Southern Bookman

Black hole images raise awe at universe's majesty

Spooky to see those images of the Milky Way black hole on Friday the 13th.

Those extraterrestrial scientists who released photos of the black hole's spectrum must have a sense of humor.

On Friday the 13th, the black hole appears even more ominous and strange. Scientists say a black hole sucks into its endless dark chamber anything that gets too close.

And I'd thought the black hole was the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. Will it ever hold public hearings?

Another black hole is the U.S. Senate, where progressive legislation goes to die.

Black hole: that would be a good name for the coal mining corporation that made Joe Manchin a millionaire.

The big cookie monster at the center of the universe is 4 million times larger than the sun. A few years ago, scientists released images of an even bigger black hole farther out toward the universe's edge.

Those cosmic images are not actually the black hole, called Sagittarius A*, like the title of a sci-fi novel. Black holes, as their name implies, can’t be seen or photographed.

The international organization of scientists captured images of the black hole's outer spectrum, the light and matter that surrounds the black hole's swirling gravitational pull. The images reveal an orange halo resembling a misshapen doughnut. Images of Sagittarius A* match Einstein's theory of relativity. 

Capturing the first images of the black hole closest to earth - a mere 27,000 light years away - is an impressive accomplishment for an international group of researchers involved in the Event Horizon Telescope project. The term event horizon refers to the point where there's no escaping the black hole's embrace.

The black hole's images illuminate another mystery of the universe.

Too bad the United States now lacks the cooperative spirit of the Event Horizon team. Terrestrial black holes proliferate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

52nd anniversary of Earth Day raises urgency of climate change action

Bursting with spring beauty, LSU celebrated the first Earth Day in 1970.

Like Vietnam Moratorium Day six months before, also held on the Ole War Skule's Parade Grounds, Earth Day changed my worldview.

A freshman carrying out a misguided passive-aggressive protest against my ROTC class and close to losing my student draft deferment, I wandered through the Earth Day exhibits, instantly turning into an environmentalist.

Millions across the globe marked the event, protesting air pollution, species extinction and the destruction of the ozone layer. Climate change was an unknown concept, outside of a few academic research offices.

The Vietnam War still raged, dividing the country. But the environmental movement received nearly universal support, even in the Republican Party. The Environmental Protection Agency was created during the Nixon Administration, and action was taken to preserve the ozone layer.

That momentum waned in succeeding years, and the fossil fuel industry criminally impeded efforts to fight climate change. The world recently has begun action to reduce carbon emissions that should have been taken years ago.

The Biden administration, ambushed by rising gas prices and the Ukrainian invasion, recently retreated from its promises to move toward solar and wind energy. The climate change-denying Republican Party's culture war appears on course to retake the Congress and presidency.

On Earth Day's 52nd anniversary, the Earth is in greater peril than ever.

 

Apocalypse arriving soon if carbon emissions not slashed, U.N. panel warns

Cassandra keeps on singing.

In its latest apocalyptic alarm, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that the Earth will reach the point of no return in eight years.

As emissions soar higher and higher, the world is rapidly burning through its "carbon budget" for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees celsius over pre-industrial temperatures, according to a Washington Post article.

The world can release just 500 more megatons of carbon to have any hope of meeting that threshold set at the Paris Climate Summit. At the present rate, the budget will be blown in less than a decade.

Failure to slash emissions will result in the earth heating to 3.2 degrees Celsius, or 5.8 degrees Farenheit, by the end of this century.

That'll make most of the world uninhabitable.

Monday's report was the third warning issued recently by the panel.  The New York Times ran a page-one article on the report, but the panel's in-depth assessments  by scientists from across the globe have yet to generate urgency among world leaders, especially developed countries.

Russia's massacre of Ukraine has led to a renewed commitment to oil and gas drilling more than a green economy. Opposition from Joe Manchin, the senator from coal, killed President Biden's climate-change plan. With gas prices rising, Biden abandoned reducing emissions by announcing  the release of oil from strategic reserves.

The Ukranian disaster is horrifying. Climate change is more so.

Amazon Rainforest headed for extinction, according to report

The news articles all agree that the Amazon Rainforest is near a "tipping point."

That's when the world's lungs will hit code red. Tipping point seems a droll term to describe the impending death of the rainforest.

The Amazon’s demise is one of the many threats to humanity caused by climate change. Some enterprising journalist should compile a summation of all of them.

A recent avalanche of doomsday climate-change alarms agree that emissions must be radically reduced if humankind has any hope of avoiding extreme devastation.

When the Amazon’s point of no return arrives in the next few decades, the rainforest's disappearance into savannah will be irreversible, according to a new study.

Instead of absorbing carbon, the changing rainforest will release tons of greenhouse gases  into the atmosphere. The grasslands replacing the forest will no longer act as a carbon "sink."

Based on monthly satellite observations from 1991 to 2016, 75 percent of the rainforest has lost the ability to recover from drought, fire, deforestation and climate change, according to the study published in Nature Climate Change. The research was carried out by the University of Exeter, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Technical University of Munich, according to a BBC report.

The Amazon’s loss of resilience is higher near areas of deforestation for agriculture, encouraged by the Brazilian dictator Jair Bolsonaro.

Poet Joyce Kilmer in a much ridiculed poem said that only God can make a tree.

Only God, or nature, can make a rainforest. Once it's gone, it's lost forever. And the world will shuffle closer to doom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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New York Times' Jane Brody says farewell to readers

Jane Brody's Personal Health column in The New York Times was like a weekly letter from a wise Mom.

The 81-year-old Brody said farewell to her readers Tuesday, leaving a huge void in the newspaper's Science Times section.

After joining the Times in 1965, she began writing the Personal Health column in 1976, giving reliable information on diet, exercise, prescription drugs and medical procedures.

Like other top food and science journalists, she gave clarity to difficult information.

Jargon-free and conversational, her work undoubtedly improved and added years to people's lives. She often gave personal testimony to the benefits of her prescriptions.

In her farewell column, she notes the changes in medicine that she has documented, such as shifting dietary rules on which fats are harmful. Now the Mediterranean diet and olive oil appear best, but that could change, she points out, calling for someone else takes up her mission. 

Brody issues a mea culpa for an early column that touted conversion therapy to cure homosexuality. She also recalls a column about masturbation delayed for years until the Times editors got over their squeamishness. 

Covering an open field of topics with wit and style, she made her patch of space at the back of the Science section a garden of nutrition, medicine and science writing.

Tuesday mornings won't feel the same without Jane's greetings.

 

 

Golf fans at TPC Scottsdale cheer and toss beer as Soutwest bakes in worst drought in 1,500 years

The American Southwest's worst drought in 1,500 years made me wonder about those lush fairways at the TPC Stadium course in Scottsdale, Ariz., the site of last weekend's Waste Management Phoenix Open.

Global warming is worsening the Southwest's 20-year drought, according to a recent study, as reported by the Guardian. The extended dry conditions are the worst since 800 A.D, according to The New York Times.

Watching the WM Open, I wondered how much water the course uses to stay so green. The TPC does make an effort to conserve water, and recycles "gray water" to flush porta-potty toilets for the beer-guzzling spectators during the tournament, according to reports. Opened in 1986, the course sits on land reclaimed from a garbage landfill and features several presumably man-made lakes.

But hundreds of gallons of water are needed to keep the grass from turning back into the desert that surrounds it. The TPC does make an effort to use environmentally sustainable techniques, according to its web site, but its water consumption appears out of bounds as the drought worsens.

The tournament is famous for its par 3 stadium hole, enclosed by stands filled with drunken spectators who cheer good shots and boo those off target.

When golfer Sam Ryder made a hole in one Saturday, the crowd tossed a deluge of beer cups onto the green. The spray of beer was the most moisture seen in years.

Those cheers won't continue too long if the drought persists. It'll seem like 800 A.D. again.

Space telescope reaches destination 930,000 miles from earth

Putin's troops threaten Ukraine, inflation soars, political turmoil rages. But the James Webb Space Telescope has reached its perch on the other side of the sun.

With a last thrust of booster rockets, the $10 billion telescope with its 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors entered its orbit at Lagrange 2, a spot where the sun and earth's gravitational fields blend into equilibrium.

From its "halo orbit," the telescope will gather data from the universe's earliest moments and peer at distant stars. Jubilant NASA scientists said that the telescope will operate for 20 years or more.

The earth and sun's orbits result in five Lagrange points, numbered L1 through L5, according to the Washington Post.

 "Placing the telescope at L2 — in line with the earth and sun, where the telescope’s large shield can protect it from their glare and heat — will allow it to look farther, while also keeping its sensitive instruments at the super-cold temperatures they need to operate," the newspaper reported.

Surprisingly, the 18th century Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange discovered the places where gravity and centrifugal force counterbalance each other.

Now, NASA scientists will align the telescope's mirrors and instruments, with the first images not appearing until June or July, if all goes well. The telescope's mirrors will gaze at the first stars that rose following the big bang 13 billion years ago.

As we muddle along on earth, the great eye in the sky will be searching for clues to the origin of the universe, and whether life exists somewhere else.

Perhaps someday we’ll find our own harmonious Lagrange point right here at home.

 

 

 

Ocean warming sets another record

The world was a bit cooler last year: 2021 was the sixth warmest on record, breaking a streak of all-time annual highs.

Don't cheer too loudly: Ocean temperatures again reached all-time highs, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

If extreme ocean warming isn't somehow reversed, seafood will boil without needing to be caught. Even creatures in the darkest depths will die. A few jellyfish will keep floating on dead waters.

"During 2021, the oceans absorbed about 14 zeta Joules of additional heat energy — the equivalent of 440 billion toasters running 24 hours a day, every day of the year," John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota, told Forbes magazine. Another analogy is seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating each second, 24 hours a day, all year, the magazine said.

The ocean's surface has grown hotter every year since the 1950s. That burns away more polar ice, increasing sea levels and dramatically changing weather patterns.

Such depressing news no longer makes the front page, or the TV news. It's part of the numbing onslaught of climate change alarms. 

Yet action must be taken to stop emissions. The oceans are the crisis point of global warming. When the oceans are gone, all hope will be lost.

Blackbirds bring a winter gift

I thought the sound was rainfall.

Rain wasn't falling. Looking up, I realized the sound was hundreds of wings, united in symmetry. Flocks of small birds flew above me, passing over my neighbor's house across the street and filling the branches of trees. They kept coming, foraging from tree to tree.

I watched in wonder, until at last they vanished into the distance.

They were probably blackbirds, as identified by AJC wildlife writer Charles Seabrook in a column several years ago describing a similar experience.

A normal part of nature for hundreds of years seemed miraculous to me. In a major city, on a winter's afternoon that felt like spring, they appeared, magnificent in their intelligence.

When they disappear, the world will lose such beauty.

 

 

Giant Webb Space Telescope blasts off to view distant edge of the universe

The James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas Day, is headed for its vantage point orbiting the sun.

From a place a million miles from earth called LaGrange 2, the telescope with its giant mirror eye will collect infrared images from the distant edge of the universe.

The earliest stars formed after the Big Bang will come into view, along with whatever planets orbit them. The telescope  will glimpse black holes, comets, and possibly new space phenomena never seen before.

That's if the Webb, named for a longtime NASA administrator instead of receiving a name like Endeavor or Starship Enterprise, makes it intact to its destination. It'll take 29 days, and the giant mirror and other equipment must unfold in proper order.

If it doesn't work, the $10 billion project will float in space beyond repair.

When a problem arose with the Hubble telescope, astronauts were dispatched to fix it. But the Webb will travel far beyond where humans can go with their cosmic wrenches, although robots might do the job.

The long-delayed project was developed by NASA and the European and Canadian Space agencies. To the cheers of NASA technicians in Baltimore and astronomers viewing across the world, the telescope launched on Christmas Day from French Guiana riding an Ariane 5 rocket.

Now, the astronomers must nervously watch to see if the telescope's complex technology engages.

Astronomers don't know what discoveries the giant eye will uncover. Perhaps another mirror staring back from far far away.