That’s very good news. I’m feeling a lot better, now that I’m back on full doses. That could be psychosomatic, placebo effect, or something else. But whatever it is: it’s good news.
More good news, the post for this Saturday is taking shape.
Slightly frustrating news, I’ve been getting more spam comments: almost all for what looks like a cryptocurrency that was new to me until the spam started.
So far, it’s merely slightly frustrating. If the situation gets worse; well, I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.
The good news is that this week’s SNAFU doesn’t happen nearly as often as it might. And I live in an era where folks like me have options that simply were not available in my youth.
The not-so-good news is that I’m not perfectly perfect in every way.
Nobody currently living here on Firebase Earth is, actually; but I’m a tad more positively off both the 50th percentile and society’s fluctuating notion of perfection than many. And that’s another topic.
I talked about this last December, so the quick and easy way to review what’s wrong with me is repeating the list:
ADHD: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, inattentive type
ASD: Autism spectrum disorder
Cluster A personality disorder
GAD: Generalized anxiety disorder
PDD: Persistent depressive disorder
PTSD: Post traumatic stress disorder
It’s not a complete list, and the point is that I’ve got problems.
Now, back to good news. Some of those alphabet soup disorders are easier to manage when I take my medications. Less difficult, at any rate.
And that brings me to the current SNAFU.
One of my meds is methylphenidate. It’s a Schedule II controlled substance, so every month I have to get authorization for the prescription.
Concerns, the Controlled Substances Act of 1971, and Me
I remember the circumstances and paranoia that led to the Controlled Substances Act of 1971.
I think some of the concerns were legitimate.
But I experience frustration when I am “protected” from medication which I need. I’d better explain that.
Again, methylphenidate is a Schedule II controlled substance.
As such, each month I must submit a request to a regional health care authority which processes the request and eventually sends it to the doctor who authorizes that month’s prescription.
Some months, the process goes smoothly. This month it didn’t. The fault is partly mine: I submitted my request when there was only a week’s supply left.
I checked with the pharmacy earlier this week, and again today.
My first request may or may not have disappeared into the ether. Another may or may not be getting put through the mangle.
And, with hopes that the regional authority’s staff will not be offended, I said ‘okay’ when the pharmacy said they’d submit another request.
When I realized that something was going wrong, again, I cut my daily dose in half. It’s not my preference, since I actually need the stuff.
But after experiencing withdrawal a few times, when sorting out the mess took weeks, I’ve learned to exercise a certain degree of caution.1
It’d be nice if there was some way to track my monthly request for permission to keep using my brain, but that’s not how these things work.
So I’ll keep doing what I can, accept those aspects of reality that I can’t control: and see if I can use this month’s SNAFU as an opportunity to practice patience.
Re-reading this post, I’d say I could use the practice. 😉
Now, before getting back to working on this week’s post, the usual links:
Pisanica: Easter eggs, Croatian style. Big ones. ( Photo by Diego Delso. (2014) delso.photo, License CC-BY-SA, used w/o permission.)
Recapping Friday’s post: whether Jesus died from cardiac rupture, cardiorespiratory failure or something else, the main point is that he died.
Then Jesus was buried.
Again, let’s remember that he was, in the words of the Munckin coroner in “Wizard of Oz”, sincerely dead:
“…As Coroner I must aver, I thoroughly examined her. “And she’s not only merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead….” (“…The Witch Is Dead!“, “Wizard of Oz” (1939) via LyricsFreak)
All that happened Friday. I gather that the following Saturday was comparatively quiet.
Then, Sunday morning, women who had been traveling with Jesus went to the tomb.
They brought along materials needed for a proper burial. Our Lord’s Friday interment had been a rush job.
“When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go and anoint him.” (Mark 16:1)
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all describe the same event. But each looks at it from a different angle. And that’s another topic.
“I Have Seen the Lord”
This morning’s readings include John 20:1–9. I’ll pick up a couple verses later.
“But Mary stayed outside the tomb weeping. And as she wept, she bent over into the tomb “and saw two angels in white sitting there, one at the head and one at the feet where the body of Jesus had been. “And they said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they laid him.’ “When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus there, but did not know it was Jesus. “Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?’ She thought it was the gardener and said to him, ‘Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him.’ “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni,’ which means Teacher. “Jesus said to her, ‘Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them, “I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”‘ “Mary of Magdala went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord,’ and what he told her.” (John 20:11–18)
Convincing Peter and the other Apostles that Jesus had stopped being dead took 40 days and at least one working lunch.
But they finally realized what had happened. Then they started sharing the best news humanity’s ever had, with anyone who would listen.
Two millennia later, it’s still part of our job. And what Jesus did is still the best news ever:
TRAPPIST-1 planetary system: known planets in 2016 and 2017.
There may have been times when one generation’s world was much like another’s.
This is not one of those times.
Science textbooks of my youth included speculation that Earth’s mountains exist because our planet has been cooling and shrinking. One of my geology professors didn’t “believe in” continental drift, and that’s another topic.1
Back then, we knew that planets orbit our star, but weren’t sure how the star we call the Sun and the Solar System formed.
We still don’t, for that matter. Not for sure. But the nebular hypothesis, or something very much like it, is a pretty good fit with observations.
I’ll get back to that, and some of what we’ve been learning about planetary systems: including TRAPPIST-1 and its seven worlds.
Oversimplifying something fierce, around 1630 René Descartes said that the Solar System got started as a big swirling vortex. These days, we see Descartes’ vortex as an early version of the nebular hypothesis.
He figured the swirling vortex would explain the Sun’s rotation and the planets’ circular orbits. Then Newton wrote about gravity, which Descartes hadn’t covered. Not the way Newton had, at any rate.
Emmanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant, Pierre-Simon Laplace and others either formed or tweaked nebular hypotheses for how the Solar System started.
Fast-forward to the 20th century.
In 1904 or maybe 1905, Forest Moulton and Thomas Chamberlin came up with the planetesimal hypothesis as a model for the Solar System’s formation.
They said that maybe, early on, another star had passed very close to the Sun. This would have raised tidal bulges on both stars. And that, along with supercharged solar prominences, would have left enough material orbiting the sun to form planets.
About three decades later, Raymond Lyttleton said pretty much the same thing: except that the other star collided with the Sun’s companion star, and that debris from the collision formed the planets.
Then in 1951, 1961 and 1981 three Swiss astronomers — never mind the names and don’t bother memorizing this, there won’t be a test — said maybe the Sun was spinning really fast at first, and blorped out material for the planets.2
Clashing Stars and Pulsar Planets
One more ‘stellar collision’ idea, and I’ll move on.
In 1917, James Jeans said the Solar System happened when another star and the Sun almost ran into each other. Tidal effects would pull massive amounts of stuff out of both stars, which would then condense into planets. That was the idea, anyway.
Harold Jeffreys said that a near-miss like that was wildly unlikely, and Henry Norris Russel said the tidal model had problems with angular momentum. They were both right. But nebular hypotheses have angular momentum issues, too. Problem is, the Sun has 99%-plus of the Solar System’s mass, but only 2% of its angular momentum.
Starting in the 1930s, some scientists started sorting ‘how the Solar System formed’ ideas into categories. There were loads of ideas — I’ve been listing a selection — so they had no shortage of material.
Here’s an over-simplified version of the categories:
The Sun formed first, then planets formed
Planets formed from outside dust and gas that just happened to come along
Another star hit the Sun and that’s where planet-stuff came from
And the Sun spit out planet-forming stuff
The Sun and planets formed at pretty much the same time, from the same stuff
It wasn’t until the 1970s that option number 2 got traction again.
A version of the nebular hypothesis had been generally accepted by the end of the 1980s. But it didn’t explain why the Solar System’s planets don’t orbit in exactly the same plane.
And we’re still not sure how the Solar System’s double planet formed. Or whether Earth-Moon should be called a double planet.
I’m okay with the idea, but I’m not a scientist: and don’t have a career built partly on saying that the Moon is a satellite, not the other unit of a binary world.
Maybe I’m being unfair.
Anyway, in 1992 Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail found planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12.3
Not Quite Like the Solar System: 55 Cancri’s Planets
Comparing Solar System’s Earth and Jupiter, 55 Cancri system. NASA (2006)
A little over three decades later, we’ve cataloged upwards of 5,000 exoplanets in nearly 4,000 planetary systems.
Of those, 855 systems have more than one known planet.
That’s the count as of April 1, 2023, at any rate: with thousands of unconfirmed worlds still in Kepler and TESS archives, waiting to be processed.
A few planetary systems look a bit like ours; like 55 Cancri, with its planets e (Janssen), b (Galileo), c (Brahe), f (Harriot) and d (Lipperhey).
Lipperhey is a gas giant, a bit more massive than Jupiter but orbiting about as far from 55 Cancri as Jupiter is from Sol. The others are closer to their sun, spaced very roughly like Mercury, Venus and Earth.
But Galileo, the second planet out from 55 Cancri, is nearly as massive as Jupiter.4
Kepler-90: Solar-Style Planetary Size Selection, With Compact Orbits
Then there’s the Kepler-90 system. I talked about it last week.
Its eight planets are nicely arranged, with rocky worlds near the sun and gas giants farther out.
So far, this sounds like the planetary systems some of us were expecting. Or hoping for.
The orbit of Kepler-90’s most distant world is just barely bigger than Earth’s.
And, like I said, it’s about as big and massive as Jupiter.
That was a surprise.
But it wasn’t the first one in our study of exoplanets. I’m pretty sure it won’t be the last.
Before we started charting other planetary systems, assuming that they’d be pretty much like our Solar System made sense.
If there was more than maybe one other planetary system in this galaxy.
Thinking that the Solar System began with an extremely unlikely near-miss or collision with another star had two advantages, of a sort. It kept the study of other worlds close to home, and made our star one of the highly-exclusive ‘I’ve got planets’ club.
After 1992, that obviously wasn’t the case.
Then, after discovering planets around a pulsar, Astronomers figured they might find planets around other pulsars. They did, but not many.
After that first three-planet pulsar system, and after checking at least 800 pulsars, scientists found only four pulsars with a planet. One planet around each.5
I think a take-away here is that what’s discovered early-on isn’t necessarily typical.
A Profusion of Pea Pod Planets
By 2018, we’d been studying a fair number of multi-planet systems.
Many of the ones spotted by the Kepler space telescope followed a pattern. But it wasn’t the Solar System’s.
[text describing chart at right] “The architectures of California-Kepler study multi-planet systems with four planets or more. Each row corresponds to the planets around one and the circles represent the radii of planets in the system. Note how many have lines of planets that are roughly the same size. (Image credit:Lauren Weiss, The Astronomical Journal (January 3, 2018) via NASA News (July 13, 2018))
In many systems, the planets were all roughly the same size as the planet in orbit next to them. (No tiny-Mars-to-gigantic-Jupiter transitions.) This kind of planetary architecture was not found everywhere but it was quite common — more common than random planet sizing would predict….
“…What’s more, [University of Montreal astronomer Lauren] Weiss and her colleagues found that the orbits of these ‘planets in a pod’ were generally an equal distance apart in ‘multi’ of three planets or more. In other words, the distance between the orbits of planet A and planet B was often the same distance as between the orbits of planet B and planet C….”
The NASA article talked about a “peas in a pod” paper in The Astronomical Journal, which is where they got that chart: a screen capture. I’ve put a link in the footnotes.
Since the “peas in a pod” study involved Kepler data, it didn’t include the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system. Kepler hadn’t been looking in that direction.
The ‘pea pod paper’ included a close look at 355 planetary systems.
If I’m counting them right, that chart shows the 51 systems where the star has a mass from 0.67 to 1.26 times the Sun’s and four or more planets. Make that 52, since it includes Sol, our star, a little shy of halfway down the list.
Compared to other multi-planet systems described in that 2018 paper, the Solar System looks like an oddball.
That’s one reason I’ll probably take a closer look at the ‘pea pod paper’ later on.
The Solar System may be well off the 50th percentile, but the TRAPPIST-1 planets follow the similar-size and close-orbits pattern. And that, finally, brings me to TRAPPIST-1 and its planets.6
TRAPPIST-1’s Pea Pod Planets
Comparing TRAPPIST-1’s worlds and Solar System’s inner planets. (2021)
The TRAPPIST-1 planetary system fits the ‘pea pod planets’ pattern.
I doubt that’ll be the pattern’s generally-accepted label, although scientists have gotten less stuffy about names and descriptions. And that’s yet another topic.
TRAPPIST-1 is in the constellation Aquarius, in the general direction of Phi Aquarii; but a whole lot closer: about 40 light-years out.
The star is an ultra-cool red dwarf, with a surface temperature of 2,566 kelvins, give or take 26.
That’s cool for a star, but still hot: around 2,840° centigrade or 4,650° Fahrenheit.
By comparison, a candle flame’s luminous zone is around 1,200° to 1,500° centigrade. I talked about color temperature, stars, traffic lights and space art last week.
I also mentioned a 2017 paper that talked about TRAPPIST-1’s magnetic field, and how it might set up induction heating in the system’s three innermost worlds.
That’d be TRAPPIST-1 b, c, d, e, f, g and h.
Oddly enough, none of the TRAPPIST-1 planets have names yet. I don’t know whether that’s because or in spite of it being such a high-profile planetary system.
Getting myself back on-topic, the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system is arguably more orderly than ours.
The planets’ orbits are very nearly circular, and stay within 0.1° of the system’s ecliptic. The Solar System’s planets aren’t nearly as well-aligned, with orbits inclined up to seven degrees from Earth’s:7
Mercury 7.01°
Venus 3.39°
Earth 0°
Mars 1.85°
Jupiter 1.31°
Saturn 2.49°
Uranus 0.77°
Neptune 1.77°
Possible Interiors: 2021
Three possible interiors for TRAPPIST-1 planets (2021).
Recapping, the TRAPPIST-1 system’s orbits are all basically in the same plane. That plane passes through the Solar System, so the planets regularly pass across the face of their sun from our viewpoint.
This lets astronomers measure the TRAPPIST-1 planets’ size and orbits. And that lets them work out their masses and densities.
Or, rather, their approximate masses and densities. Margins of error get smaller as astronomers get more and more precise data. So I’m hoping we’ll see an update to topics covered by a 2021 paper.
“The 7 Rocky TRAPPIST-1 Planets May Be Made of Similar Stuff“ Calla Cofield, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California; Exoplanets, Feature, NASA (January 22, 2021; updated January 25, 2021) Tony Greicius, editor “Precise measurements reveal that the exoplanets have remarkably similar densities, which provides clues about their composition.
“The red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 is home to the largest group of roughly Earth-size planets ever found in a single stellar system. Located about 40 light-years away, these seven rocky siblings provide an example of the tremendous variety of planetary systems that likely fill the universe….”
“…A new study published today in the Planetary Science Journal shows that the TRAPPIST-1 planets have remarkably similar densities. That could mean they all contain about the same ratio of materials thought to compose most rocky planets, like iron, oxygen, magnesium, and silicon. But if this is the case, that ratio must be notably different than Earth’s: The TRAPPIST-1 planets are about 8% less dense than they would be if they had the same makeup as our home planet. Based on that conclusion, the paper authors hypothesized a few different mixtures of ingredients could give the TRAPPIST-1 planets the measured density….”
That article’s “today” was January 22, 2021; so if there hasn’t been more exact data gathered yet, there soon will be. But that article in The Planetary Journal is the most recent I’ve found, so I’ll run with that. Plus whatever I find elsewhere.
Briefly, since it’s Friday afternoon as I write this.
First, about the three possible interiors shown in that illustration:
“Three possible interiors of the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets. The more precisely scientists know the density of a planet, the more they can narrow down the range of possible interiors for that planet. All seven planets have very similar densities, so they likely have a similar compositions. (NASA/JPL-Caltech (January 22, 2021))”
Next, what the scientists said about looking forward to more precise data:
Although the TRAPPIST-1 planets are all nearly the same density, they’re not identical.
TRAPPIST-1c, for example might be a rocky world with a Venus-like atmosphere; TRAPPIST-1d might be covered in a very deep ocean while TRAPPIST-1e could have been all iron and rock.
Those informed speculations made sense in 2018. Like I’ve said, we keep getting better data, which lets us fine-tune what we know.
Maybe at least some of the TRAPPIST-1 planets have a mantle and core, although not as proportionately large a core as Earth’s. If so, they might have their own significant magnetic fields. How their fields would interact with their sun’s? That, I don’t know.
Which reminds me. TRAPPIST-1 has a strong magnetic field: with a mean strength of about 600 gauss. That’s a lot stronger than the Sun’s overall 10 gauss.8
Living in “a Grain From a Balance”, and Admiring the View
Maybe, between lower-than-Earth density, stronger-than-Solar magnetic fields and being (probably) tidally locked, with one face always facing their sun, none of the TRAPPIST-1 planets are habitable.
It’s even possible, based on what we know today, that none of them have more than a close-to-vacuum atmosphere.
But, also based on what we know today, some of them might.
Not TRAPPIST-1 b, though. Observations from the Webb telescope showed that the system’s innermost world is hot and airless.9
But much as I’d like us to find another world with life, and people, I won’t insist that we must have neighbors. Or that we must not. Either way, it’s not my decision.
“Our God is in heaven and does whatever he wills.” (Psalms 115:3)
Part of my job is admiring the view. I’ve talked about that before:
The World of Descartes; Plenary address to the 7th Annual Conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses, University of Notre Dame, 5-8 April 2001; published in The Wider World of Core Texts and Courses (ACTC, 2004), 73-83
“Refining the Transit-timing and Photometric Analysis of TRAPPIST-1: Masses, Radii, Densities, Dynamics, and Ephemerides“ Eric Agol, Caroline Dorn, Simon L. Grimm, Martin Turbet, Elsa Ducrot, Laetitia Delrez, Michaël Gillon, Brice-Olivier Demory, Artem Burdanov, Khalid Barkaoui, Zouhair Benkhaldoun, Emeline Bolmont, Adam Burgasser, Sean Carey, Julien de Wit, Daniel Fabrycky1, Daniel Foreman-Mackey, Jonas Haldemann, David M. Hernandez, James Ingalls, Emmanuel Jehin, Zachary Langford, Jérémy Leconte, Susan M. Lederer, Rodrigo Luger, Renu Malhotra, Victoria S. Meadows, Brett M. Morris, Francisco J. Pozuelos, Didier Queloz, Sean N. Raymond, Franck Selsis, Marko Sestovic, Amaury H. M. J. Triaud and Valerie Van Grootel; The Planetary Science Journal (January 22, 2021) via Institute of Physics (IOP), iop.org
“NASA’s Webb Measures the Temperature of a Rocky Exoplanet“ Laura Betz, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland; Margaret Carruthers, Christine Pulliam, Space Telescope Science Institute(STSI), Baltimore, Maryland; Solar System and Beyond, NASA (March 27, 2023)
No question about it. He was having a really bad day.
No, that’s not quite true. There have been alternative versions run up the flagpole.
But it’s been a few decades since I’ve seen assertions that Jesus didn’t really die.
The one I’m remembering was pretty straightforward: after being tortured and nailed to a cross, the Nazarene fainted. And Roman soldiers couldn’t tell the difference between a dead body and some chap who’d swooned.
I don’t know which is less likely: that someone survived the physical and psychological stress described in the Gospels, or that Roman soldiers didn’t know what “dead” looks like.
At any rate, I haven’t seen the ‘Jesus fainted’ assertion for decades. Maybe there are too many copies of Journal of the American Medical Association, March 21, 1986, still around.1
“…Jesus’ death after only three to six hours on the cross surprised even Pontius Pilate. The fact that Jesus cried out in a loud voice and then bowed his head and died suggests the possibility of a catastrophic terminal event….
“…Thus, it remains unsettled whether Jesus died of cardiac rupture or of cardiorespiratory failure. However, the important feature may be not how he died but rather whether he died. Clearly, the weight of historical and medical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead before the wound to his side was inflicted and supports the traditional view that the spear, thrust between his right ribs, probably perforated not only the right lung but also the pericardium and heart and thereby ensured his death (Fig 7). Accordingly, interpretations based on the assumption that Jesus did not die on the cross appear to be at odds with modern medical knowledge.” (“On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ“; William D. Edwards, MD; Wesley J. Gabel, MDiv; Floyd E. Hosmer, MS, AM: Special Communication, JAMA, Vol 255, No. 11 (March 21, 1986))
And that’s not what I was going to talk about today.
Dialog on a Cross
That JAMA article described how being nailed to a cross made breathing very difficult.
And that’s why I’m guessing this dialog’s long and formal phrases are a polished version of the actual conversation:
“Above him there was an inscription that read, ‘This is the King of the Jews.’
“Now one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.’
“The other, however, rebuking him, said in reply, ‘Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation?
“And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this man has done nothing criminal.’
“Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’
“He replied to him, ‘Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.'” (Luke 23:38–43)
That said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” is among my favorite bits in the Bible.
Here he was, nailed to a cross, talking to another guy who’d been worked over by the authorities and was also being crucified.
And he said “…when you come into your kingdom” — not “if”: “WHEN“.
That’s a first-rate example of faith. And one I’m apt to admire, since I think our Lord was being accurate when he said “…today you will be with me in Paradise.”
God Loves Us: All of Us
Then there’s the reason Jesus had been nailed to a cross. There’s a fair amount of theology and background involved, but I’ll skip that and just mention the motive.
“On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ“ William D. Edwards, MD; Wesley J. Gabel, MDiv; Floyd E. Hosmer, MS, AM: Special Communication, JAMA, Vol 255, No. 11 (March 21, 1986)
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))
Blog - David Torkington
Spiritual theologian, author and speaker, specializing in prayer, Christian spirituality and mystical theology [the kind that makes sense-BHG]
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.
