Paul Gilster | Centauri Dreams

The Odds on Starshot

by Paul Gilster | Apr 13, 2016 | Missions | 112 Comments

Yesterday's announcement of Breakthrough Starshot brought an email from exoplanet hunter Greg Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz), whose work has been an inspiration to me since the early days of Centauri Dreams. One of Greg's new projects, working with Anthony Aguirre (Foundational Questions Institute) and several other colleagues, is a website called Metaculus, which bills itself as "a community dedicated to generating accurate predictions about future real-world events by aggregating the collective wisdom, insight, and intelligence of its participants." In other words, this is a kind of prediction market space for science and tech issues. Breakthrough Starshot fits the bill here exactly, because Metaculus is all about the probability of future events, some of which can be predicted to a high degree, while others are purely a matter of calculated odds. The site is open to all and contains the basic information about its methods, and any logged in user can propose a question for consideration....

Breakthrough Starshot: Mission to Alpha Centauri

by Paul Gilster | Apr 12, 2016 | Missions | 133 Comments

Here on Centauri Dreams we often discuss interstellar flight in a long-term context. Will humans ever travel to another star? I've stated my view that if this happens, it will probably take several hundred years before we develop the necessary energy resources to make such a mission fit within the constraints of the world's economy. This, of course, assumes the necessary technological development along the way — not only in propulsion but in closed-loop life support — to make such a mission scientifically plausible. I get a lot of pushback on that because nobody wants to wait that long. But overall, I'm an optimist. I think it will happen. Let's attack the question from another direction, though, and leave human passengers for a later date, as Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Initiatives, aided by Stephen Hawking, is doing today in a New York news conference. What if we talk about unmanned missions? What if, in fact, the question is: How soon can we put a scientific payload...

The Snowbank Orbit, Redux

by Paul Gilster | Apr 8, 2016 | Missions | 48 Comments

We haven't yet found Planet Nine, but the evidence for its existence is solid enough that we can start thinking about its possibilities as a mission target. That work falls in this essay to Adam Crowl, a Centauri Dreams regular whose comments on articles here began not long after I started the site. An active member of the Project Icarus attempt to re-design the 1970s Project Daedalus starship, Adam is also the author of Crowlspace, where his insights are a frequently consulted resource. Today he harkens back to a 1960s science fiction story that has given him notions about a way not only to reach Planet Nine but to establish orbit around it. by Adam Crowl Fritz Leiber is better known for his fantasy and SF-fantasy, but he could write hard-SF too. A fine example is his 1962 story, "The Snowbank Orbit", the title of which alludes to World War II tales of pilots surviving bailouts without parachutes by plunging into snow-drifts. Five spacecraft, racing towards Uranus at 100 miles per...

A Young, Free-Floating Jupiter Analog in TW Hydrae

by Paul Gilster | Apr 7, 2016 | Exoplanetary Science | 7 Comments

A stellar association is a loose grouping of stars of similar spectral type and age that share a common motion. About 90 percent of all stars are thought to originate as members of associations. The TW Hydrae association (TWA) is a case in point: The group is made up of about thirty young stars, each thought to be roughly ten million years old. This is the youngest grouping of stars in the neighborhood of the Sun. You may recall 2M1207, which has turned up in these pages before, a brown dwarf member of the TWA that has a companion of planetary mass. Now we learn of another exotic find, a young, bright free-floating planet-like object. Jonathan Gagné (Carnegie Institution for Science) used the FIRE spectrograph on Carnegie's Baade 6.5-m telescope in Chile to measure the line-of-sight velocity of the object, known as 2MASS J1119-1137. This along with the sky motion of the object allowed researchers to make the definitive call that 2MASS J1119-1137 is indeed a member of the TW...

Supernova at Twilight

by Paul Gilster | Apr 6, 2016 | Deep Sky Astronomy & Telescopes | 8 Comments

In his novel The Twilight of Briareus (John Day, 1974), Richard Cowper, who in reality was John Middleton Murry, Jr., wrote about a fictitious star called Delta Briareus that goes supernova (true, there is no constellation called Briareus, but bear with me). Because it is only 130 light years out, the supernova showers the Earth with radiation, with consequences that are in some cases obvious, in others imaginative in the extreme. It's a good read, one that at least one critic, Brian Stableford, has compared to J. G. Ballard's early disaster novels. The novel contrasts an earthy domesticity with the celestial display that soon shatters it. It's worth quoting a patch of the book: It so happened that I, in common, no doubt, with several million others -- was among the first in England to observe that 'majestic effulgence' within seconds of its arrival. At about twenty past nine on the Tuesday evening I switched off the telly and suggested to Laura that we could do worse than saunter...

SETI: A New Kind of ‘Water Hole’

by Paul Gilster | Apr 5, 2016 | Uncategorized | 28 Comments

Some of you may recall an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which the inhabitants of a planet called Aldea use a planetary defense system that includes a cloaking device. The episode, “When the Bough Breaks,” at one point shows the view from the Enterprise’s screens as the entire planet swims into view. My vague recollection of that show was triggered by the paper we looked at yesterday, in which David Kipping and Alex Teachey discuss transit light curves and the ability of a civilization to alter them. After all, if an extraterrestrial culture would prefer not to be seen, a natural thought would be to conceal its transits from worlds that should be able to detect them along the plane of the ecliptic. Light curves could be manipulated by lasers, and as we saw yesterday, the method could serve either to enhance a transit, thus creating a form of METI signaling, or to conceal one. In the latter case, the civilization would want to create a change in brightness that would...

A Transit Signature for SETI?

by Paul Gilster | Apr 4, 2016 | Astrobiology and SETI | 16 Comments

David Kipping and Alex Teachey have a new paper out on the possibility of ‘cloaking’ a planetary signature. The researchers, both at Columbia University, make the case that any civilization anxious to conceal its existence -- for whatever reason -- would surely become aware that all stars lying along its ecliptic plane would see transits of the home world, just as its own scientists pursued transit studies of planets around other stars. And it turns out there are ways to make sure this signal is masked by adjusting the shape of the planet’s transit light curves. Now this is a fascinating scenario as presented by the head of the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler, whose business it is to know about the slightest of variations in light curves because they may contain information about exomoons or rings. Thus Kipping is a natural to look into the artificial manipulation of light curves, a study with definite SETI implications. Because methods like these work in two directions -- a...

John Ford Fishback and the Leonora Christine

by Paul Gilster | Apr 1, 2016 | Missions | 41 Comments

Like the Marie Celeste, the Leonora Christine is a storied vessel, at least among science fiction readers. In his 1967 story "To Outlive Eternity," expanded into the novel Tau Zero in 1970, Poul Anderson described the starship Leonora Christine's stunning journey as, unable to shut down its runaway engines, it moved ever closer to the speed of light. Just how a real Leonora Christine might cope with the stresses of a ramjet's flight into the interstellar deep is the subject of Al Jackson's latest, which draws on memories not only of Robert Bussard, who invented the interstellar ramscoop concept, but a young scientist named John Ford Fishback. by A. A. Jackson Project Pluto - a program to develop nuclear-powered ramjet engines - must have been on Robert Bussard's mind one morning at breakfast at Los Alamos. Bussard was a project scientist-engineer on the nuclear thermal rocket program Rover -- Bussard and his coauthor DeLauer have the two definitive monographs on nuclear propulsion...

SETI Looks at Red Dwarfs

by Paul Gilster | Mar 31, 2016 | Astrobiology and SETI | 15 Comments

When it comes to astrobiology, what we don't know dwarfs what we do. After all, despite all conjecture, we have yet to find proof that life exists anywhere else in the universe. SETI offers its own imponderables, adding on to the question of life's emergence. How often does intelligence arise, and if it does, how often does it produce civilizations capable of using technology? Even more to the point, how long do such civilizations last if they do appear? We keep asking the questions out of the conviction that one day we'll start retrieving data, perhaps in the form of a signal from another star. It's because of the lifetime-of-a-civilization question that I'm interested in a SETI search focused on red dwarf stars. True, M-dwarfs have a lot going against them, as Centauri Dreams readers know. A habitable planet around an M-dwarf may be tidally locked, which could be a showstopper except that some scientists believe global weather patterns may make at least part of such planets...

TVIW 2016: Worldship Track

by Paul Gilster | Mar 30, 2016 | Missions | 45 Comments

Our second report from the recent Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop is the work of Cassidy Cobbs and Michel Lamontagne, with an emphasis on the worldship track. Cassidy has an MS from Vanderbilt, where she studied ecology and evolution. She currently works at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, doing traditional and next-generation gene and genome sequencing. Her interest in space travel/engineering was enhanced by attending Advanced Space Academy in Huntsville at age 14. Michel Lamontagne is a French-Canadian mechanical engineer, practicing in the fields of heat transfer and ventilation, with a passion for space. An active member of Icarus Interstellar, he tells me he has "been designing spaceships since he was 12 years old, and waiting for reality to catch up!" Photos throughout are from New York photojournalist Joey O'Loughlin, and are used with permission. By Cassidy Cobbs and Michel Lamontagne This year's Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (TVIW-2016) was held in...

Of a Mountain on Titan

by Paul Gilster | Mar 29, 2016 | Outer Solar System | 6 Comments

If Saturn’s inner moons are, as we discussed yesterday, as ‘young’ as the Cretaceous, then we have much to think about in terms of possible astrobiology there. But Titan is unaffected by the model put forward by Drs. ?uk, Dones and Nesvorný, being beyond the range of these complex interactions. Huge, possessed of fascinating weather patterns within a dense atmosphere, Titan probably dates back to Saturn’s earliest days, in some ways a frigid ‘early Earth’ analog. When my son Miles was a boy, we drove through the Appalachians on a journey that eventually took us into Canada. Somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley he commented on how insignificant the mountains seemed compared to what he was used to out west, where the Rockies dominate the sky. True enough, but of course the Smokies and the Cumberlands have their own tale to tell. Once monumental, they’ve fallen prey to wind and rain, ancient relics of once grander peaks. The latest work on Titan from Cassini data now reveals something...

Saturn’s Moons: A Question of Age

by Paul Gilster | Mar 28, 2016 | Outer Solar System | 6 Comments

Some years back at a Princeton conference I had the pleasure of hearing Richard Gott discussing the age of Saturn’s rings. Gott is the author of, in addition to much else, Time Travel in Einstein's Universe (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). I admit the question of Saturn's rings had never occurred to me, my assumption being that the rings formed not long after the formation of the planet. But of course there is no reason why this should be, and a number of reasons why it should not. How long, for instance, does it take moons to collide with each other, contributing debris to a growing ring system? And are such collisions the only way a ring system can form? With all this in mind, I was interested in a new paper that a number of readers referenced in emails. Lead author Matija ?uk (SETI Institute), working with Luke Dones and David Nesvorný (both at SwRI), offers up the possibility that the inner moons of Saturn and possibly the rings were actually formed much later than we would expect. In...

Thirteen to Centaurus

by Paul Gilster | Mar 25, 2016 | Uncategorized | 115 Comments

J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) emerged as one of the leading figures in 20th Century science fiction. His fascination with inner as opposed to 'outer' space infused his characters and landscapes with a touch of the surreal, taking the fiction of the space age into deeply psychological realms. Christopher Phoenix here looks at the question of centuries-long journeys to the stars, with reference to a Ballard story in which a crew copes with isolation on what appears to be an interstellar mission. What we learn about ship and crew informs the broader discussion: If it takes more than a single generation to make an interstellar crossing, what can we do to keep our crew functional? And is there such a thing as happiness under these constraints? By Christopher Phoenix A few months back, Centauri Dreams ran Gregory Benford's review of Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora. After reading that review and the discussion that followed, I began thinking about fiction that explores how starflight might...

Planets in the Process of Formation

by Paul Gilster | Mar 24, 2016 | Exoplanetary Science | 5 Comments

Back in 2014, astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to produce high-resolution images of the planet-forming disk around the Sun-like star HL Tau, about 450 light years away in the constellation Taurus. The images were striking, showing bright and dark rings with gaps, suggesting a protoplanetary disk. Scientists believed the gaps in the disk were caused by planets sweeping out their orbits. All this was apparent confirmation of planet formation theories, but also a bit of a surprise given the age of the star, a scant million years, making this a young system indeed. Here is the ALMA image, along with the caption that ran with the original release of the story from NRAO. Image: The young star HL Tau and its protoplanetary disk. This image of planet formation reveals multiple rings and gaps that herald the presence of emerging planets as they sweep their orbits clear of dust and gas. Credit: ALMA (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ); C. Brogan, B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)....

Gravity, Impartiality & the Media

by Paul Gilster | Mar 23, 2016 | Culture and Society | 85 Comments

Marc Millis is once again in the media, this time interviewed by a BBC crew in a show about controlling gravity. The impetus is an undertaking I described in the first chapter of Frontiers of Propulsion Science, Project Greenglow. The former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project and founding architect of the Tau Zero Foundation, as well as co-editor with Eric Davis of the aforesaid book, Millis has some thoughts on how we discuss these matters in the media, and offers clarifications on how work on futuristic technologies should proceed. by Marc Millis A BBC 'Horizons' episode will air next Wednesday, March 23 (8pm UK) about the Quest for Gravity Control. The show features, among other things, an interview with myself about my related work during NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project and thereafter with the Tau Zero Foundation. Quoting from an advertisement for the show, Project Greenglow - The Quest for Gravity Control: This is the story of an extraordinary...

TVIW 2016: Homo Stellaris Working Track

by Paul Gilster | Mar 22, 2016 | Culture and Society | 8 Comments

Herewith the first of several reports on the recent Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop; more next week. It comes from Doug Loss, who was a participant in the Homo Stellaris working track I had hoped to attend before illness changed my plans. An experienced network and IT security administrator, Doug attended and eventually organized The Asimov Seminar from 1977 until the early 2000s, a yearly, four-day-long retreat at a conference center in upstate New York. Isaac Asimov, the noted science fiction author, was the star of the Seminar and its main draw until his death in 1992. Each year the Seminar would explore a different topic having to do with the future of human society, with Seminar attendees assuming roles that would allow them to examine the questions associated with that year's topic on a personal basis. TVIW is likewise following a highly interactive workshop strategy, as Doug's report attests. The photos below come from New York photojournalist Joey O'Loughlin, and are...

Making Centauri Dreams Reality, Virtually

by Paul Gilster | Mar 18, 2016 | Culture and Society | 31 Comments

I often think about virtual reality and the prospect of immersive experience of distant worlds using data returned by our probes. But what of the state of virtual reality today, a technology that is suddenly the talk of the computer world with the imminent release of the Oculus Rift device? Frank Taylor is just the man to ask. He has worked with computer graphics since the 1970s, starting at the University of Arizona. He worked several years at aerospace companies in support of DoD and NASA including simulation and virtual reality technology in support of astronaut training at NASA JSC. Frank has also been a successful entrepreneur doing work with Internet and other computer technologies. His most notable recent accomplishment was the completion of one orbit of the Earth at 0 MSL - he and his wife left in 2009 and sailed around the world arriving back in the US in 2015. Frank is the publisher of Google Earth Blog since 2005. Have a look now at the surprisingly wide possibilities...

Protecting Life on the Early Earth

by Paul Gilster | Mar 17, 2016 | Exoplanetary Science | 28 Comments

Kappa Ceti is a young star -- 400 to 600 million years old -- in the constellation Cetus (the Whale). It's a tremendously active place, its surface disfigured by starspots much larger and more numerous than we find on our more mature Sun. In fact, Kappa Ceti hurls enormous flares into nearby space, 'superflares' releasing 10 to 100 million times the energy of the largest flares we've ever observed on the Sun. What would be the fate of planets around a star like this? The question is directly relevant to our own system because Kappa Ceti is a G-class dwarf much like the Sun, giving us a look at what conditions would have been like when our own system was forming. The calculated age of the star, extrapolated from its spin, corresponds to the time when life first appeared on the Earth. Thus we're seeing a model of our distant past, one that makes it clear that a magnetic field is an essential for planetary habitability. The violent activity on the surface of Kappa Ceti is driving a...

What Ceres’ Bright Spots Can Tell Us

by Paul Gilster | Mar 16, 2016 | Outer Solar System | 18 Comments

Garrett P. Serviss was a writer whose name has been obscured by time, but in his day, which would be the late 19th and early 20th Century, he was esteemed as a popularizer of astronomy. He began with the New York Sun but went on to write fifteen books, eight of which focused on the field. He was also a science fiction author whose Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) used Wellsian ideas right out of War of the Worlds. It was a sequel to an earlier story, involving master inventor Thomas Edison in combat against the Martians both on the Martian surface and off it. I think this is the first appearance of spacesuits in fiction. In any case, Serviss anticipates the 'space opera' to come, and will always have a place in the history of science fiction. I can only wonder what he would have made of the Dawn mission at Ceres. In Edison's Conquest of Mars, he refers to a race of 'Cerenites' who are, because of the low gravity of their world, about forty feet tall. They are at war with the...

StarSearch: Our Hunt for a New Home World

by Paul Gilster | Mar 14, 2016 | Culture and Society | 91 Comments

His interest fired by an interview with interstellar researcher Greg Matloff, Dale Tarnowieski became fascinated with the human future in deep space. One result is the piece that follows, an essay that feeds directly into a recent wish of mine. I had been struck by how many people coming to Centauri Dreams are doing so for the first time, and thinking that I would like to run the occasional overview article placing the things we discuss here in a broader context. Dale's essay does precisely this, looking at our future as a species on time frames that extend to the death of our planet. Dale retired in January 2015 from the position of assistant director of communications with New York City College of Technology/CUNY, a veteran journalist and editor of "Connections," the college's print and online magazine. He also did considerable writing for the New York City College of Technology Foundation and its annual Best of New York Award Dinner (and continues to do so on a freelance basis)....

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In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For many years this site coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation. It now serves as an independent forum for deep space news and ideas. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image courtesy of Marco Lorenzi).

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