Month: March 2019

7. Supernova 1987A

[audio version of this article]

Stars produce energy from nuclear fusion reactions in their cores, where the light elements making up the bulk of the star are compressed and heated by gravity until they fuse into heavier elements. There is a limit to this, however, because once iron is produced in the core no more energy can be extracted from it. Fusing iron requires an input of energy. As iron accumulates, the layers near the core collapse inwards, because not enough energy is being produced to hold them up. At a certain point, the collapse speeds up suddenly and catastrophically, the whole core of the star collapsing in a few seconds. This releases an enormous amount of gravitational energy, fusing heavier elements and initiating nuclear reactions in the outer parts of the star, which blow off in a vast explosion. The star has turned into a supernova, one of the most energetic phenomena in the universe. A supernova can, briefly, shine brighter than the entire galaxy of 100 billion (1011) stars containing it.

Historically, supernovae were detected visually, when a “new star” suddenly appeared in the night sky, shining brightly for a few weeks before fading away from sight. We have reliable records of visible supernovae appearing in the years 1006, 1054, 1181, 1572, and 1604, as well as unconfirmed but probable events occurring in 185 and 393. These supernovae all occurred within our own Milky Way Galaxy, so were close enough to be visible to the naked eye. Since 1604, there have been no supernovae detected in our Galaxy – which is a bit of a shame because the telescope was invented around 1608, just too late to observe the most recent one.

Astronomers have used telescopes to observe supernovae in other galaxies since the late 19th century. Almost none of these are visible to the naked eye. But in 1987 a supernova occurred in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy satellite of our own, making it the nearest supernova ever observed in the telescopic era. It reached magnitude 3, making it as bright as a middling star in our sky. It was first seen by independent observers in Chile and New Zealand on 24 February 1987.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is visible from the southern hemisphere of Earth, and in the north up to a latitude around 21°N. It is never visible from any point further north. And so supernova 1987A (the first supernova detected in 1987) was never visible from any point further north than 21°N.

Supernova 1987A

Supernova 1987A and the Large Magellanic Cloud. SN 1987A is the bright star just right of the centre of the image. (Photo: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International by the European Southern Observatory.)

When a supernova explosion occurs, the collapsing star emits vast quantities of matter and radiation into the surrounding space. Visible light is just one part of the radiation. SN 1987A also emitted gamma rays, x-rays, and ultraviolet light, the latter two of which were detected by space-based telescopes. And it also blasted particles into interstellar space: heavy element nuclei, neutrons, electrons, and other subatomic particles. One of the types of particles produced was neutrinos. Neutrinos have such a small mass that so far we’ve been unable to perform any experiment that can distinguish their mass from zero. And this means that they move at close to the speed of light – so close that we’ve never made any observation that shows them to move any slower.

At the moment of collapse, SN 1987A emitted a huge burst of neutrinos. These travelled through intergalactic space and some of the neutrinos made it to Earth, where some of them were detected. This neutrino burst was detected almost simultaneously at three different neutrino observatories in different parts of the world:

While a total of 24 neutrinos might not sound like a lot, this is significantly higher than the background detection rate of neutrinos from other sources such as our sun and general cosmic rays from random directions in space. And all 24 of these neutrinos were detected within a single 13-second time window – if corrected for the differences in light travel time from SN 1987A to each observatory caused by their locations on the spherical Earth.

You might notice that all three of the detectors listed are in the northern hemisphere. In fact, the southernmost of them is Kamioka, at 36° 20′ 24″ N. This means that the Large Magellanic Cloud, and SN 1987A in particular, are not visible in the sky at any of these detector locations. This fact by itself provides fairly convincing evidence to most people that the Earth cannot be flat, but Flat Earth enthusiasts propose various solutions for the limited visibility of celestial objects from different parts of the Earth. In Flat Earth theory, all visible stars and galaxies are above the plane of the Earth, and obscured from some parts by distance or intervening objects. This obviously requires SN 1987A to be above the plane of the Flat Earth.

In fact, at this point it might seem that the spherical Earth has a problem: If SN 1987A is not visible from the locations of the neutrino detectors, then how did they detect neutrinos from it? The answer is that neutrinos are extremely elusive particles – they barely interact with matter at all. Neutrinos are known to pass right through the Earth with ease. So although the spherical Earth blocked the light from SN 1987A from reaching the neutrino observatories, it did not stop the neutrinos. The neutrinos passed through the Earth to reach the observatories.

Astronomers estimate SN 1987A released around 1058 neutrinos. The blast was 168,000 light years away, so at the distance of Earth, the number of neutrinos passing through the Earth would be approximately 3×1020 neutrinos per square metre. The Kamiokande-II detector is a cylinder of water 16 metres high and 15.6 metres in diameter, so nearly 1023 SN 1987A neutrinos would have passed through it, leading to just 11 detections. This matches the expected detection rate for neutrinos very well.

Additionally, the Kamioka and Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven detectors are directional – they can determine the direction from which observed neutrinos arrive. They arrived coming up from underground, not down from the sky. The observed directions at both detectors correspond to the position of the Large Magellanic Cloud and SN1987A on the far side of the spherical Earth [1][2].

Kamiokande-II results

Distribution of SN 1987A neutrino detections at Kamiokande-II in energy of produced electrons and angle relative to the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Detected electrons are produced by two different processes, the first is rapid and highly aligned with neutrino direction, while the second is a slower secondary particle generation process and randomises direction uniformly. Neutrinos 1 and 2 (the earliest in the burst) are aligned directly with the LMC, and the remainder are distributed uniformly. This is statistically consistent with the burst having originated from the LMC. Figure reproduced from [1].

In a flat Earth model, SN 1987A would have to be simultaneously above the plane of the Earth (to be visible from the southern hemisphere) and below it (for the neutrino burst to be visible coming up from under the plane of the Earth). This is self-contradictory. However the observations of SN 1987A are all consistent with the Earth being a globe.

References:

[1] Hirata, K.; Kajita, T.; Koshiba, M.; Nakahata, M.; Oyama, Y.; Sato, N.; Suzuki, A.; Takita, M.; Totsuka, Y.; Kifune, T.; Suda, T.; Takahashi, K.; Tanimori, T.; Miyano, K.; Yamada, M.; Beier, E. W.; Feldscher, L. R.; Kim, S. B.; Mann, A. K.; Newcomer, F. M.; Van, R.; Zhang, W.; Cortez, B. G. “Observation of a neutrino burst from the supernova SN1987A”. Physical Review Letters, 58, p. 1490-1493, 1987. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.58.1490

[2] Bratton, C. B.; Casper, D.; Ciocio, A.; Claus, R.; Crouch, M.; Dye, S. T.; Errede, S.; Gajewski, W.; Goldhaber, M.; Haines, T. J.; Jones, T. W.; Kielczewska, D.; Kropp, W. R.; Learned, J. G.; Losecco, J. M.; Matthews, J.; Miller, R.; Mudan, M.; Price, L. R.; Reines, F.; Schultz, J.; Seidel, S.; Sinclair, D.; Sobel, H. W.; Stone, J. L.; Sulak, L.; Svoboda, R.; Thornton, G.; van der Velde, J. C. “Angular distribution of events from SN1987A”. Physical Review D, 37, p. 3361-3363, 1988. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.37.3361

6. Gegenschein

[audio version of this article]

If you shine a light into a suspension of fine particles, the particles will scatter the light. This is easy enough to show with a little bit of flour stirred into a glass of water, or with a dilute solution of milk in water, in which case the particles are small globules of fat. You can see a beam of light passing through such a medium because of the scattering, which is known as the Tyndall effect.

We can model the interaction of light with the scattering particles using Mie scattering theory, named after German physicist Gustav Mie. This is essentially a set of solutions of Maxwell’s equations for the propagation of electromagnetic radiation (in this case, light) in the presence of the scattering objects. If you solve these equations for diffuse particles a bit bigger than the wavelength of light, you can derive the angular distribution of the scattered light. The scattering is far from uniform in all directions. Rather, it has two distinct lobes. Most of the light is scattered by very small angles, emerging close to the direction of the original incoming beam of light. As the scattering angle increases, less and less light is scattered in those directions. Until you reach a point somewhere around 90°, where the scattering is a minimum, and then the intensity of scattered light starts climbing up again as the angle continues to increase. It reaches its second maximum at 180°, where light is reflected directly back towards the source.

This bright spot of reflected light back towards the source is called backscatter. It can be seen when shining light into smoke or fog. It’s the reason why some cars have special fog lights, angled down to illuminate the road, rather than shine straight into the fog and reflect back into the driver’s eyes. Backscatter is also the reason for the bright spot you might have noticed when flying, on clouds below you around the shadow of the plane (at the centre of the related optical phenomenon of glories).

Another place where there is a collection of smoke-sized particles is in interplanetary space. In the plane of the planets’ orbits around the sun, there is a considerable amount of left over material of sizes around 10 to 100 micrometres, constantly being replenished by asteroid collisions and outgassing from comets. This material is called the interplanetary dust cloud, or the zodiacal dust cloud, because it is densest in the ecliptic—the plane of the planets—which runs through the zodiac constellations. This dust has been sampled directly by several deep space probes: Pioneers 10 and 11, Ulysses, Galileo, Cassini, and New Horizons.

The brightest source of light in the solar system is the sun. As it shines through this interplanetary dust cloud, some of the light is scattered. Most of the scattered light is deflected only by small angles, in accordance with Mie theory. But some is backscattered, and in the backscatter direction there is a peak in brightness of the scattered light directly back towards the sun. S. S. Hong published a paper in 1985, with calculations of the scattering angles of light by the interplanetary dust cloud [1]. Here’s the pertinent plot from the paper:

Scattering intensity v. angle for interplanetary dust

Scattering intensity versus scattering angle for interplanetary dust. Figure reproduced from [1].

The different curves correspond to different choices of a power law to model the size distribution of the dust particles. In each case you can see that most of the scattering occurs at small angles, there is a minimum of scattering intensity around 90°, and the scattering increases again to a second maximum at 180°, the backscattering angle.

As an aside, this backscattering also occurs in interstellar dust, and here’s a figure from a paper by B. T. Draine showing scattering intensity versus angle for the measured dust distributions of the Small Magellanic Cloud, Large Magellanic Cloud, and Milky Way galaxy, plotted for several wavelengths of light [2]. The wavelengths are shown in Angstroms, and in these units visible light occurs between 4000 and 7000 Å (lower being ultraviolet and higher infrared). In these cases the models show minima in scattering around 130°, with the backscattering again being maximal at 180°.

Scattering intensity v. angle for interstellar dust

Scattering intensity versus scattering angle for interstellar dust. Figure reproduced from [2].

We’re not concerned with interstellar dust here, but it shows the general principle that there is a peak in scattered light directly back towards the light source, from fog, smoke, and space dust.

We are concerned with backscatter from the interplanetary dust cloud. Given that this phenomenon occurs, it implies that if we could look into space in the direction exactly opposite the direction of the sun, then we should see backscatter from the interplanetary dust.

If the Earth is spherical, then night time corresponds to the sun being behind the planet. You should see, in the night sky, the point exactly opposite the direction of the sun. You should be able to see, in that direction, the backscattered light of the sun from the interplanetary dust cloud.

Now let’s imagine the Earth is flat. The sun shines on some part of the Earth at all times, so therefore it must be above the plane of the Earth at all times. (How some parts of that plane are in the dark of night is a question for another time. Some Flat Earth models propose a sort of cosmic lampshade for the sun, which makes it more like a spotlight.) At any rate, it should never be possible to look into the sky in the exact opposite direction to the sun. So there should be no point in the night sky with a peak of backscattered sunlight.

Now that we’ve made the predictions from our models, what do we actually see? It turns out that the backscattered sunlight is a visible phenomenon, and it can be seen exactly where predicted by the spherical Earth model. It’s a faint glow in the night sky, centred on the point in the exact opposite direction to the sun. It’s highly likely that pre-industrial civilisations would have observed this glow in their dark night skies, but not had any idea of its significance. The earliest recorded description of it comes from 1730, by the French astronomer Esprit Pézenas. The German explorer Alexander von Humboldt wrote about it around 1800 on a trip to South America, and gave it the name Gegenschein (German for “counter-shine”).

Unfortunately, in our modern industrial society light pollution is so bad that it’s almost impossible to see the gegenschein anywhere near where people live. You need to go somewhere remote and far away from any settlements, where it is truly dark at night. If you do that, you can see something like this:

Gegenschein

Gegenschein, as seen from the Very Large Telescope site, Cerro Paranal, Chile. (Photo: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International by the European Southern Observatory.)

The gegenschein is the glow in the sky just above the centre of the image. Heck, it’s so beautiful, here’s another one:

Gegenschein

Gegenschein, as seen from the Very Large Telescope site, Cerro Paranal, Chile. (Photo: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International by the European Southern Observatory.)

This is a fisheye image, with the band of the Milky Way and the horizon wrapped around the edge of the circle. Here the gegenschein is the broad glow centred around a third of the way from the centre, at the 1 o’clock angle.

The visibility of the gegenschein shows that, in places where it is night time, the sun is actually behind the Earth. On a flat Earth, the sun can never be behind the Earth, so the gegenschein would never be visible. And so the optical effect of backscatter provides evidence that the Earth is a globe.

References:

[1] Hong, S. S. “Henyey-Greenstein representation of the mean volume scattering phase function for zodiacal dust”. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 146, p. 67-75, 1985. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1985A%26A…146…67H

[2] Draine, B. T. “Scattering by Interstellar Dust Grains. I. Optical and Ultraviolet”. The Astrophysical Journal, 598, p. 1017-1025, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1086/379118

2.a Making Eratosthenes’ measurement

Performing the experiment described in 2. Eratosthenes’ measurement.

The equinox here in Sydney occurred on 21 March, with local noon at 13:02 local time. Unfortunately the day dawned grey and rainy, with bands of heavy rain blowing in from the south.

As midday drew closer the rain eased off tantalisingly, and there was even a glimpse of blue sky, only to be followed by more heavy rain. Undaunted, a friend joined me for an expedition to a suitable location to make the measurement. I took with me my handy wizard staff to serve as the vertical stick, and a spirit level and tape measure.

We found some flat ground near the McMahons Point ferry wharf, and waited for a break in the clouds. My friend suggested that if we encountered any police and they asked why we were carrying around a quarterstaff, we should say, “Ohhh, just doing a little weather experiment”.

Waiting for the clouds to clear

Waiting for the clouds to clear.

Magically, about 15 minutes before solar noon, the clouds parted and a hot sun shone down out of the sky. We took some quick measurements in case the patchy clouds obscured the sun at the critical time, and they drifted across the sun, turning it on and off as we waited.

Fortunately, around 13:02, there was a good few minutes of uninterrupted sunshine and we measured the shadow of the staff carefully a few times, making sure the staff was held vertical with the spirit level.

Sunshine at local solar noon

Sunshine at local solar noon. Boldly doing Science!

Science successfully done, we headed to a nearby Japanese restaurant for a well-earned lunch!

I’ve been receiving measurements from all across the world today, and have run some preliminary numbers to get results. They look pretty good! But I’ll wait until everyone’s measurements are in before presenting a full report.

Let’s measure the Earth: reminder

Just a quick reminder that the equinox (autumn if you’re in the southern hemisphere, spring if you’re in the north) happens on 20 March in the Americas, and 21 March in the rest of the world. That’s the day you can help me to measure the size of the Earth, by doing a simple measurement!

See my post on Eratosthenes’ measurement for details!

5. Horizon dip angle

[audio version of this article]

We’re all familiar with the horizon. Informally, the horizon is as far as you can see, where the sky apparently meets the ground. The horizon of the Earth will come up in several of the proofs we’ll be looking at, but today we’ll be looking at one specific property of the horizon.

Firstly, we need to define our terms more precisely, and recognise that there are three different types of horizon. For the first type, the horizon is defined by a plane perpendicular to the direction of up and down. Up and down are defined by the direction of gravity. If we’re standing on the surface of Earth, then the force of gravity has a specific direction, which we call down. Now look exactly perpendicular to this direction. You can spin on the spot, looking perpendicular to the down direction at all times. This defines a horizontal plane; indeed the very word “horizontal” is derived from “horizon”. This horizon you are looking at is called the astronomical horizon. It might also sensibly be called the geometric or mathematical horizon.

Now let’s define the horizon in a different way. Imagine standing on the surface of the Earth, in a relatively flat area such as an open plain, or perhaps looking out to sea. Look in the direction of the apparent line where the sky meets the Earth’s surface. This is what most people usually think of when they think of “the horizon”, and this is called the true horizon.

A third type of horizon occurs when you’re standing in a place where the landscape is not particularly flat. The true horizon might be obscured by mountains or trees or buildings or whatever. In this case, as far as you can see is called the visible horizon. If the visible horizon obscures the true horizon, then the obstructions need to be projecting above the notionally smooth surface of the Earth, so the visible horizon must be higher and closer than the true horizon (or at the same place as the true horizon if there are no obstructions).

Horizon definitions

The three types of horizon.

Let’s think about the case where there are minimal obstructions and the visible horizon is more or less the same as the true horizon. Now the question arises: Is the true horizon the same as the astronomical horizon, or different?

If the Earth is flat, the astronomical horizon is a plane parallel to the (flat) ground, at the height of the human observer’s eyes. The true horizon is the plane of the Earth itself. These two planes run parallel and, by the laws of perspective, appear to converge at infinity. So if you look horizontally (i.e. in the direction of the astronomical horizon), you will see the true horizon in the same direction.

On the other hand, if the Earth is spherical, the Earth’s surface curves downwards, away from the plane of the astronomical horizon. So there should be a non-zero angle between the directions of the astronomical and true horizons. This angle is called the dip angle of the horizon. For a person standing on the ground, this angle is very small and mostly imperceptible. But you can measure the dip angle with a surveyor’s theodolite or its less technological predecessor, an astrolabe. And as your elevation increases, the dip angle increases as well. If you make these measurements with an instrument, you can verify that the dip angle is non-zero, and that it increases with the elevation of your observing position.

Al-Biruni

Al-Biruni. (Copyright-free image from a Soviet Union postage stamp.)

The 11th century Persian scholar Abū Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Al-Bīrūnī (usually known in English as Al-Biruni) recognised all of this, and what’s more he realised that by measuring the dip angle of the horizon from a known elevation he could do the geometry and calculate the circumference of the Earth. Eratosthenes beat him to it, but Al-Biruni’s method was arguably more clever, and could be done without needing measurements at different cities.

First, Al-Biruni measured the height of a mountain near where he lived. He did this by sighting two elevation angles to the top of the mountain from different distances, and solving the geometry to get the height. Then he climbed the mountain and measured the dip angle of the horizon. From the height, the dip angle, and some basic geometry, Al-Biruni could calculate the circumference of the Earth.

Horizon dip angle

Horizon dip angle and relation to the Earth’s radius.

Given the geometry in the figure, some straightforward trigonometry shows that the radius of the Earth is given by the expression:

R = h(cos θ) / (1 – cos θ)

The circumference is just 2π times the radius, so:

Earth’s circumference = 2πh(cos θ) / (1 – cos θ)

How close did Al-Biruni get? Here’s where things get a little fuzzy. There are claims that he got the correct answer to within about 20 kilometres, significantly more accurate than Eratosthenes’ measurement. But these claims are disputed, partly for reasons similar to Eratosthenes’ result: nobody seems to be sure of the conversion factor from Persian cubits to modern units of distance. There are also claims that atmospheric refraction effects in the hot Persian desert would make measuring the angle correctly difficult, if not impossible.

What is the truth here? At this point far removed in history it seems almost impossible to tell. Did Al-Biruni even make the actual measurement? This raises a question about how much we trust historical accounts of scientific activities and experiments. In the case of Eratosthenes, we have multiple sources that agree on what he did, and the tradition of written literature from the Classical Greek period to the present day is more or less continuous and argued by scholars to be mostly reliable. For Al-Biruni, the evidence is less clear.

However, whether or not these historical figures actually made the measurements they are credited with is much less important for science than it is for history. History is the study of what happened in our past. Due to incomplete or unreliable record keeping, history can, alas, be lost. Science, in contrast, is the study of the universe and the laws of nature. Scientific experiments, by their very nature, are repeatable. Even if Eratosthenes or Al-Biruni never made the measurements, we can reproduce the methods and come up with the same answers (to within the care and accuracy of our experiments).

What does seem reasonably certain is that Al-Biruni did the geometry, providing us with another method of demonstrating that the Earth is not flat. We don’t have to take anyone’s word for it that he did the experiment and showed that the Earth is spherical, because we can do it ourselves.

There are a couple of ways of doing this experiment. The traditional way is with a theodolite. Surveying theodolites have an accurate levelling mechanism. Once the level is set, the theodolite can measure the vertical angle to any object you sight through the telescope eyepiece. Just sight the line of the horizon and read off the dip angle.

Theodolite

A theodolite. (Public domain image from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)

If you don’t happen to have a theodolite, there are smartphone apps available that use the phone’s GPS and inclinometer systems to provide navigation or surveying aids, including an artificial horizon indicator. The phone’s inclinometer measures the direction of gravity, so the app can easily plot the astronomical horizon. This is displayed on your phone screen, overlaid on a photo from the phone’s camera.

If you calibrate and check the app at sea level, you can see that the astronomical horizon is very close to the true horizon – the angle between them is too small to notice or measure easily. But on a mountain or on a flight, you can capture a photo of the horizon—where the ground or layers of clouds below you meet the blue sky‒overlaid with the artificial astronomical horizon. You can see the angle between them and measure it with the app. And if you know your altitude, which you can also get from the GPS reading on the app, or by checking in-flight data, you can calculate the circumference of the Earth yourself. In theory.

In practice there are a few complicating factors. The inclinometers in phones are not especially accurate and can be thrown out by forces in flight when turning or changing altitude. And the Earth’s atmosphere refracts light, so sighting very distant objects can give inaccurate angles. So although you can see that the true horizon is lower than the astronomical horizon, calculating the Earth’s circumference in this way can easily give an incorrect value. What this teaches us is that when doing scientific experiments, we have to be aware of any factors that can bias our measurements, and try to eliminate them or correct for them. This is a common theme through the history of science: Not only does our understanding grow, but our ability to understand and correct for complicating factors becomes more sophisticated as well.

4. Airy’s coal pit experiment

[audio version of this article]

Gravity is the force that causes objects to fall towards the ground. Observations of the movements of the planets led Isaac Newton in 1687 to publish his formulation of the force between two objects caused by gravity, stating that the force is proportional to the masses of the objects and the reciprocal of the square of the distance between them. This simple relationship has been wildly successful, although it was superseded in 1915 when Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity. Einstein’s model differs from Newton’s only by imperceptible amounts, except when extremely large masses or speeds close to the speed of light are involved. For something the size of Earth, Newton’s law of gravity works just fine.

Given Newton’s law, some relatively straightforward vector calculus can be used to prove Gauss’s law for gravity, which gives a relationship between the gravitational flux of an enclosed surface and the amount of mass inside that surface. For symmetrical cases like spherical objects, the gravitational flux is just the gravitational field strength multiplied by the surface area of the sphere. The details are not as important here as the result: For a spherical object, the gravitational force of the object at any point—outside or inside the object—depends only on the distance from the centre of the object and the amount of mass within a sphere of that radius.

So consider the Earth – assuming it’s spherical. If you are on the surface or above it, the gravitational force you feel is produced by the entire mass of the Earth. However, if you are beneath the surface of the Earth, all of the mass of the Earth at shallower depths has no effect on you – the gravitational pull in all different directions cancels exactly to zero. You only feel the gravity from the part of the Earth that is deeper than you are. This means that as you burrow deeper into the Earth, the gravitational force you feel decreases, until eventually, if it were possible to reach the centre of the Earth, it would be zero. On the other hand, if the Earth is flat there’s no a priori reason to think that gravity should get progressively less strong as you go deeper underground.

Gauss's Law for gravity

Gauss’s Law for gravity. (Human not to scale.)

Gravitational force, it turns out, is fairly easy to measure. The period of a swinging pendulum depends on the force of gravity, and we’ve been able to measure small changes in the period of a pendulum fairly precisely for hundreds of years. Since before Newton’s time, in fact. The Elizabethan-era philosopher Francis Bacon first suggested taking pendulums up mountains to see if gravity varied with altitude in 1620. This experiment was actually carried out in 1737 by the French mathematician Pierre Bouguer, in the Peruvian Andes. (And perhaps more about that particular experiment another day.)

But in the 1820s the British astronomer George Biddell Airy realised that if you measured the force of gravity at the surface of the Earth, and also down a deep mine, you should get two different values. Not only that, but the size of the difference and the depth of the mine could be used to calculate the density of the Earth. He began experimenting in 1826, but unfortunately his first attempt failed due to a mine flood. Airy was a busy guy, accepting the post of Astronomer Royal in 1835 and discovering and inventing a whole bunch of other stuff. But finally in 1856 he tried the gravity experiment again.

George Biddell Airy

George Biddell Airy. (Public domain image)

Airy used a coal pit at the Harton Colliery, near Harton in the county of Tyne and Wear in north-eastern England. The pit was 1260 feet (384 metres) deep, and at the bottom Airy built a sophisticated pendulum and time measurement system. He compared timing measurements made at the surface and the bottom of the pit over a period of 60 hours with the same length pendulum, and discovered that the pendulum at the bottom of the pit ran slower by 2.24 seconds per day.

Airy's pendulum apparatus

Airy’s pendulum apparatus at the bottom of the Harton coal pit. Figure reproduced from [1].

For our purposes, this difference is the evidence we need that the Earth is spherical. We predicted that if the Earth is spherical then gravity should be lower at the bottom of a pit than on the surface, and Airy showed that is indeed true. But he didn’t stop there, because of course he already knew that the Earth was round, and its circumference. With that piece of data and his pendulum measurement, he could calculate the density of the Earth, finding a figure of 6.62 times the density of water.

As it turns out, modern measurements give a density of 5.51, about 17% less. Airy’s coal pit experiment was very fiddly, and it’s a credit that he got so close to the correct answer.

Airy's pendulum apparatus

Schematic diagram of Airy’s pendulum apparatus. Figure reproduced from [2].

Now remember that previously we’ve shown that Eratosthenes measured the size of the Earth, simply using sticks and shadows. Airy’s experiment shows that once you know the size of Earth, you can get a decent measurement of the density of the planet using something as simple as a pendulum. And once you know the size and the density of something, its mass is simply the volume multiplied by the density.

In other words, if you’re clever enough you can measure the mass of the Earth with a stick, a length of string, and a weight.

References:

[1] Airy, G. B., “Lecture on the Pendulum-Experiments at Harton Pit”, lecture delivered at Central Hall, South Shields, 24 October 1854, Longman & Co., London. https://books.google.com/books?id=JRZcAAAAQAAJ

[2] Airy, G. B., “Account of Pendulum Experiments Undertaken in the Harton Colliery, for the Purpose of Determining the Mean Density of the Earth”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 146, p. 297-355, 1856. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1856.0015

On the nature of scientific proof

Since it’s going to come up a lot and be a potential point of discussion on pretty much every post I make here, I’ve written a page (linked in the sidebar navigation) on The nature of proof. It discusses the semantics of what we mean by “proof” in a scientific context.

TL;DR: Each proof I post isn’t meant to be stand-alone, irrefutable, ironclad evidence of absolute truth that the Earth is a globe. What they are, are experiments and observations that are consistent with a spherical Earth, and more or less inconsistent with a straightforward Flat Earth model. You might be able to make them fit a Flat Earth model with some ad-hoc tweaking or conspiracy theories – but overall the spherical Earth model is a much simpler explanation.

3. Meteor arrival rates

[audio version of this article]

Meteors are small interplanetary objects that cause visible streaks of light in the sky when they collide with the Earth’s atmosphere. Before this visible collision, the object in space is called a meteoroid, and if any pieces of the object survive to land on the surface of Earth they are called meteorites. Meteoroids are considered to range from roughly the size of a peppercorn up to about a metre across. Larger objects are generally called asteroids, while smaller ones are micrometeoroids or space dust.

Most meteoroids are made of various types of rock, but a small percentage are mostly iron or iron-nickel alloy, and a few are icy. There are vast numbers of these objects in orbit around the sun, and many million enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day, although only a small fraction of those are large enough to produce a meteor trail visible to the human eye. Meteoroids originate from the asteroid belt, or as broken off parts of comets. These small objects are very easily perturbed by the gravity of large objects in the solar system, which effectively randomises their orbits. So in any region of the solar system, the positions and velocities of meteoroids is more or less random.

Henbury Meteorite

One of the Henbury Meteorites, cut to show iron composition.

From an observation point on Earth, we can watch for meteors. Better than counting by eye, we have built specialised radar systems that can detect meteors with greater sensitivity, including during daylight hours, and we can set them up counting meteors all day, every day. Every time the radar detects a meteor, it can record where in the sky it was, what direction it moved, and what time the event occurred. Thinking about the time in particular, we can count how many meteors arrive during any given hour, and average this over many days to produce an hourly rate of meteor events. Many experiments do just this.

Let’s consider what time of day meteors arrive, and if the hourly rate of meteors is the same at all times, or if it varies with time. If the Earth were flat, how might we expect the hourly rate of meteors to behave? Is there any reason to think that the hourly rate of meteors might be different at, say, 8pm, compared to 4am? Or midnight? If the Earth is flat, then… meteors should probably arrive at the same rate all the time. There’s no obvious reason to think it might vary at all.

What happens in reality?

There are several published studies showing measurements of the hourly arrival rate of meteors versus the time of day. Here are some graphs from one such paper (reference [1]):

Hourly meteor rate graph 1

Hourly meteor arrival rate at Esrange Space Centre, Sweden. Figure reproduced from [1].

These graphs show the average number of meteors observed arriving during each hour of the day as observed by a meteor-detecting radar station at the Esrange Space Centre near Kiruna in Sweden. The numbers on the vertical axis are normalised so that the 24 hourly bins add up to 1. As shown earlier in the paper, the total number of meteors observed per day is roughly 2000 to 5000, for an overall average of approximately 150 per hour. The times on the horizontal axis are in Universal Time, but Sweden’s time zone is UTC+1, so local midnight occurs at 23 on the graph. Notice that the number of meteors observed per hour is not constant throughout the day, but varies in a systematic pattern. Hmmm.

Here’s another set of data (reference [2]):

Hourly meteor rate graph 2

Hourly meteor arrival rate at stations in southern USA. Figure reproduced from [2].

This shows the hourly arrival rate of meteors for a single day as recorded by the American Meteor Society Radiometer Project stations in the southern USA. Again, the times shown are UTC, but the time zone is UTC-6, so local midnight occurs at 6 on the graph.

For good measure, here’s one more (reference [3]):

Hourly meteor rate graph 3

Hourly meteor arrival rate at three SKiYMET stations. Figures reproduced from [3].

These plots show the hourly arrival rate of meteors at three separate SKiYMET meteor observation sites, at latitudes 69°N, 22°S, and 35°S respectively. The times shown on the horizontal axis here are all local times.

Now, notice how in all of these graphs that the hourly arrival rate of meteors varies by time of day. In particular, in every case there is a maximum in the arrival rate at around 6am local time (to within 2 or 3 hours), and a minimum at around 6pm local time. This pattern, once you notice it, is striking. What could be the cause?

The Earth is moving in its orbit about the sun. In other words, it is sweeping through space, in an almost circular path around the sun. Now, remember that the distribution of meteoroid locations and velocities in space is essentially random. If the Earth is moving through this random scattering of meteoroids, it should sweep up more meteors on the side of the planet that is moving forwards, and fewer on the side that is trailing. And the Earth is also rotating about its axis, this rotation being what causes the daily variation of night and day – in other words the times of the day.

Earth orbit diagram

Diagram showing movement of Earth in its orbit and rotation. Earth image is public domain from NASA.

The side of the Earth that is moving forwards is the side where the rotation of the Earth is bringing the dark part of the Earth into the light of the sun, at the dawn of a new day. We call this the dawn terminator. In terms of the clock and time zones, this part of the Earth has a time around 6am. The trailing side of the Earth is the sunset terminator, with a time around 6pm. There will be some variation, up to a couple of hours or so at moderate latitudes, caused by the seasons (the effect of the tilt in the Earth’s rotation axis relative to its orbit).

In other words, if the Earth is a rotating sphere in space, orbiting around the sun, we should expect that the dawn part of the Earth, where the local time is around 6am, should sweep up more meteors than the sunset part of the Earth, where the local time is around 6pm. And if the Earth is a sphere, this variation should be sinusoidal – the distinctive smooth shape of a wave as traced out by points rotating around a circle.

And this is exactly what we see. The variation in the hourly arrival rate of meteors, as observed all across the Earth, matches the prediction you would make if the Earth was a globe. One consequence of the Earth being a globe is that if you want to see meteors – other than during one of the regular annual meteor showers – it’s much better to get up before dawn than to stay up late.

References:

[1] Younger, P. T.; Astin, I.; Sandford, D. J.; and Mitchell, N. J. “The sporadic radiant and distribution of meteors in the atmosphere as observed by VHF radar at Arctic, Antarctic and equatorial latitudes”, Annales Geophysicae, 27, p. 2831-2841, 2009. https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-27-2831-2009
[2] Meisel, D. D.; Richardson, J. E. “Statistical properties of meteors from a simple, passive forward scatter system”. Planetary and Space Science, 47, p. 107-124, 1999. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0032-0633(98)00096-8
[3] Singer, W; von Zahn, U; Batista, Paulo; Fuller, Brian; and Latteck, Ralph. “Diurnal and annual variations of meteor rates at latitudes between 69°N and 35°S”. In The 17th ESA Symposium on European Rocket and Balloon Programmes and Related Research, Sandefjord, Norway, 2005, ISBN 92-9092-901-4, p. 151-156. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252769360_Diurnal_and_annual_variations_of_meteor_rates_at_latitudes_between_69N_and_35S

2. Eratosthenes’ measurement

[audio version of this article]

Determining that the Earth is not flat is not a feat that requires space age technology to achieve. In fact, you can demonstrate it with not much more than a stick and some elementary geometry. And this was indeed done in antiquity.

Around the year 240 BC the Greek scholar Eratosthenes realised the significance of certain observations based on shadows cast by the sun. Not only did he show that the Earth is not flat, he did an experiment to measure the circumference of the spherical Earth.

Eratosthenes

Eratosthenes teaching in Alexandria. Painting by Bernardo Strozzi (1581-1644)

Eratosthenes was the head librarian at the great Library of Alexandria. He had heard that at noon on the day of the summer solstice, the sun shone directly down a vertical well in the Egyptian city of Syene, where the modern city of Aswan now stands. Equivalently, at noon on the solstice, a stick placed vertically in the ground would cast no shadow, because the sun was directly overhead. This property was well known amongst geographers as a curiosity, because it didn’t happen at any cities further north.

Eratosthenes took it a step further by thinking about why this was the case. He figured that the sun was a very long way away, at least much further away than, say, the distance between Syene and Alexandria on the northern coast of Egypt – measured by surveyors to be 5000 stadia. (According to the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea, Eratosthenes in fact calculated the distance from the Earth to the sun, possibly using a method developed by Aristarchus. Eusebius’s figures are ambiguous, but can be interpreted as giving a figure of 149 million km, almost exactly correct.) If the Earth were flat, the sun would be directly overhead everywhere at the same time. But this was not the case. At noon on the summer solstice, a vertical stick in Alexandria cast a definite shadow. He realised not only that the Earth’s surface must be curved, but that he could use the length of the shadow to calculate how big the Earth was.

By measuring the length of a vertical stick and its shadow in Alexandria at noon on the solstice, Eratosthenes calculated that the sun was at an elevation of 7°12′ to the vertical. The angle of 7°12′ is exactly one fiftieth of a circle. Eratosthenes also figured that Alexandria was pretty much due north of Syene. So this meant that the distance from Syene to Alexandria must be one fiftieth of the circumference of the Earth. So the circumference of the Earth, Eratosthenes concluded, must be 250,000 stadia.

Shadows in Syene and Alexandria

Shadows in Syene and Alexandria, if the Earth were flat, or spherical.

How long is a classical Greek/Egyptian stadion? There is some debate over this. Some scholars suggest that Egyptian surveyors used a stadion of 174.6 metres, giving a circumference of 43,650 km. Others think they used a stadion of 184.8 m, giving a result of 46,000 km. Modern measurements of the Earth’s circumference around the poles set the figure at 40,008 km. So depending which figure we use for the stadion, Eratosthenes got the answer right to within 9% or 15%, respectively. Not too bad for a measurement made with nothing but a stick!

The main mistake Eratosthenes made was assuming Alexandria was due north of Syene. The distance needs to be adjusted to remove the east-west offset, and if you do this you get an answer even closer to the modern measurement. The rest of the error is likely mostly due to imprecision in measuring distances and angles. We might even speculate that Eratosthenes did a bit of rounding to make his measured angle exactly one fiftieth of a circle.

Can we do better than Eratosthenes? With your help, I’d like to do an experiment and collect some data, and see how accurately we get to measuring the circumference of the Earth. Rather than use the northern summer solstice, we’re going to use the March equinox, which conveniently happens less than two weeks from when I post this entry: on 20 March (or 21 March in some time zones). On that date, I’d like you to help me by doing a simple measurement, wherever you happen to be. Full instructions follow:

  1. Work out the date closest to the equinox where you are. For time zones of UTC+2 or less (including all of the Americas, Europe, and most of Africa) it’s on 20 March, 2019. For time zones UTC+3 or more (including Eastern Africa, Asia, Australia) it’s on 21 March. Actually if you’re in Europe or Africa, the equinox is close to midnight this year, so it probably doesn’t matter much if you do this on 20 or 21 March.
  2. Work out what time is local solar noon where you are. (This is the time when the sun is directly over the meridian of longitude running through your location, and it’s usually not exactly at 12:00.) For this, use TimeandDate.com’s Sun Calculator. Enter your location in the search box. When the page brings up the data for your location, scroll down to the calendar table and find the entry for the date you have worked out at step 1. Look at the column marked “Solar noon” and read the time given there. You now have the date and the exact time when you need to make your measurement. Hopefully it will be sunny for you then!
  3. Work out where you’ll be at that time on that date. Find a nice flat, level area there. Get a straight stick – the longer the more accurate. Measure the length of the stick.
  4. On the equinox date, at the exact time of your local solar noon: If it’s sunny, place your stick vertically on your flat area. Do this as accurately as you can – use a spirit level or inclinometer if you can. If you don’t have one, let the stick dangle from the top, with the bottom just barely touching the ground. With the stick vertical, measure the length of its shadow cast by the sun, again as accurately as you can manage. Using a friend to help you will make things easier. If it’s not sunny at the right time, oh well, I appreciate your help anyway, but that’s how science works sometimes!
  5. Once you have the shadow length, you’re ready to report your data! I need to know: (1) Where you were – city, state, country – enough that I don’t get it wrong. If you can tell me your exact latitude (using Google maps or a GPS), even better. (2) The length of your vertical stick. (3) The length of the shadow you measured. Send these three bits of data to me by email [dmm at dangermouse.net], by the end of March.

I’ll calculate the results, do some statistics, and come up with our very own measurement of the circumference of the Earth! I’ll post the results here in April.

1. The Blue Marble

[audio version of this article]

The most straightforward way to check the shape of the Earth is to look at it. There’s one small problem, though. To see the shape of the Earth as a whole, you need to be far enough away from it. For most of human history, this has not been possible. It was only with the advent of the space age that our technology has allowed us to send a human being, or a camera, more than a few kilometres from the surface.

The earliest photo of the whole Earth from space was taken by NASA’s ATS-3 weather and communications satellite in 1967. The photo was taken from geostationary orbit, some 34,000 kilometres above the surface of the Earth, and shows most of the western hemisphere, with South America most prominent. And you can see quite clearly that the Earth is round. It looks spherical, for the other landmasses that we know are there are hidden around the other side, and there is foreshortening of the features near the edges which matches our experience with spherical objects.

ATS-3 image of Earth

Photo of Earth taken by NASA’s ATS-3 satellite in 1967. (Public domain image by NASA.)

A more famous image of Earth taken from space is the Blue Marble image, captured by the Apollo 17 astronauts on their way to the Moon in 1972. This photo was taken from a distance of about 45,000 kilometres.

Blue Marble image of Earth

The Blue Marble photo of Earth taken by Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972. (Public domain image by NASA.)

This image is clearer and it’s arguably easier to see the spherical shape of the planet. Both these photos were taken with the full hemisphere lit by the sun.

The Apollo 13 astronauts, in their ill-fated flight, captured a different view, with part of the Earth in darkness because the sun was not behind them.

Apollo 13 image of Earth

The Earth photographed by Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970. (Public domain image by NASA.)

Here it is even easier to get a feeling for the round, spherical shape of Earth, because our experience with the way light falls on round objects helps our minds make sense of the curved shadow.

Well, that’s pretty definitive. But what else do we have?