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Unusual Lightcurve of a ‘What Is This’ Star

by Paul Gilster | Mar 28, 2019 | Deep Sky Astronomy & Telescopes | 18 Comments

VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) is a near-infrared instrument located at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal site, and is by all accounts the world's largest survey telescope, with extremely wide field of view and sensitive detectors. On the peak next to ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), VISTA shares its exceptional viewing conditions using a 4.1-meter primary mirror and a three-tonne camera with 16 infrared detectors. With its time devoted to six surveys ranging from complete southern sky coverage to small patches of sky looking for extremely faint objects, VISTA was bound to come up with interesting data, especially in the survey known as VVV, which stands for VISTA Variables in Via Láctea. Here, astronomers are homing in on regions that are obscured by dust in the bulge and southern Galactic disk, using pulsating RR Lyrae and Cepheid variables as distance indicators, with a focus on microlensing events, eclipsing binaries and pre-main sequence...

The Problem with Probes

by Paul Gilster | Mar 27, 2019 | Astrobiology and SETI | 70 Comments

I'll wrap up this three-part series on 'lurker' probes and ways of finding them with Keith Cooper's provocative take on the matter. A contributor to Centauri Dreams whose far-ranging ideas have fueled a number of dialogues here (see the archives), Keith is editor of Astronomy Now and the author of the upcoming book The Contact Paradox: Challenging Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. I've read the manuscript and can tell you that you're going to want this one on your shelves. Today, Keith takes us into the practical realm. If we were to find a Bracewell probe in our Solar System, what would we do with it? Who might discover it, who would claim its technologies, and what, under international law, would be its legal status? Plenty of material for science fiction plots here as we embark on the search to see what's out there among Earth's co-orbitals. by Keith Cooper It's enough to keep me awake at night. Suppose that an extraterrestrial probe is discovered in our...

Gregory Benford: Further Thoughts on ‘Lurkers’

by Paul Gilster | Mar 26, 2019 | Astrobiology and SETI | 70 Comments

Because I've been re-reading Gregory Benford's Galactic Center sequence (now into Furious Gulf), I want to quickly mention the galactic center simulation available here, which offers a 360-degree, ultra-high-definition view based on Chandra X-ray observations as massaged by NASA supercomputers. It's lively stuff, showing "the effects of dozens of massive stellar giants with fierce winds blowing off their surfaces in the region a few light years away from the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A* for short)." Just remember Greg got there first. But back to the probe question we've been examining. Jim Benford's take on a SETI search for 'lurkers,' probes that fit into the Bracewell category, examines targets known as Earth co-orbitals, as we saw on Friday. UCI physicist Greg Benford's comments about his brother's article examine the question of what the presence of such a probe in our system might imply. The possible scenarios take us into the realm of what Greg has...

A SETI Search of Earth’s Co-orbitals

by Paul Gilster | Mar 22, 2019 | Astrobiology and SETI | 46 Comments

One objection to SETI is that it is not falsifiable -- there is no point at which a lack of signals can prove that extraterrestrial civilizations do not exist. But there are some aspects of SETI that can be falsifiable. Consider a class of objects near enough for us to investigate not only with listening efforts but with probes, one small enough to be thoroughly covered, and one most people know almost nothing about. Could these offer a listening post for 'Bracewell probes,' a way of watching the development of our culture and reporting home to ETI? And if so, could we combine SETI with METI to advance both disciplines without compromising our own security? If the idea of nearby probes seems far-fetched today, it was even more so when Ronald Bracewell advanced his 'sentinel hypothesis.' Bracewell took the question of SETI and stood it on its ear. That was no mean feat in 1960, for SETI was just being born in that year through the efforts of Frank Drake at the Green Bank instrument in...

Working with the Unexpected at Asteroid Bennu

by Paul Gilster | Mar 21, 2019 | Asteroid and Comet Deflection | 28 Comments

We know by now to expect surprises when we do something for the first time with a spacecraft. The latest case in point is OSIRIS-REx, which has revealed multiple unexpected facets of the asteroid Bennu, near which it has been operating since December. Consider the surface of the asteroid, a key factor in how the mission goes forward since this is a sample return mission, and that involves finding a place relatively free of surface debris from which to take the sample. The problem: This smallest body ever to be orbited by a spacecraft turns out to be strewn with boulders. The original sample collection plan -- christened Touch-and-Go (TAG) -- will have to be altered, for it was dependent on a sample site with a 25-meter radius free of hazards. The OSIRIS-REx team has been unable to identify any site that meets those requirements. A new type of candidate site will have to be found, demanding higher performance using an updated sampling approach called Bullseye TAG that will be tailored...

Carbon Monoxide as Biosignature?

by Paul Gilster | Mar 20, 2019 | Exoplanetary Science | 26 Comments

Biosignature gases are those that can alert us to the possibility of life on a planet around another star. We're moving into the era of biosignature observation by studying the atmospheres of such planets through instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope, and the effort to catalog the combinations of atmospheric gases that point to life is intense and ongoing. One gas has turned out to be controversial. It's carbon monoxide, which in some quarters has been considered to be the opposite of a biosignature, a clear sign, if detected in sufficient abundance, that a planet is not inhabited. Edward Schwieterman (UC-Riverside) begs to disagree, and a team led by Schwieterman has produced its modeling of biosphere and atmosphere chemistry to focus on living planets that nonetheless support carbon monoxide at levels we should be able to detect. The work appears in the Astrophysical Journal. Interestingly, the paper harks back to our own planet's deep past. We don't expect to see high...

Exploring our System’s Dust Lanes

by Paul Gilster | Mar 19, 2019 | Asteroid and Comet Deflection | 10 Comments

Dust rings in the Solar System are of interest because they offer clues about the formation of the planets, as well as allowing us to contrast our own circumstellar dust with what we see around other stars in varying stages of planetary development. Recent work out of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center offers a dust ring with a difference from others we've found in our own system. Scientists have traced a dust ring near the orbit of Venus, and it's one with origins different than the dust that occurs in Earth's orbit as well as dust found near Mercury. Explaining what is going on in Earth's orbital path has us resort to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where the collisions of small objects create a steady source of dust. The material drifts gradually toward the Sun, but some of it, moving near the Earth, is drawn into our planet's orbit. A surprising amount of dust falls to Earth each day (one recent estimate is fully 60 tons of the stuff), and the mechanism seems a...

Spacefaring Mythologies

by Paul Gilster | Mar 15, 2019 | Culture and Society | 53 Comments

I became fascinated with Scandinavian mythologies in grad school and wound up doing a deep dive into early Icelandic literature. Heroic tales from a worldview long superceded proved a rich source of materials, but is myth always a thing of the past? Joseph Campbell would speak about ritual as the only way to participate in mythologies that were essentially over, but perhaps, as Nick Nielsen argues below, there is a mythology of the future that is being born right now. If humanity succeeds in expanding to the stars, how will our descendants look back upon the early age of space? Perhaps the things we do today turn into the far future’s own mythologies, particularly if waves of star travel lead to speciation or post-human outcomes. Nielsen probes cultural and philosophical aspects of an interstellar future in Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon, and Grand Strategy Annex, where as in the essay below, the outcomes of the choices we make today propel the discussion. by J. N. Nielsen 1....

Asteroid Bennu: Changes in Rotation Rate

by Paul Gilster | Mar 14, 2019 | Asteroid and Comet Deflection | 10 Comments

Tuesday’s post on asteroids and what it would take to deflect or destroy one has been usefully reinforced by a new paper from Mike Nolan (Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona) and colleagues, who discuss their findings in Geophysical Research Letters. Here we’re looking at observations of the near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu, both archival (extending back to 1999) and current, drawing on the OSIRIS-REx mission. You’ll recall that OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer) is in operation around the asteroid, its observations helping us understand the object’s rotation, structure and composition, with a sample return planned for 2023. The Nolan paper fills us in on observed changes in rotation, which are apparent on the order of about 1 second per century. The asteroid’s rotation is speeding up. Exactly what’s going on here is something we can hope OSIRIS-REx can help nail down. One possibility is a process...

A Biosignature Plus for K-Class Stars

by Paul Gilster | Mar 13, 2019 | Exoplanetary Science | 31 Comments

Kepler-62 is a reminder of how interesting K-class stars (like Alpha Centauri B) can be. Here we find two worlds that are conceivably in the habitable zone of their star, with Kepler 62f, imagined in the image below, orbiting the host star every 267 days. Kepler-62e, the bright object depicted to the right of the planet, may orbit within the inner edge of the habitable zone. Both planets are larger than Earth, Kepler 62f about 40 percent so, while Kepler-62e is 60 percent larger. Image: The artist's concept depicts Kepler-62f, a super-Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of a star smaller and cooler than the sun, located about 1,200 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/Tim Pyle. We actually have five planets here, all known thanks to Kepler to transit their star. The two of habitable zone interest may or may not be solid planets -- their masses are not well constrained through either radial velocity or transit timing methods, so we are a...

Asteroids in Collision: A New Model

by Paul Gilster | Mar 12, 2019 | Asteroid and Comet Deflection | 12 Comments

If we were to find an asteroid on a trajectory to impact the Earth, what strategies would we use to stop it? Recent work from Johns Hopkins University shows that there is a wide range in our thinking on what happens to asteroids under various mitigation scenarios. Much depends, of course, on the asteroid's composition, which we must account for in our models. A good thing, then, that we are supplementing those models with sampling missions like OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa-2. Let's look at the JHU work, though, which updates earlier results from Patrick Michel and colleagues, reported in a 2013 paper; the latter had considered the 5 km/s head-on impact of a 1.21 km diameter basalt impactor on a 25 km diameter target asteroid, with a model varying mass, temperature and material brittleness. Michel's work showed evidence that the asteroid being targeted would be completely destroyed by the impactor. What Charles El Mir and colleagues at Johns Hopkins have been able to show is that other...

A Sparse Population of Small Kuiper Belt Objects?

by Paul Gilster | Mar 11, 2019 | Outer Solar System | 4 Comments

One problem with learning about the Kuiper Belt is that objects out there are small and details from Earth-based imaging all too sparse. New Horizons yielded up a world of wonders with Pluto, showing us nitrogen glaciers, and mountains fully 4 kilometers tall. But even relative proximity doesn't help us in some areas. Pluto's surface has seen enough geologic activity that evidence of its impact history is sparse. Where to turn to learn what has hit it, and when? The large moon Charon may provide some answers. Unlike Pluto, its surface is relatively stable, giving us insights deep into the past. And we learn from a new paper by Kelsi Singer (SwRI) that there is a surprising lack of craters here nonetheless. The craters we do see on the two worlds were, according to the paper, formed by objects with diameters ranging from ~40 kilometers to ~300 meters, making them smaller than most KBOs we can observe with our telescopes. Thus a measure of how much in the dark we are about...

Confirming Kepler-1658b: Tight Orbit around an Evolved Star

by Paul Gilster | Mar 8, 2019 | Exoplanetary Science | 13 Comments

A planet designated Kepler-1658b is, after a good deal of investigation, demonstrated to be a 'hot Jupiter,' orbiting a star that is 50 percent more massive and three times larger than the Sun. The sizzling world is close enough to its star that were you to look into its sky from near the planet, the star would be 60 times larger than the Sun as seen from Earth. And while none of this makes Kepler-1658b unique in our catalog, what does stand out is how we learned all this. For we are talking about the first planet candidate ever uncovered with the Kepler Space Telescope. Recall that for any transiting planet to be considered confirmed, we need a second kind of detection. The reason: Various astrophysical processes can mimic transit activity. Prudence dictates the backup, and in the case of Kepler-1658b, both the initial estimate of the star's size and the size of the planet were underestimated. The result was that the putative world became thought of as a false positive whose numbers...

Black Hole Propulsion as Technosignature

by Paul Gilster | Mar 6, 2019 | Advanced Rocketry | 47 Comments

When he was considering white dwarfs and neutron stars in the context of what he called 'gravitational machines,' Freeman Dyson became intrigued by the fate of a neutron star binary. He calculated in his paper of the same name (citation below) that gradual loss of energy through gravitational radiation would bring the two neutron stars together, creating a gravitational wave event of the sort that has since been observed. Long before LIGO, Dyson was talking about gravitational wave detection instruments that could track the 'gravitational flash.' Image: Artist conception of the moment two neutron stars collide. Credit: LIGO / Caltech / MIT. Observables of this kind, if we could figure out how to do it (and we subsequently have) fascinated Dyson, who was in this era (early 1960s) working out his ideas on Dyson spheres and the capabilities of advanced civilizations. As to the problematic merger of neutron stars in a 'machine,' he naturally wondered whether astrophysical evidence of...

Investigating the ‘Halo Drive’

by Paul Gilster | Mar 5, 2019 | Advanced Rocketry | 78 Comments

One of the interesting things about gravitational assists is their ability to accelerate massive objects up to high speeds, provided of course that the astrophysical object being used for the assist is moving at high speeds itself. Freeman Dyson realized, as we saw yesterday, that a pair of tightly rotating white dwarfs could offer such an opportunity, while a binary neutron star carried even more clout. When Dyson was writing his “Gravitational Machines” paper, neutron stars were still a theoretical concept, so he primarily focused the paper on white dwarfs. Get two neutron stars in a tight enough orbit and the speeds they achieve would make it possible to accelerate a spacecraft making a gravity assist up to a substantial percentage of lightspeed. But what an adventure that close pass would be -- the tidal forces would be extreme. I don’t recall seeing a neutron star propulsive flyby portrayed in science fiction (help me out here), though Gregory Benford offers a variant on the...

Pondering the ‘Dyson Slingshot’

by Paul Gilster | Mar 4, 2019 | Advanced Rocketry | 45 Comments

Let's start the week by talking about gravitational assists, where a spacecraft uses a massive body to gain velocity. Voyager at Jupiter is the classic example, because it so richly illustrates the ability to alter course and accelerate without propellant. Michael Minovitch was working on this kind of maneuver at UCLA as far back as the early 1960s, but it was considered even before this, as in a 1925 paper from Friedrich Zander. It took Voyager to put gravity assists into the public consciousness because the idea enabled the exploration of the outer planets. Can we use this kind of maneuver to help us gain the velocity we need to make an interstellar crossing? Let's consider how it works: We're borrowing energy from a massive object when we do a gravity assist. From the perspective of the Voyager team, their spacecraft got something for 'free' at Jupiter, in the sense that no additional propellant was needed. What's really happening is that the spacecraft gained energy at the...

Evidence of Passing Stars

by Paul Gilster | Mar 1, 2019 | Exoplanetary Science | 12 Comments

The sheer range of possible outcomes in a planetary system is something we’re beginning to appreciate with each new exoplanet. Not long ago we looked at a possible collision between two large worlds in the young system Kepler 107, and the knowledge of how violent an evolving system can be informs our thinking about the formation of our own Moon and other Solar System phenomena. Now we’re learning to look for signs of another kind of early cataclysm, the migration of a planet caused by the close passage of one or more nearby stars. None of this should be surprising when we think about the outer system today. We have a vast cloud made up of trillions of comets encircling a more disk-like belt of debris in the Kuiper Belt, and a host of small objects moving on orbits that challenge our theories of how they formed. Indeed, the orbits of ‘scattered disk’ objects influenced by Neptune and, even more intriguing, unusual trans-Neptunian objects like Sedna may implicate a yet undiscovered...

Tuning Up HPF: The Habitable Zone Planet Finder

by Paul Gilster | Feb 28, 2019 | Exoplanetary Science | 14 Comments

If you had a hot new instrument like the Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF) now mounted at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (McDonald Observatory, University of Texas), how would you run it through its paces for fine-tuning and verification of its performance specs? The team behind HPF has chosen to deploy the instrument during its commissioning phase on a nearby target, Barnard's Star, which for these purposes we can consider something of an M-dwarf standard. Working at near-infrared wavelengths, HPF uses radial velocity methods to identify low-mass planets around nearby M-dwarf stars. The choice of wavelength is determined by the mission: M-dwarfs (also known as 'red dwarfs') are prey to substantial magnetic activity that shows up as spots and flares that disrupt instruments working in visible light, not to mention the fact that they are small to begin with and thus faint on the sky. In the near-infrared, close to but not in the visible spectrum, this category of star appears brighter...

Alternatives to DNA-Based Life

by Paul Gilster | Feb 27, 2019 | Astrobiology and SETI | 29 Comments

The question of whether or not we would recognize extraterrestrial life if we encountered it used to occupy mathematician and historian Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974), who commented on the matter in a memorable episode of his 1973 BBC documentary The Ascent of Man. "Were the chemicals here on Earth at the time when life began unique to us? We used to think so. But the most recent evidence is different. Within the last few years there have been found in the interstellar spaces the spectral traces of molecules which we never thought could be formed out in those frigid regions: hydrogen cyanide, cyano acetylene, formaldehyde. These are molecules which we had not supposed to exist elsewhere than on Earth. It may turn out that life had more varied beginnings and has more varied forms. And it does not at all follow that the evolutionary path which life (if we discover it) took elsewhere must resemble ours. It does not even follow that we shall recognise it as life — or that it will...

Ultima Thule at Highest Resolution

by Paul Gilster | Feb 26, 2019 | Outer Solar System | 21 Comments

One of the most enjoyable interviews I've been involved with lately was with Ryan Ferris, who runs the podcast Cosmic Tortoise from Christchurch, New Zealand. Ryan's questions were sharp and of a philosophic bent, plumbing issues like the purpose and direction of human exploration. From Thor Heyerdahl's extraordinary experiments at shipbuilding and navigation to the impulses that took Polynesian sailors into unknown waters as they settled Pacific islands, is there an innate human impulse to explore? We kicked all this around, along with SETI, the 'Oumuamua object, and the need for a re-orienting long-term approach to civilization. Ultima Thule and the recent exploration of it by New Horizons fit comfortably within the narrative Ryan and I discussed, as an example of satisfying that drive to push into the unknown, and also as an early marker for the growth of infrastructure in the Solar System. The Kuiper Belt pushes us hard for now, but we learn with each mission. In the meantime,...

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In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For many years this site coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation. It now serves as an independent forum for deep space news and ideas. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image courtesy of Marco Lorenzi).

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