Superman’s Home Planet Krypton ‘Found’

A prominent astrophysicist has pinned down a real location for Superman’s fictional home planet of Krypton.

Krypton is found 27.1 light-years from Earth, in the southern constellation Corvus (The Crow), says Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York City. The planet orbits the red dwarf star LHS 2520, which is cooler and smaller than our sun.

Tyson performed the celestial sleuthing at the request of DC Comics, which wanted to run a story about Superman’s search for his home planet.

The new book — Action Comics Superman #14, titled “Star Light, Star Bright” — comes out Wednesday (Nov. 7). Tyson appears within its pages, aiding the Man of Steel on his quest.

“As a native of Metropolis, I was delighted to help Superman, who has done so much for my city over all these years,” Tyson said in a statement. “And it’s clear that if he weren’t a superhero he would have made quite an astrophysicist.”

You’ll have to read “Star Light, Star Bright” to find out just how Superman and Tyson pinpoint Krypton. For amateur astronomers who want to spot the real star LHS 2520 in the night sky, here are its coordinates:

Right Ascension: 12 hours 10 minutes 5.77 seconds

Declination: -15 degrees 4 minutes 17.9 seconds

Proper Motion: 0.76 arcseconds per year, along 172.94 degrees from due north

Superman was born on Krytpon but was launched toward Earth as an infant by his father, Jor-El, just before the planet’s destruction. After touching down in Kansas, Superman was raised as Clark Kent by a farmer and his wife.

Now Superman will apparently know exactly where he came from.

“This is a major milestone in the Superman mythos that gives our super hero a place in the universe,” DC Entertainment co-publisher Dan DiDio said in a statement. “Having Neil deGrasse Tyson in the book was one thing, but by applying real-world science to this story he has forever changed Superman’s place in history. Now fans will be able to look up at the night’s sky and say, ‘That’s where Superman was born.’”

source

Quantum Entanglement With the Past

Side Note: Remember when I was going off on my ramblings about using quantum entanglement to somehow communicate with the past? Well this may not be as imaginative and hopeful about communicating with the past in our dimension as opposed to that of the quantum world but here’s an awesome article from livescience getting into this recent experiment physicists did back in April of this year, 2012. Basically they showed that in theory, it is possible to send a particle from one computer into another across vast distances long after one particle has ceased to exist, showing that quantum entanglement works both ways. A particle in the future can alter one in the past. This kind of experiment and discovery is paramount to the future of how we use our communications technology.

Entanglement is a weird state where two particles remain intimately connected, even when separated over vast distances, like two die that must always show the same numbers when rolled. For the first time, scientists have entangled particles after they’ve been measured and may no longer even exist.

If that sounds baffling, even the researchers agree it’s a bit “radical,” in a paper reporting the experiment published online April 22 in the journal Nature Physics.

“Whether these two particles are entangled or separable has been decided after they have been measured,” write the researchers, led by Xiao-song Ma of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the University of Vienna.

Essentially, the scientists showed that future actions may influence past events, at least when it comes to the messy, mind-bending world of quantum physics.

In the quantum world, things behave differently than they do in the real, macroscopic worldwe can see and touch around us. In fact, when quantum entanglement was first predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein expressed his distaste for the idea, calling it “spooky action at a distance.”

The researchers, taking entanglement a step further than ever before, started with two sets of light particles, called photons.

The basic setup goes like this:

Both pairs of photons are entangled, so that the two particles in the first set are entangled with each other, and the two particles in the second set are entangled with each other. Then, one photon from each pair is sent to a person named Victor. Of the two particles that are left behind, one goes to Bob, and the other goes to Alice.

But now, Victor has control over Alice and Bob’s particles. If he decides to entangle the two photons he has, then Alice and Bob’s photons, each entangled with one of Victor’s, also become entangled with each other. And Victor can choose to take this action at any time, even after Bob and Alice may have measured, changed or destroyed their photons.

“The fantastic new thing is that this decision to entangle two photons can be done at a much later time,” said research co-author Anton Zeilinger, also of the University of Vienna. “They may no longer exist.”

Such an experiment had first been predicted by physicist Asher Peres in 2000, but had not been realized until now.

“The way you entangle them is to send them onto a half-silvered mirror,” Zeilinger told LiveScience. “It reflects half of the photons, and transmits half. If you send two photons, one to the right and one to the left, then each of the two photons have forgotten where they come from. They lose their identities and become entangled.”

Zeilinger said the technique could one day be used to communicate between superfast quantum computers, which rely on entanglement to store information. Such a machine has not yet been created, but experiments like this are a step toward that goal, the researchers say.

“The idea is to create two particle pairs, send one to one computer, the other to another,” Zeilinger said.”Then if these two photons are entangled, the computers could use them to exchange information.”