Category: Astronomy

The Weirdest, And Naughtiest, Star in The Galaxy

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Astronomy: Stellar Science, Astronomy: Techniques, UncategorizedLeave a comment

It was an interesting ringtone — aggressive but feminine, with a hint of desperation.  And it was a ringtone I hadn’t programmed into my phone.  The number was intriguing, too — 710-555-1701.  It didn’t add up, so I answered the ring. “Moire here.”

“Hello, Mr Moire, this is Victoria Baird.”

“It’s been a long time, Ms Baird.  What can I do for you?”  Her voice and the memory of her pointed ears sent chills down my spine.

“This time it’s what I can do for you, Mr Moire.  Here’s a tip — Tabby’s star.”  I could hear the italics.  I wanted to ask questions but the line went dead.

Considering the context, I called my Astronomy Department source.  “Morning, Cathleen.  It’s break time, can I buy you some of Al’s coffee and a scone?”

“You’re going to ask me questions, aren’t you?  What am I going to have to bone up on?  I know, it’s Tabby’s Star, right?”

“Got it in one, Cathleen.  Meet you at Al’s?”

“Yeah, give me 15 minutes.”Tabbystar 400

A quarter-hour later we had a table, two mugs of coffee and a plate of scones in front of us.  “So how’d you know I’d be asking about Tabby’s star?  And what is it?  And who is Tabby?”

“Tabby is Tabetha (she spells it with an ‘e’) Boyajian, PhD.  She teaches Astronomy at Louisiana State, does research specializing in high-precision star measurement.  In her spare time she manages a citizen-scientist project called Planet Hunters.  The Hunters get their kicks combing through databases from the Kepler satellite telescope.  They get all excited if the records indicate that a star’s been transited.”

“Oh, like that star-dimming that found the TRAPPIST-1 planets?”

“Exactly.  I think they’ve got over a hundred candidate planetary systems and a couple-dozen confirmed ones to their credit by now.  Anyhow, 2012 was a banner year for them, ’cause they raised an alert on what’s now being called the weirdest star in the galaxy.”

“Which would be Tabby’s Star.  Got it.  But what’s weird about it?”

“Poets like to write about ‘the constant stars.’  This star is world-champion not-constant.  You know how stars seem to flicker when you look at them?”

“Yeah, that’s how I tell them apart from planets.”

“Then you know that the flickering comes from starlight getting messed up going through our turbulent atmosphere.  Astronauts don’t see the flickering.  Neither does Kepler up there, so it can reliably detect miniscule variations in a star’s output.  Virtually all of the 150,000 stars it tracked for four years had rock-steady production.  A few of them occasionally dimmed or flared by maybe a percent, but Tabby’s Star (formally known as KIC 8462852) got the Hunters’ attention when it dimmed by 16%.”

“Twenty times a normal dimming!  Did it stay that way or did the light come back up again?”

“Oh, it came back all right, but the curve on the way up didn’t match the curve on the way down.  That was even weirder.  So the team scoured through the star’s 4-year record and found a dozen events on the 0.05-2% scale, plus one at 8% and another at 21%.”

“21%?  That’s a big shadow.”

“Ya think?  Especially since the between-event timing was seriously irregular and some of those events were complex with three or more separate components.  But that’s not all the weirdness. Those dips lasted for hours or even days, longer than most planetary transits.  After Boyajian and her 48 collaborators published their initial report, which has to have one of the naughtiest titles in the astronomical literature, some other —”

“Wait, a naughty title?  C’mon, don’t tease.”

“OK <sigh>.  The technical term for a star’s light output is flux.  That paper was half about the observations and half about what might be causing the variation.  Assuming the star’s real output is constant, the question becomes, ‘What happened to that missing light?‘  Or as the authors put it, ‘Where’s The Flux?‘  Since then both the paper and the star have been informally referred to as WTF.  OK?”

“OK <sigh>.  So you were saying there’s something else.”

“Yeah.  Some other astronomers went digging in the archives.  WTF has been dimming gradually for at least the past 100 years.  Weird, eh?”

“Yeah.  So what’s causing it?”

“We don’t even have good guesses.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Gozer, The Stay Puft Black Hole

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Stellar Science, Gravitational astronomy, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

We’re downstairs at Eddie’s Pizza.  Vinnie orders his usual pepperoni.  In memory of Sam Panapoulos, I order a Hawaiian.  Then we’re back to talking black holes.

“I been thinking, Sy.  These regular-size black holes, the ones close to the Sun’s mass, we got a lot of ’em?”

“I’ve seen an estimate of 50,000 in the Milky Way Galaxy so you could say they’re common.  That’s one way to look at it.  The other way is to compare 50,000 with the 250 billion stars in the galaxy.  One out of 5,000,000 is a black hole, so they’re rare.  Your choice, Vinnie.”

“But all three confirmed LIGO signals were the next bigger size range, maybe 10 to 30 solar masses; two of ’em hittin’ each other and they’ve all been more than a billion lightyears away.  How come LIGO doesn’t see the little guys that are close to us?”

“Darn good question.  Lessee… OK, I’ve got several possibilities.  Maybe the close-in little guys do collide, but the signal’s too weak for us to detect.  But we can put numbers to that.  In each LIGO event we’ve seen, the collision released about 10% of their 40-to-60-Sun total mass-energy in the form of gravitational waves.  LIGO’s just barely able to detect that, right?”

“They were excited they could, yeah.”

“So if a pair of little-guy black holes collided they’d release about 10% of two makes 0.2 solar masses worth of energy.  That’d be way below our detection threshold if the collision is a billion light-years away.  But we’re asking about collisions inside the Milky Way.  Suppose the collision happened near the center, about 26,000 lightyears from us.  Signal strength grows as the square of how close the source is, so multiply that ‘too weak to detect’ wave by (1 billion/26000)² =15×1012, fifteen quadrillion.  LIGO’d be deafened by a signal that strong.”

“But LIGO’s OK, so we can rule that out.  Next guess.”

“Maybe the signal’s coming in at the wrong frequency.  The equations say that just before a big-guy collision the two objects circle each other hundreds of times a second.  That frequency is in the lower portion of the 20-20,000 cycles-per-second human audio range.  LIGO’s instrumentation was tuned to pick up gravitational waves between 30 and 7,000.  Sure enough, LIGO recorded chirps that were heard around the world.”

“So what frequency should LIGO be tuned to to pick up little-guy collisions?”

“We can put numbers to that, too.  Physics says that at a given orbit radius, revolution frequency varies inversely with the square root of the mass.   The big-guy collisions generated chirps between 100 and 400 cps.  Little guy frequencies would be f2/f50=√(50/2)=5 times higher, between 500 and 2000 cps.  Well within LIGO’s range.”

“We don’t hear those tweets so that idea’s out, too.  What’s your third try?”

“Actually I like this one best.  Maybe the little guys just don’t collide.”

“Why would you like that one?”

“Because maybe it’s telling us something.  It could be that they don’t collide simply because they’re surrounded by so many other stars that they never meet up.  But it also could be that binary black holes, the ones that are fated to collide with each other, are the only ones that can grow beyond 10 solar masses.  And I’ve got a guess about how that could happen.”

“Alright, give.”

“Let’s start with how to grow a big guy.  Upstairs we talked about making little guys.  When a star’s core uses up one fuel, like hydrogen, there’s an explosive collapse that sets off a hotter fuel, like helium, until you get to iron which doesn’t play.  At each step, unburnt fuel outside the core gets blown away.  If the final core’s mass is greater than about three times the Sun’s you wind up with a black hole.  But how about if you don’t run out of fuel?”

“How can that happen?  The star’s got what it’s got.”Binary protoBHs

“Not if it’s got close neighbors that also expel unburnt fuel in their own burn-collapse cycles.  Grab their cast-off fuel and your core can get heavier before you do your next collapse.  Not impossible in a binary or cluster where all the stars are roughly the same age.  Visualize kids tossing marshmallows into each other’s mouths.”

“Or paying for each other’s pizzas.  And it’s your turn.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Prelude to A Waltz

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Stellar Science, Gravitational astronomy, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

An excited knock, but one I recognize.  In comes Vinnie, waving his fresh copy of The New York Times.

“LIGO‘s done it again!  They’ve seen another black hole collision!”

“Yeah, Vinnie, I’ve read the Abbott-and-a-thousand paper.  Three catastrophic collisions detected in less than two years.  The Universe is starting to look like a pretty busy place, isn’t it?”

“And they all involve really big black holes — 15, 20, even 30 times heavier than the Sun.  Didn’t you once say black holes that size couldn’t exist?”

“Well, apparently they do.  Of course the physicists are busily theorizing how that can happen.  What do you know about how stars work, Vinnie?”

“They get energy from fusing hydrogen atoms to make helium atoms.”

“So far, so good, but then what happens when the hydrogen’s used up?”

“They go out, I guess.”

“Oh, it’s a lot more exciting than that. Does the fusion reaction happen everywhere in the star?”

“I woulda said, ‘Yes,’ but since you’re asking I’ll bet the answer is,  ‘No.'”

“Properly suspicious, and you’re right.  It takes a lot of heat and pressure to force a couple of positive nuclei close enough to fuse together despite charge repulsion.  Pressures near the outer layers are way too low for that.  For our Sun, for instance, you need to be 70% of the way to the center before fusion really kicks in.  So you’ve got radiation pressure from the fusion pushing everything outward and gravity pulling everything toward the center.  But what’s down there?  Here’s a hint — hydrogen’s atomic weight is 1, helium’s is 4.”

“You’re telling me that the heavier atoms sink to the center?”

“I am.”

“So the center builds up a lot of helium.  Oh, wait, helium atoms got two protons in there so it’s got to be harder to mash them together than mashing hydrogens, right?”Star zones
“And that’s why that region’s marked ash zone in this sketch.  Wherever conditions are right for hydrogen fusion, helium’s basically inert.  Like ash in a campfire it just sinks out of the way.  Now the fire goes out.  What would you expect next?”

“Radiation pressure’s gone but gravity’s still there … everything must slam inwards.”

“Slam is an excellent word choice, even though the star’s radius is measured in thousands of miles.  What’s the slam going to do to the helium atoms?”

“Is it strong enough to start helium fusion?”

“That’s where I’m going.  The star starts fusing helium at its core.  That’s a much hotter reaction than hydrogen’s.  When convective zone hydrogen that’s still falling inward meets fresh outbound radiation pressure, most of the hydrogen gets blasted away.”

“Fusing helium – that’s a new one on me.  What’s that make?”

“Carbon and oxygen, mostly.  They’re as inert during the helium-fusion phase as helium was when hydrogen was doing its thing.”

“So will the star do another nova cycle?”

“Maybe.  Depends on the core’s mass.  Its gravity may not be intense enough to fuse helium’s ashes.  In that case you wind up with a white dwarf, which just sits there cooling off for billions of years.  That’s what the Sun will do.”

“But suppose the star’s heavy enough to burn those ashes…”

“The core’s fresh light-up blows away infalling convective zone material.  The core makes even heavier atoms.  Given enough fuel, the sequence repeats, cycling faster and faster until it gets to iron.  At each stage the star has less mass than before its explosion but the residual core is more dense and its gravity field is more intense.  The process may stop at a neutron star, but if there was enough fuel to start with, you get a black hole.”

“That’s the theory that accounts for the Sun-size black holes?”

“Pretty much.  I’ve left out lots of details, of course.  But it doesn’t account for black holes the size of 30 Suns — really big stars go supernova and throw away so much of their mass they miss the black-hole sweet spot and terminate as a neutron star or white dwarf.  That’s where the new LIGO observation comes in.  It may have clued us in on how those big guys happen.”

“That sketch looks like a pizza slice.”

“You’re thinking dinner, right?”

“Yeah, and it’s your turn to buy.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Goldilocks Zone and The Three Gazillion Bears

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Crazy Theories, General: Fun Stuff, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Tell me a bedtime story, Uncle Sy.”

“OK, Teena, what kind of story?”

“One with bears in it.  Nice bears.”

“Hmm…  How about ‘Goldilocks Zone and The Three Gazillion Bears’?”

“Gazillion?  Is that what kind of a bear they are?”

“No, that’s a number word.  It means ‘more than you could ever hope to count.’  Like a million but way way more.”

“But if you can’t count them, how do you know there are three times that many?”

“You’ll see, have patience.”

“Little girls don’t have patience, Uncle Sy, I wanna hear the story.  Wait, water bears?”

“Mm-hm, they’re a different kind of bear.”

“What’s different about them, and what do they do with water?  I bet they swim.”

“Why yes, they do.  In fact, they spend most of their time in water or at least being wet.  Another thing that’s special about them is that they’re tiny, about the size of the smallest dot you can see on your Mommy’s computer screen here.”
waterbear 1“If they’re so small, why are they called bears?”

“Take a look.  Doesn’t she look kind of like a nice bear?”

“She’s got too many legs.”

“She’s got just the right number for water bears.”

“And she’s green.”

“Well, yes, but the picture’s kind of pretend and doesn’t show proper colors.  She’s so small she’s almost transparent.  She eats particles of algae and such, so maybe in real life she might be sort of green.”

“I like the way she’s smiling.  She reminds me of …  the fat man in the Laurel-n-Hardy movie you showed me last Saturday.”

“Oliver Hardy?  Yeah, I can see that.  Except the smiley bit is actually a wrinkle.  Her mouth is the round thing that looks like a nose.”

“That’s silly.  If her nose is her mouth how can she breathe?”

“Through her skin.  Animals can do that if they’re very small.”

“How else is she different?”

“Well, her kind’s one of Earth’s oldest animals.  Scientists have found water bear fossils over 500 million years old, twice as old as the oldest dinosaur.”

“Older than dinosaurs!”

“But the big thing and the big puzzle is, they’re amazingly rugged little beasties.  They live all over the world — high on mountaintops, at the bottom of the sea, next to ice at the South Pole and next to boiling hot springs.  In experiments, water bears have survived doses of chemicals and radiation that would kill most other creatures.  Astronauts on the ISS even exposed dried-out water bears to the vacuum of space.  The little guys just got happy-active again when they were brought back inside and dunked in some water.”

“What’s the puzzle?”

“Why are they so tough?  They make special molecules that protect them against dehydration and radiation and toxins even though they live in wet environments that don’t get irradiated and rarely get poisoned.  Fish and insects that evolved in lightless caves stopped using energy to make eyes they don’t need.  Why or even how have water bears held onto all that specialized protective DNA for hundreds of millions of years?”

“Does anybody know the answer?”

“Nope.  Some people have guessed that because water bears can survive exposure to space, maybe they came to Earth from another planet somewhere.  Maybe some advanced civilization sprayed water bears out into the Universe to spread life around.  Doesn’t that sound spooky?”

“Ooohh, yeah.  I like that.  Water bears from space!”

“But it gets better.  Maybe there’s different kinds of water bears for different kinds of planets.  That’s where Goldilocks Zones come in.  What did Goldilocks say about the porridge?”

“This bowl’s too hot and this bowl’s too cold, but this bowl is j-u-s-t right!”Water bears and planet“Yup, and that’s one way astronomers can classify planets.  Earth’s in the Goldilocks Zone for liquid water, essential for life as we know it.  Saturn’s moon Titan might support some other kind of life in its cold hydrocarbon seas.  If that’s the case, there’d be a much colder Goldilocks Zone for that kind of life.  Maybe there’s another, hotter Goldilocks Zone for life that’s happy in molten silica.  And maybe there’s water bears designed for each kind of Goldilocks Zone.”

“Mommy, Uncle Sy’s being silly again.”

“Nighty-night, Teena-girl.  Sweet dreams.”

“Nighty-night.”

~~ Rich Olcott

How Many Ways Can You Look at The Sky?

On By rolcottIn Astronomy, Astronomy: Techniques, Mathematics, Uncategorized2 Comments

Cathleen and I were discussing her TRAPPIST-1 seminar in Al’s coffee shop when a familiar voice boomed over the room’s chatter.

“Hey, Cathleen, I got questions.”

“Vinnie?”

“Yeah, Sy, he hangs out with the Astronomy crew sometimes.  You know him, too, huh?”

“From way back.  Long story.”

“What’re your questions, Vinnie?”

“I missed the start of your talk, Cathleen, but why so much hype about this TRAPPIST-1 system?  We’ve already found 3,500 stars with planets, right, and some of them have several.  What’s so special here?”

“You’re right, Vinnie, Kepler-90 has seven planets, just like TRAPPIST-1. (brandishes a paper napkin)  But that star’s more than 60 times further from us than TRAPPIST-1 is.  It’s just too far away for us to be able to learn much more about the planets than their masses and orbital characteristics.  This new system’s only 40 lightyears away, close enough that we’ve got a hope of seeing what’s in the planetary atmospheres.”

(another paper napkin)  “That ties in with the second thing that’s special.  The star’s surface temperature, 2550ºK, is so low that even though its planets orbit very close in, three of them are probably in the Goldilocks Zone.  They’re not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on their surface.  IF there’s liquid water on one of them and IF there’s something living there, we should be able to detect traces of that biochemistry in the planet’s atmosphere.”

Star demographics
Observational data (dots) and four different models
of star count (vertical axis) versus temperature.
Hotter stars are to the left.

(napkin #3)  “The third special thing is that TRAPPIST-1 is the first-known planet-hosting star in its category — ultra-cool dwarf stars burning below 2700°K.  Finding those stars is hard — they’re small and dim.  No-one really knows how many there are compared to the other categories.  Some models say they should be rare, other models suggest they could be as common as G-type stars like our Sun.  IF there’s lots of ultra-cool dwarfs and IF they generally have planets like G-type stars do, then the category’s a new prime target for exoplanet hunters seeking life-signs.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because it’s easier to spot a small planet around a small star than around a big one.  Transits across TRAPPIST-1 dim its light by 1% or so.  A TRAPPIST-1 planet transiting our Sun would dim it by 1/100th of that.  The same problem hinders planet-finding methods fishing for stars that wobble because a planet’s orbiting around it.”

“Alright, I get that TRAPPIST-1 is special.  My other question is, I heard the part of your talk where you figured the odds on seeing its transits, but you lost me with the word steradian.  My dictionary says that’s an area on a sphere divided by the square of the sphere’s radius. What would that get me?  Where’d your numbers come from?”

“You need one additional piece of information.  If you take any sphere’s total surface area and divide that by r², you’ll always get 4π steradians.  You can use that to convert between absolute surface area and fraction of the sphere.  Mmm…  Sy, you own some land outside of town, yes?”

“A little.”

“And you have mineral rights?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s why I bought it.”

“And they go how far down?”

“All the way to the center of the Earth.”

“So your claim’s actually a pyramid 6370 kilometers deep.  When I moved here I learned it’s impolite to ask how much land someone has.  For round numbers I’ll assume 40 acres, which is about 1,000 square meters.  (tapping keys on her smartphone)  The Earth’s radius is 6.37×106 meters, so Sy’s claim is 1,000/(6.37×106)2 = 2.47×10-11 steradians.  Divide 4π by that and you get … 5.08×1011.  So Earth’s entire surface has room for 5.08×1011 patches matching Sy’s.  Visualize 5.08×1011 pyramids pointing in every direction from Earth’s center.  Now extend each pyramid outward to define a separate patch of sky.  Got that picture, Vinnie?”viewing cones

“Sort of.”

“TRAPPIST-1 is 3.74×1017 meters away.  TRAPPIST-1h’s orbit is a near-circle whose radius is 9.45×109 meters.  It covers π(9.45×109)2/(3.74×1017)2 = 2.00×10-15 steradians on a sphere centered on us. Divide 4π by 2.00×10-15 …  6.27×1015 sky-patches the size of TRAPPIST-1h’s orbit.  They had to pick the right patch to find TRAPPIST-1.”

“Long odds.”

“Yep.”

~~ Rich Olcott

The Luck o’ The (insert nationality here)

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Stellar Science, Astronomy: Techniques, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Afternoon, Al.  What’s the ruckus in the back room?”

“Afternoon, Sy.  That’s the Astronomy crew and their weekly post-seminar coffee-and-critique session.  This time, though, they brought their own beer.  You know I don’t have a beer license, just coffee, right?  Could you go over there and tell ’em to keep it covered so I don’t get busted?”

“Sure, Al.  … Afternoon, folks.  What’s all the happy?”

“Hey, Sy, welcome to the party.  Trappist beer, straight from Belgium!”

“Don’t mind if I do, Cathleen, but Al sure would like for you to put that carton under the table.  Makes him nervous.”

“Sure, no problem.”

“Thanks.  I gather your seminar was about the new seven-planet system.  How in the world do the Trappists connect to that story?”

“Patriotism.  The find was announced by a team from Belgium’s University of Liege.  They’ve built a pair of robotic telescopes tailored for seeking out rocks and comets local to our Solar System.  Exoplanets, too.  Astronomers love tying catchy acronyms to their projects.  This group’s proudly Belgian so they called their robots TRAnsiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescopes, ergo TRAPPIST, to honor the country’s 14 monasteries.  And their beer.  Mainly the beer, I’ll bet.”

“So the planets are a Belgian discovery?”

“Well, the lead investigator, Michaël Gillon, is at Liege, and so are half-a-dozen of his collaborators.  Their initial funding came from the Belgian government.  But by the time the second paper came out, the one that claimed a full seven planets spanning a new flavor of Goldilocks Zone, they’d pulled in support and telescope time from over a dozen other countries — USA, India, UK, France, Morocco, Saudi Arabia… the list goes on.  So it’s Belgian mostly but not only.”

“I love international science.  Next question — I see the planets are listed as TRAPPIST-1b, TRAPPIST-1c, and so on up to TRAPPIST-1h.  What happened to TRAPPIST-1a?”

“Rules of nomenclature, Sy.  TRAPPIST-1a is the star itself.  Actually, the star already had a formal name, which I just happen to have written down in my seminar notes somewhere … here it is, 2MASS J23062928 – 0502285.  You can see why TRAPPIST-1 is more popular.”

“I’m not even going to ask how that other name unwinds.  So what was the seminar topic this week?”

7 planets
TRAPPIST-1’s planets,
drawn to scale against their star. The
green ones are in the Goldilocks Zone.

“The low probability for us ever noticing those planets blocking the star’s light.”

“I’d think seeing a star winking on and off like it’s sending Morse code would attract attention.”

“That’s not close to what it was doing.  It’s all about the scale.  You know those cartoons that show planets together with their host sun?”

(showing her my smartphone) “Like this one?”

“Yeah.  It’s a lie.”

“How is it lying?”

“It pretends they’re all right next to the star.   7 planets perspectiveThis image is a little better.”  (showing me her phone)  “This artist at least tried to build in some perspective.  Even in this tiny solar system, about 1/500 the radius of ours, the star’s distance to each planet is hundreds to a thousand times the size of the planet.  You just can’t show planets AND their orbits together in a linear diagram.  Now, think about how small these planets are compared to their sun.”

“Aaaa-hah!   When there’s an eclipse, only a small fraction of the light is blocked.”

“That’s part of it.  Each eclipse (we call them transits) dims the measured brightness by only a percent or so.  But it’s worse than that.”

eclipses“How so?”

“All those orbits lie in a single plane.  We can’t see the transits unless our position lines up with that plane.  If we’re as little as 1½° out of the plane, we miss them.  But it’s worse than that.”

“How so?”

“During a transit, each planet casts a conical shadow that defines a patch in TRAPPIST-1’s sky.  You can tile TRAPPIST-1’s sky with about 150,000  patches that size.  There’s one chance in 150,000 of being in the right patch to see that 1% dimming.  In our sky there are over 6×1015 patches the size of TRAPPIST-1h’s orbit.  The team had to inspect the just right patch to find it.”

“With odds like that, no wonder TRAPPIST uses robots.”

“Yep.”

~~ Rich Olcott

The New System’s in Tune

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Stellar Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

<We interrupt our running story line to bring you this important development…>

“Morning, Sy.  What can I get you?”

“My usual mugfull of black, Al.  What’s the Scone-of-The-Day?”

“I’m calling this The Trappist.  It’s got raspberry jam!”

“Why that name?”

“In honor of TRAPPIST-1, you know, that star they just found a bunch of planets around.”

“Your coffee shop being right next to the Astronomy building, I guess you’ve heard a lot about it.”

“Sy, you couldn’t believe.  The planetologists are going nuts of course, even though no-one’s actually seen the planets, and the astrometrics folks are lining up for telescope time ’cause they’ve got a whole new class of stars to monitor and of course the astrophysicists get to figure out how the system even works.”

“Astrometrics folks?  New class of stars?”

“Yeah, the high-precision star-measurers.  They didn’t used to pay attention to the small, dim stars because why bother.  But now … woo-hoo, whole new ballgame.”

“Nobody’s seen those planets?  How do they know they’re there?”

“Process of elimination, Sy.  The TRAPPIST telescopes picked up repetitive dark blips in the light coming from that star.  It’s a close, fast-moving star so there’s no sense supposing it’s like going behind or in front of a regular array of rocks or stars or something.  It’s not wobbling side-to-side like it would if it was a binary so it’s not traveling along with another star.  If the blips were sunspots going around as the star rotates there’d be only one rhythm, but these blips come in too complicated for that.  Besides, the star’s low-activity, too cool for lotsa sunspots.  Gotta be planets eclipsing it.”

trappist-1-system-450
NASA’s artistic (and cute) rendition
of the TRAPPIST-1 system
Note the close-in steam and the frost further out

“Sounds pretty good, but…”

“Hey Sy, there was something else, maybe you could explain it.  One astrophysics guy was real impressed that the planets had residences.  I didn’t understand that.”

“Residences?  That’s a new one on me.”

“Had something to do with the blip periods.  Yeah, here’s the paper napkin he wrote ’em all down on.”

Object
TRAPPIST-1x
Period, days
Resonance
Actual /
Expected
b
1.51
c
2.42
5c:8b
1.002
d
4.05
3d:5c
1.004
e
6.10
2e:3d
1.004
f
9.20
2f:3e
1.006
g
12.35
3g:4f
1.007
h
20?
5h:8g
1.012?

“Oh, resonances! That I recognize, and yeah, those numbers are much more convincing.  Remember my post about gear logic?”

“Sorry, Sy, that must’ve been a long time ago and who has time to read?”

“I understand.  OK, that post explained how planets that survive the early chaos of a forming solar system tend to wind up in orbits whose relative year-lengths form ratios of small whole numbers.  In our system, for instance, the length of Pluto’s year is exactly 3/2 of Neptune’s, Neptune’s year is twice that of Uranus, and so on.  If a planet doesn’t synch up with its neighbors, it’ll collide with someone or be flung out of the system.  Put another way, a system’s not stable if its planetary orbit periods are just any old numbers.  Make sense?”

“I suppose, so…?”

“So look at this guy’s table.  The periods of each pair of adjacent objects follow that rule almost exactly.  Five times c‘s period is less than 0.25% away from eight times b‘s, and so on all the way out to h, which I take it has an uncertain period because the guy put in that question mark.  In fact, I think this system follows the rule more tightly than our Solar System does.  As far as I’m concerned that regularity in the periods makes the case for TRAPPIST-1 having planets.  You hear anything else?”

“Yeah, there was a lot of excitement about the middle three planets being in some kind of Goldilocks zone.  What’s that about?”

“Hah, I’d be excited, too.  If a planet’s too close to the star, like Mercury is to ours, it’ll be too hot for liquid water.  If the planet’s too far, any water it has would be frozen stiff.  Either way, not good for life to grow there.  In the Goldilocks zone, it’s…”

“Just right, huh, Sy?”

“On the nose, Al.  I’m going to have to read up on TRAPPIST-1.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Three Body Problems

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Stellar Science, Gravitational astronomy, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

The local science museum had a showing of the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar so of course I went to see it again.  Awesome visuals and (mostly) good science because Nolan had tapped the expertise of Dr Kip Thorne, one of the primary creators of LIGO.  On the way out, Vinnie collared me.

“Hey, Sy, ‘splain something to me.”

“I can try, but first let’s get out of the weather.  Al’s coffee OK with you?”

“Yeah, sure, if his scones are fresh-baked.”

Al saw me walking in.  “Hey, Sy, you’re in luck, I just pulled a tray of cinnamon scones out of the oven.”  Then he saw Vinnie.  “Aw, geez, there go my paper napkins again.”

Vinnie was ready.  “Nah, we’ll use the backs of some ad flyers I grabbed at the museum.  And gimme, uh, two of the cinnamons and a large coffee, black.”

“Here you go.”

At our table I said, “So what’s the problem with the movie?”

“Nobody shrank.  All this time we been talking about how things get smaller in a strong gravity field.  That black hole, Gargantua, was huge.  The museum lecture guy said it was like 100 million times as heavy as the Sun.  When the people landed on its planet they should have been teeny but everything was just regular-size.  And what’s up with that ‘one hour on the planet is seven years back home’ stuff?”

“OK, one thing at a time.  When the people were on the planet, where was the movie camera?”

“On the planet, I suppose.”

“Was the camera influenced by the same gravitational effects that the people were?”

“Ah, it’s the frames thing again, ain’t it?  I guess in the on-planet inertial frame everything stays the relative size they’re used to, even though when we look at the planet from our far-away frame we see things squeezed together.”

(I’ve told you that Vinnie’s smart.)  “You got it.  OK, now for the time thing.  By the way, it’s formally known as ‘time dilation.’  Remember the potential energy/kinetic energy distinction?”

“Yeah.  Potential energy depends on where you are, kinetic energy depends on how you’re moving.”

“Got it in one.  It turns out that energy and time are deeply intertwined all through physics.  Would you be surprised if I told you that there are two kinds of time dilation, one related to gravitational potential and the other to velocity?”

“Nothing would surprise me these days.  Go on.”

“The gravity one dropped out of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity.  The velocity one arose from his General Relativity work.”  I grabbed one of those flyers.  “Ready for a little algebra?”

“Geez.  OK, I asked for it.”gargantua-3
“You certainly did.  I’ll just give you the results, and mind you these apply only near a non-rotating sphere with no electric charge.  Things get complicated otherwise.  Suppose the sphere has mass M and you’re circling around it at a distance r from its geometric center.  You’ve got a metronome ticking away at n beats per your second and you’re perfectly happy with that.  We good?”

“So far.”

“I’m watching you from way far away.  I see your metronome running slow, at only n√[1-(2 G·M/r·c²)] beats per my second.  G is Newton’s gravity constant, c is the speed of light.  See how the square root has to be less than 1?”

“Your speed of light or my speed of light?”

“Good question, considering we’re talking about time and space getting all contorted, but Einstein guarantees that both of us measure exactly the same speed.  So anyway, in the movie both the Miller’s Planet landing team and that poor guy left on good ship  Endurance are circling Gargantua.  Earth observers would see both their clocks running slow.  But Endurance is much further out (larger r, smaller fraction) from Gargantua than Miller’s Planet is.  Endurance’s distance gave its clock more beats per Earth second than the planet gets, which is why the poor guy aged so much waiting for the team to return.”

“I wondered about that.”

Then we heard Ramona’s husky contralto.  “Hi, guys.  Al said you were back here talking physics.  Who wants to take me dancing?”

We both stood up, quickly.

“Whee, this’ll be fun.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Gravity’s Real Rainbow

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Multi-messenger, Astronomy: Stellar Science, Gravitational astronomy, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Some people are born to scones, some have scones thrust upon them.  As I stepped into his coffee shop this morning, Al was loading a fresh batch onto the rack.  “Hey, Sy, try one of these.”

“Uhh … not really my taste.  You got any cinnamon ones ready?”

“Not much for cheddar-habañero, huh?  I’m doing them for the hipster trade,” waving towards all the fedoras on the room.  “Here ya go.  Oh, Vinnie’s waiting for you.”

I navigated to the table bearing a pile of crumpled yellow paper, pulled up a chair.  “Morning, Vinnie, how’s the yellow writing tablet working out for you?”

“Better’n the paper napkins, but it’s nearly used up.”

“What problem are you working on now?”

“OK, I’m still on LIGO and still on that energy question I posed way back — how do I figure the energy of a photon when a gravitational wave hits it in a LIGO?  You had me flying that space shuttle to explain frames and such, but kept putting off photons.”

“Can’t argue with that, Vinnie, but there’s a reason.  Photons are different from atoms and such because they’ve got zero mass.  Not just nearly massless like neutrinos, but exactly zero.  So — do you remember Newton’s formula for momentum?”

“Yeah, momentum is mass times the velocity.”

“Right, so what’s the momentum of a photon?”

“Uhh, zero times speed-of-light.  But that’s still zero.”

“Yup.  But there’s lots of experimental data to show that photons do carry non-zero momentum.  Among other things, light shining on an an electrode in a vacuum tube knocks electrons out of it and lets an electric current flow through the tube.  Compton got his Nobel prize for that 1923 demonstration of the photoelectric effect, and Einstein got his for explaining it.”

“So then where’s the momentum come from and how do you figure it?”

“Where it comes from is a long heavy-math story, but calculating it is simple.  Remember those Greek letters for calculating waves?”

(starts a fresh sheet of note paper) “Uhh… this (writes λ) is lambda is wavelength and this (writes ν) is nu is cycles per second.”

“Vinnie, you never cease to impress.  OK, a photon’s momentum is proportional to its frequency.  Here’s the formula: p=h·ν/c.  If we plug in the E=h·ν equation we played with last week we get another equation for momentum, this one with no Greek in it:  p=E/c.  Would you suppose that E represents total energy, kinetic energy or potential energy?”

“Momentum’s all about movement, right, so I vote for kinetic energy.”

“Bingo.  How about gravity?”

“That’s potential energy ’cause it depends on where you’re comparing it to.”

light-in-a-gravity-well“OK, back when we started this whole conversation you began by telling me how you trade off gravitational potential energy for increased kinetic energy when you dive your airplane.  Walk us through how that’d work for a photon, OK?  Start with the photon’s inertial frame.”

“That’s easy.  The photon’s feeling no forces, not even gravitational, ’cause it’s just following the curves in space, right, so there’s no change in momentum so its kinetic energy is constant.  Your equation there says that it won’t see a change in frequency.  Wavelength, either, from the λ=c/ν equation ’cause in its frame there’s no space compression so the speed of light’s always the same.”

“Bravo!  Now, for our Earth-bound inertial frame…?”

“Lessee… OK, we see the photon dropping into a gravity well so it’s got to be losing gravitational potential energy.  That means its kinetic energy has to increase ’cause it’s not giving up energy to anything else.  Only way it can do that is to increase its momentum.  Your equation there says that means its frequency will increase.  Umm, or the local speed of light gets squinched which means the wavelength gets shorter.  Or both.  Anyway, that means we see the light get bluer?”

“Vinnie, we’ll make a physicist of you yet.  You’re absolutely right — looking from the outside at that beam of photons encountering a more intense gravity field we’d see a gravitational blue-shift.  When they leave the field, it’s a red-shift.”

“Keeping track of frames does make a difference.”

Al yelled over, “Like using tablet paper instead of paper napkins.”

~~ Rich Olcott

LIGO and lambda and photons, oh my!

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Multi-messenger, Gravitational astronomy, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, Physics: Light and Relativity, Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I was walking my daily constitutional when Al waved me into his coffee shop.  “Sy, he’s at it again with the paper napkins.  Do something!”

I looked over.  There was Vinnie at his table, barricaded behind a pile of crumpled-up paper.  I grabbed a chair.

“Morning, Vinnie.  Having fun?”

“Greek letters.  Why’d they have to use Greek letters?”

The question was both rhetorical and derivative so I ignored it.  There were opened books under the barricade — upper-level physics texts.  “How come you’re chasing through those books?”

“I wanted to follow up on how LIGO operates with photons after we talked about all that space shuttle stuff.  But geez, Sy!”

“You’re a brave man, Vinnie.  So,  which letters are giving you trouble?”

“These two, that look kinda like each other upside down.” He pointed to one equation, λ=c/ν.

“Ah, wavelength equals the speed of light divided by the frequency.”

“How do you do that?”

“Some of those symbols go way back.  You just get used to them.  Most of them make sense when you learn the names for the letters — lambda (λ) is the peak-to-peak length of a lightwave, and nu (ν) is the number of peaks per second.  If it makes you feel any better, I’ve yet to meet a physicist who can write a zeta (ζ) — they generally just draw a squiggle and move on.”

“And there’s this other equation,” pointing to E=h·ν.  “What’s that about?”

“Good eye.  You just picked two equations that are fundamental to LIGO’s operation.  If a lightwave has frequency ν, the equations tell us two things about it — its energy is h·ν (h is Planck’s constant, 6.6×10-34 Joule-seconds), and its wavelength is c/ν (c is the speed of light).  For instance, yellow light has a frequency near 520×1012/sec.  One photon carries 3.8×10-40 Joules of energy.  Not much, but it adds up when a light beam contains lots of photons.  The same photon has a wavelength near 580×10-9 meters traveling through free space.”

“So what happens when one of those photons is in a LIGO beam?  Won’t a gravitational wave’s stretch-and-squeeze action mess up its wave?”

paper-napkin-waveI smoothed out one of Vinnie’s crumpled napkins. As I folded it into pleats and scooted it along the table I said, “Doesn’t mess up the wave so much as change the way we think about it.  We’re used to graphing out a spatial wave as an up-and-down pattern like this that moves through time, right?”

“That’s a lousy-looking wave.”

time-and-space-and-napkin
As the napkin moves through space,
the upper graph shows the height of its edge
above the observation point.

“It’s a paper napkin, f’pitysake, and I’m making a point here. Watch close.  If you monitor a particular point along the wave’s path in space and track how that point moves in time, you get the same profile except we draw it along the t-axis instead of along a space-axis.  See?”

“Hey, the time profile is the space profile going backwards.  Oh, right, it’s goin’ into the past ’cause it’s a memory.”

“That’s one of those things that people miss.  If you only draw sine waves, they’re the same in either direction.  The important point is that although timewaves and spacewaves have the same shape, they’ve got different meanings.  The timewave is directly connected to the wave’s energy by that E equation.  The spacewave is indirectly connected, because your other equation there scales it by the local speed of light.”

“Come again?  Local speed of light?  I thought it was 186,000 miles per second everywhere.”

“It is, but some of those miles are shorter than others.  Near a heavy mass, for instance, or in the compression phase of a gravitational wave, or inside a transparent material.  If you’re traveling in the lightwave’s inertial frame, you see no variation.  But if you’re watching from an independent inertial frame, you see the lightwave hit a slow patch.  Distance per cycle gets shorter.  Like that lambda-nu equation says, when c gets smaller the wavelength decreases.”

Al walked over.  “Gotcha a present, Vinnie.  Here’s a pad of yellow writing paper.  No more napkins, OK?”

“Uhh, thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

~~ Rich Olcott