I won’t try convincing you that [party A] or [politico A] is to blame for everything you don’t like — while [party B] or [politico B] will solve all your problems.
But now and then I talk about something with a political angle: like the ongoing mess in the Middle East. And I’ll admit to a bias.
Although I realize that the situation is complex, I don’t think that killing folks at a music festival is okay. I don’t think taking hostages is okay.1 Even if the folks responsible felt like they had high and noble reasons.
“Some rules apply in every case: – One may never do evil so that good may result from it….” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1789)
That applies to me, too. Not that I’m likely to commit murder and kidnapping. Both of which are ‘don’t do this’ activities. (Catechism, 2258-2283, 2297)
Oh, right. I haven’t explained what got me started on this. From my news feed, Sunday:
“Tens of thousands of grieving and angry Israelis surged into the streets Sunday night after six more hostages were found dead in Gaza, chanting ‘Now! Now!’ as they demanded that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reach a cease-fire with Hamas to bring the remaining captives home.
“The mass outpouring appeared to be the largest such demonstration in 11 months of war and protesters said it felt like a possible turning point, although the country is deeply divided….”
I don’t doubt that family and friends of folks who were kidnapped, and who maybe haven’t been killed yet, feel bad.
Maybe family and friends of the maybe-still-alive hostages feel that if only their government would stop being mean to Hamas, at least for a while, they’d get their loved ones back. Alive.
That might even be a possible outcome of the cease-fire Hamas wants.
But I think they, and the rest of us, might do well to remember that the folks running Hamas are the ones who started this kidnapping-and-killing spree. Unless that is ‘the fault of the Jews’, too.
Meanwhile, I can’t do a thing to free the hostages; much less unkill the folks who have been killed. But I can pray for everyone involved. Everyone.
And I will, as soon as I post this.
Hey, prayer can’t hurt.
I’ve talked about this, and somewhat-related topics, before:
Re’im music festival massacre (“…As part of the attack, 364 civilians were killed and many more wounded by Hamas at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering, an open-air music festival during the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret near kibbutz Re’im. Hamas also took 40 people hostage….”)
Lucara Diamond’s “Epic 2,492 Carat Diamond From the Karowe Mine”. (August 21, 2024)
I take commercial puffery with a grain of salt, but that 2,492 carat diamond from the Karowe mine does seem “epic”.
It’s also what I’ll be talking about this week: along with the Karowe mine, Botswana, what diamonds are and where they come from, and why I see Botswana’s recent history as a success story. Of sorts.
Second-largest diamond ever found, from the Karowe mine in Botswana, weighs more than a pound. (2024)
Putting this rough diamond’s 2,492 carets through Inch Calculator’s Carats to Pounds & Ounces Converter, I got a weight of one pound, 1.58 and a hair ounces. That’s sizable.
“Largest Diamond Since 1905 Unearthed by Miners in Botswana” Rudy Molinek, Mass Media Fellow, AAAS; Smithsonian Magazine (August 23, 2024) “Volcanic eruptions long ago brought the 2,492-carat diamond—the latest in a string of stunning discoveries over the last decade—to the surface”
“Miners in Botswana made a dazzling discovery this week, when they uncovered a 2,492-carat diamond, weighing about one pound. The last time miners unearthed a diamond this big, the Model T Ford was still three years away from rolling off the assembly line.
“‘This is history in the making,’ Naseem Lahri, Botswana managing director for Lucara Diamond Corp., the Canadian mining company that found the gem, tells Sello Motseta of the Associated Press (AP). ‘I am very proud. It is a product of Botswana.’
“The new diamond was excavated at the Karowe mine, about 300 miles north of Botswana’s capital city of Gaborone. The same mine has produced four other large rough diamonds in the last decade, including the 813-carat Constellation diamond that sold for a record $63 million in 2016….”
As a nation, Botswana is a top producer of diamonds. BBC News says about 20% of all diamonds come from that south African nation. When I started looking into who’s doing what with diamonds in Botswana, things got complicated.
A Canadian company, Lucara Diamond, run by two Canadians and a very rich Swede, owns and operates the Karowe mine. About 14 years back, Lucara Diamond bought another company: African Diamonds. And that led me down a lot of rabbit holes.
Along the way, I ran across another company, Botswana Diamonds: an outfit that says they “developed West African Diamonds which later merged into Stellar Diamonds”. Botswana Diamonds’ website has a .uk top-level domain and a mailing address in the Republic of Ireland.1
Given time, maybe I’d work out who owned African Diamonds, who operated the company, and how they spent their money.
Then again, maybe not.
I found a great deal of enthusiastic marketing content, and ample confirmation that folks find diamonds fascinating. But in-depth descriptions, not so much.
Comparing and Contrasting: Botswana and the United States
Botswana president Mokgweetsi Masisi examines the recently-discovered 2,492-carat diamond. (2024)
Something I did notice — make that confirm — while digging into Botswana’s history is that Botswana is not America. On the other hand, we’ve got more in common than many other countries.
We’ve both got presidents, and we’re both former English colonies. But Botswana’s government is a parliamentary republic with an executive president, while my country is a presidential republic.
My country cut ties with England in 1776. Two wars later, in 1815, colonists made the claim stick, and that’s another topic. Botswana negotiated a smooth transition to independence from 1964 to 1966.
We’ve had one internal war as a free nation. Botswana hasn’t had any. But then, they’ve only been independent for about six decades, compared to our two and a half centuries.2
That brings me to what Botswana’s president, and the Lucara mining company chief executive, said.
“…On Thursday [August 22, 2024], President Mokgweetsi Masisi of Botswana became one of the first people to look at the newly discovered diamond up-close. It was large enough to fill up the palm of his hand.
“‘It is overwhelming,’ he said, per the AP. ‘I am lucky to have seen it in my time.’…
“…Lucara aims to leverage these developments [new tech, including X-ray devices] with a lofty goal in mind: finding the largest diamond ever.
“William Lamb, the company’s chief executive, tells the New York Times, ‘We believe that we can eclipse the Cullinan.’” [emphasis mine]
How President Masisi’s remarks figure into this year’s election, I don’t know. It was, however, nice to see a national leader expressing admiration for a natural wonder.
Speaking of which, I don’t know how much of this whacking great lump of carbon crystal’s sale price will go through Botswana’s economy.
“…Lucara has 100% ownership of the mine in Karowe.
“Botswana’s government has proposed a law that will ask companies, once granted a licence to mine, to sell a 24% stake to local firms if the government does not exercise its option of becoming a shareholder, Reuters news agency reported last month.” [emphasis mine]
What that proposed law’s status is, and how it would actually work: that, I don’t know.
Wealth, Fertility Rates, Statistics —
I gather that Botswana went from being among the world’s poorest nations in 1966 to what a Wikipedia page called an “upper middle-income country”.
I see that as good news.
Botswana’s drop in fertility rate, from over five children per woman in the 1980s to about 2.4 (a tad above the 2.1 replacement rate) in 2013 is another matter.3
I grew up in a culture where that would have been applauded as a great step forward.
I see fewer folks dying young as a good thing. But I’m also aware that each of us will eventually die. If folks don’t get around to having and raising kids, we’ll run out of the current crop in about a century. Less, actually, and that’s almost another topic.
The good news for Botswana is that they’re not depending on immigration for their country’s future. I see it as good news, at any rate.
I’m not sure what I think about this assessment of Botswana’s politics:
“…Botswana was ranked as a ‘flawed democracy’ and 33rd out of 167 states in the 2023 Democracy Index (The Economist), which was the second highest rating in Africa, and highest ranking in continental Africa (only the offshore island nation of Mauritius bested its ranking). However, according to the 2024 V-Dem Democracy Indices, Botswana has been experiencing an episode of democratic backsliding over the past ten years, recording its lowest ever score on the indices. The indices classify Botswana as an electoral democracy in a ‘grey zone’ between electoral democracy and electoral autocracy….” (Botswana > Government and politics, Wikipedia)
— “Democracy”, and Dan Backslide
I’ll admit to a bias. I remember when ardent defenders of “democracy” warned Americans against the dread dangers of communism, rock music, and the Catholic Church: not necessarily in that order.
Since then, I’ve gotten the impression that — for many zealous do-gooders — “democracy” can mean “support for ideas I like”, while a “threat to democracy” is anyone who’s not sufficiently supportive of those ideas.
The word “backsliding” in that Wikipedia page didn’t help.
I associate it with well-meaning folks I rubbed shoulders with in my youth, and the infamous Dan Backslide of “The Dover Boys at Pimento University; or, The Rivals of Roquefort Hall” (1942).
The point I’m groping for is that I don’t know how the folks behind the Democracy Index and V-Dem Democracy Indices define “democracy”, and what they consider a “flawed” democracy.
Diamonds
Itasca International’s cross-section of Karowe mine, showing rock strata. (2019)
Depending on context, I could say that diamonds come from a bank vault, a jewelry store, diamond mines — you get the picture.
This month’s one-pound diamond came from the Karowe open-pit mine, south of Lake Makgadikgadi: a place that became salt flats around the time Earth’s most recent glacial period ended.
I gather that Karowe’s owners plan on digging tunnels “to access the highest value portion of the Karowe orebody”. That project’s over budget and behind schedule. Seems that keeping water out of the tunnels is a bigger job than expected.4
Instead of looking at why folks pay so much for sparkly rocks, I’ll talk about how diamonds wind up being close enough to the surface for us to find.
Graphite and Diamond: Same Element, Different Crystal Form
Starting with the basics, diamonds are carbon in a particular crystal form.
Carbon is the fourth most abundant element by mass in the universe, and the second most abundant in the human body. It’s got chemical properties that make it dandy for building the complex molecules I’m made of. And that’s yet another topic.
Carbon is also good at allotropy. Carbon atoms will stick to each other in several ways, making different shapes. I’ve put ‘for more information’ links in the footnotes.
The two carbon allotropes I’m most familiar with are graphite and diamond. They’re both crystalline, with atoms sticking together in repeating geometric patterns.
The crystalline pattern of graphite is two-dimensional, with very light bonding between layers.
Diamond crystals are three-dimensional.
Diamonds will burn, but it takes a fair amount of heat to ignite them.
Although they’re chemically stable at room temperature and pressure, diamonds don’t last forever: not at “NTP” (Normal Pressure and Temperature). Diamond is metastable, so a diamond will, given lots of time, turn into graphite.
That’s because at NTP, graphite has a lower energy state than diamond. “Energy state” is an aspect of quantum mechanics, and that’s something I’d rather sidestep: this week, at any rate. Again, I’ve put links in the footnotes.
Given time, and a quantum nudge, carbon atoms in a diamond rearrange themselves into the lower-energy-state pattern of graphite.
That’s here on the surface.
Deep inside Earth, with much higher temperatures and pressures, diamond has the lower energy state; and that brings me to where diamonds are formed.5
Formed in the Depths, Rushed to the Surface
Mice of Mu’s illustration of Earth’s deep carbon cycle.
By the time I was in high school, I’d heard that diamonds are formed when coal gets squeezed and heated, deep inside Earth.
That’s not the way it works. Not usually, at any rate.
Coal starts out as dead plant matter from forests and marshes accumulating in peat bogs. Eventually some of those peat bogs get covered by more stuff, geology happens, and what had been peat becomes coal.
A coal bed could get pulled down in a subduction zone — that’s yet again another topic for another day — with diamonds forming when the coal’s carbon gets sufficiently concentrated. Diamonds are rare, but they’re not that rare.
Scientists have been learning that carbon’s lurking deep beneath our feet,
Carbon is the 15th or 17th most abundant element in Earth’s crust, depending on how “abundance” gets measured.
There’s even more carbon in Earth’s mantle, coming at least partly from carbon-rich ocean sediments that were pulled down in subduction zones.
When carbon in Earth’s mantle gets concentrated, under the right conditions, diamond crystals start growing.
Then a particular sort of volcanic eruption shoots those diamonds and the material around them to the surface.
“…Kimberlite pipes are the result of explosive diatreme volcanism from very deep mantle derived sources. The theory is that they are formed deep within the mantle, between 93 and 280 miles in depth, from anomalously enriched exotic mantle compositions, and are erupted rapidly and violently, often with considerable CO2 and volatile components. It is this depth of melting and generation which makes kimberlites prone to hosting diamond xenocrysts….” (“Geology of the Crater of Diamonds State Park and Vicinity, Pike County, Arkansas“; J. M. Howard, W. D. Hanson; State Park Series 03 (2008)) [emphasis mine]
Lamproite pipes form the same way
That Arkansas State Park Service article says kimberlite pipes are “carrot-shaped”, an apt and simple description in otherwise rather academic-sounding text.6
On the Shores of Arkansas
Earth, 100,000,000 years ago.
About 100,000,000 years ago, clams and oysters shared a warm ocean shore with things that looked like crocodiles, long-tailed ostriches, and 11-foot roadrunners with hands and nightmare-inducing talons.
Then part of the landscape exploded.
“…a mass of material moved out of the earth’s mantle at a high rate of speed—30 to 50 miles per hour, driven by carbon dioxide gas. During its journey, it gathered rocks from all the zones of rock it passed through. As it reached the upper crust, the speed increased to as much as 150 miles per hour. When it came near the earth’s surface, about 850 feet below the ground, the pressure of the gas overcame the weight of the overlying sedimentary rock and an explosion occurred. The expanding gas rapidly cooled the mass so we see little heating effects in the surrounding sediments. The resulting explosive volcano is classified as a diatreme by geologists..” (“Geology of the Crater of Diamonds State Park and Vicinity, Pike County, Arkansas“; J. M. Howard, W. D. Hanson; State Park Series 03 (2008)) [emphasis mine]
Time passed. Plants, animals, and the land, changed. Glaciers approached but did not reach the old volcanic pipe. The glaciers melted, and now folks can look for diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas.
They’ll occasionally find one, but the rock-to-diamond ratio is so low that the place has been strictly a tourist attraction for decades.
I think of diamonds as coming from exotic places like the shores of the rivers Godavar, Penner, and Krishna. And so they did, a few millennia back.7 That’s a part of diamond lore I’ll save for another time.
To Be Continued
Lobby card for “The Moonstone”, Monogram Pictures. (1934)
I’ll be talking about diamonds, history, folklore, and a Wilkie Collins novel next Saturday. Unless something else pops up.
I’m wrapping up this week’s post with a look at why I see Botswana’s recent history as a success story. Remember: no internal wars since independence: which shouldn’t be remarkable, but is.
Don’t worry: I’m not going to start an in-depth review of a continent’s history. I’ll mostly look at what used to be the Kingdom of Kongo.8
Congo Chaos and Lebensraum for Mountain Gorillas
The Kingdom of Kongo was in one of Earth’s major river basins, and apparently doing okay; at least until folks from Europe showed up and started making arrangements for trade.
I’m over-simplifying centuries of geopolitics something fierce here, by the way.
What used to be the Kingdom of Kongo arguably hit bottom when it was repackaged as the “Congo Free State”: an ironic name for Leopold II of Belgium’s private property.
Next it was called the Belgian Congo, run along perhaps less-rapacious lines by the Belgian government. Then, around 1960, when arranging independence for former holdings was all the rage, folks in the Congo River Basin were free to set up their own government.
The last I heard, there’s less death and destruction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo / Free Republic of the Congo / Republic of the Congo / Republic of the Congo (Léopoldville) / Republic of Zaire / South Kasai / State of Katanga, than there was in the Sixties.
The country’s kept the same name for several decades now, but I get the impression that folks living in what should be a prosperous nation — well, ‘nuf said.
That’s definitely true for folks who had been living in what’s currently on the Democratic Republic of the Congo/Uganda border, the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Depending on who’s talking they’re the Twa, or Batwa.
The Batwa had working agreements with their neighbors, and were getting along. Until the powers that be decided that mountain gorillas had prior claim on their land.
Last I heard, they’d been dropped into territory they couldn’t use.
Bad as their situation is, it could have been worse.
For one thing, the higher-ups apparently regard the Batwa as people, which I see as a step in the right direction.
A ‘down’ side is that they’re not the only folks whose lack of legal and economic clout left them on the short end of some high-minded enterprise.
“Conservation refugee” isn’t in the news much, its my language’s term for people in that predicament.9
Blood Diamonds, Mountain Gorillas: and Working With What We’ve Got
Finally, I haven’t seen “blood diamond” in the news lately. More good news. Of a sort.
What I hope are well-intentioned efforts like the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme may be putting a crimp in shady and/or illegal diamond mining and sales.
It’s run by a multi-national outfit that’s at least partly connected with the United Nations. That’s probably a good idea. The United Nations is the closest thing we’ve got to an international authority with membership that’s in principle available to all nations.
Working with what we’ve got, rather than sitting on our hands and wishing that we had something better, strikes me as a good idea.
Another United Nations outfit was involved in booting folks out of their homeland, making room for mountain gorillas.
I don’t doubt that the World Heritage folks meant well.
But it would have been nice if they’d shown as much concern for the well-being of humans living in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, as they did for mountain gorillas.
Still, things could have been worse for the folks who, in effect, lost a property rights case to mountain gorillas. Instead of being killed, they were relocated.
It wasn’t all that long ago that folks in charge had, by long-established custom and law, the right to kill unwanted people or inconvenient groups of people.10
“…When Lemkin asked about a way to punish the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide, a law professor told him: ‘Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing.’ As late as 1959, many world leaders still ‘believed states had a right to commit genocide against people within their borders’, according to political scientist Douglas Irvin-Erickson….” (Genocide > Pre-criminalization view, Wikipedia) [emphasis mine]
I’m not, putting it mildly, content with today’s status quo.
But I know history, and I’ve lived through some distinctly mercurial decades.
We do not live in an ideal world. But we can learn: and some of us have, now and again, made changes that improved peoples’ lives.
I see the occasional injustice that’s corrected, and reform that achieves at least some of its goals, as — again — good news.
Next week, barring the unexpected, I’ll be back with tales of cursed gems, glow-in-the-dark diamonds, diamonds from outer space, whatever else comes to mind, and why I’m not worried that the Hope Diamond’s current owner is the Smithsonian.
Xenolith (a rock fragment enveloped in a larger rock during the larger rock’s development and solidification — a xenocryst is an individual foreign crystal within an igneous body of rock)
“What are Kimberlites?” Public Information Circular (PIC) 16, Kansas Geological Survey, The University of Kansas
“What is coal?” Frequently Asked Questions, USGS (United States Geological Survey)
7Even more about diamonds and all that, but I’m almost done:
Wikipedia
Arkansaurus (theropod dinosaur, looked sort of like an ostrich with a long tail)
Cenomanian (part of the Cretaceous, 100.5 to 93.9 million years ago)
“Contributions to Economic Geology”, Diamond-Bearing Peridotite in Pike County, Arkansas, pp. 279-322 Hugh D. Misek, Clarence S. Ross; Contributions to Economic Geology, 1922, Part 1 (1922) via USGS (United States Geological Survey)
9 Places, people, and problems; focusing on central Africa:
Wikipedia
Bwindi Impenetrable Forest (on the Democratic Republic of Congo/Uganda border, currently Gorillaland; “Batwa pygmy people” mentioned)
Belgian Congo (territory controlled by Belgium, 1908-1960)
Congo Crisis (lethal SNAFU following independence from Belgium, 1960-1965)
Congo Free State (“free” only in the sense that King Leopold II of Belgium was free to do what he wanted with his personal property: which included this territory, 1885-1908)
Conservation refugee (folks who get booted off their land when the powers that be decide they’re in the way of more important critters)
Mgahinga Gorilla National Park (“This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards….”) (“…Popular tourist activities include … bird watching and meeting the Batwa community….”)
Republic of the Congo (Léopoldville) (Republic of the Congo 1960-1964, AKA Congo-Léopoldville 1960-1966, Democratic Republic of the Congo 1964-1971
Republic of the Congo (Not to be confused with Republic of the Congo: this one was started in 1958, independent 1960-present (2024))
Rhodesia (region) (territory held by the British Empire ca. 1890 to 1920s-1960s — it’s complicated)
South Kasai (an “unrecognised secessionist state” in what’s now part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1960-1962))
State of Katanga (“This article needs additional citations for verification….”) (a “breakaway state” in what’s now part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1960-1963))
Zaire (official name for what’s currently called Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1971-1997)
Zambia (none of the above, a country south of Democratic Republic of the Congo, used to be part of “Rhodesia”: independent since 1964, current constitution since 2016)
10 Good intentions, working in an imperfect world:
Wikipedia
Bwindi Impenetrable Forest (on the Democratic Republic of Congo/Uganda border, currently Gorillaland; “Batwa pygmy people” mentioned here)
Blood diamond (AKA brown diamonds, conflict diamonds, hot diamonds, red diamonds; diamonds mined in a war zone, sold to bankroll an insurgency/terrorists/invaders/warlord: the bad guys, in short)
“…’And I am speaking now to the straight community,’ he told the crowd. ‘How did you feel when you heard that 49 people had been gunned down by a self-proclaimed terrorist? That’s the easy question. Here is the hard one: Did that feeling change when you found out the shooting was at a gay bar at 2 a.m. in the morning? If that feeling changed, then we are doing something wrong.’…” [emphasis mine]
I’m not ‘political’, so I won’t try either extolling or slandering Spencer Cox — he’s the person who made that “I am speaking” statement, is currently Utah’s governor, and is newsworthy again for another reason.
I am, however, a Catholic who tries acting as if what I say I believe matters.
That includes acting as if loving my neighbor is a good idea. I’ll get back to that, briefly.
Seeing my neighbor’s viewpoint — arguably part of that ‘loving my neighbor’ thing — is easier in some cases, than in others. Having had parallel experiences helps.
“Affect Display” and Perceptions
…I’d been having my usual frustrating experience, being one of the 99-plus out of a hundred or so job applicants who didn’t get hired. I’ve since learned that my affect or affect display isn’t squarely on the 50th percentile, which didn’t help.
“Affect display” is psychobabble for verbal and non-verbal displays of emotion. I’m a very emotional man, and — well, apparently I don’t consistently act normal.
Anyway, back to frustrations, me, and a career counselor. We’d been discussing incentives I might offer a potential employer, including government funding.
He asked me if I was homosexual. Turns out, the question made sense: during the ’70s in the Upper Midwest, at any rate. For one thing, bias against homosexuals made — I think it was still called affirmative action — an option.
For another, I fit the profile.
I’m creative, articulate and not obsessed with sports. I can’t swear, some four decades later, to “articulate” being in the mix. But I’m pretty sure that talking like I was at least a little smart was part of the reason I fit the homosexual profile.
But, despite fitting the profile, I’m not homosexual. Which is no great virtue. I’ve got issues, lots of issues: but not that particular one.
This isn’t what I’ll be talking about this week, but today’s (August 27, 2024) planned commercial test flight is — my opinion — a big deal.
Something I haven’t noticed discussed — apart from a passing reference to getting the Hubble telescope into a higher orbit — as a reason for learning how to get folks into orbits higher than the ISS seems obvious.
Our communications, weather, and other satellites occasionally don’t work right.
Sending a repair crew up strikes me as an improvement on launching another satellite.
But again, that’s not what I’ll be talking about this week, so here’s an excerpt from the news, and a video:
“Polaris Dawn, an ambitious all-civilian spaceflight, is scheduled to liftoff Tuesday.
“When the mission commences with the launch of a SpaceX Dragon capsule, four private astronauts will rocket into the upper reaches of Earth’s orbit, where they will conduct the first-ever commercial spacewalk, among other things.
“The mission has the potential to be a historic one — and not just because of the many firsts that billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman’s crew hopes to accomplish. A successful mission would also be a crucial step in laying the groundwork for future deep space exploration as NASA and other space agencies set their sights on destinations like Mars….”
Installing the NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) X-ray concentrators.
A paper published this month doesn’t so much tell us what’s inside a neutron star, as show what’s not inside. Considering how little we know about these immensely-dense stellar objects, that’s a significant step toward understanding the things.
I’ll take a look at that, but mostly I’ll be talking about what we’ve been learning, and why I think paying attention to this wonder-packed universe is a good idea.
Even if — maybe because — this Haldane quote, written a few years before we knew about neutron stars, still reflects how God’s universe has been surprising us.
“Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose….” (“Possible Worlds and Other Essays” , p. 286, J. B. S. Haldane (1927) via Wikiquote)
“New data on the brightest pulsar observed with a telescope on the International Space Station suggests neutron star interiors are ‘squishy.’
“Astronomers have found a way to peer inside neutron stars and glimpse the exotic matter hiding in their cores. By pinning down the properties of the closest and brightest neutron star yet, Devarshi Choudhury (University of Amsterdam) and colleagues have ruled out both the plainest and the strangest ideas describing the dense matter inside these exotic objects….”
The “closest and brightest neutron star” these scientists have been studying is a pulsar: PSR J0437-4715.
Pulsars and neutron stars weren’t on the old star charts. They’re too dim for anything short of really good telescopes. The supernovae that form them, that’s another matter.
Around the time folks living west of the Black Sea were making high-quality ceramics and public baths, a massive star exploded.
This isn’t the one that became PSR J0437-4715, by the way. It’s the supernova that formed the Crab nebula. Anyway —
The explosion’s wavefront reached Earth the same year that the Church stopped trying to coordinate its eastern and western regions. These days, folks speaking my language call it the Great Schism, and — when it’s mentioned at all — say that the split happened because folks in Rome and Constantinople squabbled over theological stuff.
There’s some truth to the name and claim. But I strongly suspect that we’re looking at what happens when folks let issues accumulate for a few centuries.
Besides, we didn’t have either airlines or the Internet back then. Communication between places more than a day’s walk apart wasn’t easy. Plus, the Church was going through one of its rough patches. We have those every half-millennium or so, and that’s another topic.1
Where was I? An exploding star’s wavefront reaching Earth. Right.
Supernova!
Chinese astronomers noticed a “guest star” in July of 1054. Folks living in what’s now San Juan County, New Mexico, did, too: assuming that what we call the “Supernova Pictograph” is their record of the event.
John Bevis, an English doctor, electrical researcher and astronomer, spotted a fuzzy spot where the supernova had been in 1731. French astronomer Charles Messier did the same thing in 1758, and made it the first entry in his catalog of things that look like comets but aren’t.
William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, an English engineer and astronomer, observed and drew a picture of the fuzzy spot in the 1840s. He said it looked sort of like a crab. In 1848, using a bigger telescope, he observed it again, and changed his mind. But the moniker “Crab Nebula” caught on, anyway.
Fast-forward to the early 20th century. Astronomers had started using photography, and noticed that the Crab Nebula was getting bigger. I’ll skip a bunch of important names.
In 1928, Edwin Hubble said the Crab Nebula was related to the 1054 guest star. The idea didn’t line up with known physics, so it wasn’t until Nicholas Mayall used a spectrograph and considerable analysis to — okay. Bottom line, Mayall showed that Hubble was right.
In late 1933, astronomers Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky said that neutron stars — extremely dense supernova remnants — might exist. As it turns out, they were right.
That was in the 1930s. The supernova tie-in started a search for other supernova sightings in humanity’s archives.2
Neutron Stars: Gravity, Math, and Weirdness
Hugo Spinelli’s diagram: Bosons, Hadrons, and Fermions.
Finally, and this is what I had planned on focusing on, neutron stars are what’s left when a really big star, between around 10 to 25 times our Sun’s mass, explodes.
What’s left of the star collapses until it’s a dozen kilometers across, give or take.
It’s about as dense as an atom’s nucleus: something like 100,000,000,000,000 grams per cubic centimeter.
Neutron stars are made of degenerate matter, which is a state of matter and has nothing to do with moral character.
Degenerate matter is under so much pressure that elementary particles like electrons and neutrons get squeezed together.
“…Upon the star’s collapse, the core’s atoms broke down into neutrons; only a rule that helps govern the world of the very small (the Pauli exclusion principle) prevents the neutrons from getting too friendly with one another. That pressure prevents further caving-in to gravity….” (“Neutron Stars Might Be Squishy Inside” , Monica Young, Sky & Telescope (August 6, 2024 ))
Since making and keeping degenerate matter in laboratories isn’t practical, scientists study things like neutron stars to see how it works.
This is where things get weird, involving math that’s beyond me and phrases like “equation of state”.
An equation of state describes the state of matter in particular physical conditions.
“In physics and chemistry, an equation of state is a thermodynamic equation relating state variables, which describe the state of matter under a given set of physical conditions, such as pressure, volume, temperature, or internal energy. Most modern equations of state are formulated in the Helmholtz free energy. Equations of state are useful in describing the properties of pure substances and mixtures in liquids, gases, and solid states as well as the state of matter in the interior of stars….” (Equation of state, Wikipedia)
That’s a useful definition.
So is this example of an equation of state’s general form: f(p, V, T)=0, “…where p is the pressure, V is the volume, and T is the temperature of the system….” Or, rather, it would be useful: if I knew more about math and its formulaic conventions.
I’m guessing that f is a number that’s the equation of state value for some substance, but I don’t know.
I was going to talk neutrons, fermions, bosons, how angular momentum applies to subatomic particles, a couple research papers using data from the NICER telescope, and what we’ve been learning about PSR J0437-4715, the closest and brightest known pulsar.
But I’m not up to digging through all that this week.
Instead, I’ve put ‘for more information’ links in the footnotes.3
“Astronomers surveyed dozens of neutron stars, homing in on three that challenge most ideas about what these exotic objects are made of.
“Astronomers using the XMM-Newton and Chandra space telescopes have revisited a trio of young neutron stars that are particularly cool for their age. Explaining their existence requires ruling out 75% of all neutron star models — bringing astronomers closer to identifying the correct one.
“A neutron star is among the universe’s most exotic objects, forged in the fury of a massive star’s death. The star’s core buckles under its own weight, crashing down so hard that electrons and protons are forced to merge into neutrons. The resulting neutron star material is so dense that a single spoonful would weigh more than every human on Earth put together.
“Yet astronomers still don’t know the exact structure of a neutron star, which probably includes electrons and protons in its crust and maybe quarks in its core. The key to finding out what’s really inside neutron stars is identifying the correct equation of state that describes the relationship between temperature and pressure in all neutron star interiors. There are hundreds of possibilities….”
I don’t see nearly as many ‘science proves that’ declarations now as I did, back when folks were still getting used to the idea that Robert Goddard was right. Apart from the usual climate doomsayers, that is, and that’s yet another topic.
Maybe it’s because I have access to better sources these days. That’s another reason I’m not upset about the Internet and other threats to the status quo.
I suspect that the old ‘Scientific Certainty Frees Us From the Shackles of Superstition, Ignorance, and (religious) Oppression’ triumphalist tone was clashing with the 20th century’s discoveries of just how much we haven’t learned yet.
And I suspect scientists, those involved with physics and related fields at any rate, have been getting a great deal less stuffy.
Sure, folks have been naming telescopes after famous scientists, like the XMM-Newton and Chandra space telescopes.
But we’re also calling one the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer.
I’ll grant that the full name sounds a bit pretentious: even megalomaniacal. As my oldest daughter said Tuesday, “A neutron star explorer? How are they going to get that thing close [to] a neutron star?”
Fact is, they can’t. There’s serious talk about launching interstellar probes, but technology like that is still in the early R&D stages.
I’ll probably talk about Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer and the research it’s making possible — eventually. This week I’ll focus, very briefly, on its shorter name: NICER.
I mean to say: a telescope called NICER.
Writing about squishy stars.
Subatomic particles called quarks.
Quarks that are up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange.
And scientists who don’t even Latinize their names for research papers.4
Quite a lot has happened over the last hundred years. Take astronomy, for example.
New Views of This Universe: Radio, X-Ray, Gravitational Waves …
The Virgo gravitational Wave detector in Italy. (2015)
It’s been about four centuries since Galileo Galilei — and almost certainly others — turned a “Dutch perspective glass” into a “telescope”. Five decades later, someone made the first telescope with mirrors instead of lenses.
Textbooks say Isaac Newton invented reflecting telescopes, and that’s probably so.
By 1927, U.S. Navy short-wave communications researchers were launching detectors into the upper atmosphere on Goddard’s rockets.
In 1932, physicist and radio engineer Karl Jansky noticed radio noise, a “hiss”, coming from the constellation Sagittarius.
He announced what he’d learned in 1933, but the Great Depression was in progress, followed by World War II. Building another, more expensive, radio antenna/telescope wasn’t an option. Even so, I think 1932 is a reasonable choice for radio astronomy’s start.
Nicola Tesla’s signals “from another world” in 1899 had probably been transmissions from another researcher’s radio.
Either way, radio astronomy took off when amateur astronomer Grote Reber built the first parabolic radio telescope. That was in 1937, followed by more folks who had been working on wartime radar systems.
Suborbital flights picked up Solar ultraviolet radiation in 1946. The Orbiting Solar Observatory’s ultraviolet telescope gave astronomers a better look, starting in 1962.
Instruments launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in 1949 detected X-rays from the sun in 1949. That suborbital flight used a V-2 rocket. The first rocket-born X-ray telescope imaged the Sun in 1963.
Infrared astronomy arguably started in 1800, when William Herschel put a thermometer in sunlight that had passed through a prism. Skipping ahead, better technology and radio astronomy’s success put infrared astronomy on the map in the 1960s.
Then, in 2015, the LIGO and Virgo collaborations recorded the first observations of gravitational waves.5
It’s been an eventful century.
Beauty, Wonders, and Paying Attention
Psalms 98:4; and sunrise over the Pacific Ocean, seen from the ISS. (2003)
I could be a Catholic and not take a lively interest in God’s universe.
But paying attention to the beauty and wonders around me is, I think, a good idea. If I don’t, I’ll be missing a great deal of what God is ‘saying’ to us. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 293, 299, and more)
I figure that’s partly why folks like Saints Hildegard of Bingen and Albertus Magnus helped lay the foundation of what we call science.6
That was just under a millennium back now, but the idea of taking notice both of God’s creation and God is much older.
“God is known by natural knowledge through the images of His effects.” (“Summa Theologica” , First Part, Question 12 – How God is known by us, Article 12 – Whether God can be known in this life by natural reason?, Reply to Objection 2; St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century, unfinished at his death in 1274) via NewAdvent.org) [this is a very brief excerpt]
“Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air, amply spread around everywhere, question the beauty of the sky, question the serried ranks of the stars … question all these things. They all answer you, ‘Here we are, look; we’re beautiful.’… “…Prayer: “O God, You are never far from those who sincerely search for You. Accompany those who err and wander far from You. Turn their hearts towards what is right and let them see the signs of Your Presence in the beauty of created things. We ask this….” (The beauty of the unchangeable creator is to be inferred from the beauty of the changeable creation, St. Augustine, Sermons, 241, Easter (c.411 A.D.))
Developing a sense of scale is also prudent. And remembering who’s in charge.
“By faith we understand that the universe was ordered by the word of God, so that what is visible came into being through the invisible.” (Hebrews 11:3)
“He who lives forever created the whole universe; the LORD alone is just.” “Like a drop of water from the sea and a grain of sand, so are these few years among the days of eternity. That is why the Lord is patient with them and pours out his mercy on them.” (Sirach 18:1–2, 10–11)
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the firmament proclaims the works of his hands.” (Psalms 19:2)
If this sounds familiar, it should. I’ve talked about it before:
PSR J0437-4715 (closest and brightest known pulsar; 509.8 light-years out; in the general direction of Eta Pictoris)
Saeculum obscurum (Caesar Baronius’s “a dark age”: 896-964) (The term, and idea, caught on during Europe’s big turf wars, ca 1522-1712; remaining popular during and after The Enlightenment)
“A NICER View of the Nearest and Brightest Millisecond Pulsar: PSR J0437-4715“ Devarshi Choudhury, Tuomo Salmi, Serena Vinciguerra, Thomas E. Riley, Yves Kini, Anna L. Watts, Bas Dorsman, Slavko Bogdanov, Sebastien Guillot, Paul S. Ray, Daniel J. Reardon, Ronald A. Remillard, Anna V. Bilous, Daniela Huppenkothen, James M. Lattimer, Nathan Rutherford, Zaven Arzoumanian, Keith C. Gendreau, Sharon M. Morsink, Wynn C. G. Ho (submitted July 8, 2024) via arXiv
“Atmospheric Effects on Neutron Star Parameter Constraints with NICER“ Tuomo Salmi, Serena Vinciguerra, Devarshi Choudhury, Anna L. Watts, Wynn C. G. Ho, Sebastien Guillot, Yves Kini, Bas Dorsman, Sharon M. Morsink, Slavko Bogdanov (submitted August 18, 2023); last revised October 23, 2023) via arXiv
Neutron Stars Astr221 – Stars and Planets; Chris Mihos, Department of Astronomy, Case Western Reserve University; Cleveland, Ohio (Fall 2005)
4 Science, scientists, subatomic particles, X-ray space telescopes, and an old custom:
Something new each Saturday.
Life, the universe and my circumstances permitting. I'm focusing on 'family stories' at the moment. ("A Change of Pace: Family Stories" (11/23/2024))
I was born in 1951. I'm a husband, father and grandfather. One of the kids graduated from college in December, 2008, and is helping her husband run businesses and raise my granddaughter; another is a cartoonist and artist; #3 daughter is a writer; my son is developing a digital game with #3 and #1 daughters. I'm also a writer and artist.
I live in Minnesota, in America's Central Time Zone. This blog is on UTC/Greenwich time.
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Blog - David Torkington
Spiritual theologian, author and speaker, specializing in prayer, Christian spirituality and mystical theology [the kind that makes sense-BHG]
I am not “political”.
![Keith Gendreau/NASA/Goddard's photo: 'NICER Optics Lead Takashi Okajima installs one of NICER's 56 X-ray concentrators, each consisting of 24 concentric foils.... The Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) is a NASA Explorer Mission of Opportunity dedicated to studying the extraordinary environments - strong gravity, ultra-dense matter, and the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe - [of] neutron stars. An attached payload aboard the International Space Station, NICER will deploy an instrument with unique capabilities for timing and spectroscopy of fast X-ray brightness fluctuations. The embedded Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology demonstration (SEXTANT) will use NICER data to validate, for the first time in space, technology that exploits pulsars as natural navigation beacons.' (July 9, 2015) via Wikipedia, used w/o permission.](https://i0.wp.com/brendans-island.com/blogsource/20240813ff/20240820-Neutron_star_Interior_Composition_Explorer_NICER_-_34718447596-658.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)
![NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab's illustration: 'Scientists think neutron stars are layered, [this diagram] suggesting one, simplified view of those layers' compositions. The state of matter in their inner cores remains unknown.' (2021) via Wikipedia, used w/o permission. see https://www.nasa.gov/universe/nasas-nicer-probes-the-squeezability-of-neutron-stars/](https://i0.wp.com/brendans-island.com/blogsource/20240813ff/20240819-neutron-star-sectioned-1000px-900x588-658.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)
