The HST photo of the photoevaporating molecular clouds of M16 is the iconic go-to image, but it’s always struck me as veering toward flash over substance. The “pillars of creation” name combines with the visual cues to create the illusion that you’re looking at something in an up-down gravitational field.

I think my favorite astronomical image is the not-quite-so-famous photo of Barnard 68. Here, one gets a far more immediate and accurate sense of what one is actually seeing. A cold, black self-gravitating cloud, looming in the foreground, blotting out the stars. It’s easy to imagine a sped-up film which depicts the cloud boiling and writhing with its internal turbulence.

There’s a certain undeniable menace to the dark cloud, and not without reason. If we rewind the tape by 4.54 billion years, all the material in our own solar system would have looked not unlike Barnard 68. If viewed in time-lapse, the pre-solar dark cloud would have collapsed from inside out upon itself, leading to the formation of the Sun, the planets, and eventually, a vanguard of five delicately engineered probes heading tentatively out into the galaxy. There would have indeed been cause for long-term concern…

Creepy undertones aside, Barnard 68 is a great slide to show during talks about star and planet formation. If the Sun is a 0.2mm grain of sand in San Francisco, Barnard 68 is half a mile across and located roughly at the distance of Los Angeles. The dark cloud itself is the equivalent of grinding up one percent of three small grains of sand, and dispersing the resulting powder through a half-mile wide volume.

The last time I gave a talk, it occurred to me that I’d never had enough faith in common sense to actually question whether that last analogy is appropriate, and indeed nobody in an audience has ever called me on it. Is it really possible to grind up 3% of a sand grain so that it creates an opaque half-mile wide cloud? That sounds totally nuts!

Asteroid 99942 Apophis (Image Source).

The absolute finest that one could envision grinding up a sand grain, while still retaining it in some sense as powdered “sand”, would be to the level of individual silica (SiO2) molecules. A 0.2 mm grain contains roughly 6×10^17 silica molecules. There’d thus be ~2×10^16 molecules available to disperse through the half-mile-wide volume of our model for Barnard 68. Scaling up to the solar mass, this would imply a Barnard 68 chock full of kilometer-wide asteroids, whereas in reality, the dust in Barnard 68 is micron-sized, roughly the consistency of cigarette smoke.

If the metals in Barnard 68 were in the form of km-wide asteroids, the cloud would indeed be transparent — fewer than one in a billion of the photons from the background stars would be absorbed on their way through the cloud.

Image Source.

The month of October slipped by. No new oklo posts. Like seemingly everyone else, I’ve been in a state of continual distraction regarding the election. Instead of writing posts about planets, spare moments are spent scanning the news.

Sometimes, if you’re waking up in the middle of the night, there’s perspective in the knowledge that one can build a fully to-scale model of the Earth-Sun system by taking a grain of sand and holding it two arms lengths away from a dime. A real time simulation can then be put into effect by moving the sand grain through 6.92 degrees per week.

I do have a post nearly done in draft form, but my colleague, Prof. Jonathan Fortney, eliminated any chance that I’ll get it finished and posted before Nov. 5th, by introducing me to fivethirtyeight.com. Over there, you can get the latest polling data with a 10,000-trial Monte-Carlo sheen:

Jason Wright recently sent me an advance copy of a preprint from his group that sums up the state of knowledge of the 27 multiple exoplanet systems that are currently known to orbit ordinary stars. It’s really quite remarkable, in scanning through the table of planets, how alien the systems are, how, on the whole, they are so unlike the solar system.

We’re fast approaching the tenth anniversary of the discovery of the three planets orbiting Upsilon Andromedae. I vividly remember setting up integrations of the outer two orbits in that system just after it was announced, and watching the eccentricities of planets “c” and “d” cycle through their huge (compared to solar system) variations. At that time, I had never bothered to give secular theory the slightest consideration (aww, that stuff was all worked out in the 18th century). It was a revelation to watch the orbits shimmer and vibrate as the integrator ticked off the centuries at the rate of a million years an hour.

As the multiple-planet business enters its second decade, emphasis is shifting toward the detection of systems with ever-lower planet masses. Ups And packs at least two thousand Earth masses into the inner several AU surrounding the star. HD 40307, by contrast has planets that start at only four times the mass of Earth.

As the planetary masses go down, so to do the signal strengths. The Upsilon Andromedae periodogram practically wears its planets on its sleeve, whereas nowadays, the surveys are likely combing though forests of tantalizing yet ambiguous peaks. Detectability increases with the square root of the number of observations, which exerts pressure to spend more telescope time on fewer stars.

From the standpoint of someone who’s interested in planet-planet dynamics, systems like Gliese 876, with its incredible signal-to-noise are clearly the most valuable. From the perspective of someone who’s interested in planet formation and the statistics of the galactic census, the systems with low-mass planets are a bigger deal. A single statistic that captures the relative value of a multiple-planet system could be expressed as:

Where the sum inside the root is over the planets in the system, and the quantities are the planetary masses, M, the rms of the residuals to the fit, $\sigma$, and the radial velocity half-amplitudes, K. The statistic seems to do a reasonable job of aggregating signal-to-noise and the potential for dynamical interaction, while simultaneously placing emphasis on lower mass planets. Plugging in the numbers, the known multiple-planet systems stack up with the following ranking:

Interestingly, the ranking seems to capture the vagaries of the press release industry pretty well. The top six multiple planet systems have all seen their names appear in the New York Times, in some cases on the front page:

HD 40307:

Gliese 581:

Gliese 876:

HD 69830:

Mu Arae:

55 Cancri:

Newsworthiness appears to run out, however, when the list reaches the two-planet system orbiting HD 190360:

Amazon, however, has kindly sponsored a link that puts it up for sale:

Now that flipping houses is passé…

Image Source.

Last May, Mark Marley sent me a link to the photograph shown above. It’s a Cassini image of Alpha Centauri A and B hanging just above the limb of Saturn. It provides an interesting bookend to the remarkable pictures that can be taken from Earth when Saturn and the Moon are close together in the sky. Mystery on the scientific horizon of the year 1610 has transformed itself into mystery on the horizons of today.

Image source.

It’s also a nice coincidence that the actual distance between the two components of Alpha Cen is similar to the distance between Earth and Saturn. Right now, Alpha Cen A and B are more than 20 AU apart, but within our lifetimes, they’ll close to nearly the Earth-Saturn distance as they reach the next periastron of their 80-year orbit in May 2035.

We’re fortunate that we’ve arrived on the scene as a technological society right at the moment when a stellar system as interesting as Alpha Cen is in the very near vicinity. During the last interglacial period, Alpha Cen did not rank among the brightest stars in the sky. A hundred thousand years from now, the Alpha Cen stars will no longer be among our very nearest stellar neighbors, and in a million years, they will have long since faded from naked-eye visibility. At the moment, though, Alpha Centauri is drawing nearer at 25 km/sec, a clip similar to the Earth’s orbital velocity around the Sun. It’s as if we’re on the free trial period of an interstellar mission…

And what of the status of the observational search? In the interim since the last oklo.org update, Debra Fischer obtained one year of NSF funding to begin high-cadence radial velocity observations of the Alpha Cen system with the CTIO 1.5m telescope in Chile. Debra, along with Javiera and a number of CTIO scientists have worked very hard to get the telescope and a spectrograph into condition for high-precision Doppler work. Many nights of Alpha Cen observations have now actually been carried out, and by all indications, the prospects look quite promising from an instrumental standpoint. The project will need long-term funding, though, since it will take of order 3-5 years of dedicated observation to reach any truly habitable worlds that are orbiting our nearest stellar neighbors.

In preparing my talk for the Torun meeting, it seemed appropriate to take a careful look at the book that got the whole planetary systems business going — De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres) by Copernicus.

Being not in possession of a classical education, that meant settling for an English translation, but it’s interesting to look at the original Latin editions (which are dramatically out of copyright, and hence available from the ether in the departure lounge at O’Hare if one is willing to fork out for a wi-fi connection). Here’s the frontispiece of Harvard’s edition:

The text translates to:

Diligent reader, in this work, which has just been created and published, you have the motions of the fixed stars and planets, as these motions have been reconstituted on the basis of ancient as well as recent observations, and have moreover been embellished by new and marvelous hypotheses. You also have most convenient tables from which you will be able to compute those motions with the utmost care for any time whatever. Therefore, buy, read and enjoy.

To a modern sensibility, the exhortation to buy the book seems to run at cross purposes with the warning just below (written in Greek for heightened effect):

Let no one untrained in geometry enter here.

Certainly, in trying to make sense of the text, it’s clear that the warning is no empty threat. The book, with its arduous descriptions of ephemerides is tough going. Section 17 of Book V presents a typical example:

Now it was made clear above that in the last of Ptolemy’s three observations Mars, by its mean movement as at 244.5 deg, and its anomaly of parallax was at 171 deg, 26′. Accordingly during the year between there was a movement of 5 deg 38′ besides the complete revolutions. Now for the 2nd year of Antoninus on the 12th day of Epiphi the 11 month by the Egyptian calendar 9 hours after mid-day, i.e. 3 equatorial hours before the following midnight, with respect to the Cracow meridian, to the year of Our Lord 1523 on the 8th day before the Kalends of March 7 hours before noon, there were 1384 Egyptian years 251 days 19 minutes [of a day]. During that time there were by the above calculation 5 deg 38′ and 648 complete revolutions of anomaly of parallax. Now the regular movement of the sun was held to be 257 1/2 deg. The subtraction from 257 1/2 deg of the 5 deg 38′ of the movement of parallax leaves 251 deg 52′ as the mean movement of Mars in longitude. And all that agrees approximately with what was set down just now.

By connecting observations from the Ptolemaic era with his own (and other contemporary) observations, Copernicus was able to achieve a great improvement in timing accuracy. Remarkably, his combination of timing data and positional measurements for solar system planets such as Mars give a signal-to-noise quite similar to the modern data that we currently have for transiting hot Jupiters such as HD 149026b. These extrasolar planets have been observed over hundreds of orbits with both ground-based photometry (for timing) and with radial velocities (for elucidating the orbital figure).

Given that the distances to the planet-bearing stars are millions of times larger than the distances to the solar system planets, this is a testament both to how far we’ve come in 500 years, and simultaneously, to the durability of the Copernican accomplishment.

Sometimes, when I give a talk, I’m asked why the extrasolar planets don’t have evocative names.

Names and labels carry a heavy freight and they get people worked up. The agonized IAU deliberations vis-à-vis Pluto’s status as a plutoid or a planet or a dwarf planet constituted by far the biggest planet news of 2006, dwarfing, for example, the discovery of the triple Neptune system orbiting HD 69830. It’s unlikely that New Horizons would have gotten its congressional travel papers in order had Pluto been a plutoid right from the start.

When new comets and asteroids are discovered, their names generally follow on fairly quickly. Comets are bestowed with the name of the discoverer(s), and as a result, Dr. Hale and Mr. Bopp are entwined together in immortality. With asteroids, the discoverer gets the naming rights (subject to certain IAU rules), resulting in both some cool choices, (99942) Apophis, (3040) Kozai, as well as a Kilroy-was-here sloop of John B’s: (6830) Johnbackus, (20307) Johnbarnes, (4525) Johnbauer, (15461) Johnbird, (12140) Johnbolton, (16901) Johnbrooks, (11652) Johnbrownlee, (26891) Johnbutler, etc. etc.

Galileo, in sighting the moons of Jupiter, made the first telescopic discovery of solar system objects. Ever on the eye for an angle, he tried to increase his odds of patronage by naming his new moons “The Medicean Stars” in reference to Cosimo II de’ Medici, fourth Grand Duke of Tuscany. It’s now generally agreed that Mr. Medici, whatever his merits, was rather dramatically undeserving of the following accolades:

Serenissimo Grand Duke, “scarcely have the immortal graces of your soul begun to shine forth on earth than bright stars offer themselves in the heavens, which, like tongues [longer lived than poets] will speak of and celebrate your most excellent virtues for all time.”

Later in the seventeenth century, when Giovanni Cassini discovered Saturn VIII, V, III, and IV, he tried the same tactic. Three hundred and twenty two years later, his prose reads like a purple toad:

In the Conclusion, the Discoverer considers that the Antient Astronomers, having translated the Names of their Heroes among the Starrs, those Names have continued down to us unchanged, notwithstanding the endeavour of following Ages to alter them; and that Galileo, after their Example, had honoured the House of the Medici with the discovery of the Satellites of Jupiter, made by him under the Protection of Cosmus II; which Starrs will be always known by the Name of Sidera Medicea. Wherefore he concludes that the Satellites of Saturn, being much more exalted and more difficult to discover, are not unworthy to bear the Name of Louis le Grand, under whose Reign and in whose Observatory the same have been detected, which therefore he calls Sidera Lodoicea, not doubting but to have perpetuated the Name of that King, by a Monument much more lasting than those of Brass and Marble, which shall be erected to his Memory. [1]

In order to forestall just these sorts of embarrassments, the current IAU naming convention specifies that, the names of individuals or events principally known for political or military activities are unsuitable until 100 years after the death of the individual or the occurrence of the event.

The Medicean Stars are neither medicean nor stars, and so it’s not surprising that the name failed to stick. In 1847, the names of the Sidera Lodoicea were finally standardized to Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys, and Dione, all of which just sound right. It’s remarkable that nearly two hundred years elapsed before the final names were assigned.

At present, there’s no IAU sanction for naming extrasolar planets. Sometimes astronomers give it a go anyway, as seen here in the abstract for astro-ph/0312382:

Three transits of the planet orbiting the solar type star HD209458 were observed in the far UV at the wavelength of the HI Ly-alpha line. The planet size at this wavelength is equal to 4.3 R_Jup, i.e. larger than the planet Roche radius (3.6 R_Jup). Absorbing hydrogen atoms were found to be blueshifted by up to -130 km/s, exceeding the planet escape velocity. This implies that hydrogen atoms are escaping this “hot Jupiter” planet. An escape flux of >~ 10^10g/s is needed to explain the observations. Taking into account the tidal forces and the temperature rise expected in the upper atmosphere, theoretical evaluations are in good agreement with the observed rate. Lifetime of planets closer to their star could be shorter than stellar lifetimes suggesting that this evaporating phenomenon may explain the lack of planets with very short orbital distance.

This evaporating planet could be represented by the Egyptian God “Osiris” cut into pieces and having lost one of them. This would give us a much easier way to name that planet and replace the unpleasant “HD209458b” name used so far.

The name Osiris doesn’t seem to have caught on, perhaps because (5×10^9)(3.17×10^7)(1×10^10) is a good deal less than (1.4×10^30). Also, I’d tend to disagree that HD 209458b is “unpleasant”. A sequence of letters and numbers carries no preconception, underscoring the fact that these worlds are distant, alien, and almost wholly unknown — K2 is colder and more inaccessible than Mt. McKinley, Vinson Massif or Everest.

Ray Bradbury, in several of his stories, tapped into the profound significance of names. In the 2035-2036 section of The Martian Chronicles, he wrote:

The old Martian names were names of water and air and hills. They were the names of snows that emptied south in the stone canals to fill the empty seas. And the names of sealed and buried sorcerers and towers and obelisks. And the rockets struck at the names like hammers, breaking away the marble into shale, shattering the crockery milestones that named the old towns, in the rubble of which great pylons were plunged with new names: Iron Town, Steel Town, Aluminum City, Electric Village, Corn Town, Grain Villa, Detroit II, all the mechanical names and the metal names from Earth.

I think we’ll eventually reach the extrasolar planets, and in so doing, we’ll find out what their true names are.

Yikes! It was brought to my attention this morning that the transitsearch.org domain name expired last week. The robots at Network Solutions were apparently posting their anxious renewal demands off into the great unknown. Visitors to transitsearch.org are now presented with a blandly science and astronomy themed page with links to topics such as “Save the planet” and “NASA Jobs”. Vaguely curious, I clicked on “NASA Jobs” and discovered that astronauts can earn online degrees in as fast as one year.

Renewal of the Transitsearch domain is now in progress using a sepulchural fax-based procedure. An inevitable credit card payment and a few days lag time, and everything should be back in working order. In the meantime, you can always access the candidates page at the oklo server, where the transit tables continue to be brewed anew every ten minutes:

http://207.111.201.70/transitsearch/dynamiccontent/candidates.html

And oklo.org? A chronic lack of posts, yes, but no, we’re not on vacation. The referee’s report on our HD 80606 results. A better transitsearch algorithm and table design. The rejuvenation of the console and the systemic backend. Doppler Survey schedule optimization. Etc. Etc., all soaking up much more time than expected.

I’m very hopeful, though, that the solution to the anagram can be revealed sooner rather than later…

Visitors to oklo.org over the past several weeks have frequently been greeted with page loading from the 2400 baud era, or worse yet, with the dreaded grey and yellow “highload.html” page.

I’ve been fully distracted with other projects, and so I didn’t really give it much attention. In what’s best described as a case of wishful thinking, I chalked the slowdown to the traffic spike that came in when the anagram post got written up at the NY Times site.

Over the weekend, things suddenly got much worse. It was clear that something was wrong. A little digging revealed that the wordpress installation was out of date, and was being exploited to the hilt by link spammers. The normally lightfooted footer.php script in the themes directory was staggering under a 427 kB load of grungy links. Oklo dot org was under full scale assault by dreary robots with single minded enthusiasms for cia1is and satellite TV.

A complete reinstall seems to have fixed the problem. It’d be tragic if those evil robots win.

On a related note, it might be worthwhile to sift through all those CoRoT lightcurves for photometric banner ads. As Luc Arnold writes in the abstract for “Transit Lightcurve Signatures of Artifical Objects” (astro-ph/0503580):

The forthcoming space missions, able to detect Earth-like planets by the transit method, will a fortiori also be able to detect the transit of artificial planet-size objects. Multiple artificial objects would produce lightcurves easily distinguishable from natural transits. If only one artificial object transits, detecting its artificial nature becomes more difficult. We discuss the case of three different objects (triangle, 2-screen, louver-like 6-screen) and show that they have a transit lightcurve distinguishable from the transit of natural planets, either spherical or oblate, although an ambiguity with the transit of a ringed planet exists in some cases. We show that transits, especially in the case of multiple artificial objects, could be used for the emission of attention-getting signals, with a sky coverage comparable to the laser pulse method. The large number of expected planets (several hundreds) to be discovered by the transit method by next space missions will allow to test these ideas.

Download 1017 x 761 px version here.

This dry range is near Gabbs, Nevada.

I remember stopping at a bar in Gabbs on a Saturday night in October 1993. We were low on gas, having foolishly skipped a possibility to fill up at Walker Lake. We’d been driving all day. In the deserted gravel lot, the sky was freezing black and spangled with stars.

I drank a beer and talked to the only other patron — a grizzled Vietnam veteran who worked at the molybdenum mine. The word molybdenum sounded strange, exotic. In 1993, the price of molybdenum was in free fall, and in 1994, it would reach a low of $3,510 per metric ton ($1.59 per pound). The mine was laying off workers and was in danger of closing.

The gas station in Gabbs was closed. The bartender called the nearest possibility, the old Pony Express station Middlegate, 50 miles north. “You’re in luck, they’ve got gas.”

The current spot price for Molybdenum oxide is 33.50 dollars per pound, a less-noticed example from the many changes that make 1993 seem increasingly a part of a bygone millennium. Hundreds of extrasolar planets, e-mail inboxes that routinely receive hundreds of messages (mostly spam) per day, and this uneasily growing realization that the raw materials may be the deciding factor after all.

I wonder whether the extrasolar planets will ever have a flatly practical economic value. The scramble to detect new planets often feels like a land rush, but is there a real possibility that we’ll eventually pack up and go to these systems that are showing up in the correlation diagrams? Do the economics of interstellar travel ever work out?

In this context, it’s slightly disconcerting to remember that the molybdenum has already made the interstellar journey (see e.g. here). The most abundant Mo isotope is molybdenum-98, which constitutes 24.14% of Earth’s molybdenum. These atoms were produced both via the s-process, which takes place in red giant stars, and where a chain of slow neutron captures is interspersed with beta decays, and by the r-process, which occurs in supernovae.

The fact that the resources made the trip for free makes it seem a little more likely that we may well be able to get more, but only if we pay…