Science is Drokking Fantastic Because...

[Hawkmumbler]

I blame the commies, a holographic moon is just the kind of thing those fiends would try to pull off!

[The Legendary Shark]

Where to Look for Intelligent Life?

In his 2014 article, A Strategic "Viewfinder" for SETI Research, Massimo Teodorani explored a problem vexing to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) - where do you look for signals?

To start with, dishes were pointed at likely candidate stars virtually at random. As time and technology passed, candidates for inhabited solar systems decreased as knowledge about stars themselves grew. There's not much point looking to a red giant or a white dwarf because the processes that making them what they are probably evaporated their attendant planets long ago. Modern programs like Kepler and Spitzer have narrowed down the options even more by discovering actual exoplanets. Even so, it's a Big universe out there and narrowing things down from a few trillion to a few billion isn't much help.

I liken it to those explorers of old who died of hunger or thirst in the Outback, surrounded by sources of water and nourishment they had no clue how to look for. Like lifting pebbles on an endless shingle beach in the hope of finding a crab or a worm. Sure, some of those pebbles are going to have things living under them but an awful, awful lot aren't. Add to that the sheer amount of data to sift through and it's not even much like looking under a pebble, more like glancing.

What is needed, Teodorani reasons, are more ways to narrow down the field. One option, he suggests, is to look first for signs of mega-scale alien engineering projects such as a Dyson Sphere. Now, to me a Dyson Sphere is a massive solid shell constructed around a star, like the one Scottie crashed into in that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but not so.

Even if it was so, a Dyson Sphere like that would essentially hide the star altogether, leaving nothing but a cool, invisible infra red pinprick in the cosmos.  Z. Osmanov, however, in his article On the search for artificial Dyson-like structures around pulsars, suggests ring-like structures instead. This makes more sense. Enclosing a whole star inside a shell is a rather large and materially expensive project but to construct huge pieces of a Dyson Sphere in orbit of a star would seem easier - even for hyper-advanced space aliens.


Constructions like this, Teodorani thinks, will have two tell-tale signatures. Firstly, the chunks of machinery (or whatever) orbiting the star will give off anomalous IR emissions and, secondly, will give rise to curious luminosity fluctuations. Find something like that in the data and you might have a reasonably good target to focus SETI on for a really good look. Or listen. Or whatever the Hell it is they do with that damned screensaver of theirs.

About five years ago, on the Planet Hunters website, where anyone can join in the hunt for extrasolar planets, something stirred.  Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale, looked into it. What she found was a mystery.

A small, unassuming F-type main-sequence star with the dispiriting name KIC 8462852 has a normal IR signature and a very odd light curve. There's something going on around this star not seen anywhere else to date. It should be a big planet, a cloud of dust or gas or rubble - but things like that leave IR fingerprints and around KIC 8462852 there are none. It could be natural fluctuations on the star itself, sunspots for example, but no other F-type star has been observed to act in this way. Something's there but it's unclear what it is.

The most reasonable hypothesis put forward by Boyajian et. al. in her paper is that the fluctuation is caused by a shattered comet even though she admits this scenario is not without problems. The debris field would have to be massive and be proceeding tail-first, which isn't impossible. It also isn't impossible that such a cometary break-up would have such a low IR fingerprint, despite the energies involved. Still, that's where her paper ends.

A recent article on The Atlantic website, The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy,  quotes Boyajian as saying there are "other scenarios" she is considering. Boyajian is now working with Jason Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The three of them are writing up a proposal to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.

Will they find anything? Who knows - but it seems like a good place to look.

[The Legendary Shark]

Latest Cassini images of Enceladus. Wow.

[The Legendary Shark]

Hot off the press (I haven't read it myself, yet) - The Ĝ Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies. IV. The Signatures and Information Content of Transiting Megastructures, by Jason T. Wright et al. Some SETI-centric thoughts about KIC 8462852...

[The Legendary Shark]

SETI Institute Undertakes Search for Alien Signal from Kepler Star KIC 8462852.

[Hawkmumbler]

One that might be of interest to some, but i'm taking up the Scuba Archaeology Course, working out in Scapa Flow next September. A bit of training up in Oban and off the Welsh coast beforehand, as well as simulations, as well as specialty kit i'll have to get used too (some of which is bloody expensive!) but i'm jumping with giddy joy right now.

[The Legendary Shark]

Sounds like the experience of a lifetime, Hawkie - great stuff!

[The Legendary Shark]

Unknown artificial object headed for impact near Sri Lanca on Friday the 13th of November.

Space junk, probably. Fascinating to think about what's up there and what becomes of it.

[O Lucky Stevie!]

Had the terrific experience of seeing an actual nova over the weekend, even if I didn't know it at the time.

A most belated welcome to the club, TB.

SN1987A on the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud marked Stevie's induction during February of the eponymous year.

Which by strange coincidence was also the first anniversary of the publication of the third & final volume of The Ballad of Halo Jones. Make of that what you will.

For those of you who are unfortunate enough to have never experienced the splendor that is the Southern Sky, the LMC is generally visible to the naked eye as a faint cloud forming a veiled backdrop to the constellations of Dorado & Mensa.








Oh, & you know how they say that a supernova briefly outshines the rest of its galaxy?

It's true.

[ZenArcade]

Yep the southern night sky is essentially a vista towards the galactic centre; in the northern hemisphere we are looking towards the edge of the galaxy.  Still nice though. Z

[TordelBack]

Still nice though.

Ahh it's alright, I suppose.

My brother moved to Oz decades ago, and despite being an outdoorsy type just looks at me blankly when I quiz him about the Magellanics, the dark nebulae of Crux and the Carina cluster. Such a waste!

[ZenArcade]

Jeez, what a pity. It is supposed to be stunning.  Maybe if we can drag our Thryll Seeker away from his Slaine kick for a while, he can post us some pics of the Coal Sack. Z

[Jim_Campbell]

Pluto continues to be interesting. Keep in mind that NASA is doing this with basically no money... imagine what they could be doing if they'd had the money the US has pissed away on completely futile interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Cheers

Jim

[Dandontdare]

Aaaargh - Phobos is disintegrating: https://earthsky.org/space/mars-moon-phobos-slowly-falling-apart

[Jim_Campbell]

Aaaargh - Phobos is disintegrating: https://earthsky.org/space/mars-moon-phobos-slowly-falling-apart

Geeks.

Clearly, Geeks.

Cheers

Jim