04/25/2002
Truly
Brian Trumbore closed a recent Week in Review with a farewell to Arnold Palmer in the Masters and a statement that he would never forget walking 18 holes with Arnie. Many decades ago, I was in the gallery at a "Tournament of Champions" in Las Vegas. It was my first golf tournament and I followed a young Arnie, who was paired with Cary Middlecoff. At one point, Arnie''s drive landed behind a tree directly in line with the green. He would obviously have to lay up. Not Arnie. He walked up and remarked to us, "That''s not so bad, is it?" Of course, he curved that ball around the tree onto the green and I became a member of Arnie''s Army right there.
In contrast, could anything be stranger than the world''s top golfers'' performances once Tiger took the lead in the Masters? Especially shocking was Vijay, still in contention, dumping two balls in the water and carding a 9 on the 15th hole. I know just how Vijay must have felt. A couple days ago, I was on my way to breaking 100 for the first time in three years, arriving at the 17th hole needing only two sixes to accomplish this impressive feat. I got my 6 on the 18th but preceded this by skulling three balls into the pond and 3-putting for a 13 on the 17th!
Since we also discussed strange things in last week''s column, how could I resist those strange objects that have been in the news recently? I mean those two stars that go by the monikers of 3C58 and RXJ1856. (Can you tell me why my spellchecker has just flagged RXJ1856 but let 3C58 go unchallenged?) You''ve never heard of these two stars? I hadn''t either but now it seems that they may be true "strange" stars. What''s with all this "strange" stuff? Let''s dig into it a bit deeper.
Regular readers might guess that, when digging into something deeper, I often start with hydrogen, the simplest element. An atom of ordinary hydrogen is essentially a negatively charged electron whizzing around a positively charged proton. Suppose we take this hydrogen atom and squeeze it so hard that we force the electron to fuse into the proton. We now have a neutron, which has no charge since the negative and positive charges cancel each other.
But we discussed in an earlier column that a neutron is actually made up of particles known as quarks. Physicists are sort of quirky about quarks and arbitrarily call the various kinds of quarks by such names as "up" and "down". A neutron is two down quarks and one up quark. (In case you wonder how the quarks got there when we merged the proton and electron, a proton is also made up of quarks.)
But now let''s squeeze our neutron really hard. If we squeeze hard enough, maybe we can break up the neutron into its pieces, the quarks. We might also have to heat the neutron to pretty high temperatures to pry the quarks apart. They really like to stick together. If we do manage to break up the neutron, we would find that some of the quarks have changed into what physicists call "strange" quarks. I agree, any quark is strange by normal standards but let''s humor those physicists.
Let''s now go back to stars and a brief refresher course about what happens to them when they start to burn out. As our sun starts to ''burn" less and less hydrogen there will be a point at which the force of gravity takes over. Eventually, the sun will shrink and end up as a "white dwarf", about the size of Earth. Much bigger stars than our sun end up as black holes.
Then there are the stars that are bigger than our sun but too small to become black holes. These end up as neutron stars. The gravity is powerful enough to squeeze the protons and electrons together to form neutrons. These neutron stars are typically around 12 to 20 miles in diameter. Pretty small potatoes as stars go but the amount of mass is fantastic. Imagine the mass of our sun being squashed down into a ball less than the length of a Marathon run in diameter.
You may have already deduced what comes next. Suppose that the star is more massive than the star that ends up as a neutron star but too small to become a black hole. What happens to it? With more gravity, could it squeeze the neutrons so much that they break up into quarks? Bingo! That''s what''s so exciting about our friends 3C58 and RXJ1856.
To me, 3C58 is interesting because its history goes back to August of 1181, 821 years ago, when observers in China and Japan saw a supernova explosion that gave birth to 3C58. X-ray measurements from the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory have been used to calculate the temperature of 3C58 and it''s twice as low as would be expected if it were a neutron star cooling down for over 8 centuries. The star is also 16 times lower in luminosity than expected for a neutron star. The proposed explanation is that 3C58 is a true "strange" star containing strange and other quarks. David Helfand of Columbia University and the Chandra team did this work.
Jeremy Drake and his colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics looked at the light and X-rays coming from RXJ1856. From these data, they calculated the size as being only about half the size of a neutron star. If their size estimate is correct, RXJ cannot be a neutron star. Again, the explanation proposed is that RXJ is a strange star made up of quarks.
As with any new finding, there are some disclaimers and skeptics. It''s possible that the stars could be neutron stars and the data may have been misinterpreted due to a lack of thorough understanding of neutron star behavior. However, if the strange quark star proposal holds up, these stars present an opportunity to study a form of matter that doesn''t exist here on Earth. Billions of dollars have been and are being spent on costly atom smashers trying to approach the generation of matter composed of free quarks. If these stars and others are indeed composed of free quarks, the physicists should have a great time measuring the properties of this superdense matter.
Meanwhile, I shall continue to try to understand another difficult fundamental problem. What is the unseen physical force that causes a golf ball to be attracted so strongly to bodies of water? In truth, there are probably more individuals interested in the solution to this problem than in free quarks and strange stars.
Addendum: I went on the World Golf Hall of Fame Web site to check the spelling of Middlecoff''s name and found that he was no slouch either. He won two U.S. Opens and a Masters, but was also known for his "glacial" pace on the course due to his "fastidious" setup routine. In fact, he might have won the 1957 Open but for his slowness. In that Open he closed with two 68s to tie Dick Mayer, forcing a playoff. Mayer showed up for the playoff with a camping stool to use while Middlecoff prepared to hit the ball. Speculation is that the ploy shook up Middlecoff so much that he shot a 79 and lost to Mayer by 7 strokes!
Allen F. Bortrum
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