Friday, August 28, 2009

The planet that should not exist

There is an interesting news story about a planet that should not exist. Thanks to Kea also for additional references: see this and this. The exoplanet is so close to its Sun that it should have spiralled long ago to the Sun. For some reason this has not happened.

The finding brings in mind more than hundred year old problem: why the electron orbiting atom did not spiral into atomic nucleus? The solution of the puzzle was provided by the discovery of quantum theory. The postulate was that electron moves on Bohr orbits and can make only transitions between the Bohr orbits emitting light in these transitions. There is minimum value for the radius of Bohr orbit. Later wave mechanism emerged from Bohr model.

TGD view about dark matter suggests an analogous solution to the astrophysical variant of this puzzle. Planets correspond to Bohr orbits but for a gigantic value of Planck constant whose value is dictated by Equivalence Principle to high degree. This Planck constant could be assigned to the space-time sheet mediating gravitational interaction or even with matter. This means astroscopic quantum coherence and the interpretation is that astroscopic quantum coherence is associated with dark matter around which visible matter condenses and makes in this manner visible the quantum character of dark matter.

That the planet does not spiral to the star means smallness of dissipation and this is guaranteet by the large value of hbar. The naive estimate is that dissipation rate is proportional to the inverse of hbar. As Donkerheid noticed also Mars-Phobos forms a similar mysterious system and the explanation would be same.

A more refined view about the situation is in terms of light-like 3-surfaces, which are basic dynamical objects in quantum TGD. At elementary particle level their size is about CP2 size (about 104 Planck lengths). Also macroscopic and even astroscopic sizes are possible and this would be the case for dark matter for which Planck constant and thus also quantum scales are scaled up. Note that light-like 3-surfaces are boundaries between regions of space-time with Euclidian and Minkowskian signature of metric. The recent TGD inspired vision about Universe is as a kind of Indra's net formed by light-like 3-surfaces appearing in all length scales and having extremely complex topology. For details see the chapter Anyons and Quantum Hall Effect of "Towards M-matrix" explaining Quantum Hall Effect in terms of macroscopic light-like 3-surfaces and suggesting that this kind of anyonic phases are realized also in astrophysical scales for dark matter.

Amusingly, the counterpart of Planck length scaling as (hbar G)1/2 is apart from numerical constant equal to (v0)-1/2 GM (2GM is Scharschild radius) if one assumes that hbar= GM2/v0 is associated with an astrophysical system with mass M: v0/c ≈ 2-11 holds true for the inner planets in the solar system. Planck length would be few orders of magnitude larger than Schwartscild radius so that Planck scale physics would be scaled up to astrophysical length scale! Black-hole entropy which is proportional to 1/hbar is of order unity and would be extremely small for the ideally dark black-hole. Obviously M-theorists would be forced to reconsider the physcal significance of their black hole entropy calculations if this picture is correct.

The interested reader can consult the chapter Quantum Astrophysics of "Physics in Many-Sheeted Space-time" and the chapter Anyons and Quantum Hall Effect of "Towards M-matrix".

7 comments:

Kea said...

Many more news articles are showing up now.

donkerheid said...

The article you've linked mentions Mars and its moon too. Is it the same thing in your opinion?

Matti Pitkänen said...

Thank you Kea.

Matti Pitkänen said...

Thank you Donkerheid,

I attach a piece of text from the article.

"In our solar system, the closest example of a similar mystery is Mars' moon, Phobos. It orbits Mars at a distance of only about 5,600 miles. (Our moon orbits Earth at 40 times that distance.) Phobos' orbit should cause it to crash into Mars in just 30 million years, a fraction of the 4.5-billion-year age of the solar system."

I do not see any big difference between Mars and its Moon as compared to star and its planets.

Note that just the assumption of a large value of Planck constant (leaving open the question about Bohr orbit) would reduce the friction: the naive guess would be that the loss of energy by friction is proportional to 1/hbar.

Javier said...

I readed somewhere that it was beeing revised the validity of the detection approach fr all those planets.

Some people suspected that in fact it was possible that some stars actually have some periodical diming because of some unknown reason. This periodical diming was confused with planets orbiting around them. for that reasoon it was good that there were actual direct observations of some planets. In fact one of that articles mentions something that seems to state that there is an independent observation of the planet beyond the star diming, but it is not to clear about it.

By the wya, that hipotesis about periodical diming is earliest that this new about this planet so I wonder wy the author (probably spetialists in the field) don't even mention it.

For theorethical physicist it would be good to have a clear experimiental status of those things in order to know if Einstein gravity needs to be modified in astrophisical, i.e. macroscopical, situatios that would be a really unexpected situation.

Matti Pitkänen said...

Critical thinking is needed. As I mentioned, there is also a mystery very near to us. Mars has moon, Phobos, which should have also spiralled to Mars long time ago.

Low dissipation rates are the basic testable prediction of astroscopic quantum coherence. From a conference discussion with Nassim Haramein few years ago I learned that too low dissipation rates represent quite general phenomenon in astrophysics. Unfortunately I do not have any general reference.

Matti Pitkänen said...

To Javier:

The new physics that I am proposing would relate more to the basic quantum theory rather than description of gravitation which would be in TGD framework geometrical and imply also stringy picture in finite measurement resolution.

There are also other gravitational anomalies suggesting large values of gravitational Planck constant.
One such anomaly is the strange behavior of penduli during solar eclipses discovered by Nobelist (in economy) Allais. I have discussed a model for this effect.