Centauri Dreams

As I write, we’re thirteen and a half days out from the Pluto/Charon encounter. New Horizons will make its closest approach to Pluto at 0749 EDT (1149 UTC) on July 14. All of which has had me reading Pluto-related science fiction that I missed along the way, including most recently Wilson Tucker’s “To the Tombaugh Station.” The story, which ran in the July, 1960 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction, is a murder investigation that includes a journey to the station of the title, which had been established to investigate a ‘Planet X’ still further out in the system. Isaac Asimov has an essay on Pluto in this issue as well.

Image: The cover of the July, 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction shows a generic moon landing scene by artist Mel Hunter. But if you look at it with our post-1978 (discovery of Charon) eyes, it could be seen as an imaginative take on a Pluto landing, with the Earth on the horizon being replaced by Charon. Given the prominence of “To the Tombaugh Station” on the cover, I found myself doing a double-take.

As to the real Pluto, we now learn that the infrared spectrometer on New Horizons has detected frozen methane on the surface, a compound first observed on the dwarf planet as early as 1976. What New Horizons will bring to the table is the chance to study differences in methane ice from one part of the surface to another. According to this NASA news release, Dale Cruikshank (NASA Ames, and a member of the New Horizons team) led the team of ground-based astronomers that made the original methane detection.

Image: The location of the New Horizons Ralph instrument, which detected methane on Pluto, is shown. The inset is a false color image of Pluto and Charon in infrared light; pink indicates methane on Pluto’s surface. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

I hope you’re taking advantage of the fact that the raw images from New Horizons are being made available on the JHU/APL website. There you can see images from the spacecraft’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) displayed without special processing. They’re posted within about 48 hours after coming in to the New Horizons Science Operations Center.

And below is the latest time-lapse movie, this one showing changes in the apparent size of Pluto and Charon as the spacecraft moves from 56 million kilometers to 22 million kilometers. The images involved in this time-lapse approach movie were taken between May 28 and June 25. Pluto continues to show a surface marked by a bright northern hemisphere, with darker material in a discontinuous band along the equator. It’s exciting to see differences emerging on Charon as well, along with the previously noted dark polar region.

The short video below is an annotated version of the above in which Pluto’s prime meridian (the region of the planet that faces Charon) is shown in yellow and the equator is shown in pink.

New Horizons’ Alice ultraviolet imaging spectrograph performed a test observation of the Sun on June 16 (this from a distance of 5 billion kilometers) to use in the interpretation of atmospheric observations to be taken on July 14. On that day, not long after the Pluto flyby, the spacecraft will study sunlight as it passes through Pluto’s atmosphere. New Horizons scientist Randy Gladstone (SwRI) puts it well: “It will be as if Pluto were illuminated from behind by a trillion-watt light bulb.” That backlight will tell us much about the atmosphere’s composition.

A thruster burn beginning at 1101 EDT (1501 UTC) on June 29, stopping 23 seconds later, was used to make the smallest of the nine course corrections since the spacecraft’s launch in 2006. New Horizons changed velocity by 27 centimeters per second, making a slight adjustment to its arrival time and position at close approach and flyby. The difference upon arrival: The craft would have reached close approach 20 seconds late without the burn, and 184 kilometers off-target.

“This maneuver was perfectly performed by the spacecraft and its operations team,” added mission principal investigator Alan Stern, of Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. “Now we’re set to fly right down the middle of the optimal approach corridor.”

Planet formation can be tricky business. Consider that our current models for core accretion show dust grains embedded in a protoplanetary disk around a young star. Mixing with rotating gas, the dust undergoes inevitable collisions, gradually bulking up to pebble size, then larger. As the scale increases, we move through to planetesimals, bodies of at least one kilometer in size, which are large enough to attract each other gravitationally. Some planetesimals break apart through subsequent collisions, but a few grow into protoplanets, then planets themselves.

It’s a reasonable theory that fits what we see around young stars as solar systems take hold. But what Alan Boss (Carnegie Institution for Science) has been working on is a question raised by the process: How do the dust grains and objects smaller than planetesimals keep from being drawn into the protostar before they can become large enough to attract the materials they need to grow? The pressure gradient of the gas in the disk should make smaller objects — particularly those between 1 and 10 meters in radius — spiral inward to inevitable destruction.

By modeling the interactions between protoplanetary disks and their stars, however, Boss has come up with a proposed solution. Stars like the Sun can undergo explosive bursts of a century or so in duration, accompanied by an increase in the luminosity of the star. An explosive phase like this, which Boss’s paper argues can be linked to a period of gravitational instability in the disk, can scatter objects in the 1 to 10-meter range outward from the infant star.

Image: An artist’s concept showing a young stellar object and the whirling accretion disk surrounding it. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The paper refers to the disruptions of the disk under scrutiny as ‘marginally gravitationally unstable phases of evolution’ (MGU), but they’re more widely known as ‘FU Orionis events.’ The star FU Orionis is a pre-main sequence star showing just this range of fluctuation in magnitude. It has given its name to the entire class, with other examples being V1057 Cyg and V1647 Orionis. We’re apparently seeing mass from an accretion disk falling into the young star, creating a high-luminosity phase that can persist for lengthy periods.

It has been suggested that eruptions like these can occur from 10 to 20 times as a young star matures. The event is, in any case, striking when it occurs. When V1057 Cyg was first observed undergoing this behavior in 1970, it increased in brightness by 5.5 magnitudes (going from 17th magnitude to 12th) over a multi-year interval. But we have a lot to learn. No FU Orionis star has yet been seen shutting down from its high-luminosity phase. Mike Simonsen provides an excellent background discussion of FU Orionis stars in The Furor over FUORs.

Boss modeled protoplanetary disks undergoing FU Orionis events for disks at 1 to 10 AU containing a wide variety of solid particle sizes subject to gas drag and gravitational forces. Backing up this model of gravitational interaction, recent work has shown that young stars can form spiral arms in their disks like those thought to be involved in the disruptive events Boss has studied. The gravitational forces produced by these spiral arms may be the key to scattering boulder-sized bodies so that they can survive gas drag and grow into planetesimals.

Larger bodies, then, have a chance to survive. Boss’ models showed that over time scales of ~6 X 10³ years or longer, about half the gaseous disk mass was accreted onto the protostar, but during this same period, few objects between 1 and 10 meters were lost through inward migration. A much greater fraction of particles between 1 and 10 centimeters were lost to the protostar during the same period, but even here, a significant fraction survive.

“This work,” Boss adds, “shows that boulder-sized particles could, indeed, be scattered around the disk by the formation of spiral arms and then avoid getting dragged into the protostar at the center of the developing system. Once these bodies are in the disk’s outer regions, they are safe and able to grow into planetesimals. While not every developing protostar may experience this kind of short-term gravitational disruption phase, it is looking increasingly likely that they may be much more important for the early phases of terrestrial planet formation than we thought.”

The paper is Boss, “Orbital Survival of Meter-size and Larger Bodies During Gravitationally Unstable Phases of Protoplanetary Disk Evolution,” Astrophysical Journal Vol. 807 (July 1, 2015), No. 1, 10 (abstract).

Objects that seem younger than they ought to be attract attention. Take the so-called ‘blue stragglers.’ Found in open or globular clusters, they’re more luminous than the cluster stars around them, defying our expectation that stars that formed at about the same time should develop consistent with their neighbors. Allan Sandage discovered the first blue stragglers back in 1953 while working on the globular cluster M3. Because blue stragglers are more common in the dense core regions of globular clusters, they may be binary stars that have merged, but a number of theories exist, most of them focusing on interactions within a given cluster.

Image: The center of globular cluster NGC 6397, in an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: Francesco Ferraro (Bologna Observatory), ESA, NASA.

Now we may have found a planet that seems to be younger than it ought to be. Michael Jura (UCLA) and team report on the results in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, making the case that a planet orbiting an aging red giant may feed off mass flowing outward from its dying primary. A red giant can lose half its mass or more as it makes the transition to white dwarf, with sheets of material flowing into the outer system where aging gas giants may lurk.

Thus the white dwarf PG 0010+280, noted for its unexpectedly bright infrared signature in data UCLA student Blake Pantoja examined from the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission. Spitzer observations from 2006 confirmed the excess of infrared, which could come from a small companion star — conceivably a brown dwarf — or a planet that has been rejuvenated by the inflow. The paper is careful to examine a range of alternatives, but further work is definitely called for given that this might represent planetary survival after the red giant phase.

At this point, we don’t have a good understanding of how common planets are around white dwarfs. Direct imaging has turned up a large gas giant at about 2500 AU orbiting the white dwarf WD 0806-661, and we also have theoretical calculations showing that planets can survive a red giant phase and remain in orbit around a white dwarf if they’re more than several AU out. Systems like this look to be unstable, with surviving minor planets eventually accreting onto the white dwarf to produce an enriched stellar atmosphere or a disk around the star.

Image: This artist’s concept shows a hypothetical “rejuvenated” planet — a gas giant that has reclaimed its youthful infrared glow. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope found tentative evidence for one such planet around a dead star, or white dwarf, called PG 0010+280 (depicted as white dot in illustration). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Digging around in the new paper, I learn that we find dust disks around about four percent of white dwarfs, with all of those so far studied also showing an atmosphere enriched with heavy elements like oxygen, magnesium, silicon and iron. These elements have been assumed to be leftover materials from asteroids pulled apart by gravitational forces. An excess at infrared wavelengths is one way researchers have looked for low-mass companions around white dwarfs, and the first assumption about PG 0010+280 surely went in the same direction.

But as we learn, this is one white dwarf that does not fit the model for asteroid disks well. PG 0010+280 shows an infrared excess but no sign of heavy elements. From the paper:

Its unique infrared color as well as the non-detection of heavy elements with high-resolution spectroscopic observations suggest a possible alternative origin than white dwarfs with infrared excess from a circumstellar disk. From fitting the SED [Spectral Energy Distribution], we can not exclude models of either an opaque dust disk within the tidal radius or a substellar object at 1300 K, from an irradiated object or a re-heated planet. Future observations, particularly with spectroscopic observations in the ultraviolet and near-infrared, could reveal the nature of the infrared excess.

To fit the data, a cool brown dwarf would need a radius too small to produce the observed infrared excess, while a hot brown dwarf (re-heated during the red giant phase) would be too hot. A re-heated giant planet remains a real possibility, and the paper adds that spectroscopy in the near-infrared might be able to detect the signature of such a world, whose rejuvenation would leave a huge amount of dust in its atmosphere. “Due to possible accretion of carbon-rich material, the composition of the object’s atmosphere could be substantially modified and display CH₄ and CO.”

A gas giant like the one hypothesized here would be about ten times the size of its primary — white dwarfs are about the size of the Earth, and as this JPL news release notes, such a star would be small enough to easily fit inside the Great Red Spot on Jupiter.

The paper is Xu et al., “A Young White Dwarf with an Infrared Excess,” Astrophysical Journal Letters Vol. 806, No. 1 (abstract / preprint). Thanks to Ashley Baldwin for the pointer on this one.