JWST M51 image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team

You may be aware that I write a weekly column for Scientific American posted every Friday. I cover things going on in the sky, explainers, and the like. It’s fun!

Once a month or so I also write an OpEd piece, where I express and hopefully factually back up an opinion I have about something astronomical or more generally science-based. 

What I wrote for this month’s opinion piece is about the problematic names we give things, from JWST to racist/sexist monuments, astronomical objects, and even software, and how people sometimes dig in when we try to fix these issues.

For the most part, in that piece I lay the blame at the feet of personal identity and the feeling that when these poorly-named objects are attacked, we ourselves are being attacked. And hey, in some cases it’s true; if you identify with Confederate generals and other enslavers then I have no problem at all attacking your values.

But more than that, a lot of the reticence to rename these objects is due to a dearth of empathy, an inability for some people to see that they are not the main character, the standard against which all others are to be judged. The iconic example of this in my mind is the phrase “regular people”, one that was used a lot in the 1970s to mean “white Americans”, implying that anyone not white and straight were “irregular”, somehow lesser, other. This implies there is a standard American, and anyone not like them didn’t deserve the same consideration, or even the same rights.

I’ve written about this many times, including the fact that I too was under the sway of this type of thinking until embarrassingly late in life. It’s very us-vs-them, which is a powerful force over the way we think. I see it all the time online, and it’s exhausting, perhaps even more so because I went through it and a lot of my brain is still dedicated to shaming myself about it. It’s hard to stand up to yourself and say, “Yes, I was an utter ass, and I should feel bad about that, but I’m better now and still working on improving every day.”

Use that feeling to make things better, if you can. Turning negatives into positives is also a powerful force, and a pretty good one.

SPECULOOS has done it again: The weirdly named project has found a third tiny red dwarf star with an Earth-sized planet orbiting it [link to journal paper].

SPECULOOS stands for the Search for Planets Eclipsing Ultra-cool Stars. It uses arrays of small telescopes to look at nearby stars for transits, the mini-eclipses created when an orbiting planet blocks a small fraction of its host star’s light as it passes directly in front of it once per orbit. The project specifically targets very low-mass red dwarfs, ones with a tenth the mass of the Sun or less. These stars are small, not much bigger than Jupiter, which makes it easier to see transiting planets: the fraction of the star blocked by the planet is larger than it would be for a bigger star like the Sun.

The first planets the SPECULOOS project found were orbiting TRAPPIST-1, which is only 40 light-years away. A total of seven Earth-sized planets orbit that dim bulb of a star, three of which may have surface conditions that make them potentially habitable (I wrote a whole chapter on the TRAPPIST-1 system in my book Under Alien Skies).

Another star, LP 890-9, was found by the project to host a super-Earth (a planet somewhat bigger than Earth); a planet had already been seen in TESS data there as well.

The new planet, called SPECULOOS-3b, is almost exactly the same size as Earth. It orbits the star every 17 hours at a distance of only a million kilometers—close enough that even the faint light from the star heats the planet to well above the boiling point of water. So it’s not Earth-like at all.

But then the first planets found around TRAPPIST-1 were close in and hot as well! There might be more planets in this system farther out. The astronomers looked for them in the data and ruled out anything bigger than 1.5 times the diameter of Earth that takes less than 10 days to orbit the star. That distance includes the star’s habitable zone, where liquid water can exist on the surface of a planet. However, they wouldn’t detect smaller (Earth-sized) planets with orbits shorter than a day, so it’s possible some still exist at the right distance to be potentially habitable. It’s too early to say.

I love this sort of thing. Besides always being interested in these low-mass stars, I also like the numbers: low-mass red dwarfs dominate all stars in the galaxy, making up 70-80% of the total. We’re finding that they tend to have planets, and these planets also tend to be smaller rocky ones like Earth! So, statistically speaking, it’s likely that most habitable planets in the Milky Way have a red star shining in their sky. And there could be tens of billions of them.

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