BAN #128: Nerd disses, ‘Oumumua still isn’t a spaceship, wild ducks

[Saturn image credit: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute / Gordan Ugarkovic]

Book ’em

Sometimes I read books

Hey! This is issue #128, which is also equal to 2^7 (i.e., 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2). That is also the number of nerd insults in the book “2^7 Nerd Disses: A Significant Quantity of Disrespect”, a collection of intelligent insults I wrote with Zach Weinersmith (yes, that Zach Weinersmith) and illustrated by Jess Fink.

So apropos of that and nothing else, I’m plugging it. Enjoy.

Space news

Space is big. That’s why we call it “space”

I’ve written about ‘Oumuamua approximately eleventy bazillion times, so hopefully by now you know a little about it: It was a chunk of rock discovered as it was passing through the inner solar system, and had so much excess speed it was clear it came from interstellar space. It’s the first true interstellar object we’ve ever seen in our own solar system.

Its behavior was… odd. Nothing that by itself would make you freak out, but just a lot of weird stuff all together. It came from the stars. Its shape is apparently highly elongated. It seems to be slowing too much as it left the inner solar system, as if it were venting gas, as some comets do… but none was detected. Things like that.

A paper came out from a pair of scientists at Harvard saying the behavior was compatible with it being an alien spacecraft. I found this claim to be far-fetched, to say the least. The logic of it was internally inconsistent, and while their claim that it might be very thin, like a solar sail, was mathematically possible, it didn’t necessarily mean that was the case. It could me more like a very low density snowflake, in fact.

[Artwork depicting ‘Oumuamua. Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, ESO, M. Kornmesser]

A new paper has come out pretty much putting the nail in the coffin of this alien spaceship claim. It’s technical, but one of the authors has written an accessible blog post showing what’s what. He takes apart the clams one by one, showing that it’s more likely ‘Oumuamua is a natural — if still weird — object.

Well, yeah. I agree. And it’s still exciting! It implies that a great many of such objects are passing through our solar system all the time, and they’re too small and/or far away to see easily. But bigger ‘scopes that can see fainter objects all over the sky are coming online in the next few years, so we may spot a lot more ‘Oumuamuas, and when we do we’ll learn some fun things about how other solar systems behave. Why are these objects ejected? Are their chemical makeups different than ours? How does all this affect planet formation?

There’s a lot we can learn from such objects, as long as we keep our heads about them. Wondering if something is an artifact is fine; I’d hate to miss a true alien signal due to an overabundance of skepticism. But we also have to remember that the Universe is a damn strange place, and that while “alien” can be on our list of explanations for a given phenomenon, it should be way down that list.

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a short description so you can grok it

I love scanning the summer Milky Way with binoculars or a low power telescope, especially towards the region marked by Sagittarius and Scorpius. That’s looking toward the center of the galaxy, so you’re looking across the galactic disk to the hub, where a lot of the action is. There’s tons of stars, gas clouds, and other sights you can just stumble over by accident.

One nice one is Messier 11, also called the Wild Duck cluster (if you let your eyes defocus a bit when looking at it it kinda sorta resembles a flock of ducks flying). At about 6,000 light years away its collective brightness (adding all the stars together) is such that it’s technically visible to the naked eye, but that part of the sky (in the constellation Scutum) is so crowded it’s very difficult. It’s obvious in binoculars though, and has thousands of stars in it.

And that makes it an excellent target for Hubble:

[M11, the Wild Duck cluster, seen by Hubble. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, P. Dobbie et al.]

Yowza. I love all the different star colors! This image is the combination of two different filters, one that lets blue light through and another centered closer to yellow. The astronomers were looking to observe white dwarfs in the cluster, the super-dense remains of stars that were once much like the Sun. In this case they’re looking for ones that are particularly massive, left over from stars that started out life with 5 – 10 times the Sun’s mass. Stars even a bit more massive than this explode as supernovae, leaving behind neutron stars or black holes, so these white dwarfs are themselves about as massive as they can get. We don’t know much about them, so looking for stars very near the ends of their lives in this cluster will help astronomers understand them.

I’ve seen this cluster many times myself, but of course never like this. Maybe this summer, when it’s over the southern horizon, I’ll take a poke at it with my ‘scope. I think it will look just as cool, just in a very different way. There’s nothing like having those photons hit your own eyes after a few thousand years of journey across the galaxy.

Et alia

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