2 1/4 inches of snow in the Notch

First real snow of this winter.  It ain't enough to open Cannon, but it helps.

Dark Matter could be Macho's rather than WIMPs

Astronomers discovered a free planet, some 100 light years away.  It's a sizeable beast, several times the size of Jupiter and way out in free space, no star anywhere close.  Free planets are very hard to see since they lack a sun to light them up.  This one was detected by its infra red emissions.  

Are free planets the "Massive Halo Objects" (Macho's) of the missing mass discussion?  We are pretty such that the universe needs more mass, a lot more mass, than we can see glowing in the night sky.   This bit of knowledge comes from watching galaxies rotate.  Speed of rotation depends upon mass of the galaxy.  Heavier galaxies have to rotation faster to create enough centrifugal force to prevent the stars from getting sucked down into the galaxy center.  This bit of physics comes to us from Isaac Newton and is taught in freshman college physics.  That is where I learned it. 

   The mass of the galaxies was estimated by counting all the stars in the galaxy and assuming that the stars were of average mass.  Doing this came up short of mass, a lot short, say one or two times the observed (luminous) mass.  Two solutions were suggested.  There might be a new sub atomic particle with mass like a proton but as hard to detect as a neutrino.  This was dubbing Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (wimp for short).  This came up shortly after the Higgs boson was discovered, leaving a lot of particle accelerators and accelerator physicists looking for something to do.  The other idea was a "Massive Halo Object" (Macho for short).  

This newly discovered free planet is a Massive Halo Object.  There might be more, they are hard to detect so there might be a lot more.  Question:  How many free planets would there have to be to furnish the missing mass?  Is it a reasonable number?  Or is the required number so high that we would have noticed free planets zipping by the earth already?

Wind blew hard all night. Leaves are gone

 As late as yesterday we still had  fine crop of colorful leaves on the trees.  The wind blew hard all last night, and this morning the leaves are mostly gone, blowing across the road and my lawn in flurries.  We are into the bare tree winter look. 

Veteran's Day

 The TV (at least Fox News) is making a bigger deal out of Veteran's day than they used to.  I'm a veteran, so this is just fine by me. 

Kyle Rittenouse Trial on TV

 What I see on TV is bad, bad, bad.  Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager, 17 years back than, 18 now was at the Kinosha riot.  Wound up shooting three rioters with his AR-15.  He is on trial for murder.  He is naturally claiming self defense.  To me, the prosecution wants to be proving that Kyle shot three innocent bystanders.  Instead the prosecutors have been talking about Kyle obtaining the rifle when state law requires you to be 18 to buy a rifle, (a misdemeanor, where as murder is far more serious).  And a discussion about bullets, full metal jacket versus soft nose bullets.  To which the proper answer (which Kyle did not think of) is "all bullets are deadly", rather than a gun magazine discussion of the merits of various bullet types.  And today a long discussion about video imaging techniques, what happens when a video image is enlarged.  To which the proper answer (which was NOT giver) is "Video imaging technology changes, a lot, from month to month and I have no idea what technology was used on this particular image. 

Way to stay in office. Have a scary bad vice president.

 

Every time anyone thinks about impeaching Biden, they immediately think of Kamala Harris succeeding Biden. Everyone thinks that bad as Biden is, Harris is worse. So nobody talks about impeaching Biden. So we just grin and bear it. We might be able to elect a good solid republican majority in the House and the Senate next year. Let's hope American voters are up for voting in Republicans.

Road Runner bites the dust.

 

My email account got deleted and all the posts there in are gone.  If you have sent me an email in the last ten days, I have not seen it.  If it is important, could you please resend it.  Roadrunner, my ex-email provider of some 15 years offered no reasons for deleting my email account. 

Anyhow, I have a new email provider, yahoo.com.  Which makes my email address dstarrboston@yahoo.com.  I would be obliged if you all could update your email lists.  Thanks in advance.  Sorry about the inconvenience.  And I will not be using road runner for anything ever again.