This is the Classical Astronomy Update, an email newsletter especially
for Christian homeschool families (though everyone is welcome!) Please feel free to share this with any interested friends.
Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day: -- Job 3:9
IN THIS
UPDATE Commemorating the "Supernova Detector" Auroras Over Cleveland Goodbye Comet Hello Friends, Well, the comet came and went. I didn't receive any emails from any Update readers who saw it, so I'm surmising that most everyone missed it. As usual with such cosmic visitors, Comet
Tsushinchan-Atlas failed to deliver, though some of my friends and I saw it, in spite of its low visibility. Some pix are attached below. On another note, I was recently recalling an amusing exchange from years ago with a coworker. When I first landed in Washington, D.C. in 1987, everyone in my office was from all over the USA and beyond.
For many of us, this was our first experience living out-of-state. So we all had a lot of fun laughing at each other's regional accents and dialects, including the usual "pop vs. soda vs. coke" debates. (As every Ohioan of my vintage knows, the correct answer is "pop.") One issue arose when I caually mentioned "root beer." In
the local idiom of Cleveland, Ohio, "root" rhymes with "put." But this coworker from Upstate New York insisted that "root" properly rhymes with "boot." So we went round and round for a while, and discovered that I also say "roof" with a similar short "u" sound like "root" but she insisted that it should also be a long "u" like her version of "root." It didn't occur to me at the time, but I hope everyone can agree that "foot" does not rhyme with "boot" though it does rhyme with my pronunciation of "root." Same with "soot." But on the other hand, I hope we can also all agree that her pronuciation rhymes with "hoot," "loot," "moot," "toot" and "zoot" (as in "zoot suit.") Switching out one letter, I think we all pronounce "food" and "mood" her way, but I also think we all say "good," "hood" and "wood" my way. Please let me know if you say it differently. Anyway, it's no wonder immigrants have a hard time learning this crazy language! For more information about topics from Classical Astronomy discussed in this newsletter, please check out a homeschool astronomy curriculum (but popular with adult readers too!) Visit our archive of previous editions of the Classical Astronomy Update newsletters, going back to 2007. ***** Commemorating the "Supernova Detector" My friend Wes sent an email with this pic, a
plaque recently installed at Mentor Headlands State Park along the shores of Lake Erie. The plaque commemorates the Neutrino Lab 2000 feet underground in an old Morton Salt mine. Though it's not supposed to be amusing, I still found this plaque really funny! Let me tell you "the rest of the story...." When I was a physics student at Cleveland State University way back in the 1980s (before moving to Washington, D.C.), that facility was called the “Proton Decay Detector.” According to atomic theory, the half-life of a proton is 10^31 years. That means that, if you had a large sample of protons, half of them should decay in... wait for it... 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. That's 10 "decitillion" years, or
10,000 BILLION BILLION BILLION years. (I know, right? Scientists -- sheesh!) Since nobody wants to wait around for that, the brain boys figured that, if you could put 10^31 protons next to a suitable array of detectors, there should be one single proton decay per year which would emit a neutrino that could be detected, according to
theory. So to test this theory, they made an underground volume in the old salt mine equivalent to a 6 story building containing ultra-pure water. The walls of this volume were covered up and down by an array of neutrino detectors. We all know that the recipe for water is good old H20, two atoms of hydrogen for one atom of oxygen. And hydrogen is nothing but a single proton as a nucleus encircled by an electron. So out of all that 6 stories of water, one of those tiny little hydrogen nucleus protons should decay annually. Well, it should have, anyway. It ought to have done so according to atomic theory. One single tiny event. Every year. 12 months of nothing
followed by a split second of something. Imagine being the scientists on this project. Had to have been the most boring job ever. Sitting in a 2000 foot deep hole in the ground waiting for an annual event. Worse yet, the years were rolling by and no proton decays were observed! There was a PBS program back in the 80s that showed a scuba diver swimming inside that huge tank changing one of the detectors lining the walls. My question at the time was, what if a hydrogen nucleus in a water molecule one inch away from the scuba diver's head goes off in that short period while he's switching out the tube? Then you need to kill another whole year waiting for the next proton
decay! There had to be someone paying the bills for this project, wondering why there was no payoff! Maybe heads were about to roll? (During this period, I was the president of the Cleveland State chapter of SPS, the Society of
Physics Students. We tried to arrange a tour of the Proton Decay Detector for our 9 classmates. We were told there was nothing to see, just a control room not big enough for all of us to stand in. I was told the person on the phone was rather surly, as if they were embarrassed about failing to deliver the goods year after year. So we instead scheduled a tour at the nearby NASA-Lewis Research Center for January 28, 1986. If you don’t recognize the date, this happened
to be the day of the Challenger disaster. Suffice to say the tour was cancelled. And that was all that happened in my tenure as SPS president!) So anyway, the story has it that funding was running out and the Proton Decay experiment was imperiled. But that all changed on February 24, 1987 when the neutrino detectors in Mentor FINALLY started
lighting up! WAY more than just a single proton decay! I pictured a napping scientist in that tiny control room falling out of his chair when the claxons starting ringing! The story soon broke that the famed Supernova SN1987 had just popped off in the Large Magellanic Cloud, visually observed at observatories in Chile and New Zealand in the Southern
Hemipshere. This was the closest and brightest supernova since the one witnessed by Johannes Kepler in A.D. 1604. There hasn't been another since. And well, wouldn't you know, as luck would have it, there just so happened to be a "supernova detector" conveniently available in an old salt mine 2000 feet below Lake Erie in Mentor, Ohio! The freshly rebranded laboratory was suddenly, abruptly, thrust into the international limelight, and made headline news all over the world. The news soon trickled in that neutrinos were also observed at two other neutrino facilities in Japan and the USSR, confirming the findings. So all was well along the lakeshore in Mentor and the lab remained open for a good run. Over the years, I have heard much about the lab's role in the supernova but I never heard another peep about a proton decay detector! And now there is a new historical plaque proclaiming the revisionist history! Still no update and whether proton decay has ever been detected anywhere, nearly 40 years later. Anyway, that's why I find the plaque highly amusing! Auroras Over Cleveland We missed the aurora outbreak back in May
that was visible from Northern Ohio, but we got another chance on the evening of October 11, 2024 when another powerful coronal mass ejection from the Sun slammed into the Earth. I foolishly declined at invitation to join my friends John and David down along the shore of Lake Erie where the view would have been best. David sent along these colorful pix afterwards: We still had a nice enough view from our light polluted neighborhood. But as colorful as these pix appear, I've learned that smartphones enhance and exaggerate the color, amplifying the available light. Such stunning
views might be visible from a pristine dark sight but not under the city lights. As seen from my house, the red auroras appeared distinctly maroon, and the green auroras were clearly lighter and not any shade of red. And they changed over a span of minutes, with the reddish stuff in different parts of the sky over time. But I'm sure David and John had
more of a stunning view from down along the lake where the auroras would be visible down to the horizon. In Cleveland, Ohio in 2024 we've now had a total solar eclipse, two aurora outbursts and a comet. Such "signs and wonders in the heavens" are unprecedented in my lifetime of observing the sky. In olden times, such "signs" were considered to be omens,
foreboding imminent disaster. Meanwhile, in other unrelated news, we have "the most important election of our lifetime" coming up next week. Hmmm.... Whatever the case, it's never a bad time to "trust in the LORD with all of your heart" (Proverbs 3:5). Goodbye Comet As reported in the last newsletter, Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas showed up on schedule round about
October 13, and was visible in the western sky after sunset. It might still be visible but by now it'll be very faint and probably not easy to see, possibly detectable with a telescope by expereinced observers. Wouldn't you know, after a long stretch of gorgeous fall weather, the rain clouds rolled onto the mist-enshrounded shores of Lake Erie for the 5 peak
days of comet visibility. And the comet was far away from Earth by the time the clouds cleared. But I got some pix from friends. Here's a pic from my friend and pastor Shawn snapped in Salt Lake City, Utah: Here's a nice zoom from my eclipse pal Mark in San Antonio, Texas. Nice shots! Thanks friends! My wife Debbie and I tried for a couple nights to spot the comet from our light-drenched city neighborhood, but to no avail. I knew then that this was going ot be yet another comet dud. But then buddy Mike and I went out comet hunting last Friday and finally bagged our target alongside a corn
field under the semi-darkish skies of Spencer, Ohio, southwest of Cleveland. Like the aurora, the comet was brighter and more visible in smartphone cameras than with the eyes, so the nice pix above were probably not representative of the actual views. So I tried to create some "artist's conceptions" of what I saw, which might be a better representation than
photography. The comet was a very pretty sight through binoculars, quite bright in that magnified view. It appeared to have a fluffy tail that reminded me of my cute fuzzy black kitty Shady (a.k.a "Puffsqueak") shown below. However, the comet was just a faint, indistinct smudge as seen with only the unaided eye. I have a fair amount of experience with spotting such negligible ghosts in the night sky, so I was able to spot the comet using just my aging, myopic eyeballs, though Mike was not. Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas was the 5th comet that I'm sure I've seen in 27 years of effort, and it is the third best one of all followed by Comets Hale-Bopp and Hyakutke back in the 90s. It was better than the recent Comet Neowise back in 2020. But it was still not the
next "Great Comet" that we are all anticipating. Sorry if I got your hopes up and your family was disappointed. This is the ongoing dilemma of comets. I've been burned so many times over and over, but I keep sticking my neck out and reporting on them anyway. I always promise myself that I won't fall fro it and get suckered by the
next comet, that I'll blow it off and not write a newsletter about it. But then I wonder, gee, what if this turns out to be "the one"? So I feel like Charlie Brown taking another missed kick at Lucy's football! Okay friends, I promise that next time I'll write about something you will actually see! Till next time, God bless and clear skies, - jay The Ryan
Family Cleveland, Ohio, USA When I consider thy
heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? - Psalm 8:3-4, a Psalm of David
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