'Mathematically Perfect' Star System Being Investigated For Potential Alien Tech 71
Astronomers are investigating a star system 100 light-years away with six sub-Neptune planets in near-perfect orbital resonance, piquing the interest of scientists searching for alien technology, or technosignatures. Space.com reports: To be clear, no such evidence was found in the system, dubbed HD 110067. However, the researchers say they're not done looking yet. HD 11067 remains an interesting target for similar observations in the future. In our own tiny pocket of the cosmos, radio waves from satellites and telescopes beaming out in the plane of our solar system, meaning that if somebody outside our solar system watched Earth cross the face of our sun, they'd maybe be able to pick up a signal that coincides with the planet's transit.
HD 110067 is viewed edge on from Earth, so we are seeing the six planets in the plane of their system -- a view that gives us an excellent chance of picking up such a signal if there exists one, study co-author Steve Croft, a radio astronomer working with the life-searching Breakthrough Listen program at the University of California, Berkeley, told Space.com "Our technology in our own solar system has spread outside the habitable zone," Croft told Space.com. So technology-friendly civilization in HD 110067, if any, may have communication relays set up on multiple planets in the system, he said. "Even if it is a negative result, that still tells us something."
When HD 110067's discovery was announced, Croft and his team used the world's largest fully steerable telescope, the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, and searched the system for signs of alien technology. The researchers looked for signals that were continuously present when the telescope was pointed at the system and absent when directed away, the smoking gun of technosignatures local to HD 110067. But such signals are difficult to distinguish from natural sources of radio waves and humankind's own technological signals, such as radio waves beaming from cell phones connected to Wi-Fi, SpaceX's Starlink satellite network in low Earth orbit. This creates a haystack of signals in which researchers look for a needle of a potential extraterrestrial signal, said Croft. "I should add we don't know if there are needles in the haystack," he said. "We don't really know what the needles look like." The research has been published in the journal Research Notes of the AAS.
HD 110067 is viewed edge on from Earth, so we are seeing the six planets in the plane of their system -- a view that gives us an excellent chance of picking up such a signal if there exists one, study co-author Steve Croft, a radio astronomer working with the life-searching Breakthrough Listen program at the University of California, Berkeley, told Space.com "Our technology in our own solar system has spread outside the habitable zone," Croft told Space.com. So technology-friendly civilization in HD 110067, if any, may have communication relays set up on multiple planets in the system, he said. "Even if it is a negative result, that still tells us something."
When HD 110067's discovery was announced, Croft and his team used the world's largest fully steerable telescope, the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, and searched the system for signs of alien technology. The researchers looked for signals that were continuously present when the telescope was pointed at the system and absent when directed away, the smoking gun of technosignatures local to HD 110067. But such signals are difficult to distinguish from natural sources of radio waves and humankind's own technological signals, such as radio waves beaming from cell phones connected to Wi-Fi, SpaceX's Starlink satellite network in low Earth orbit. This creates a haystack of signals in which researchers look for a needle of a potential extraterrestrial signal, said Croft. "I should add we don't know if there are needles in the haystack," he said. "We don't really know what the needles look like." The research has been published in the journal Research Notes of the AAS.
Why is the plane important? (Score:1)
Re:Why is the plane important? (Score:5, Informative)
If the various planets are communicating with each other, and using something resembling a beam of photons to do it, most of the scatter that escapes is going to be in or near the plane of their planetary system. If they're not using beams, it matters less, but they probably are. We do.
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curious.
are there other parts of the known universe with similar configurations.
from my perspective.
humanity can not get those dam quantum computers working fast enough
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Does the planet go radio-silent when it's behind its sun? Does the Earth go radio-silent for those planets when the Earth is relatively behind our Sun from them?
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Even Earth won't go totally dark, thanks to the Deep Space Network allowing us to send signals on a roundabout path around the Sun.
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TLDR; does not do what OP said it did.
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Until you build energy collection devices fully around stars, the power required to connect 100 cavitations per mi
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All our probes have been launched inline with the orbital plane to take advantage of planetary gravity assists to get them out of Sol's gravity well. If you're communicating with your probes, you're going to be broadcasting along the same plane, which increases the odds of emissions in our direction. If those probes are on the far side of that solar system, they will also be broadcasting in our direction, albeit at a bee's fart of a power level. Mal-2 has already highlighted the possibility of interplanetar
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The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) was replaced by Solid State Phased Array Radar System (SSPARS) because Russia still has ICBMs. The system still emits narrow band, narrow beam, high power radar pulses.
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Whoops! (Score:3)
Looks like we're missing Arecibo right about now... I guess the aliens will be making first contact with the Chinese.
Re:Whoops! (Score:5, Insightful)
If the worldwide science community had bothered to donate the funds required to maintain it, it would still be around. But they didn't, so here we are.
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Well, if they're hungry I hope they'll be satisfied with Chinese food.
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It's like they say: You can detect an entire signal from HD 110067, but 30 minutes later you're ready to detect another.
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Looks like we're missing Arecibo right about now... I guess the aliens will be making first contact with the Chinese.
They would have done that anyways. The larger local food source is the natural place to initially land. :-)
Three Body Problem and Dark Forest (Score:2)
I guess the aliens will be making first contact with the Chinese.
We saw how well that ended for humanity. [wikipedia.org]
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https://www.seti.org/ata [seti.org]
Sponsored by Windows 95 Lic Fees, if it makes you feel smug.
Gas giants, Aliens, Perfect (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Maybe the orange dude is from there: he's an oddly tinted gassy giant with a Tribble on his head.
-5 Troll
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Orange being says: It was a perfect star system. So perfect
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"Every Orion ho says so!"
We're fucked (Score:5, Funny)
They should be picking up our radio signals from the 1920s now, which means they'll start aiming their telescopes this way. Then in 20 years they'll see WWII play out. Following that they'll see nukes go off periodically during the cold war nuclear testing, but the icing on the cake will be when they start getting episodes of Jerry Springer. I mean, given all that .. what would YOU do if you were the aliens? Keep in mind the aliens watching it would most likely in possession of advanced technology such as a deathstar laser they've never had a chance to try out.
Re:We're fucked (Score:5, Interesting)
I know you're being tongue in cheek, but on a more serious point - there's no guarantee aliens could translate/understand our language and/or culture even assuming they could figure out our broadcast encoding methods.
Scientists have been trying to figure out what animals are saying since god was a boy and even more so recently but we still have little idea what even our close relatives likes chimps mean when they hoot, never mind whales or lions etc. And they're mammals that evolved on the same planet as us. Imagine trying to figure out what an alien organism is saying when it might have a completely different experience of the universe and think in a completely different way.
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Scientists have been trying to figure out quipus ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) for a few centuries. Hieroglyphics took a little miracle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ). Those are even closer than other mammals.
Yeah, decrypting random EM noise into a communication method you know nothing about does sound like a very long shot.
OTOH: if they're capable enough to listen and guess that we're happening, pointing telescopes isn't that much of a stretch. Assuming they see in a similar spectrum as we d
Re:We're fucked (Score:5, Informative)
Analog radio should be easy .. old black and white television should be just as easy --- the signal repeats and has periodicity. NTSC color is not very difficult either .. they'll have to guess we only see three primary colors -- and that should be fairly obvious upon analysis of enough signals.
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Hieroglyphics took a little miracle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ). Those are even closer than other mammals.
It's all about having a native speaker. Someone who can point at a glyph and then point at a thing, or act something out, etc. Perhaps our broadcasts can function as that native speaker for them to make the associations. And as mention earlier, in 1969 we started broadcasting Sesame Street. :-)
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They should be able to figure out our analog transmissions. Radio and black & white television signals should be decipherable fairly easily .. the signal has enough periodicity and structure (repeated lines). Then figuring out the color NTSC signal shouldn't be that hard either. Language should be figure-outable after they analyze enough video and see words and images .. even if they don't catch children's shows like Sesame Street. What will be hard to decipher will be HDTV signals.
They learned English from Sesame Street in 1969 (Score:2)
I know you're being tongue in cheek, but on a more serious point - there's no guarantee aliens could translate/understand our language and/or culture even assuming they could figure out our broadcast encoding methods.
Sure they could, as soon as they receive the Sesame Street broadcasts that started in 1969.
Scientists have been trying to figure out what animals are saying since god was a boy and even more so recently but we still have little idea what even our close relatives likes chimps mean when they hoot, never mind whales or lions etc.
An alien species advanced enough to move stars may find that less difficult than we do.
And they're mammals that evolved on the same planet as us.
It's not clear any of those have a language in the human sense. Scope, abstraction, math, etc. Communication is not necessarily language as we understand it. It may be quite limited.
Imagine trying to figure out what an alien organism is saying when it might have a completely different experience of the universe and think in a completely different way.
People have been working on that. They seem to generally begin with mathematics and fundamental concepts of physics and chemistry.
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Conversely animals can figure out human words like "sit", "roll over", or "walk". Maybe we're easier to understand than animals are.
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Err, can be trained to respond to certain sounds. On the other hand, cats seem to have evolved a meow to trigger the parenting (feeding) instinct in people, dogs as well seem to have evolved means of communicating with humans.
All these happened after generations of close contact.
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>cats seem to have evolved a meow to trigger the parenting (feeding) instinct in people
in the wild/near species, cats only meow to mothers, not adult cats.
So, yes, that is *exactly* the role.
Mom! Mom! Mom!
>dogs as well seem to have evolved means of communicating with humans.
dogs have one more muscle than other wolves. It is between the eyes, and allows them to make an expression closer to human babies.
Orbital Mechanics (Score:2)
there's no guarantee aliens could translate/understand our language and/or culture even assuming they could figure out our broadcast encoding methods.
If they have the technology to arrange Neptune-sized planets in perfect orbits decoding our language and broadcast methods is unlikely to pose much of a challenge to them if they find us interesting enough to try. We've figured out how other animals communicate, even ones as different from us as bees.
However, given that all these planets are so close to their star that the longest period is 55 days I suspect that this is just a natural occurrence due to the rapid orbits all in close proximity. However,
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Star Trek 4 - human chauvinism to think that these aliens aren't already communicating with the intelligent species on our planet; the whales.
Arrival - Amy Adams deciphers the communication of giant squids.
The aliens are probably debating on their version of Slashdot as to whether they should use their sun's planetary alignments to create a slingshot to send faster than light communications back in time to warn us of our demise and thus avoid WW2 in the first place.
Such an alternative timeline that diverged
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We may not be able to understand the language, but when we see them use a tool, we understand what the tool is supposed to do and why it works and even how it works.
So if they see a mushroom cloud a few times on the video they intercepted, they may not know if it was a nuke or a huge TNT explosion, but they will know it's some form of WMD usage or testing for development.
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Or a system with asteroids regularly hitting a planet.
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The radioactive signature will say otherwise.
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They should be picking up our radio signals from the 1920s now, which means they'll start aiming their telescopes this way. Then in 20 years they'll see WWII play out.
IIRC the signals get too weak after a few tens of light years to be distinguishable from background noise.
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It depends on the antenna specifications. If they've got planet-sized antennas they could pick it up. We get the signal from the Voyager space probes, which are about 24 light-hours away, on a DSN antenna of diameter 70 meters. Since their planetary system is about 1 million times as far, they'll need an antenna around the diameter of Saturn to pickup that signal. That's huge, but if they are moving Neptune sized planets around building such an antenna shouldn't be hard for them.
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>If they've got planet-sized antennas they could pick it up.
"That's no planet . . . it's an antenna!"
hawk wan kenobi
Re: We're fucked (Score:2)
So we should be looking for the wakes of stardrive ships moving civilizations away from our direction.
The Resonances (Score:2)
"the first planet makes three orbits for every two of the second planet. The exact same dynamics play out between the next two planets. The fourth planet is computed to make four orbits for every three of the fifth planet, which, in turn, makes four orbits around the star for every three of the outermost planet."
Of course, there are asteroids in similar resonance with Jupiter and Io, Europa, and Ganymede are in a 1:2:4 resonance around J
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From https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ad235f [iop.org] "the first planet makes three orbits for every two of the second planet. The exact same dynamics play out between the next two planets. The fourth planet is computed to make four orbits for every three of the fifth planet, which, in turn, makes four orbits around the star for every three of the outermost planet." Of course, there are asteroids in similar resonance with Jupiter and Io, Europa, and Ganymede are in a 1:2:4 resonance around Jupiter
The funniest part to me, in tandem with the resonance, is that it's at 100 LY distance. Did the beings that made the simulation plant it out there as a test? "Let's see how long it takes the clever simulants to find this easter egg."
More seriously, the universe is so vast that the improbability of any given mathematical perfection in one star system, maybe even many, is nearly zero. Infinite infinity most likely contains ever possible permutation many, many times over. It's a fun coincidence, and I'm all fo
"Mathematical perfect" is nothing unusual (Score:5, Insightful)
So I would not expect any alien technology there, just normal planetary harmonics.
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The three major inner moons of Jupiter have a resonance of 4:2:1.
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The Titius-Bode law is now considered coincidence. Otherwise, you're correct, celestial orbits have a tendency to form resonances.
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So I would not expect any alien technology there, just normal planetary harmonics.
The problem is, neither do they expect any. With a probability almost approaching unity, you are almost certainly not a research academic in the field of orbital mechanics. And yet ten seconds of rubbing two thoughts together in a row told you the same thing that it told me, that their assertion is a load of overstated nonsense. Which means they know exactly the same thing.
They are just using this to generate funding. Which is borderline (or even not so borderline) academic malfeasance.
They should look deeper into the resonance. (Score:2)
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Our own solar system has a bunch of similar resonances as well, so that's not really something new. This seems to be something orbiting bodies just do. This particular system is very small, so in spite of the star being young its planets have had time to complete many, many orbits and settle ever closer to "perfect" resonances as well as eject anything that was not in a self-correcting resonance.
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I'm willing to bet everything I own (Score:2)
It isn't aliens.
Humanity may one day move the Earth into Mars' current orbit to avoid the expanding Sun (we already have the technology, but it's a multi-million year job and we probably don't have the will or patience and we're a long way from the need).
But that involves exchanging orbital energy between Jupiter and Earth. Nobody is going to find the energy to move around sub-Neptunian planets just to make a pretty arrangement. The idea that anybody would actually do this is so stupid that you should pro
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It isn't aliens.
Humanity may one day move the Earth into Mars' current orbit to avoid the expanding Sun (we already have the technology, but it's a multi-million year job and we probably don't have the will or patience and we're a long way from the need).
We're in a world obsessed with Just In Time methodologies. Ain't no way we'll look at a project that long term with any form of seriousness today.
But that involves exchanging orbital energy between Jupiter and Earth. Nobody is going to find the energy to move around sub-Neptunian planets just to make a pretty arrangement. The idea that anybody would actually do this is so stupid that you should probably sneer at any (formerly) serious scientist willing to have their name associated with it.
I'm of the opinion that the most likely explanation for this is probably the randomness of the universe combined with the sheer scope of everything out there showing giving us a pretty pattern to study in a near enough star system we can now see it. That said, you're looking at a very narrow view of possible tech if you say it absolutely can not be tech-related, f
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It's a matter of time and energy. It is not easy to move a planet, and it isn't quick. Typically the most efficient way is to use an intermediary mass to transfer momentum between two masses... Which requires that intermediary to travel between the two masses. You're unlikely to go interstellar with this due to the required travel times and extra challenges with plotting the required courses, and there is only so much mass to use within a single planetary disk.
To make matters worse, the planets under dis
Fleet of Worlds (Score:5, Insightful)
Orbital Resonance (Score:2)
the orbits of all three confirmed planets existing nearly perfectly in what scientists call resonance. That is, the first planet makes three orbits for every two of the second planet. The exact same dynamics play out between the next two planets. The fourth planet is computed to make four orbits for every three of the fifth planet, which, in turn, makes four orbits around the star for every three of the outermost planet.
In our own solar system, Pluto is in a similar resonance with Neptune (it circles our sun twice for every three orbits of Neptune).
Isn't that what they always do? (Score:2)
I'm not a physicist but I seem to recall reading that over a long period of time it's likely that gravitational attraction can sync up orbits in a resonant pattern....if we're talking about largeish planets aligned on the same plane and relatively close to each other it sounds like the perfect environment for resonance to form.
I'm not saying it's aliens but... (Score:2)
It's aliens.
Couple Qs, love some As. (Score:2)
And am I misreading this but is that not a bit on the small side? "All of the planetary orbits in the HD 110067 system are closer to their star than distance between the planet Mercury and the Sun."
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The star has the letter A, then the letters are assigned on discovery of other objects in the system. As for the orbits, lots of dwarf red stars with very tight orbits of their planetary systems. Red dwarf's are closer in size to Jupiter then the Sun.
Mathematically perfect, you say? (Score:1)
A mathematically perfect star system deserves a mathematically perfect name. I propose we name this system PEANUT HAMPER!
Better hope... (Score:2)
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space
'Cause it's bugger all down here on Earth
~
I'm more afraid...of shitty technical reporting (Score:2)
Well first, I'm no mathematician, but where astronometrics are concerned, 'nearly perfect' is a pretty big distance from 'perfect'.
Further, as far as I can see the SCIENTISTS seem to call it resonant but the term 'nearly mathematically perfect' seems to come from the reporter.
And hell, even the scientists are sketchy, to wit this quote from one of the co-authors:
""If the galaxy was the Empire State Building, we can only see and detect the planets next to stars that have apartments on our floor," study co-au