Y Dwarf Stars

What do you call a body in space that is bigger than a planet but not hot enough to be a star? Apparently, they are being called Y-dwarf stars.

These bodies are not undergoing fusion, so they aren’t what we usually think of when we think of stars. But they are bigger than a planet, and their gravity is so strong, the interior is heated - to some extent. If one was in orbit around a ‘normal’ star of any size, it would probably be called a planet. If it is wandering through space alone, or has anything orbiting it, it’s a failed star, a type of brown dwarf.

Brown dwarves come in 3 types, depending on their surface temperature. The hottest are the L-type, the cooler ones are T-type, and the coolest are this Y-type that we are discussing. Scientists know of at least 24 Y-type brown dwarves.

Brown dwarves can be as much as 80 times the mass of Jupiter, but a Y-type is only 5 to 20 times Jupiter’s mass. At that size, their surface temperature appears to be from 250 to 350 degrees Farenheit. They are hard to spot, not only because of their low temperature but because the energy they emit (weakly) is mostly in the infrared spectrum.

If I read the articles correctly, most Y-dwarves have an atmosphere, which I imagine is even more chaotic than that of Jupiter. And don’t be thinking that atmosphere might be breathable. Instead, think of alkali elements and noxious clouds.

I am left wondering how I could work a Y-type brown dwarf into a story. I don’t think you could ‘land’ on it. The articles didn’t specifically say it, but I don’t think they have any rocky core to them. How about if you had to dip into the atmosphere and ‘suck up’ some of that atmosphere as a type of fuel? Maybe you’d had a fuel leak that you finally got patched, but now you didn’t have enough fuel to get to any regular re-fueling station. Considering the gravity involved and the turbulence of that atmosphere, would your ship hold together?

Maybe you tried to stay on the very edge of the atmosphere, sipping up the fuel slowly, instead of going lower and gulping. But a sudden storm pulled you lower, to the point where the ship’s joints are creaking and complaining, so you have to open your vents wide and let the atmosphere flood your tanks, then take a chance and use that raw, unrefined fuel to blast your way out of the atmosphere and to a safe distance. That could be a bumpy ride, as your engines try to cope with pockets of impurities!

Well, that’s one thought. I’m sure others will come to me.

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/science-y-class-brown-dwarfs-01368.html

https://phys.org/news/2017-07-y-type-stars.html

The Sky is Falling

If you follow me on facebook, you may have noticed that I have shared many articles on climate change and that I have started using the comment, “The Sky is Falling.”

It seemed more appropriate than saying, “The Boy Cried Wolf.” In that story, the boy is lying, only looking to introduce some excitement into his own life, without regard for the consequences.

Chicken Little, on the other hand, was telling the truth, as best he knew it. Something (a raindrop) had come down from the sky and hit him. He had never experienced anything like that before, so the logical conclusion was that something terrible was happening, the sky was falling! Chicken Little ran around the farmyard squawking his terrible news, trying to warn all the other farm critters.

Even that doesn’t exactly fit the problem of climate change. Chicken Little was very young and inexperienced. But it’s scientists who have been trying to warn the world’s population that the climate was changing far quicker than it should. They have lots of experience at studying climate and how it has changed in the past, and they have a pretty darn good idea where it’s headed.

In the past week, I have read several articles concerning the number and severity of heatwaves that have been happening around the world. Not only has the world been having more of them, not only have they broken records for daytime high temperatures, they’ve broken records for the highest low temperatures as well. That means that after a sweltering day, you don’t get much relief during the night, because the heat that has accumulated all day doesn’t dissipate fast enough.

I think Europe has already broken several summer records during a heatwave in June of this year. There’s no guarantee they won’t have another later this summer. Or this fall, or... whenever. A heatwave can happen at any time on the calendar, because it is a comparison between the present and what has been ‘normal’ previously.

The scientists don’t ‘think’ any particular place will start having a heatwave every year. But it could happen. After all, they wanted us to keep the warming of the Earth to 2°C or less. What are they saying now, that it’s officially reached a warming of 1.8°C? But in Europe, the temperatures reached +4 to +8°C over ‘normal’.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t get much done when the temperature gets to 95°F. I sure don’t want it to consistently reach 123°F. Or higher.

Maybe Chicken Little isn’t the best story for me to quote to try to get my point across, but it’s the one I can remember as the summer heat settles in. So I’ll keep squawking my warning and hope somebody is listening, because...

The sky is falling.

Trilobite, Do You Bite in Threes?

When you spend a lot of time as a child/teen/adult reading everything you can find on all those fascinating creatures that inhabited the Earth before Humans came along, you come across a lot of strange names. You aren’t sure what those names mean. You might have a rough idea what that type of creature looked like, and that’s probably about all that you know. Because, really, who cares about an extinct sea creature that looked like some crazy kind of beetle?

So I decided to see what I could find out about trilobites, see if there was something about them that would prove interesting. I headed for Wikipedia to get a smattering of layman information before I looked for more advanced info.

Wow. The first sentence in the Wikipedia article is (basicly) “Trilobites ... are a group of extinct marine arachnomorph arthropods that form the class Trilobita. Guess we’d better put on our thinking caps for this one!

Extinct = they are all dead.

Marine = lived in the sea. Or maybe lived in water.

Arachnomorph = ? Well, arachnid is a type of spider, scorpions and what have you. (Thanks, dictionary.com, but why don’t you have the entire word in your list?) Morph has more than one meaning, but the one I’m most familiar with is “to transform”.

Arthropod = an invertebrate with a segmented body, jointed limbs and usually a hard shell that can be molted (discarded) should the creature get too big for it.

So far, what we’ve got is a water creature with a segmented body, limbs with joints and a hard shell. Might have looked vaguely like a spider. What comes to mind is a lobster, but they didn’t really look like that. The most common rendition I’ve seen for a trilobite is an oval shape. The larger ‘end’ is a pretty solid ‘half moon’ shape, with a ‘tail’ that goes down the middle of the oval to the smaller ‘end’. Behind the half moon head and on either side of the tail, filling up all the rest of the oval, are lots of limbs. But other trilobites had much different shapes. Let’s go on; what more can I find?

Trilobites ranged from 1/10 of an inch to about 12 inches. I think that entire range is for adult specimen.

The last of the trilobites died about 252 million years ago. But before that, they were quite a successful species, having spread all around the world and existing for over 300 million years. Scientists believe trilobites started their long journey as much as 700 million years ago, or possibly even further back. And if you think humans have some wildly different lifestyles, you obviously have not met many trilobites. Some were aggressive, and moved over the sea bed as predators, scavengers and/or filter feeders. Others were less aggressive and swam while eating plankton. Scientists are still debating whether or not any trilobites were parasites, while one group of trilobites appear to have had a symbiotic relationship with sulfur-eating bacteria.

Trilobites are thought to have originated in what is now Siberia. But that was over half a billion years ago, and with plate tectonics, who knows where that was actually located? Well, I’m sure there are people who do know, but I don’t. I’m going to have to look it up. Look for it in a later episode.

Anyway, as I said before, the trilobites all died out. Although they seemed to excel in changing shape, habitat and food throughout their long existence, eventually there was only one family left, and when its habitat disappeared, so did they. But while they were here, there were thousands of variations of trilobite. This diversity helped them fill many niches in the cycle of life.

On the other hand, there are some very distant relatives of the trilobites still living on Earth. Think horseshoe crab and others of that ilk.

And that is all I found that I understood in this 29-page article on Wikipedia. Go ahead and read it, if you want, but I warn you, it is FULL of very long words, most of them names of genus, family and specie, but not all. The ones that aren’t are used generously, with no explanation what it refers to, and which may not be in your dictionary. Have fun!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite

Check Your Facts

Several years ago, I got an idea for a science fiction short story. It involved the young captain of a ‘worn-out’ asteroid mining ship who found herself pregnant. Such a thing is hardly novel on Earth, but I had the idea stuck in my head - with no idea where I had gotten it - that it wasn’t possible to get pregnant in space. The entire crew is left wondering, “How did that happen?”

Not terribly original, I suppose, but I hoped I was treating the story ‘differently’ from everybody else who had ever written a ‘mystery pregnancy’ story.

So I took the story to my writing group, where everybody told me that of course, she got pregnant; nobody was using birth control, and there’s no reason why people can’t get pregnant in space.

Bummer. That was one of the things that convinced me that my science knowledge was out of date, where-upon I subscribed to and started reading various science magazines, trying to do some catch-up. Until a week ago, I had tried to shove that space pregnancy story out my mind, figuring it had taught me a lesson; Check your ‘facts’.

I was wrong. But not in the way I thought.

Imagine my surprise when I came to an article in the May/June 2019 issue of Discover about how scientists are studying the problem of human reproduction in places that are not on Earth. The problem being that it doesn’t seem possible. Which would make colonies hard to sustain.

As I remember it, they started with lizards and amphibians, which they took to the space station for a period of time. Those didn’t seem bothered by the lack of gravity, or the increased radiation, but some of their off-spring weren’t right.

Then they tried the same experiment with mice, who are mammals, and - biologically - quite a bit like humans. (That’s a lovely thought, isn’t it?) Strangely, the mice must have been freaked out by the no-g or the radiation, or something, but they were not nearly as interested in sex as mice usually are. And even when they did indulge in sex, they didn’t have any offspring.

Apparently, there is a piece of the female mouse’s sexual organs that rapidly decreases and then completely disappears while the mouse is in space. If the same thing happens to human females, then Earth would be the only place where we can make more humans.

Now, that’s a Bummer. But... I was right! (To a degree.) If technology provides a method of humans to begat humans, but only in places that more or less replicate conditions on Earth, then the first human baby conceived without those conditions would indeed be a shock. Not only for the parents, but for the entire race. And that’s the kind of shock I was trying to portray.

So, yes, you should check your facts that you are putting in your stories. And even if everybody in your writer’s group says your fact is wrong, maybe you should check their facts, too.

Hallucigenia

I have started a new list of subjects to research and possibly write a blog about. I get these ideas from on-line and magazine articles that I read; sometimes I jot down the article subject, or a phrase, or just a word I’m not familiar with.

Hallucigenia is one of those last ones. If I had realized how many MORE words I would have to look up just to make sense of the wikipedia article on this extinct animal...

However, I’m trying to expand my science knowledge, so let’s get on with this.

Hallucigenia is a genus of lobopodian worms from the Cambrian period, which lasted from about 541 million years ago to 485 million years ago. The Cambrian period is known for its explosion of new creatures, as nature explored all the different variations it could think of.

Hallucigenia was discovered as articulated fossils in shale-type deposits in Canada and China, and isolated spines have been found around the world. Even so, trying to reconstruct what they looked like was difficult. In fact, the first attempt showed the creature upside down and said the front was the back.

I probably would have made the same mistakes. First of all, these creatures were only 3/16 to 1-3/8 inch long. It kind of amazes me that anybody even noticed them. To try and imagine what they looked like, start with a worm about that long. Put 7 or 8 pairs of short, flexible appendages down the length of it. Now, flip it over, and put pairs of longer, stiff appendages down the other side of it. The ‘head’ and ‘tail’ are pretty much identical. Which appendages are the legs?

The first reconstruction attempt placed the pairs of stiff appendages as the feet because half the flexible appendages were still hidden in dirt. But once the other flexible appendages were discovered, it made sense to put them on the bottom. Flexible legs are easier to use, and stiff ‘spines’ offer some protection.

And, by the way, each foot ends with a claw.

I found no information on whether these were marine or land creatures, what they ate, what might have eaten them...

Now that I’ve researched these creatures, how could I possibly use this information? I suppose I could have a bare-footed colonist step on one, and strange chemicals from the creature are introduced through the spines now buried deep in the colonist’s foot? Or maybe on another planet, these creatures got larger and became the dominant, intelligent species? That might be interesting. How would you incorporate them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucigenia

What is This World Coming to? 7

And we are back to water. It seems only fitting, since the globe is mostly covered by it.

As I was looking over information on Central America, one of my hard-copy magazines - Popular Science - had an entire issue on water. Including an article on the sudden and sustained lack of water in Colombia in the northern part of South America.

The northern part of South America is also definitely in the tropics, because that area straddles the Equator, and the tropics is generally 30° north to 30° south of the equator. That’s latitude degrees, not temperature degrees.

Colombia is also quite mountainous, but that doesn’t mean their water supply is assured. The article spoke of one city sitting in the heights below a ski resort. Until recently, that resort could exist because of a glacier that sat atop the mountain. That glacier also was the source of the water used by the city.

Guess what. That glacier is gone now. Not just receding, like so many glaciers are, it is GONE.

No more skiing on that mountain, no more water for that city. Now the water officials load up what water is available into tank trucks and deliver it around the area. When the truck pulls up and stops, everybody runs for whatever they have that will hold water; pots, barrels, bottles and jars. They may go home and empty those items into their sinks or bathtub and run back to see if the truck is still there. If it is, they fill their pots, barrels and jars again.

They don’t know how long it will be before the truck arrives to deliver more water, so they have to be stingy with every drop. It is all they have for cooking and possibly a sponge bath. In the meantime, they listen for notices from the government as to when the water in their taps may be turned on for a limited time.

At one point, the author was with a woman who had stayed home from work that afternoon. The water was supposed to be turned on in the pipes for 3 hours, and she wanted to get some laundry done. But the water never came from her pipes that afternoon. No laundry got done.

Did all the women in the city stay home that afternoon, hoping to get some laundry done?

The article ended with a brief mention of another Colombian city on another mountain, also depending on the mountain-top glacier for its water supply. That glacier is visibly shrunken, smaller than anybody has ever seen it before.

Perhaps they’ll figure out another source for water. The article didn’t mention any attempts to look, to figure something out. Everybody - even the water officials - just kept saying, “The rains will come.”

What are we, ostriches? Refusing to acknowledge a problem will not make it magically go away!

This is a depressing subject, and not the type I would usually spend time on trying to spin into an entertaining novel. I suffer from chronic depression and just found an anti-depressant that actually works for me. I don’t know if I’m done researching this subject or not... my constant companion - depression - keeps telling me to stick my head in the sand and think of pretty things. But the story for the novel is beginning to take shape in my head. I think I’ll start thinking out scenes and where they would go, and speak of other things in this blog for a while. If I need to, I can still do more research.

So, next time, the subject will be... Oh, who knows? Whatever I find interesting between now and then.

What is This World Coming to 2?

Okay, we were talking about the sea and what climate change is doing to it. My examples last time were in Europe and the US, in the northern temperate zones. Now I want to consider all that ice and water in the extreme north and south, around the poles.

If you’ve been paying attention, you might remember news of huge chunks of Antarctic ice breaking away. I’m talking chunks bigger than some states. Antarctica is receiving warmer weather than it’s seen in millennia, or maybe even millions of years. Some coasts that certain types of penguin have called ‘home’ for countless generations are becoming inhospitable for them. They already live at the bottom of the world, where are they supposed to go from there?

The Arctic Ocean is not doing any better. There is no land under all that ice at the north pole, just water. You might think, ‘That’s okay, because it takes a lot of energy to warm water up.’ Yes, it does. And yet, that water under that thick sheet of ice has warmed up.*

If you look at a map or globe, you’ll see a bunch of islands above Canada. During Europe’s Age of Exploration, several well-provisioned ships made attempts to find a ‘Northwest Passage’ during the summers, trying to find a way to get around the Americas to do trade with the Orient. I don’t remember hearing of any of those excursions ever making it through, nor of any making it home again. At that time, I understand, whatever open channels of water that could be found among all those islands were unreliable and tended to close up and freeze a ship in place, even in summer. The last few years, so much of that ice has melted during the summer, that some cruise lines have offered cruises from one coast to the other, via the Canadian passage.

Something has happened to the Beaufort Gyre. That is a 60-mile-diameter pool of cold freshwater and sea ice located north of Alaska. It used to spin clockwise for 5-7 years, then slow down and start spinning in the opposite direction. This change in direction was caused by periodic cyclones that moved from the Northern Atlantic Ocean into the Arctic Ocean. But the North Atlantic has been warming up even faster than other parts of the world, and has failed to get the Beaufort Gyre to change direction in a dozen years or more.

So it’s just been sitting there, spinning and getting larger. And although it contains ‘cold’ water, that’s a matter of relativity. This spinning water contains twice as much heat now as it did 30 years ago. But it’s not sitting on top, like you’d think it would. It extends so deep, it is creeping under the Arctic ice sheet, which I understand can be a mile or more thick. Once it starts melting that ice sheet from below, well, how long before that ice sheet starts to break apart into gigantic icebergs, like the Antarctic ice has already started doing?

And what happens when all that ice breaks up and melts? Right, it raises sea level, which we discussed last time.

I had never heard of the Beaufort Gyre until a couple days ago, but I’m not done with it. From what I’ve been reading, whether it continues its current spin or starts going the other way, somebody’s in for a nasty time. Maybe it will come up next time.

* https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/9/5/1792312/-Warm-ocean-water-has-penetrated-deep-into-the-Arctic-interior-portending-year-round-loss-of-sea-ice

What is This World Coming to?

I firmly believe in climate change. In my mind, it is here, and it’s going to get bad.

But I’m not here to debate that with anyone. So, for the purpose of this series of blog entries, let’s say I’m trying to figure out what could happen (climate-wise) in the next 50 years, and how it will effect the people who have to live through it. Well, try to live through it.

The sea level will rise. There has been and still is a lot of water on the Earth that is not located in the seas. It’s not a liquid, it’s solid in the form of snow and ice. Glaciers, sea ice, and so on. This has all been melting at an increasing pace, and probably will continue until snow and ice become rare items.

You can already see the sea level rising, if you look; Miami FL has streets that are underwater during high tides. Miami Beach, located on a barrier island that barely qualifies as dry land, is quietly raising its streets, particularly the ones that run along the edges of the island.

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there was much talk of how badly the shoreline was being eroded. If I remember right, there is an oil refinery or some such that was built on the shore. Now it is pretty much an island, and the road leading to it may or may not be passable during high tides. Those tides even reach 5 or 10 miles inland, making it hard to get in or out of small towns that dot that road. The road, I understand, has been raised in a lot of places, making it even harder to navigate in those small towns.

Parts of Amsterdam in The Netherlands are 18 feet below sea level. Much of The Netherlands consists of land ‘reclaimed’ from the sea and thus below sea level. They did this by building dikes, dams and canals to control where the water could go. This will be an ever increasing chore, as the sea rises.

So I find myself wondering, what happens when the sea rise reaches that critical point, whatever it is? Will The Netherlands continue building their dikes taller, until they loom and cast an ominous shadow over the land they are intended to protect? Is that possible? Does it make more sense to raise the land they are living on? Is that possible?

At what point do people simply give in to nature and move to higher ground? Do those who are displaced get any assistance from their government, or do they have to abandon the home they’ve had for who knows how long, take what they can to some other place, and try to start over again? I suspect the latter, because the former would probably bankrupt any government.

Even if Earth’s population doesn’t grow beyond what it is now, it’s possible the concentration of that population will increase, because there could be less land for us to live on.

Well, with the next entry, we’ll continue with the water theme. Yes, there is more about water to think about.

Martian Shelter 2

Okay, last time, we looked at the balloon-type house/shelter. It sounded like a lot of work to get it set up, supported, tied down and covered in sand. Not to mention the care that would be needed to see that it didn’t get any holes poked in it. Would it come with a set of ‘instant bandages’ you could use to patch any accidental holes? Personally, I think I’d make that a condition before I agreed to buy, but maybe that’s just me.

Today, we’re going to look at a slightly different possibility, one that apparently does not require shoveling sand around:

2. An above-ground shelter made from multiple layers of plastic film with low density foam between them. The thinking is that the Martian atmosphere is so thin, it would not ‘suck’ heat from the shelter walls. I’m left wondering about the radiation that was considered omni-present and probably deadly in years gone by. And... really? It’s cold, but it’s a thin cold, so that doesn’t count? Right, and 120° in the desert is hot, but it’s dry, so that’s okay.

Can you show me the Heat/AC power consumption on that type of shelter?

We recently visited the Kennedy Space Center, where the display for Atlantis (shuttle) explained that excess heat was disposed of by running tubes of heated liquid into the shuttle bay doors, which were opened to let that heat disperse. There’s a lot less ‘atmosphere’ in space than on Mars, but heat only gets sucked away when you want it to be, and doesn’t get sucked away when you want to keep it? You have to work at it, either way, and I’m just not convinced flimsy plastic and foam is enough insulation.

Also, I have to assume there is some sort of support system for this ‘tent’. Who gets to put that up? And tie the walls down? Once again, it’s going to need air locks, so will those be pre-fabbed and attached to the ‘walls’ before lift-off? But, since there isn’t any mention of burying it in the sand, would there be sections of the plastic film that would be transparent so the new Martians can look outside and see what the weather is like? Of course, the low density foam in those areas would need to be transparent, also, but I’m doubting that foam could avoid distorting the view.

Well, this is a little mind-boggling, isn’t it? You wanted a cottage to raise a family in, maybe with a picket fence, and all we’ve looked at so far indicates your actual choices are either a balloon buried in sand or a tent that may or may not retain any heat when the wind blows. Buck up, we’ve just begun to look at the possibilities. We’ll find something that’s just right for you.

http://www.imagineeringezine.com/e-zine/mars-makeshelter.html

A Girl’s Best Friend...

...is a Diamond... Planet?

55 Cancri-e was discovered in 2004, circling a star not that far from us. It was called a “super-Earth”, because it was rocky like the Earth and larger. Its radius is twice Earth’s, making its mass about 8 times ours, while it speeds around its star in only 18 hours. To do that, it has to be so close to the star’s surface that the planet’s surface reaches temperatures around 3,900° F (2,100° C). {Just a little warmer than Nebraska in August.}

{By the way, the ‘e’ of 55 Cancri-e means this was the 4th planet found in orbit around this star. (The star itself is designated A.)The other 3 reside even closer. Where does the star end and planet(s) begin? More recently, a 5th planet - ‘f’ - has been discovered, with a year lasting about 261 Earth days.}

If 55 Cancri-e had a planetary chemistry similar to Earth’s, the temperature and mass might mean it was covered with oozing ‘supercritical fluids’ (gases at such a high pressure they would act more like liquids). So it was imagined, at one time. But further study has revealed that it has a planetary chemistry far different.

For one thing, it apparently has no water on it at all.

Astronomers felt 55 Cancri-e was probably composed almost exclusively of carbon (diamond & graphite), iron, silicon carbide and possibly silicates. More than 1/3 of its mass could be pure diamond, which would be more than the entire Earth. Try sticking that into an engagement ring!

However, the diamond part was probably not just one big chunk. They thought the planet’s surface was covered in graphite and diamond rock, rather than our familiar water and granite. Actually, the Earth has far, far less carbon in comparison. So they tried to figure out what that difference meant. This different planetary chemistry could mean 55 Cancre-e could have had a very different thermal evolution than Earth and strange plate tectonic processes, which would mean bizarre types of volcanism, mountain formation and seismic activity.

But a new analysis indicated that 55 CancriA (the star in question) had more oxygen than previously thought. That might mean 55 Cancri-e might not have quite as much carbon as they had thought. Or it might mean nothing. The processes of star and planet formation are not fully understood, but it is known that the composition of a planet does not always match that of its parent. So the studies continued.

In 2016, observers detected hydrogen, helium and possibly hydrogen cyanide in ‘e’s atmosphere. In 2017, they decided there might be a global ocean... made of lava, so no skinny dipping. And that e’s atmospheric pressure was about 1.4 bar, so a slightly thicker atmosphere than ours.

If all this sounds familiar, well... We visited the 55 Cancri system on or about 6Sept2017, in the 2nd episode of my ‘Weird Planets’ series of blogs. But I think I found more details this time, so hope you enjoyed ‘catching up’.

Oh, yes, in July 2014, the International Astronomical Union launched a process for giving ‘proper’ names to some exoplanets and their host stars. The name selected for 55 CancriA was Copernicus, and e was named Janssen. (Yes, all his known siblings got named, too.)

https://www.space.com/18011-super-earth-planet-diamond-world.html

https://www.space.com/23138-diamond-planet-super-earth-discovery.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/55_Cancri_e

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/121011-diamond-planet-space-solar-system-astronomy-science/

https://www.cnet.com/news/hubble-probes-atmosphere-on-diamond-planet/

Weird Planets 10

Good morning! Congratulations on completing the first 9 installments of your tour. We don’t have as many worlds to visit as yesterday, so there will be ample time to relax. If you want a pillow or beverage, press the blue button on your arm rest, and either CXQ-9 or CXQ-10 will tend to you. Now, if everybody is comfortable, we’ll get started.

Excuse me. I’m sorry to disturb you, but we are entering the system of today’s first planet. If you turn your attention to your viewers, currently on their maximum magnification, you’ll see a small deep-pink blob. This is GJ-504b, the Pink Planet, 57.3 light years from Earth. The dark pink glow of GJ-504b is caused by the remaining heat of its formation. It’s about the same size as Jupiter, but it’s further from its sun than Neptune is from ours. Scientists didn’t think such a large planet could form at that distance because there wouldn’t be enough dust and debris. Your viewers will adjust their magnification as we approach and swing past, so you can get a good look.

Your attention, please. We are now 434 light-years from Earth, approaching planet J1407B, which is described as a ‘Super-Saturn’. It has a mass of 40 Jupiters and 37 rings surround it, spanning 120 million kilometres. That’s about 200 times the size of Saturn’s rings. Some scientists think these rings may be in the process of forming moons, which has them quite excited, since they’ve never seen that happen outside of our solar system. Actually, even within our system, we haven’t seen it happen.

CXQ-9 and -10 will serve brunch as we move on, complete with champagne! Enjoy!

Good afternoon! Your viewers are currently showing KOI-314c, the lightest planet to have both its mass and physical size measured. Rather surprisingly, it has the same mass as Earth, but is 60% larger in diameter. If you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, you will still weigh 100 pounds on KOI-314c. However, the larger diameter seems to indicate a very thick atmosphere. If you look slightly to the left of the planet’s image, you’ll see the red dwarf star that it orbits. This system is about 200 light-years from Earth. Yes, we are already headed back to the tour station.

This is our final viewing for today. This is Epsilon Eridani b, which orbits an orange Sun-like star only 10.5 light years from Earth. Before long, Earth telescopes may be able to photograph it directly. Unfortunately, it is too far from its star to have liquid water or life as we know it. However, I’m going I’ll make a couple low orbits around it and set your viewers on maximum, and you can all try to spot life as we don’t know it!

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have returned to the tour station. I hope you have enjoyed your day with Star Tours. Er, I mean, Planet Tours.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/g1265/space-oddities-8-of-the-strangest-exoplanets/

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/643662/The-10-weirdest-planets-to-have-been-discovered-so-far

www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets.html

Weird Planets 9

How many are here for Leg 9 of the Weird Planets Tour? All of you? Okay, we’ll get started. Frankly, a lot of people stay in their hotel room for this day. After 8 straight days of viewing planets, they feel they’ve seen all the possibilities. I prefer to think that each planet has something that makes it unique. Everybody secured? Here we go.

Today we’re going to visit planets and systems discovered by the Kepler Telescope, which was the first unit designed and launched specifically to look for xenoplanets. Our first stop is the Kepler-11 system. Take a look; there are at least 5 planets, although sometimes I swear there’s 6. And they’re all packed in real close to their parent star. If this were the Earth system, all of them would be within Mercury’s orbit. And yet, this system is stable; they aren’t playing havoc with each other’s orbits. When this system was first discovered, a lot of scientists revisited the ideas about planet formation. And Kepler-11 also suggested that systems with multiple small planets might be common. It makes the Earth system a little less unique, but ups the possibility that other intelligent beings – or at least life of some kind – will eventually be found.

At about that same time, the Kepler Telescope discovered Kepler-10c, a mega-Earth planet that some called the “Godzilla of Earths”. 10c is 2.3 times the size of Earth, and 17 times heavier. I think that means if you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, on 10c you would weigh 1,700 pounds. You couldn’t stand up on 10c. You wouldn’t have enough muscles to do it. Now, 10c has a sibling, Kepler-10b, which is a lava world. We’ll catch a glance of that on our way out. The Kepler-10 system is 570 light years from Earth, and is located in the constellation Draco. Considering the naming practice, there should also be a planet called Kepler-10a. I keep asking about it, but they never add any notes about that planet, if it even exists.

In front of us, you can see a double star. Orbiting around both stars is a circumbinary planet, Kepler-16b, which some have nick-named “Tatooine”. You’ve already visited the other so-called “Tatooine”, haven’t you? In a trinary star system? Yes, that earlier 1 only orbits one of the 3 stars, so the chances of any occupants actually seeing 2 suns setting at the same time are pretty slim, but on Kepler-16b, that could be possible.

Our next planet is Kepler-22b. Yes, ma’am, I’m sure there were discoveries between 16 and 22, but they haven’t given me any information on them. They carefully pick which planets to have you view. I’m afraid we couldn’t possibly visit every planet that’s been discovered. At this point, there are thousands of them, and it would take years, even if we managed several in 1 day.

The next planet is Kepler-22b. This planet is in its system’s habitable zone, and could possibly be an actual water world, which we don’t have in Earth’s system.

A short hop away is the Kepler-36 system. Do you see the 2 planets? Just 2, and their orbits are extremely close to each other. At their closest, the distance between them is 1.2 million miles, which is only 5 times the distance between the Earth and her moon. That might make colonizing easier than Earth had in colonizing Mars.

And now we skip all the way to Kepler-186f. Does anything look familiar about this planet? Some people think there is, even if they can’t say what. Kepler-186f was the first rocky planet found in the habitable zone, so the temperature is right for liquid water. It’s also very close in size to Earth. It always makes me want to land and see what might live there. But we have to keep moving, or we’ll never get done.

Here we have the Kepler-444 system, the oldest known planetary system. Here we have no less than 5 terrestrial-sized planets, all in orbital resonance. This group shows that solar systems have formed and existed in our galaxy for nearly its entire life.

Kepler-452b is the first Earth-sized planet found in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. So it might look even more familiar than 186f did. 452b is only 60% larger than Earth, and 5% further from its star. Following our earlier logic, if you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, here you would weigh 160 pounds, which would be tiring, but do-able. And if a typical day on Earth got to 100°, here it might get to 95°. But there are a lot of things that have an influence on a planet’s temperature, so I’m not absolutely certain of that last statement. Still, at first glance, it certainly sounds inviting.

And now, just one last pause on our way back to the station. As you may know, the Kepler Telescope developed a technical problem, which scientists ‘fixed’, sort of, but its mission had to be modified to accommodate its somewhat limited capability. At that point, they stopped using ‘Kepler’ in the naming ritual and started using ‘K2’, to indicate these discoveries were made after its mission was modified.

This is the K2-3 system. We’re a bit late getting back, so we won’t stop here long. K2-3 has 3 super-Earths in orbit. If you check today’s pamphlet, the mass and radius of each is listed. The home office keeps promising to include updates on their atmosphere compositions, so if you see that information, I’d appreciate you letting me know.

And here we are. I apologize for a long day, but Leg 9 always takes longer than the home office thinks it should. Have a pleasant evening and get a good night’s sleep.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/20-intriguing-exoplanets

www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets.html

Weird Planets 8

Good morning. I am your replacement driver and tour guide. Your previous driver, um, has been... has been asked to stay home today.

Hope you had a large breakfast, because we’re going to visit several ‘HD’ systems on this leg, and it could be a long time until supper. Everybody buckled in? If not, get that way, ‘cause we’re headed out.

Okay, on the right side is HD 106906 b. It’s 11 times the size of Jupiter. Yes, it does have a parent star. It’s one of those bright bits of light ahead of us. This planet’s distance from its star is 650 times as Earth’s distance from our sun, so I can’t blame you for asking. Despite being so remote from its star, the average temperature on the surface is 1500° Celsius, which is 2,732° Fahrenheit. That’s pretty toasty warm, in my mind. Scientists say it shouldn’t exist at all, being so large and so far from its parent. Where did it get enough material that far out? But however it came to exist, it’s only 13 Million years old. Just a baby, really, since the universe is over 14 Billion years. So maybe it just hasn’t had a chance to cool off since it came into being?

Now, right over here is Osiris, more formally known as HD 209458 b, which was the first planet to be seen as it crossed in front of its star. It’s also the first planet to have its light directly detected. Its discovery showed that transit observations were possible, which opened up a whole new realm of exoplanet discovery.

The planet ahead of us is HD 189733 b. It’s about the size of Jupiter, and has been studied quite a bit ever since scientists discovered it transiting its star while they studied that star using X-ray frequencies. This is also one of the first planets to have its atmosphere ‘sniffed’ to determine its composition. I don’t remember the full list, but I do remember that the atmosphere contains methane. No, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s cows on that planet. Methane can be produced naturally. It doesn’t have to be a biological byproduct.

Now we come to HD 114762 b, which was discovered in 1989. This is the first discovered planet to be orbiting a sun-like star. However, because its mass is - as seems so popular - 11 times that of Jupiter, and because it only takes 84 days to complete an orbit, it was initially thought to be a brown dwarf. But it’s not. As a comparison, tiny little Mercury takes 88 days to complete an orbit around our sun.

I have to ask you to please be quiet as I approach this one. If it was up to me, we wouldn’t even bother with this one. Too dangerous, if you ask me; you never quite know what to expect from HD 80606 b. It’s orbit is so eccentric-- Oh! Hang on! ... Whew! That was close. I think we’ll be safe now, at least for a few minutes. Besides its highly eccentric orbit, HD 80606 b also displays plenty of storms and atmospheric heating, and you can plainly see how fast it rotates.

Okay, that’s our tour for today. I’ll take you back to base so you can get some supper. I know I’m ready for it. No, I’m sorry, I don’t know who will be your next driver and tour guide. No, I don’t know where you’ll be taken, either. From the looks of it, you still have quite a number of planets to visit. We are all qualified drivers and tour guides, ma’am, otherwise, we wouldn’t have the job.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/643662/The-10-weirdest-planets-to-have-been-discovered-so-far

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/20-intriguing-exoplanets

www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets.html

Weird Planets 7

We are about to start our whirl-wind tour of some of the remaining weird planets, but first, please pay attention to the following non-safety-related information:

Who designed the way stars and planets are named? I’ve more or less figured out how it works, but it really doesn’t give you any information about that star or planet. First, there’s some designation that I think indicates who/what ‘discovered’ the star. I recognize ‘Kepler’, which in its 2^nd stage of life is denoted as ‘K2’. But WASP? CaRoT? No Idea. Then comes a number to designate the star. And finally, a letter to designate the planet within that star’s system. The planets are lettered as they are found, so smaller planets probably have later letters than big planets, even if they are closer to that star.

Please keep your hands and legs inside this blog at all times, as I am both driver and tour guide, and we have a lot of space to cover!

The first planet we’ll visit in this 3^rd leg of our tour is PSR J1719-14 b (AKA the Sun Hugger), which is only 3,900 light-years from Earth. This is a possible member of the diamond-planet family (I told you about one of those in an earlier blog), and it races around its star in only 2.2 Earth hours, which makes it the fastest planet in the Ultra-Short-Period-Planet category. Also, it’s a pulsar planet, because its star is a pulsar.

Now, out the other window, take a peek at PSR J1719-1438-?, another pulsar planet orbiting a pulsar 4,000 light-years from Earth. Scientists think this planet was once a star, but when its companion became a pulsar, the huge gravity field stripped most of it away, leaving it with only the mass of Jupiter, and exerted pressure on what was left to make it a diamond planet.

Now around here – somewhere – we can see the PSR B1257+12 system discovered in 1992 and 1994. These pulsar planets at one time were the smallest planetary bodies known to exist outside our own solar system.

Here we’ve reached 12,400 light years from Earth to view PSR 1620-26 b (AKA Methuselah). As you might have guessed, it got its nickname by being old. Too old, some say, because it’s 13 billion years in age, almost 3 times as old as Earth! It would have formed less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, even though it was thought there wasn’t enough material (I assume they mean heavier elements) to create a core for a planet. So, what’s it made of? I don’t know, they didn’t say. At that distance, maybe they can’t tell. So how do they know how old it is? Do you suppose they counted its wrinkles? J

Okay, you can take a little break now while I get us in another section of the universe.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/g1265/space-oddities-8-of-the-strangest-exoplanets/

www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets.html

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/20-intriguing-exoplanets

Weird Planets 6

Some of these planets look familiar, which is how they get their nicknames. Is it a surprise that someone has imagined planets similar to actual exoplanets?

HD 188753 is sometimes called Tatooine. It is a Jupiter-sized planet located 149 light-years away from us… in a triple star system. One list explained that this meant the planet orbited a star, which orbited another star, which orbited a third star. They could be right that HD 188753 is set up this way, but it is not the only configuration available to 3 stars and 1 planet. How many other configurations can you come up with?

Whatever the configuration of this system, the gravitational fields would be complex, so scientists were surprised to find planets could be created in such a gravity maelstrom. Dr Maciej Konacki of CalTech feels the view from this planet would be spectacular, with ‘occasional’ triple sunsets. Yes, that’s possible; it depends on the distance between the triplet stars. Some ‘companion’ stars are so far apart that each appears as only a bright point to the other. But this Tatooine would definitely be hot; it completes an orbit around its star in 3.5 Earth days, so it is snuggled up real close.

CoRoT-7b was the first exoplanet to be dubbed a ‘Super Earth’. That means it’s a rocky planet, not a gaseous one. Knowing that other rocky planets exist, scientists can look for potentially habitable planets that reside in a star’s ‘Goldilocks’ zone.

However, this particular planet does not look like a pleasant place, as it is tidally locked to its star, meaning the same side always faces the star, and the temperature on that face is around 4,000° F. If you want to visit, consider that it may be the rocky core of a vaporized gas giant where it rains rocks. Be sure you take a strong umbrella with you!

Kepler-10b is the first rocky planet discovered by the Kepler equipment. It is the smallest known exoplanet; an Earth-sized world that may have a lava ocean on its surface. I love a hot tub, but that’s too hot.

OGLE-2005-BLG-390 is the first ‘cold super Earth’ exoplanet discovered, nicknamed Hoth. The thought is that it began to accumulate a Jupiter-like core of rock and ice, but didn’t stop with just a core. It is 5.5 times the mass of Earth, has a surface temperature of -364° Fahrenheit, and orbits a red dwarf star some 28,000 light-years away.

Well, on this trip, we’ve gone from Tatooine to Hoth. Have we gotten all the ‘extremes’ done? I’m not sure. But next week, we’ll start zipping through the planets that only appeared on 1 list. Bring your seat belt!

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/643662/The-10-weirdest-planets-to-have-been-discovered-so-far

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/20-intriguing-exoplanets

www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets.html

Weird Planets 5

Now we begin exploring the exo-planets that only appeared on 2 of the 4 lists. Does it seem like this series will never end? Cheer up; the process will get faster. The fewer lists that contained a particular planet, the less information I have to pass on to you. I’d like to get through several planets today, so let’s get started.

Earth Jr is only 20 light years away. It’s official name is Gliese 581d. Actually, there may be 2 planets around the same star, but only 581d is mentioned on both lists. 581g was a ‘shiny thing’ that briefly appeared in the same paragraph on the first list.

Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star located in the Libra constellation, and 581d sits on the outer edge of the Goldilocks zone, so it would be possible for water there to be liquid. In addition, the atmosphere produces a significant greenhouse effect, making it even more hospitable for life (more or less) as we know it. It is, however, 8 times the mass of Earth, so do you think any creatures living there would be Big and Strong? Or Short and Strong? I can’t decide, myself, and I assume it would depend - at least in part - on the biochemistry of the creatures.

If it exists, Gliese 581g sits in the middle of that same habitable zone. Some research says it does exist, other research says it doesn’t. This is only 20 light years away, so let’s go find out, shall we?

WASP-18b is 325 light years away. But since we don’t yet have light-speed travel, we aren’t likely to get there before it dies. Some scientists think it should have already died, before we ever got a glimpse of it. WASP-18b races around its sun in less than 24 hours, but its orbit is apparently degrading, so it’s getting closer and closer to its sun, and in 1 million years (or less?), it will plunge into that star.

WASP-12b is 870 light-years from us. I don’t think we’ll want to settle there, for it is rather warm - 4000°F or 2250°C. It sits only 2 million miles from its sun (Earth is 93 million miles from our sun), and takes just over 1 Earth day to make a complete orbit of that star. It’s also a gaseous planet, with 1.5 times the mass of Jupiter and about twice Jupiter’s size. Obviously, it’s less dense than Jupiter, right? So, even less chance that in all that gas there would be anyplace solid to build a new home. And can you imagine the air conditioning bill?

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/g1265/space-oddities-8-of-the-strangest-exoplanets/

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/643662/The-10-weirdest-planets-to-have-been-discovered-so-far

www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets.html

Weird Planets 4

TrES-2b is called the Dark World. Sounds like a world Sith Lords would be attracted to, right? It’s a gas giant the size of Jupiter. And it is black, to match the Sith Lords’ hearts.

Dark World is 750 light years from us. It orbits its star at a mere 3 million miles (Earth is 93 million miles from the sun), but TrES-2b is darker than pure coal or the blackest paint. It turns out that the Dark World reflects only 1% of the light that falls on it. So as we approached it, we’d see a black ball of gas, possibly with a slight red glow to it, according to one scientist.

Why is it so dark? Nobody knows, but there are some theories:

1. It has no reflective clouds due to its high temperature. All the gas giants in our system have plenty of clouds, so they reflect quite a bit of light. But a gas giant without clouds? Would that make it transparent? I’m thinking it is highly unlikely that the only gases making up any planet are clear. Iodine gas is dark purple, nitrogen dioxide is dark brown, and Trifluoronitrosomethane (I have no idea what this is or how it’s made, but apparently it’s a gas) is deep blue. That doesn’t get us to black, but what I’m saying is, How would it manage to be absolutely clear? I suppose if it was clear, most of the light would go through it and come out the other side.

But, even without a rocky core, the deeper the light goes into the gas giant, the more gravity it is subjected to. I remember from physics classes that light has properties of both waves and particles, so I’m thinking the light would get bent as it traveled through. Would that act as a prism and produce a rainbow as it came out the other side? Would we be able to see such an effect from here? I don’t know. That is a long distance, and there’s no atmosphere (to speak of) between us and it to let us see any such rainbow.

2. The dark world’s atmosphere contains chemicals that absorb light. My resident chemist being out of the house right now, I tried to google what chemicals might do that. Chlorophyll and other organic compounds absorb light, but they usually specialize. Around 2015, some biochemists learned to manipulate cholorophyll’s atomic structure so it would absorb different colors, and they got the entire range of visible light absorbed. Their inspiration was nature; a tiny creature called a sea squirt had bacteria and microbes that - between them - absorbed every bit of visible light that hit the squirt. So I suppose this is possible, but wouldn’t the planet need to be totally covered in varieties of cholorophyll, which is an organic substance. My resident chemist says that ‘organic doesn’t necessarily mean it has anything to do with life.’ Well, on Earth, cholorophyll is found in plants, bacteria and microbes, so it looks like cholorophyll has something to do with life here. Would the same be true for The Dark World?

3. It has a chemical we haven’t thought of yet. This one also seems mildly possible. I find it very difficult to comment on it, because if we haven’t even thought of this chemical, how would we have any idea what its properties are?

4. I think The Dark World is made of Dark Matter. I know, I know, Dark Matter can’t be seen, and we can (barely) see the Dark World. Maybe it’s got a bit of regular matter mixed in. I don’t really know much about Dark Matter (not enough physics classes recently), it just sounds really cool. And really, really dark. Like the Dark World!

So, which theory do you like? Now, using that theory, imagine a story where humans arrive at The Dark World to explore. It is, apparently, one of a kind. Or at least, weird.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/g1265/space-oddities-8-of-the-strangest-exoplanets/

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/643662/The-10-weirdest-planets-to-have-been-discovered-so-far

www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets.html

Space Pollution

For millennia, mankind has used Earth’s resources however it wanted, and when we were done with something, we simply abandoned it. Most of this stuff will - eventually - return to its component parts, thanks to weather and other natural events.

But there is no weather in space, so what happens to stuff that gets abandoned there?

Mostly, it stays where we left it, usually in some kind of orbit around Earth. Lose contact with an old satellite? That’s okay, we need a new one anyway; we’ll just put the new one in a new orbit. Somebody lost their wrench while working outside? I think the job can still be done with this other wrench and a little ingenuity. The lost wrench? Oh, just move the station another kilometer higher, and you should be fine.

Yes, we’ve been cavalier about the junk we’ve left out there. Some gets sent into a ‘graveyard orbit’ at the end of its usefulness. Other stuff eventually is pulled toward the Earth and (hopefully) burns up before it hits the ground. Remember Skylab? That was scary, to know this big thing was coming down, that it would not burn up completely, but not know exactly where it would hit. Then it broke into pieces, some of which still made it to the surface, and even more uncertainty where they would hit.

Some satellites had a nuclear reactor to power their equipment. At the end of their ‘life’, many were sent to a graveyard orbit, but others fell to Earth, where they became a problem. Even those in the graveyard could be punctured by a micro-meteor and leak coolant from the reactor. The coolant would solidify and become droplets of more junk.

So, let’s see, we have dead satellites, booster stages, fragments of booster stages that have exploded, fragments caused by collisions, and lost equipment, just to name a few categories of space pollution. Now, the movies always depict (these days) a tool as having a tether to connect it to the astronaut, but it apparently took time to think of doing that. The ‘lost equipment’ category includes: a glove, 2 cameras, a thermal blanket, bags of garbage, a wrench and a toothbrush. Okay, those bulky space suit gloves can make it difficult to maintain a grip, but how does an astronaut lose one of his gloves?

People try to keep track of all this stuff, try to avoid collisions with equipment still in use. I don’t know who supplied these numbers, but there are over 170,000,000 pieces of debris smaller than 1 cm, as of July 2013. Additionally, there are 670,000 pieces between 1 and 10 cm (3.9 inches), and 29,000 pieces larger than 10 cm.

So, who cares? Most of it’s tiny, and if it’s big enough to do damage, you just move your ship or satellite out of the way. Yes, most of it is tiny, but at the speeds they travel, even the tiny ones pack quite a punch. And the equipment can’t always move out of the way.

The Kessler syndrome theorizes that once space debris reaches a particular density, there will be a chain reaction of collisions, each breaking its components into smaller pieces, which go on to have more collisions... It’s uncertain whether the Earth has already reached that point, but it’s not something we want to happen. The Earth could become completely swaddled in debris to the point that we could no longer launch ourselves into space. There goes our glorious dreams of a Space Empire! Or even of just getting off this rock to colonize... any place else.

Would such a debris cloud cut the amount of sunlight that reaches us? That might help mitigate global warming! If not, then I guess we’ll just bake ourselves on the ground as we kick ourselves for making it impossible to move away.

There have been many suggestions on how to remove space debris. At least one country has built their idea and sent it up for testing, but couldn’t get it to work. Most don’t see it as ‘cost effective’.

So, here’s my idea. If you have a big problem, you need to think big. Build a space station. I know, we have one, but that’s not big enough. We need a big one, with manufacturing capabilities and housing/entertainment for the workers. Use a small space tug to go out, grab debris and bring it back as ‘raw material’ for building interplanetary space ships.

Or maybe you prefer to sit back and wait for ‘nature to take its course’?

By the way, have you seen the movie Gravity? That was the Kessler syndrome in action.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris