchers first thought they had an instrument glitch when the spacecrafts passed through bubbles.
Three thoughts:
Sir Arthur Eddington was right when he said, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
I am constantly amazed both at how we daily add to the wealth of our knowledge of Creation and that every new discovery reveals that we have more to learn than we ever supposed.
In a period of time only a bit longer than I’ve been alive we’ve gome from taking our first tenative steps into space to building a spacecraft capable of surviving temperatures of 18 million degrees.
I know this might drive some of you a little crazy, but this puts me in mind of Psalm 19:1.
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
(h/t: John J. Miller, The Corner)
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Category: Out in the Black
Don't be that impressed by the 18,000,000 degF number; at gas densities that low, the conductive heat absorbed by a spacecraft is very small.
It still strikes me as quite an accomplishment considering all the thought and work that had to go into building that craft and conceiving of makeing it survive a temperature that warm.
Fair enough. I'll be a bit more specific in my amazement. Not only am I amazed that we have the means to measure such a temperature but I"m also amazed that we manage to put anything into space that can withstand the rigors of being there and survive, much less report back with any meaningful data.
I understand enough about thermodynamics to know that atmosphere is critical. Nevertheless, to have a craft move from inside the magnetosphere to the outside and have it be useful to us is a big accomplishment.
I also think it's neat that we didn't have to go far, astronomically-speaking, to find something else to make our big-brains say "Hmmmm….where'd that come from?"
Argh. This is one of those cases where your facts are right, and yet your conclusion is unwarranted. Not to say that the people involved haven’t achieved something remarkable, it’s just not remarkable in the way you think. Personally, I’m impressed that they managed to measure plasma densities and temperatures that are that extreme, but the survival of the spacecraft is no more of an accomplishment than the survival of any spacecraft. (Well, any interplanetary spacecraft, anyway; the radiation environment outside the magnetosphere is harsher than the comparatively balmy area where the ISS orbits.)
The trouble comes with the definition of ‘temperature’; your intuitive understanding will work perfectly well as long as there’s some atmosphere around, but in vacuum, it doesn’t really mean what you think. I’m trying to avoid going into all the thermodynamics, because this comment is long-winded enough already (sorry, you got me where I live…) but think of it this way–many spacecraft have been through these bubbles already, and never noticed, because their internal temperature was unaffected. This particular satellite was the first with the right instrumentation in the right place to detect them.