It's Raining Stardust (3X Increase From Six Years Ago)

Science News Magazine ^ | 8-23-2003 | Ron Cowen

[ASA Vet]

That's 90 billionths of a meter.

But what is it in fractions of an inch?

[nicollo]

My brother works on this subject. He's putting together computer models that will describe planet-formation from space dust. He's got access to UC and Los Alamos supercomputers that chomp it out for him. I think it's a fundamental problem that needs to be resolved regarding the Big Bang theory.

I know nothing more about it, other than that it's respected work. (One of his models on black holes or some such was featured on the cover of "Nature"). At family gatherings, we try to avoid asking him about his work, as nobody understands it.

[farmfriend]

Rights, farms, environment ping.

Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from this list.

[blam]

"Just FYI, the newest generation of processors is being fabbed at .09 microns (some at .1), or as it is more commonly referred to, 90 nanometers. That's 90 billionths of a meter."

Thanks. After a thirty year career in chip-making, I've been retired for almost nine years and have lost touch.

[bootless]

Not only that, but what did Hoagy Carmichael know, and when did he know it?!

[E.G.C.]

BTTT!!!!!!

[woofer]

I had no idea that when Kruschev said that the USSR would bury us the was speaking astronomically.

[Wolfstar]

LOL! Glad to see there's yet another FReeper with a dry, sardonic wit. It's one of the things I like best about reading posts on this forum.

[Wolfstar]

Classic.

[GregoryFul]

Someone previously said the dust is neutral and therefore unaffected by the sun's magnetic field.

1) Sun's ultraviolet radiation can charge objects.

2) According to James McCanney, the solar system has a electrical field gradiant due to the sun's proton wind, sun negative, spherical zone of positive charge beyond Pluto's orbit.

Either way, dust that enters the solar system picks up positive charge, and is potentially attracted to the sun, and baring any significant magnetic field around the sun, plunges in.

Could this explain the cosmic microwave background radiation? The starlight is absorbed and reradiated as heat? Seems quite a bit simpler than the current theories cosmologists cling to.

According to Eric Lerner, "The Big Bang Never Happened", the cosmic microwave background radiation is not an artifact of the big bang, but is a diffuse microwave fog generated, absorbed and re-radiated by spiraling electrons trapped in powerful magnetic fields spawned by vast plasmic currents running around the universe.

Lerner asserts that the big bang origin of the cosmic background radiation has many defects. Among the most glaring: at about 3-4 degrees, it's about 1/10th the predicted temperature; its spectrum is much too perfect and its appearance is too isotropic to account for the observed large structures in the universe.

[blackie]

Bump!

[Elliott Jackalope]

There are 25.4 microns to a mil, there are a thousand mils to an inch. So an inch is 25,400 microns long. A nanometer is a thousanth of a micron, so an inch is 25,400,000 nanometers. And, for further fun, an angstrom is one tenth of a nanometer. Angstroms are useful for measuring the diameter of atoms.

So, to answer your question, a .1 micron gate, aka 100 nanometers, is equal to one 254,000th of an inch. In other words, about 250,000 could fit inside of an inch, if measured only by gate length, with each gate right next to the other.

[Elliott Jackalope]

I did 23 years myself, doing layout design of mixed-signal circuits (A/D, D/A, analog front end for cameras, Ethernet etc.) mostly in CMOS. I've been retired for a year, now working on a new business.

[RightWhale]

Are you hinting

Just that the circulation of certain elements in the atmosphere could cause a magnetic field. The mag field being due to earth's core is a hypothesis, and doesn't explain the sun's nor Jupiter's massive mag fields.

[null and void]

30 years here. Finally got a part time consulting gig after a year's dry spell.

It's sorta like being self unemployed...

[PeaceBeWithYou]

I wonder what effect this is having on our weather and climate, Global Warming?

Not warming, cooling, according to this.

Galactic dust cooling Earth?
Nature ^ | 8 July 2003 | TOM CLARKE

Controversial climate claim exonerates carbon dioxide.

The impact of cosmic rays on our climate might outweigh that of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, a controversial new report suggests₁.

"It's no excuse to ignore sensible resource use," says one of the report's authors, physicist Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. "But the bottom line is that carbon dioxide is not the bad boy that people claim it is."

The suggestion has met with scepticism, however: "I don't buy it," says climate-change expert Wallace Broecker of Columbia University in New York.

Shaviv and climatologist Ján Veizer of Ruhr University, Germany, reckon that the spiral arms of our galaxy hold the secret to the Earth's see-sawing climate. Every 150 million years, blasts of cosmic rays cool the planet on its stately passage through the cosmos, they argue₂.

Cosmic rays thrown out by dying stars in the dust-rich arms of the Milky Way increase the number of charged particles in our atmosphere. There is some evidence that these may encourage low-level clouds to form, which cool the Earth.

Shaviv and Veizer have created a mathematical model of the number of cosmic rays hitting our atmosphere. They compared its predictions with other researchers' estimates of global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels over the past 500 million years.

They conclude that cosmic rays alone can account for 75% of the change in global climate during that period, and that less than half of the global warming seen since the beginning of the twentieth century is due to greenhouse gases.

The links are tenuous, others counter. Palaeontologist Paul Olsen, also of Columbia University, warns that Shaviv's study shows only a correlation between temperature, as inferred from ancient sediment records, carbon dioxide, as inferred from fossilized sea shells and cosmic rays, as inferred from meteorites. All three techniques are open to interpretation. Plus, geologists consider one of the 'cool' periods in the mathematical reconstruction to be a warm period, Olsen points out.

Despite these uncertainties - which hamper many efforts to reconstruct past climate - some researchers are more receptive. "It's intriguing," says Giles Harrison of the University of Reading, UK, who studies cosmic rays' impact on climate.

Shaviv attempts to explain how the Sun's natural variability affects the number of cosmic rays hitting the Earth, says Harrison. The Sun also produces radiation similar to cosmic rays, especially at the hottest part - called the solar maximum - of its 11-year cycle. Previous studies have failed to tease apart the climatic impacts of this radiation, of cosmic rays from the galaxy, and of warmth from the Sun.

Upcoming research should help clarify the situation. Physicists plan to mimic cloud formation in the lab by using particle accelerators to create cosmic-ray-like radiation.

References:

1. Shaviv, N. J. & Veizer, J. Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate? GSA Today, 13, 4 - 10, (2003).Homepage

2. Shaviv, N. J. Cosmic ray diffusion from the galactic spiral arms, iron meteorites, and a possible climatic connection? Physical Review Letters, 89, (2002).Article

The links all work.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!

[blam]

"Finally got a part time consulting gig after a year's dry spell."

Excellent. I made the break and never looked back.

[djf]

:Keep your lectric eye on me Babe,
Put your raygun to my head,
Press your space-face close to mine love,
freak out in a moonage daydream, Oh yeah...”

The only tune I have on my cell phone.

I’ve been listening to Bowie since literally Space Oddity hit the airwaves.
I don’t give a crap if he is as queer as a three dollar bill.

The man is a rock and roll genius. A brilliant writer and composer, an arranger par excellence.

I went to the very first ever concert at the Tacoma dome with a beautiful Irish Catholic gal named Cathy who I wish to this day I had been able to convince to marry me. I did everything but get on my knees...

August 11th, 1983

Still love Bowie.
Goes without saying I will love her forever...