NASA News #1

In the spirit of the Contrabang! series, let's take a look at headlines from NASA's own website in the past week. This won't become another weekly series...for now at least. However, Contrabang! will not likely continue indefinitely. That series is a good opportunity to critique a scientific narrative that is being promoted to the public, but Ethan is not himself a scientific authority; he merely finds whatever the scientific consensus happens to be and then promotes that with great pomp. At some point it becomes repetitious. On the other hand, NASA appears to be the single-largest promoter of these lies as a scientific authority that is held in high esteem by most of the public. Thus, we will start attempting to be more mature about these things, and focus on the players rather than the cheerleaders.

NASA’s NICER Delivers Best-ever Pulsar Measurements, 1st Surface Map (link)

Astrophysicists are redrawing the textbook image of pulsars, the dense, whirling remains of exploded stars, thanks to NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station. Using NICER data, scientists have obtained the first precise and dependable measurements of both a pulsar’s size and its mass, as well as the first-ever map of hot spots on its surface. 

This is misleading enough to call it a lie. They do not have any of the implied measurements; they only have models. While the NASA homepage article is misleading, the journal summary they link to uses the correct language.

Notably, the inferences drawn from Bayesian modeling of the PSR J0030 NICER pulse-profile data set provide:

• the first precise (±10%, 1 sigma) mass and radius measurements for the same star;
• the first mass measurement for an isolated (i.e., non-binary) NS; and
• the first map—fully accounting for relativistic light deflection—of an NS’s surface “hot spots,” providing the locations, shapes, sizes, and temperatures of heated regions and serving as a guidepost to the star’s magnetic field configuration.

The so-called measurements are merely the results of Bayesian model, which is a graph of conditional probabilities. A conditional probability is the statement of the probability of X given that we know Y. What is the probability that they cancel school tomorrow? Low. What is the probability that they cancel school tomorrow given that we know it just snowed a foot? High. The probability of the thing we don't know is dependent on the facts we do know. In the case of pulsars, most of what is "known" is a false (and ludicrous) theory of dead rotating stars composed of theoretical neutronium. So the description of the results should read more like this: given the observed timings and spectral signature of the observed star - and that our pulsar models are not complete horse manure - then these are the most probable measurements of the star according to our calculations.

The pulsar in question, J0030+0451 (J0030 for short), lies in an isolated region of space 1,100 light-years away in the constellation Pisces. While measuring the pulsar's heft and proportions, NICER revealed that the shapes and locations of million-degree “hot spots” on the pulsar’s surface are much stranger than generally thought.

“From its perch on the space station, NICER is revolutionizing our understanding of pulsars,” said Paul Hertz, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Pulsars were discovered more than 50 years ago as beacons of stars that have collapsed into dense cores, behaving unlike anything we see on Earth. With NICER we can probe the nature of these dense remnants in ways that seemed impossible until now.”

We see the old familiar pattern emerging. Scientists make new observations and state that they are strange, impossible, revolutionizing, etc. What happens next?

For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out exactly how pulsars work. In the simplest model, a pulsar has a powerful magnetic field shaped much like a household bar magnet. The field is so strong it rips particles from the pulsar’s surface and accelerates them. Some particles follow the magnetic field and strike the opposite side, heating the surface and creating hot spots at the magnetic poles. The whole pulsar glows faintly in X-rays, but the hot spots are brighter. As the object spins, these spots sweep in and out of view like the beams of a lighthouse, producing extremely regular variations in the object’s X-ray brightness. But the new NICER studies of J0030 show pulsars aren’t so simple.

That's right, the response to unexpected observations is always to hold on to all the old assumptions and start adding complexity to the models.

Using NICER observations from July 2017 to December 2018, two groups of scientists mapped J0030’s hot spots using independent methods and converged on similar results for its mass and size. A team led by Thomas Riley, a doctoral student in computational astrophysics, and his supervisor Anna Watts, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam, determined the pulsar is around 1.3 times the Sun’s mass and 15.8 miles (25.4 kilometers) across. Cole Miller, an astronomy professor at the University of Maryland (UMD) who led the second team, found J0030 is about 1.4 times the Sun’s mass and slightly larger, about 16.2 miles (26 kilometers) wide.

The methods are not really independent, because they are both dependent on the same flawed model of neutron stars. If one of the groups had declared beforehand that the academic embrace of neutron stars is laughably absurd, they'd have been excluded and another group chosen. Thus, no independence.

“NICER’s unparalleled X-ray measurements allowed us to make the most precise and reliable calculations of a pulsar’s size to date, with an uncertainty of less than 10%,” Miller said.

The uncertainty of the size is less than 10% given that they are 100% certain in their model for pulsars.

“It’s remarkable, and also very reassuring, that the two teams achieved such similar sizes, masses and hot spot patterns for J0030 using different modeling approaches,” said Zaven Arzoumanian.

The same data, the same model for the stars, only different implementations of the Bayesian networks. It would only be amusing if they hadn't gotten similar results. But, garbage in, garbage out is the gold standard in the world of peer-review supremacy, just so long as your garbage looks consistent with theirs.

NASA's Juno Navigators Enable Jupiter Cyclone Discovery (link)

Juno makes a "fundamental discovery" at Jupiter's south polar region. Where there were five storms swirling around the pole in a pentagonal pattern, a sixth emerging storm has been photographed, with the new pattern hexagonal.

"These cyclones are new weather phenomena that have not been seen or predicted before," said Cheng Li, a Juno scientist from the University of California, Berkeley. "Nature is revealing new physics regarding fluid motions and how giant planet atmospheres work. We are beginning to grasp it through observations and computer simulations. Future Juno flybys will help us further refine our understanding by revealing how the cyclones evolve over time."

There is, of course, nothing in the standard models of planetary mechanics to explain pentagon and hexagon shaped storm formations at the poles of gas giants, and I doubt they'll be able to add any amount of complexity to their models to make it happen.

X Marks the Spot: NASA Selects Site for Asteroid Sample Collection (link)

After a year scoping out asteroid Bennu’s boulder-scattered surface, the team leading NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission has officially selected a sample collection site.

NASA has sent a probe to a near-Earth asteroid to collect samples to return the Earth. The USA has never executed a soil return mission. Allegedly the Apollo missions returned nearly half a ton of moon rocks, but those samples remain classified and locked away. The Russians also claimed to have returned soil from the moon in the 1970. Perhaps they did, but I retain skepticism, because the next attempt was not made until 2010 when the Japanese Hyabusa probe to a near-Earth asteroid was mostly a failure when only a minuscule amount of dust was returned. A second Hyabusa mission is underway and is expected to return samples a year from now. If it succeeds, then it may actually be the world's first successful mission to return a soil sample from another celestial body.

Boeing and NASA Approach Milestone Orbital Flight Test (link)

On Friday, NASA is planning on launching an unmanned mission of their new Boeing-built spacecraft intended to ultimately ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and end the embarrassment of having to pay Russia for rides. Previously, this blog said America was out of the manned-space business for good (or at least as long as the Woke Era prevails). I also note that Boeing is having trouble developing safe passenger airliners after embracing diversity as a core principle. I'd put their odds at less than 50%, and predict there will be problems either way.

NASA’s SDO Sees New Kind of Magnetic Explosion on Sun (link)

The mainstream scientific world is ever so slowly opening up to the electric reality of the universe. The rule is that they must refer to the observations as magnetic rather than electric. So here, they have invented the term "magnetic explosion" to explain electric arcing seen on the sun's surface. Magnetic fields are okay; electric fields are still verboten. In fact, it is preferable to make up magnetic phenomena rather than speak in electric terms. Thus, magnetic field lines - which are only an abstraction - are said to "recombine." The lines don't really exist - they were created by humans to help visualize the direction and strength of magnetic fields. Still, the move away from a strictly gravity dominated universe to one where magnetism play a major role is a good shift, since the magnetic universe is just a back door to the electric universe.