Science News Nov 23

[This is a transcript with references.]

Welcome to this week’s science news. Today we’ll talk about how to build a radio telescope – on the moon, recent wormhole headlines, the Artemis 1 launch and why it was delayed, quantum microscopes and the status of quantum computing, the first metaverse nation, manta rays, advances in material design, the link between chaos and biodiversity. And of course, the telephone will ring.

A group of astronomers and engineers have detailed their plans to plant a Radio Telescope on the moon. Its purpose would be to look into the dark ages, and no, I don’t mean it’d broadcast the evening news. The dark ages are a period in the early universe after atoms formed but before stars ignited. There was some light around at the time but with the expansion of the universe, the light has by now been stretched to extremely long wavelengths, which is why you need a big telescope to measure it. There are other things you can measure in this wavelength range, such as radio emissions from exoplanets.

Those signals are very difficult to measure down here on earth because the atmosphere is in the way. An ideal place for such a radio telescope would be the far side of the moon which permanently faces away from Earth. I can’t blame it.

This possible mission has been dubbed the Far-side Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark ages and Exoplanets, FARSIDE for short. The array would cover an area of about 100 square kilometres. The idea for FARSIDE has been around for more than a decade, but the new paper lays out details for how an uncrewed lander with robots could carry out the installation on the moon. They tried different arrangements for the telescope array and found that the deployment would work best for a four-armed spiral with about 10 kilometres diameter.

The idea was developed in collaboration between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Blue Origin. The leader of the team, Dr. Gregg Hallinan, believes the project could launch by the year 2028. They didn’t estimate the cost for the mission, but I’d guess it’s upwards of 10 billion dollars. Sounds like a lot of money, but if we can get the thing to send 280 character messages, then maybe Elon Musk’ll pay for it.

Many of you asked me to comment on some recent headlines claiming that black holes might actually be wormholes. Those headlines are about a paper that was recently published in PRD by a group of physicists from Bulgaria. What they do in the paper is to analyse the polarization of light emitted from gas that swirls around a wormhole, and compare that to what you’d expect from a black hole. To make a long story short, the two are very difficult to tell apart. In the paper they look at some scenarios where they’d be easier to tell apart, cases where the space-time curvature is noticeably different or when one can see radiation coming from the other end of the wormhole, but overall the conclusion is that the current observations would well be compatible with the result they get for wormholes.

This calculation is all well and fine, but it does certainly not mean that it’s plausible we have observed wormholes. What they do in the paper is use the space-time geometry for a static wormhole. Static means it doesn’t change in time. You can do this mathematically.

But physically a static wormhole doesn’t make sense because the universe itself isn’t static. For the idea of wormholes to make physical sense, there’d have to be a way how they can be created as the universe expands. We know how black holes form. But no one has any idea how wormholes should form. The other issue with wormholes is that even if they would exist, they’d be unstable and close immediately. In summary, just because there’s maths for it doesn’t mean it’s real.

Last Wednesday, the unmanned rocket Artemis 1 lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was a refreshing launch as it didn’t include a billionaire trying to compensate for a lack of popularity.

It’s the first test of NASA’s Orion space-craft that might one day carry astronauts to the moon or even mars. But for now, the 25-day mission will go once around the moon and then return to Earth. The space-craft is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean in December.

The mission’s launch date has been delayed four times prior to the successful launch. Two times because of bad weather and two times because of technical issues.

The main cause of the technical delay is a small but important element of the launch system. The rocket engine and boosters are fuelled by hydrogen. To keep the boosters full all the way up to the top while the rocket is on the launch pad, the fuel tank remains hooked onto hydrogen supply until the very moment of take-off. At that point, the hydrogen lines must be quickly disconnected.

The problem is, these connections can’t be made too tight, otherwise they wouldn’t come off quickly enough, so they leak hydrogen. Mixed with air, that becomes highly explosive. If the sensors detect too much hydrogen leakage, the launch must be cancelled. This has happened repeatedly. NASA’s reliance on hydrogen boosters has been criticized by experts. Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator at NASA said in an interview with Ars Technica earlier this year: “I attribute it to this sort of group think, the contractors and the self-licking ice cream cone.”

Physicists from Australia China have developed a prototype of a quantum microscope according to a new paper just published in Nature Physics.

Quantum microscopes image fine details of atomic structures, from which one can extract material properties such as temperature, the presence of defects, the type of atomic bonds, magnetic and electric fields, and so on. The new prototype improves on previous designs by using an imaging sensor that’s a van der Waals material with only a few atomic layers thickness. This makes it possible to get the sensor closer to the objects than earlier, bulkier, sensors. At present, the prototype can resolve micrometre scales, but the team hopes that further improvements can push the resolution down into the nanometre range.

According to one of the authors of the paper, Dr Mehran Kianinia from the University of technology in Sydney possible applications could be “in space, defence and agriculture where remote sensing and imaging are key.”

Hi Rishi,

They do what? Climb highway gantries? Can’t they just glue themselves to the road like normal people?

I do miss the quiet days of the pandemic. Talk to you soon.

According to a new paper in PRX quantum computers are still far away from being practically useful. Small quantum computers with up to a few hundred qubits exist, and some have demonstrated a “quantum advantage”, for example Google’s Sycamore processor. But quantum advantage just means that these devices have performed some calculation faster than a conventional computer could have done. However, the calculations that have been done so far on quantum computers didn’t deliver any useful results, they just produced certain random distributions that are difficult to calculate in any other way.

For the new paper used a quantum computer from Google with 53 qubits to try to calculate properties of some atomic lattices. And that kind of worked, in the sense that they did get results. But simulations with more than 300 gates were overwhelmed by noise and produced no useful results. This means the largest size of the lattice they could simulate had 6 atoms. Yeah, that’s not much of a lattice.

Scientists have found the largest known population of oceanic manta ray thriving off the coast of Ecuador. It’s ten times larger than any other known subpopulation of the species.

Oceanic manta rays are the largest species of ray, with wingspans that can reach more than 20 feet. They are filter feeders that eat large quantities of krill and other zooplankton. They usually live in small groups in warm waters and spend much of their time in the open ocean. The major threat to oceanic manta rays is commercial fishing, both because they’re targets and unintentional bycatch.

The species was listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 2018, and in 2019 their threat category increased from vulnerable to endangered on the Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The discovery is a welcome surprise.

Mr President,

Yes, loss of biodiversity is a big concern.

I fully support more pronouns for fish.

Oh I see. They don’t use bathrooms.

Always at your service.

The Metaverse will soon see the rise of a digital nation. The Pacific nation of Tuvalu is planning to create a version of itself in the metaverse as a response to the threat of rising sea levels. Tuvalu's minister for justice, communication, and foreign affairs, Simon Kofe, announced the plans last week in a digital address to leaders at COP27.

This step is a preparation for a worst-case scenario and would see the entire nation digitally copied to preserve the rich culture and beautiful island scenery.

The metaverse is Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the future of society, a world in which the real blends with the virtual. Zuckerberg’s vision has been widely criticized as ignoring most people’s more practical needs, such as the possibility of disabling the facebook messenger. Mark if you’re listening, I just want to turn it off!

Simon Kofe of Tuvalu has a knack for media stunts. Last year, he made an address to leaders at the COP26 meeting standing knee deep in water to draw attention to the precarious situation of his island nation.

But hey, let’s look at the bright side. A recent paper by researchers from the university of Hawaii has found that climate change will probably lead to more rainbows.

Researchers at Stanford University believe they are close to a breakthrough in material science. A big difficulty, maybe THE biggest difficulty, in designing new materials is to make accurate predictions for the physical properties of a material based on its molecular structure. According to their new paper, the researchers have successfully used electron microscopy to visualize the arrangement of molecules in a polymer. They then combined the visualization with computer modelling to find out how certain structural changes could improve the flow of electricity in the material. This method of combining measurements with simulation has the potential to accelerate the development of new materials.

In my opinion material science is one of the most under-appreciated and under-reported research areas. Understanding the properties of materials is relevant for basically all areas of technology development, and the possibility to custom-design materials will undoubtedly soon lead to a boom in the field.

Scientists at the Universities of Köln and Osnabrück say that chaos may be the key to biodiversity. It’s the first time that non-linear processes and chaotic dynamics have been found to occur in the evolution of a single species. The study tracked the growth of a certain type of bacteria under controlled, constant, environmental conditions. The bacteria interact with each other by exchanging various biochemical products. The researchers observed non-linear trends in many of those pathways and claim to have found evidence for chaotic behaviour.

The result highlights that chaotic behaviour is the rule rather than the exception. Then again, you probably knew this already.