Transcript: KIC 8462852 Boyajian's Star Update for 03/03/17

This is an update in my continuing coverage of KIC 8462852 or Boyajian's star for March 3, 2017. For the back story on this fascinating star, see the other videos on my channel starting with my first update of April of last year.

Boyajian's star remains as much of a mystery as it has always been with a host of new natural explanations on the table and the alien megastructure hypothesis remains unlikely, but is still in the mix.

As I reported earlier this year, one theory regarding the type of alien megastructure that theoretically could be involved is stellar lifting, a hypothetical technology that allows a civilization to harvest materials from their star. Along with this theory came a prediction that on February 21st or thereabouts, the next dimming event would occur.

I found this prediction interesting, but highly unlikely due to the alien nature of the theory. That said, it was quite difficult to pin down exactly what happened on the 21st. There was a good reason for this, Boyajian's star was behind the sun at this time and therefore quite difficult to observe on earth and apparently the weather was bad for what ground observation could be done. As a result, there was no data as would normally be available through the American Association of Variable Star Observers who are monitoring this star nightly and plotting what they see in order to catch the next dip.

The star was however under observation by the SWIFT space craft and the main science team investigating the star led by Dr. Boyajian. On a German language news site that I cannot pronounce, link in the description below, members from the team said in an interview that they did not see a dip.

Dr. Heindl notes that SWIFT only observed the star for a few minutes and may not have caught it, but Dr. Boyajian notes that the dips that Kepler observed tended to last for several days so it likely would have caught it. Dr. Heindl's next prediction for a dip consistent with his hypothesis is February of 2019.

And that brings us to a very different kind of prediction, this one from Dr. Boyajian's blog, link also in the description below. There she gives a loose prediction on the next dimming event based on the idea that if you assume that the two large dimming events that Kepler observed are related, then the next dimming event could start in a window of several months before May of this year and several months after. Now, Dr. Boyajian is careful to caution in the post that it's merely a possibility that the two events were related and this prediction may not happen at all.

But if it doesn't happen, it would suggest that whatever is going at the star isn't periodic, at least short term. That might bolster some of the explanations that involve interstellar dust clouds moving past or irregularities with the star itself which one theory suggests that it's in the process of calming down after recently eating a planet.

So there you have it, the predicted February 21st dimming event does not appear to have happened as far as anyone knows and the mystery at Boyajian's star continues. It truly is one strange star and no matter if the explanation is natural, which is far more likely, or alien it's going to be something rare and interesting regardless.

http://www.grenzwissenschaft-aktuell.de/erwartete-verdunklung-von-kic-8462852-blieb-aus20170303/

http://www.wherestheflux.com/single-post/2016/06/09/What-will-happen-in-May-of-2017

Transcript: Life on Pluto?

The search for life on planets within our solar system other than Earth has a long and spotty history. A hundred years ago, the obvious candidate was Mars where some astronomers such as Giovanni Schiaperelli and Percival Lowell were certain they were observing a large network of alien-created canals on the surface of that world. To this day, we have no idea what they were looking at since nothing even close to what they claimed to have observed exists on that planet.

The best guess is that they were seeing optical illusions caused by their own telescopes. We now know that civilization on Mars at any time in its past is an utter impossibility for many reasons, lack of a substantial long-term atmosphere being a good one. High levels of sterilizing solar radiation on the surface due to the lack of a substantial magnetosphere would be another.

But what is possible on Mars is the past existence of microbial life early in its history and a lingering possibility that if you go deep enough into the liquid water aquifers thought to still exist on Mars you may still find holdouts of simple life on the red planet. But what none of the canal-spotting astronomers of old expected was that Mars, just a century later, would no longer be the best candidate for a second source of life in our solar system.

Given that all life on earth requires liquid water to exist, it's a good bet that this is true anywhere else in the universe -- though there are other, theoretical ways for it to happen. And the best sources for liquid water in our solar system, and perhaps the universe at large, may not be big ocean planets like Earth. These are probably somewhat rare. Instead, it's the smaller icy bodies of our solar system that may hold the best chances for developing life.

As we've explored our solar system, we have found no other ocean planets. Mars may have been one long ago, but that ocean is long gone and locked up in ice. Even earth is not so stable in that regard, having gone through numerous great ice ages where the planet's surface came close to freezing over. But we have found, potentially, other alternative oceans on not just one world in the solar system but quite a few including the moons Enceladus, Titan and Europa that could all harbor subsurface liquid oceans that might hold life that in theory could be complex perhaps similar to the life that exists on earth near deep-ocean geothermal vents.

But now we can add one more potential extraterrestrial ocean to that list. And, before the New Horizons flyby, it was probably the most unlikely body to be considered for life in our solar system. It's Pluto, and it would be hard to understate that this tiny world is one bizarre place and the more we study the data returned by the New Horizon's probe, the worse it gets.

There are two remarkable things going on at Pluto. Unknown geologic processes that have led to water ice mountain ranges and what may be complex prebiotic organic chemistry going on in the thin atmosphere of that world. Prebiotic means just that, chemistry that is a precursor to life rather than actually being life. But it's interesting to see at this little world because by all rights it should be completely dead but it's not, it more resembles Titan with its hydrocarbon rain than any other world in our solar system.

Interesting organic chemistry aside, the geologic processes going on at Pluto are not well understood but one possibility is that beneath the surface of the planet exists a liquid water ocean kept warm by radioactive decay in the planet's core. This creates an interesting mix, prebiotic chemistry in the atmosphere and liquid water under the surface existing on the same world opens up a lot of possibilities.

It's going to be a long while before we have a proper understanding of Pluto and it's equally strange and interesting moon Charon, but what is becoming clear is that the most interesting places as far as the potential for life are concerned may be the cold, seemingly frozen worlds far outside the habitability zones of stars. In fact, with the addition of Pluto to the possible list, there are now more worlds that could theoretically harbor life in our solar system outside the sun's habitable zone than within it. 

Transcript: TRAPPIST-1 UPDATE for 02/24/17

This is an update in my continuing coverage of the intriguing star system called TRAPPIST - 1 that includes no less than seven earth-like rocky planets, see my first video update on that on this channel for the back story. In the few days since NASA's press conference, a clearer picture is emerging on just how bizarre yet familiar this star system is.

There seems to be a high likelihood for liquid water existing on two of these worlds, and in fact could exist on all seven if the atmospheric conditions of some of those worlds allow it. But there is actually a very specific reason why scientists think this is likely.

When planets form out of the discs of debris that often surround young stars, the materials in the disc are not uniformly distributed. You can infer just where a planet originally formed by its composition. In early solar systems planets tend to migrate until they ultimately settle into stable orbits. The current models for TRAPPIST - 1 indicate that the planets of the system formed relatively far out from the star and eventually migrated inward. This would mean that they formed in an area of the disc that was rich in water ice. Warm water ice up, and you have liquid water.

Where you have liquid water, you have the potential for life. Now one point against TRAPPIST - 1's planets developing life is their proximity to the star. They are really close and when you're close to a star you are subject to some serious radiation. One type of radiation that's unfriendly towards life is ultra-violet. Here on earth we are protected from the sun's UV radiation by the ozone layer. A similar such ozone layer may protect one or more of the worlds at TRAPPIST - 1, only further study will tell.

Another issue is the presence of a strong magnetic field to deflect radiation. These planets would need that to support life, but as with Earth, it has a strong magnetic field so they may too. Again, further study here is needed.

But in one area the new planets are favored for life. Life here is linked to tidal pools early in earth's history where the magic of organic chemistry could be worked that eventually leads to life. For life to develop, at least according to current thinking, you need tidal pools. Tidal pools need tides. Tides require a moon. Now, at first glance the mechanics of the TRAPPIST planetary system seems to disfavor moons. These planets pass very close to each other and affect each other with their gravity and probably would have tossed any moons out of that area pretty quickly.

But that's also the saving grace. They pass so close that the planets themselves would create tidal effects on any water present in the system. So here we have a case where the circumstances allow for tides without moons. 

So let's say, hypothetically, that on one of the planets microbial life has developed. The interesting thing here is that if it has, then at some point it is likely that life will arise on any of the other planets in the system that allow for it. The reason for this is panspermia. This is a process where impacts by asteroids can blow debris off of one world where it would then wander space for a bit and land on another. It is possible for dormant microbial life to survive the journey and in fact it's possible that we've seen this first hand, though the subject is more hotly debated than is commonly known.

During the Apollo 12 mission to the moon astronauts retrieved the main camera from the surveyor 3 mission that had been sitting on the moon for three years. When they got it back to earth, they found living bacteria between the lenses that appear to have survived the harsh conditions of the moon. Now, this has been widely criticized because there was apparently plenty of opportunity for contamination but it still seems rather odd that the handful of bacteria all happened to be the same species and when cultured behaved as though they had been dormant. The truth will likely never be known since the cameras are not now in a sterile environment.

This sort of thing could easily occur with rocks, and might in fact have happened in our own solar system. One existing theory is that life in our solar system actually originated on Mars and was deposited on this planet by a meteorite. This theory is attractive because at the time that life arose on earth, the environment here was not that great for the formation of life. Mars had once been a more hospitable place for life than Earth in this solar system.

Given the very close proximity of the planets of TRAPPIST - 1, these planets would pass by each other and look even larger in the sky than our moon does, it seems likely that materials get exchanged, or did in the past, due to impacts. As a result, life may have hitched a ride and populated more than just one world in this system.

Only time will tell if these worlds at TRAPPIST - 1 hold the potential for life or are more likely to be sterile worlds. After all, three planets also lie within our sun's zone of habitability and any alien culture out there studying us probably initially wondered if life could exist on all three.

But as they study the atmospheres of our planets, they would quickly see that the closest of the three, Venus, is unsuitable for most straightforward kinds of life and they would see that Mars is too small to hold the necessary atmosphere for much other than underground microbes. But then they would see our blue jewel and the oxygen life creates in its atmosphere and then they would know.

Habitable Planets Galore! Trappist -1 Update 02-22-17

Earlier today, NASA held a press conference to announce a highly unusual star system known as Trappist - 1 that is currently setting the fields of planetary science and exobiology afire. This system doesn't just contain one earth-like world within its habitable zone, but at least an astonishing three that could conceivably host life as we know it. And, they are close at just under 40 light-years away.

The planets were discovered through a method known as transit photometry initially with the Trappist telescope in Chile and further studied with the Spitzer space telescope. Transits occur when planets pass in front of their host star and block just a little bit of its light. In fact, this is how we found out about Boyajian's star and many of the known exoplanets. Looking at how much of the light was getting blocked told scientists how big these worlds were. It turns out they're small, about the size of earth. But how much like earth?

The key here is the availability of liquid water, like our oceans. You have to be a certain distance from your star in order for water to avoid freezing solid but also not evaporate into gas. Water is chemistry's universal solvent, the medium where organic reactions can occur. This is key for all life on earth, everything needs water to exist. There are a few other ways life might manage to exist, but water-based organic chemistry is by far the best chance.

That's where these new planets come in. They seem to not only have the possibility of bearing liquid water like a planet like Proxima B or Earth, but the conditions are such for all three that, as far as we know so far, they probably do. And there are a further four planets in this system that are also seemingly rocky and are about the same size of earth, but it's not completely clear yet if they are also within the zone of habitability. In other words, this is a star system that could have seven earths orbiting it.

Now two of these worlds are probably tidally locked to their star. That puts them in the same league as Proxima B where they would have a ring of habitability in the twighlight zone of the planets. But the sunlit sides would likely be rather hot and the night side a frozen wasteland and this could cause extremely high winds, we don't yet know. The third planet is on the edge of the zone of habitability but is not tidally locked.

One thing going against life in Trappist-1 system is its age. The system is only 500 million years old. This may not be enough time for life to have developed, and isn't anywhere near long enough for intelligent life as we understand it to develop. And, another hurdle is the type of star it is. Trappist-1 is another red dwarf, similar to Proxima Centauri and its planet.

Recent research suggests that red dwarfs are rather unstable early in life, and this star is bizarrely metal rich and it's unclear why that is or what that means or what implications that has, so the planets my still be sterile even if there is liquid water present.

But that may not be true forever. This star will live an unbelievably long life, at least 4 trillion years. When our sun expands into a red giant and engulfs earth in a few billion years, this star will still be young. When most of the stars of the universe have lived their lives, this star will be among the few main sequence hydrogen burning stars left in the universe. That leaves plenty of time for life to evolve there at some point in the future. But this system is close enough that it seems more likely that if we survive someday these planets will be colonies, more on that in a minute. 

The first thing scientists will do is determine of these planets have atmospheres at all and what they are like. This discovery is so important that the Hubble Space Telescope is doing just that already, which will no doubt be the source of future news in the coming months. But a combined spectrum we have for Trappist B and C rules out huge hydrogen envelope atmospheres like our outer planets and is more consistent with a water vapor atmosphere, or Venus-like atmosphere, or even Earth. 

Where this will get interesting is if you can determine the makeup of an earth-like planet's atmosphere and you see certain gases within the atmosphere, such as oxygen, it is a dead ringer for the existence of biological activity on that world. If it's there, we could have conclusive proof of other life elsewhere in the universe in just a few years, or even sooner.

Imagining what it's like in this system is mind-blowing. Because the star is cool and dim, its zone of habitability is far closer to the star's surface than it is with a larger star like the sun. The first planet would have a year that is only a day and a half long. The second planet's  year would be just 2.4 days and the third is unclear and could be anywhere from four to 73 days. The star would appear ten times larger or more in the sky. You would see planets occasionally pass by that would appear as large as the moon, and everything would be very dim since Trappist - 1 is a red dwarf. But it would be warm on these planets, since the star radiates brightly in the infrared.

We have always wondered down here on earth what we would eventually do when our sun expands into a red giant. But the truth of the matter is, our changing sun will make life as we know it on this planet impossible in just a few hundred million years. We arose at the tail end of a 3 billion year process of evolution on a stable planet that simply won't be habitable for much longer.

As a result, we must either colonize other worlds, or develop future technologies that can mitigate the effects of the changing sun. All is not lost there, I'm confident that there will still be people on earth a billion years from now. But we do need to branch out, and these seven worlds offer us a place where we could conceivably survive until there's nothing left in the universe to survive on.

The Event Horizon Telescope Update 02/19/17

One of the strangest and most mysterious phenomena in science today is the black hole. So strange in fact that once you go through one, which would most certainly kill you, you will have left our universe entirely and entered some place else that can only be described as ambiguous at best. It's a place where the laws of physics as we know them break down and if someone were watching you fall in time itself would appear to stop.

At the center of most galaxies, you will find supermassive black holes. The Milky Way is no exception. Called Sagittarius A, this supermassive black hole lies hidden in the shadows of the galaxy's central core. And while we've known about its existence for some time, the one thing we've never been able to do is take a picture of it, or for that matter any black hole.

Now, we can theorize what they might look like close up but even this has been subject to change. But the current theory is that it should look like a black dot surrounded by a halo of light which represents the black hole's glowing accretion disk. A good representation of this view, and one of the few scientifically accurate parts, was the recent movie "Interstellar" which featured Gargantua, a black hole that humans intended to colonize.

But from our perspective, Einstein predicted that it may be more of a crescent than a ring due to one area of the disc appearing brighter than the rest due to a dramatic doppler effect on the light that's being emitted. But to really know for sure what they look like we must photograph a black hole.

This has never been done. For good reason, they are impossible to photograph. The reason for this is that they swallow light itself, leaving nothing but black. But a radical, new telescope will be coming online in April of this year that may change that.

The Event Horizon Telescope isn't really a single instrument, but a network of radio telescopes scatted across the world as an array. Known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI, this technique promises to provide unprecedented resolution. The telescope will go live from the 5th through the 14th of April and intends to photograph the black shadow of Sagittarius A superimposed over its accretion disc.

This is hard to do. Black holes, for their mass, are very, very small. Even though Sagittarius A is millions of times more massive than our sun, it's compacted very tightly and as a result the diameter if its event horizon is comparatively small. It's also very far away, at 26 thousand light-years. And to top it all off, it's obscured by dust and gas.

Hoping to peek through the gas and dust the telescopes will look at radio emissions from the black hole at a wavelength of 1.3 mm, or 230 GHz. Because there are so many radio receivers focused on the black hole, the resolution will be extraordinarily high allowing scientists, hopefully, to glimpse in the radio spectrum the event horizon of the black hole. Think resolutions that could spot a softball at the distance of the moon.

In addition to imaging the black hole in radio, Einstein's theory of General Relatively should predict the exact size of the black hole based on how much it bends space-time around it. This will either create yet another validation of General Relatively, or throw the world of physics into chaos if the prediction ends up being wrong.

So there you have it. At the end of this year or the beginning of 2018, if all goes well, we may have our very first direct image of a black hole.

Thanks for listening! I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently very excited because an image of a black hole is one of the top items on my astronomy bucket list to see within my lifetime and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channel for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.  

Proxima B Update

The discovery of the exoplanet Proxima B last year was a landmark revelation for two reasons. The first is its proximity, it orbits the closest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, which itself has recently been determined to be a member of the greater Alpha Centauri system. The second reason is that the planet happens to be located within the zone of habitability of its star opening up the possibility that it might be earth-like, at least in some ways and that it may hold the potential for life to have evolved there.

But in a new study published by Vladimir Airapetian and his colleagues there is a model for how red dwarfs act when they're young and how that affects any planets within their zones of habitability. Unfortunately, the implications on Proxima B are not so good.

This study shows that immense solar flares may have removed all oxygen from the planet's atmosphere early in its history, and in fact would affect any planets within the habitability zone of any red dwarf star. These are the most common stars in the galaxy, something on the order of 75 percent of all stars and that holds significant ramifications for answering the Fermi Paradox, or the question of if there are aliens out there, why don't we see them? Well, if three quarters of all stars can't develop life within their zones of habitability, that eliminates a lot of the potential for life in the universe in general.

The reasoning behind the study is that while red dwarfs are among the coolest stars in temperature, they counter intuitively end up more active. They can even fire off superflares early in their history, this is bad news for life. So while they are a very stable kind of star when they age, and live enormously long lives that would give evolution a chance to get a foothold,  their violent past may preclude life from arising in an earth-like way on any planets orbiting them.

Part of the problem is that red dwarfs are tiny and dim, and that means that their zones of habitability are in a different location than a star such as our sun. Planets must therefore be over ten times closer to their star in order to be within the zone. This leaves them wide open to damage caused by solar flares and storms.

Planets that are located in inner solar systems tend to lose hydrogen because the X-Ray and Ultraviolet radiation from stellar flares strips electrons from the atoms which escape into space and drag the ionized atoms with them. When you get much closer to a star, as is the case for habitability zones around red dwarves, oxygen and nitrogen can then escape in the same way. That would leave the planet devoid of two necessary elements for life as we know it to evolve.

But there's even worse news. When you bring hydrogen into that mix, it becomes a situation where the planet would also slowly lose its liquid water as it evaporates and enters the atmosphere. This would leave Proxima B a lifeless, arid world even though it's within a zone of habitability.

But in a way, this is good news. The planet is close to us, so much so that it's within the realm of possibility that if initiatives like Project Starshot see fruition, some of us may see close up images of proxima B within our lifetimes. We may well find a world that we can terraform if there's enough ice in the outer part of the system and then some day call it another home for humanity.

Will Earth's Magnetic Poles Flip and What Does it Mean?

The conditions that allow life on earth are a strange dichotomy where life seems both resilient and tenacious yet lives on a fragile, incredible world that against all odds has been a paragon of stability since life first arose. This stability has been key to the rise of humans and one of the most important aspects of that stability is the existence of earth's protective magnetic field.

Earth's magnetic field bathes and protects the surface of our planet from charged particles streaming off the sun. Generated in the earth's molten core by convecting currents, the field is not something we can take for granted. It changes continuously, but not all planets have magnetic fields and certain aspects of our own can change on a dime. One such aspect are the earth's magnetic poles which in the past have reversed multiple times, typically several times per million years. They will do so again in the future, so the natural question is when will the next shift occur and what effect will it have on life on earth?

One thing it won't do is outright shut down, if it did that life on earth would have gone extinct long before microbes would have had time to evolve into complex life. But, if past events are any indicator, it will become weaker for a time and become more complex potentially losing up to 90% of its strength. We might also see, for a short time, multiple north and south poles all over the earth.
There are also different classes of pole reversals. One are incomplete reversals known as excursions where the magnetic poles wander from their normal positions for a time or reverse temporarily. One such reversal, the Laschamp event, did just that about 41,000 years ago, saw a 250-year period where the poles reversed completely but reverted back with the whole field returning back to normal within a thousand year period. The other class are full reversals where the poles shift completely and stay that way until the next event occurs hundreds of thousands of years later.

But as far as life is concerned, the changes that will happen will allow more radiation from the sun to reach the surface. This isn't as bad as it seems for us, the most vulnerable thing is our technology. As we're currently set up, it would wreak havoc on our satellites and power grid and our civilization in general. But we're already at risk of that from powerful solar flares which present a much more urgent threat but that's a topic for another video.

It's worth noting however that life itself has survived many of these reversals, so it must not be that bad as far as being alive is concerned. How it affects our species however is different. We are the top of the chain as far as evolution is concerned and that could easily make us more prepared for it due to our intelligence and ingenuity, or wide open for a collapse of technology and even an extinction. It's hard to say, but we did survive the Laschamp event early in our history so I suspect we would survive a full reversal but our technological civilization, at least as it is now, would not.

The collapse of civilization aside, where I would wonder are the species on earth that make use of magnetoreception. This is thought to include everything from migratory birds, bacteria, mammals, and potentially even us though that is still unproven. These organisms, to varying degrees, sense earth's magnetic field and use it for navigation while they migrate or find their way home. If you change the magnetic map for them, do we end up with confused geese heading towards the arctic and salmon beaching themselves by the millions?

But how close are we to the next reversal? Well, studies of the earth's magnetic field reveal that it's already decreasing in strength at a rate of about 5 percent per century. This would suggest that we're within 2000 years of the next one. But that's about all we can say as the inner workings of the circulating molten iron outer core generating the field are still poorly understood.

But, despite the outer core being located thousands of miles beneath us and notoriously difficult to study, we learn more each year, so some day it may be the case where predicting earth's inner weather is done as easily with as much accuracy as we do with its atmospheric weather ... hey, wait.