The rush to judgment

A loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an email asking me what my opinion was about two current candidates for evidence of alien spacecraft -- the Palomar transients and the object called 3I-ATLAS.

First, some facts.

The Palomar transients are some mysterious moving objects spotted on photographic plates taken at Palomar Observatory in the 1940s and 1950s, all before the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, in 1957.  They included both single objects and multiple objects -- in one case, five -- arrayed in a straight line.  In-depth analysis ruled out conventional explanations like meteors and flaws in the photographic plates; and curiously, there was a forty-five percent higher likelihood of transient detection within one day of nuclear testing, which was going on pretty regularly at the time.  The transients also were a little over eight percent more likely on days when there were UAP reports from other sources -- either visual observation by pilots or on-ground observers, or unexplained blips on military radar.  The authors of the paper, which appeared in Nature last week, were up front that the phenomenon was "not easily accounted for by prosaic explanations."

One of the Palomar transients, from July 1952 [Image courtesy of Stephen Bruel and Beatriz Villarroel, Nature, 20 October 2025]

3I-ATLAS is an interstellar object -- that's what the "I" stands for.  (The ATLAS part is because it was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System; but fear not, the closest it will get to Earth is 1.8 astronomical units, so it poses no impact threat.)  We know it's an unbound interstellar object because of its speed and trajectory.  It's on a hyperbolic path, having come from somewhere in deep space, falling into the gravity well of the Sun, where it will ultimately slingshot its way back out of the Solar System and into deep space once again.  From analyses of the object itself, as well as the gas and dust it is currently ejecting, it appears to be an icy comet something on the order of three kilometers across, and mostly composed of frozen carbon dioxide, with small amounts of water ice, carbon monoxide, and carbonyl sulfide.

Comet 3I-ATLAS [Image licensed under the Creative Commons International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Shadow the Scientist, 3I-ATLAS noirlab2525b crop, CC BY 4.0]

3I-ATLAS was immediately grabbed by (now rather notorious) astronomer Avi Loeb, whose unfortunate habit of shouting "IT'S ALIENS!" every time something unexplained happens has brought up repeated comparisons to The Boy Who Cried Wolf.  Not long after 3I-ATLAS was confirmed to be an interstellar object, Loeb and a couple of collaborators published a paper on arXiv in which they said its "anomalous characteristics" indicate it's an extraterrestrial spacecraft, and might in fact be hostile.  The claim was equally quickly shot down by a large number of exasperated astrophysicists who are sick unto death of Loeb's antics.  One, Samantha Lawler, said, "while it is important to remain open-minded about any 'testable prediction', the new paper [by Loeb et al.] pushes this sentiment to the limit...  [E]xtraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but unfortunately, the evidence presented is absolutely not extraordinary."

What strikes me here -- especially with regards to the (many) folks who have weighed in on the possibility that these are evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence -- is the need for a rush to judgment.  (Nota bene: this is in no way meant as a criticism of the reader who contacted me with the question; she was just interested in my take both on the facts of the case, and people's reactions to them.)  In the case of 3I-ATLAS, I think the evidence very strongly suggests that what we have here is simply a large comet of interstellar origin, so something of great interest to astronomers and astrophysicists, but unlikely otherwise to be earthshattering in any sense including the literal one.  As far as the Palomar transients go -- well, we don't know.  The most recent of them occurred seventy-odd years ago, and all we have is some old photographic plates to go by.  They're certainly curious, and I'm glad they're being looked at, but... that's about all we can say for the time being.

"Well, what about the Menzel Gap?" I've seen asked multiple times.  Isn't that suggestive?  The "Menzel Gap" refers to the fifteen-year block of missing plates attributable to actions by Harvard Observatory astronomer Donald Howard Menzel, a prominent scoffer about aliens and UFOs, who became notorious for ordering the destruction of hundreds, possibly thousands, of astronomical photographic plates stored there.  Menzel cited considerations of storage space, claiming we'd already learned as much from them as we could, but UFO aficionados hint at something darker.  Menzel had top secret security clearance, they say; he led a "clandestine life as an elite member of the U. S. intelligence community" and was systematically covering up evidence of aliens visiting the Earth in the fashion of Cigarette-Smoking Man on The X Files.

Why he and others would go to all that trouble to stop the public from finding out about aliens is never really explained.  "They were just that evil" is about the clearest it gets, often along with vague claims that it was to prevent panic amongst the populace.

As if what the government was openly doing at the time, and that made headlines worldwide, wasn't equally bad.

In any case, back to the original question: what do I think about all this?

Well, the truth is, I don't think anything.  I simply don't know.  It seems likely that whatever the Palomar transients were, they were not all due to the same cause; it could be that some were debris from nuclear testing, but that clearly doesn't account for all of them.  Menzel might have been a misguided bureaucrat, or might have been destroying the plates to prevent their being co-opted by the UFOs-and-aliens crowd, or may have had some other motives entirely.  In any case, it's okay to say "we don't know," and then just leave it there.  Perhaps researchers will find more evidence, perhaps not; in either case, the best thing is to hold the question in abeyance, indefinitely if need be.

So that's where we have to leave it.  I know that's disappointing; believe me, I've been waiting since I was a six-year-old breathlessly watching Lost in Space for unequivocal evidence of aliens.  At the moment, what we've got simply doesn't amount to much.  But if you're as intrigued by the possibilities as I am, I have two suggestions.

First, learn some actual astronomy and astrophysics.  You're less likely to fall for specious claims if you have a good command of the facts and current scientific models.

Second, keep looking up.  As has been commented many times, "It's never aliens... until it is."  I still think it's likely that life is common in the universe, and although the distances and scale (and the Einsteinian Cosmic Speed Limit) make it unlikely they've come here, it's not impossible.  Maybe there have been extraterrestrial spacecraft passing by, or even landing on, our planet.

Wouldn't it be fun if you were the first to know?  Make sure and take lots of pictures, okay?

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Encyclopedia Galactica

I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos first aired.

It was back in 1980, and I still remember being blown away by it all -- the melding of science with animation and gorgeous music, and Carl Sagan's lyrical, almost poetic way of expressing his enduring love for astronomy.  My friends and I always waited excitedly for the next episode to air, and the day afterward spent an inordinate amount of time chatting about what we'd learned.

One of the episodes that resonated the most strongly with me was entitled "Encyclopedia Galactica."  Sagan predicted a day when we'd know so much about the universe that we'd have an encyclopedia of alien planets, each page of which would be accompanied by a list of their physical characteristics -- and types of life forms.  He was unequivocal in his belief that we were not alone in the universe, and that in fact life would turn out to be common.  Not, perhaps, "life as we know it, Jim" -- and much of it almost certainly pre-technological -- but life, he thought, would turn out to be pretty much everywhere we looked.

In the forty-five years since it aired, our detecting equipment has gotten better and better, but we're still up against the Fermi Paradox -- that famous quip from physicist Enrico Fermi who, when told that life was likely to be common in the universe, said, "Then where is everybody?"  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recall that a few years ago I did a deeper dive into the Fermi Paradox and the infamous "three f's," but the fact remains that despite getting better and better at astronomy and astrophysics, we still have no incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial life (intelligent or otherwise).

But extrasolar planets?  Those are kind of a dime a dozen.  As of this month, there have been a bit over six thousand exoplanets conclusively identified, and some of them have challenged our models of what planets can be.  (I took a look at a few of the weirder ones in a post earlier this year.)  So even if we don't yet have aliens in our back yard, there's been a lot of really cool information discovered -- three examples of which have just come out in the past couple of weeks.

No Andorians yet, more's the pity.

The first is about the TRAPPIST-1 system, which was one of the first multi-planet systems discovered.  Not only that, it has four planets in the "Goldilocks zone" -- the region around the host star that is "just right" for having temperatures where water could be in its liquid state.  (This doesn't mean there is water; just that if other factors were favorable, there could be liquid water.)  Not only that, but we lucked out that TRAPPIST-1 is fairly close (a little over forty light years away, in the constellation of Aquarius), and that its planets' orbits are aligned so that from our perspective, they cross in front of their host star, allowing astrophysicists to use the transits to take a stab at the composition of their atmospheres.

The outstanding YouTuber Dr. Becky Smethurst did a wonderful video explaining how this all works (and why the planet TRAPPIST-1d probably doesn't have an atmosphere), but a capsule summary is that when the planet passes in front of the star, its light passes through the planet's atmosphere (if it has one), and any gases present absorb and scatter characteristic frequencies of light.  Compared to the unobstructed spectrum of the star, those frequencies are then missing (or at least diminished in intensity), and from that information astrophysicists can deduce what might be present in the atmosphere.

Well, the other three planets in the habitable zone -- TRAPPIST-1b, c, and d -- have pretty conclusively been shown to lack an atmosphere.  So it all hinges on 1e, the farthest one out, and a study at the University of Bristol, using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, has said that it cannot rule out the presence of an atmosphere on that one.  Not a ringing endorsement, that, but at least not a categorical no -- so we'll keep our eyes on TRAPPIST-1e and hope future studies will give us good news.

The other two stories are about "rogue exoplanets" -- planets out there floating in space that don't (or at least, don't now) orbit a star.  Whether they formed that way, or started out in a stellar system and then were ejected gravitationally, is unknown (and may well be different in different cases).  These, for obvious reasons, are considered poor candidates for life, but they still are pretty amazing -- and the fact that we know about them at all is a tribute to our vastly improved ability to detect objects out there in interstellar space.

The first one, CHA-1107-7626, is currently accreting material like mad -- something not seen before in an exoplanet, rogue or otherwise.  It is estimated to be between five and ten times the mass of Jupiter, so on the verge of being a "brown dwarf" -- a superplanet that has sufficient mass and pressure to fuse deuterium but not hydrogen.  They emit more energy than they absorb, but don't quite have enough for the nuclear furnace to turn on in a big way.

But if CHA-1107-7626 keeps going the way its going, it may get there.  It's hoovering up an estimated Jupiter's worth of material every ten million years or so, which is the largest accretion rate of any planet-sized object ever observed.  So what we might be witnessing is the very earliest stages of the formation of a new star.

The final study is about the rogue exoplanet SIMP-0136, which came out of Trinity College Dublin and again uses data from JWST.  But this exoplanet is bizarre for two different reasons -- it has vast storms of what amounts to liquid droplets of sand... and it has auroras.

Once again, I'm staggered by the fact that we could detect this from so far away.  The temperature of the surface of the planet is around 1,500 C -- hotter than my kiln at full throttle -- and it has three hundred kilometer per hour winds that blow around bits of molten silica.  But most peculiar of all, the planet's atmosphere shows the characteristic polar light flashes we see down here as auroras.

What's weirdest about that is that -- at least on Earth -- auroras are caused by solar activity, and this planet isn't orbiting a star.  The way they form down here is that the solar wind ionizes gases in the upper atmosphere, and when those ions grab electrons, and the electrons descend back to the ground level, they emit characteristic frequencies of light (the same ones, not coincidentally, that are swiped by gases in the atmospheres of planets during transits).  Red for monoatomic oxygen, green for diatomic oxygen, blue for molecular nitrogen, and so on.

What is ionizing the gases on SIMP-0136?  Astrophysicists aren't sure.  Sandstorms here on Earth can certainly cause static electrical discharges (what we laypeople refer to as "bigass lightning bolts"), so it's possible we're seeing the light emitted from interactions between the molten silica and whatever gases make up the planet's atmosphere.  But it's too soon to be sure.

So even if we haven't yet discovered Skithra or Slitheen or Sontarans or whatnot, we're still adding some pretty amazing things to our Encyclopedia Galactica.  Carl Sagan, as usual, was prescient.  As he put it, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

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The legend of the lost sister

The difficult thing about any sort of historical research is that sometimes, the evidence you're looking for doesn't even exist.

In my own field of historical linguistics, for example, we're trying to determine what languages are related to each other (creating, as it were, a family tree for languages), figuring out word roots, identifying words borrowed from other languages, and reconstructing the ancestral language -- based only on the languages we now have access to.  There are times when there simply isn't enough information available to solve the particular puzzle you're working on.

The further back in time you go, the shakier the ground gets.  You'll see in etymological dictionaries claims like "the Proto-Indo-European word for 'settlement' or 'town' was *-weyk," but that's an inference; there aren't many Proto-Indo-Europeans around these days to verify if this is correct.  It's not just a guess, though.  It was reconstructed from the suffixes -wich and -wick you see in a lot of English place names (Norwich, Warwick), the Latin word vicus (meaning "a village in a rural area"), the Welsh gwig and Cornish guic (which mean approximately the same as the Latin does), the Greek word οἶκος (house), the Sanskrit viś and Old Church Slavonic vĭsĭ (both meaning "settlement"), and so on.  Using patterns of sound change, we can take current languages (or at least ones we have written records for) and backpedal to make an inference about what the speakers of PIE four thousand years ago might have said.

Still, it is only an inference, and the inherent unverifiability of it sometimes leaves practitioners of "hard science" scoffing and quoting Wolfgang Pauli, that such claims "aren't even wrong."  I think that's unduly harsh (but of course, given that this is basically what my master's thesis was about, it's no surprise I get a little defensive).  Even so, I think we have to be careful how hard to push a claim based on slim evidence.

That was my immediate thought when I read an article by Jay Norris, of Western Sydney University, in The Conversation.  It was about the mythology associated with my favorite naked-eye astronomical feature -- the Pleiades.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rawastrodata, The Pleiades (M45), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Norris and another astronomer, Barnaby Norris (not sure if they're related, or if it's a coincidence), have authored a paper that appeared in a book in 2022 called Advancing Cultural Astronomy which looks at a strange thing: in cultures all over the world, the Pleiades are associated with a collection of seven individuals.  They're the Seven Sisters in Greece, and also in many indigenous Australian cultures, for example.  And Norris and Norris realized two things that were very odd; first, that even on a clear night, you can only see six stars with the naked eye, not seven; and in both the Greek and Australian myth, the story involves a "lost sister" -- one of the seven who, for some reason or another, disappeared or is hidden.

So they started looking in other traditions, and found that all over the world, in cultures as unrelated as Indonesian, many Native American groups, many African cultures, the Scandinavians, and the Celts, there was the same tradition of associating the Pleiades with the number seven, and with one of the group who was lost.

They then went to the astronomical data.  They found that the stars in the Pleiades are moving relative to each other, and that a hundred thousand years ago there would have been seven stars visible to the naked eye in the cluster, but in the interim two of them moved so close together (from our perspective, at least) that they appear to be a single star unless you have a telescope.  That, they say, is the "lost sister," and is why cultures all over the world have a tradition that the group used to have seven members, but now only has six.

And this, they said, was evidence that the myth of the Pleiades is one of the oldest stories humans have told.  At least fifty thousand years old -- when the indigenous Australians migrated across a grassy valley that (when the sea level rose) became the Bay of Carpentaria -- and perhaps as much as a hundred thousand years old, when the common ancestors of all humans were still living in Africa and (presumably) shared a single cultural tradition.

It's a fascinating claim.  I have to admit that the commonalities of the myths surrounding the Pleiades in cultures all over the world are a little hard to explain otherwise.  Still, I can't say I'm a hundred percent sold.  I know from my work in reconstructive linguistics that chance similarities are weirdly common, and can lead to some seriously specious conclusions.  (Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall my rather brutal takedown a few years ago of a guy named L. M. Leteane, who used cherry-picked chance similarities between words to support his loony claim that the Pascuanese -- or Easter Islanders -- were originally from Egypt, as were the Olmecs of Central America, and both languages were descended from Bantu.)

So as far as the claim that the story of the Seven Sisters is over fifty thousand years old, count me as interested but unconvinced.  I think it's possible; it's certainly intriguing.  But to me, it's too hard to eliminate the simpler possibility, that the "loss" of one of the stars in the Pleiades was noted by many ancient cultures -- separately, and much more recently -- and became incorporated into their legends, rather than all the legends of the Pleiades and the lost sister coming from a single, very ancient ancestral story.

But it'll give you something to think about, when you see the Pleiades on the next clear night.  Whatever the origins of the myths surrounding it, it's awe-inspiring to think about our distant ancestors looking up at the same beautiful cluster of stars on a chilly, clear winter's night, and wondering what it really was -- same as we're doing today using the tools of science.

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Flash in the pan

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

So wrote William Shakespeare in Hamlet, and if anything, it's a significant understatement.  If Shakespeare were writing today, considering recent discoveries in science, he might phrase it as, "Horatio, you seriously have no idea how weird it is out there.  I mean, literally," which gains in accuracy but does lose something in poetic diction.

To take just one example, consider the paper that appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters this week, about a gamma ray burst that was discovered by the amusingly-named Very Large Telescope (they're currently building a bigger one down in Chile which will be called, I shit you not, the Extremely Large Telescope).  Gamma ray bursts are already pretty astonishing; NASA describes them as "second only to the Big Bang as the most energetic and luminous phenomena known."  There are several possible causes of these enormous releases of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation -- supernovae, the catastrophic merger of neutron stars, and flares from magnetars amongst them.  (You would not want to be looking down the gun barrel of one of these when it went off.  There is some suspicion that the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction -- one of the "Big Five" mass extinctions, and second only to the Permian-Triassic "Great Dying" event in terms of magnitude -- was caused by a nearby gamma ray burst.)

Most of these events are one-offs, and considering the energy they involve (most of them release more energy in a few seconds than the Sun will in its entire lifetime) you can understand why.  After one flare-up of that size, it's unsurprising that it wouldn't do it again any time soon.  So the astrophysicists were puzzled when they found a gamma-ray burster (GRB 250702B) that seems to recur -- it produced a sequence of five flares, and did that entire sequence three times.  Weirdest still, each time, the interval between the second and third flare in the sequence was an integer multiple of the interval between the first two!

What in the hell could cause that?

The gamma-ray burst seems to be extragalactic -- to be coming from a source outside the Milky Way.  The source is near a known galaxy, but whether the burst is coming from within the galaxy, or simply from a source that happens to be lined up with it, hasn't been determined yet.  The galaxy is one of the thousands that have been located by the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes but have yet to be studied; they don't even know what its red shift is (which would tell you how far away it is).  But because the red shift of gamma ray bursts is impossible to determine -- to calculate red shift, you need identifiable spectral lines, and those don't occur in something as massive and chaotic as a burst -- this still wouldn't tell you whether the source was actually inside the galaxy or not.

In fact, there's more that's unknown than known about this phenomena.  The periodicity led the researchers to suggest one possibility, that it was some unfortunate massive star in an elliptical orbit around a massive black hole, and having pieces torn off it every time it gets to perihelion.  Another possibility is an "atypical stellar core collapse," which is astrophysics-speak for "a collapsing star where we really have no idea why it's acting like it does."  A third is that the detected periodicity is an artifact caused by "dust echoes" -- reflection of the original gamma-ray burst from concentric shells of dust surrounding the remains of an exploded star.  The final possibility -- at least of the ones the authors came up with -- is that it's an example of gravitational lensing, where light emitted by a star (or other astronomical object) travels close to a black hole, the curved space around the black hole causes the light beam to split along more than one path, and different parts of it arrive at different times.

The paths of light traveling through a gravitational lens [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The upshot is that we simply don't know what's going on here.  The authors write:

We have... new, multiwavelength observations of a superlative series of associated GRB triggers, GRB 250702B.  Our observations reveal a rapidly fading, multiwavelength counterpart likely to be embedded in a galaxy with a complex and asymmetric morphology.  We... conclude that GRB 250702B is an extragalactic event.  The relatively bright and extended host suggest the redshift is moderate (z < 1).

GRB 250702B is observationally unprecedented in its timescale, morphology, and the onset of X-ray photons prior to the initial GRB trigger.  In addition, we find a striking, near-integer time step between the GRB outbursts, suggesting (although not proving) possible periodicity in the events.

All of this is absolutely fascinating to the astronomers, because it opens up the perennial question of "Is this a phenomenon we've already seen and know how to explain, or is it actually new physics?"  At present, there's no way to answer this with any certainty.  All that's known is something really weird is going on out there, and we're going to have to do a lot more observation before we'll be able to figure out what the explanation is.

So like I said, Shakespeare was spot-on.  And the more we look out into the skies, the more we find that is Not Dreamt Of In Our Philosophy.  Only now we have astrophysicists working on actually explaining these phenomena -- so perhaps this very peculiar flash-in-the-pan won't remain a mystery forever.

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The lure of the unknown

Carl Sagan once said, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

I think that's one of the main things that attracted me to science as a child; its capacity to astonish.  I still remember reading the kids' books on various scientific stuff and being astounded to find out things like:

• dinosaurs, far from being the "failed experiment" they're often characterized as, "ruled the Earth" (as it were) for about five hundred times longer than humans have even existed.  (I only much later found out that dinosaurs still exist; we call 'em birds.)
• when supergiant stars end their lives, they detonate in a colossal explosion called a supernova that gives off in a few seconds as much energy as the Sun will emit in its entire lifetime.  What's left is called a black hole, where the gravitational pull is so powerful even light can't escape.
• bats can hear in a frequency range far above humans, and are so sensitive to their own vocalizations that they can hear the echoes of their own voices and distinguish them from the cacophony their friends and relatives are making.
• when an object moves, its vertical and horizontal velocities are completely independent of each other.  If you shoot a gun horizontally on a level surface, and simultaneously drop a bullet from the gun's muzzle height, the shot bullet and the dropped bullet will hit the ground at the same time.

And that's all stuff we've known for years, because (not to put too fine a point on it) I'm so old that when I was a kid, the Dead Sea was just sick.  In the intervening fifty years since I found out all of the above (and lots of other similar tidbits) the scientists have discovered tons of new, and equally amazing, information about our universe and how it works.  We've even found out that some of what we thought we understood was wrong, or at least incomplete; a good example is photoperiodism, the ability of flowering plants to keep track of day length and thus flower at the right time of year.  It was initially thought that they had a system that worked a bit like a chemical teeter-totter.  A protein called phytochrome has a "dark form" and a "light form" -- the dark form changes to the light form during the day, and the reverse happens at night, so the relative amounts of the two might allow plants to keep track of day length.  But it turns out that all it takes is a flash of red light in the middle of the night to completely upend the plant's biological clock -- so whatever is going on is more complex that we'd understood.

This sudden sense of "wow, we don't know as much as we thought!", far from being upsetting, is positively thrilling to scientists.  Scientists are some of the only people in the world who love saying, "I don't understand."  Mostly because they always follow it up with "... yet."  Take, for example, the discovery announced this week by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory of a huge cloud of gas and dust in our own Milky Way Galaxy that prior to this we hadn't even known was there.

It's been named the Midpoint Cloud, and it's about two hundred light years across.  It's an enormous whirlpool centered on Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center, and seems to act like a giant funnel drawing material inward toward the accretion disk.

"One of the big discoveries of the paper was the giant molecular cloud," said Natalie Butterfield, lead author of the paper on the phenomenon, which appeared this week in The Astrophysical Journal.  "No one had any idea this cloud existed until we looked at this location in the sky and found the dense gas.  Through measurements of the size, mass, and density, we confirmed this was a giant molecular cloud.  These dust lanes are like hidden rivers of gas and dust that are carrying material into the center of our galaxy.  The Midpoint Cloud is a place where material from the galaxy's disk is transitioning into the more extreme environment of the galactic center and provides a unique opportunity to study the initial gas conditions before accumulating in the center of our galaxy."

[Image credit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/P.Vosteen]

Among the amazing features of this discovery is that it contains a maser -- an intense, focused microwave source, in this case thought to be caused by compression and turbulence in the ammonia-rich gas of the cloud.  Additionally, there are several sites that seem to be undergoing collapse; we might be witnessing the birth of new stars.

What's astonishing to me is that this cloud is (1) humongous, (2) in our own galaxy, and (3) glowing like crazy in the microwave region of the spectrum, yet no one had any idea it was there until now.  How much more are we overlooking because we haven't tuned into the right frequency or turned our telescopes to the right coordinates?

The universe is a big place.  And, I suspect, it's absolutely full of surprises.  Hell, there are enough surprises lying in wait right here on the Earth; to give just one example, I've heard it said that we know more about the near side of the Moon than we do about the deep oceans.

How could anyone not find science fascinating?

This is also why I've never understood how people think that science's progress could be turned into a criticism -- I used to hear it from students phrased as, "why do we have to learn all this stuff when it could all be proven wrong tomorrow?"  Far from being a downside, science's capacity to update and self-correct is its most powerful strength.  How is it somehow better to cling to your previous understanding in the face of evidence to the contrary?

That, I don't think I'll ever come close to comprehending.

I'll end with another quote from a scientific luminary -- the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman -- that I think sums it all up succinctly: "I'd much rather questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."

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Requiem for a dead planet

If I had to pick my favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the clear winner would be "The Inner Light."  Some classic episodes like "Darmok," "Frames of Mind," "Yesterday's Enterprise," "The Offspring," "Cause and Effect," "Remember Me," "Time's Arrow," "The Chase," and "Best of Both Worlds" would be some stiff competition, but "The Inner Light" not only has a beautiful story, but a deep, heartwrenching bittersweetness, made even more poignant by a tour-de-force performance by Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

If you've not seen it, the plot revolves around the Enterprise encountering a huge space station of some kind, of apparent antiquity, and in the course of examining it, it zaps Captain Picard and renders him unconscious.  What his crew doesn't know is that it's dropped him into a dream where he's not a spaceship captain but an ordinary guy named Kamin, who has a wife and children and a job as a scientist trying to figure out what to do about the effect of his planet's sun, which has increased in intensity and is threatening devastating drought and famine.

As Kamin, he lives for forty years, watching his children grow up, living through the grief of his wife's death and the death of a dear friend, and ultimately grows old without ever finding a solution to his planet's dire circumstances.  All the while, the real Captain Picard is being subjected to ongoing interventions by Dr. Crusher to determine what's keeping him unconscious, and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to bring him out of it.  In the end, which makes me ugly cry every damn time I watch it, Kamin lives to watch the launch of an archive of his race's combined knowledge, realizing that the sun's increase in intensity is leading up to a nova that will destroy the planet, and that their civilization is doomed.  It is, in fact, the same archive that the Enterprise happened upon, and which captured Picard's consciousness, so that someone at least would understand what the civilization was like before it was wiped out tens of thousands of years earlier.

"Live now," Kamin says to his daughter, Maribol.  "Make now always the most precious time.  Now will never come again."

And with that, Picard awakens, to find he has accumulated four decades of memories in the space of about a half-hour, an experience that leaves a permanent mark not only on his mind, but his heart.

*brief pause to stop bawling into my handkerchief*

I was immediately reminded of "The Inner Light" by a paper I stumbled across in Nature Astronomy, called, "Alkali Metals in White Dwarf Atmospheres as Tracers of Ancient Planetary Crusts."  This study, led by astrophysicist Mark Hollands of the University of Warwick, did spectroscopic analysis of the light from four white dwarf stars, which are the remnants of stellar cores left behind when Sun-like stars go nova as their hydrogen fuel runs out at the end of their lives.  In the process, they vaporize any planets that were in orbit around them, and the dust and debris from those planets accretes into the white dwarf's atmosphere, where it's detectable by its specific spectral lines.

In other words: the four white dwarfs in the study had rocky, Earth-like planets at some point in their past.

"In one case, we are looking at planet formation around a star that was formed in the Galactic halo, 11-12.5 billion years ago, hence it must be one of the oldest planetary systems known so far," said study co-author Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, in an interview in Science Daily.  "Another of these systems formed around a short-lived star that was initially more than four times the mass of the Sun, a record-breaking discovery delivering important constraints on how fast planets can form around their host stars."

This brings up a few considerations, one of which has to do with the number of Earth-like planets out there.  (Nota bene: by "Earth-like" I'm not referring to temperature and surface conditions, but simply that they're relatively small, with a rocky crust and a metallic core.  Whether they have Earth-like conditions is another consideration entirely, which has to do with the host star's intrinsic luminosity and the distance at which the planet revolves around it.)  In the famous Drake equation, which is a way to come up with an estimate of the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe, one of the big unknowns until recently was how many stars hosted Earth-like planets; in the last fifteen years, we've come to understand that the answer seems to be "most of them."  Planets are the rule, not the exception, and as we've become better and better at detecting exoplanets, we find them pretty much everywhere we look.

When I read the Hollands et al. paper, I immediately began wondering what the planets around the white dwarfs had been like before they got flash-fried as their suns went nova.  Did they harbor life?  It's possible, although considering that these started out as larger stars than our Sun, they had shorter lives and therefore less time for life to form, much less to develop into a complex and intelligent civilization.  And, of course, at this point there's no way to tell.  Any living thing on one of those planets is long since vaporized along with most of the planet it resided on, lost forever to the ongoing evolution of the cosmos.

If that's not gloomy enough, it bears mention that this is the Earth's ultimate fate, as well.  It's not anything to worry about (not that worry would help in any case) -- this eventuality is billions of years in the future.  But once the Sun exhausts its supply of hydrogen, it will balloon out into a red giant, engulfing the inner three planets and possibly Mars as well, then blow off its outer atmosphere (that explosion is the "nova" part), leaving its exposed core as a white dwarf, slowly cooling as it radiates its heat out into space.

Whether by that time we'll have decided to send our collective knowledge out into space as an interstellar archive, I don't know.  In a way, we already have, albeit on a smaller scale than Kamin's people did; Voyager 2 carries the famous "golden record" that contains information about humanity, our scientific knowledge, and recordings of human voices, languages, and music, there to be decoded by any technological civilization that stumbles upon it.  (It's a little mind-boggling to realize that in the 48 years since Voyager 2 was launched, it has traveled about 20,000,000,000 kilometers, so is well outside the perimeter of the Solar System; and that sounds impressive until you realize that's only 16.6 light hours away, and the nearest star is 4.3 light years from us.)

So anyhow, those are my elegiac thoughts on this August morning.  Dead planets, dying stars, and the remnants of lost civilizations.  Sorry to be a downer. If all this makes you feel low, watch "The Inner Light" and have yourself a good cry.  It'll make you feel better.

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The phantom whirlpool

The universe is a dangerous place.

I'm not talking about crazy stuff happening down here on Earth, although a lot of that certainly qualifies.  The violence we wreak upon each other (and by our careless actions, often upon ourselves) fades into insignificance by comparison to the purely natural violence out there in the cosmos.  Familiar phenomena like black holes and supernovas come near the top of the list, but there are others equally scary whose names are hardly common topics of conversation -- Wolf-Rayet stars, gamma-ray bursters, quasars, and Thorne-Zytkow objects come to mind, not to mention the truly terrifying possibility of a "false vacuum collapse" that I wrote about here at Skeptophilia a while back.

It's why I always find it odd when people talk about the how peaceful the night sky is, or that the glory of the cosmos supports the existence of a benevolent deity.  Impressive?  Sure.  Awe-inspiring?  Definitely.

Benevolent?  Hardly.  The suggestion that the universe was created to be the perfectly hospitable home to humanity -- the "fine-tuning" argument, or "strong anthropic principle" -- conveniently ignores the fact that the vast majority of the universe is intrinsically deadly to terrestrial life forms, and even here on Earth, we're able to survive the conditions of less than a quarter of its surface area.

I'm not trying to scare anyone, here.  But I do think it's a good idea to keep in mind how small and fragile we are.  Especially if it makes us more cognizant of taking care of the congenial planet we're on.

In any case, back to astronomical phenomena that are big and scary and can kill you.  Even the ones we know about don't exhaust the catalog of violent space stuff.  Take, for example, the (thus far) unexplained invisible vortex that is tearing apart the Hyades.

The Hyades is a star cluster in the constellation Taurus, which gets its name from the five sisters of Hyas, a beautiful Greek youth who died tragically.  Which brings up the question of whether any beautiful Greek youths actually survived to adulthood.  When ancient Greeks had kids, if they had a really handsome son, did they look at him and shake their heads sadly, and say, "Well, I guess he's fucked"?

To read Greek mythology, you get the impression that the major cause of death in ancient Greek was being so beautiful it pissed the gods off.

Anyhow, Hyas's five sisters were so devastated by the loss of their beloved brother that they couldn't stop crying, so the gods took pity on them even though Zeus et al. were the ones who caused the whole problem in the first place, and turned them into stars.  Which I suppose is better than nothing.  But even so, the sisters' weeping wouldn't stop -- which is why the appearance of the Hyades in the sky in the spring is associated with the rainy season. (In fact, in England the cluster is called "the April rainers.")

The Hyades [Image licensed under the Creative Commons NASA, ESA, and STScI, Hyades cluster, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In reality, the Hyades have nothing to do with rain or tragically beautiful Greek youths.  They are a group of fairly young stars, on the order of 625 million years old (the Sun is about ten times older), and like most clusters was created from a collapsing clump of gas.  The Hyades are quite close to us -- 153 light years away -- and because of that have been intensively studied.  Like many clusters, the tidal forces generated by the relative motion of the stars is gradually pulling them away from each other, but here there seems to be something else, something far more violent, going on.

A press release from the European Space Agency describes a study of the motion of the stars in the Hyades indicating that their movements aren't the ordinary gentle dissipation most clusters undergo.  A team led by astrophysicist Tereza Jerabkova used data from the European Southern Observatory to map members of the cluster, and to identify other stars that once were part of the Hyades but since have been pulled away, and they found that the leading "tidal tail" -- the streamer of stars out ahead of the motion of the cluster as a whole -- has been ripped to shreds.

The only solution Jerabkova and her team found that made sense of the data is that the leading tail of the Hyades collided -- or is in the process of colliding -- with a huge blob of some sort, containing a mass ten million times that of the Sun.  The problem is, an object that big, only 153 light years away, should be visible, or at least detectable, and there seems to be nothing there.

"There must have been a close interaction with this really massive clump, and the Hyades just got smashed," Jerabkova said.

So what is this "really massive clump" made of?  Given the absence of anything made of ordinary matter that is anywhere nearby, the team suggests that it might be something more exotic -- a "dark matter sub-halo."  These hypothesized objects could be scattered across the universe, and might provide the energetic kick to objects whose trajectories can't be explained any other way. But what exactly they are other than a bizarre phantom gravitational whirlpool, no one knows.

Nor what the risk is if we're close to one.

So add "dark matter sub-halos" to our list of scary astronomical phenomena.  I find the whole thing fascinating, and a little humbling.  I'll still find the beauty of a clear night sky soothing, but that's only if I can get my scientific mind to shut the hell up long enough to enjoy it.  Because the truth is, a lot of those twinkling lights are anything but peaceful.

But I suppose it's still better than the gods killing you if you're too handsome.  That would just suck, not that I personally am in any danger.

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Awe

I was pondering the question of what the hell is wrong with so many of the people in positions of power on our planet, and I've come to the conclusion that part of it is that they've lost the capacity to feel awestruck.

When we're awestruck, in a way, our entire world gets turned on its head.  The day-to-day concerns that take up most of our mental and emotional space -- jobs, relationships, paying the bills, keeping up with household chores, the inevitable aches and pains -- suddenly are drowned by a sense that in the grand scheme of things, we are extremely small.  It's not (or shouldn't be) a painful experience.  It's more that we are suddenly aware that our little cares are just that: little.  We live in a grand, beautiful, mysterious, dazzling universe, and at the moments when we are privileged to perceive that, our senses are swept away.

The philosophers have come up with a name for such experiences: numinous.  It doesn't imply a connection to a higher power (although it manifests that way, or is interpreted that way, for some people).  German writer Rudolf Otto describes such a state as "a non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self...  This mental state presents itself as wholly other, a condition absolutely sui generis and incomparable, whereby the human being finds himself utterly abashed."

What would happen if you couldn't -- or were afraid to -- experience awe?  This would trap you in the petty quotidian trivia of life, and very likely magnify their importance in your mind, giving them far more gravitas than they deserve.  I suspect it could also magnify your own self-importance.

It'd be interesting to see if there's an inverse correlation between narcissism and our capacity to feel awestruck.  After all, how could you simultaneously perceive the glory and grandeur of the universe, and remain convinced that your needs are the most important thing within it?  And if you combine narcissism with amorality, you produce an individual who will never admit fault, never look beyond their own desires, and stop at nothing to fulfill them.

We could probably all name a few prominent people this describes.

I think the two things that have the greatest ability to make me feel awe are music and astronomy.  Music has had the ability to pick me up by the emotions and swing me around since I was very small; my mom used to tell the story of my being about four and begging her to let me use the record player.  She finally relented (one of the few times she ever did) and showed me how, and -- to my credit -- I never damaged a single record.  They were simply too important to me.

Just a couple of days ago, I was in the car, and Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis came on the classical station I was listening to.  If I had to name one piece that has that ability to lift me out of myself, that's the one I'd pick.  The first time I heard it, as a teenager, I ended up with tears streaming down my face, and honestly had been unaware of where I was for the entire fifteen-minute play time.

It's astronomy, though, that is why this topic comes up today.  A paper this week in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics describes a new study of the Silver Coin Galaxy in the constellation Sculptor, a beautiful spiral galaxy about 11.4 million light years away.  The study, which required fifty hours of time at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, produced an image with unprecedented detail:

The Silver Coin is called a "starburst galaxy," a region of space undergoing an exceptionally high rate of star formation, so it's of great interest to astronomers and astrophysicists as we learn more about how galaxies, stars, and planetary systems form and evolve.  "Galaxies are incredibly complex systems that we are still struggling to understand," said Enrico Congiu, who led the study.  "The Sculptor Galaxy is in a sweet spot.  It is close enough that we can resolve its internal structure and study its building blocks with incredible detail, but at the same time, big enough that we can still see it as a whole system."

In that one rectangular photograph is captured the light from billions of stars.  From what we know of stars in our own galaxy, it's likely that the majority of those points of light have their own planetary systems.  It's not certain -- but many astronomers think it's very likely -- that a good many of those planets host life.  Some of that life might be intelligent, and looking back at us through their own telescopes, wondering about us as we do about them.

How could anyone look at this image, think those thoughts, and not be awestruck?

To me, that was part of what I wanted as a science teacher.  I honestly couldn't have cared less if my students got to the end of the year and couldn't tell me what the endoplasmic reticulum did.  (If they need to know that at some point in their lives, they can look it up.)  What I do care deeply about is that they know how to think critically, can distinguish truth from fiction, and have enough basic understanding of biology to be able to make good decisions about their health and the environment.  And in addition, I tried to instill in them a sense of wonder at how cool science is.

That I did at least sometimes succeed is supported by a funny incident from not long before I retired.  I was having one of our required twice-yearly administrator observations, and the principal was watching me teach a lesson to my AP Biology class.  I recall that it was something about genetics -- always a favorite subject -- but I can't remember what exactly the topic was that day.  But something I said made one kid's eyes pop open wide, and he said, "Wow, that is so fucking cool."

Then he had the sudden aghast realization that the principal was sitting in the back of the room.

The kid turns around, red-faced, and said, "Oh, my god, Mr. Koeng, I'm sorry."

The principal grinned and said, "No, that's okay.  You're right.  It is really fucking cool."

I was lucky to work, by and large, for great administrators during my 32-year career, and I often discussed with them my goal as a science teacher of instilling wonder.  But I think we all need to land in that space more often.  The ability to look around us and say, "Wow.  Isn't this amazing?" is incredibly important, and also terribly easy to lose.  The morass of daily concerns we're faced with can add up in our minds to something big enough to block out the stars.

And isn't that sad?

So I'll end with an exhortation: find some time this week to look and listen and experience what's around you.  Get down and examine the petals of a flower.  Go out on a dark, clear night and look up at the stars.  Listen to a piece of music -- just listen, don't engage in the "listening while" that most of us do every day.  Create the space in your life to experience a little awe.

But don't be surprised if you come out of the experience changed.  Being awestruck will do that.

In fact, maybe that's the point.

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Down in flames

The more exoplanets we find, the more they challenge our notion of how planets should be.

For the many of us who grew up watching Star Trek and Lost in Space and Doctor Who, it's understandable that we picture planets around other stars as being pretty much like the ones we have here in our own Solar System -- either small and rocky like the Earth, or gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn.

The truth is, there is a far greater variety of exoplanets than we ever could have dreamed of, and every new one we find holds some sort of surprise.  Some of the odder ones are:

• TrES-2b, which holds the record as the least-reflective planet yet discovered.  It's darker than a charcoal briquet.  This led some people to conclude that it's made of dark matter, something I dealt with here at Skeptophilia a while back.  (tl:dr -- it's not.)
• CoRoT-7b, one of the hottest exoplanets known.  Its composition and size are thought to be fairly Earth-like, but it orbits its star so closely that it has a twenty-day orbital period and surface temperatures around 3000 C.  This means that it is likely to be completely liquid, and experience rain made of molten iron and magnesium.
• 55 Cancri e, nicknamed the "diamond planet."  Another "hot super-Earth," this one is thought to be carbon rich, and that because of the heat and pressure, much of the carbon could be in the form of diamonds.  (Don't tell Dr. Smith.)
• PSR J1719−1438, a planet orbiting a pulsar (the collapsed, rapidly rotating core of a giant star).  It has one of the fastest rates of revolution of any orbiting object known, circling its host star in only 2.17 hours.
• V1400 Centauri, a planet with rings that are two hundred times wider than the rings of Saturn.  In fact, they dwarf the planet itself -- the whole thing looks a bit like a pea in the middle of a dinner plate.

We now have a new one to add to the list -- BD+05 4868 Ab, in the constellation of Pegasus.  Only 140 light years away, this exoplanet is orbiting so close to its parent star -- twenty times closer than Mercury is to the Sun -- that its year is only 30.5 hours long.  This proximity roasts the surface, melting and then vaporizing the rock it's made of.  That material is then blasted off the surface by the stellar wind.

So BD+05 4868 Ab is literally evaporating, and leaving a long, comet-like tail in its wake.

The estimate is that each time it orbits, it loses a Mount Everest's worth of rock from its surface.  It's not a large world already, and the researchers say it is on track to disintegrate completely in under two million years.

"The extent of the tail is gargantuan, stretching up to nine million kilometers long, or roughly half of the planet's entire orbit," said Marc Hon of MIT, who co-authored a paper on the planet, which appeared this week in Astrophysical Journal Letters.  "The shape of the transit is typical of a comet with a long tail,.  Except that it's unlikely that this tail contains volatile gases and ice as expected from a real comet -- these would not survive long at such close proximity to the host star.  Mineral grains evaporated from the planetary surface, however, can linger long enough to present such a distinctive tail."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Marc Hon et al. 2025, submitted to AAS Journals, BD+05 4868Ab simulation dust cloud (Figure 12), CC BY 4.0]

So we have a new one to add to the weird exoplanet list -- a comet-like planet in the process of going down in flames.  Not a place you'd want to beam your away team to, but fascinating anyhow.

Makes me wonder what the next bizarre find is going to be.  The universe is like that, isn't it?  We think we have it figured out, then it turns around and astonishes us.

I, for one, think that is fantastic.

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