Crash course

As if we needed one, there's another clickbait sort-of-sciencey-or-something site that I should warn you about.

It's called the Mother Nature Network, and it bills itself as follows:

MNN is designed for people who want to make the world a better place.  Its content is engaging, non-political, and easy-to-understand and goes well beyond traditional "green" issues — encompassing topics that include family, health, home, travel, food, and community involvement. It has been labeled “The Green CNN” by Time, “The USA Today of Sustainability” by Fast Company, “Green Machine” by Associated Press, and “one of the hottest web properties out there” by NBC News; highlighted on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon; selected “Best Idea” at Fortune Magazine’s Green Summit; and chosen as a “Top Pick” by Newsweek.

Well, that may be, but it makes me wonder about how Time et al. are deciding who to laud.  MNN is even a cut below I Fucking Love Science as regards to sensationalized headlines, shallow analysis of actual science stories, and the usual smattering of "the world of the bizarre" kind of articles (as an example, on of their "trending stories" is "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016").

My objection, though, is not that there's another clickbaity website that exists solely to grab ad revenue -- heaven knows those are a dime a dozen, and include sites that claim to be legitimate media, such as The Daily Mail Fail.  My main beef with these places is the misrepresentation of science.  Because, heaven also knows that given the general low comprehension of actual science by the voting public, we do not need media making it worse.

As an example, check out their story from this past Wednesday called "A Whole Other Star Is On a Crash Course With Our Solar System" by Bryan Nelson.  Well, don't actually check it out unless you want them to get another click's worth of advertising money.  But let me tell you the gist, and save you the moral dilemma.

First, what the hell is with the headline?  Is Bryan Nelson in third grade?  "A Whole Other Star?"  So, it's not Part of Another Star?  Or the Whole Same Star As Before?

But we'll let that pass.  The topic does sound alarming, doesn't it?  But when you read the text, you find that we've got a while to prepare:

[I]n around 1.35 million years, that's close to what might happen.  Scientists have been plotting the course of a rogue star, Gliese 710, which currently sits in the constellation of Serpens some 64 light years from Earth.  Turns out, it's headed straight for us.

And "close to what might happen?"  What the fuck does that even mean?  Turns out Bryan Nelson isn't really sure either:

The star isn't scheduled to collide directly with Earth, but it will be passing through our solar system's Oort Cloud, a shell of countless comets and other bodies in the outer reaches of the Sun's gravitational influence.  You might think that's a safe distance, but the star is likely to slingshot comets all over the solar system, and one of those could very well have our name on it.

So a star is going to be in our general vicinity over a million years from now, and it might disturb some comets, which are likely to get flung in toward the inner Solar System, and one of them might hit the Earth.  Or not.

But that's not all:

Scientists calculated that Gliese 710 is the star that's expected to come closest to us within the next 10 million years (which is as far ahead as scientists could project), but it's not the only close encounter.  As many as 14 other stars could come within 3 light-years distance in the next few million years, and there are numerous fainter, red dwarf stars with unknown trajectories that could be headed our way too.

So we shouldn't just worry about Gliese 710, we should also worry about other stars which might or might not come close to the Solar System in the next few million years, not to mention other stars which might or might not exist and could do indescribably bad things if they do.

"Hoag's Object" -- the remnants of a collision between two galaxies [image courtesy of NASA]

I decided to do a little research, and find out where all this stuff had come from.  I found a paper in Astronomy Letters from 2010 (i.e., actual research and not hyped silliness) called "Searching for Stars Closely Encountering the Solar System" by Vladimir V. Bobylev, and it included the following:

Based on a new version of the Hipparcos catalog and currently available radial velocity data, we have searched for stars that either have encountered or will encounter the solar neighborhood within less than 3 pc in the time interval from −2 Myr to +2 Myr. Nine new candidates within 30 pc of the Sun have been found. To construct the stellar orbits relative to the solar orbit, we have used the epicyclic approximation. We show that, given the errors in the observational data, the probability that the well-known star HIP 89 825 (GL 710) encountering with the Sun most closely falls into the Oort cloud is 0.86 in the time interval 1.45 ± 0.06 Myr. This star also has a nonzero probability, 1 × 10−4, of falling into the region d < 1000 AU, where its influence on Kuiper Belt objects becomes possible.

Did you catch that?  The "nonzero probability" of Gliese 710 influencing the Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud comets is 1 × 10−4.

For you non-math-types, that's one in ten thousand.

If you needed any more indication that the Mother Nature Network article was sensationalized clickbait, there you have it.

So add that one to our list of suspect media sources, along with the usuals -- Natural News, InfoWars, Mercola, Breitbart, Before It's News, and so on.  My general advice is not to go there at all.  But if you disregard this, whatever you do, don't click on "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016."  You have been warned.

Trip to the stars

Because the news down here on Earth in the last few days is making me angry, frustrated, depressed, or all three simultaneously, in today's post I'm going to go to my Happy Place, which is: outer space.

This all comes up not only because of the goings-on I'm exposed to every time I read the news, but because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a link to a wonderful article by Nola Taylor Redd in Astronomy magazine online entitled, "The Outer Solar System Keeps Getting Weirder."  In it we find out that recent research has shown that our home system is not nearly as orderly or predictable as we thought it was back when I was in grade school and remembering the mnemonic "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pies" gave you all of the planets in order, and that was pretty much that.

First, we have the discovery of a small icy planet (or dwarf planet; the astronomers aren't exactly sure yet) called L91, which has a highly elliptical orbit varying from 50 Astronomical Units (an AU is the average distance from the Sun to the Earth) to 1,430.  Not only does L91 have an odd orbit, the orbital trajectory isn't stable.  "Its orbit is changing in quite a remarkable way," said astrophysicist Michele Bannister of Queen's University Belfast at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences Conference in Pasadena, California.  "There are minute changes in the object’s orbit that could come from the passing gravity of other stars or interactions with the hypothetical Planet Nine."

Artist's conception of the Sun as viewed from Sedna (a dwarf planet three times more distant than Neptune) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I remember when the whole Planet Nine thing first was proposed, right around the time I was an undergraduate student of physics at the University of Louisiana.  Two of my teachers, Daniel Whitmire and John Matese, had proposed the periodic disturbance of comets in the Oort Cloud by a large planet outside the orbit of Pluto as a mechanism for periodic mass extinctions (the idea being that the planet, as it passes through the Oort Cloud, interacts gravitationally with the comets, slingshotting some of them in toward the inner Solar System, and increasing the likelihood of an impact with the Earth and a resultant catastrophe for us Earthlings).  Apparently, Whitmire and Matese are still at it, and have been vindicated at least so far as the existence of Planet Nine; earlier this year Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology announced independent evidence of a large planet that was perturbing the orbit of dwarf planets in the distant reaches of the Solar System.

So that's pretty cool.  I mean, not the comets striking the Earth and obliterating everything part, but the odd stuff in the far reaches of the Solar System part.

To further explore my Happy Place, I then went to the Hubble Telescope image gallery, and found the following extremely cool photographs, further emphasizing that although things can get ugly down here on Earth, we live in a gorgeous universe.  Here are a few of my favorites.  All images are courtesy of NASA/Hubble Space Telescope and are in the public domain.

A supernova in the galaxy NGC3021

The Helix Nebula

A supernova remnant in the constellation Cassiopeia

The Sombrero Galaxy, NGC 4594

The Whirlpool Galaxy, M51

There.  I don't know about you, but I feel much better now.  The idea that there are billions of stars out there, many of which probably host intelligent life, is a real source of comfort to me.  Especially considering that just by the law of averages, some of them must get by without doing the stupid stuff we do down here on Earth.

Orange dwarf catastrophe

It's no great insight that the media likes sensationalized stories, and that a lot of them (including, sadly, some major news outlets) have the attitude that facts don't matter much as long as they can keep readers reading.

What is more frustrating is the way the readers themselves become complicit in this dissemination of bullshit.  Now that we have the interwebz, sending along ridiculous "news" stories takes only a click. And before you know it, you have people believing that humanity is going to be wiped out because the Solar System is going to be destroyed during a collision with an orange dwarf star.

The original study, by astronomer Coryn Bailer-Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, is interesting enough.  Astronomers have long known that the stars move relative to each other; this means that the constellations aren't fixed, and that millions of years from now, a time traveler from today wouldn't recognize any of the current star patterns.  (I still remember my first encounter with this idea, on Carl Sagan's Cosmos, when I was a freshman in college.  Seeing the animation of the movements of the stars in the Big Dipper was one of those moments when I realized, "I really want to know more about science!")

So it's not too surprising that some stars will get closer to the Sun over time.  And Bailer-Jones found that two orange dwarf stars are predicted to make relatively close approaches -- HIP 85605 could get as close as 0.13 light years, and GL 710 could make a pass of 0.32 light years.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Cool stuff.  But the media, unfortunately, is not content simply to report the facts.  Because that, somehow, would be boring.  This research has been picked up by a number of different online news sources, and one and all, they focus on the fact that this "close pass" might wipe us all out by gravitationally dislodging comets from the Oort Cloud, resulting in a "rain of comets," some of which could, perhaps, collide with the Earth.

Notice how many times I said "could" and "might" in the previous two paragraphs?  Bailer-Jones is up front about her study being speculative; the upper bounds for the pass distance of the two stars are 0.65 light years and 1.44 light years, respectively.  To put things in perspective; the closest estimate of HIP 85605 to the Sun was 0.13 light years, right?  Well, Pluto is 13 light hours from the Sun.  So this means that even at its closest, HIP 85605 will be 9,000 times further away than Pluto.

Next, let's consider the likelihood of a disruption of comets leading to a "rain of comets" and the certainty of a devastating Earth strike.  Let's assume that we do have a bunch of comets swooping inwards from the near pass of these stars.  What kind of target does Earth represent?

The issue here is scale, of course, and the amount of the Solar System that is (virtually) empty space. The best analogy I have run across is that if you shrank the entire Solar System down to a circle with a radius of 1,000 meters, with the orbit of Pluto as its perimeter, then the Earth would be about 7 meters from the center.

And it would be the size of a peppercorn.

So it's not exactly a huge target.  Yes, a comet or two could strike the Earth, as they have repeatedly during Earth's history.  No, it would not cause a rain of death.

But those aren't the only misrepresentations in the "news" story.  Not only has Bailer-Jones's research been sensationalized, it's had information added to it that is outright false.  In the above-linked story, which is no worse than the various other versions I've seen (i.e., I didn't pick this one because it was especially bad; they were all bad), here are some direct quotes, with commentary:

Apparently, the comets are made of rocks, dust and organic materials.

Actually, comets are mostly ice, a fact which has been known for decades and would have been immediately apparent had the author bothered to consult Wikipedia.

(T)he gravity [of the stars] can attract comets into the inner solar system and the passing comets might harshly affect Earth's atmosphere due to the powerful ultraviolet radiation that the comets might cause.

Ultraviolet radiation from what source, pray?  Comets aren't giant orbiting tanning lamps, for fuck's sake.

(A) small number of the alleged stars might explode like supernova while passing through the Oort Cloud.

Oh noes!  Not alleged stars explode like supernova!  That sound bad!

The Hip 85605 might reach the solar system in 0.13 to 0.65 light years away, while the GL 710 might take around 0.32 to 1.44 light years.

Ninth graders in Earth Science learn that a light year is a measure of distance, not time, a point that seems to have escaped the author, making me wonder how he ever got chosen to write a science story.  To be fair, unit confusion also plagued the writers of Star Wars, wherein we famously had Han Solo boasting that the Millennium Falcon had done the Kessel Run in "less than twelve parsecs," which would be like saying that your car was so fast that you went to the grocery store in less than five miles.  (Of course, there are Star Wars apologists who have talked themselves into thinking that the scriptwriters had some kind of fancy time-travel space-warp relativity thing in mind when they wrote it.  Myself, I think they just didn't know what a parsec is.)

And of course, it's only midway through the article that we find out when this catastrophe is predicted to happen:

1.3 million years from now.

So, to boil it all down:

Two small stars might, or might not, pass 9,000 times further away from the Sun than Pluto is, some millions of years in the future.  This could increase the number of comets entering the inner Solar System, generating a somewhat higher likelihood of a comet striking Earth.

But that version of the story wouldn't have induced so many people to read it and pass it along, would it?  Nope.  So they add sensationalized nonsense to it, so as to make it better clickbait.

At least it's still better than the post I saw on social media yesterday, wherein someone asked for help for a school project their child is doing regarding why the stars were created.  The responses included that god had made them "to rule the night with the moon," "to be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years," and "to declare god's glory."  The scholarly references given were the Book of Genesis and Psalm 19.

But hey, if you're going to buy into non-science, I guess you should go all the way, right?