Citizen Science + Zero-Point Challenge Answer Script (Patreon)

We are all born scientists. Curiosity is a fundamental part of being human. So why not use that brilliant brain of yours for the betterment of science? I’m talking about citizen science.

The professional astronomer or astrophysicist is a pretty recent phenomenon. In the past, astronomy was often performed by nobility and extremely enthusiastic amateurs. Take William Herschel: by trade a classically trained musician, but as an amateur astronomer he discovered Uranus and was the first to observe binary star systems, among other things. Although it seems like the scientific exploration of our universe is now in the hands of full-time career astro-professionals, a ton of really valuable science is still done by people with proper day jobs. today I want to talk about some of the stunning contributions still being made by citizen scientists, and the contributions YOU can make.

Some of the most important amateur astronomer work is in spotting changes in the night sky. Spotting things like comets and supernovae, or monitoring variable stars are well within the capabilities of a good amateur telescope, yet require a lot of eyes on the sky for a lot of hours – and that’s not a good use of our giant professional telescopes. Comets in particular are often discovered by amateur astronomers. Two particularly famous recent comets, Comet Hale-Bopp and Shoemaker-Levy 9, were co-discovered by amateur astronomers Thomas Bopp and Carolyn Shoemaker. Shoemaker in particular was incredibly active, discovering or co-discovering 32 comets, 377 minor planets, and over 800 asteroids.

Supernovae are also fair game for amateurs. These exploding stars show up as transient points of light, typically in very distant galaxies. There are a number of supernova hunting amateurs, but perhaps the most impressive is Tim Puckett’s effort out of his Pucket Observatory in Georgia. There supernova search program has found well over 300, contributing to many scientific papers.

While individual work can advance science, often the biggest advances come from the efforts of a group of people working together. The American Association of Variable Star Observers, founded in 1911, has generated an archive of variable star data taken primarily by amateur astronomers. This international database houses over 20 million variable star brightness measurements dating back over a hundred years.

Getting started with this sort of citizen science takes a bit of dedication and cash, but you can get started with even a relatively affordable telescope – especially for variable star monitoring. Fair warning though – if you want your own supernova-hunting program you better be ready to spend some money. Aperture fever is no joke.

If you’re more the artistic type, AND you want to use a science-grade instrument on a SPACESHIP! then probably JunoCam is for you. JunoCam is a camera mounted to the outside of the Juno Jupiter orbiter. It was deployed primarily for citizen scientist use. NASA provides the raw visible and infrared images to the public via their website, and talented folk turn those streams of 1’s and 0’s into beautiful images, which NASA publishes. The results are spectacular.

Citizen science isn’t just about getting more telescopes on the sky or public outreach. There are some things that lots of regular human eyes and brains can do much better than a small number of scientists operating the best computers in the world. A lot of it has to do with pattern recognition, which humans are uncannily good at. The Zooniverse project leverages this very human superpower in lots of its projects. For example: spotting supernova, looking for gravitational waves in LIGO, and finding planets forming in the debris disks of new solar systems. And of course there’s Zooniverse’s first and founding project: Galaxy Zoo. This project used citizen scientists to classify the morphological types of nearly one million galaxies. The newest zooniverse project is called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. Its goal is to search beyond Neptune for the potential ninth planet as well as looking for Brown Dwarfs, cool faint failed stars, that live, well right in our own backyard. The project has located nearby brown dwarfs, but citizens are still searching for Planet 9. Maybe you’ll be the one to spot it.

You can also contribute to science without using any of your own brainpower – just donate your computer’s. Using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or BOINC for short, you can link your computer with others around the globe to form one giant computer capable of processing more than any single computer could. With over three hundred thousand participants and over eight hundred thousand computers processing an average of 19.912 PetaFLOPS, it is Guinness World Records “Worlds largest computing grid.”

This all started with the SETI at Home program, which looks through radio data for signs of signals from intelligent life. There’s also Einstein at home, which searches LIGO gravitational wave data for signals produced by rotating neutron stars, and Milky Way at home which generates 3-D dynamical models of streams of stars using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. So if you can spare a few of them computer cycles, why not do some science with them.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t go to university to become a professional scientist, but I’m also saying you don’t have to in order to do real science. I’ve just given some examples, so please share in the comments if you’ve been involved in these or any other cool citizen science projects. Links to everything I mentioned are in the description. 

OK, time for the answers to the recent zero-point challenge question. There were two, both quizzing you on the zero-point energy of the quantum vacuum. Here we go.

The first question was about practical uses of the quantum vacuum. Geckos cling to surfaces by using what is essentially the Casimir effect between the tiny hairs - setae - on their feet and the surface. So the obvious question is, how many geckos would you need to leash in order to drag you up a wall? An average gecko might be able to effectively apply 200,000 of their millions of setae at any one time, and each can support 200 microNewtons of force. Multiply those together and you get that a gecko can support something like 40 Newtons, or 4 kg in Earth gravity. So how much do you weigh? I need around 20 geckos. Finding them shouldn’t be so hard - it’s getting a harness on the little suckers that’s the challenge.

And the extra credit question: A simplistic theoretical estimate of the vacuum energy density comes from assuming that there are no virtual photons above a certain cutoff frequency. If you choose that to be the frequency corresponding to a photon with the Planck energy you get a vacuum energy density of 10^112 ergs/cm3. In this theoretical estimate, vacuum energy density is proportional to the 4th power of cutoff frequency. So my question was what cutoff frequency is needed for this theoretical estimate to give the energy density implied by dark energy? 

OK, so the energy density implied by dark energy is around 10^-8 ergs/cm^3, which is a surprising 120 orders of magnitude lower than the theoretical estimate I just mentioned. The frequency of a photon with the Planck energy is the Planck energy divided by the Planck constant - or an insane 3x10^42 Hertz. And if vacuum energy is proportional to the fourth power of cutoff frequency then this equation gives the relationship we need. There are a bunch of constants in the cutoff frequency-vacuum energy relation, but they cancel out so we don’t even need to know them. That ratio of vacuum energies is 10^120, so we get a cutoff frequency for dark energy of 3x10^12 Hz. That corresponds to a photon wavelength of a tenth of a millimeter, which is far infrared. 

What does this tell us? Well, it tells us that the simplistic method of choosing the right maximum virtual photon frequency definitely can’t give us the vacuum energy that we see as dark energy. Photons with wavelengths shorter than .1 millimeters definitely exist - we see particle interactions that require the exchange of much shorter wavelength virtual photons. Also, the first successful Casimir experiment saw the force emerge when plates were separated by around 1 micrometer, 100 times smaller than our .1 millimeter cutoff. That proves that virtual photons with wavelengths smaller than this plate separation. Also, without a very short-range Casimir force, geckos would fall off walls.

So we randomly selected 6 correct answers as winners of the challenge. If you see your name scroll below that includes you! You win a t-shirt! And lucky you, we now have two new t-shirts on offer. There’s The Heat Death of the Universe is Coming, which is also available for anyone to purchase, and exclusively for challenge winners and Patreon supporters we have Astrochicken Von Neumann, conqueror of the galaxy. Plus, of course, the original space time t-shirts. Winners should email pbsspacetime@gmail.com with your mailing address, and let us know which t-shirt you’d like, your US t-shirt size - small, medium, large, etc. See you all next week for a fresh new episode of Space Time.