GRB 990510 and a Solar Wind Problem Extracted in late September 2002 from: West Nile Virus Latest update 12 May 2008. Recent changes or additions are in bold. Key Words: astrobiology, exobiology, gamma-ray bursts, nuclear photodissociation, solar wind This page begins with a West Nile Virus arrival date problem, but migrates to a possible connection between GRB 990510 and a very unique space weather event.. The null hypothesis in the basic article is that there is no significant correlation between whatever Venus does and new outbreaks (of unknown origin) of West Nile Virus. The metric being used in the study is the time differential between Venus inferior conjunctions and initial cases of West Nile Virus in geographical regions where surface-to-surface transmission of the disease from other terrestrial regions is questionable. 1999 - United States The first case of West Nile virus in the Western hemisphere has been reported to have occurred in New York City (two dead crows) on June 29, 1999. The onset may have been about two weeks earlier. According to a U.S. Government Accounting Office report(1), a veterinarian at Bayside Veterinary Clinic (New York City area?) found crows with signs of nervous system disorders in the mid-June to late July 1999 time frame. The birds were treated. Those that survived were released. Special Problem If one chooses to think in terms of extraterrestrial pathogens entering Earth's upper atmosphere one to two months prior to their expression at the Earth's surface, then the upper atmosphere drop-in time frame (for the June 29, 1999 USA WNV bird deaths) would have been roughly April 29 to May 29. In the middle of that period, the angle between Venus and Earth, with respect to the sun, would have been on the order of 70 degrees. At that angle the solar wind should have blown Venusian particles, biological or otherwise, well clear of the Earth. See following diagram. This looks like trouble for the Venusian pathogen hypothesis. Venus-Sun-Earth angle approx 70 degrees - Normal solar wind. Top On the other hand.... (Read: Save the Principle!) An unprecedented solar wind disruption took place on May 10, 1999, which may have some bearing on the interplanetary particle delivery problem. From late May 10, 1999 to early May 12, 1999, NASA's ACE and Wind spacecraft observed that the density of the solar wind dropped by more than 98 percent. See NASA's article: The Day the Solar Wind Disappeared. This writer speculates that the unusually intense Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB 990510), which was also detected on May 10, 1999, at about 8:49 universal time (UT), caused the solar wind disruption just mentioned. The effects of the GRB should have been at least two-fold. Keep in mind that the GRB radiation flashed through the solar system from a point near the South Celestial Pole, and that most of the material density associated with the solar wind is concentrated near the solar system's equatorial plane. (Click here to see a graph of Ulysses spacecraft data regarding solar wind speed as a function of heliographic latitude.) The thrust of this paragraph leads to a dead end. The following paragraph spells out the problem. The primary effect of concern, would be that the intense light pressure of the GRB should have imparted a northward impulse to the whole circumstellar disk of solar wind material. The disk would have begun levitating, so to speak, generally northward. If the rate of the northward movement was sufficient, the disk, in its entirety, could be removed from our line of sight to the sun. In fact, over a 17 hour period the solar system's equatorial region became nearly devoid of solar wind particles. (During this period the solar wind speed in the equatorial plane tapered off to about half its normal value and the solar wind electrons developed a northerly direction component.) January 22, 2003 note. The light pressure scenario described above misses the mark. The upward momentum, supplied by GRB 990510, was much too small to get the solar wind disk "lifting" accomplished. (Maximum induced upward velocity of the disk would have been on the order of one centimeter per second .) That leaves the "other" effect, mentioned in the following paragraphs, to save (or lose) the day. Quantitative details of that exercise were "embargoed" until after the Mississippi Academy of Sciences meeting in Hattiesburg MS on 14 February 2003. The abstract for the author's presentation is online on page 77 of the [PDF] Journal of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences, Volume 48, No. 1, January 2003. (End of January 22, 2003 note.) [The formerly embargoed material has been incorporated later on in this article.] The other effect, which should have occurred much more rapidly, would be that the majority of all exposed interplanetary atomic nuclei, those more massive than hydrogen (H1), would tend to get photodissociated (all the way down to protons and electrons) by the Gamma radiation. The NASA article, referenced above, described a paucity of heavier ions in the solar wind. (Time frame not stated.)     "According to observations from the ACE spacecraft, the density of     helium dropped to less than 0.1% of its normal value, and heavier ions,     held back by the Sun's gravity, apparently could not escape at all." . . . On average it takes 4.3 days for ions to travel from the Sun to the Earth. If the sun had lost its acceleration vigor at about the same time as the wind density began decreasing, ... then there should have been some remarkable corresponding ... electromagnetic perturbation in the Sun's appearance four to five days earler. The author has seen no reference to such an event. [RSF 07 July 2003 Revised 05 Jul 2007.] If the GRB photodissociated the heavier nuclei, then it should have been accomplished within a fraction of a second whenever/wherever the radiation passed through a given volume of space. Instant plasma! Comparison of various spacecraft data has probably already resolved that question. Consequences of Photodissociation/Disentegration of "Heavy" Nuclei (Added 24 February 2003.) This new material was presented at the Mississippi Academy of Sciences meeting in Hattiesburg Mississippi on 14 February 2003. According to the author's Emission-Absorption-Scattering (EAS) model of sub-quantum physics, a neutron consists of a proton with an electron in a grazing orbit. (This viewpoint might make Heisenberg unhappy, but it is basically consistent with the 1920's idea of nuclear electrons.) See Emission-Absorption-Scattering (EAS) Sub-quantum Physics and subsidiary articles, EAS Nuclear Glue and EAS Neutron Beta Decay. In the EAS model of a neutron, an electron would orbit a proton at about 0.91 times the speed of light. At this orbit speed the electrical force between the proton and electron would be equal to and opposite to the electron's so called orbital centrifugal force. The orbit radius would be on the order of 1.3 fermis , i.e. 1.3 x 10e-15 meter and the orbital frequency would be on the order of 10e22 Hertz (Hz). The upper end of the measurable Gamma ray spectrum is also on the order of 10e22 Hz. Whenever the frequency of a wavelet of Gamma radiation happens to approximate the orbiting frequency of a nuclear electron, the Gamma radiation can electromagnetically pump energy into ... the electron's orbit. ... This interaction of Gamma radiation with the orbiting electron can ultimately lead to the electron's escape from the proton. (This is analogous to pumping a swing at the proper frequency to make it's oscillations increase in amplitude.) From the EAS viewpoint, the end result of this process would be called neutron beta decay. The average speed for escaping electrons in neutron beta decay should be on the order of one half the speed of light. (They tend to be slowed the electrical interaction between the proton and the electron.) Assuming conservation of linear momentum for neutron decay products, the proton decay product will have an average speed on the order of 0.5 c / 1737, or roughly 100 km/sec. That speed is about one fourth of that for the average slow solar wind. Whenever the neutrons in any given nucleus are induced to undergo beta decay, then the nucleus itself will rapidly fly apart due to proton-proton Coulomb repulsion. (   . . .  ) It is postulated that extremely high energy Gamma-rays induce nuclear neutrons to beta decay which leads to explosive photodissociation of all the remaining nuclear protons. [Added 7 July 2006.] GRB 990510 illuminated the solar wind disk from a point near the direction of the Southern celestial pole. It is speculated that the majority of the heavier nuclei in the solar wind underwent Gamma-driven photodissociation, which blew the solar wind apart. [A sentence about solar wind disk lifting has been removed.] That the density of the heavier nuclei dropped to less than 0.1 percent of normal, can be attributed to the dissociation process, rather than to the Sun's loss of its ability to accelerate the ions above their escape velocities. For info on GRB 990510 see the European Southern Observatory (ESO) press release Southern Fireworks above ESO Telescopes, 18 May 1999, and the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) press release The Light of 5 Billion Billion Suns, 19 May 1999. Regardless of what caused the solar wind interruption, it could be useful to determine whether or not the two-day cessation could have permitted Venusian particles to jaywalk, so to speak, to Earth, as depicted in diagram (B). Solar wind reduction allows jaywalker event? (Revised Diagram) The present delivery mechanism under consideration is that Venus, as an electrically charged sphere, accelerated charged microscopic particles (including microbes) in its upper atmosphere, sufficiently for them to make the roughly 100 million mile journey to Earth before the solar wind disk regained its normal density. For this transfer to work, as stated, the viral particles would have to be traveling away from Venus at approximately twice the average speed of the typical solar wind. . . . Any jaywalking Venus viruses that reached Earth's upper atmosphere on around May 13, 1999 could conceivably have been doing their thing, i.e., initial outbreaks, in the time frame of June 13 to July 13. That's using the one to two months window mentioned above. The first reported cases of crows with nervous disorders (birds usually get it first) occurred in mid-June. Diagram (C) shows the normal hypothetical delivery geometry for Venusian particles to Earth. (In this case the August 22, 1999 Venus inferior conjunction is being shown.) There was a resurgence of West Nile Virus in the United States in the September-October timeframe. Normal Venus-to-Earth Delivery System 15-17 June 2003 A talk on this subject was presented in the 10th Annual Conference of the Natural Philosophy Alliance (NPA), at the University of Connecticut at Storrs on 9 June 2003. The following additions to this web article are made in response to questions and comments raised by the conferees. It was stated above that nuclear electrons, having orbital frequencies on the order of 10^22 Hz could be electromagnetically "pumped out of orbit" by gamma radiation of the same approximate frequency. This means that an energy audit is in order. The purpose of the audit will be to see if gamma radiation and accepted binding energy ideas can account for the disintegration of a significant fraction of the heavier nuclei in the solar wind. [This paragraph needs some re-write.] If we consider electromagnetic radiation to be comprised of photons, the following calculation for gamma photons of frequency 10^22 Hz is applicable. Here is a table for binding energies of the lightest nuclides. Based on energy considerations alone, the hypothetical 41 MeV gamma photons should be able to totally disassemble any of the light nucleons up thru Lithium, and cause serious trouble for more massive nuclei. Then there is the matter of checking the fluence (energy flux per unit area) for GRB 990510 against the number of candidate nucleons to be disassembled. If we restrict ourselves to a very oversimplified scenario by pretending that the "heavier" nuclei in the solar wind are strictly deuterium nuclei (one proton + one neutron), we can make a rough estimate of how many nucleons could be involved in the gamma-induced fission process. (Fission may not be the most appropriate term.) The following solar-wind disk relations will be used. Here, we concern ourselves with the lower half of the disk. (If we get the lower half moving upward, the top half will follow.) Keep in mind that the binding energy for a Deuterium nucleus is 2.22 MeV. We then calculate how much energy GRB 990510 could apply to the problem. We use the BATSE fluence(2) for radiation above 20 keV. It appears that, based on energy considerations alone, GRB 990510 could have induced a total of about eight fission events in the square-centimeter column of height equal to one-half the thickness of the solar wind disk. If the numbers above are more-or-less in order, then we cannot apply accepted energy considerations to the problem of diffusing the solar wind external to the Sun itself.. That would leave the resonance-like pumping interaction of Gamma-radiation and hypothetical orbiting nuclear electrons as an open-ended adventure. (One other possibility, is that there was no direct en-route connection between the Gamma-ray Burst and the solar wind perturbation, and that something did in fact affect the Sun, itself, in some unknown way.) With regard to the idea that the solar wind disk became less dense (enroute), another possibility could be that, instead of the disk being lifted from below, the rapidly disassembled nucleons may have caused the disk to expand explosively, above and below the ecliptic, which led to the temporarily rarified solar wind, which was nearly devoid of nuclei more massive than bare protons. The normal solar wind speed is about 400 km/sec. At that speed it takes about one hour to for solar wind perturbations to traverse the 1.5 million km distance between the L1-region ACE spacecraft and the Earth-region WIND spacecraft. If the onsets of the solar wind density decreases, as recorded by these spacecraft, occurred within minutes, or tens of minutes, of each other, it would be compelling evidence that a Sun-based phenomenon was NOT the ultimate cause of the disruption. [The time delay, between the ACE and WIND spacecraft, for a pre-GRB solar wind perturbation, which started at 07:55 UT on 10 May 1999 (solar wind speed was approximately 400 km/sec) was, in fact, on the order of one hour. ACE-WIND delay analysis for perturbations in the hours immediately following the GRB, are in work. This exposition is not out of the woods yet. This note, was inserted on 24 June 2003. RSF] The following graph shows ACE and WIND proton densities before and after GRB 990510. . . . ACE and WIND SWE Proton Densities vs Time Source: http://www-ssc.igpp.ucla.edu/forms/polar/corr_data.html For a more developed picture of the solar wind event see ACE-WIND 09-12 May 1999. More material is being added to this section. Go to basic article, References (1) [PDF] Timeline of Key Dates and Events in the West Nile Virus Outbreak, 1999. (2) Michael S. Briggs, Robert D. Preece, Jan van Paradijs, Jean in 't Zand, John Heise, Erik Kuulkers and C. Kouveliotou, "Wide-Band Spectroscopy of GRB 990510," Gamma-Ray Bursts - 5th Huntsville Symposium, (1999) AIP Conference Proceedings, 526, 125-129. Related Articles and Web Pages Energy Burst from An X-Ray Star Disturbed Earth's Environment - Stanford University Courtesy Science Blog - (2004) Postscript For the author's take on what's really going on with gamma-ray bursts, please go to Ritzian Gamma-Ray Bursts Sampling of recent papers on Photo Induced Nuclear fission. (These deal with heavy nuclei.) R.A. Malaney, (1989), Nature, 337, 718. "Gamma-Ray induced fission and the Production of Technetium in Red Giants." T.E. Cowan et al., (2000) Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 903. Deals with gamma-induced fission of 238U. S. Fan, A. Wagner, E. Grosse, http://www.fz-ossendorf.de/FWK/jb00/fan1.html "Postneutron Yield of Bremsstrahlung-Induced Fission of 238U with an Endpoint Energy of 12 MeV". W.D. Ledingham, R.P. Singhal, P. McKenna, I. Spencer, (2002), Europhysics News Vol. 33 No. 4. "Laser-induced nuclear physics and applications." Papers on Gamma-Ray Induced Nuclear Photodissociation. (These deal with light nuclei.) Kikuchi, Sheishi, "The Photodissociation of the Deuteron by High Energy Gamma-Rays," Phys. Rev., 85, 1062-1063 (1952) - NADS Kikuchi, Sheishi, "Nuclear Photodissociation by High Energy Synchrotron Gamma-Rays," Phys. Rev., 86, 41-51 (1952) - NADS Shade Tree Physics Send comments/inputs to Robert Fritzius at fritzius@bellsouth.net Top