Passion Blog

Last semester, I did my best to write about astronomy and space, despite me knowing very little about it. I never took astronomy in high school or college, so researching and learning about various astronomy topics well enough to be able to write about them for my blog took quite a bit of time for me. Although astronomy is inherently interesting to me, I felt I never truly did the subject matter justice with my lack of experience dealing with it. Because of this, I plan to pursue psychology topics for my passion blog this semester as I have more experience with psychology but still find it as interesting as astronomy. Some topics I plan to write about would be the phenomenon known as the “Call of the Void”, how our brains can create false memories and what happened during the Stanford Prison experiment  and how it created The Lucifer Effect. All of these topics absolutely  fascinate me and I look forward to explaining them to others via my blog so people can make their own assertions about them.

By this point in writing my passion blogs, I have exhausted any inherent or acquired knowledge I have in astronomy so this topic is a little more down to Earth. This week I researched Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPP suits. These lawsuits are essentially a powerful individual or company putting a chokehold on free press or individuals by threatening to sue media outlets or people for defamation with the knowledge that most newspapers, sites and people lack the funds to defend themselves in court against fiscal juggernauts. In most media cases, the newspaper or site retracts the article rather than risk going to court over it, and in the case of individuals, companies or powerful people will usually send journalists or activists a cease and desist letter, warning that failure to observe the notice will result in a lawsuit. I first learned about this topic after watching Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Oliver was prepared to do a piece on the state of the coal industry and its safeguards to protect workers. Specifically, the piece focused on the Murray Energy Corporation, headed by CEO Robert Murray. The piece condemned Murray on encouraging unsafe mining practices and lying to families about the death of workers when one of his mines collapsed, which he blamed on an earthquake. When Murray’s legal team learned of the piece before it was taped and broadcasted, they sent John Oliver and HBO a cease and desist letter, stating that any attempt to defame or slander Robert Murray would result in legal action. Oliver actually read the letter on the air, and then followed the script he had prepared anyway. Sure enough, this resulted in a lawsuit from Murray Energy against John Oliver. Luckily, HBO, the parent company of his show, backed Oliver, loaning him their legal team to defend him in court. The result of the case was Oliver and HBO winning, with the Judge stating that Robert Murray was attempting to infringe on first amendment rights. Murray ended up having to pay all of the court costs, and Oliver gloated on air once again. Now this is uplifting that free speech won out in this case, but it is a very rare occurrence. Not everyone has the TV studio behind Game of Thrones on their side then they are sued by large corporations. This system not only suppresses free speech, but is a burden on the legal system as well. These lawsuits are frivolous and numerous, taking time away from genuine cases that need to be ruled upon. I believe that regulation from the Justice Department is in order. I think defamation lawsuits should be harder to bring against news organizations and individuals, and there should be strict guidelines to what constitutes actual malicious attacks, or just merely people expressing their opinions.

Initially before making this passion blog, I wanted to write about wormholes and wether or not time travel could be possible using these theoretical bodies, but that was simply too much math and science for me to comprehend so instead I am writing about supernovas because explosions are much easier to understand. A supernova is essentially when a star explodes. These explosions are the brightest and most powerful in the universe. For scale, the strongest supernova ever recorded was 600 billion times brighter than our sun, and produced more 10^44 joules, or more energy than our sun would over 10 billion years. There are two ways supernovas can take place. A star can turn into a supernova in two ways. The first way a supernova can take place is when a star accumulates matter from a nearby white dwarf until a runaway nuclear reaction ignites. While one star must be a white dwarf, the other star can be any type. Once the white dwarf has stolen enough mass to use as fuel from the other star, 1.4 the mass of the sun to be precise, the white dwarf will explode. These explosions are more rare and much tamer compared to the second type, called core-collapse supernovas. These supernovas occur when a star 8 to 15 times larger than our sun runs out of hydrogen and helium at its core. Once this happens, the heavier elements begin to sink towards the star’s core, while the lighter ones rise to the surface. Eventually, these heavier add to to the core’s mass until the star reaches the Chandrasekhar limit, which is when the core heats up and eventually implodes from the added mass, creating the supernova. While supernovas are the most violent and powerful explosions in the universe, there is a part of the former star left behind called a neutron star. Neutron stars are typically very small as far as celestial objects go, and are formed by gravity pulling the remaining parts of the star’s core together to create a new object all together. The first supernova to ever be observed was seen by astronomer Alicia Soderberg in 2008. She was monitoring a star when suddenly, her computer registered extreme brightness and a release of X-rays. This went on for about 5 minutes and was considered to be an astronomical find (pun intended) in the field of astronomy. So important in fact, that it was regarded the most fascinating observation of a celestial process up until scientists photographed a black hole this year. With more advanced technology and satellites and probes traveling farther and farther into space each year, perhaps one day, we will successfully be able to record a supernova without the device being destroyed. The chances of a manmade craft being in the right place at the right time at the right distance is slim, but I think I speak for all humanity when I say that we would all like to see a star go boom.

Irrationally, humans use the expression forever lightly. “We’ll be together forever”, “Class today took forever”. But nothing is forever, not even all of the stars and galaxies in the universe. Last week, I was on Youtube when a video titled, “The Terrifying way our Universe will Die” was presented in my recommended feed. Intrigued by the eye catching and cynical headline, which was great pathos on the part of the video’s author, I watched the video and was fascinated by the fleeting nature of time relative to the universe. The video used theories and logic to put forth a realistic and practical timeline to how the universe could end. The video theorized that in billion years, the sun will increase drastically in temperature and in size, evaporating the Earth’s oceans and ending all life on Earth. Next, in 4-5 billion years, the Milky Way Galaxy and neighboring galaxy, the Andromeda, will collide into each other. Even now at this present moment, these two galaxies are racing towards each other at 250,000 miles per hour. When this galactic collision happens, our solar system will remain intact but both galaxies will not survive in same capacity they are present in now. In 5-8 Billion years, the sun’s nuclear furnace will become unstable, and eventually swell to such an astronomical size, that it will engulf Mercury, Venus, and Earth. It is important to note that while all of these events are taking place, the universe will be rapidly expanding. Because of this, in 100 billion years, the expansion will have been so drastic  that galaxies beyond our cosmic neighborhood will be billions of light years away from each other. This distance is so vast, that light from other galaxies will not reach us. In a trillion years, gravity will eventually combine our cosmic neighborhood, which is made up of about 50 galaxies, into one single “super galaxy”. This will be just one of billions of super galaxies. In 100 trillion years, our universe will enter what astronomers have already coined a little in advance “The Degenerate Era”. Over time in this era, all stars in the universe will die, leaving only behind cool, dim remnants of their former selves. In 10-100 quintillion years, the remnants of all of these stars will either have escaped their respective gravities’ pull, or will be consumed by the massive black hole that will have formed. A decillion years later, black holes will be present in astonishing numbers, essentially dominating our universe. After hearing this portion of the video, I assumed it would be over. I had always assumed that black holes were forever, and once they were created, they were there to stay, but alas, there was 1 minute and 30 seconds left in the video. In this time period, I learned that even black holes eventually die, which I found unnerving due to my previous lack of awareness for of black hole’s mortality. They eventually die through a phenomenon called Hawking Radiation, in which they slowly lose mass by emitting radiation. That is a gross simplification but I’m not STEM major. In a googol years, which I had to look up because I thought it was a made up number, the last black hole in the universe will die, leaving behind nothing but emptiness. The universe will continue to expand, but will not have enough energy to produce new stars or galaxies. This video was fascinating, yet unsettling. It is already difficult enough to picture the number of galaxies in the universe and stars in those galaxies. In my opinion, it is even more difficult to imagine all of those stars and galaxies wiped from existence never to return. It is relatively easy to comprehend human mortality, although we try not to think about it, cosmic mortality is even more seldomly thought of, not because we choose not to think about it, but because few people even know that the universe as we know it is not forever.

Side note, if anyone is wondering what a googol years looks like its this: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Being a political science major, it is not often that I am required to delve into STEM related fields. In my case, the decision to study astronomy is of my own accord. I frequently watch videos about galaxies, read articles about technologies NASA is developing for deep space research and read lists of planets where such bizarre things take place, they sound straight out of a movie. One night, I was down the Youtube rabbit hole and came across a video that asked the question, “Are there more grains of sand on Earth than stars in the universe?”.  After watching the video and finding out the answer, I decided to read another article on it to confirm the verdict in the video. After spending time listening to and reading complicated math, it was concluded that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth. Dr. Marshall, the man who did the numbers in this article, was able to reach this conclusion by stating that 20 grans of sand packed together would equal a centimeter and by using this metric, he concluded that 8000 grains of sand would equal one cubic centimeter. Next, he used this as a scale and estimated the of grains of sand on earth to be numbered around 5 sextillion. Furthermore, he then stated that there is likely 5 to 10 times more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth. This absolutely fascinated me because the draw of the universe is the almost mystical nature of its enormous scale. The universe is so big, that the human mind often cannot comprehend it however, this question and its answer puts into context just how massive the universe actually is. I’m sure anyone who was posed this question would assume that the answer would be stars, I did anyway, but it is still mind boggling to think that something as small and abundant of sand can be topped in sheer number by another group of objects. For example, Praia do Cassino is the largest beach in the world, stretching about 150 miles long, the amount of sand present in that beach alone is an astoundingly high number. The ocean is 70% of Earth’s surface with an ocean floor covered in sand, making Praia do Cassino look like a sandbox for comparison, and yet it is dwarfed by the number of stars in the universe. I am no good at science, I rarely understand math, but I appreciate the thought that is required to comprehend the universe and the deductive reasoning that goes into theorizing about the universe, for me the universe is merely a hobby.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/09/17/161096233/which-is-greater-the-number-of-sand-grains-on-earth-or-stars-in-the-sky

This is a fascinating article about a hypothetical question that asks, are there more stars in the sky or grains of sand on Earth? The article then seeks to answer the question using their best estimates. This really puts the scale of our whole universe together, as people eventually become numb to hearing large numbers, comparing stars to something that we can see and picture makes it easier to comprehend the sheer mass of space. Astronomy is something I really enjoy reading about because there are so many unexplained phenomenons that we can’t explain and the gigantic scale of the universe really provokes thought pertaining to life and purpose.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-32810887

This is an article that pertains to Brexit and provides the reasons and potential ramifications should Britain fully leave the EU. I think is it very interesting as there are themes of party infighting, people questioning the legitimacy of Brexit and demanding a recount, and a sentiment of de-globalization. It is also a very important issue here as the move will have an effect on the global market and force countries to deal with the EU and UK in separate ways. I love drama and politics and this important global issue has plenty of both.

Welcome to Sites At Penn State. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!