NASA – Bean Thinking

Coffee and Pluto

Three billion miles away, on an object formerly known as the planet Pluto (now sadly demoted to the dwarf planet Pluto), there exists a plain of polygonal cells 10-40 km across, extending over a region of about 1200 km diameter. Last year, the New Horizons mission photographed this region and these strange shapes (see photo) as the probe flew past Pluto and its moon Charon. But what could have caused them, and perhaps more importantly for this website, can we see the same thing closer to home and specifically in a cup of coffee? Well, the answer to those questions are yes and probably, so what on Earth is happening on Pluto?

Plutonian polygons — What is causing these strange polygons on the surface of Pluto. Image © NASA

Pluto moves in an highly elliptical orbit with an average distance to the Sun of 5.9 billion km (3.7 billion miles). Each Pluto year is 248 Earth years but one day on Pluto is only 6½ Earth days. As it is so far from the Sun, it is very cold on Pluto’s surface, somewhere between -238 to -218 ºC. The polygons that were photographed by New Horizons are in the ‘Sputnik Planum’ basin where the temperatures are at the lower end of that scale, somewhere around -238 ºC. At this temperature, nitrogen gas (which makes up 78% of the Earth’s own atmosphere) has not just liquified, it has solidified; turned into nitrogen ice. These polygons are made of solid nitrogen.

But solid nitrogen is a very odd type of solid and in fact, at the temperatures on Pluto’s surface, solid nitrogen is expected to flow with a very high viscosity (like an extremely gloopy liquid). And it is this fact that is the clue to the origin of the odd polygons (and the link to fluids like coffee). Pluto is not just a cold dead rock circling the Sun, but instead it has a warm interior, heated by the radioactive decay of elements in the rocks making up Pluto. This means that the base of the nitrogen ice in the Sputnik Planum basin is being heated and, as two groups writing earlier this summer in Nature showed, this leads to the nitrogen ice in the basin forming convection currents. The warmer nitrogen ‘ice’ at the bottom of the basin flows towards the surface forming convection patterns. It is these nitrogen convection cells that appear as the polygons on the surface of Pluto.

Rayleigh Benard cells in clouds — Rayleigh-Benard cells in cloud structures above the Pacific showing both closed and open cell structures. Image © NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response

Of course, convection occurs in coffee too, we can see it when we add milk to the coffee and watch the patterns form or by observing the dancing caustics in a cup of tea. So why is it that we see stable polygons of nitrogen on the surface of Pluto but not coffee polygons on the surface of our coffee? The first point to note is the time-scale. Although the polygons on Pluto are moving, they are doing so much more slowly than the liquid movement in a cup of tea or coffee, at a rate of only a few cm per year. But secondly, the type of convection may be different. Although both of the papers in Nature attributed the polygons on Pluto to convection, they differed in the type of convection that they considered was happening. McKinnon et al., suggest that the viscosity of the nitrogen on Pluto is much greater on the surface of the basin than in the warmer interior and so the surface flows far more slowly. This leads to cells that are much wider than they are deep. We would not expect such a drastic change in the viscosity of the coffee between the (cool) top and (warm) bottom of the cup! In contrast, Trowbridge et al., think that the cells are Rayleigh-Bénard convection cells, circular convection cells that form such that the cells are as wide as they are deep. This sort of convection is seen in a coffee cup as well as in the sky on cloudy days: On the Earth, clouds often form at the top (or bottom) of Rayleigh-Benard cells, where hot humid air meets cold dry air (more info here). But to form cells that you can see in your coffee (such as are on the surface of Pluto) you would need the coffee to be in a fairly thin layer and heated from below. You would also need some way of visualising the cells, either with an infra-red camera or with powder suspended in the liquid, it would be hard I think to see it in coffee alone. However, you can see these cells in cooking oil as this video shows:

As well as providing the link to the coffee, the different types of convection on the surface of Pluto hypothesised by Trowbridge and McKinnon have consequences for our understanding of the geology of Pluto. If the cells are formed through Rayleigh-Bénard convection (Trowbridge), the basin has to be as deep as the cells are wide (meaning the basin has to be 10-40km deep with nitrogen ice). If McKinnon is correct on the other hand, the basin only needs to be 3-6 km deep. It is easy to imagine that an impact crater could cause a shallow crater such as that needed for McKinnon’s mechanism. A deeper crater would create another puzzle.

If you do manage to heat coffee (or tea) from below and form some lovely Rayleigh-Bénard cells while doing so I’d love to see the photos or video. Please do contact me either by email, Facebook or Twitter. Otherwise, if you just enjoy watching the patterns form on your coffee, it’s worth remembering that there could be an entire cosmos in that cup.

Coffee & Contrails (I)

contrail, sunset — A set of criss-crossing contrails taken in the evening.

If you gaze up at the sky on a clear day, you will often see a few contrails tracing their way across the blue. Formed as a result of water in the atmosphere condensing onto exhaust particles from aeroplanes, contrails are a regular feature of the skies in our modern life. There are at least two ways that I can think of, in which the physics of the contrail is connected to the physics of the coffee cup, so, there will be two Daily Grind articles about them. This first one, about the physics of how we see them, and a second post (scheduled for 10th June) about interesting effects that we can see in them.

Perhaps now would be a good point to go and make a cup of coffee before coming back to this post. Make sure that you notice how the steam clouds form above the kettle spout as the water boils. Do you see the steam at the spout itself, or just a few centimetres above it? With the cup next to you, notice the steam rising above it. Does the steam seem more obvious on some days than others? For example, the coffee always seems to me to steam more on cold damp days in winter than on warm-ish days in late spring. Both of these observations (about where and when we see the steam clouds) are mirrored in the contrails, it’s time to take a closer look at the coffee.

V60 from Leyas — The clouds above a coffee cup are a rough indicator of the relative humidity.

The difference in the day to day visibility of the steam above the coffee cup is an indicator of the relative humidity of the atmosphere. If we prepare our cup of coffee on a day when the relative humidity is already high, adding that extra bit of water vapour from the cup leads to clouds of steam above the mug, as the water condenses into droplets of liquid water and forms clouds. If our coffee was instead prepared on a day with low relative humidity, the water vapour above the coffee cup is less likely to condense into clouds. Contrails are formed high in the atmosphere when the relative humidity is quite high. Exhaust particles from the engines of the plane offer a surface onto which the water in the surrounding (humid) atmosphere can condense to form clouds. We know that it is mostly the atmospheric moisture that is forming the contrails (rather than water from the exhaust itself) because of research done by NASA. In research flights, the amount of water vapour leaving the aeroplane engine was 1.7 grammes per metre of travel while the mass of water in the contrail was estimated to be between 20.7 and 41.2 kilograms per metre. This means that contrails can give a clue as to the weather: on dry days, contrails will not form because the water in the atmosphere is likely to remain a gas and therefore invisible to us, it is only when the air is already quite humid that contrails are likely to form and persist.

glass of milk, sky, Mie scattering — A glass of (diluted) milk can provide clues as to the colours of the clouds in the sky as well as the sky itself

Then there is the question of why we see them at all. Contrails appear as white clouds trailing behind the plane. We see them as white because of an optical effect caused by the size of the condensed droplets of water (actually ice) in the contrail. Objects appear as having different colours either as a result of light absorption by chemicals in the object (leaves are green because of chlorophyll) or as a result of light scattering from the object. A water droplet is colourless and so the colour we see coming from the droplet must be purely a consequence of light scattering rather than a light absorption effect. Clouds appear white because the water droplets within the cloud are as large, or larger than, the wavelength of visible light (0.7 μm). Droplets this size will scatter all wavelengths of visible light and so appear white. If the droplets were much smaller than the wavelength of light they would scatter different wavelengths by different amounts. It is because the atmosphere is full of such tiny particles (and molecules) that blue light is scattered more than red light in the atmosphere and so the sky appears blue to us from our vantage point on the Earth’s surface. Milk is composed of large fat droplets (which will scatter a white light) and smaller molecules which will preferentially scatter blue light, just as the sky. This is why you can mimic the colours of the sky in a glass of milk. It is because the water droplets have formed a few cm above the kettle spout that you can see them scattering the light. For exactly the same reason, the contrails in the sky appear as white clouds.

Contrails can persist in the sky for anything from a few minutes to a few days. Just like clouds, contrails affect the way that light (and heat) is reflected from the Sun or back towards the Earth. However, unlike normal clouds they are entirely man-made, another factor that could have an unknown effect on our climate. A few years ago, a volcano eruption in Iceland caused the closure of UK airspace (as well as the airspace of much of Europe). I remember being in the queue to buy a cup of coffee in the physics department and hearing the excited conversation of two atmospheric physicists behind me. For the first time they were able to study some particular atmospheric effects without the influence of any contrails. In effect they could start to understand the influence of contrails by this unique opportunity of taking measurements during their absence. What was a major pain in the neck for so many travellers in 2010 meant a lot of extra (but presumably very interesting) work for them.

Coffee & Contrails (II) is about the structures you can sometimes see within the contrail. If you can think of any other connections between coffee and contrails (or coffee and clouds) why not let us know in the comments section below.