| Theme of 1984 West Roxbury Transcript article was that small clues often lead to discovery of much family history and many cousins. Jack Barrett's aunt Minnie Buckley around 1903-4 corresponded with her uncle Michael Buckley on ancestral farm at Moskeigh in old Templemartin parish now part of Newcestown six miles north of Bandon county Cork. John Barrett junior visited the farm in 1970s when it was operated by Anne Loretto Buckley, granddaughter who remembered Michael Buckley. She is a second cousin of Commander Barrett---- You are correct that the optimal long term mass for stabilization of solar radiation is very large, but precise figures are not known to anyone at the present time. If Dr. Baliunas is still at Harvard, she may be relatively well informed on the subjects - Princeton is one center for the type of astrophysics involved. Hans Bethe was in top intellectual form when I heard his historical talk 1995- if by some miracle he still has has full powers, he is an authority. I do not have Nature magazine file here, but there was a basic article 1972 by Carl Sagan et. al. Caldeira and Kasting are primarily life scientists who set out to determine how long life generally lasts in the universe when it arises on a planet - and how large a zone around a star will have hospitable environments, but their late 1992 Nature article has bibliographical references. Observation of other stars may give clues. Rotation speed can be a factor in stellar evolution and metallicity. You wouldn't like to organize a research group and seek funding? I will continue to do all I can, but I am sixty-four years old- like this rural area where I have many friends - don't mind occasional travel but after 1996 uprooting not eager to move again soon, and I can't see myself administering a complex funded operation even if support was offered. Could you take the lead or find someone? So that is "m". Now "v squared" or is it "DELTA-V Squared"? I heard Egil Leer of U. Oslo speak in 1995. I don't want to embarass him but publicizing an offhand opinion he was kind enough to offer in conversation, but he suggested that at the present rate of solar wind, it would take on the order of a hundred trillion years for sun to lose all its mass. Suppose we set a target that we would remove eighty per cent of present solar mass in four billion years. That is just a first approximation to stimulate somebody else to argue. In the 1930s a French physiologist was reported to have proved that bumblebees cannot fly, but they do anyway. There is a solar wind, and other stars have stellar winds - observation is fundamental in science. Not all particles in a gas travel at the same speed. A temperature is an average - observations are always approximate. But there are molecules traveling at escape speed, and we just need give them a little help. There are areas of the lower temperature where temperatures are MILLIONS OF DEGREES, and experts don't completely understand why. A variety of structures are observed in the outer CHROMOSPHERE, and these can be targets, where there must be fast moving particles. Study of hotter stars will give us ideas. Look at STARS! Some stars have gaseous envelopes- are these transitory or long lasting? ANTIMATTER is great stuff if you can handle it properly. If you could beam antimatter at the solar surface, you would annihilate some of the sun's mass and generate a great deal of heat. This was a new idea last night. Of course, it may be like the mice trying to bell the cat- where do we get the antimatter- could it be contained and directed magnetically? Would antimatter be easier to handled if cooled to superconducting temperatures- though it would annihilate ordinary matter, it might be relatively inert near absolute zero? There is more than one way to skin a cat - a sentiment that may originally have referred to catFISH, someone has suggested. I won't elaborate other exotic ideas jusy now as molecules with mesons, being tested in fusion at Oxfordshire. I shall save for another E mail the possibility of disrupting the solar chromosphere [magnetically perhaps] and exposing hotter matter beneath. In some respects the escape of solar wind is comparable to evaporation - the hottest molecules escape, leaving a cooler residue. Get the resideue out of the way and let more inner heat escape. Your brother Nick was a wrestler -- I forget [or never knew, having graduated 1953] whether you were also. Wrestlers and ju-jitsu practitioners let the opponent's own momentum work in their favor. The sun will be both friend and foe. We hope mostly to apply the sun's own energy to our purposes. I find new ideas coming rapidly - I want no monopoly - team back -huddle- get other people thinking!-John Barrett --- Dave Latham wrote: David - At 5500 degrees C. many particles in the > solar surface are already just below escape velicity and need just a little boost to escape into the solar wind. My impression is that the typical speed for atoms in the solar atmosphere > is a few km/s, which is much less than the escape velocity, which is more than 500 km/s. To first order you will need to supply all the energy implied by the escape velocity to remove mass from the sun to infinity. |
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