SpaceTiger said:
I must say this is a very interesting thread. Let me add a few other ideas. Sorry if I accidentally repeat anything:
- Quark stars
- Magnetic monopoles
- primordial black holes
- Oort cloud
- quantum gravity
- "ejected" planets (planets not bound to stars)
- white holes
- wormholes
- GZK cutoff (maybe resolved)
- Cosmological Neutrino Background (CNB)
- Tachyons
- Source of cosmic rays
- Intermediate Mass Black Holes (maybe seen)
Me too, and your's is an interesting list - thanks. I have questions about four of your items:
On Magnetic monopoles - I am confused about how heavy they are. I saw a website in google search that set floor by fact none have been produced in accelerators. That "floor" is many OM below theory predictions I have seen which tend to put the mass at least 10^15 times the proton mass. (some as high as 10^21 times!)
I have also seen site suggesting an interesting reason why they have not been seen - I.e. suggestion that even one Mag. Monopole may be so heavy and so compact that it is a black hole (some how stabilized by the magnetic field) or was a BH that long ago evaporated. A third idea (mine, but perhaps not original) is that a N & S Mag. Monopole would attract over long ranges much more rapidly than gravity assembled matter into stars and might be able to form a stable "hydrogenic like" atom. It would need to call upon quantum mechanics to escape the death spiral of radiation loss, just as the electron accelerating around the nucleus does. Any comments?
On "ejected planets" - I would bet that any planets that could slowly form from matter that did not end up in star would be in stable nearly circular orbits ad not likely to be ejected by any "sister" planets unless there were a pair of stars. Paired stars are quite common, if not more common than single stars. Perhaps two stars mutually orbiting could resonately "pump up" from a gravitation well of one a planet. So I limit my bet to the single star case. Obviously a third body on an open trajectory could gravitationally quickly eject a planet. (This is what happens to the sun's outer planets when the "dark visitor" of my book by same name passes.) Can you think of any other mechanism that can eject planets or reject my "bet" ? (I.e. claim that chaos in solar systems can eventually eject weakly bound planets of single star even though their orbits were stable long enough for difuse matter to collect into a planet.)
On tachyons - Their mass becomes infinite if they were to slow down to speed of light, so they never will or could. If one were inside our equipment's "light cone" now, at for example the left side of our light cone and headed towards the right side, I think we could get to it. I.e. we could have it and our measuring equipment at the same point in our space, but at (or very near) this common point it would only be passing thru our light cone so quickly that nothing could be measured. Is this correct? If it is, they could exist and never be observed, but like gravity "escaping" from a black hole, their gravity might be felt - could it be the "dark matter?
On Intermediate Mass Black Holes - Your comment "maybe seen" interests me greatly - what did you mean by this?
The implosion of a star large enough to have formed an iron core before imploding is, IMHO, very unlikely to be the spherically symmetric implosion always assumed for mathematical convenience. (It is quite a fine art to implode even the very uniform and small critical mass of uranium to make a A-bomb, without blowing it into pieces.)
Because only the extreme "Maxwellian tail" of the velocity distribution is energetic enough to be fusing in nuclear collisions in the active region of a star, I would think that despite what must be high thermal conductivity, some regions of the active fusing region of a star are slightly hotter than others. This would be a self amplifying instability that is only limited by the density decrease of the hotter region. This true because the fusion rate should be decreasing only quadratically with density decrease, which would be linear with the temperature increase, but the fusion rate is increasing exponentially with temperature. (I am assuming that the velocity of light is not limiting the increase of velocity, even at iron forming temperatures, but the instability effect I am tying to describe must still exist even if it is, only the strong quadratics exponential proportions I have stated would be less strong.)
Thus, I think it highly likely that some parts of the "active fusing region" get closer to the iron end point before others. If true, the implosions compressing a
large and inhomogeneous mass - much harder to do than symmetrically compress a small uniform shell of uranium, and of course there is no one trying hard to make it a symmetric collapse. This is why I think that when the final implosion comes, it is very unlike to be the symmetric event assumed in most if not all models.
Since the first generation of stars (and perhaps most of the second generation too - all those that had already started to assemble) were roughly at least 100 times the solar mass, it seems to me that several of your "intermediate mass black holes" and lots of planet size chunks of iron could have separated in the blast of an asymmetric implosion.
Some "implosion pieces" and smaller BHs that formed during the implosion would would no doubt be recaptured by the larger BHs created, but if some of the "trans iron elements" that now exist were "built up" or "slow cooked" inside active stars by baryon capture, as I understand accepted theory teaches, and these atoms escaped (some are inside me now) then surely some of the larger pieces that were separated in an
asymmetric and inhomogeneous implosions could also.
Thus, I think one can plausibly argue along these lines (and also noting that there were several generations of large stars before our sun was born) that there are
more of your "intermediate black holes" than there are currently active stars. (A number that has been estimated to be greater than all the grains of sand on Earth's beaches!) Next paragraph provides one answer to the question: Where are they?
We should not be able to see them, unless they were close to our sun because:
(1) Their "weak quasar" radiation would not been seen, probably not even from the "night side" of a planet orbiting a star until it enters the solar wind of that star as the density in "empty" intra stellar space is so low.
(2) Even if one were to pass very close to Barnyard's star (I think that is the closest star's name) it would not be detectable or resolved from the stellar radiation, if only a few stellar masses.
This reasoning is why I assigned only 2.2 solar masses to the "dark visitor," I presumed to be now about 130 AU from the sun, still undetected, but headed our way. Any comments?
