Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2018 Annual Fall Meeting of the APS Ohio-Region Section
Volume 63, Number 15
Friday–Saturday, September 28–29, 2018; University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio
Session E01: Astronomy/Physics Education |
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Chair: Carolyn Raithel, University of Arizona, Steward Observatory Room: SU 2582 |
Saturday, September 29, 2018 9:00AM - 9:15AM |
E01.00001: Multimessenger Observations of Neutrinos from the Direction of Blazar TXS 0506+056 Andres Medina High-energy neutrinos are thought to be produced in the most powerful accelerators in the Universe such as pulsars, active galactic nuclei and blazars. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory along with multiple photon observatories have produced compelling evidence that the blazar TXS 0506+056 is a source of High Energy Neutrinos. Observations from IceCube and the Fermi-LAT (Large Area Telescope) have found a temporal and spatial correlation between a flaring blazar and a neutrino, IceCube-170922A, with a significance of 3 $\sigma$. This sparked a follow up study to look through 9.5 years of archival data from IceCube. An excess of neutrinos was found coming from the direction of TXS 0506+056 above atmospheric background between September 2014 and March 2015 with 3.5 $\sigma$ significance. These two pieces of evidence, a neutrino coincident with a flaring blazar and a spatial excess, suggests that blazars are a possible source of high energy neutrinos. |
Saturday, September 29, 2018 9:15AM - 9:30AM |
E01.00002: The High Energy Light Isotope Experiment (HELIX): A Balloon-borne Superconducting Magnetic Spectrometer Keith W McBride Propagation of cosmic rays and properties of the Galaxy can be studied through measurements of secondary cosmic ray isotopes. Radioactive isotopes such as Be-10 probe the confinement lifetime. I will present the High Energy Light Isotope eXperiment (HELIX), which aims to measure the Be-10/Be-9 ratio at energies higher than any previous detector. HELIX is a balloon-borne magnet spectrometer utilizing a superconducting magnet of magnitude ~1 T together with a silica aerogel ring imaging Cherenkov counter (RICH) to identify the masses of relativistic particles. HELIX is scheduled to fly in Antarctica in 2020, and makes use of NASA's long duration ballooning capability. I will review the capability of the first HELIX flight to help constrain cosmic ray confinement in the Galaxy. |
Saturday, September 29, 2018 9:30AM - 9:45AM |
E01.00003: Dynamics of the Solar Wind: Parker's Treatment and the Laws of Thermodynamics Pierre-Marie Robitaille, Stephen Crothers In 1958, Eugene Parker proposed that the solar wind must be produced by thermal expansion of coronal gas.1 At the time, he advanced a dimensionless parameter, λ = GMSMH/2kBToa, where G corresponds to the universal constant of gravitation, MS to the solar mass, MH to the mass of the hydrogen atom, kB to Boltzmann’s constant, To to the temperature at the location of interest, and 'a' to the radial distance of that location from the center of the Sun. It is straightforward to demonstrate that this equation stands in violation of the zeroth and second laws of thermodynamics, by simply rearranging the expression in terms of temperature, To = GMSMH/2λkBa, in which case temperature, an intensive property, is being defined in terms of an extensive property, MS, and the radial position, 'a', which is neither intensive nor extensive. All other terms in this expression are constants and therefore unable to affect the character of a thermodynamic property. As a result, temperature in this expression is not intensive. Consequently, the expression advanced by Parker is not compatible with the laws of thermodynamics. This analysis demonstrates that solar winds cannot originate from the thermal expansion of coronal gas as currently accepted. |
Saturday, September 29, 2018 9:45AM - 10:00AM |
E01.00004: Fake the Funk on a Nasty Dunk: Modelling the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament Howard L Richards, Karen D. Slattery Because the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament is a subject in which many young people are already interested, it provides an excellent opportunity to involve students in the creation, refinement, and testing of a scientific model. Many statistical features of the real tournament can be captured by a particularly simple model that can be understood by typical high school students or even advanced middle school students. Refining the model requires the use of Monte Carlo simulations, which can be easily performed by a (macros enabled) Excel spreadsheet. This model also provides an important illustration of the danger of taking scientific results out of their context; most people assume that the model that best represents the tournament will produce the best "bracket scores", but we show that this is not the case. |
Saturday, September 29, 2018 10:00AM - 10:15AM |
E01.00005: What if “Quanta”? J. Gordon Wade Max Planck displays the best ideals of science, an exemplar of Kuhn’s “normal scientist”: humble, focused, and dogged. These are qualities that led him to first suggest, in 1900, that bodies emit electromagnetic energy in discrete “quanta”. And it was indeed little more than a suggestion, “a purely formal assumption”, made after some twenty years of struggle to solve the blackbody problem. This whisper of “what if ... quanta?” started the avalanche which was the enormous scientific revolution of the 20th century.
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