The Search For Earth-Like Planets - Version 1

BETELGEUSE LIVE and ZOOMED in The Constellation of ORION 13th November 2010

But an atypical year is coming very soon if Calvin astronomy professor Larry Molnar’s calculations are correct. Molnar is predicting that a star he is monitoring will explode between 2018 and 2020; a comparable prediction has never been made.

Larry Molnar, professor of astronomy at Calvin College Noah PreFountaine

“It’s a one-in-a-million chance that you can predict an explosion,” Molnar said of his bold prognostication. “It’s never been done before.”

The star known as KIC 9832227 came to Molnar’s attention in 2013. He was attending an astronomy conference when astronomer Karen Kinemuchi presented her study of the brightness changes of the star, which concluded with a question: Is it pulsing or is it a binary (two stars orbiting each other)?

Also present at the conference was then-student Daniel Van Noord ’14, Molnar’s research assistant. He took the question as a personal challenge and made some observations of the star with the Calvin observatory.

“He looked at how the color of the star correlated with brightness and determined it was definitely binary,” said Molnar. “In fact, he discovered it was actually a contact binary, in which the two stars share a common atmosphere, like two peanuts sharing a single shell.

“From there Dan figured out the orbital period from Kinemuchi’s data and was surprised to discover that the period was not the same as earlier data showed; it was getting shorter,” Molnar continued.

FURTHER EXPLORATION

Based on that discovery, Molnar and Van Noord wanted to explore further, so they continued to monitor the orbital period using the Calvin observatory. “We found the period getting even shorter at a faster rate,” said Molnar. They surmised that they might be seeing the merger of two stars, a process that can culminate in a kind of stellar explosion known as a Red Nova.

Nobody has ever predicted a nova explosion before. It’s been done at Calvin with a small telescope, one professor and a few students looking for something that is not likely.

LARRY MOLNAR, PROFESSOR OF ASTRONOMY

“It was really exciting to find something like this,” said Van Noord, who came to Calvin because of his interest in studying variable stars. While here he developed a now-internationally used computer program that discovers binary stars in archived data. “It’s proof that the method of research we use at Calvin works.”

The team also took cues from an article by astronomer Romuald Tylenda, who had studied the observational archives to see how another star (V1309 Scorpii) had behaved before it exploded unexpectedly and produced a red nova in 2008. The pre-explosion record of that star is the “Rosetta stone” that Molnar is using to interpret the new data.

“I remember thinking that if I ever see one [a trajectory] that looks like that, I better pay close attention,” said Molnar.

A red nova explosion Space Telescope Science Institute

THE NEXT STEP

While the new star seemed to be following Tylenda’s model, other models and explanations had to be eliminated. This next step of research was taken by Calvin student Cara Alexander.

“We had to rule out the possibility of a third star,” said Alexander. “That would have been a pedestrian, boring explanation. I was processing data from two telescopes and obtained images that showed a signature of our star and no sign of a third star. Then we knew we were looking at the right thing.

“It took most of the summer to analyze the data, but it was so exciting. To be a part of this research, I don’t know any other place where I would get an opportunity like that; Calvin is an amazing place.”

Jason Smolinski, a Calvin professor collaborating on the project, said the research will produce results such that astronomers have never had before. “Any time stellar explosions are seen, it’s always after the fact,” he said. “That’s interesting, but you always wonder what was there beforehand? For us to be able to study this type of merger in great detail across the entire spectrum is remarkable,” he said.

Being a Christian astronomer gives you so much more wonder, it gives you so much more appreciation knowing that it was handcrafted–it was made by the hand of God.

CARA ALEXANDER, '16

And Molnar is convinced Calvin is exactly the right place for a discovery of this magnitude.

“Most big scientific projects are done in enormous groups with thousands of people and billions of dollars,” he said. “This project is just the opposite. It’s been done using a small telescope, with one professor and a few students looking for something that is not likely.

“Nobody has ever predicted a nova explosion before. Why pay someone to do something that almost certainly won’t succeed? It’s a high-risk proposal. But at Calvin it’s only my risk, and I can use my work on interesting, open-ended questions to bring extra excitement into my classroom. Some projects still have an advantage when you don’t have as much time or money.”

“Being at Calvin gives you the freedom to explore,” added Alexander. “At large institutions you often study what you can get grants for instead of what needs to be studied.”

And it makes you more awestruck.

LUMINOUS SHEDS LIGHT ON RED NOVA RESEARCH

While Larry Molnar’s discovery is rare and atypical, the opportunity to document the finding along the way is an exceptional opportunity in its own right.

That’s why Sam Smartt, Calvin professor of communication arts and sciences, agreed to partner with Molnar to chronicle the process.

“I felt like it was a little gem of story here in our backyard,” said Smartt, who is a documentary film producer.

Smartt and others in his film production crew, including Kemp Lyons, Calvin’s video producer, and student Daniel Baas, have logged about 60 hours of filming. Smartt’s Intermediate Filmmaking class helped in the production of a trailer and a few short films this fall.

“I felt like we had to jump on it right away during the period of uncertainty—will it or won’t it explode?” said Smartt. “That’s what makes it interesting.”

The full documentary, which will continue to chronicle the research, will likely be finished a few years after the predicted explosion.

Luminous will focus on the nature of scientific discovery, the development of undergraduate researchers and the power of “small science.”

“Big science is multimillion dollar funding with a lot of people working on big projects,” said Smartt. “Small science is a small telescope with just a few people looking at one thing for a very long time. You wouldn’t think that a small liberal arts college with no graduate students and only an astronomy minor would have a story like this. It’s kind of an underdog story.”

SO MUCH WONDER

“Being a Christian astronomer gives you so much more wonder,” she said. “It gives you so much more appreciation knowing that it was handcrafted—it was made by the hand of God. Secular institutions take the appreciation of the glory out of it. From the huge vastness to the tiniest of details, Calvin professors help you see it. They help you see God through it.”

With the star still following the model, Molnar is predicting the explosion will occur in about three to five years, at which time the star will increase its brightness ten thousand fold.

“If Larry’s prediction is correct, his project will demonstrate for the first time that astronomers can catch certain binary stars in the act of dying, and that they can track the last few years of a stellar death spiral up to the point of final, dramatic explosion,” said Matt Walhout, chair of Calvin’s physics and astronomy department.

Knowing God better is one of the things we seek to do.

LARRY MOLNAR

“The project is significant not only because of the scientific results, but also because it is likely to capture the imagination of people on the street,” he added. “If the prediction is correct, then for the first time in history, parents will be able to point to a dark spot in the sky and say, ‘Watch, kids, there’s a star hiding in there, but soon it’s going to light up.’”

Indeed, the explosion will catch the attention of scientists, media and ordinary people across the globe.

The outcome, one of the brighter stars in the heavens for a time, will be visible as part of the constellation Cygnus, and will add a star to the recognizable Northern Cross star pattern.

Molnar, who is now as certain of his prediction as science allows, believes whatever happens, “the answer will be interesting.”

“Knowing God better is one of the things we seek to do,” he said. “One of the ways to do that is to explore this amazing universe. The Psalmist says, ‘the heavens declare the glory of God,’” said Molnar. “If you’re not listening you’re missing that message.”

'Laser Cloak' Could Hide Earth from Evil Aliens — A new paper describes how laser beams could disrupt measurements of Earth's orbit around the sun, potentially deceiving inquisitive aliens. Here, a 22W laser used for adaptive optics shines from the Very Large Telescope in Chile.
**Credit: ESO/G. Hüdepohl**

A simple laser beam could disrupt aliens' observations of Earth, making it look like there's nobody home on the third rock from the sun, a new study suggests.

David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University in New York, said he first considered this idea when he heard about the strangely dimming star that was detected recently by NASA's Kepler space telescope. Researchers speculated the signal could have come from an "alien megastructure" orbiting the star.

That's a remote possibility, many scientists stressed; the star's strange signal likely has a natural cause. But the Kepler observations got Kipping thinking about ways humanity could alter the signals it sends into space — or hide them altogether from life-hunting aliens, who may have malicious intentions. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]

He and Columbia graduate student Alex Teachey concluded that it would be surprisingly easy to wipe out Earth's signal, distort it to look strange or even edit out the fingerprint of life — provided researchers knew the location of the snooping aliens.

"We essentially played the thought experiment that if we really had xenophobic tendencies and wanted to avoid the Earth being discovered (as Stephen Hawking and others have been warning about), could we hide the Earth from alien planet-hunters?" Kipping said in an email.

How to build a cloaking device

The key to Kipping and Teachey's thinking lies in the way humans have identified most planets around other stars, a process called the transit method. This strategy, which has most famously been employed by the Kepler spacecraft, detects tiny dips in the brightness of stars, which can indicate an orbiting planet.

The transit method could theoretically be used by alien civilizations to detect Earth, too. But there's a way to trip up such extraterrestrial searches, Kipping and Teachey said.

"To make it look like the planet is not there at all, you've got to get rid of that dip. You've got to fill in the missing starlight," Teachey said in an explanatory video.

**NASA's Kepler space telescope uses small dips in a star's brightness to detect planets passing in front of the star. Each planet will leave a distinctive light signature.**
**Credit: Alex Teachey/Columbia University via YouTube**

Engineers could shine a very bright laser or collection of lasers toward a star suspected of hosting intelligent aliens during the time Earth was passing in front of the sun from the other planet's perspective. Then, aliens making measurements wouldn't see any change in solar brightness.

"I started to think about lasers," Kipping told Space.com. "Most people might have stopped there, because the sun emits so much light — how could you possibly produce a laser beam which could ever compete with the sun? But it turns out, when you actually run through the equations, it's really not that bad." [How to Discover an Alien Planet (Video)]

"We could build this next week if we wanted to," Teachey added.

To alter Earth's signature as seen by an alien version of Kepler, a laser system would have to emit 30 megawatts of power for about 10 hours per year, coinciding with Earth's passing in front of the sun, the duo calculated.

That equates to significantly less than the energy the International Space Station gathers in a year with its solar panels, Kipping said, or the energy used by about 70 homes over the course of a year. Such a laser system, either on Earth or in orbit, could charge its solar-powered batteries for most of the year and then release the high-powered blasts at just the right time, brightening when the sun's light would normally dim.

While a laser of that intensity hasn't been built before, the researchers said, such a cloaking system could also use multiple smaller lasers, all shining in the same direction. The alien star would be so distant that such a difference would be indistinguishable. Laser beams are tightly focused, but at greater distances, the beams will have grown large enough to require less precise aim.

Shining a laser beam toward a planet whose inhabitants might see the Earth pass in front of the sun could replace the light the Earth blocks out. This would conceivably hide the planet. Using different laser wavelengths can create other illusions with the Earth's transit.
**Credit: Alex Teachey/Columbia University via YouTube**

By varying the wavelength and strength of the beams, humans could conceal Earth from more complicated detectors. Such a "cloak" that concealed all wavelengths would take about 250 megawatts of power, with lasers blasting at different wavelengths, the researchers said. The laser strategy could also alter Earth's signature to look like almost anything, even something that appears distinctive and artificial, the scientists said, like the New York skyline or a featureless box.

But perhaps the most interesting use, the researchers said, would be as a "bio-cloak," which would actually use less power than would be required to totally conceal the planet. When a planet crosses its star's face, a little bit of light passes through the planet's atmosphere, and researchers can determine the atmosphere's makeup based on the wavelengths of that light. By sending laser beams that are the inverse of certain wavelengths, humanity could conceivably edit out the life-generated "biosignatures" in Earth's atmosphere, Kipping said.

"We can actually cancel those features out, such as oxygen," he said. "The alien civilization is going to detect your planetary transit. They're going to detect your planetary radial velocity, but then when they 'smell' the atmosphere, it would not look like a tasty planet. It would just look like a dead world."

While a planet that was fully cloaked could still be detected by other means, such as by the gravitational pull it exerts on its star, this kind of cloak would arouse less suspicion, because the planet would be there as expected, just without signs of life.

"We feel like this is the most deceptive cybercloaking you could possibly do, because then everything adds up — there's no missing piece to the puzzle," Kipping said. "And that would be a very difficult cloak to see." [10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life]

Kipping and Teachey laid out their thinking in a study published Thursday (March 31) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Many possibilities

Concealing Earth's existence from extraterrestrials, or announcing its presence with an artificial light curve, would work only if humanity knew or suspected where those aliens were living. But the concept is still intriguing as scientists look out to read other stars' light signatures and speculate about alien astronomers reading signals from Earth.

Kipping and Teachey suggested that alien civilizations could communicate with each other during transits by varying their light signatures, because individuals investigating a planet are likely to watch it as it passes in front of its star. Alien lasers could even encode information to transmit, the researchers said.

One possible next step, they added, would be to look more carefully through archival Kepler data to search for artificial signatures.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Pennsylvania State University, recently published a paper about how scientists could identify advanced civilizations around other stars. "Alien megastructures" would dim stars more than expected, whereas lasers would tend to brighten them, but "we should look for both," Wright told Space.com.

"The fact that Kepler looked at 100,000 stars and didn't see much of anything along those lines suggests that that is pretty rare in the galaxy," Wright added. "And we should look more closely to see if there are things that aren't totally obvious."

In terms of this particular technology on Earth, "The only time it'd be useful for us is if we had some knowledge of alien civilizations along the thin strip of the sky that would see Earth transit the sun," he said.

Avi Loeb, who chairs the astronomy department at Harvard University in Massachusetts, told Space.com that the laser-cloaking method assumes researchers know where to look, that aliens aren't observing from moving spaceships and that putative extraterrestrial observers are mainly investigating planets by looking for transits across stars.

Energy demands would quickly grow as a civilization tried to hide from, or signal to, an increasing number of star systems, Loeb added. But the laser cloak is still an interesting new idea to add to the arsenal in the search for extraterrestrial life, he said.

"If there is a literature of ideas like this one, ideas that people proposed for potential signals that are artificial — the richer the literature is, the better it is," Loeb said. "The moment we find something artificial, it will change everything. It's good to have the imagination at work prior to seeing something unusual, so we are aware that there are possibilities beyond what we expect."

"I don't think anyone's thought of this particular application before," Wright said. "I think it just emphasizes how little energy is actually required to get someone's attention across the galaxy."

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.