Centauri Dreams
Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration
Directly Imaging a Young ‘Jupiter’
Centauri Dreams continues to follow the fortunes of the Gemini Planet Imager with great interest, and I thank Horatio Trobinson for a recent note reminding me of the latest news from researchers at the Gemini South installation in Chile. The project organized as the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey is a three-year effort designed to do not radial velocity or transit studies but actual imaging of young Jupiters and debris disks around nearby stars. Operating at near-infrared wavelengths, the GPI itself uses adaptive optics, a coronagraph, a calibration interferometer and an integral field spectrograph in its high-contrast imaging work.
Launched in late 2014, the GPIES survey has studied 160 targets out of a projected 600 in a series of observing runs, all the while battling unexpectedly bad weather in Chile. Despite all this, project leader Bruce Macintosh (Stanford University), the man behind the construction of GPI, has been able to announce the discovery of the young ‘Jupiter’ 51 Eridani b, working with researchers from almost forty institutions in North and South America. The discovery was confirmed by follow-up work with the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea (Hawaii).
Image: Discovery image of 51 Eri b with the Gemini Planet Imager taken in the near-infrared light on December 18, 2014. The bright central star has been mostly removed by a hardware and software mask to enable the detection of the exoplanet one million times fainter. Credits: J. Rameau (UdeM) and C. Marois (NRC Herzberg).
This is a world with about twice the mass of Jupiter, and this news release from the Gemini Observatory is characterizing it as “the most Solar System-like planet ever directly imaged around another star.” The reasons are obvious: 51 Eridani b orbits at about 13 AU, putting it a bit past Saturn in our own Solar System. And although 51 Eridani b is some 100 light years away, Macintosh and colleagues have found a strong spectroscopic signature of methane.
“Many of the exoplanets astronomers have imaged before have atmospheres that look like very cool stars” says Macintosh. “This one looks like a planet.”
Indeed, and we have further evidence that this is a planet rather than a brown dwarf in chance alignment with the star in the form of a recent paper that analyzes the motion of 51 Eridani b and finds it consistent with a forty-year orbit. Moreover, we’re going to be learning a great deal more about this interesting object in years to come, as the paper explains:
Continued astrometric monitoring of 51 Eri b over the next few years should be sufficient to detect curvature in the orbit, further constraining the semimajor axis and inclination of the orbit, and placing the first constraints on the eccentricity. Absolute astrometric measurements of 51 Eri with GAIA (e.g., Perryman et al. 2014), in conjunction with monitoring of the relative astrometry of 51 Eri b, will enable a direct measurement of the mass of the planet. Combined with the well-constrained age of 51 Eri b, such a determination would provide insight into the evolutionary history of low-mass directly imaged extrasolar planets, and help distinguish between a hot-start or core accretion formation process for this planet.
Image: The Gemini Planet Imager utilizes an integral field spectrograph, an instrument capable of taking images at multiple wavelengths – or colors – of infrared light simultaneously, in order to search for young self-luminous planets around nearby stars. The left side of the animation shows the GPI images of the nearby star 51 Eridani in order of increasing wavelength from 1.5 to 1.8 microns. The images have been processed to suppress the light from 51 Eridani, revealing the exoplanet 51 Eridani b (indicated) which is approximately a million times fainter than the parent star. The bright regions to the left and right of the masked star are artifacts from the image processing algorithm, and can be distinguished from real astrophysical signals based on their brightness and position as a function of wavelength. The spectrum of 51 Eridani b, on the right side of the animation, shows how the brightness of the planet varies as a function of wavelength. If the atmosphere was entirely transmissive, the brightness would be approximately constant as a function of wavelength. This is not the case for 51 Eridani b, the atmosphere of which contains both water (H2O) and methane (CH4). Over the spectral range of this GPI dataset, water absorbs photons between 1.5 and 1.6 microns, and methane absorbs between 1.6 and 1.8 microns. This leads to a strong peak in the brightness of the exoplanet at 1.6 microns, the wavelength at which absorption by both water and methane is weakest. Credit: Robert De Rosa (UC Berkeley), Christian Marois (NRC Herzberg, University of Victoria).
Christian Marois (National Research Council of Canada) discusses the nature of the find:
“GPI is capable of dissecting the light of exoplanets in unprecedented detail so we can now characterize other worlds like never before. The planet is so faint and located so close to its star, that it is also the first directly imaged exoplanet to be fully consistent with Solar System-like planet formation models.”
As you would expect, 51 Eridani b is a young planet, young enough that the heat of its formation gives us a solid infrared signature, allowing its direct detection. In addition to being in an orbit that reminds us of the Solar System, the young world is probably the lowest-mass planet yet imaged, just as its atmospheric methane signature is the strongest yet detected. Given that the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey is only a fraction of the way through its observing list, we can expect to find more planets in the target area within 300 light years of the Solar System.
The paper is Macintosh et al., “Discovery and spectroscopy of the young jovian planet 51 Eri b with the Gemini Planet Imager,” Science Vol. 350, No. 6256 (2 October 2015), pp. 64-67 (abstract). The follow-up paper is DeRosa et al., “Astrometric Confirmation and Preliminary Orbital Parameters of the Young Exoplanet 51 Eridani b with the Gemini Planet Imager,” accepted at The Astrophysical Journal Letters (preprint).
A Kepler-438b Caveat (and a Digression)
Before we go interstellar, a digression with reference to yesterday’s post, which looked at how we manipulate image data to draw out the maximum amount of information. I had mentioned the image widely regarded as the first photograph, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s ‘View from the Window at Le Gras.’ Centauri Dreams regular William Alschuler pointed out that this image is in fact a classic example of what I’m talking about. For without serious manipulation, it’s impossible to make out what you’re seeing. Have a look at the original and compare it to the image in yesterday’s post, which has been processed to reveal the underlying scene.
Image: New official image of the first photograph in 2003, minus any manual retouching. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras. c. 1826. Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center / University of Texas at Austin. Photo by J. Paul Getty Museum.
And here again is the processed image, a much richer experience.
The University of Texas offers this explanation of how the image was made:
“Niépce thought to capture this image using a light-sensitive material so that the light itself would “etch” the picture for him. In 1826, through a process of trial and error, he finally came upon the combination of bitumen of Judea (a form of asphalt) spread over a pewter plate. When he let this petroleum-based substance sit in a camera obscura for eight hours without interruption, the light gradually hardened the bitumen where it hit, thus creating a rudimentary photo. He “developed” this picture by washing away the unhardened bitumen with lavender water, revealing an image of the rooftops and trees visible from his studio window. Niépce had successfully made the world’s first photograph.”
As with many astronomical photographs, what the unassisted human eye would see is often the least interesting aspect of the story. While we always want to know what a person looking out a window would see, we learn a great deal more by subjecting images to a variety of filters.
Meanwhile, in the Rest of the Galaxy…
Habitable zone planets are a primary attraction of the exoplanet hunt, but so often a tight analysis shows that what we know of a world isn’t enough to confirm its habitable status. Kepler-438b is a case in point, a world that is likely rocky orbiting a red dwarf some 470 light years away in the constellation Lyra. The planet orbits the primary every 35.2 days, but writing in these pages last January, Andrew LePage estimated there was only a one in four chance that Kepler-438b is in the habitable zone, declaring it more likely to be a cooler version of Venus.
Now we have more evidence that a planet some in the media have called ‘Earth-like’ is in fact a wasteland, its chances of life devastated by hard radiation from the host star. Kepler-438 produces huge flares every few hundred days, each of them approximately ten times more powerful than anything we’ve ever recorded on the Sun. These ‘superflares’ are laden with energies of 1033 erg, although energies of 1036 erg have been observed.
But the flares are part of a larger problem for Kepler-438b. They are associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs), a phenomenon likely to have stripped away the planet’s atmosphere entirely. In work to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, David Armstrong (University of Warwick, UK) and colleagues analyze conditions around the red dwarf. Armstrong explains in a University of Warwick news release:
“If the planet, Kepler-438b, has a magnetic field like the Earth, it may be shielded from some of the effects. However, if it does not, or the flares are strong enough, it could have lost its atmosphere, be irradiated by extra dangerous radiation and be a much harsher place for life to exist.”
Image: The planet Kepler-438b is shown here in front of its violent parent star. It is regularly irradiated by huge flares of radiation, which could render the planet uninhabitable. Here the planet’s atmosphere is shown being stripped away. Credit: Mark A Garlick / University of Warwick.
The relationship of flares and CMEs is complicated, as are the effects of a magnetic field. From the paper:
It is possible that CMEs occur on other stars that produce very energetic flares, which could have serious consequences for any close-in exoplanets without a magnetic field to deflect the influx of energetic charged particles. Since the habitable zone for M dwarfs is relatively close in to the star, any exoplanets could be expected to be partially or completely tidally locked. This would limit the intrinsic magnetic moments of the planet, meaning that any magnetosphere would likely be small. Khodachenko et al. (2007) found that for an M dwarf, the stellar wind combined with CMEs could push the magnetosphere of an Earth-like exoplanet in the habitable zone within its atmosphere, resulting in erosion of the atmosphere. Following on from this, Lammer et al. (2007) concluded that habitable exoplanets orbiting active M dwarfs would need to be larger and more massive than Earth, so that the planet could generate a stronger magnetic field and the increased gravitational pull would help prevent atmospheric loss.
A coronal mass ejection occurs when huge amounts of plasma are blown outward from the star, and the extensive flare activity on Kepler-438 makes CMEs that much more likely. With the atmosphere greatly compromised or stripped away entirely, the flares can do their work, bathing the surface in ultraviolet and X-ray radiation and a sleet of hard particles. For a time, Kepler-438b looked so intriguing from an astrobiological standpoint, especially with its small radius 1.1 the size of Earth’s, but it takes an optimistic assessment of the habitable zone indeed to include it in the first place, and it now appears that the chances for life here are remote.
The paper is Armstrong et al., “The Host Stars of Keplers Habitable Exoplanets: Superflares, Rotation and Activity,” accepted at MNRAS and available as a preprint.
Pluto and How We See It
As I did after yesterday’s post, I occasionally get requests for pictures of objects in natural color, as opposed to significantly enhanced images (at various wavelengths) designed to tease out structure or detail. Here are Pluto and Charon as seen by New Horizons’ LORRI (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager), with color data supplied by the Ralph instrument. The images in this composite are from July 13 and 14 and according to JHU/APL, “…portray Pluto and Charon as an observer riding on the spacecraft would see them.”
For those interested, Jenna Garrett wrote a fine piece for WiReD last summer called What We’re Really Looking at When We Look at Pluto that goes into the instrumentation aboard New Horizons and discusses the philosophical issues separating what we see from what is really there. Let me quote briefly from this:
It’s not hard for a photographer to understand why you’d question actually seeing Pluto—the same question has nagged photographers since Nicéphore Niépce made View from the Window at Le Gras in 1826. A camera is a simple machine: A lens and a shutter that allows the passage of light, which hits the chemical emulsion of film or the pixels of a digital sensor. That intervening technology takes photons bouncing off an object and interpolates them into data. More technology turns that data into an image. And still more technology disseminates that image so you might see it.
I don’t want to get too far into philosophy, but just for fun, here’s the Niépce image.
Image: The first recorded photograph, taken from a window in his study by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. For more, visit this University of Texas site.
It’s always good to ask how images are processed, especially when dealing with data being returned from the edge of the Solar system through a number of instruments. New Horizons carries three imagers: The aforementioned LORRI and Ralph, along with Alice, an ultraviolet imaging spectrometer. Ralph has ten times the resolution of the human eye, but we use data as needed from the instrument packages to ferret out what scientists are looking for.
I also like this quote by Jon Lomberg, a deeply felt ratification of New Horizons from Garrett’s piece:
“You don’t really have to understand a lot about astronomy to know how difficult this is,” says Lomberg. “Getting it there, having it work for nine years and having it do exactly what they’re telling it to do. You just want to applaud. It makes everybody think Goddamn! that was a good thing to do!“
I’m sure that most of the Centauri Dreams audience is with Jon on that sentiment. But let’s move on to further news about Pluto from the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in Maryland. In analyzing the New Horizons data, we learn that Pluto’s upper atmosphere is a good deal more compact and significantly colder than we had thought based upon earlier models. Pluto’s atmosphere seems to escape more or less the same way that atmospheric gases do on Earth or Mars, rather than acting as we would expect from a cometary body. Here is the already famous image that showed us ‘blue skies’ (of a sort) on Pluto.
Image: Pluto’s haze layer shows its blue color in this picture taken by the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The high-altitude haze is thought to be similar in nature to that seen at Saturn’s moon Titan. The source of both hazes likely involves sunlight-initiated chemical reactions of nitrogen and methane, leading to relatively small, soot-like particles (called tholins) that grow as they settle toward the surface. This image was generated by software that combines information from blue, red and near-infrared images to replicate the color a human eye would perceive as closely as possible. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.
Here again we’re aiming at something close to what the human eye would perceive.
We also learned at DPS that Pluto’s moons are unlike anything we’re familiar with in the rest of the Solar System. Most inner moons in the Solar System (including ours) move in synchronous rotation, with one face always toward the planet. But the small moons of Pluto do nothing of the kind. Hydra rotates 89 times during a single circuit of Pluto, while the rest of the small moons rotate faster than we would expect as well. Have a look at the chart that Mark Showalter (SETI Institute) prepared for presentation at DPS.
Image: Spin periods for the range of Pluto’s moons. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.
We may well be looking at chaotic spin rates — variable over time — and likely the result of the torque Charon exerts, which would keep the moons from settling into synchronicity. Showalter characterized these wobbling moons as ‘spinning tops,’ and it also appears that several of them may have been formed by merger, with two or more former moons coming together following the event that created Charon. That would make sense — surely there were a large number of objects after a massive impact, with the present system having consolidated from these. Here’s the slick video illustrating the motion of these moons that NASA has produced.
I love Showalter’s take on all this in a SETI Institute news release: “There’s clearly something fundamental about the dynamics of the system that we do not understand. We expected chaos, but this is pandemonium.”
Pluto’s Unexpected Complexities
Keeping up with a site like this can be a daunting task, especially when intriguing papers can pop up at any time and announcements of new finds by our spacecraft come in clusters. But site maintenance itself can be tricky. Recently Centauri Dreams regular Tom Mazanec wrote in with a project to be added to the links on the home page and before long, with my encouragement, he had sent a number of solid suggestions on exoplanet projects both Earth- and space-based, most of which have now been added. My thanks to Tom and all those who have at various times caught a broken link or added a suggestion for new links or stories.
We begin the week looking at work discussed at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Maryland, starting with the continuing bounty coming in from New Horizons. I always like to quote Alan Stern, because as principal investigator for New Horizons, he is not only its chief spokesman but the guiding force that saw this mission become a reality. And I think he’s absolutely on target when he points to how fulsome a discovery Pluto is turning out to be:
“It’s hard to imagine how rapidly our view of Pluto and its moons are evolving as new data stream in each week,” says Stern. “As the discoveries pour in from those data, Pluto is becoming a star of the solar system. Moreover, I’d wager that for most planetary scientists, any one or two of our latest major findings on one world would be considered astounding. To have them all is simply incredible.”
Image: Pluto and Charon are revealing themselves as worlds of profound complexity. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.
All this with a flyby, leading me to wonder what we might find with a Pluto orbiter.
Think about Voyager. It opened our eyes to new worlds for this first time. It flew by Io and gave us active volcanoes. It flew by Triton and we saw weird ‘cantaloupe terrain’ and nitrogen geysers. All these stay fixed in my mind as I remember first learning about them. But what New Horizons is showing us ranges from bizarre moons to possible ice volcanoes, the huge satellite Charon in a system that is practically a binary ‘planet,’ and surface features that tell us about an active world that was once thought to be inert. Who thought Pluto/Charon would be this complex!
Wright Mons and Piccard Mons, as it turns out, each appear to have a hole at their summit, the signature of a volcano, but one expected to cough up water ice, nitrogen, ammonia or methane in a melted slurry rather than lava. We can’t push this too far, because on a world about which we have so much to learn, we may be in for yet another surprise. And Oliver White, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA Ames, points out another of the unknowns:
“If they are volcanic, then the summit depression would likely have formed via collapse as material is erupted from underneath. The strange hummocky texture of the mountain flanks may represent volcanic flows of some sort that have travelled down from the summit region and onto the plains beyond, but why they are hummocky, and what they are made of, we don’t yet know.”
Image: Scientists using New Horizons images of Pluto’s surface to make 3-D topographic maps have discovered that two of Pluto’s mountains, informally named Wright Mons and Piccard Mons, could possibly be ice volcanoes. The color is shown to depict changes in elevation, with blue indicating lower terrain and brown showing higher elevation; green terrains are at intermediate heights. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.
As this JHU/APL news release makes clear, Pluto’s surface is also showing us far more textures than we might have expected. Why do we see so few small craters? Neither Pluto nor Charon give us many of these, casting doubt on the older model of Kuiper Belt objects formed by the accumulation of small objects. Now you can see why 2014 MU69 is beginning to loom so large. This KBO may be a pristine primordial planetesimal, the first ever to be explored. Assuming the New Horizons mission is extended, a flyby of 2014 MU69 will give us another look at a class of objects that may have been formed quickly and at close to their current size.
But we still have a lot of explaining to do re Pluto’s surface itself. Trying to determine the age of a surface is often a matter of counting the crater impacts to see what has accumulated over time (think of the relatively smooth surface of Europa, which indicates continuing resurfacing that obscures impacts). On Pluto, we do find surfaces that point to the earliest era of the Solar System four billion years ago, but we also see things like Sputnik Planum, whose smooth and impact-free terrain looks to have been formed within the past ten million years, an eyeblink in astronomical time.
Image: A slide from Oliver White’s presentation at DPS, showing crater densities on Pluto’s surface. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.
Other terrains on Pluto look to be somewhere in between, with evidence of cratering extending back not nearly as far as the oldest areas. So is Sputnik Planum, which is on the left of Pluto’s heart-shaped feature, an anomaly, or a marker for a surface that has been geologically active for much of its history? We’re looking at evidence for how objects in the outer Solar System formed, again a splendid reason to back the extension of New Horizons to 2014 MU69.
More on Pluto/Charon and the findings discussed at the DPS meeting tomorrow.
The Initiative for Interstellar Studies: A Three Year Update
Kelvin Long is chief editor of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and the author of Deep Space Propulsion (Springer, 2011). A founder and first project leader of Project Icarus, the ongoing re-design of the Project Daedalus starship, Kelvin is also a co-founder of the non-profit Icarus Interstellar. He now serves as executive director of the Institute for Interstellar Studies, an organization whose mission (‘Scientia ad Sidera: Knowledge to the Stars’) he describes in the following essay.
by Kelvin F. Long
The Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is) is a not-for-profit foundational institute incorporated in the United Kingdom with the mandate to develop interstellar capabilities. We at the initiative just successfully passed our third anniversary since our founding. We began work in August 2012 and went live on the 12th September 2012. Shortly after, we ratified our purpose through our innovative logo, and our mission and vision statements. And today we are focused on the launch of our innovative new educational course titled ‘Starship Engineer’. We are piloting the first version of this in London during November, and we hope some of you will join us: http://i4is.org/news/starship_engineer
But first, it is worth just reminding the readers what we are really about. The mission of i4is is to foster and promote education, knowledge and technical capabilities which lead to designs, technologies or enterprise that will enable the construction and launch of interstellar spacecraft. The vision of i4is is to aspire towards an optimistic future for humans on Earth and in space. Our bold vision is to be an organisation that is central to catalysing the conditions in society over the next century to enable robotic and human exploration of the frontier beyond our Solar System and to other stars, as part of a long-term enduring strategy and towards a sustainable space-based economy. Our motto is “Scientia ad sidera” (knowledge to the stars) and our philosophy of approach is “Starships in our Lifetime”. In addition to this, we also spent weeks writing our own bespoke articles of association, which forms our effective constitution as a company limited by guarantee but not having a share capital – which means we are a not-for-profit entity. In addition, our team produced a ‘founding Declaration’ which sets out what we believe and are working towards. The full text of this can be read here: http://i4is.org/the-starship-log/foundations
So how far have we got in the constitution of the world’s first ever foundational institute dedicated to the goal of the stars? The Initiative for Interstellar Studies is led by a board of directors for which I serve as its Executive Director, supported by the Deputy Directors Rob Swinney and Andreas Hein. We are also supported by our international advisory committee which is chaired by Professor Gregory Matloff and deputy Professor Chris Welch. We have various committees, including a marketing committee and a finance committee, which ensures we are fiscally compliant and ethical? But our activity based committee’s number a few, and I shall give a brief synopsis of each in turn along with their achievements to date?
The Alpha Centauri Prize Committee has the purpose of rewarding success and incentivising progress in activities related to interstellar studies. So far the committee has given out several awards for University students associated with their thesis projects, or for internal members for work that they have done to assist our mission that goes above and beyond what is expected of them. We have received sponsorship from several external organisations to fund those awards. We seek to establish the Alpha Centauri Prize awards as the standard by which all of our progress is measured.
The Educational Academy Committee is chaired by Rob Swinney and has the purpose of fostering educational abilities to conduct research relating to a broad set of subjects pertaining to interstellar studies, associated sciences and the arts. The committee has undergone much public outreach work, working with schools and universities, particularly across the UK.
The largest activity of this committee is in working with the International Space University in Strasbourg, and in particular with its Master’s Director Professor Chris Welch, who is a continued inspiration not just for the students but for all of us in his steadfast support of our ambitious efforts. Within this co-operative relationship, for which we have signed a Memorandum of Understanding, some of our projects have included “Autonomous Space Colony Construction” authored by Michio Hirai, which considered the manufacture of large structures in space; “Agriculture Design Trade-offs for Space Colony Feasibility“, authored by Erik Franks, which discussed farming methods in spaceflight; “Review of the Deceleration Options for a Robotic Interstellar Spacecraft Entering the System of Another Star“, authored by Wei Wang; “The Oculus Project: Solar Sailing to Discover Exoplanets at the Center of Our Galaxy“, authored by Piotr Murzionak, which looked at a gravitational lensing mission based on the ideas of the pioneer Claudio Maccone; “Jude: Solar Sailing A Low Mass Payload to Alpha Centauri-B“, authored by James Harpur, which considered an interstellar solar sail mission. The committee has also created a fun educational exam paper, which we call the ‘interstellar minimum’ – dare you have a go at it? http://i4is.org/the-starship-log/interstellar-minimum
Our biggest technical and educational accomplishment working with the International Space University has been the initiation and completion of a world ship project titled “Astra Planeta” and you can read a copy here: https://isulibrary.isunet.edu/opac/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=9454].
This project was selected as one of the few team projects that the ISU runs each year and it involved over 20 Master’s students. The team also looked at the issues of creating a strategic and technological roadmap for a world ship. But the nice thing about this project, is that it also got supported by representatives from the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop and Icarus Interstellar – so it may be one of the first successful pan-interstellar community projects, and is perhaps a model for the future.
The Technical Research Committee is chaired by Andreas Hein and has the purpose of conducting innovative theoretical and experimental research and development across the broad spectrum of issues relating to interstellar studies, associated sciences and the arts.
The committee’s flagship initiative is Project Dragonfly, which seeks to develop laser-sail propulsion capabilities based on the original ideas of Robert Forward. In the summer, the team ran a Kickstarter award and successfully won over $10,000.
This helped to fund a university affiliated design competition, which included participating teams from Cairo University, Egypt; University of California Santa Barbara, USA; Technical University of Munich, Germany and CranSEDS which involved students from Cranfield University in the UK, Skoltech in Russia and UPS in France. The University of Munich team won the competition with their innovative sail design. The four reports submitted by these teams were highly comprehensive and had to adhere to detailed competition requirements. To celebrate the award, the space artist David A Hardy was commissioned to produce an inspirational piece of art work of the winning design. The Technical Committee is now working on a technology roadmap focussed around the laser-sail technologies and this includes the consideration of actual space missions for the near future.
Image: Schematic of the winning Project Dragonfly design.
Image: David A Hardy commissioned art work of the winning laser-sail design for project Dragonfly.
The committee is also chairing several projects and this has already led to several reports. This includes “Project Sentinel” authored by Sissi Enestam, which described research into emission signals from different potential advanced space transportation systems as a contribution to SETI; “Space Eternal Memory” authored by Melissa Guzman which described methods of preserving and storing information on long duration deep space missions; “Project BAIR: the Black Hole Augmented Interstellar Rocket”, authored by Andrew Alexander, which discussed a black hole engine that utilised the Hawking radiation effect; “Program to Characterise the Local Stellar Environment” authored by Shambo Bhattacharjee. The committee is also currently launching a project relating to von Neumann machines and the Universal Constructor Project. The vision is to enable small interstellar probes to have the capability to build space infrastructures autonomously.
The Sustainability & Research Committee is chaired by Professor Rachel Armstrong and has the purpose of seeking space-based technological solutions to solving problems on Earth and in space, human made or environmental, and improving the human condition and harmonising cultural relations. Through this committee we have begun a relationship with a team of architects and initiated discussions on innovative technologies for the future that we can bring to our metropolis. The committee has also instigated the exciting ‘Starship Cities’ programmes, which seeks to develop the technologies for our society that can truly prepare us for the world ship journeys of the future. This includes looking at living architecture technologies such as protocells, and the ability to utilise them as a form of programmable matter and as a mechanism to simulate biological computing. In the last year the committee also completed a project with the International Space University titled “Biological Life Support Systems for Future Spaceflight Missions” authored by Brian Ramos. The committee is also looking at an innovative experimental architectural platform, upon which many types of experiments could be conducted on an iterative learning basis.
The Business Enterprise Committee is chaired by myself and has the purpose of encouraging entrepreneurship and business innovation initiatives related to the objects. We are currently exploring models for nurturing start-ups and aiming to develop a facilitation scheme over the next year. In addition, the committee is also in discussions with various private inventors about bringing potential products to market to benefit the community. One new company for which we have helped to nurture to fruition is Nebula Sciences (www.nebulasciences.com). This is a company led by Sam Harrison, who also serves on our Enterprise Committee, and conducts high altitude balloon launches into the upper stratosphere. That company is now working with multiple aerospace and marketing ventures throughout the world. The same team earlier placed the i4is logo at 89,000 ft, which was a milestone achievement for us, and demonstrates we are not just talking about theoretical developments.
Image: The i4is Logo at 89,000 ft in the stratosphere
As of our three year anniversary, our team has published over 100 papers, reports, articles and essays, has given over 50 presentations, has produced nearly 100 external and internal blog articles, has held over 30 formal team meetings and around 100 informal team meetings, has been involved with over 50 other external organisations, has participated in over 40 different international events, and today has around 70 people directly involved in our activities in one form or another. We have had media articles in multiple international publications and have participated in online podcasts and radio shows. We have attended or presented at events across the globe, throughout the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. As a part of our participating in the London World Science Fiction convention 2014, our team also built a 4 m tall monolith in what may be a world record (anyone?). Our packed out session at this exciting venue included talks from the world renowned science fiction authors Gregory Benford, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds.
Image: Our Monolith displayed at Loncon3.
We have produced much of our own merchandise including t-shirts, post-cards and a calendar. One of our proudest and longest running achievement is the publication of our popular magazine Principium, and we are currently working on our twelfth issue. This is a popular publication for the community, and we always try to have an article on other organisations activities to help promote their work.
Image: Principium, the popular magazine of i4is.
We also have published our very own book “Beyond the Boundary” which had contributions from other 20 different authors associated with our subject [http://www.lulu.com/shop/http://www.lulu.com/shop/kelvin-long/beyond-the-boundary/hardcover/product-22028046.html]. And just to show that we are technologically minded, we have also developed our very own educational iPhone app. We have also been working with the inspirational artist and musician Alex Storer, and we are now on our fourth interstellar themed music album. This all proves we are engaging the both the arts and the sciences as we attempt to communicate the vision of interstellar travel. We have also recently just launched our own academic journal, Axiom, and we are now working on our second issue.
Image: Music albums, a journal and smartphone app of i4is.
So what about the future? Well, we are currently looking at facilities to host our Head Quarters and our team has visited many locations over the last couple of years and we are excited about the prospect of hosting interstellar events from such a facility. We are also working on another volume of the “Beyond the Boundary” book, as well as more issues of Principium and Axiom. We continue to attend events and this month we are attending Novacon, a science fiction convention held in Nottingham, UK, every year. Our team are busy working on papers for journals and various research projects from which we hope to see progress towards our goal made. We have also recently launched our supporting membership scheme (get in touch if you want to join) and we are planning to extend this in 2016. We are also keen to recruit more active volunteers to help out with our many activities.
One of the things I am personally keen to do in the future is to address how we can take this interstellar community onto the next level. That is, towards a path of constructive co-operation, resource sharing, and more focussed goal setting through inspirational leadership. One proposal I have made towards this, is the formation of an International Interstellar Committee, which would hold a bi-annual interstellar conference for which all of the community would help organise and participate in. Such a body would contain individual organisational membership, preserving their individual identifies and self-autonomy, whilst facilitating a global voice and finding synergies in strategies. It is my opinion, that such an entity may be needed if we are to find ways of harmonising relationships among different groups, but for all have their hearts set on the same goal.
Some still view our endeavours as premature, given the state of human space exploration to date. But I rather believe that now more than ever, there is the need for a visionary stretch goal to focus the energies of our fragmented civilisation. The vision of the stars gives us such promise, about the discovery of other worlds or new life forms. Its such an exciting journey to be a part of and it also has transformation potential for human civilisation, so that we can start to address the universe on its own terms, whether we live in a crowded galaxy, or if we are the only intelligent life out there. I for sure, would like to find out – so let’s build those starships in our lifetime, and go forth with less of our weaknesses and more of our strengths, as a unified people, embracing discovery and adventure as a primary goal. Personally, I can’t think of anything more fulfilling to dedicate one’s life too. At the Initiative for Interstellar Studies, we are making some progress towards that goal.
The Most Distant Dwarf Planet Yet
Back in the days when Clyde Tombaugh was using a blink comparator to search for ‘Planet X,’ finding a new object in the outer Solar System was highly unusual. Uranus had been found in 1781, Neptune in 1846, and I suppose I should add Ceres in 1801, although it’s a good deal closer than the other two. The real point is that the Solar System seemed straightforward in Clyde Tombaugh’s day. There were eight planets and an asteroid belt. It wouldn’t be until 1943 that Kenneth Edgeworth argued that the outer system might have ‘a very large number of comparatively small bodies,’ with Gerard Kuiper publishing his own speculations in 1951.
Estonian astronomer Ernst Öpik first described what we now know as the Oort Cloud in 1932, with Jan Oort, a Dutch astronomer, reviving the idea in 1950. The Oort Cloud was a way to explain why comets behave the way they do. Oort believed that there must be a cometary ‘reservoir’ far away from the Sun — he chose 20,000 AU as a likely range because of the number of long period comets with aphelia at approximately that distance. Moreover, long-period comets seemed to come from all directions of the sky. As we’ve refined the idea and the numbers, we’ve begun to see just how vast the Solar System really is.
None of this is to take anything away from the discovery of the small world called V774104, announced yesterday at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Washington, DC. Astronomer Scott Sheppard (Carnegie Institution for Science) and Chad Trujillo (Gemini Observatory, HI) have found a world 15.4 billion kilometers out, which works out to 103 AU and makes V774104 the most distant dwarf planet known, fully three times further from the Sun than Pluto. In Tombaugh’s day, such a discovery would have been front page news. Today we’ve come to assume that there are a lot of dwarf worlds out there, and expectations are that as our equipment improves, we’ll find plenty more.
Image: A dot moving (slowly) across background stars, V774104 was found about 15 degrees off the ecliptic. Credit: Subaru Telescope by Scott Sheppard, Chad Trujillo, and David Tholen.
V774104 is currently estimated to be between 500 and 1000 kilometers in diameter, less than half Pluto’s size. Just how significant it is in the larger scheme of things has yet to be determined because we’re not yet sure about the parameters of its orbit. Is it, at 103 AU, close to aphelion, and will it eventually swing back toward Neptune, making its orbit the likely result of a gravitational encounter with that planet? Or is V774104 actually something far more unusual, a world similar to Sedna and VP113 in being a possible member of the inner Oort Cloud?
Neither Sedna nor VP113 comes close enough to the Sun to experience gravitational effects from the giant planets. In fact, both stay outside 50 AU, thought to be the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt, and have aphelia as distant as 1000 AU. Colin at the Armagh Planetarium site notes the problem in V774104: Could a Dark World Put a New Light on Solar System History?:
…the current highly elliptical orbits of Sednoids cannot be their original orbits, the chance of smaller bodies in such eccentric paths accreting into objects hundreds of kilometres across is fantastically low. Sednoids must have originally formed in relatively circular orbits, possibly in the Oort Cloud.
So how did they get where they are today? One possibility to explain their orbits is that they reflect conditions in the Solar System’s infancy, when the young Sun was in a local environment rich in nearby stars. The other possibility is one that Percival Lowell would have loved. There may be a large, rocky planet out there that has elongated previously circular orbits.
The data from the 8-meter Subaru instrument in Hawaii that produced V774104 have also yielded a number of other objects roughly 80 to 90 AU from the Sun, all of which will need lengthy follow-up study to clarify the nature of their orbits. Like V774104, any of these might join Sedna and VP113 in never coming closer to the Sun than 50 AU. We may be about to see a surge in the numbers of dwarf worlds in this unusual category. Explaining why a region once thought to be empty is not should occupy astronomers and theorists for years to come.
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