by Paul Gilster | Mar 30, 2016 | Missions |
Our second report from the recent Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop is the work of Cassidy Cobbs and Michel Lamontagne, with an emphasis on the worldship track. Cassidy has an MS from Vanderbilt, where she studied ecology and evolution. She currently works at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, doing traditional and next-generation gene and genome sequencing. Her interest in space travel/engineering was enhanced by attending Advanced Space Academy in Huntsville at age 14. Michel Lamontagne is a French-Canadian mechanical engineer, practicing in the fields of heat transfer and ventilation, with a passion for space. An active member of Icarus Interstellar, he tells me he has “been designing spaceships since he was 12 years old, and waiting for reality to catch up!” Photos throughout are from New York photojournalist Joey O’Loughlin, and are used with permission.
By Cassidy Cobbs and Michel Lamontagne
This year’s Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (TVIW-2016) was held in Chattanooga, Tennessee from February 28 to March 2. Attendance was good, reaching the limits determined by the organization committee. Everything seemed to run smoothly, although one can imagine the usual frantic behind the scenes activity required to create that illusion!
Image: Co-author Michel Lamontagne.
The Life Systems Engineering for the Worldship track was very productive, engaging in active work sessions and managing to start interesting lines of inquiry into some the questions of the biological, social, and heat transfer facets of the worldship concept.
In our first working track session, we split into two groups, designated “Biotic” and “Abiotic” to brainstorm on some of the unanswered questions of Worldship theory and design.
Image: Abigail Sheriff (left), a graduate of the International Space University, and Cassidy Cobbs, co-leader of the Worldship track.
We began populating a whimsical list of included and excluded species, sure to generate heated debate — for example, the entire Australian continent was excluded on account of being too deadly!
We also came up with a number of unexplored questions, including three concerns that we would explore in depth in our Day 2 session: The agricultural framework of a Worldship; how to establish and maintain indefinitely carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and oxygen cycling; and how to adapt Earth-normal light, water, and heat cycles to a (much smaller) Worldship.
Cameron Smith (Portland State University) added his ongoing reflections about the human societal aspects of the worldship to the discussions, and provided fascinating parallels with early villages and paleolithic societies, where proto-cities housed small stable communities for periods similar to those expected for a worldship trip.
Image: Biomedical engineer Leigh Boros in the Worldship track. Credit: Joey O’Loughlin.
In our second session, the track split into three groups to look at a few of the questions generated the day before.
Our first group decided to explore some of the changes in heat transfer regimes from living on a sphere with the heat from the outside to living in a cylinder with heat from the inside. We didn’t have the time to work out if we could make it rain in the worldship using only convection cycles, but we agreed that rain would be needed and decided to address the problem in follow-up work sessions on the Internet.
Group two looked at resource cycling, and began to develop the calculations necessary to determine how much of elements such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and oxygen would be needed on board the ship at launch to maintain those natural cycles.
Image: Oz Monroe (left) and Miles Gilster (right), framing Greg Matloff in the background. Credit: Joey O’Loughlin.
The final group explored a potential framework for agri- and aquaculture, creating a list of diverse livestock and crops that would fulfill the nutritional and cultural needs of the humans on board. They also began to think about issues of crop rotation, soil health, and water requirements and to calculate what percentage of land would need to be allocated to agriculture.
The Worldship track was proud to host a new generation of designers, with Hannah Sparkes (age 15) and Ashleigh Hughes (age 17) joining with researchers Anton Smirnov (28) and Andrew Kirkpatrick (26) to ensure that analysis of interstellar worldship engineering has a future.
Image: A poster for the worldship track, as prepared by Michel Lamontagne.
For the plenary events, the subjects covered in the papers and talks ranged widely, as usual for TVIW, from starwisps to space wars. Philip Lubin (UC-Santa Barbara) invited the crowd to do the math for his incarnation of the laser-powered sail, one that recently garnered a lot of media attention with a ’30 minutes to Mars’ thought experiment, although the Mars journey is actually only one element of what Lubin sees as a complete Roadmap to the Stars.
Image: A scene from the Space Mining track. Edwin Etheridge (left) discusses specifics with Matt Ernst. Credit: Joey O’Loughlin.
The Moon vs asteroid mining debate politely raged on, with proponents on both sides and an entire track devoted to exploring detailed mineral processing methods. Melting Lunar basalts to create large caverns for rotating habitats, both in system and at interstellar destinations, was also the subject of an interesting talk by Ken Roy. Meanwhile, the sheer immensity of asteroid resources was highlighted by John Lewis in his keynote address.
Image: Keynote speaker John S. Lewis (author of Mining the Sky). Credit: Joey O’Loughlin.
Jim Benford proposed beam leakage from propulsion systems as a new SETI venue, inspired in part by the KIC 8462852 light anomalies uncovered in the Kepler planet finder data.
Image: Jim Benford discussing beamed propulsion issues in a SETI context. Credit: Joey O’Loughlin.
Al Jackson revisited and augmented his seminal Interstellar Laser Powered Interstellar Ramjet design, applying graphene to increase performance and setting the ultimate physical limits of the technology. Creating antimatter from space vacuum fluctuations using high energy lasers, as a part of an advanced antimatter drive, while respecting classical conservation of energy, was the subject of the exotic physics talk by Gerald Cleaver.
Image: Stefan Zeidler (left), newest member of the board of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies, with i4IS founder Kelvin Long and Bill Cress. Credit: Joey O’Loughlin.
by Paul Gilster | Mar 8, 2016 | Astrobiology and SETI |
Running a site like Centauri Dreams means adapting and reconfiguring on a daily basis. The best laid plans and all that… When I wrote recently about the SETI efforts at KIC 8462852, my plan had been to follow up that discussion with a broader SETI issue — where is the best place in the sky to search for a SETI signal? Then life intervened, first with my preparations to go to the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in Chattanooga, and then with the illness that cancelled those plans and left me with a thoroughly disrupted train of thought.
I’m now ready to tackle that SETI question with particular reference to a new paper by René Heller and Ralph E. Pudritz, but I still want to put the discussion into context. With the KIC 8462852 SETI effort, we looked at a targeted observation campaign using the Allen Telescope Array to see if researchers could find any evidence of unusual activity associated with the star. As we saw in Jim and Dominic Benford’s recent work (see Power Beaming Parameters & SETI re KIC 8462852), no evidence of microwave beaming could be found in the brief observational window, although our equipment would be capable of detecting many forms of it.
The unusual light curves in our Kepler data made KIC 8462852 a high-profile target. What the ATA search was looking for was ‘leakage’ radiation, associated with the activities of a technological civilization but not intended as deliberate attempts to communicate with anyone else. And the fact that we found nothing shouldn’t be taken too far in any particular direction. A thorough study of KIC 8462852 in a more systematic manner and at other frequencies would be called for if we wanted to investigate the star in depth and had the resources to do it long-term.
But what about this matter of leakage’ radiation? It’s an intriguing fact that there have been receptions of signals of a one-off nature (the Wow! signal is one) that could conceivably be the result of a beam sweeping past us from a distant system. Or, at least, consistent with it — these are pulsed, intermittent signals that were reported, for example, in a 1997 survey of the Milky Way’s center (citation below). We also have sources like GCRT J1745-3009, a transient bursting radio source that fails our expectations for flare stars, binary pulsars and much else.
Image: The Allen Telescope Array, recently used for a SETI effort at KIC 8462852. Credit: ATA.
A Communicating Civilization
SETI got started in the experimental way with Frank Drake’s work at Green Bank in 1960, targeting the close stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Here the intention was to listen out for a directed signal, a ‘hello’ announcement from another star system, and for one brief, unforgettable moment, Drake thought he had found one (the signal, we now know, was local). Given the nature of such directed beaming, this would theoretically be a much easier signal to detect, as it would stay fixed upon us and would be at sufficient power levels that, unlike our own radio and television broadcasts, it would survive the long interstellar journey.
Most of the SETI searches since — there have been more than 100! — have looked at nearby systems or in some cases stellar clusters. The SETI Institute’s Project Phoenix worked at different sites between 1995 and 2004 and, according to Heller and Pudritz (both at McMaster University, Ontario) covered more than 800 stars as distant as 240 light years. We’ve done targeted searches of the galactic center and highly focused looks at specific stars like Gl 581, and in 2015 we looked for laser emissions from more than a thousand Kepler Objects of Interest. And let’s not forget the SETI@Home project that draws on Arecibo data.
We have yet to find directed beacons or leakage radiation unless some of the signals discussed above happen to be instances of one or the other — the eponymous ‘Benford beacon’ would actually sweep past us as a transient which we couldn’t identify without further observations.
In terms of sheer numbers, we would expect leakage signals would be the most abundant, because they would be generated by many technological civilizations and not just those intent on communicating with us. In any case, where to look seems clear. Looking toward regions of sky with higher stellar densities makes abundant sense. If ETI is out there, we would expect to see more signal activity where there are more worlds that might be habitable.
Image: The world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope, at Green Bank, West Virginia. Frank Drake launched observational SETI from Green Bank in 1960. Credit: NRAO.
Toward the Galactic Center
Thus the galactic center search strategy laid out by Gregory, Dominic and Jim Benford in an older paper, 2010’s “Searching for Cost Optimized Interstellar Beacons,” which calls for a search in the plane of the spiral disk because 90 percent of the galaxy’s stars are within 9% of the sky in the plane and hub of the galaxy. From the analysis:
Whatever forms might dwell further in from us toward the center, they must know the basic symmetry of the spiral. This suggests the natural corridor for communication is along the spiral’s radius from Galactic Center or toward it, a simple direction known to everyone. (A radius is better than aiming along a spiral arm, since the arm curves away from any straight-line view of view. On the other hand, along our nearby spiral arms the stars are roughly the age of ours.) This avenue maximizes the number of stars within a telescope’s view, especially by staring at the galactic hub. Thus, a Beacon near the center should at least broadcast outward in both directions, while societies at the far reaches may save half their cost by not emitting outward, since there is much less chance of advanced societies there.
But we’re not through yet. In fact, we’re just beginning, as this paper goes on to explain. In 2004, Robert A. Rohde & Richard A. Muller (UC-Berkeley) suggested a 62 million-year cycle followed by marine life on Earth, a suggestion developed by subsequent researchers to suggest that the movement of our Sun vertically above and below the galactic plane (a 62-million year oscillation) would mean that the galaxy’s bow shock produces additional cosmic ray flux when the Sun reaches its extended position north of the galactic plane. This enhanced flux could damage the biosphere and would presumably do so for any inhabited world.
We may, then, have a plane near the center of the galactic disk perhaps 500 light years deep within which intelligent life is more likely to be found. It’s interesting to note that the highest power transient sources reported by Carl Sagan and Paul Horowitz in a 1993 paper lie close to the galactic plane, and the idea of a vertical oscillation of about 500 light years within which intelligent life is more likely gives us another way to focus our search on likely targets.
Image: The Milky Way in stars and dust, showing us the most likely regions of the sky in which to search for SETI signals. Credit & Copyright: Serge Brunier.
Now back to Heller and Pudritz, who have drawn on an idea first mooted in the 1980s. The two scientists suggest that we focus our attention to an even smaller swath of stars, as defined by planetary systems from which it is possible to see the Earth transiting in front of the Sun. Think of a thin strip around the ecliptic and project that strip onto the galaxy — Heller and Pudritz call this strip the Earth’s transit zone, or ETZ. The idea is that extraterrestrials observing the Earth from within the ETZ will have direct evidence that there is life here, which would make them more likely to attempt communications.
I’m running out of time this morning, but tomorrow we’ll look at the notion of the Earth’s transit zone as it applies to practical decisions about targets. It turns out there are numerous stars for us to look at, but it’s also a well-defined population of extremely high-priority targets.
The paper is Heller & Pudritz, “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in Earth’s Solar Transit Zone,” Astrobiology Vol. 16, No. 4 (2016) (preprint). The Benfords’ paper is “Searching for Cost Optimized Interstellar Beacons,” Astrobiology 10 (2010), 491-498 (abstract / preprint). The 1997 paper mentioning the transients I discuss above is Sullivan et al., “A Galactic Center Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligent Signals,” Astronomical and Biochemical Origins and the Search for Life in the Universe, IAU Colloquium 161, Publisher: Bologna, Italy, p. 653.
by Paul Gilster | Feb 25, 2016 | Astrobiology and SETI |
Thinking that we can understand the motivations of an extraterrestrial civilization seems like a fool’s gambit, but we have to try. The reason is obvious: We have exactly one technological society to work with — we’re all we have — and if we want to look for SETI signals, we have to interpolate as best we can. An alien culture, it is assumed, will do the same. This was the procedure outlined by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison in their classic 1959 paper “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” that began the modern era of SETI.
If there are civilizations around stars like the Sun, the paper reasons, then some will be motivated to reach out elsewhere. From the paper:
To the beings of such a society, our Sun must appear as a likely site for the evolution of a new society. It is highly probable that for a long time they will have been expecting the development of science near the Sun. We shall assume that long ago they established a channel of communication that would one day become known to us, and that they look forward patiently to the answering signals from the Sun which would make known to them that a now society has entered the community of intelligence. What sort of a channel would it be?
What results is an explanation of the factors needed to overcome signal attenuation and the frequencies most likely to be used. Thus we get what Cocconi and Morrison called “a unique, objective standard of frequency, which must be known to every observer in the universe.” This is 1420 MHz, the 21 centimeter wavelength of neutral hydrogen. Thus we know where to look assuming a civilization is trying to make contact with us. The authors conclude “… the foregoing line of argument demonstrates that the presence of interstellar signals is entirely consistent with all we now know, and that if signals are present the means of detecting them is now at hand.”
The Hunt for SETI Observables
We’ve looked frequently in these pages at how SETI has changed since the Cocconi and Morrison days, with so-called ‘Dysonian SETI’ invoked as a way of looking for observable evidence in our astronomical data. The unusual star KIC 8462852 has elevated the method to wider attention because of the possibility that some kind of astroengineering could explain its unusual light curves (search the archives here for numerous articles on the star).
In any case, Dysonian SETI assumes, contra Morrison and Cocconi, no intent to contact anyone. We are simply looking for activity, albeit on a colossal scale. We must be the ones to figure out what that activity might be.
Which brings me to a new paper from James Benford and son Dominic (NASA GSFC). “Power Beaming Leakage as a SETI Observable,” submitted to The Astrophysical Journal, asks whether we might detect the use of power beaming to transfer energy and accelerate spacecraft within a distant solar system and, perhaps, beyond it if the technology is being used to accelerate starships. KIC 8462852 is also considered here because there have been two attempts to study it, one optical and one at radio frequencies, in the context of a SETI search.
As the paper notes:
The most observable leakage from an advanced civilization may well be from the use of power beaming to transfer energy and accelerate spacecraft, both within and beyond the star system where the civilization is located. In future, such applications may make the Earth’s radiation in the microwave, millimeter and visible/near-IR parts of the electromagnetic spectrum be very intense…. The power levels are high, focused, and transient and could easily dwarf any of our previous leakage to space. These are not SETI signals so much as leakage, a detectable aspect of advanced civilizations.
The kind of SETI observable the Benfords are examining is essentially leakage, but of a different kind than the widely repeated trope of picking up alien TV signals, just as extraterrestrial cultures are presumably now enjoying “I Love Lucy” from our signals. As the Benfords argue, the leakage of radio and television signals is essentially undetectable between stars not only due to the weakness of the signal but to its lack of coherence. Planetary radars are much more likely to be detectable, but signals like these are also extremely transient.
Intense beams of radiation being used to move power about in a distant solar system or accelerate spacecraft on long journeys should be more readily detected. James Benford argued as much in 2008, and more recently James Guillochon and Abraham Loeb have quantified the leakage to be expected from space propulsion-related beaming, showing that a beam being used to drive a large sail would be observable. The duo write: “…for a five-year survey with ~10 conjunctions per system, about 10 multiply-transiting, inhabited systems would need to be tracked to guarantee a detection” using our existing radio telescope infrastructure.
Image: Taken from the Guillochon and Loeb paper, this diagram shows a Mars mission using microwave beaming for propulsion. In the schematic, the dashed line represents the sailcraft. You can see the prospects for signal leakage here. Notice the inset showing the beam profile as it overlaps the sail of diameter Ds. Credit: Guillochon & Loeb.
But remember the notion we started with: If we are trying to understand what an extraterrestrial civilization might do, we have to look at the uses we ourselves would make of these technologies. We try to be as flexible as possible while acknowledging the fundamental gap in our knowledge of an alien culture, but we have to start somewhere. And this kind of reasoning takes us down an interesting path, as the Benfords note in their paper. For possessed of powerful beaming technologies, such a culture should be aware of SETI implications:
It has previously been noted that such leakage from other civilizations could be observable (Benford 2008). Guillochon & Loeb (2015) have quantified leakage from beaming for interplanetary space propulsion, its observables, and implications for SETI. Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI), having done the same thinking, could realize that they could be observed. Hence there may be a message on the power beam, delivered by modulating it in frequency, amplitude, polarization, phase, etc., and broadcast it for our receipt at little additional energy or cost. By observing leakage from power beams we may well find a message embedded on the beam.
That’s a fascinating notion in its own right. It’s a kind of METI signal sent out by an alien civilization that is, like a beacon, broadly targeted rather than aimed at a specific solar system. And it operates on the assumption that another culture might in the course of its SETI investigations notice high-powered, focused and transient beams and analyze them. Or put another way, if our own civilization has figured this out, our extraterrestrial counterparts working the SETI various concepts must surely have come up with the same implications.
Uses of the Beam
Detecting a message embedded in a power beam would, of course, be a breakthrough of historic proportions, but so would the simple detection of power-beaming itself — no message attached — which would signal the presence of an advanced civilization. One of the things recently looked at by the Allen Telescope Array was whether the intriguing star KIC 8462852 showed any signs of activity, and it turns out that the observations, while finding nothing, do allow us to set some limits on power-beaming in that system. KIC 8462852 became, in other words, a useful exercise even though the observations were short-lived. More tomorrow on this, and also see the Benfords’ Quantifying KIC 8462852 Power Beaming in these pages.
And just what might a technological civilization do with power-beaming methods that we could observe? One answer is obvious: We’ve been talking about beamed sails for well over ten years on Centauri Dreams, keying off Robert Forward’s fascination with the subject as it applied to interstellar missions. Here the requirements are enormous, with a space-based solar power station beaming to a 1000-kilometer sail in some of Forward’s missions, although subsequent work found ways to trim the sail down to the 1-10 kilometer range.
The idea of a power station orbiting in the inner part of the Solar System where the photon-flow is maximized has dual use, as using microwave beams to transport power to a planet’s surface is a major driver. As a SETI observable, power beaming to a planet is not a likely target. The paper notes that the beam would have to be tightly controlled, with side lobes maximally reduced. In contrast, power being beamed to a spacecraft should show increasing leakage as the craft is accelerated — the beam increasingly leaks around the edges of the accelerating vehicle — making transportation applications a realistic SETI observable.
The Benfords’ paper quantifies the various kinds of power beaming missions and applications and their observable parameters, looking at twenty concepts in terms of power radiated, duration and likely time for the radiation to repeat. More on this tomorrow as we continue looking at the paper and the question of how an advanced technology could use power beaming.
The Benfords paper is “Power Beaming Leakage Radiation as a SETI Observable,” submitted to The Astrophysical Journal and available as a preprint. The Guillochon and Loeb paper is “SETI via Leakage From Light Sails in Exoplanetary Systems,” The Astrophysical Journal 811, No. 2 (23 September 2015), with abstract here. Jim Benford also discusses the Guillochon and Loeb paper in Seeing Alien Power Beaming.
by Paul Gilster | Feb 22, 2016 | Astrobiology and SETI |
Given the interest the unusual star KIC 8462852 has generated here and elsewhere, I want to be sure those of you in California are aware of an upcoming talk that touches on the matter, as well as broader SETI issues. Titled “The Breakthrough Initiative – Listen and Megastructures at KIC 8463,” the talk will be delivered by Andrew Siemion (UC-Berkeley). The venue is 1065 La Avenida Street, Mountain View, CA 94043. The time: Tuesday, February 23, 2016 from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM (PST).
More at this web page, from which the description that follows:
Dr. Andrew Siemion, Director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center (BSRC) at the University of California, Berkeley, will present an overview of the Breakthrough Listen Initiative, 100-million-dollar, 10-year search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Dr. Siemion will also discuss other SETI efforts ongoing at the BSRC, including the successful citizen science project SETI@Home, as well as a concerted effort to undertake panchromatic observations of the mysterious Kepler star KIC 8462852.
by Paul Gilster | Jan 28, 2016 | Astrobiology and SETI |
The question of a gradual dimming of KIC 8462852 continues to make waves, the most recent response being Michael Hippke’s preprint on the arXiv site, discussed in the post immediately below. Bradley Schaefer (Lousiana State University), who published his work on the dimming he found in now digitized photographs in the archives of Harvard College Observatory, disagrees strongly with Hippke’s findings and is concerned that the paper impugns the solid work being performed by DASCH (Digital Access to a Sky Century@Harvard). Below is Dr. Schaefer’s response with details on the astrophotographic photometry at the heart of the issue.
by Bradley E. Schaefer
A few hours ago, Michael Hippke posted a manuscript to arXiv (http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07314), and submitted the same manuscript to the Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJLett). This manuscript claims to have found that the DASCH data produces light curves with secular trends (both systematic dimmings and brightenings) over the century-long records. This same DASCH data (from the collection of archival sky photographs now at Harvard Observatory) was used to recognize a dimming of KIC 8462852 (a.k.a. ‘Tabby’s Star’ or the ‘WTF star’) at an average rate of 0.165±0.013 magnitudes per century from 1890 to 1989.
This dimming from the DASCH data is just a long-time scale version of the dimming also seen with the Kepler spacecraft, and these dimmings are still a high mystery and a perplexing problem. Hippke is taking his claimed result (that the majority of DASCH light curves have major and widespread calibration errors resulting in apparent secular trends) as then implying that KIC 8462852 does not have any secular trend. This claim is easily proved wrong.
Hippke made two major errors, both of which are beginner’s mistakes, and both of which will erroneously produce apparent dimmings and brightenings when none exist. First, Hippke explicitly includes red-sensitive and yellow-sensitive photographs together with the blue-sensitive photographs. The different colors will produce systematically different brightnesses (magnitudes). The trouble is further that the red and yellow photographs are predominantly at late times in the century-long light curve (in the 1970s and 1980s), so the inclusion of many magnitudes that are systematically high or low only at the end of the century will artificially make the star appear to brighten or dim over the century.
Second, Hippke explicitly includes magnitudes from photographs with known and recognized defects. The Harvard photographs are not perfect, with some having long-trailed images, some being double exposures with stars overlapping, and some having various plate defects where the emulsion is nicked or such. The DASCH scanning and software has a robust means of identifying problem photographs, and these are objective measures independent of the magnitude. These known-poor-quality magnitudes should not be used for any sensitive purposes. Colloquially put, these are ‘garbage’. Hippke keeps all the many good DASCH magnitudes and he also adds in the garbage magnitudes, so his final light curves have many points that are systematically skewed.
The frequency of the poor-quality magnitudes varies over time, usually with more early-on during the century. And the erroneous magnitudes are variously systematically brighter or dimmer, also varying over the century. The result of Hippke’s good+garbage light curves is that the garbage points tilt the light curve by a bit. This is seen when I take all of Hippke’s same stars and data and go from his sloped light curves (including his garbage points) to flat light curves (with only the good points). The bottom line is that Hippke’s second big mistake was to include the poor-quality photographs. Garbage-in, garbage-out.
So we understand why Hippke’s secular trends are wrong. But we already knew this very well anyway. The reason is that the DASCH people have already measured many (likely up around the millions) of light curves for single main sequence stars (i.e., stars that really should be perfectly constant) and found that their light curves are actually very flat. This is in stunning contradiction to the claims of Hippke that the majority show big secular trends.
Hippke’s paper has a title of “KIC 8462852 Did Likely Not Fade During the Last 100 Years”, yet his paper never discusses or analyses any data from KIC 8462852. One reason is perhaps that he cannot get around the flatness of the five check star light curves. That is, these five stars always appear within 3 millimeters of Tabby’s Star on these 10″x8″ phootgraphs, these stars are all of similar brightness as Tabby’s Star, and they all have similar color as Tabby’s Star.
If there were any systematic problems for the DASCH data with Tabby’s star, then we should see the exact same dimming trend in the check stars as is seen for Tabby’s Star. But we do not. These ‘check stars’ serve as the classic control study in science. They serve as proof that neither the check stars nor Tabby’s Star have any substantial systematic problem. They serve as proof that Hippke’s title is wrong.
Hippke submitted his draft manuscript to ApJLett, to arXiv and to reporters even before he had any checks with experts on archival sky photographs. For example, I first read his email just about the time that he was submitting his manuscript. He did not contact any of the DASCH people, despite them being the target of his attack. Indeed, he has not talked with anyone who has any experience with or knowledge of any archival photographs. This topic has a lot of detail and many quirks, but Hippke apparently did not have the realization or the will to check out his claims. And, in an email from Hippke from early this morning, he explicitly labelled himself as “a novice” for this technical topic. So he is a novice working without bothering to check with anyone knowledgeable. As such, it is not surprising that he made beginner’s blunders.
A broader problem is now that DASCH has the publicly-stated claim that it has major, widespread, persistent calibration and measurement errors. In knowledeable circles, Hippke’s paper won’t come to anything. But these circles are not large, because few people really understand the working of DASCH or plate photometry.
So most people will simply look at the paper’s conclusions, not recognize the horrible beginner’s blunders that create the false conclusion, and only come away thinking that the DASCH light curves are “wrong” or at least “questionable”. Public perceptions do matter for many aspects. Most important for DASCH is their future success rate in funding proposals, the reception of all future papers relating to DASCH, and the future useage of the DASCH data.
Perhaps from a journalistic point of view, any ‘stirring of the pot’ is good copy. But from the point of view of science and knowledge, putting up unchecked and false claims is bad all the way around. Science has a great strength of being error-correcting, with the normal procedure now for the DASCH people to put out a full formal refutation of Hippke’s claims, and such will appear in many months. But with the one-day turn-around of arXiv and with fast journalist response, there will be many months where the reputation of DASCH is maligned. So Hippke’s choice of running to reporters before the paper appeared publicly, and disdaining any experienced advice despite being a self-proclaimed “novice”, is not good science.
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For more on this controversy, see KIC 8462852: Where Are We After Eight Months?, Michael Hippke’s follow-up.
