Centauri Dreams

Nine years ago in a piece titled Asteroid Belts, Possible Planets Around Epsilon Eridani, I discussed work that Massimo Marengo was doing on the nearby star, examining rings of material around Epsilon Eridani and considering the possibilities with regard to planets. Marengo (now at Iowa State University) has recently been working with Kate Su (University of Arizona) and other colleagues, using the SOFIA telescope (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) to help us refine our understanding of the evolving planetary system.

Image: Astronomers (left to right) Massimo Marengo, Andrew Helton and Kate Su study images of epsilon Eridani during their SOFIA mission. Credit: Massimo Marengo.

The researchers used the 2.5-meter telescope aboard the Boeing 747SP jetliner to collect data about the star, working at 45,000 feet in a region above most of the atmospheric water vapor that absorbs the infrared light being studied. Epsilon Eridani is a bit over 10 light years from the Sun, and about a fifth of its age, meaning we have close at hand a stellar system that can help us understand what our own Solar System was like in its youth.

The new paper confirms Marengo’s earlier findings that there are separate inner and outer disk structures, with the possibility that the inner disk is itself made up of more than one debris belt. Says Marengo:

“This star hosts a planetary system currently undergoing the same cataclysmic processes that happened to the solar system in its youth, at the time in which the moon gained most of its craters, Earth acquired the water in its oceans, and the conditions favorable for life on our planet were set.”

Image: This is an artist’s illustration of the Epsilon Eridani system showing Epsilon Eridani b, right foreground, a Jupiter-mass planet orbiting its parent star at the outside edge of an asteroid belt. In the background can be seen another narrow asteroid or comet belt plus an outermost belt similar in size to our Solar System’s Kuiper Belt. The similarity of the structure of the Epsilon Eridani system to our Solar System is remarkable, although Epsilon Eridani is much younger than our sun. SOFIA observations confirmed the existence of the asteroid belt adjacent to the orbit of the Jovian planet. Credit: NASA/SOFIA/Lynette Cook.

This is fine-grained work, for it requires the astronomers to separate the faint emission of Epsilon Eridani’s circumstellar disk from the bright light of the host star. But when Marengo likens the work with SOFIA to using a time machine, he has an obvious point. Debris disks result when belts of planetesimals are perturbed by newly formed planets, creating collisions that over time break the minor bodies down into dust. We know of more than 400 debris disks around other stars, but we have few systems close enough to study at high resolution. Moreover, what the paper describes as the two benchmark nearby debris disks are around A-class stars, Fomalhaut and Vega. Epsilon Eridani gives us a star much more like the Sun.

Debris disks, which can include rocky and icy bodies as well as gas and dust, can be broad, continuous disks or they can become concentrated into belts of debris. Here the analogy is to our own Solar System’s asteroid belt and Kuiper Belt, two distinct regions with one disk of debris concentrated beyond the orbit of Mars and the other beyond the orbit of Neptune. With an outer cold disk and a warm inner one assumed, the new work focuses on the inner disk. Here there are two different models for how the inner disk is formed, with implications for planets.

One model calls for an inner disk made up of two narrow rings of debris, with one ring roughly at the position of our asteroid belt around the star, and the other at a region corresponding to the orbit of Uranus. The other model sees the inner disk region being populated by dust from the outer, Kuiper Belt-like region, with material inflowing into the inner disk. The latter model assumes a single broad disk in the inner system as opposed to two belt-like rings. The new SOFIA observations favor the narrow belt model rather than a broad continuous disk.

Combining data from SOFIA with earlier Spitzer observations, the researchers found that excess emissions in the inner 25 AU region around the star are the result of a dust-producing planetesimal belt, and perhaps more than one. For it turns out that the resolution achieved by the SOFIA data was insufficient to determine whether the inner disk is itself divided into more than one narrow belts, but it did allow the team to rule out the possibility that the inner region’s warm emissions were the result of dust grains pulled in from an outer, much colder belt.

That favors the first model. The paper makes the case that in the absence of dust grains being dragged in from the cold outer belt, a planet might be necessary to explain what is seen in Epsilon Eridani’s inner disk structure. From the paper:

The observed profiles are not consistent with the case dominated by dragged-in grains (uninterrupted dust flow from the cold Kuiper-belt-analog region) as proposed by Reidemeister et al. (2011). This might suggest the need of a planet interior to the 64-au cold belt to maintain the inner dust-free zone, or a very dense cold belt where the intense collisions destroy the dust grains before they have enough time to be dragged in. In either case, some amount of dragged-in grains from the cold belt can still contribute a fraction of the emission inside 25 au; the exact amount remains to be determined by future high spatial resolution.

Image: Illustration based on Spitzer observations of the inner and outer parts of the Epsilon Eridani system compared with the corresponding components of our Solar System. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC).

What we do have, though, is confirmation that we have at least one inner disk, and that it is near the orbit of the Jupiter-class planet that circles the star at a distance comparable to Jupiter’s from the Sun. Kate Su explains:

“The high spatial resolution of SOFIA combined with the unique wavelength coverage and impressive dynamic range of the FORCAST camera allowed us to resolve the warm emission around eps Eri, confirming the model that located the warm material near the Jovian planet’s orbit. Furthermore, a planetary mass object is needed to stop the sheet of dust from the outer zone, similar to Neptune’s role in our solar system. It really is impressive how eps Eri, a much younger version of our solar system, is put together like ours.”

The paper is Su et al., “The Inner 25 AU Debris Distribution in the epsilon Eri System,” Astronomical Journal Vol. 153, No. 5 (25 April 2017). Abstract / preprint.

I have a special enthusiasm for microlensing as a means of exoplanet discovery. With microlensing, you never know what you’re going to come up with. Transits are easier to detect when the planet is close to its star, and hence transits more frequently. Radial velocity likewise sends its loudest signal when a planet is large and close. Microlensing, detecting the ‘bending’ of light from a background object as it is affected by a nearer star’s gravitational field, can turn up a planet whether near to its star or far, and in a wide range of masses. It can also be used to study planetary populations as distant as the galactic bulge and beyond.

Now we have news of a cold planet about the size of the Earth orbiting what may turn out to be a brown dwarf, and is in any case no more than 7.8 percent the mass of our Sun. Is this an object like TRAPPIST-1, the ultra-cool dwarf star we’ve had so much to say about in recent days as investigations of its 7 planets continue? If so, the planet OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb is in no way as interesting from an astrobiological point of view. It’s probably colder than Pluto. It is also the lowest-mass planet ever found using the microlensing technique.

Image: This artist’s concept shows OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb, reported in a 2017 study in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Study authors used the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet), operated by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, to track the microlensing event and find the planet. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

But don’t think this frigid world, about 13000 light years away, doesn’t have its uses. It is part of an ongoing investigation into the distribution of planets in the galaxy. The OGLE designation signifies the ground-based Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment survey, run by the University of Warsaw, which alerted astronomers to the initial microlensing event. The authors of the study on OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb then used the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) as well as the Spitzer space telescope to study the outcome.

With this planet, we are at the lowest end of what microlensing can detect with current methods. We’ll need to get to NASA’s upcoming Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) to begin finding smaller bodies than this. Tuning up the method will be useful as we work on understanding how planets are distributed in the Milky Way, since microlensing can find planets at distances far beyond the capabilities of other detection methods. Specifically, will we find a difference in the planet populations of the Milky Way’s central bulge as compared to its disk? OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb is a member of the disk population.

“Although we only have a handful of planetary systems with well-determined distances that are this far outside our solar system, the lack of Spitzer detections in the bulge suggests that planets may be less common toward the center of our galaxy than in the disk,” says Geoff Bryden, astronomer at JPL and co-author of the study.

Let’s dig a little deeper, though, into planet formation around ultracool stars. A 2007 paper by Matthew Payne and Giuseppe Lodato looked at the core accretion method of planet formation in the context of very low mass stars and brown dwarfs, arguing that if such objects have protoplanetary disks in the range of several Jupiter masses, then Earth-mass planets should be frequent around them, typically at about 1 AU from the star. But if brown dwarf disks contain less than a Jupiter mass of material, then they probably cannot form a planet.

The OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb paper runs through the scholarship, including a 2013 study from Daniel Apai showing that disks occur as frequently around ultracool dwarfs as around Sun-like stars. And a 2016 paper from Leonardo Testi and colleagues found evidence for dusty disks around 11 of 17 young brown dwarfs studied. A Herschel study from Sebastian Daemgen and team, likewise in 2016, found that half of the ultracool dwarf disks it examined were of at least one Jupiter mass.

So we’re making progress at learning about planet formation in ultracool environments, and here again microlensing comes to the fore. Stars this faint, and their even fainter planets, are a tough challenge for most planetary detection methods, though four have been found with direct imaging. Microlensing does not rely on light from the system being studied, but it can give us information about the planetary and stellar masses involved. And indeed, we have four previous microlensing events that have found planets around ultracool dwarfs.

Two of these previous microlensing detections show planets as small as a few Earth masses, and OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb lowers the detected mass still further. From the paper:

These [previous discoveries] suggest that the protoplanetary disks of ultracool dwarfs have sufficient mass to form terrestrial planets, as also hinted at by direct imaging of such disks. The location of these planets, at about 1 AU, support planet formation predictions. However, since the sensitivity of current microlensing surveys for systems with such small mass ratios is very narrow, around projected separations of ?1AU, they cannot set strong constraints on the presence of planets elsewhere around ultracool dwarfs, such as the much closer separations seen in the TRAPPIST-1 system.

Small planets may be common around ultracool dwarfs, an idea that previous microlensing discoveries reinforce, along with the work on protoplanetary disks and the seven planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1. As to our expectations regarding planets in the galactic bulge as opposed to the disk, the jury is still out. The planets Spitzer has thus far found in its microlensing campaign for the galactic distribution of planets are all located in the disk. We have two upcoming Spitzer microlensing campaigns, one this year and one next, which should offer additional insights. The key question: Is the galactic bulge deficient in planets?

The paper is Shvartzvald et al., “An Earth-mass Planet in a 1-AU Orbit around an Ultracool Dwarf,” accepted at Astrophysical Journal Letters (preprint).

What to make of Fergus Simpson’s new paper on waterworlds, suggesting that most habitable zone planets are of this type? If such worlds are common, we may find that most planets in the habitable zones of their stars are capable of evolving life, but unlikely to host technological civilizations. An explanation for the so-called ‘Fermi Paradox’? Possibly, but there are all kinds of things that could account for our inability to see other civilizations, most of them covered by Stephen Webb in his If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … Where Is Everybody? (2nd ed., Springer 2015), which offers 75 solutions to the problem.

Simpson (University of Barcelona) makes his case in the pages of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, arguing that the balance maintained by a planetary surface with large amounts of both land and water is delicate. The author’s Bayesian statistical analysis suggests that most planets are dominated either by water or land, most likely water. Earth may, then, be something of an outlier, with most planets over 90 percent covered in water.

Image: Continents on other habitable worlds may struggle to break above sea level, like much of Europe in this illustration, representing Earth with an estimated 80% ocean coverage. © Antartis / Depositphotos.com.

The unlikelihood of a planet maintaining a balance like the Earth’s gives the paper its direction. Simpson offers a pedagogical example of the Bayesian approach:

…imagine that you look at a kitchen worktop and notice some spilled coffee granules. One of those granules, selected at random, is found to lie within 0.1?mm from the edge of the 600?mm worktop. This proximity could of course be entirely coincidental. But it is much more likely that the bulk of the granules fell on the floor, and what you are seeing is merely the tail end of the distribution.

Is planet Earth at the tail end of the distribution? We don’t have enough exoplanet data to know. But the statistical model here does take note of what we have learned in our explorations of the outer Solar System. Think of Titan, where Stanley Dermott and Carl Sagan predicted in 1995 that instead of a surface covered in extensive ocean, the lack of circularization of the moon’s orbit from oceanic tidal effects pointed to a largely dry surface. We now know that the duo was correct: Titan’s liquid hydrocarbons account for about 1 percent of the total surface area.

Simpson finds this a remarkable call, but he adds that the prediction could have been made even without orbital data on Titan. Let me quote him on this, as it reiterates his method:

On a purely statistical basis, and in the absence of correlations, one expects the division of liquid and solid surface areas to be highly asymmetric. This is because the volume of liquid need not match the capacity of perturbations in the solid. The two quantities often differ by several orders of magnitude. If it is the liquid that dominates, the solid surface becomes completely immersed. Enceladus and Europa offer exemplary cases of this phenomenon. Beneath each of their icy crusts, a single ocean completely envelops a solid core (Kivelson et al. 2000; Waite et al. 2009). If, on the other hand, the liquid’s volume is subdominant, it settles into small disconnected regions, as was found to be the case on the surface of Titan.

To put this in context, we need to consider the delivery of water from icy objects originating beyond the snow line. Here we have to assume a huge variety of outcomes, planets in the habitable zone with a wide variation in the amount of water delivered to the surface. What happens over time? Some water will be found in the mantle, some lost through the upper atmosphere. Planetary topography shapes the distribution of resulting oceans.

The author goes on to consider feedback mechanisms including erosion and soil deposition as well as the deep water cycle by way of placing what happened on Earth in context. Across the galaxy, trillions of dice have been rolled, comments Simpson, and what we would like to know is whether the dice somehow favor a balance between land and water. He thinks not.

Here the anthropic principle weighs in. Does our Earth have the particular balance of water and land we see because planets without this balance — desert worlds or waterworlds — would produce intelligent land-based species at a much lower rate? In other words, if we did not live in a place with this fine-tuned balance, we wouldn’t be observers, something we should keep in mind as we consider the prevalence of worlds like our own. We can also assume that planets with larger habitable areas are more capable of sustaining larger populations. These factors imply to Simpson that the Earth has a greater habitable area than most life-bearing worlds.

We see a planet that could not be otherwise for us to be here, and assume other habitable zone worlds are similar. Our planet, argues the author, is itself close to the waterworld limit, and the water mass fraction among habitable planets could be a good deal higher. From the paper:

…numerical simulations based on delivering water from planetary embryos found a median water mass fractions of approximately 1?per?cent (Raymond et al. 2007), 10 times higher than the terrestrial value. Extremely elevated water compositions have been associated with the inflation of planetary radii (Thomas & Madhusudhan 2016). This scenario, in which the Earth is among the driest habitable planets, could help explain the appearance of a low-mass transition in the mass–radius relation of exoplanets (Rogers 2015; Chen & Kipping 2017).

And if it turns out that the Earth is unusually dry for a habitable zone planet, various mechanisms can explain the result. It is possible that low eccentricities and inclinations of planetary orbits in our Solar System make for less effective water delivery. Perhaps water delivery was affected by migration of the gas giants (Simpson considers the ‘Grand Tack’ model in which Jupiter reversed its migration, but points out that this might also produce a higher rate of water delivery). Or perhaps we have a drier Earth simply because of the stochastic nature of the delivery of water. The trillions of dice throws gave us the numbers we live with and take to be commonplace. We can hardly, then, take the Earth as the norm.

71 percent of Earth is covered by water. In addition to the amount of water delivered (and the mechanisms of that delivery), we have to factor in where it will be stored, how ocean and mantle interact, and how topographical features affect water distribution. Life has been able to emerge and technological civilization take hold because all these factors prevent the planet from becoming a waterworld, a fine balance, says Simpson, that most habitable zone worlds lack.

Simpson’s paper is an intriguing read and one that should provide fodder for science fiction scenarios (I consider that all to the good), but it’s highly speculative given that our models of water delivery in the early Solar System are still works in progress. What we come back to again and again is the need for observation. In the Titan reference Simpson makes early in the paper, it was data that proved the point made by Dermott and Sagan, and data that are required to put such factors as the depth of Earth’s water basins in a cosmic context. So we can keep waterworld theories in mind as we begin studying the actual atmospheric content of exoplanets within coming decades, when new space- and ground-based resources come online.

The paper is Simpson, “Bayesian evidence for the prevalence of waterworlds,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 468 (3) (2017), 2803-2815 (full text). Thanks to Phil Tynan for an early pointer to this paper.