Shedding Light on Dark Matter

Sometime in the 17 th century, a man was supposedly hit on the head by an apple, ripe, that had detached itself from the tree he had been
sitting under. This story should be familiar to any self-respecting
physics student–myself included-. How true this story is, or the less
painful version of him merely observing the very hard fruit falling to
the ground, is subject of little importance. But the events that
followed have affected every aspect of how we view the world today.
We see stuff fall to the ground all the time, it really is no biggy. I
mean, it's just a fact of life; things will fall. In that fateful
century, however, in an unplanned vacation induced by an epidemic of
the plague that ravaged parts of Europe, a very smart scholar used
this time very wisely and out of it came the answer to the most
unasked question of all time: why does stuff fall down? Newton, today
known to many as the greatest thinker of all time, pondered this
question (in more formal English).
After countless hours he came up with a very nifty equation, stating
how gravity is a force that pulls stuff together, and how the strength
of this force decreases by a square of the separation of these two
objects. He also explained the motion of the planets and that was
that. Well, it's all good until you ask the question: what is gravity?
Of course, it is a force that pulls objects together, thus creating
the effect of the less massive one falling toward the one with greater
mass.
The trouble with this answer is that it just doesn't explain what
gravity is, it just explains what is does. Sort of like explaining
wind with the bending of trees. Einstein came to the rescue with his
famous theory of general relativity which explained how massive
objects distort the space-time around them, thus explaining the motion
of objects in such gravitational fields. He proposed another way of
looking at this force and in this way solved a long standing riddle of
the peculiar orbit of Mercury.
It seems there is an adversary of this universal force, a force that
does the complete opposite of what we've known gravity to do; it
pushes things apart. After the expansion of the universe was
discovered, an even greater anomaly was observed. The expansion of the
universe was expected to slow down but the discovery that this
expansion is actually accelerating, caught those who observed it by so
much surprise that at first they thought they'd made a mistake
somehow.
Observations have shown that there's stuff literally appearing out of
empty space and pushing galaxies apart. It's an energy that pushes
incredible masses apart; we literally have no clue what it is, despite
studying it for over a decade. It's so illusive and so little is known
about it, save its effects, that it has been termed: Dark Energy. Not
related to the enigma of Dark Matter, its sexy adjective reminds us
how little we know about it.
In a recent scientific endeavor, a very sensitive satellite was used
to scan through the sky in all directions, in search for what is
essentially the afterglow of the Big Bang. The result was a dirty
looking rugby ball of a map that is the holy grail of cosmology known
as the Cosmic Microwave Background. Now, it gave many results of great
importance that as I am typing this I am contemplating a draft of the
column solely based on these topics.
Now, one part of the result shows that dark energy makes up 68.3% of
the universe, leaving dark matter being 26.8% and normal visible
matter a mere 4.8%. I find it fascinating that this stuff, this force,
this energy we know so very little about makes a bulk of the universe.
This mystery of dark energy is just one of many that keep me curious
and reminds me of how much more there is to know out there. The
universe holds many more secrets than we thought, and the more we
know, the more we realize how little we do know. For every one
question we answer, many more questions appear.
Now is an excellent and very exciting time to be an astronomer, and a
South African one at that. Also, being a science journalist and
enthusiast puts one at the forefront of what projects such as the SKA
project will produce regarding this anomaly and many more mysteries it
will answer, and many, many more it will create!
And by 'we', I am referring to all those curious and have insatiable
appetites to know more.

Isilimela

I would like to take this opportunity for which I am very grateful for
to honor a man whom I have only met in his works. Anthony Ferrel is
the author of the popular astronomy book: Skywatching,which comes
highly recommended for professionals and enthusiastsalike. I found the
book during an unguided exploration of the local library, in my very
younger years when I was stilltrying to find my identity, so to speak,
in the kind of booksI like.
This book is the very root of my being today somewhat of avoracious
reader and knowledge seeker of sorts. So, many years later I was very
lucky to meet a former student of his, whom, though not surprisingly,
spoke very highly of him. I remember vividly how I was still
'charging', soaking up the morning sun on a stoep in the very crisp
winter morning at the South African AstronomicalObservatory in Cape
Town, when this former student informed me that the great professor
had died a couple of years back.
Very few people get to meet their favorite authors, and I'msure that
those who do treasure such moments. I hadn't read the book in a
longtime but knew its contents, page by beautiful page by heart, and
just meeting one ofhis students who knew him personally was the
closest I had to meeting him. I imagined how he might have been in
thevery spot I was standing when I visited the observatory in
Sutherland when one evening, as he so vividly describes in the
introduction in his book, he saw the few constellations that had
already started appearing in that twilight aftersunset.
I even remember how he described each of them they that he saw as if
they were people and drew for me a picture of the sky that I'd never
seen. It was like discovering something that had always been there,
right over my head, a canvas in which a higher being may have reserved
to show His best works. The illustrations and simple English he used
enthralled me and to this day, I try to follow suit as best I can. One
of the topics he wrote about revealed to me something I never thought
was possible, that Africans are astronomers in their own right, or at
least used to be.
I have always had this idea that looking up at the stars was a western
thing, and many of my peers do away with such stupidity. Anthony, in
his book, opened my eyes in many respects. This particular page has
this Nguniword that caught my then very curious eye: Isilimela, and he
wrote about it somewhat along these lines. This term was and still is
an essential facet in the Xhosa calendar. It marks the beginning of
the agricultural season and the time in which initiates 'go to the
mountain' as they say.
It begins when a group of stars known as the Pleiades cluster in the
Taurus constellation reappears in an eastern twilight. This also
brings light, to the people, who I consider the earliest (African)
astronomers who were entrusted with spotting the reappearance of this
cluster, this Isilimela which was then very important in that it
marked the best time in which the season could begin. So important was
this task that the first person to spot itwas rewarded with the
slaughtering of a cow with his name held in great esteem.
I find myself thinking how this vital skill was passed down orally,
with no books with drawings and beautiful pictures to spark the
imagination, but poetic and mythical descriptions that would
flamboyantly paint the picture in the student's mind. Iimagine a crisp
night, an old man, young boy on his lap, sitting on a rock in the
twilightas the cluster slowly appears and the wise one pointing out
the twinkling beauty.
In this, I see a cosmic connection, and an African oneat that. The
night sky is beautiful, and finding out whatmakes such beauty, is part
of the adventure of being an aspiring astronomer. It is my ancestral
right. I am what I am,and are to be, because of books like Antony
Ferrel's. And in him, I am eternally grateful.

The Truth About Immune Boosters

My very loving mother has advised me against writing, let alone publishing, this very innocent column in fear of some kind of retaliation from the local syndicate whose livelihood I'm about to
attack.

I ergo write this under duress, and if it so happens that the gentle reader is reading this from the musky smelling pages of a newspaper, do not forget the great lengths and the many nights of contemplating the risks involved in order to bring you this piece of cut-throat journalism! No fear, no favor. From the time of print, I will be probably watching my back (I need a periscope), and avoiding open drinks (as I should always), so as to live to write another column that might cause me injury. Oh the humanity!
Here we go.

As I sat down to write this, I dreaded the many hours of research I would have to put in in order to bring you this exclusive. Thank God for Google and other smartasses like me, reports of these
quacks have been all over the internet for many years now. Just a few minutes out of your lunch hour to Google "immune booster hoax" will give you more than enough reasons to stop buying these untested concoctions that are made of who-knows-what.

Like the authors of the New Testament, I myself have an agenda in writing a column on this
particular topic. I mean, I could have just written about the president's private parts
of his life (his house), how rich people can make the government look away (Guptagate) or how South Africa has collectively numbed itself against rape and domestic violence. But no! I wanted to write about something that's closeto my heart. I'm a scientist in training and a great enthusiast of the truth. So, when I see the truth being twisted, screwed, spat on, bottled and labeled to look like the truth; I get very angry and go hulk on your ass!

What gets my lymphocytes into a real fit is the blatant untruth presented by these dodgy looking companies who sell these so-called immune boosters. What does that even mean,'boosters'? The truth (which the reader can find on the net) is that the immune system of a healthy person is an evolutionary masterpiece that does not need to be improved, boosted or re-engineered. It is a very complex system that we vaguely understand, and how these concoctions claim to improve it, leaves me scratching my head as I slave over these medical textbooks and reputable websites.

What's the big deal? This stuff can't kill you, right? Well… not directly. For the first time, this column is about to become very opinionated, maybe even subjective, I dare say! Winter's coming, and
this muti is being advertised as protection against the coming flu season. The trouble with this is thats the average consumer, who is not exposed to the possibility of immunization through vaccination, might as well buy the much cheaper immune boosters that promise to prevent diseases I've never heard of and bring your long lost spouse back to you among other benefits.

Now, vaccines do not boost your immune system as such, but what they do is actually give your system a sort of a heads up of what's to come in the coming season. How it actually works is that they inject you with a weakened version of the virus (such as for measles) and the immune system reacts as if it is facing the real deal, and the result of this is that the immune system is ready next time that strain of
the virus attacks.

That's how one is protected. There was a scandal in Europe in 1998 in which a scientist, Andrew Wakefield, claimed to had found a link between the MMR vaccine and the development of autism in children. Parents, on the authority of this scientist, avoided taking their kids to be vaccinated and this in turn put many lives at great risk.

The results were later rubbished as their instigator was later found to be extremely biased (he was developing an alternative vaccine) and he had altered his results. The consequences of his actions have are still prevalent even today with parents who still will not vaccinate their children based on this blatant untruth. The media was also criticized for its role in the irresponsible reporting and having not covered the rubbishing of the results.

I hope it'll never come to this. But what I have seen are these adverts that use scientific terms and facts in saying why the immune system is important and why pathogens are so dangerous. They then proceed to tell you how this sugar water they call a miracle is going to help you protect yourself from this flu season. So how can a layman stay unconvinced after someone who knows science says it is?

I am simply against the twisting of the truth especially when people's lives are at stake. I don't like what I'm seeing. The remnants of a denialist government who had an uncanny fetish for beet-root.

Why bother with astronomy? (Part 2)

The world view we have today is astonishing, we see how little we
know, as the universe is said to be made up of stuff, most of which we
cannot see or detect directly. This stuff is all over the universe and
makes up the bulk of it, 84%. That just leaves us with 24% of stuff
that we see and can study
thoroughly. The same stuff that stars billions of light years away are
made of, is the same stuff that you and everything you can see around
you is made of, we call it (rather unromantically) visible matter, and
the other stuff: Dark Matter.
There is something else, perhaps even more weird than the dark stuff.
Though not related to dark matter it is called dark energy. And no, it
is not a force of evil (at least we think it isn't), just a force that
acts
against gravity, and by the looks of it, it looks like its winning as
it is accelerating the expansion of the universe set off by the big
bang some 14 billion years ago. This is as weird as throwing a ball in
the air, expecting it to fall back down as it reaches its maximum
height it instead accelerates upward. That shouldn't happen, right?
Well this is the perfect
analogy given by the astrophysicist, Katie Mack, on her blog.
If history is anything to go by, this world view will also not last
forever, we will find out what this stuff and energy really is, perhaps
discover new physical laws and get ever closer to the truth of where
we come from and where we might end up.

For now we rest easy know the edge of the world is the stuff of
legend...or is it?

Why bother with astronomy?

Astronomy has too broad a definition to put in one line. But basically it is the study of the universe as a whole.
Yes but, what is the universe?
Let me give a very short history lesson so simple and quick that the reader will not get bored too quickly. About 14 billion years ago…okay, maybe that's too far back, more on that later. The view of the world has undoubtedly changed so many times that this subject alone is worth quite the mention. The ancients had simple world views very much connected to each culture's creation story. There's far too many to mention but before mentioning one that a lot of us are familiar with in general history, I find great intrigue in how the Sumerians saw the world.
The Sumerian creation story also takes into account the occurrence of all the continents on one face of the earth. It starts off with two bodies in the solar system; two planets violently crashing into each other. The remnants of the two planets thus created the huge oceanic floor that occupies one side of the earth and the continents on the other side that survived the impact of the crash and the remaining debris is how the moon came to be. Amazingly, this fact about the moon is a recent discovery in conventional astronomy. What's amazing about this story is the time in which it was documented; thousands of years before the planets were found to be other worlds, and worlds orbiting the sun for that matter.
One cannot look down upon the world view of the ancients as one is not surprised at the number of individuals who, today still, have remnants of it embedded in their notion of the world we live in. We know today that the sun does not come up or set, yet this notion still has a strong footing in the English language. We know today that the universe is not perfect the way we thought it was: a series of concentric spheres in which the earth is at the center (geocentric). We know today that the earth is not flat and many other things that seem obvious to our generation that were not so obvious to our ancestors a mere century ago.
Many of the scientific and paradigm advances of mankind dawn from individuals who looked further than the accepted world views of their time and thus pushed ever further the limits of the universe, and so the limits of our psyche, our imagination. The irony is that, for some, what pushed them was the desire to prove the then current world views, and you can imagine just how hazy the results drove them.
Through true dedication and hard work they worked at finding out the truth and in this way, the sun upgraded from a mere orb in the celestial sphere (geocentric view) to being at the center of the universe itself (heliocentric view) to it being just another sun in a myriad of hundreds of billions in our Milky way galaxy in which further observation showed billions of other 'island universes', galaxies that make the fabric of the large scale universe, a cosmic web so beautiful and intricate, its perfect.
This is the universe.
So perfect is the cosmos that it is amazing how the ancients set out to find this perfection: the spheres of geocentrism, the perfectly circular orbits of the planets (Latin for wanderers) and the Euclidian geometry Kepler sought in the pattern of the distances of the planets from the sun.
Plato thought that God made the universe to be perfect, and perfection to Plato must have been the dimensions of a sphere. We cannot, still, brush off these world views as incorrect as we must remember how long they lasted, with geocentrism having lasted over 1200 years, we know that no world view will last as long as this again. We must never forget that we will never know everything but at the same time we must not take this as a deterrent but as motivation to study further. Who knows how many more secrets the universe holds?

(I'm sleepingly blogging this from my not-so-smart-but-reliable mobile and have too much to say for its little cpu to handle, so my blog continues immediately)

Stay hungry, stay curious.

A (very) Brief History of the Universe

One of the pleasures of looking at the stars at night is trying to figure out what all the stuff out there really is and how it came to be.

Some of the stuff you will see includes giant gas clouds where stars are born, and like everything that is born, death is inevitable.
The death of stars is nothing short of dramatic; they can explode in a supernova (a really really huge explosion) and colapse into a black-hole (not just the stuff of science fiction), leave a neutron star nuke behind (really exotic stuff), turn into a white dwarf (some really dense objects) or recycle the material to fashion a new richer solar system.

So, through many ambitious and exotic theories and many a rigorous observations, we think we know how the universe came to be. So, I will try to give a very rough account of the creation story.

Once upon a time...-let me re-phrase that- as time and space (well, space-time if you want to be all fancy and accurate) did not exist, as a matter of fact nothing did, zilch, not even a void or anything, just absolute nothing!
At this beginning, the universe and everything in it was squeezed into one very small point. Now, I have to mince my words as the word 'small' cannot apply where space does not yet exist.

All of a sudden (Chuck Norris must have sneezed if you as me), this point expanded explosively into the nothingness, superhot (and superfast) in every untouched direction.
So hot was the universe then that any sort of normal matter could not have existed until the universe was cool enough to allow this. I like to think of it as one trying to build a house of cards during a 8.5 magnitude earth-quake (figure is purely arbitiary).

The next almost emmidiate stage (inflation) of this hot universe caused the occurrence of some familiar (and anti-familiar) basic particles that flew around everywhere forming stuff we call plasma (a very hot gas).
The universe was then like a huge cloud that looked the same in every direction and as soon as the electrons were slow enough to marry themselves to protons by the powers vested in the electro-magnetic force, atoms specifically the hydrogen atom (one electron - one proton) were born.

The fog slowly cleared as, still expanding, the universe cooled enough to allow the conglamoration of cloud-like structure made entirely of gas that we fancy calling giant molecular clouds. And out of these giant clouds came about conglamorarions of stars that formed galaxies, which (each with billions of stars) are the building blogs of the universe today.

Out of one of these galaxies was one James Dean of a supermassive star that quickly used up its hydrogen fuel and thus succuming to its gravity (gravity won over the heat-pressure).
It collapsed in a supernova that ejected tons of new comples material that was cooked in the star during its lifetime.

The cloud of dust that was left behind had enough hydrogen to create another star at its centre and the rest of the material swirled around it.
The swirling cloud became a myriad of bodies; planets that counted innto the twenties, some rocky , some gassy, crashing into each other until eight survived (nine, for all those Pluto-philes out there).
One of the rocky survivors third from the sun started having life on its surface, single celled organisms that eventually became multi-cellular. One of these cosmic new-comers became smart enough to look up and around and wonder what all this stuff is made of and how it came to be.

Fast-forward to the present and the smartest of these bipedal beings started reading this column and thoroughly enjoyed it to the very end!
To get all philosophical on you, let's imagine a thought experiment that features the whole 13.7 billion years of the universe's history on a typical 12 month calendar, where the big bang is on January 1midnight and the present is on December 31 just before midnight.

Among other timescales, the appearance of humans (civilization to be exact) is only 0.16 of a second before midnight.
On that note, it's safe to say we haven't been around a very long time and I cannot help but question our self-proclaimed superiority in the universe.

I'll leave it to the rockstar of a reader to decide. I hope the inquisitive reader will read up more on this very interesting topic.

Stay hungry, stay curious.