Bonus : The Largest Organism on Earth

The organism generally given the title of ‘The Largest Organism’ is the Blue Whale, or, if specific to land, the African Elephant. But, as I’m about to explain in this post, is not exactly accurate.

So, you might be asking, what exactly is the largest living organism on the planet? Well, your question can have two answers – Armillaria ostoyae, commonly known as honey fungus, and Pando.

**A small section of the Humongous Fungus.**
Source:BBC Earth

Typically, when hearing the word fungus, most people think of mushrooms and, well, they’re not wrong. Mushrooms are a type of fungus, but in their entirety. You can think of them as the ‘fruits’ of the fungus. The majority of a fungus is underground, composed of interconnected filaments, called rhizomorphs (rather like a root system). Those ‘roots’ are what connect the aptly named ‘Humongous Fungus’. The entire fungus is spread over a colossal area of over 3.4 square miles (8.8 square kilometres).

**An image of Pando.**
Source:Atlas Obscura

The second one, Pando, also called the’ Trembling Giant’, is a clonal colony of a single, male quaking aspen tree. The forest is assumed to have one massive underground root system, sprawling over 106 acres or 0.42 square kilometres. If we talk simply in terms of mass, Pando easily takes the cake, collectively weighing around 6,000 tonnes (6 million kilograms). The root system of Pando is estimated to be 80,000 years old, making it one of the oldest known living organisms.

The reason both Pando and Humongous Fungus are considered to be one organism is because all of them are connected and therefore are clones of the original tree/fungus and have identical genetic markers.

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Here’s a video about the same by the YouTube channel ‘Debunked’ :

Colonising Mars

The concept of colonising Mars and becoming an interplanetary civilisation is one that has been talked about for decades, yet has only rather recently seen some action. This idea sounds quite achievable, for Mars has a great deal of similarities to Earth – the gravity is 0.38% of Earth’s, a Martian day is very close in duration to Earth’s (24 hours, 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds), it has a surface area 28.4% of Earth’s, which is slightly less than the amount of dry land on Earth; a similar axial tilt of 25.19° and, as a result, has seasons comparable to Earth (although they last nearly twice as long, as a Mars year is about 1.88 Earth years); and recent observations have confirmed the existence of water ice on the planet.

However, that’s where the similarities end and the problems begin. Mars is believed to once have had an atmosphere and climate similar to Earth, but, as Mars’ core cooled down and solidified, it purged Mars of its magnetic field, allowing most of its atmosphere top be blown away by solar winds. What’s left of Mars’ atmosphere now is only about 1% of the atmosphere of Earth, now composed mostly of carbon dioxide.

This draws us to our next problem, radiation. On Earth, radiation isn’t one of our primary worries (although it may be soon, because of the depletion of the ozone layer), but it is on Mars. To retaliate this problem, the bases that humans live in would have to have rounded shapes, as edges and corners are weak points; they would have to encased in ice and on top of that, be covered with a layer of Martian soil to block radiation from getting in. These bases would be small, cramped on the inside and have minimal windows. The team of technicians who begin the colonization would live boring, repetitive lives in these bases and would have to remotely control rovers and other machines from the inside. The food they eat would be bland, although this could probably be improved. All this would lead to morale being awfully low.

The machines we send on Mars would also encounter problems as Martian dust particles, being much smaller than Earth’s, would get into the machinery and congest our gears and electronics.

**A render of a Mars Base.**
Source: autodesk.com/redshift/designing-mars-virtual-reality

Another one of the extensive issues with colonising Mars is power and oxygen. Solar energy will only be about 30% as effective as it is on Earth and wind energy would be terrible due to the incredibly thin atmosphere. Creating an oxygen rich atmosphere would be an extreme task, as we can’t simply bring any plant to Mars. However, we can use cyanobacteria, organisms which can respire anaerobically and add oxygen to the atmosphere. The reason we know this will work is because of the sudden increase of oxygen in our planets atmosphere, the aptly named ‘Oxygen Catastrophe’. This occured 2.5 billion years ago and was Earth’s first mass extinction event. Oxygen is a very reactive element, which isn’t usually a problem, but is when you’re an organism made of a few molecules. Oxygen takes away some of their atoms and/or molecules, killing them.

Colonising Mars is a project of an astronomical scale, and would take decades to finish. In this blog, I’ve just grazed the surface of what it would be like to colonise Mars. Possibly, I might even write a follow-up to this blog and discuss more about this topic. (If anyone is interested, there was a game quite recently released about colonising mars called ‘Surviving Mars’. It was released for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.)

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Just like always, I’ll be attaching a video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell on the same:

White Dwarfs – A Light for Survival in a Dying Universe

A white dwarf is the stellar core remnant of a dwarf or main-sequence star composed mostly of electron degenerate matter. A white dwarf, like all final stages of a star’s life cycle , is immensely dense, since it contains the mass of a main-sequence star, similar to our sun, in a volume the size of the Earth.

**An artistic rendition of a white dwarf.**
Source: http://www.deviantart.com/i3a12c1/art/white-dwarf-2-0-164623658

A white dwarf is formed when a main-sequence star has inadequate mass to become a neutron star and hence is unable to generate the core temperature required to fuse helium carbon after its helium-fusing period. This process takes place when due to the aforementioned issue, a mass of inert carbon and oxygen builds up at its centre. After this, the star sheds its outer layers in an exquisite planetary nebula. Planetary nebulae such as ESO 225-9 (The Ant Nebula) and NGC 6543 (the Cat’s Eye Nebula) are some of the nebulae you may have seen.

A planetary nebula is a relatively short-lived phenomenon, lasting for perhaps a few tens of thousands of years. After a planetary nebula fades away, the star leaves behind a white dwarf about the size of the Earth.

**The Cat’s Eye Nebula.**
Source: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_211.html

A white dwarf does not undergo fusion reactions and consequently cannot support itself from gravitational collapse with the heat generated by fusion. The only thing preventing it from gravitational collapse is electron degeneracy pressure, making it extremely dense.

When formed, a white dwarf is very hot, but, having no source of energy, it eventually cools as it radiates its energy away. Eventually, over tens, or even hundreds, of billions of years, white dwarfs will turn into black dwarfs.

Now, it’s about time we moved on to the topic of the title, how white dwarfs may be a source of heat and light for the survival of life in a dying universe. A dying universe, here, refers to a time period of the universe where all, or most, stars have either died or turned into white dwarfs. Life can exist around a white dwarf very similar to the way it can around a red dwarf.

But, all the perks of a planet around a white dwarf also come with the detriments. However, those problems may not apply as when a main-sequence star swells to the size of red giant, it consumes the planets close to it. Consequently, a civilisation of ships or satellites around the dwarf may be formed. The main advantage that white dwarfs have over red dwarfs is the lack of solar flares, making it much safer to reside near a white dwarf.

Well, that’ll be it for this post of mine. I’ll probably be mixing it up with my next blog with a topic other than astrophysics.

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As usual I implore you to explore this and other related topics. Here’s a video about white dwarfs by the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt – In A Nutshell:

Red Dwarfs – An Interminable Light for the Vestige of Life

A red dwarf is a type of star which was never able to gather enough energy or mass to form into a normal-sized star or massive star. These stars are the most common stars in our universe and the smallest, just larger than the size of gas giants like Jupiter. This small size enables them to live the longest, as they burn slowly over trillions of years. That is precisely why they are the best type of star for the survival of life in the universe.

**An artistic rendition of a red dwarf.**
Source: Universe Today

On the other hand, the habitable zone of a red dwarf is very small. To be in the habitable zone of a red dwarf, a planet would need to be about 75 times closer to the aforementioned star than mercury is to our sun.

But, this is detrimental for the planet as this tidally locks the planet. This means that the planet will not rotate the way most planets do. One side would be locked in perpetual, blazing day and the other in a cold, endless night. A small fraction of the region between the two zones could have a day-night cycle, liquid water and could possibly support life.

Another problem with red dwarfs is that they have incredibly large solar flares. Our sun and all stars beget solar flares, but, due to the closeness of the planet to the red dwarf, these solar flares could have cataclysmic effects on the aforementioned planet.

The death of a red dwarf is a lethargic process as the star slowly burns its supply of hydrogen, fusing it into helium. When a red dwarf, or any star for that matter, runs out of supply of hydrogen, it fuses helium into carbon and carbon into heavier elements. For heavier stars, this process is gradual, but in a red dwarf, this sparks a huge change as they start to radiate blue and burn hotter.

In all stars, there exists a balance between the star’s mass, pertaining to gravity, and its heat. When this balance is disturbed, the stars die. A normal-sized like our sun will slowly shed its outer layers in an exquisite planetary nebula, leaving behind a tiny, yet dense white dwarf whereas a supermassive star will go out in a bang, literally, in the form of a supernova. On the other hand, a red dwarf will, quite peacefully, transform into a white dwarf.

A white dwarf is a very dense remnant of a star, with lots of reserved heat, which it releases over trillions upon trillions of years.

Now, not even white dwarfs can last forever, but that’s a topic for another blog.

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If you would like to look into this topic more, I highly suggest the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt -In a Nutshell. Here’s their video about red dwarfs:

The First Image of a Black Hole

The first ever image of a black hole was released very recently on the 10th of April. The black hole shown on this image is a supermassive black 38 billion times the mass of our Sun at the centre of the M87 galaxy. The sheer impact of this image on the world has to be something everyone alive today knows.

The reason that being near a black hole is so difficult is due to its massive gravity. Black holes are black because of the fact that their gravity exceeds the speed of light This means that not even light can escape from a black hole’s event horizon, i.e, the point after which nothing can escape the black hole, a point of no return. Due to this stupendous force of gravity, space-time itself is warped around a black hole. As we know, gravity is the bending of space around a massive body. To interpret this in easier methods, if space is a soft comforter, then Earth would be a small, lightweight ball creating a slight depression in the comforter; the Sun would be a heavier ball with a deeper depression and a black hole would be the equivalent of a small, highly dense metal ball which creates a depression exponentially larger than the one created by our ‘Sun’. This bending of space-time becomes even more ludicrous when you realise the fact that if you were to fall towards a black hole, time would slow down for you and for anyone watching you from outside, you would speed up.

Now, this image may not mean anything to a lot of people, so I’ll do my best to explain it. The black part at the centre of this image is the event horizon of a black hole. The part coloured a red-orange around the black hole is the accretion disc. The accretion disk is a disk of matter which revolves around the black hole at near light-speed. The minimum distance from the singularity at which is 3 Schwarzschild radii, i.e, 3 times the radius of the event horizon. However, you may also notice an evidently brighter section closer to the event horizon. This region is called the proton sphere, and, well, it is what it sounds like- a sphere of protons orbiting the black hole. Light, unlike matter, has no mass. So, it it possible for light to orbit the black hole much closer, at 1.5 Schwarzschild radii, to b exact. Now, I’m no astrophysicist, but I did my best to explain the image of the first black hole to you.

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Here’s a video that explains this concept a little more in depth: