Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
It's easy to get beaten down by the constant barrage of bad news.
This effect is amplified if you, like me, suffer from anxiety and depression on good days. All I have to do is spend a while reading the headlines, or (worse) hanging out on social media, and I start catastrophizing. Everything is awful. The bad guys always win. We're all doomed.
I can spiral down that whirlpool really quickly, while at the same time knowing that it's not true. A wise friend once told me, "The biggest lie that depression tells you is that the lows are permanent." Yes, there are some very bad things happening right now. But it is possible to hold that in your mind at the same time as believing there's still hope for the future. I can agree with Martin Luther King Jr.'s eloquent line, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," and still wish it would bend a hell of a lot faster.
It's why I post here every day, and (mostly) focus on the positive, or at least the intriguing, rather than writing about the current political horror show day after day. I do believe in speaking up for truth, fairness, and compassion, and decrying their opposites -- and I have done. But I've found that it's equally important to find things that give us hope. There is good news out there, and people are still doing lovely, kind, interesting, important, and wonderful things.
Sometimes those little sparks of hope come from odd quarters. Which brings us to the Dover Twist.
It sounds like some sort of obscure English country dance, but it's not. It's a species of moth native to southern England, Periclepsis cinctana, a little brown-and-white creature with a wingspan of only a bit over a centimeter.
It's an extreme habitat specialist, requiring chalk grasslands, which have largely been cleared for building. And as we've seen over and over, when conditions change -- especially with human disturbance -- the specialists always get hit first and hardest.
So it was with the Dover Twist. Although related populations still persist in mainland Europe, and a small relic on the island of Tiree off the northwest coast of Scotland, the last individual in its original habitat of southeastern England was seen in 1953. Attempts to relocate it failed, and it was declared extirpated.
"I was absolutely blown away," Levey said. "It's the kind of discovery you dream of making, but you never expect it to actually happen. With so many butterflies and moths in trouble across the UK, it’s fantastic to find this tiny little species bucking the trend. After a 73 year gap in sightings, I'm so pleased to share that we now know it is still in Kent and I'm sure it'll be keeping me busy in the near future as we begin the task of uncovering the exact habitat it needs as part of Butterfly Conservation's work helping to save our most threatened moths."
The unexpected renaissance of this species is not only lovely news in general, but gives hope that some other species thought extinct -- especially ones like the Thylacine and Ivory-billed Woodpecker, that live(d) in remote and poorly-explored regions -- might still persist. (Both of those, in fact, have been the subject of repeated sighting reports, but thus far, nothing that convinces the skeptics. The search continues.)
I'm not sure why this story cheered me up as much as it did. The Dover Twist is certainly not what my ecology professor called one of the "charismatic megafauna," something that'd be likely to end up featured in a calendar entitled "Majestic Wildlife." But that this little insect survived undetected, virtually under our noses, is a symbol that things can turn out well.
The good guys do win sometimes. Even if in this case, the good guys are a British ecologist and a minuscule brown-and-white moth. Maybe it's not a dramatic victory, the kind that would make headlines, but it does give me a little boost of hope.
Sometimes being a skeptic means answering the question, "So what happened?" with the rather unsatisfying response, "We don't know and may never know."
That was my immediate reaction upon reading a report out of Argentina, over at the website Inexplicata. (Here are the links to part 1 and part 2 of the report.) The gist of the story is as follows.
On Tuesday, November 15, a woman from the town of Jacinto Araúz went missing. A search was launched in the area where she was last seen, but there were no traces -- no signs of a struggle, no note, no vehicle missing that she might have taken if she'd run away from home. The search, in fact, turned up nothing. Trained search dogs were brought in, and they easily picked up the woman's scent trail near her house, and then abruptly lost it after only 150 meters. Neighbors said that there was no way she'd simply walked away -- her physical condition was poor, and a leisurely one-kilometer walk was enough to tire her out.
The mystery deepened when several relatives received messages from the woman's cellphone number, but the messages contained nothing but a mechanical buzzing noise and static.
Then, twenty-four hours later, she turned up again -- in Quinto Meridiano, sixty-five kilometers away. She had a cut on her forehead, but otherwise was physically unharmed.
She seemed to be in a profound state of shock, however, and wasn't able to (or at least didn't) speak a word to authorities. She was taken to a local hospital, where she wrote down what she claimed had happened to her. She said that on Tuesday, she'd been in her house when she'd heard a noise. She went outside, and there was a sudden, blinding flash of light. When her vision cleared, she was in Quinto Meridiano -- with no apparent lapse of time.
The report, of course, made all the UFO aficionados start jumping up and down making excited little squeaking noises. The area around Jacinto Araúz is a "hotspot," they said. I saw a reference to the "Dorado Incident" in the report, but I wasn't able to find a good account of it; apparently it was some sort of UFO sighting twenty-odd years ago. The report mentioned other sightings in the vicinity that have included spacecraft that landed, leaving scorch marks on the ground, and a "red-eyed creature" that has been seen more than once nearby.
But that's about all there is to the woman's story. She's missing for a day, then turns up with a superficial injury, apparent emotional shock, and a strange tale of vanishing in a flash of light.
So what really happened?
Seems to me there are five possibilities:
Her story is substantially true, and she was teleported (for want of a better word) from Jacinto Araúz to Quinto Meridiano more or less instantaneously by some unidentified, possibly extraterrestrial, agent.
She's lying -- she made the whole thing up for her "fifteen minutes of fame." She went to Quinto Meridiano by one of the usual means of transport, and invented the flash-of-light stuff. The dogs lost her scent because that's the point at which she got in a car and drove (or was driven by an accomplice) away. The phone calls with the buzzing noise were manufactured.
She's mentally unbalanced, and got to Quinto Meridiano somehow but doesn't remember how. Sixty-five kilometers would be a significant walk in twenty-four hours even for someone in good shape, but there's no reason she couldn't have hitchhiked.
She was kidnapped -- knocked on the head (thus the injury on her forehead, and possibly explaining her perception of a flash of light), and then driven to Quinto Meridiano, where she was dumped by the kidnappers.
The people who reported the story made it up, and the mysterious and unnamed woman doesn't even exist.
All of these explanations, however, leave some serious unresolved problems. In order:
Instantaneous transport, or even something very close to it, seems to break just about every law of physics we know.
This all seems like quite an ordeal to put oneself through just to give UFO enthusiasts multiple orgasms. Not only do we have an apparently weak, unwell woman taking off for the next town for a day, but giving herself a deep cut on the forehead, for no other reason than to fool a bunch of people and worry the absolute shit out of her friends and family.
If she is simply mentally ill, and hitched a ride from Jacinto Araúz to Quinto Meridiano, why hasn't anyone turned up saying that they'd seen her or given her a lift? According to the sources, her disappearance was widely publicized -- it seems like someone would have reported seeing her.
Why was she kidnapped? There's no mention of her being robbed or raped. It seems like there's a complete lack of any plausible motive for kidnapping.
It's possible the story is made up from stem to stern, but there's been enough mention of it in other news sources (such as here and here), with enough details about which police departments were involved in the search, that if it was an out-and-out hoax, it would have been debunked by now.
As I asked before: so, what really happened?
The answer is: we don't know. Perhaps more evidence will surface that will allow us to eliminate one or more of the explanations in the list, but given all we know at the moment, there's no way to narrow it down further. We have to fall back on the ECREE principle -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- which would suggest that the supernatural/paranormal explanation (#1) is less likely than the natural ones (#2-#5), but "less likely" doesn't mean "impossible."
As I used to tell my Critical Thinking classes, you don't have to have an opinion about everything; being a skeptic means that in the absence of conclusive evidence, we have to accept the rather unsatisfying outcome that we need to hold making a conclusion in abeyance, perhaps forever.
So that's our exercise in frustration for the morning. A peculiar story out of Argentina with no clear explanation. It'd be nice if everything was neat and tidy and explicable, but we have to accept the fact that there are things we don't know -- and may never know.
Some time ago, I wrote a post about the (in)famous sort-of anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, author of bestsellers like The Teachings of Don Juan and Journey to Ixtlan. Castaneda was, to put not too fine a point on it, a charlatan, who invented a pastiche of supposed Indigenous Mexican beliefs involving a "separate reality" that could be accessed by using hallucinogenic plants. He got filthy rich from it, amassing a cultlike following of people who wanted to tap into this alleged source of esoteric wisdom.
He was also a fine storyteller. In fact, in my high school and college days, I was taken in for a time. There was something compelling about the tales he told. And in my post, I concluded that it was a pity he didn't just admit up front they were fiction. They'd have lost nothing in their vividness and impact -- and we wouldn't be in the horrid situation where there are still college anthropology courses where Castaneda's work is taught as legitimate scholarly work in ethnology and indigenous religious studies.
Put simply, truth matters. It might seem sad that the universe isn't set up so as to include glowing coyotes who visit you and have conversations wherein you learn eternal wisdom, but I'm much more inclined to agree with my grandma, who observed, "Wishin' don't make it so."
What I didn't know when I wrote the Castaneda piece, however, is that this is far from the first time this sort of literary bait-and-switch has happened, and taken in large numbers of people who you'd think would have known better. And this brings us to the Scottish poet James Macpherson.
Macpherson was born in Ruthven in 1736. His youth was a turbulent time in his home country. The disastrous Battle of Culloden happened when he was ten years old. This was followed by the horrifying "Highland Clearances," during which the victorious British leaders did their damndest to break the Scottish clan system, forcing the immigration of tens of thousands of Highlanders to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. This undoubtedly ignited nationalistic fervor and cultural pride in the young Macpherson; after spending a good ten years in hiding, he attended the University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh, where he became obsessed with Scottish folklore, history, mythology, and poetry.
In 1760 and 1761, he published two works -- Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and the more famous epic poem Fingal. Neither of these, he said, was his own original work; they were translations, the latter from a poem authored (and then passed down orally) by the ancient Scottish poet Oisín (anglicized as Ossian).
Oisín was a bard, Macpherson said, son of another famous poet and musician -- Fionn mac Cumhaill (anglicised to Finn McCool), who was the great-grandson of a druid named Nuadat who was in the service of Cathair Mór, high king of Ireland during the early second century C.E. So this would have put Oisín (at a guess) some time in the middle of the second century.
And, Macpherson pointed out, there are historical markers in Fingal and his other alleged Oisín-authored poem, Temora, that support this; they mention a Roman emperor named "Caracul" and a commander named "Caros," which Macpherson said line up with the (real) figures of Caracalla (188-217) and Marcus Aurelius Mausaeus Carausius (ca. 250-293).
So if these really did represent an oral tradition, it was pretty astonishing; it had lasted, preserving significant details, for fifteen hundred years.
When Macpherson published his books, they had an incredible impact. Napoleon, Diderot, and Thomas Jefferson were huge fans; the last-mentioned said that "Ossian was the greatest poet that has ever existed," and that he planned to learn Gaelic so he could read them in the original language. Thoreau wrote, "The genuine remains of Ossian... are in many respects of the same stamp as the Iliad." Felix Mendelssohn's symphonic work Fingal's Cave and Niels Gade's tone poem Echoes of Ossian were directly inspired by Macpherson's supposed translations.
The Oisín cycle was also a major influence on the rise of Celticism -- the renewal of interest in all things Celtic, often coupled with dramatic romanticization of the culture of the Celts (something that still hangs around today; consider how many New Age spiritual books claim to have their basis in the teachings of the druids, when in fact we know next to nothing about what the druids and their followers actually believed).
It also was the basis of dozens, possibly hundreds, of works of art:
Ossian Singing by Nicolai Abildgaard (1787) [Image is in the Public Domain]
Not everyone was impressed, however. English author and polymath Samuel Johnson said the pieces were "forgeries... the grossest imposition as ever the world was troubled with" and called Macpherson "a mountebank, a liar, and a fraud." When asked, "But Doctor Johnson, do you really believe that any man today could write such poetry?" he replied, "Yes. Many men. Many women. And many children."
This, of course, caused an immediate firestorm in Scotland. No Englishman could dare utter such words against someone who had become something of a national hero. The controversy raged for decades, with most of it devolving into "he is too" and "he is not" shouted back and forth across the River Tweed. It wasn't until the late nineteenth century that blood had cooled sufficiently for someone finally to ask, "Well, what evidence do we have?" and started cross-checking it against other collections that had been made of Scottish oral history, tradition, and folklore.
The upshot: some scraps of the Oisín legends were actually part of the oral tradition in the Scottish Highlands. (No one doubts, for example, that Fionn mac Cumhaill was a real figure of legend.) But Fingal, and especially Temora, were mostly an invention by Macpherson himself.
That's not to say they aren't beautiful in their own right. William Paton Ker, the Scottish-born professor of literary history at Oxford University, said, "all Macpherson's craft as a philological impostor would have been nothing without his literary skill."
But you have to wonder why Macpherson wasn't content to publish them under his own name. Instead, he stretched the truth to the snapping point; his detractors say outright that he lied. Did he believe that his work would never receive the publicity it deserved without his attributing it to a legendary authorship? Or did he want to lend credence to a vision of a quasi-historical time in Scotland when it was powerful, stable, and producing works of timeless beauty?
It's impossible to parse the motivations of someone who's been dead for over two hundred years, but it does strike me as a shame -- just as with Castaneda, what could have been a dramatic and inspiring work of fiction has forever been tarnished because its author falsely claimed it to be true. (Well, in Macpherson's case, that it was an authentic piece of folklore.)
The truth matters, or it should. It's easy to condemn those who lie to cover up ugly behavior; what about liars who create wonders? Even Castaneda, although late in life he succumbed to the desire for power, sex, and money, started out simply creating a fascinating and gripping fictional tale that, shockingly, millions of people ended up believing.
I can't help but find the whole thing sad. The world is a hard, cold place sometimes, and we need beautiful stories to buoy us up in the all-too-common troubled times. When the creators of those stories turn out to have engaged in nothing more than literary sleight-of-hand, it feels like a betrayal.
However inventive they are, it's a lie I find very hard to excuse.
I first ran into the fine-tuning argument around twenty-five years ago when I read astrophysicist Martin Rees's wonderful book Just Six Numbers, in which he looks at how a handful of fundamental constants -- the gravitational flatness of the universe, the strength of the strong nuclear force, the ratio between the strength of the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force, the number of spatial dimensions, the ratio between the rest mass energy of matter and the gravitational field energy, and the cosmological constant -- have combined to produce the universe around us. One by one, he goes through each of them, and shows that if you changed them -- some by as little as one percent in either direction -- you would have a universe profoundly hostile to life, and (in come cases) one in which matter itself wouldn't be stable.
To a lot of people, this looks very much like someone superpowerful tweaked the dials to just the right settings, so that these constants have values that allow for stable, long-lived stars, complex chemistry, and -- ultimately -- life. We don't yet know any underlying physics from which any of these could be derived; they seem to be, essentially, arbitrary. For some people, this line of reasoning ends with, "ergo... God."
Well, I have two objections, and if you're a long-time reader of Skeptophilia, you probably know what they are. First, there's that awkward little word "yet." We don't yet know if these constants are constrained -- i.e., if their values are required to be what they are by some overarching principle. There may be such a principle that we just haven't discovered, just as the properties of the elements seemed arbitrary until Mendeleev (and Bohr, de Broglie, Pauli, and others) came along and showed that there was an organizing scheme and an underlying set of physical mechanisms that made sense of it all.
My second objection is that of course we live in a universe that has properties that allow life. If the universe didn't have properties that allowed life, we wouldn't be here to ask the question. This formulation, called the Weak Anthropic Principle, more or less devolves into a tautology, a little like being puzzled about why organisms that require oxygenated air to breathe are found only in places that have oxygenated air.
The question, though, is not as facile as I'm perhaps making it sound. There are a great many seemingly arbitrary constants in physics (physicists prefer the term free parameters), such why the fundamental particles in the Standard Model of Particle Physics have the masses they do.
[Image is in the Public Domain]
Also unknown is why there are three "generations" of fermions and only one of bosons, why there are four fundamental forces, and why gravitation has (again, thus far) resisted all attempts to incorporate it into a Grand Unified Theory.
Some physicists have attempted to explain this messiness by saying that this is only one universe in a multiverse, and all the other universes have different properties -- in fact, all the possible combinations of parameters exist in a universe somewhere. The problem with this is that it's an explanation that doesn't really explain anything. We have no way of detecting those other universes, so what does it even mean to say they "exist?" In my mind, this is no better than the "God-as-dial-twiddler" model. In fact, it's worse; at least in the latter, there's an entity who cares enough about us to create a relatively hospitable universe for us poor slobs who are stuck inside it.
The reason this comes up is a new paper from physicist McCullen Sandora, that I found out about from Sabine Hossenfelder's physics news YouTube channel. Called "Multiverse Predictions for Habitability: Fundamental Physics and Galactic Habitability," Sandora turns the entire discussion upside-down; instead of looking at the physical free parameters and asking why they are what they are, he asks the question, "What does the presence of life tell us about how the universe had to be?"
Sandora's intriguing conclusion is that "neat" universes -- ones with unified forces, few free parameters, and simple interactions -- are incapable of generating the complexity required for life. Hossenfelder says:
The surprising result is that the idea that the fundamental forces are unified do badly. Well, at least I found that surprising, but the more I thought about it the more sense it made. You see, a unified theory will in one way or another tie different parameters to each other. Then, if you vary one parameter, you break several others at the same time.
As a consequence, the more strongly different interactions are tied together, the more difficult it becomes to create life. Most universes end up either short lived, empty, or chemically boring. More flexible theories do better. Theories where parameters can vary more independently produce a larger fraction of observer-friendly universes. In other words, once you include the multiverse and selection effects, physics that is slightly messy beats physics that is mathematically elegant.
Hossenfelder herself has argued vehemently against using the criteria of "beauty" or "elegance" as the driver to find theoretical frameworks in physics; her excellent book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray is one long plea to go back to an empirical basis for physics research. (An especially egregious example is the long, expensive, and fruitless quest for supersymmetry, a postulated system that argues the existence of a "supersymmetric partner" for every particle in the Standard Model; a decades-long search has turned up exactly zero of these hypothesized partners.)
We humans like things neat and tidy, though, don't we? Look at the biologists' concerted efforts -- only recently abandoned -- to pretend that the concept of species has any actual relevance. The biological world doesn't fit into neat little cubbyholes; maybe the physical world doesn't, either.
Perhaps we do just live in an untidy universe, caught somewhere between sterile simplicity and complete chaos. Being here in the middle allows for complexity, interconnectedness, and its own kind of messy-haired beauty. But maybe that's what we should expect, you know? It reminds me of the quote from the brilliant musician and electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos: "What is full of redundancy or formula is predictable and boring. What is free of all structure or discipline is random and boring. In between lies art."
Maybe it's more than than just art, though. Maybe in between lies... everything.
Although you don't tend to hear much about it, the Ordovician Period was a very peculiar time in Earth's history.
From beginning (485 million years ago) to the end (444 million years ago) it experienced two of the biggest global climatic swings the Earth has ever seen. In the early Ordovician the climate was a sauna -- an intense greenhouse effect caused the highest temperatures the Paleozoic Era would see, and glacial ice all but vanished. Life was abundant in the shallow seas. One of the dominant groups were the conodonts:
Those of you who know your fish might guess that conodonts like Panderodus were related to modern lampreys, and you're right. But it took a really long time to figure that out. Their soft bodies didn't fossilize well, so about all that we had were the cone-shaped teeth that gave them their name. In fact, those teeth are the most common fossils in Ordovician sedimentary rocks, so we knew whatever grew them must have been abundant -- but it took a while to determine what kind of animal they came from.
So things were warm, humid, with tropical conditions virtually pole to pole. Then... something happened. We're still not entirely sure what. Part of it was undoubtedly simple plate tectonics; the supercontinent of Gondwana was gradually moving toward the South Pole. There's some evidence of a large meteorite strike, or possibly more than one. But whatever the cause, by the end of the Ordovician, glaciers covered much of what is now Africa and South America, resulting in a drastic drop in sea level and a massive extinction that wiped out an estimated sixty percent of life on Earth.
At this point, life was confined to the oceans. The first terrestrial plants and fungi wouldn't evolve until something like twenty million years after the beginning of the next period, the Silurian, and land animals only followed after that. As the Ordovician progressed, and more and more ocean water became locked up in the form of glacial ice, much of what had been shallow, temperate seas dried up to form cold, barren deserts. And that was all there was on land -- thousands of square kilometers of rock, sand, and ice, without a single living thing larger than bacteria to be found anywhere.
Then, the climate reversed again. The seas flooded back in, and the warmer, sulfur-rich, oxygen-poor water upwelling from the bottom knocked out about twenty percent of the cold-adapted survivors. By the time the period ended, the Earth had a seriously impoverished biosphere, with something like fifteen percent of the original biota making it through the double-whammy.
But what survived this pair of climate swings was to shape Earth's biological history forever. Because it included primitive vertebrates with paired jaws -- the gnathostomes -- which became the ancestors of 99% of modern vertebrate animals, including ourselves.
The reason this comes up is some new research out of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology that analyzed thousands of fossils from species that made it through the Late Ordovician bottleneck -- and an equal number of those that didn't. And they found two interesting patterns. First, the survivors were mostly species that found their way into refugia -- small, isolated pockets of ecosystems with (slightly) more hospitable conditions that allowed them to squeak their way through the worst times. Second, each of the major extinction pulses was followed by dramatic diversification, as the surviving populations expanded into niches vacated by the ones that weren't so fortunate.
"We pulled together two hundred years of late Ordovician and early Silurian paleontological research," said study lead author Wahei Hagiwara. "By reconstructing the ecosystems within these refugia, we were able to measure changes in genus-level diversity over time. Our analysis revealed a steady but striking rise in jawed vertebrate diversity following the extinction. And the trend is clear -- the mass extinction pulses led directly to increased speciation after several millions of years."
As Ian Malcolm so accurately put it, "Life, uh, finds a way."
A couple of other things strike me about this research, though.
The first is how contingent our existence here is. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a provocative piece about "replaying the tape of life," coming to the conclusion if you were to start over from the beginning, so much of the path of evolution has rested on chance occurrences that the chances of it turning out exactly the same way is nearly zero. In a situation like the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction, which assortment of species made it into the few hospitable refugia must have had as much to do with luck as with being well-adapted; had a different set of populations survived, life today almost certainly would look very different.
The second is the fact that both of the Ordovician climate swings were far slower than what we're currently doing to the environment. Like, hundreds of times slower. The second one, in fact -- the warm-up and subsequent melting of polar ice -- was almost certainly a very gradual rebound toward the greenhouse conditions that were to pertain by the mid-Silurian. We're talking about something on the order of ten million years to go from cool to warm.
What we're doing now has taken only a couple of hundred.
What happened in the Late Ordovician should be a wake-up call for us. Yet somehow, we arrogant humans think we're immune to the effects of our out-of-control fossil fuel burning. We have a striking fossil record documenting the terrible effects of rapid climate change in prehistory; at the moment, mostly what we seem to be doing is saying, "Yeah, but it won't happen to us, 'cuz we're special."
So that's our cautionary tale for today. The climate change deniers are fond of saying, "Earth's climate has changed many times before now," and almost never add, "... and when it did, enormous numbers of species went extinct." And the difference, too, is that the natural fluctuations (such as those caused by plate movement, asteroid strikes, and changes in insolation) aren't something we could control even if we wanted to, but what we're doing now is entirely voluntary.
And until the people in charge realize that addressing climate change is in all of our best interest, I'm afraid our path forward is not likely to change.
I'll start today with a quote (often misquoted) from William Shakespeare -- more specifically, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5:
Horatio:
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
Hamlet:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Horatio and Hamlet, of course, are talking about ghosts and the supernatural, but it could equally well be applied to science. It's tempting sometimes, when reading about new scientific discoveries, for the layperson to say, "This can't possibly be true, it's too weird." But there are far too many truly bizarre theories that have been rigorously verified over and over -- quantum mechanics and the General Theory of Relativity jump to mind immediately -- to rule anything out based upon our common-sense ideas about how the universe works.
That was my reaction while watching a YouTube video about an astronomical object I'd never heard of -- Przybylski's Star, named after its discoverer, Polish-born Australian astronomer Antoni Przybylski. The video comes from astronomer David Kipping's channel Cool Worlds Lab, which looks at cutting-edge science -- and tantalizing new data about the universe we live in. (You should subscribe to it -- you won't be sorry.) Przybylski's Star is 355 light years from Earth, in the constellation of Centaurus, and is weird in so many ways that it kind of boggles the mind.
It's classified as a Type Ap star. Type A stars are young, compact, luminous, and very hot; the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius, is in this class.
Przybylski's Star rotates slowly. I mean, really slowly. Compared to the Sun, which rotates about once every 27 days, Przybylski's Star rotates once every two hundred years. Most type A stars rotate even faster than the Sun; in fact, a lot of them rotate so quickly that the light from their receding hemisphere and that from their approaching hemisphere experience enough red-shift and blue-shift (respectively) to smear out their spectral lines, making it impossible for us to tell exactly what they're made of.
You probably know that most ordinary stars are primarily composed of hydrogen, and of the bit that's not hydrogen, most of it is helium. Hydrogen is the fuel for the fusion in the core of the star, and helium is the product formed by that fusion. Late in their life, many stars undergo core collapse, in which the temperatures heat up enough to fuse helium into heavier elements like carbon and oxygen. Most of the rest of the elements on the periodic table are generated in supernovas and in neutron stars, a topic I dealt with in detail in a post I did about six years ago.
My point here is that if you look at the emission spectra of your average star, the spectral lines you see should mostly be the familiar ones from hydrogen and helium, with minuscule traces of the spectra of other elements. The heaviest element that should be reasonably abundant, even in the burned-out cores of stars, is iron -- it represents the turnaround point on the curve of binding energy, the point where fusion into heavier elements starts consuming more energy than it releases.
So elements that are low in abundance pretty much everywhere, such as the aptly-named rare earth elements (known to chemists as the lanthanides), should be so uncommon as to be effectively undetectable. Short-lived radioactive elements like thorium and radium shouldn't be there at all, because they don't form in the core of your ordinary star, and therefore any traces present had to have formed prior to the star in question's formation -- almost always, enough time that they should have long since decayed away.
The composition of Przybylski's Star, on the other hand, is so skewed toward heavy elements that it elicits more in the way of frustrated shrugs than it does in viable models that could account for it. It's ridiculously high in lanthanides like cerium, dysprosium, europium, and gadolinium -- not elements you hear about on a daily basis. There's more praseodymium in the spectrum of its upper atmosphere than there is iron. Even stranger is the presence of very short-lived radioactive elements such as plutonium -- and actinium, americium, and neptunium, elements for which we don't even know a naturally-occuring nuclide synthesis pathway capable of creating them.
So where did they come from?
"What we’d like to know... is how the heavy elements observed here have come about," said astronomy blogger Paul Gilster. "A neutron star is one solution, a companion object whose outflow of particles could create heavy elements in Przybylski’s Star, and keep them replenished. The solution seems to work theoretically, but no neutron star is found anywhere near the star."
"[T]hat star doesn’t just have weird abundance patterns; it has apparently impossible abundance patterns," said Pennsylvania State University astrophysicist Jason Wright, in his wonderful blog AstroWright. "In 2008 Gopka et al. reported the identification of short-lived actinides in the spectrum. This means radioactive elements with half-lives on the order of thousands of years (or in the case of actinium, decades) are in the atmosphere... The only way that could be true is if these products of nuclear reactions are being replenished on that timescale, which means… what exactly? What sorts of nuclear reactions could be going on near the surface of this star?"
All the explanations I've seen require so many ad-hoc assumptions that they're complete non-starters. One possibility astrophysicists have floated is that the replenishment is because it was massively enriched by a nearby supernova, and not just with familiar heavy elements like gold and uranium, but with superheavy elements that thus far, we've only seen produced in high-energy particle accelerators -- elements like flerovium (atomic number 114) and oganesson (atomic number 118). These elements are so unstable that they have half-lives measured in fractions of a second, but it's theorized that certain isotopes might exist in an island of stability, where they have much longer lives, long enough to build up in a star's atmosphere and then decay into the lighter, but still rare, elements seen in Przybylski's Star.
There are several problems with this idea, the first being that every attempt to find where the island of stability lies hasn't succeeded. Physicists thought that flerovium might have the "magic number" of protons and neutrons to make it more stable, but a paper released not long ago seems to dash that hope.
The second, and worse, problem is that there's no supernova remnant anywhere near Przybylski's Star.
The third, and worst, problem is that it's hard to imagine any natural process, supernova-related or not, that could produce the enormous quantity of superheavy elements required to account for the amount of lanthanides and actinides found in this star's upper atmosphere.
Which brings me to the wildest speculation about the weird abundances of heavy elements. You'll never guess who's responsible.
Go ahead, guess.
There is a serious suggestion out there -- and David Kipping does take it seriously -- that an advanced technological civilization might have struck on the solution for nuclear waste of dumping it into the nearest star. This explanation (called "salting"), bizarre as it sounds, would explain not only why the elements are there, but why they're way more concentrated in the upper atmosphere of the star than in the core.
"Here on Earth... people sometimes propose to dispose of our nuclear waste by throwing it into the Sun,” Wright writes. “Seven years before Superman thought of the idea, Whitmire & Wright (not me, I was only 3 in 1980) proposed that alien civilizations might use their stars as depositories for their fissile waste. They even pointed out that the most likely stars we would find such pollution in would be… [type] A stars! (And not just any A stars, late A stars, which is what Przybylski’s Star is). In fact, back in 1966, Sagan and Shklovskii in their book Intelligent Life in the Universe proposed aliens might 'salt' their stars with obviously artificial elements to attract attention."
A curious side note is that I've met (Daniel) Whitmire, of Whitmire & Wright -- he was a professor in the physics department of the University of Louisiana when I was an undergraduate, and I took a couple of classes with him (including Astronomy). He was known for his outside-of-the-box ideas, including that a Jupiter-sized planet beyond the orbit of Pluto was responsible for disturbing the Oort Cloud as it passed through every hundred million years or so (being so far out, it would have a super-long rate of revolution). This would cause comets, asteroids, and other debris to rain in on the inner Solar System, resulting in a higher rate of impacts with the Earth -- and explaining the odd cyclic nature of mass extinctions.
So I'm not all that surprised about Whitmire's suggestion, although it bears mention that he was talking about the concept in the purely theoretical sense; the weird spectrum of Przybylski's Star was discovered after Whitmire & Wright's paper on the topic.
Curiouser and curiouser.
So we're left with a mystery. The "it's aliens" explanation is hardly going to be accepted by the scientific establishment without a hell of a lot more evidence, and thus far, there is none. The problem is, the peculiar abundance of heavy elements in this very odd star remains unaccounted for by any science we currently understand. The fact that Kipping (and others) are saying "we can't rule out the alien salting hypothesis" is very, very significant.
I'll end with another quote, this one from eminent biologist J. B. S. Haldane: "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine."
There's an interesting idea from evolutionary theory called the cui bono principle.
Cui bono? is Latin for "who benefits?" It started out as a legal concept; if a crime has been committed, and you're looking for the suspect, find out who benefitted. That, very likely, will get you on the right path toward solving the mystery.
Cui bono in the evolutionary model has to do with explaining odd phenomena that seem to have no obvious underlying reason -- or which even induce organisms into self-destructive behavior. One common example is the strange situation where certain ant species crawl up to the tops of blades of grass and basically just wait there to be eaten by herbivores. It turns out that the bizarrely suicidal ants are infected with a parasite called a lancet worm that needs to complete its life cycle in the gut of a herbivorous mammal, so it damages the brain of the ant in just such a way as to turn its sense of direction upside down. The parasitized ant then crawls upward instead of downward to safety, gets eaten -- and the lancet worm, of course, is the one who benefits.
Another, even creepier example, is Toxoplasma gondii, which I wrote about here at Skeptophilia a few years ago. I encourage you to go back and read the post, but the upshot is this parasite -- which by some estimates infects half of the human population on Earth -- causes different symptoms in its three main hosts, cats, rats, and people. Each set of symptoms is tailored to change behavior in very specific ways, with one end in mind; allowing the parasite to jump to its next host.
I just found out about another very peculiar (and convoluted) example of cui bono just yesterday, this one involving rice plants. Many plants, it turns out, have pheromonal signaling, releasing chemicals into the air that then trigger responses in neighboring individuals, either of their own or of different species. Acacia trees that are browsed by herbivores, for example, emit a signal that triggers nearby trees to produce bitter tannins, discouraging further snacking on the leaves. Well, it turns out that rice plants have an even niftier strategy; attacked by insect pests, the rice plants emit a chemical called methyl salicylate (better known as oil of wintergreen), which attracts parasitoids -- insects like chalcid wasps that attack and kill the offending pests, usually by laying an egg in or on them and allowing the larvae to eat the pests for lunch.
Okay, but this has yet another layer of complexity, because there's a different set of organisms that have another take on cui bono. Rice are subject to a group of plant viruses called tenuiviruses, which cause rice stripe disease, weakening or killing plants and severely reducing crop yield. Tenuiviruses are spread by insect pests like planthoppers, which (much like mosquitoes with malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, and chikungunya) suck up the sap of infected plants and the virus along with it, move on to an uninfected host, and spread the disease.
Rice stripe tenuivirus [Image credit: A. M. Espinoza]
And new research has found that the tenuiviruses, once in an infected plant's tissues, suppress the plant's ability to produce methyl salicylate. The result? The plant can't send a signal to the parasitoids, the planthoppers multiply, and the disease spreads.
The authors write:
[R]ice viruses inhibit methyl salicylate (MeSA) emission, impairing parasitoid recruitment and promoting vector persistence. Field experiments demonstrate that MeSA, a key herbivore-induced volatile, suppresses vector populations by attracting egg parasitoids. Viruses counter this by targeting basic-helix-loop-helix transcription factor OsMYC2, a jasmonic acid signaling hub, thereby down-regulating OsBSMT1 and MeSA biosynthesis, responses conserved across diverse rice viruses and vector species.
So once again, we have a parasitic microorganism that is engineering a response in its host that makes it more likely to be passed on, in this case by preventing the host from calling for help.
This kind of strategy brings Tennyson's observation that "nature is red in tooth and claw" to new heights, doesn't it? Makes you wonder how many other examples there are out there of behavior being manipulated by parasites. Further evidence that evolution is the Law of Whatever Works -- even if Whatever Works is kind of unsettling.
