After its licentious article about Earth having a second moon, I thought National Geographic had published another subpar piece when I saw this headline:
Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming for Years
The headline is click-bait. The article itself is about how regional nuclear war, such as between two countries like India and Pakistan, can have global consequences, especially on the climate and agriculture. That it wouldn’t take World War III + nuclear winter for the entire world to suffer the consequences of a few – not hundreds of – nuclear explosions. And that we shouldn’t labour with the presumption that detonating a few nuclear bombs would be better than having to set all of them off. So I wouldn’t have used that headline – which seems to suggest we should maybe implanting the atmosphere with thousands of tonnes of some material to cool the planet down.
I don’t think it’s silly to come to that conclusion. Scientists at the oh-so-exalted Harvard and Yale Universities are suggesting something similar: injecting the stratosphere with an aerosol to absorb heat and cool Earth’s surface. Suddenly, global warming isn’t our biggest problem, these guys are. Through a paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, they say that it would be both feasible and affordable to “cut the rate of global warming in half” (source: CNN) using this method. From their paper:
Total pre-start costs to launch a hypothetical SAI effort 15 years from now are ~$3.5 billion in 2018 US $. A program that would deploy 0.2 Mt of SO2 in year 1 and ramp up linearly thereafter at 0.2 Mt SO2/yr would require average annual operating costs of ~$2.25 billion/yr over 15 years. While these figures include all development and direct operating costs, they do not include any indirect costs such as for monitoring and measuring the impacts of SAI deployment, leading Reynolds et al (2016) to call SAI’s low costs a solar geoengineering ‘trope’ that has ‘overstayed its welcome’. Estimating such numbers is highly speculative. Keith et al (2017), among others, simply takes the entire US Global Change Research Program budget of $3 billion/yr as a rough proxy (Our Changing Planet 2016), more than doubling our average annual deployment estimates.
Whether the annual number is $2.25 or $5.25 billion to cut average projected increases in radiative forcing in half from a particular date onward, these numbers confirm prior low estimates that invoke the ‘incredible economics’ of solar geoengineering (Barrett 2008) and descriptions of its ‘free driver’ properties (Wagner and Weitzman 2012, 2015, Weitzman 2015).
My problem isn’t that these guys undertook their study. Scientifically devised methods to engineering the soil and air to slow or disrupt global warming have been around for many decades (including using a “space-based solar shield”). The present study simply evaluated one idea to find that it is eminently possible and that it could deliver a more than acceptable return per dollar spent (notwithstanding the comment on unreliable speculation and its consequences). Heck, the scientists even add:
Dozens of countries would have both the expertise and the money to launch such a program. Around 50 countries have military budgets greater than $3 billion, with 30 greater than $6 billion.
I’m all for blue-sky research – even if this particular analysis may not qualify in that category – and that knowing something is an end in and of itself. I.e., knowledge cannot be useless because knowing has value. Second: I don’t think any government or organisation is going to be able to implement a regional, leave alone global, SAI programme just because this paper has found that it is a workable idea. Then again, ability is not the same as consideration and consideration has its consequences as well.
My grouse is with a few lines in the paper’s ‘Conclusion’, where the scientists state that they “make no judgment about the desirability of [stratospheric aerosol injection].” They go on to state that their work is solely from an “engineering perspective” – as if to suggest that should anyone seriously consider implementing SAI, their paper is happy to provide the requisite support.
However, the scientists should have passed judgment about the desirability of SAI instead of copping out. I can’t understand why they chose to do so; it is the easiest conclusion in the whole enterprise. No policymaker or lawmaker who thinks anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real is going to consider this method to deal with the problem (or maybe they will, who knows; the Delhi government thinks it’s responding right by installing giant air filters in public spaces). As David Archer, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, told CNN:
It will be tempting to continue to procrastinate on cleaning up our energy system, but we’d be leaving the planet on a form of life-support. If a future generation failed to pay their climate bill they would get all of our warming all at once.
By not judging the “desirability of SAI”, the scientists have effectively abdicated their responsibility to properly qualify the nature and value of their work, and situate it in its wider political context. They have left the door open to harmful use of their work as well. Consider the difference between a lawmaker brandishing a journal article that simply lays out the “engineering perspective” and another having to deal with an article that discusses the engineering as well as the desirability vis-à-vis the nature and scope of AGW.
BBC News Africa undertook an excellent investigation to reveal that a group of men who killed four unarmed civilians – two women and two children – in 2015 belonged to the Cameroonian military. Fourteen journalists worked on the story, together with Amnesty International, using Google Earth imagery, satellite images, social media, prior news reports and one anonymous source.
The journalists described their process in a tweet thread in September 2018, which has been retweeted over 57K times since. But oddly, towards the end of the thread, the BBC News Africa account makes a troubling suggestion that departs in spirit from the rest of the enterprise, which appears to have been level-headed and measured.
The government statement makes clear that all these men enjoy the presumption of innocence, and that they will be given a fair trial. pic.twitter.com/sFWnE4hmio
We all understand – and the BBC also establishes – that the killings were abhorrent. But the two tweets above, which appeared in that order, seem to suggest that the soldiers should not be given a fair trial because they did not give the women and children they killed a fair trial.
All trials must be fair irrespective of the heinousness of the crime or the moral vacuum of their perpetrators. This is an unpopular opinion these days but an unfair trial will only jeopardise the authority of humanitarian justice, not to mention delegitimise the judiciary and make it difficult for Cameroon to get the support of other governments.
A court is highly unlikely to find the soldiers innocent, thanks to the efforts of BBC News Africa, and if that happens, it will likely be due to an unfair trial. But if the soldiers are found guilty, the legitimacy of the process should cement it, not detract from it. The fourteen journalists + Amnesty followed that process. They should ask that Cameroon’s institutions do so as well.
A fascinating tale in the New Yorker: Michael Holick, a medical researcher and doctor at the Boston University, Massachusetts, has been finding that many American families that have had their babies taken away from them because State Services suspected abuse are in fact up against a little-known disease, called hypermobile Ehler-Danlos syndrome (EDS). The story typically goes like: family finds bruises on baby, rushes to doctor, doctor finds other bruises all together consistent with abuse, notifies state, State Services separates family and baby with emergency order, baby given to custody of guardian, case goes to trial.
Enter Holick, who, with his hypermobile EDS diagnosis, gives stranded families a new way to deal with an already difficult problem. But it’s not so straightforward. For one, Holick’s ideas are not supported by the scientific literature (nor by people known to have EDS, although this is not directly written in the story). For another, he diagnoses the babies at a rate inconsistent with the affliction’s known prevalence. For a third, he diagnoses babies of hypermobile EDS without seeing them first. In fact, as with most New Yorker stories, a summary is only going to diminish the journey of discovery necessary to understand the story in its fullness, so please go ahead and read it.
In the meantime – some of my notes after reading:
1. The New Yorker story seems to be missing details of whether the babies continued to bruise after they are returned to their parents’ custody. The story begins and ends with fractures that occur before Holick enters the families’ lives. It would be interesting to know if physical injuries, although not necessarily at the level of fracture, continued after as well.
2. It sounds to me like Holick’s research into hypermobile EDS is funded by families he has freed from the blame of child abuse using the explanation of hypermobile EDS. This is a severe conflict of interest. If this cycle was broken, and the donations from families redirected to a fund administered by scientists acting on the basis of empirical evidence, it would be interesting to see if Holick can convert some of his insights into usable data. He could also be disabused of his belief that the burden of proof is on others, not on him, when he has little proof himself (“He said that those who find fault with his views should … do studies of their own”).
2. Holick says that, before him, the conviction rate in child abuse cases used to be 100%, and after him, the rate dropped to about 90%. So in 10% of those cases, did the prosecution win the case despite Holick’s expert testimony? It would be interesting to find out more about these cases – especially if Holick was convinced that the babies had hypermobile EDS while the prosecution was able to prove that they didn’t, and that the babies had actually been abused. It could also highlight whether Holick holds an EDS conclusion before he has proof.
3. At one point in the story, a judge seems really impressed by Holick’s “172-page résumé”. I don’t know if the “résumé” here refers to Holick’s alternative explanation, in document form, of how a baby in question could have been injured or to his professional record. If it’s the latter, then it’s weird that it is 172 pages long: a résumé by definition is brief. The longer version is the curriculum vitae; although most people regularly use the two labels interchangeably, the New Yorker is also famous for its pedantry. So it’s reasonable to assume the judge was impressed by his alternative explanation – but I think the magazine should still clarify. Otherwise, it sounds like the judge is impressed by his CV and that’s never a good thing.
4. The aftermath of the 2014 interaction between Holick and Robert Sege is remarkable. To me, Holick’s reaction (that the hospital he works at expects him to “cease and desist”) gives away his insecurity about his position and his beliefs. I don’t think he’d have reacted this way if he’d had empirical evidence to back him up. The interaction also exemplifies the basis of his opponents’ vehemence: by not submitting to the traditional methods of medical enquiry, Holick is keeping the door open for potential medical malpractice, though it may not be deliberate. More importantly, if he gets just one diagnosis wrong in a trial that ends up compromised for it, things can get really bad really fastfor the baby.
Srinavasa Chakravarthy, presumably a mathematician going by a reference in his post, penned an open letter for TH Read about how Indian scientists
… rarely follow the scientific work of [our] Indian colleagues, perhaps because such attention has no practical and material consequence. Thus, we constantly face what is popularly called a double whammy. As it is, the Western academics care two hoots about our work and, what’s more, we are also written off by our beloved compatriots.
In all, Chakravarthy’s is an impassioned plea to his peers to fumble in the dark the way they were told scientists generally do, and forge their own paths instead of kowtowing after their Western counterparts. There are many dimensions to this entreaty. For example, @polybiotique, @Vasishtasetty and @leslee_lazar – all students of science – engaged in a discussion on Twitterabout whether Chakravarthy was disingenuous in not citing the many examples of scientists and science journalists who are, in fact, being Indianand original in their work.
As a science writer and editor myself, I found this part of his plea to be a bit annoying:
The somewhat dogmatic mindset has crept beyond the walls of our academic campuses also. How often do we see the local media covering the scientific work of an Indian colleague? I once saw a piece of work on computational neuroscience from a United States university reported in a local Chennai paper. It is a standard piece of work. Many of us in India have more interesting things to say. Why isn’t it talked about as much? I asked. I was told that the media doesn’t like to cover Indian science, as much as it does science from abroad, simply because the readers don’t like to read about it.
It is odd that Chakravarthy chose to lead with the example of a “local Chennai paper” when he could have chosen the national Chennai paper, The Hindu, and its famous science section. Indeed, analogous to the Twitter discussion, science journalists I have spoken to often feel a twinge of pain when their work isn’t being read or acknowledged. Part of the problem is that consumers of science journalism – just as with the scientists in Chakravarthy’s piece – stick to their usual sources and passively, though not inexcusably, miss instances of it that are good, Indian and original. So on this count, I would say Chakravarthy comes off as disingenuous for not expanding his science-writing menu.
At the same time, his choice of a “local Chennai paper” is instructive. While change must begin somewhere, it is at the level of the local paper that it will be most impactful. (Let’s think in terms of voltage: the potential difference between those writing about science and those reading about it is higher the more local you take it.) However, to expect local papers to change first would be silly. In the realm of incremental changes, a large problem is solved first where it is easiest to solve, so national newsrooms are leading the way.
At this point, in order for me to not seem disingenuous to my peers, I should mention that half the reason any Indian newsroom with a science section struggles to cover science is the Indian scientist. Just as much as you need an earnest science journalist to reach out to a scientist, you need an earnest scientist to respond meaningfully and in time. Many of my writers regularly receive the following response from scientists they’ve reached out to: “All the information is there in the paper” – betraying a severe lack of understanding of what science communication is for and/or about. My personal favourite is a researcher who responded (on a story about amorphous superconductors) after two months and then complained that his quote wasn’t used.
On the other hand, it is easy to write about Western science because scientists in the West are so damned prompt. The cost of writing a science story is much lower if, on average, I have to work with Western scientists. And if we’re wondering whether this problem reflects or contributes to a hierarchy, the answer is ‘yes’ both ways.
Let’s call it the cost tree: the lowest branches are populated by Western scientists, and the point is to bring Indians higher up to lower ground. Those Indian scientists already there include those educated in the West, those exposed to – and who endorse – the culture of communication, or both. For example, it is very ease to draw a quote from a scientist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru but very difficult to get one from a researcher at BITS Pilani. It also matters what the scientist thinks of the journalist. A researcher will sooner speak to someone from The Hindu than to someone writing for The Wire (although this is a strictly personal opinion). More broadly, a scientist is likelier to speak to a more engaged journalist than to a less engaged one, and the former cost more to commission and are typically approached for longer stories. TL;DR: There needs to be empathy on both sides for this to work.
One quick-fix for this problem is to eliminate a simple barrier: that of the unknown-unknowns. For scientists who are unaware of good, Indian and original science writing, a common reference list can be curated by scientists and media-persons alike, and added to with time. For science journalists, a similar list of Indian scientists who are available to speak to, and who have been known to respond meaningfully and in time can be curated.
Recently, an effort was made over Twitter to curate a list of scientists for science journalists. Thanks to my poor record-keeping, I’m not able to find the resulting spreadsheet right now – although here’s a Twitter list compiled by Pranesh Prakash that you can sign up to. Now, establishments like the Times of India, which regularly present bad science, and Hindustan Times, Deccan Chronicle, etc., which do so less frequently, have one less excuse to publish unverified/unqualified reports.
IMO, this is the easier part: English-speaking science journalists can be expected to congregate on Twitter; those who aren’t on the platform still have colleagues or peers who are. If you work for a digital newsroom, you’re expected to have a functional Twitter handle. However, how many scientists – who aren’t required to be on Twitter – are? More importantly, is there one forum where Indian scientists congregate? I’m all ears.
Earth’s moon may not be alone. After more than half a century of speculation and controversy, Hungarian astronomers and physicists say they have finally confirmed the existence of two Earth-orbiting “moons” entirely made of dust.
This sounds strange because there has been little else in the news about dust-moons in the last few years. No major discoveries are made in one instant, and can often be anticipated many years in advance through discussions among scientists. However, the rest of the article put paid to the doubt.
The ‘dusty moons’ National Geographic alludes to are in fact the Kordylewski dust clouds. Late last month, a group of Hungarian astronomers confirmed the presence of these clouds, located in two different directions at about the same distance Moon is from Earth.
Astronomers have been debating the existence of these clouds since the 1950s. In that decade, an astronomer named Kazimierz Kordylewski climbed a mountain and photographed parts of the night sky where these clouds had been predicted by other astronomers before him to exist. The dust clouds have since been called Kordylewski clouds in his honour.
However, confirming their presence has taken so long even though they’re so close to Earth because of their brightness – or lack of it. They are too faint to spot because the stars in their background far outshine them, even at this distance. But they aren’t completely obscured either: they reflect sunlight in feeble amounts, giving themselves away to the persistent observer.
Although Kazimierz Kordylewski found the dust clouds this way, the Hungarian group was more sophisticated. According to their two published papers (here and here), they took advantage of dust’s ability to polarise light. Waves of light are in fact waves of electric and magnetic fields undulating through space at right angles to each other.
The electric fields of different waves point in different directions. But when they hit a dust particle, they get polarised: the electric fields all line up. This is how sunglasses work: the lenses are filters that don’t let light of certain polarisations pass through, cutting glare.
Like all astronomical discoveries, their finding will have to be validated by independent observers before the community reaches a consensus. But in the meantime, the claimed discovery is a matter of concern because of where the Kordylewski clouds are located: at two Lagrange points.
The Lagrange – or libration – points are places in space where the gravitational fields of the Sun, Moon and Earth tug at each other such that an object at that point will be in an Earth-synchronous orbit around the Sun.
Scientists like stationing satellites at these points because they can stay in orbit with much less fuel spent than if they were stationed elsewhere. However, now we (may) know the Kordylewski clouds are located at the points labelled L4 and L5. This means satellites stationed there will have to carry protective shielding. Otherwise, dust particles could damage sensitive instruments and end the mission before its time.
However, the Kordylewski clouds can’t be classified as moons, although they can be as natural satellites. Judit Slíz-Balogh, a coauthor of the current study and an astronomer at the Eötvös Loránd University, calls them “pseudo-satellites”. The distinction is important because, even when bracketed between single- or double-quotes, the label of moon can’t be applied to a dust cloud.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU), which decides the meaning of astronomical terms like planet, star, etc., defines a moon only as a planet’s natural satellite. However, that isn’t license to call every natural satellite a moon. (In fact, one of the definitions of a planet would make our Moon a planet, too.)
But a size-based organisational paradigm would imply that an object much smaller than the moon would have to be called a moonlet. For example: Saturn’s moon Pan, which is 35 km at its widest. Something even smaller will have to make do with the catch-all label ‘particles’. Then again, the paradigm falters with the overall form of the satellite. For another example: the dust, ice and rocks that make up Saturn’s rings are called ‘ring particles’ even though some of them weigh a few quintals.
Carolyn Collins Petersen, a former member of the Hubble Space Telescope instrument team, wrote for ThoughtCo. earlier this year, “There is no official definition of ‘moonlet’ and ‘ring particle’ by the … IAU. Planetary scientists have to use common sense to distinguish between these objects.”
Importantly, it would be counterproductive to argue that anything goes because there is no technical definition. To the contrary, especially with science communication, it is important to use words whose meanings are generally agreed upon. ‘Natural satellites of dust’ would have helped that cause better than ‘”Moons” made of dust’.
Vijaya Gadde is the “Legal, Policy and Trust and Safety Lead at Twitter”. Her replies are to Indian right-wingers on Twitter demanding to know why Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey saw fit to be photographed holding a poster with the words “Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy” on it.
Her copy-pasted apology, while clarifying that the picture wasn’t “relective” of Twitter’s views, certainly seems to reflect the all-important difference between reality and social media platforms: everyone’s participation is better for business, Mark and Jack believe, including that of the the idiots and the barbarians. Otherwise, there’s no need @vijaya would have to apologise to a bunch of trolls engaging in whataboutery and intent on misunderstanding the phrase on the poster.
From the positions of reason, civility and constitutionality, nobody should have to apologise for standing by the message “Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy”. Or even have to clarify that “smash” isn’t a call to violence, that “Brahmanical” is very specific to the Indian context, that “patriarchy” is not a synonym for “man-hater”. Shouldn’t have to respond to idiots.
We saw exactly the same thing happen with Facebook in September, when its sole right-wing fact-checker – The Weekly Standard – objected to a partially wrong story by a liberal outlet – Think Progress – and had it blocked from being viewed on the platform. Think Progress got mad, wrote an angry oped and its supporters slathered the left media space with more. The Weekly Standard held its ground (reasonably so, the Think Progress article’s headline was evidently wrong). But Facebook just sat there, smug in its belief that it was doing good.
I think the media needs to adopt a rule about not displaying raw footage of dead animals, especially if they’re in a poor state. It’s gross, undignified and triggering – but most of all, it’s used to convey a very narrow-minded view of a complex problem.
The gross factor ties into the question of dignity: animals need to be shown the way they might be had they been alive. Using their dead, deformed bodies to inspire action on the part of some humans is not fair. The use of such images also triggers guilt, which is not useful when you want the outcome to be positive change.
But the biggest issue is that by using the image of an animal devoid of all agency, apparently at the mercy of human justice, you’re driving home a point more specifically defined than it should actually be: that it’s about saving the animals. It’s not.
Sure, we need to save the animals – but in the process we need to be solving an actual problem as well. Instead, ‘saving the animals’ has been too frequently used as a rallying cry for having done some kind of good when really it’s just been a distraction from doing the more difficult thing.
Recently, when that whale was found dead near a beach in Indonesia with 115 plastic cups in its belly, the gory image was used in the press as if to remind the people that they’re not supposed to be dumping plastic in the sea. I think that’s a problem.
Yes, our world is a consumerist nightmare that’s driving climate change and widespread resource inequalities. However, saving the animals is not the point here. Some whales are dying but if we’re to save all of them, the conversation we need to have is about how we’re going to stop manufacturing plastics and start recycling all of the rest. If we do that, the animals will be automatically saved.
Instead, we’ve got news reports almost entirely fixated on marine plastics and not talking about the way we make, transport, consume and trash plastics at all. This is what fixating on dead or dying animals does: refashions a problem to be far more downstream than and different from what it actually is.
It feels ridiculous just asking that question sitting in India. Dust is everywhere. On the roads, in your nose, in your lungs. You lock up your house, go on a month-long holiday and come back, and there’s a fine patina on the table. It’s inside your laptop, driving the cooling fan nuts.
It is also in the atmosphere, in orbit around Earth, in outer space even. It makes up nightmarish storms on Mars. Philip Pullman and Steven Erikson have written books fantasising about it. Dust is omnipresent. (The only dustless places I’ve seen are in stock photos strewn across the internet.)
But what exactly is it, and where did it all come from?
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Earth
Dust is fine particulate matter. It originates from a tremendous variety of sources. The atmospheric – or aeolian – dust we are so familiar with is composed of small particles sheared off of solid objects. For example, fast-blowing winds carry particles away from loose, dry soil into the air, giving rise to what is called fugitive dust. Another source is the smoke from exhaust pipes.
Yet another is mites of the family Pyroglyphidae. They eat flakes of skin, including those shed by humans, and digest them with enzymes that stay on in their poop. In your house, exposure to their poop (considered a form of dust) can trigger asthma attacks.
Winds lift particulate matter off Earth’s surface and transport them into the troposphere. Once dust gets up there, it acts like an aerosol, trapping heat below it and causing Earth’s surface to warm. Once it collects in sufficient quantities, it begins to affect the weather of regions below it, including rainfall patterns.
Dust particles smaller than 10 microns get into your lungs and affect your respiratory health. They conspire with other pollutants and, taking advantage of slow-moving winds, stagnate over India’s National Capital Region during winter. Particles smaller than 2.5 microns “increase age-specific mortality risk” (source) and send hospital admissions soaring.
There is also dust that travels thousands of kilometres to affect far-flung parts of the world. The “Sahara is the world’s largest source of desert dust”, according to one study. In June this year, the Atlantic Ocean’s tropical area experienced its dustiest period in 15 years when a huge billow blew over from northeast Chad towards the mid-Americas. According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, Saharan dust “helps build beaches in the Caribbean and fertilises soils in the Amazon.”
But speaking of dust that migrates large distances, the transatlantic plume seems much less of a journey than the dust brought to Earth by meteorites that have travelled hundreds of thousands of kilometres through space. As these rocks streak towards the ground, the atmosphere burns off dust-like matter from their surfaces, leaving them hanging in the upper atmosphere.
Atoms released by these particles into the mesosphere drift into the planet’s circulation system, moving from pole to pole over many months. They interact with other particles to leave behind a trail of charged particles. Scientists then use radar to track these particles to learn more about the circulation itself. Some dust particles of extraterrestrial origin also reach Earth’s surface in time. They could carry imprints of physical and chemical reactions they might have experienced in outer space, even from billions of years ago.
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Orbit
In the mid-20th century, researchers used optical data and mathematical arguments to figure that about four million tonnes of meteoric dust slammed into our planet’s atmosphere every year. This was cause for alarm: the figure suggested that the number of meteorites in space was much higher than thought. In turn, the threat to our satellites could have been underestimated. More careful assessments later brought the figure down. A 2013 review states that 10-40 tonnes of meteoric dust slams into Earth’s atmosphere every day.
Still, this figure isn’t low – and its effects are exacerbated by the debris humans themselves are putting in orbit around Earth. The Wikipedia article on ‘space debris’ carefully notes, “As of … July 2016, the United States Strategic Command tracked a total of 17,852 artificial objects in orbit above the Earth, including 1,419 operational satellites.” But only one line later, the number of objects smaller than 1 cm explodes to 170 million.
If a mote of dust weighing 0.00001 kg carried by a 1.4 m/s breeze strikes your face, you are not going to feel anything. This is because its momentum – the product of its mass and velocity – is very low. But when a particle weighing one-hundredth of a gram strikes a satellite at a relative velocity of 1.5 km/s, its momentum jumps a thousandfold. Suddenly, it is able to damage critical components and sensitively engineered surfaces, ending million-dollar, multi-year missions in seconds. One study suggests such particles, if travelling fast enough, can also generate tiny shockwaves.
Before our next stop on the Dust Voyage, let’s take a small break in sci-fi. The mid-century overestimation of meteoric dust flux may have prompted Arthur C. Clarke to write his 1961 novel, A Fall of Moondust. In the story, a cruise-liner called the Selene takes tourists over a basin of superfine dust apparently of meteoric origin. But one day, a natural disaster causes the Selene to sink into the dust, trapping its passengers in life-threatening conditions. After much despair, a rescue mission is mounted when an astronomer spots a heat-trail pointing to the Selene’s location from space, from onboard a spacecraft called Lagrange II.
This name is a reference to the famous Lagrange points. As Earth orbits the Sun, and the Moon orbits Earth, their combined gravitational fields give rise to five points in space where the force acting on an object is just right for it to maintain its position relative to Earth and the Sun. These are called L1, L2, L3, L4 and L5.
A contour plot of the effective potential of the Earth-Sun system, showing the five Lagrange points. Credit: NASA and Xander89, CC BY 3.0
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) plans to launch its Aditya satellite, to study the Sun, to L1. This is useful because at L1, Aditya’s view of the Sun won’t be blocked by Earth. However, objects at L1, L2 and L3 have an unstable equilibrium. Without some station-keeping measures now and then, they tend to fall out of their positions.
But this isn’t so with L4 and L5, objects at which remain in a more stable equilibrium. And like anything that’s been lying around for a while, they collect dust.
In the 1950s, the Polish astronomer Kazimierz Kordylewski claimed to have spotted two clouds of dust at L4 and L5. These nebulous collections of particulate matter have since been called Kordylewski clouds. Other astronomers have contested their existence, however. For example, the Hiten satellite could not find any notable dust concentrations in the L4 and L5 regions in 2009. Some argued that Hiten could have missed them because the dust clouds are too spread out.
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Space
Only two weeks ago, Hungarian astronomers claimed to have confirmed the presence of dust clouds in these regions (their papers here and here). Because the L4 and L5 regions are of interest for future space missions, astronomers will now have to validate this finding and – if they do – assess the density of dust and the attendant probabilities of threat.
Unlike Kordylewski, who took photographs from a mountaintop, the Hungarian group banked on dust’s ability to polarise light. Light is electromagnetic radiation. Each wave of light consists of an electric and a magnetic field oscillating perpendicular to each other. Imagine various waves of light approaching dust, their electric fields pointed in arbitrary directions. After they strike the dust, however, the particles polarise the waves, causing all of the electric fields to line up with one particular orientation.
When astronomers detect such light, they know that it has encountered dust in its path. Using different instruments and analytical techniques, they can then map the distribution of dust in space through which the light has passed.
This is how, for example, the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope was able to draw up a view of dust around the Milky Way.
A map of dust in and around the Milky Way galaxy, as observed by the ESA Planck telescope. Credit: NASA
That’s billions upon billions of tonnes. Don’t your complaints about dust around the house pale in comparison?
And even at this scale, it has been a nuisance. We don’t know if the galaxy is complaining but Brian Keating certainly did.
In March 2014, Keating and his team at Harvard University’s Centre for Astronomy announced that they had found signs that the universe’s volume had increased by a factor of 1080 in just 10-33 seconds a moment after its birth in the Big Bang. About 380,000 years later, radiation leftover from the Big Bang – called the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – came into being. Keating and co. were using the BICEP2 detector at the South Pole to find imprints of cosmic inflation on the CMB. The smoking gun: light of a certain wavelength polarised by gravitational waves from the early universe.
While the announcement was made with great fanfare – as the “discovery of the decade” and whatnot – their claim quickly became suspect. Data from the Planck telescope and other observatories soon showed that what Keating’s team had found was in fact light polarised by galactic dust. Just like that, their ambition of winning a Nobel Prize came crashing down. Ash to ash, dust to dust.
You probably ask, “Hasn’t it done enough? Can we stop now?” No. We must persevere, for dust has done even more, and we have come so close. For example, look at the Milky Way dust-map. Where could all that dust have come from?
This is where the story of dust takes a more favourable turn. We have all heard it said that we are made of stardust. While it would be futile to try and track where the dust of ourselves came from, understanding dust itself requires us to look to the stars.
The storms on Earth or Mars that stir dust up into the air are feeble breaths against the colossal turbulence of stellar ruination. Stars can die in one of many ways depending on their size. The supernovae are the most spectacular. In a standard Type 1a supernova, an entire white dwarf star undergoes nuclear fusion, completely disintegrating and throwing matter out at over 5,000 km/s. More massive stars undergo core collapse, expelling their outermost layers into space in a death-sneeze before what is left implodes into a neutron star or a black hole.
Any which way, the material released into space forms giant clouds that disperse slowly over millions of years. If they are in the presence of a black hole, then they are trapped in an accretion disk around it, accelerated, heated and energised by radiation and magnetic fields. The luckier motes may float away to encounter other stars, planets or other objects, or even collide with other dust and gas clouds. Such interactions are very difficult to model – but there is no doubt that these they are all essentially driven by the four fundamental forces of nature.
One of them is the force of gravity. When a gas/dust cloud becomes so large that its collective gravitational pull keeps it from dispersing, it could collapse to form another star, and live to see another epoch.
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Together
This way, stars are cosmic engines. They keep matter – including dust – in motion. They may not be the only ones to do so but given the presence of stars throughout the (observable) universe, they certainly play a major part. When they are not coming to life or going out of it, their gravitational pull influences the trajectories of other, smaller bodies around them, including comets, asteroids and other spacefaring rocks.
The Solar System itself is considered to have been condensed out of a large disk of dirt and dust made of various elements surrounding a young Sun – a disk of leftovers from the star’s birth. Different planets formed based on the availability of different volumes of different materials at different times. Jupiter is believed to have come first, and the inner planets, including Earth, to have come last.
But no matter; life here had whatever it needed to take root. Scientists are still figuring what those ingredients could have been and their provenance. One theory is that they included compounds of carbon and hydrogen called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and that they first formed – you guessed it – among the dust meandering through space.
They could then have been ferried to Earth by meteors and comets, perhaps swung towards Earth’s orbit by the Sun’s gravity. When a comet gets closer to a star, for instance, material on its surface begins to evaporate, forming a streaky tail of gas and dust. When Earth passes through a region where the tail’s remnants and other small, rocky debris have lingered, they enter the atmosphere as a meteor shower.
Dust really is everywhere, and it seldom gets the credit it is due. It has been and continues to be a pesky part of daily life. However, unlike our search thus far for extraterrestrial companionship, we are not alone in feeling beset by dust.
Bora Zivkovic, the former ‘blogfather’ of the Scientific American blogs network, said it best: journalists are temporary experts. Reporters have typically got a few days to write something up on which scientists have been working for years, if not decades. They flit from paper to paper, lab to lab; without the luxury of a beat, they often cover condensed matter physics one day, spaceflight the next, ribosomes the day after, and exomoons after that. Over time, they’re the somewhat-jacks of many trades, but there’s only one that they’re really trying to master: story-telling.
The editors they work with to have these stories published are also somewhat-jacks in their own right. Many of them will have been reporters, probably still are from time to time, and further along the road (by necessity) to understanding what will get stories read.
However, I’ve often observed a tendency among many of the scientists I work with to trivialise these proficiencies, as if they’re products of a lesser skill, a lesser perseverance even. There have even been one or two so steeped in the notion that science reporters and editors wouldn’t have jobs if they hadn’t undertaken their pursuits of truths that they treat editors with naked disdain. Some others are less contemptuous but still aver that journalists are at best adjacent to reality, and lower on some imagined hierarchy as a result.
If these claims don’t immediately seem ludicrous to you, then you’re likely choosing to not see why.
First: If X – a person in any profession – believes that it’s easy to reach the masses, and cites Facebook and Twitter as proof, then it’s not that they don’t know how journalism works. It’s that they don’t know what journalism is as well as are professing ignorance of their personal definition being wrong. The fourth estate is responsible for keeping democracy functional. It’s not as simple as putting all available information in the public domain or breaking complex ideas down to digestible tidbits. It’s about figuring out how “write a story people will like reading” is tied to “speak truth to power”.
Second: I’m not going to say reporting and editing engage the mind as much as science does because I wouldn’t know how I’d go about proving such a thing. Axiomatically, I will say that those who believe reporting and editing are somehow ‘softer’ therefore ‘lesser’ pursuits (machismo?) or that they’re less engaging/worthwhile are making the same mistake. There’s no way to tell. There’s also no admission of the alternative that editors and reporters – by devoting themselves to deceptively simple tasks like stating facts and piecing narratives together – are able to find greater meaning, agency and purpose in them than the scientist is able to comprehend.
Third: This tendency to debase communication and its attendant skills is bizarre considering the scientist himself intends to communicate (and it’s usually a ‘him’ that’s doing the debasing). If I had to take a guess, I’d say these beliefs exist because they’re proxies for a subconscious reluctance to share the power that is their knowledge, and the expression of such beliefs a desperate attempt to exert control over what they may believe is rightfully theirs. There’s some confidence in such speculation as well because I actually know one scientist who believes scientists attempting to communicate their work are betraying their profession. But that story’s for another day.
All these reasons together is why I’d ask the arrogators to write more for news outlets instead of asking them to stop. It’s not that we get to cut off their ability to reach the masses – that could worsen the sense of entitlement – but that we’ve an opportunity to chamfer their privilege upon the whetstone of public engagement. This after all is one of the purposes of journalism. It works even when we’re letting the powerful write instead of the powerless because its strength lies as much in the honest conduct of it as its structure. The plain-jane conveyance of information is a very small part of it all.
The India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), a mega science project stranded in the regulatory boondocks since the Centre okayed it in 2012, received a small shot in the arm earlier this week.
On November 2, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) dismissed an appeal by activists against the environment ministry’s clearance for the project.
The activists had alleged that the environment ministry lacked the “competence” to assess the project and that the environmental clearance awarded by the ministry was thus invalid. But the principal bench of the NGT ruled that “it was correct on the part of the EAC and the [ministry] to appraise the project at their level”.
The INO is a Rs-1,500-crore project that aims to build and install a 50,000-tonne detector inside a mountain near Theni, Tamil Nadu, to study natural elementary particles called neutrinos.
The environment ministry issued a clearance in June 2011. But the NGT held it in abeyance in March 2017 and asked the INO project members to apply for a fresh clearance. G. Sundarrajan, the head of an NGO called Poovulagin Nanbargal that has been opposing the INO, also contended that the project was within 5 km of the Mathikettan Shola National Park. So the NGT also directed the INO to get an okay from the National Board for Wildlife.
Poovulagin Nanbargal (Tamil for ‘Friends of Flora’) and other activists have raised doubts about the integrity of the rock surrounding the project site, damage to water channels in the area and even whether nuclear waste will be stored onsite. However, all these concerns have been allayed or debunked by the collaboration and the media. (At one point, former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam wrote in support of the project.)
Sundarrajan has also been supported by Vaiko, leader of the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party.
In June 2017, INO members approached the Tamil Nadu State Environmental Impact Assessment Authority. After several meetings, it stated that the environment ministry would have to assess the project in the applicable category.
The ministry provided the consequent clearance in March 2018. Activists then alleged that this process was improper and that the ministry’s clearance would have to be rescinded. The NGT struck this down.
As a result, the INO now has all but one clearance – that of the National Board for Wildlife – it needs before the final step: to approach the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board for the final okay. Once that is received, construction of the project can be underway.
Once operational, the INO is expected to tackle multiple science problems. Chief among them is the neutrino mass hierarchy: the relative masses of the three types of neutrinos, an important yet missing detail that holds clues about the formation and distribution of galaxies in the universe.
Metastable 