cosmogony.net - HL Tauri

Presented here are some of the thoughts and ideas I have had over the past ten years or so concerning the formation of the universe and our solar system. Being a metallurgist, I have had no formal cosmological training but I do have a solid secondary educational background in mathematics, physics and chemistry.

My interest in cosmology was sparked when I read "The Nature of the Universe" by Fred Hoyle, the English astrophysicist (1918 - 2001). In 1949 Fred gave a series of talks on the radio for the British Broadcasting Corporation and these talks were later presented in the above book published in 1950. It was in this series that Hoyle coined the term "big bang", not in any pejorative sense, as some people claim. Subsequently I acquired many of the books by and about him.

I spent the major part of my working life working mainly on the development, manufacture and testing of nickel/iron alloys for magnetic and controlled expansion applications. Using eight bit Motorola microprocessors, I designed and built equipment to aid manufacture and testing. I also worked on the development of copper-clad niobium/titanium superconducting wire. My working life started in a steelworks for a couple of years after graduation at the Department of Metallurgy at Kings College, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, a year before it became Newcastle University, and finished with a part-time four year post-retirement-age stint operating a scanning electron microscope at a fuel cell company.

My name is George Everett
The Appendix elaborates on some of the technical points in Main.

Introduction

Much has been written about the apparent fine tuning of Nature that has enabled our world to form and to initiate and sustain life. An "Anthropic Principle" was first suggested by Brandon Carter at a meeting in Princeton in 1970. The discovery of an unknown energy level in carbon in 1953, after it was predicted by Hoyle, is often cited as the first example of a prediction based on the Anthropic Principle, despite the prediction preceding the formulation of this principle. If it were not for the existence of this energy level (the Hoyle state) there would be no elements beyond boron. No carbon - no life - nothing.

I would like to propose that it is more than a propitious coincidence that those elements at the peak of the binding energy per nucleon curve, namely iron and nickel, also possess the property we call ferromagnetism. Nuclear fusion stops at iron and nickel with iron becoming the most abundant metal in the cosmos. I believe that ferromagnetism played a pivotal role in the formation of our solar system with its planets. Earth's iron/nickel geodynamo ensures a relatively benign environment for life to form and evolve. Without protection from the atmosphere-stripping effect of the Sun's radiation, Earth would probably be as barren as Mars is today. We need iron in our blood to absorb oxygen from the air and plants too need iron to respire and photosynthesise. Iron is surely king!

What is Cosmogony?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives two (very similar) definitions.

1: a theory of the origin of the universe

2: the creation or origin of the world or universe

I do not believe that all we can see with with our best telescopes, ground or space based, was created in one 'Big Bang' some fourteen billion years ago. It does not sound plausible to me and there is the unanswered question of what happened to the anti-matter that was supposed to have been created in this Big Bang.

The claim that the cosmic microwave background radiation is a relic of the Big Bang that proves the case for the Big Bang is just as presumptuous in my view as the claim that galactic flat rotation velocity is proof of the existence of 'Dark Matter'. Could the 2.73K blackbody background radiation simply be due to the thermalisation of stellar radiation? Have the proponents of Dark Matter considered the influence of the the billion or so neutron stars that NASA estimate should exist in our galaxy?

I have in mind a scenario I hope to develop for the origin of the universe that does not involve a single big bang event.

What is gravity?

Gravity is the weakest, yet arguably the most dominant force in the universe, but it remains an enigma. Does anti-matter exhibit attractive or repulsive gravity? Perhaps one day the secrets of gravity will be unlocked and then we might really have a 'Theory of Everything'. If we understood why and could prove that gravitational and inertial masses of ordinary matter are equivalent, it might help the cause.

Fundamental Particles

Not so long ago it was thought that there were three fundamental atomic particles - the neutron, the proton and the electron. It turns out that an unbound neutron decays into a proton and electron in about fourteen minutes. Then along came the idea of quarks which exist in triplets to form neutrons and protons, collectively called nucleons. These quarks cannot exist as separate entities outside nucleons. It is accepted that these quarks possess a charge equal to one third of that of an electron or two thirds of that of the positron. It seems to me therefore that the electron or positron cannot be a fundamental particles but must be made of three particles, which I will call the electrino, the little electron. Quarks possess one or two of these hypothesised electrinos, depending on the type of quark, and like the quark the electrino cannot exist as a separate entity outside a nucleon. Outside nucleons, three electrinos form a seemingly indivisible electron.

Evolution of the Solar System

The starting position is taken as the point when the embryonic solar system has a clearly recognisable circumstellar disc with a glowing nucleus or nebula - a protoplanetary disc such as HL Tauri. It is noticeable, even at 1 million years or less, that there are two clearly defined depleted rings. The image of HL Tauri from ALMA presented below has been generated from a new analysis by Japanese scientists of the public data in 2017. Red is dust and blue is the formyl radical HCO^-. One interpretation is that planetary formation is underway in these two rings. I think a Jupiter style planet could be forming in the outer ring. A large planet forming early could be crucial in transferring angular momentum from the nebula to the disc, as discussed below.

Hoyle, in his book "The Cosmogony of the Solar System", calculated that the Sun would reach rotational instability by the time it had condensed to a size of 40% of Mercury's present-day orbit if it did not shed angular momentum. It was therefore imperative that angular momentum from our collapsing nebula should be transferred to the circumstellar disc if the process of collapse was to proceed without disintegration. Hoyle favored magnetic coupling between the rotating nebula and the disc to transfer momentum. I think the most plausible mechanism is that of coupling by magnetic/electromagnetic means. A means by which iron/nickel particles became melted or sintered together could be by the generation of eddy currents in the particles, much in the manner of a high-frequency induction furnace.

The rotational velocity of the nebula may be expressed as the equatorial velocity at the surface or as an averaged velocity component of the angular momentum or the rotational kinetic energy of the nebula. I think the transfer of angular momentum from the nebular to the circumstellar disc is most easily understood by looking at the kinetic energy of the system. The magnetic/electromagnetic coupling of the disc and nebula may be thought as acting as a torque converter. The work done by this torque converter can be considered as extracting energy from the nebula and transferring it to the disk. It appears counter-intuitive, but as energy is transferred to the iron-containing components of the rings, these components will be forced to take up a higher radius of rotation, but at a slower orbital or angular velocity. Assuming a circular orbit, moment of inertia (I) varies directly as the square of the orbital radius while the angular velocity (ω) varies inversely as the square root of the radius, hence there is a net gain in angular momentum (Iω) in the disc, neglecting any mass effect.

As angular momentum is transferred by magnetic/electromagnetic coupling, the rotating nebula further collapses while the circumstellar disc expands. The way bands or rings form in the disc is a subject of interest. My instinct tells me that that the nebula could be generating regular and intense vibrational waves as it collapses producing a radial standing-wave-like pattern in the circumstellar disc. The frequency of vibration, along, with other factors, would determine the number of nodes and anti-nodes and hence how many rings are created, which in turn would determine the potential number of planets that could be formed. In the rings a bright central area , darkening towards the edges, can be seen especially in the outer rings of the HL Tauri image on the home page, perhaps giving credence to this interpretation. This could have been an ideal environment for the process of planetary formation with a high concentration of particles in the center of the ring.

Iron/nickel-rich accreted masses, be they large or be they small, as they are driven by the magnetic torque converter to a wider orbit will tend to collide with iron/nickel-poor accreted masses that are no so well driven. Some of the combined kinetic energy of the colliding bodies in the collision will be dissipated as heat. The effect of these collisions will be to bring the combined mass back to a lower orbit.

Therefore, a body that accretes will not move to such a such a high orbit as a body that does not accrete, if both are being driven by the magnetic torque. This raises the possibility that a body, when it reaches the edge of a ring and is still under torque, will be able to migrate out of its parent circumstellar ring into the next one. Imagine a body like this and let us call it Jupiter Junior, still in an Earth like form but possibly larger. Suppose too that there has been little major accretion in this adjacent disc because of slightly less favorable conditions and suppose this disc is in the region where what we call the asteroid belt would have been. Jupiter Junior, still under torque, would be able to work its way through this ring, accreting smaller bodies mainly by gravity, and impacting on larger bodies like wrecking ball. Most of the debris would be accreted into the body of Jupiter Junior, gaining tens of earth-masses in the process. The remainder would be either ejected from orbit or remain in orbit.

Thus Jupiter Junior worked its way through what is now the asteroid belt, leaving a trail of destruction behind. The asteroid Psyche, a large ball of nickel/iron which could be the remnant of an embryonic planet, may be the result of such an impact. It is also likely Junior Jupiter picked up the Trojan asteroids in its Lagrange points on its journey through what is now known as the asteroid belt. Also it is probable that the many very small moons that Jupiter has acquired were captured on this journey.

Migrating outwards under torque, which would likely be increased by a geodynamo in its core, Jupiter Junior would enter the next ring, still a rocky planet, where accretion to moon-sized planetesimals had already occurred. Four of these planetesimals, known today as the Galilean moons, would be captured by a growing Jupiter Junior as it gravitationally attracted hydrogen, helium and rocky material from the cold environment. Undoubtedly some planetesimals would be absorbed by direct impact with this growing planet with a substantial atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. The Galilean moons would be captured by atmospheric retardation rather than direct impact. Jupiter Junior was on the way to becoming Jupiter Senior, the Jupiter we know today and slowed its outward journey as the nebula's angular momentum was transferred not only to Jupiter but the rest of the outer planets.

The Lagrange points L4 and L5 were expected to remain sufficiently stable for the Trojans to remain in place while Jupiter acquired its mass of hydrogen and helium. The coriolis force at these Lagrange points gave the captured bodies self-regulating stability.

This scenario implies that Jupiter Junior began its life in the ring in which Mars originated. It is not an impossible hypothesis if one accepts that Earth and its moon or its moon progenitor shared the same ring during their formation. In the former case the larger body escapes the ring and in the second Earth 'captures' the moon. Perhaps the relatively small size of Mars is due to most of the material in the Mars ring being accreted into Jupiter Junior.

A large planet forming early is considered to be crucial in absorbing angular momentum from the nebula as previously mentioned. Imagine there to be a 'Goldilocks' zone where there is optimum magnetic interaction between the nebula's magnetic field, the concentration of iron/nickel rich agglomerates and the temperature in the disc. In the above scenario this would be the Mars and asteroid rings.

At each stage, as the nebula's rotation slowed and the disk cooled and expanded, the 'Goldilocks' zone would have likely shifted towards the center. This view is supported by studies involving radio-isotope ¹⁸²Hafnium eventually decaying to ¹⁸²Tungsten that strongly suggest Mars formed before Earth.

Jupiter's intense magnetic field is claimed, I believe, to be generated in the liquid metallic hydrogen outer core. This may be true, but it may also be the case that the excitation for this 'hydrogen dynamo' comes from a large earth-like geodynamo at the center.

The only external physical evidence we have that may point our thoughts in the direction of how Earth formed are meteorites, primarily from the asteroid belt. Much can be learned from the study and analysis of meteorites, some of which are known to have originated from Mars. There are many classes of meteorites but the one that is of most relevance in this context are the chondrites. They are unmelted, but not necessarily unheated, and are thought to be representative of the building blocks of our planet. Many contain iron and nickel but, as far as I can ascertain, generally not in a sufficient quantity that would give the proportion of metal that we see in Earth's core. The evidence that chondrules experienced a temperature that lead to melting suggests to me that the center of the solar nebular, when it underwent the first stage of nuclear fusion, created such a shock wave that the hot outer layer of the solar nebula was expelled through the circumstellar disc. A short but violent event that left its mark.

It is unlikely we will ever see direct evidence of the nature of the first accretions that became the center of the Earth's core but I would like to propose that it could have been similar to some of the more metallic chondrites but with a higher metal content. If there is anything in my hypothesis that ferromagnetism played a pivotal role in the cosmogony of the Solar System, then I would expect the first accretions to be high in metallic iron nickel and later ones to be low.

Iron is quoted as composing 85% of the body of Mercury. This high figure is often cited as being due to outer rocky layers being stripped off by radiation proximity effects from the sun. I would like to propose that a proximity effect which might directly account for that the high iron content is the strong magnetic influence from the sun or proto-sun, enabling iron-rich accretions to readily form.

The composition of the earth seems to around 35% by weight iron + nickel. Taking a linear rate of diminution with time of metal content of chondritic material incorporated into our planet, implies that there could have been a reduction from an initial 70% to a final zero. I am not sure if the 35% figure I read includes the non-metallic (oxides) iron, which could add another 10% to the total.

I have a picture in my mind's eye of molten rock rising up from a molten iron/nickel rich core rather than molten metal trickling down. We may never know but perhaps in ten year's time we may have filled in some of the gaps in our knowledge following a successful NASA-funded Psyche mission to the asteroid belt to examine what is thought to be a proto-planetary core.

Anthropic Principle

The following two pages are reproduced from the autobiographical "Home is Where the Wind Blows" by Fred Hoyle, with kind permission from University Science Books.

All rights are reserved. Copyright © 1994 by University Science Books.

Reproduction or translation of any part of this work beyond that permitted by Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act without the permission of the copyright holder is unlawful. Requests for permission or further information should be addressed to the Permissions Department, University Science Books.

Chapter 18

An Unknown Level in Carbon-12

THE PREDICTION in early 1953 of the existence of a hitherto unknown level at an excitation of about 7.65 million electron volts (7.65 MeV) in the nucleus of the common isotope of carbon, carbon-12 (commonly written ¹²C), has achieved some notice in recent years on account of its being an early application of what is known nowadays as the anthropic principle. Indeed, it is sometimes referred to as the only, predictive application yet made of the anthropic principle. In this chapter, I will explain how, as an outcome of another lucky chain of accidents, the prediction came about.

The anthropic principle is a curious notion that appears to be clear to some people but not to others, as often is the case with concepts to which the word principle is applied. No one can quarrel with the statement that the physical properties of the universe must be consistent with our own existence, a statement so obvious as hardly to justify the term principle, one might think. Nevertheless, this trite observation can be made to do some work, as the ¹²C story showed. Application of it to cosmology has some predictive possibilities. Thus, in evolving cosmologies, human life could not have existed in earlier times, when the temperature everywhere was too high, nor will it exist in later times, when all dwarf stars, such as the Sun, will have burned out. These two requirements set the epoch of our existence as between about 10 million years and 30 billion years after the Universe started in a big bang. If one believes in the big bang, this is not a negligible deduction. In other forms of cosmology not of the big-bang type, galaxies can be of variable ages - some old, some young.

The anthropic principle requires us to live in a galaxy that is old enough for the evolution of life to have led to our existence. Should this require us to live in an exceptionally old galaxy, then that is where we must be, regardless of the comparative rarity of exceptionally old galaxies. Probabilities do not arise in such a case, as they would for a randomly chosen observer.

256 More subtle issues appear when the existence of life is seen to depend crucially on a fine tuning of the laws of physics themselves, in the sense that it is not hard to imagine minor changes in the laws that would have made life impossible. Thus, we are faced with several alternatives. Either our existence is a freakish accident, or the laws of physics are not invariant. Either the Universe is more complex than we think, in that variations of the laws are realized (in which case we happen to pick out the particular choices that are suited to our existence), or the Universe is teleological, with the laws deliberately arranged by some agent to permit our existence. The latter view is, of course, common to most religions, but it were better for a scientist to have a millstone hung around his neck than that he should admit to such a belief - yea, verily. If he does so, his papers will be rejected, he will receive no financial assistance in his work, the publishers of his books will receive threatening letters, and his children will be waylaid on their way home from school. As well might he seek to pass through the eye of a needle, for to hold such a view is the greatest possible scientific heresy. On the other hand, it is possible to hold the inverse view (and even to win plaudits by doing so) - namely, that it is our existence that requires the laws to be the way they are. Stated this way round, you have what is called the strong anthropic principle. Our existence dictates how the Universe shall be, a fine ego-boosting point of view on which you may travel, fare paid, to conferences all over the world.

A balanced person will be surprised to hear that a respectable argument can be given in support of this seemingly outrageous point of view. It concerns the phenomenon of the condensation of the wave function in quantum mechanics. It is possible to set up a physical either/or kind of experiment without difficulty. A radioactive atom either decays in a specified time or it does not. If it does, the decay products are used to trigger a camera, and a picture is taken of the House of Commons in session. If it does not, the absence of decay products triggers a different camera, and a picture is taken of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday. So, inevitably, some picture is taken, and the question is, How do we discover if it is the House of Commons or St. Paul's? Not by calculation - absolutely not.

Any attempt to fiddle the calculations to yield a definite prediction results in abysmal contradictions. Calculation can only assign relative probabilities to the two possible results of the experiment. The widely accepted answer to the problem, given in my youth by what was called the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics, associated particularly with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, was that decision is made in the matter by the experimental equipment, the circumstances of the triggers, the electronic storage devices, and the cameras. Schrödinger differed, however, arguing (in what came to be called the "Schrödinger cat experiment")

257

Binding Energy

²⁸Nickel₆₂has the highest binding energy per nucleon. ²⁶iron₅₆ has the lowest mass per nucleon and is the most efficiently bound. ²⁶iron₅₆ and ²⁸nickel_58, having an even number of protons and neutrons, are more favoured during nucleosynthesis than ²⁷cobalt_59,the third classical ferromagnetic element, with its odd number of protons. Cobalt is at the peak of binding energy per nucleon for elements with an odd number of protons.

It is perhaps not surprising that there is a peak in the binding energy per nucleon curve. In many systems where there are number of competing forces there will be position where these will balance each other. The question I would like an answer to is why iron and nickel are at the peak. Many models, not necessarily mutually exclusive, have been proposed for the structure of the nucleus, but I do not think we have a sufficient understanding yet to answer this question.

Ferromagnetism

The phenomenon is fairly well understood and explained by the way the electrons are arranged in their orbits. There are other ferromagnetic elements than iron, nickel and cobalt. A ferromagnetic alloy can be made from non-ferromagnetic elements e.g. Heusler alloys from manganese and copper.

The first set of transition elements, scandium to zinc, is made by filling the 3d electron orbitals. The orderly filling of the shell is disrupted at chromium and copper, sandwiching manganese, iron, cobalt and nickel in-between. I am not sure if anyone can fully and rigorously explain this behavior. It is interesting that Heusler alloys are made with the two "outside" elements of the iron,cobalt and nickel sandwich.

The transition metals are listed in order: scandium, titanium, vanadium, chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel, copper and zinc.

Lagrange Points L4 and L5

Created by Neil J. Cornish for WMAP Education and Outreach 1998

The stability analysis around L4 and L5 yields something of a surprise. While these points correspond to local maxima of the generalised potential - which usually implies a state of unstable equilibrium - they are in fact stable. Their stability is due to the coriolis force. Initially a mass situated near L4 or L5 will tend to slide down the potential, but as it does so it picks up speed and the coriolis force kicks in, sending it into an orbit around the Lagrange point. The effect is analogous to how a hurricane forms on the surface of the earth: as air rushes into a low pressure system it begins to rotate because of the coriolis force and a stable vortex is formed.

¹⁸²Hafnium/¹⁸²Tungsten decay

The decay chain is ¹⁸²Hafniun --> ¹⁸²Tantalum --> ¹⁸²Tungsten --> ¹⁷⁸Hafnium. The half-life of the first decay reaction is ~9x10⁶ years, that of the second is ~14 days and that of the third is ~8x10¹⁸ years. So the ratio ¹⁸²Hafnium/¹⁸²Tungsten provides a means of determining the likely ages of meteorites and Earth material.

Conclusion

Here we have two phenomena relating to atomic structure - one concerned with the arrangement of protons and neutrons in the nucleus and the other with the arrangement of electrons in their orbitals. I propose that we do not have sufficient knowledge of the atom and its component parts to rule out the possibility that that the structure of the nucleus could influence the arrangement of electrons in their orbits, or vice versa. Regardless, the net result is the production of the most abundant metal in the cosmos with properties that help to provide an environment where life can form and endure.

This site was revised on 28th June 2018

The experience I gained at work in assembly language programming of the Motorola 6800 and 6809 microprocessors enabled me to write a program in 68000 assembler to extract the million or so prime numbers from the first 16 million natural numbers using the Sieve of Eratosthenes. It was then my intention to successively multiply these primes together, then and add 1, to hopefully obtain a massive prime number. After three days of running the BCD multiplication program I realised two things. One was that the number may or may not be prime and I would have no way of verifying if it was prime. If it was not prime all I would be able to say that the factors were greater than the top of my million or so primes. Consequently, I aborted the project. The programs were developed and run in the EASy68K environment, available for a PC from http://www.easy68k.com.

For a whiff of nostalgia, here is a photo of the Motorola 6800 MEK D2, with its full-house of 512 bytes of static RAM, that first got me involved with microprocessors. It is still working after 40 years!

The American Linus Pauling (1901 - 1994) was undoubtedly one of the scientific giants of the 20th century. He was a double Nobel prize winner for Chemistry and Peace. However, his work on the atomic nucleus was seemingly shunned by the scientific community and his Polyspheron Theory was never allowed by his peers to enter into the mainstream of physics or chemistry. His work on this subject seems to have buried in the past, much as Hoyle's Quasi Semi Steady State theory seems to have been buried. This theory predicted a cyclic universe, a type of model espoused by Roger Penrose with Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. Others too have pursued ideas of a cyclic universe.

Could cloud transmittance variation explain climate trends?

Clouds cover approximately two-thirds of the globe according to Prof Ellie Highwood of Reading University, who as a climate modeller, finds clouds both breathtakingly beautiful and infernally infuriating.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-clouds-hold-key-better-climate-models

I will start with graphs of annual UK weather data from the Met Office https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/2018

RAINFALL

MINIMUM TEMPERATURE

MEAN TEMPERATURE

MAXIMUM TEMPERATURE

SUNSHINE

These five graphs show a broadly synchronised trend of a gradual increase from 1970/75, with a levelling-off around 2005. What I found surprising was that the sunshine also followed this trend. The rainfall might be expected to follow the upward temperature trend as a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour. It is easier to imagine that the transmittance of the clouds has increased, rather than the cloud cover has decreased and there is one obvious factor that might cause an increase in cloud transmittance and that is the reduction of combustion particulates and SO₂from coal used for generating electricity. The graph below was issued by the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. There was a reduction of some 90% in the use of coal between 1970 and 2000.

America too reduced its coal consumption in this period. Al Gore on his visit to Antarctica in 2012 was reported as saying

“Yet another surprise for me was when scientists showed me that near the South Pole, the presence of air pollution in the ice cores visibly declined not long after the passage of the US Clean Air Act in 1970."

Thus, I think there is a case for attributing the temperature rise in the last quarter of the 20th century, at least in substantial part, to the industrialised West drastically reducing the burning of coal for electricity generation.

At about the turn of the century China was starting to ramp up its use of coal as shown below.

India too has been rapidly increasing its coal consumption since around 2005

The levelling-off of the warming trend around 2010 that Met Office graphs show and has been reported elsewhere, eg NOAA (below), could be caused by a reduction in cloud transmittance due to particulates and SO₂ from the increase in coal burnt in China and India.

I would like to emphasise that CO₂ plays no part in my argument and I believe its atmospheric concentration to be virtually irrelevant to climate change. If the burning of coal can be cleaned-up and the harmful by-products, collected or removed as appropriate, then the planet should not suffer and could indeed benefit. Carbon dioxide literally keeps the planet green and, ultimately, all of us alive.

Should the Chinese and Indians either run out of coal or reduce their consumption and temperature starts to drift up, then we must learn to live with it or use technology in other directions to ameliorate the effect. For all I know, natural climate change may make the world a cooler place in the years ahead. Trying to predict nature is probably a futile guessing-game.

If my case has validity, then the expenditure of vast sums of money with a huge influence on the human psyche, must be the ultimate in irony, with the consequence of carbon (dioxide) reduction-measures having the opposite outcome to that intended - a positive instead of negative feedback effect.

Electric cars are a good idea in that they reduce pollution at the street level, but do nothing for the climate on a global scale. Electric buses are already available but when will we see electric trucks and lorries on our roads?

Footnote.:

The Met Office sent me a link giving more information about sunshine measuring.

http://measuringtheweather.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/An-overview-of-sunshine-recorders-July-2012.pdf

HL Tauri

Atacama Large Millimeter Array 2014

About

Main