No Arabic abstract
Self-organization is a property of dissipative nonlinear processes that are governed by an internal driver and a positive feedback mechanism, which creates regular geometric and/or temporal patterns and decreases the entropy, in contrast to random processes. Here we investigate for the first time a comprehensive number of 16 self-organization processes that operate in planetary physics, solar physics, stellar physics, galactic physics, and cosmology. Self-organizing systems create spontaneous {sl order out of chaos}, during the evolution from an initially disordered system to an ordered stationary system, via quasi-periodic limit-cycle dynamics, harmonic mechanical resonances, or gyromagnetic resonances. The internal driver can be gravity, rotation, thermal pressure, or acceleration of nonthermal particles, while the positive feedback mechanism is often an instability, such as the magneto-rotational instability, the Rayleigh-Benard convection instability, turbulence, vortex attraction, magnetic reconnection, plasma condensation, or loss-cone instability. Physical models of astrophysical self-organization processes involve hydrodynamic, MHD, and N-body formulations of Lotka-Volterra equation systems.
The origin of the elements is a fascinating question that scientists have been trying to answer for the last seven decades. The formation of light elements in the primordial universe and heavier elements in astrophysical sources occurs through nuclear reactions. We can say that nuclear processes are responsible for the production of energy and synthesis of elements in the various astrophysical sites. Thus, nuclear reactions have a determining role in the existence and evolution of several astrophysical environments, from the Sun to the spectacular explosions of supernovae. Nuclear astrophysics attempts to address the most basic and important questions of our existence and future. There are still many issues that are unresolved such as, how stars and our Galaxy have formed and how they evolve, how and where are the heaviest elements made, what is the abundance of nuclei in the universe and what is the nucleosynthesis output of the various production processes and why the amount of lithium-7 observed is less than predicted. In this paper, we review our current understanding of the different astrophysical nuclear processes leading to the formation of chemical elements and pay particular attention to the formation of heavy elements occurring during high-energy astrophysical events. Thanks to the recent multi-messenger observation of a binary neutron star merger, which also confirmed production of heavy elements, explosive scenarios such as short gamma-ray bursts and the following kilonovae are now strongly supported as nucleosynthesis sites.
Self-organization properties of sustained magnetized plasma are applied to selected solar data to understand solar magnetic fields. Torsional oscillations are speed-up and slow-down bands of the azimuthal flow that correlate with the solar cycle, and they imply the existence of a symmetric solar dynamo with a measured polar flux of 3x10^14 Wb. It is shown that the solar dynamo is thin (~0.1 Mm gradient scale size) and powerful (~10^23 W). These properties are found from the amplitude of the torsional oscillations and the relationship of their velocity contours to solar magnetograms supports the result. The dynamo has enough power to heat the chromosphere and to power the corona and the solar wind. The dynamo also causes a rigid rotation of the heliosphere out to at least the corona and the relationship of the rotation of the corona to solar magnetograms supports this result as well. The thin solar dynamo sustains a thin stable minimum energy state that seems to be covering most of the solar surface just below the photosphere. The magnetic field lines of the minimum energy state should be parallel to the solar surface and rotate with distance from the surface with 2{pi} radians of rotation in ~1 Mm Resistive diffusion helps to push the magnetic fields to the surface and the global magnetic structure (GMS) seems to lose {pi} radians every 11 years, causing the observed 180 degree flipping of the solar magnetic field. The thin sheets of magnetized plasma in solar prominences may be the lost thin sheets of the GMS. For completeness, the formation of sunspots, CMEs and flares is discussed.
Despite the absence of a membrane-enclosed nucleus, the bacterial DNA is typically condensed into a compact body - the nucleoid. This compaction influences the localization and dynamics of many cellular processes including transcription, translation, and cell division. Here, we develop a model that takes into account steric interactions among the components of the Escherichia coli transcriptional-translational machinery (TTM) and out-of-equilibrium effects of mRNA transcription, translation, and degradation, in order to explain many observed features of the nucleoid. We show that steric effects, due to the different molecular shapes of the TTM components, are sufficient to drive equilibrium phase separation of the DNA, explaining the formation and size of the nucleoid. In addition, we show that the observed positioning of the nucleoid at midcell is due to the out-of-equilibrium process of messenger RNA (mRNA) synthesis and degradation: mRNAs apply a pressure on both sides of the nucleoid, localizing it to midcell. We demonstrate that, as the cell grows, the production of these mRNAs is responsible for the nucleoid splitting into two lobes, and for their well-known positioning to 1/4 and 3/4 positions on the long cell axis. Finally, our model quantitatively accounts for the observed expansion of the nucleoid when the pool of cytoplasmic mRNAs is depleted. Overall, our study suggests that steric interactions and out-of-equilibrium effects of the TTM are key drivers of the internal spatial organization of bacterial cells.
We explore the suggestions by Uzdensky (2007) and Cassak et al. (2008) that coronal loops heated by magnetic reconnection should self-organize to a state of marginal collisionality. We discuss their model of coronal loop dynamics with a one-dimensional hydrodynamic calculation. We assume that many current sheets are present, with a distribution of thicknesses, but that only current sheets thinner than the ion skin depth can rapidly reconnect. This assumption naturally causes a density dependent heating rate which is actively regulated by the plasma. We report 9 numerical simulation results of coronal loop hydrodynamics in which the absolute values of the heating rates are different but their density dependences are the same. We find two regimes of behavior, depending on the amplitude of the heating rate. In the case that the amplitude of heating is below a threshold value, the loop is in stable equilibrium. Typically the upper and less dense part of coronal loop is collisionlessly heated and conductively cooled. When the amplitude of heating is above the threshold, the conductive flux to the lower atmosphere required to balance collisionless heating drives an evaporative flow which quenches fast reconnection, ultimately cooling and draining the loop until the cycle begins again. The key elements of this cycle are gravity and the density dependence of the heating function. Some additional factors are present, including pressure driven flows from the loop top, which carry a large enthalpy flux and play an important role in reducing the density. We find that on average the density of the system is close to the marginally collisionless value.
The dynamic of complex ordering systems with active rotational degrees of freedom exemplified by protein self-assembly is explored using a machine learning workflow that combines deep learning-based semantic segmentation and rotationally invariant variational autoencoder-based analysis of orientation and shape evolution. The latter allows for disentanglement of the particle orientation from other degrees of freedom and compensates for shifts. The disentangled representations in the latent space encode the rich spectrum of local transitions that can now be visualized and explored via continuous variables. The time dependence of ensemble averages allows insight into the time dynamics of the system, and in particular, illustrates the presence of the potential ordering transition. Finally, analysis of the latent variables along the single-particle trajectory allows tracing these parameters on a single particle level. The proposed approach is expected to be universally applicable for the description of the imaging data in optical, scanning probe, and electron microscopy seeking to understand the dynamics of complex systems where rotations are a significant part of the process.