Twin Suns May Spell Disaster

Twin Suns May Spell Disaster: "

The image of double suns rising over the planet Tatooine from the first Star Wars movie never quite goes away. I remember watching the film in a theater about a week after its release, being dazzled by the visuals but thinking that a planet in an orbit around both stars of a binary would have to be well outside the habitable zone. I didn’t believe in Tatooine, in other words, though now I’m a bit more circumspect. A couple of years ago Cheongho Han (Chungbuk National University, Korea) wrote a paper suggesting that microlensing might be of use in finding a planet fitting this description, if indeed such a planet exists.

Then yesterday Massimo Marengo dropped me a note about new work he has been involved in that puts a damper on the idea of terrestrial worlds in such settings. Long-time Centauri Dreams readers will remember Marengo, whose fascinating work on Epsilon Eridani we’ve covered in these pages on several previous occasions. Now at Iowa State University, the astrophysicist has been studying tight double-star systems, using data harvested from the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Working with principal investigator Jeremy Drake (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Marengo and team are learning that the problem with tight binaries is the chance for planetary collisions. We’re talking about a class of binaries called RS Canum Venaticorums (RS CVns) that are separated by something on the order of 3.2 million kilometers, roughly two percent of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. That produces orbits of just a few days and tidal lock, with each star presenting the same face to the other.

Image: This artist’s concept illustrates a tight pair of stars and a surrounding disk of dust — most likely the shattered remains of planetary smashups. Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, the scientists found dusty evidence for such collisions around three sets of stellar twins (a class of stars called RS Canum Venaticorum’s or RS CVns for short). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Imagine two stars similar to the Sun in size and about as old as the Sun when life first evolved on the Earth. They’re possessed of strong magnetic fields and giant spots, the result of their fast spin, and the magnetic fields, in turn, drive powerful stellar winds that slow the stars and pull them closer together over time. Now things get tricky, for the new work suggests that the gravitational influences of the stellar pair continually change as the stars approach each other, causing planets and other objects circling the stars to experience collisions.

Says Marc Kuchner (NASA GSFC):

“These kinds of systems paint a picture of the late stages in the lives of planetary systems. And it’s a future that’s messy and violent.”

Indeed. And the evidence from Spitzer seems tight. The instrument can see the glow of hot dusky disks around three tight binary systems matching this description. The thinking is that the dust found here would normally have dissipated from stars at this level of maturity. Something, in other words, is causing fresh dust to be created, implying a chaotic process. Planetary collisions are the most likely candidate.

Image: Spitzer’s cameras, which take pictures at different infrared wavelengths, observed the signatures of dust around three close binary systems. Data for one of those systems are shown here in orange. Models for the stars and a surrounding dusty disk are shown in yellow and red, respectively. The disk reveals that some sort of chaotic event — probably a planetary collision — must have generated the dusty disk. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA.

We know that planets can exist around closely-spaced binaries — a tight eclipsing binary system called HW Virginis, for example, is known to be orbited by two gas giants. But HW Virginis c has a semi-major axis of 3.6 AU, while HW Vir b is at 5.3 AU. Both are well outside the habitable zone of the stars they orbit. In any case, this binary system involves a B-class and an M-class star, not the kind of system depicted in Tatooine or examined in the current work.

With the stars under study, we have more of a When Worlds Collide scenario than anything from Star Wars. Here’s Jeremy Drake on the matter:

“This is real-life science fiction. Our data tell us that planets in these systems might not be so lucky — collisions could be common. It’s theoretically possible that habitable planets could exist around these types of stars, so if there happened to be any life there, it could be doomed.”

Another exoplanet orbiting twin stars is found around the binary PSR B1620-26, but here again, we’re not exactly dealing with Sun-like stars. The planet involved orbits a pulsar and a white dwarf. And back to Cheongho Han for a moment. The scientist believes that if a terrestrial world did exist in a stable orbit around two stars similar to our Sun, the only way to find it would be through microlensing. Radial velocity studies avoid short-period binaries, but the microlensing signature should be detectible. Marengo and Drake’s work suggests that if such a world is found, it may be a rarity indeed.

The paper is Matranga et al., “Close Binaries with Infrared Excess: Destroyers of Worlds?” Astrophysical Journal Letters 720 (August, 2010), L164 (preprint). Cheongho Han’s paper is “Microlensing Search for Planets with Two Simultaneously Rising Suns,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 676, No. 1 (20 March 2008), L53 (abstract).

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New Planets Highlight Orbital Resonance

New Planets Highlight Orbital Resonance: "

We’re learning a lot more about how planets interact with each other gravitationally. ‘Resonance’ is the operative term here. When planets are locked in a 2:1 orbital resonance, the outer planet orbits the host star once for every two orbits of the inner planet. A 3:2 resonance occurs when the outer planet orbits the star twice for every three orbits of the inner planet.

Resonance (technically ‘mean motion resonance’) prevents close encounters between planets and provides long-term orbital stability. And if the 2:1 resonance is the most common pattern, it’s also true that things can change when planets migrate to different parts of their system. John Johnson (Caltech) describes the result of fast inner migration:

“Planets tend to get stuck in the 2:1. It’s like a really big pothole. But if a planet is moving very fast it can pass over a 2:1. As it moves in closer, the next step is a 5:3, then a 3:2, and then a 4:3.”

Johnson’s work on resonance has born fruit in a new paper in which he and his colleagues discuss the discovery of two solar systems where gas giants in relative proximity to each other have become locked into resonance. Studying the matter helps us understand how solar systems evolve, as planets farther out in the protoplanetary disk migrate inwards, causing gravitational disturbances that can only become stable in orbital resonance.

Studying the star 24 Sextantis, some 244 light years from Earth, using radial velocity methods, the researchers have found two gas giants separated by about 0.75 AU, roughly 113 million kilometers. You can contrast this with the spacing between the largest planets in our system. Jupiter and Saturn are never closer than 531 million kilometers. The planets orbit the star with periods of 455 days and 910 days and are locked in a 2:1 orbital resonance.

A second gas giant pairing occurs around the star HD 200964, some 223 light years from Earth. Here the distance between the two gas giants can close to 0.35 AU (53 million kilometers). Johnson likens the latter pairing to that of Titan and Hyperion, two Saturnian moons, which also show a 4:3 resonance, but notes that the planets orbiting HD 200964 interact far more strongly, each being 20,000 times more massive than the combined mass of Titan and Hyperion. The planets in this system have orbital periods of 630 and 830 days respectively. Johnson adds:

“This is the tightest system that’s ever been discovered, and we’re at a loss to explain why this happened. This is the latest in a long line of strange discoveries about extrasolar planets, and it shows that exoplanets continuously have this ability to surprise us. Each time we think we can explain them, something else comes along.”

Gravitational interactions in this environment are quite powerful. This Caltech news release notes that the gravitational tug between HD 200964’s two planets is 3 million times greater than the gravitational force between Earth and Mars, 700 times larger than that between the Earth and the Moon, and 4 times larger than the pull of the Sun on the Earth.

As to the history of these worlds, the paper on this work notes their current positions and their likely changes over time:

In both the 24 Sex and HD 200964 systems, the planets reside well within the so-called snow line, beyond which volatiles in the protoplanetary disk can condense to provide the raw materials for protoplanetary core growth. For a pre-main-sequence, 1.5 M [solar mass] star the snow line is located beyond 2-3 AU… It is therefore likely that the planets around 24 Sex and HD 200964 formed at larger semimajor axes and subsequently experienced inward orbital migration.

Both of these stars are massive and dying, subgiants that have evolved off the main sequence and have run out of hydrogen for nuclear fusion. The eventual fate of such stars is to become a red giant, but neither of the stars has progressed that far. While red giants are problematic for radial velocity methods because their pulsations mask the spectral shifts that would reveal orbiting planets, subgiants have not expanded to that point and planet hunting remains possible. In fact, using the Keck Subgiants Planet Survey, Johnson and team are learning a great deal about such systems:

“Right now, we’re monitoring 450 of these massive stars, and we are finding swarms of planets. Around these stars, we are seeing three to four times more planets out to a distance of about 3 AU — the distance of our asteroid belt — than we see around main-sequence stars. Stellar mass has a huge influence on frequency of planet occurrence, because the amount of raw material available to build planets scales with the mass of the star.”

The paper is Johnson et al., “Retired A Stars and Their Companions VI. A Pair of Interacting Exoplanet Pairs Around the Subgiants 24 Sextan[t]is and HD 200964,” accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal (abstract).

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Can the Pioneer Anomaly Be Explained by Inertia Modification?

Can the Pioneer Anomaly Be Explained by Inertia Modification?: "

by Richard Obousy

Physicist Richard Obousy here takes a look at an intriguing new paper by Mike McCulloch, a researcher at Plymouth University. In addition to his work in theoretical physics and warp drive possibilities, Obousy is current project leader and primary propulsion design lead for Project Icarus, a joint venture between the British Interplanetary Society and the Tau Zero Foundation to re-think the original Project Daedalus starship design. In the review below, Obousy places McCulloch’s work on the Pioneer anomaly in the context of current thinking on dark matter, dark energy and the nature of mass. Does the Higgs field explain inertial mass, or are there alternatives? Read on.

Few areas of research have garnered as much attention from both the public and scientific communities as those of dark energy and dark matter – and for good reason. Both terms stem from observations of the physical universe that, simply put, don’t belong within the well-understood framework of known physics. Another phenomenon discovered in the nineties concerns an anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer probes. These ostensibly unrelated observations may, in fact, be connected to each other by an intriguing line of research currently being investigated by Mike McCulloch, a researcher at the University of Exeter. Before exploring McCulloch’s research, a brief review of dark energy, dark matter, and the anomalous Pioneer acceleration will be presented.

Dark matter is a proposal put forward to explain the observations first made by Zwicky in 1933 that galaxies were too energetic to be held together by observable matter. Zwicky originally proposed the existence of an unseen form of baryonic matter that provided the necessary gravitational force to hold the galaxies together. Due to constraints imposed by modern cosmology, the idea has evolved to assume this form of matter is non-baryonic (not made of quarks); however, the fundamental idea has remained unchanged. After decades of searching for dark matter, none has been directly detected, but a number of experiments are ongoing.

Dark energy stems from the truly astounding observation made originally by Riese and Perlmutter in the late 90′s that the rate of cosmological expansion, long thought to be either static or decelerating, is actually accelerating. For this to be happening, it is commonly believed that the universe is filled with a ubiquitous and exotic negative pressure field that drives the accelerated expansion. Although we can give this energy a name, and predict what it will do, dark energy as a ‘real’ physical field has never actually been measured in the lab, and today, dark energy remains somewhat of an enigma.

As if dark energy and dark matter haven’t dealt theoreticians enough of a blow, cracks began to appear in our understanding of gravity due to the observation made by Anderson et al in 1996 that both Pioneer 10 and 11 are experiencing an anomalous acceleration of 8.74±1.33×10^-10 m/s² directed approximately towards the sun. It is precisely this anomaly that is studied by Mike McCulloch in his recent publication in Europhysics Letters called Minimum Accelerations from Quantized Inertia (reference below). McCulloch’s work addresses the Pioneer anomaly, and within the framework of his model, one could perhaps come to a deeper understanding of dark matter and dark energy thanks to a novel idea known as MOND, or Modified Newtonian Gravity.

The basic idea that McCulloch explores is the nature of mass, and the possibility that inertial mass, in fact, changes slightly under certain conditions. It has been known since the time of Newton that all bodies attract all other bodies in the universe with a force that is proportional to their mass. This type of mass is what is known as gravitational mass. It is also known that when one applies a force to an object, it accelerates at a magnitude that is proportional to its mass. This type of mass is known as inertial mass. It is commonly assumed that gravitational and inertial mass are identical, and this has been verified by our highest precision instruments to date.

The fundamental nature of inertial mass is not precisely known and is an issue that has been pondered at least since the time of Mach. Recent efforts to codify inertial mass into the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics have resulted in the famous Higgs field, which is a ubiquitous field that bestows mass upon matter via a process known as spontaneous symmetry breaking. Although the Higgs field has not been experimentally detected, many physicists are confident that it will be found at the Large Hadron Collider.

Despite the widespread acceptance in the existence of the Higgs field, there have been alternative attempts to uncover the nature of inertial mass. One paper, Inertia as a Zero Point Lorentz Force, written in 1994 by Rueda, Puthoff and Haisch (RPH), represents a stalwart effort to model inertia as a back-reaction of matter to the quantum vacuum similar to the Unruh field. Despite not gaining widespread acceptance in the theoretical community, the paper galvanized interest in the possibility that the quantum vacuum and inertial mass may be related. The basic premise of the paper was that matter, modeled as a ‘Parton’, interacts with the quantum vacuum in such a way that any acceleration generates a Lorentz-type back-reaction to the vacuum which manifests itself macroscopically as a resistance to acceleration or, more simply, as inertial mass.

The RPH paper was not the first to suggest that accelerated matter is effected by the quantum vacuum. In 1976, Unruh showed that a body undergoing an acceleration in the vacuum sees a thermal radiation of temperature T that is related to its acceleration. Wien’s displacement law tells us that, for a given temperature, there will be a dominant wavelength which, via the Unruh effect, is inversely proportional to the acceleration – namely, as the acceleration gets smaller, the radiation wavelength gets bigger. As the acceleration decreases, this wavelength reaches a limiting value: the wavelength of the observable universe. Milgrom, in 1994, speculated that at this point, there would be a ‘break in the response to the vacuum’ and the Unruh radiation would be unobservable. He further speculated that this could have an effect on inertial mass. Herein lies the crux of this line of thinking – that matter’s response to the vacuum is what generates inertia.

McCulloch further develops the idea of Milgrom by allowing for a more natural development in the Unruh radiation spectrum. In the original idea by Milgrom, only the dominant wavelength was considered. McCulloch, however, develops what he calls a Hubble-Scale Casimir effect, where a range of wavelengths are allowed based on the boundary conditions of the size of the observable universe.

“The new assumption is that this Unruh radiation is subject to a Hubble-scale Casimir effect. This means that only Unruh wavelengths that fit exactly into twice the Hubble scale (harmonics with nodes at the boundaries) are allowed, so that a greater proportion of longer Unruh waves are disallowed, reducing inertia in a new, more gradual, way for low accelerations.”

Using this model, McCulloch is able to develop an equation which illustrates the modification of inertial mass for low accelerations. Put in simpler terms, as the Pioneer probes depart our solar system they experience a force due to the gravitational attraction of the sun. This force generates an acceleration which, due to its extremely small value, modifies the inertial mass of the pioneer probe. Because of this modification, the Pioneer probes, seemingly now less massive, feel a greater acceleration due to the sun than that predicted by Newtonian mechanics, creating the anomalously large acceleration.

How does this all relate to dark energy and dark matter? The answer is in the relationship between certain natural scales that occur in physics. The basic building block is the scale that characterizes the cosmological constant. We call this scale R and it is the distance scale over which the cosmological constant curves the universe. R is about 10 billion light years and is 10⁴⁰ times the size of an atomic nucleus – the scale where the standard model of particle physics is applicable). R is also 10⁶⁰ times the Planck scale – the scale at which we believe in GUT’s (Grand Unified Theories), where all the forces in nature behave identically. It is therefore pragmatic to wonder whether this scale R might be indicative of some new physics.

Hints at new physics at the scale R manifest themselves in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang. This radiation has been cooling as the universe expands, and is now at a fairly uniform temperature of 2.7 degrees Kelvin. Fluctuations in this temperature exist to a level of a few parts per 100,000, and the patterns of these fluctuations provide us with clues to the physics of the early universe.

Analysis of the temperature fluctuations over the last decades illustrate how much energy is contained in this radiation as a function of wavelength. It appears that the CMB is dominated by a single large peak, followed by a number of smaller peaks. It also appears that there is very little energy in the longest wavelength. This data can be interpreted as indicative of a ‘cutoff’, above which the thermal modes are less excited. What is particularly remarkable is that this cutoff occurs on a scale R which we associate with the cosmological constant.

This cutoff is somewhat puzzling from the perspective of inflation theory, which was developed by Alan Guth of MIT and, originally, by Alexei Starobinsky of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow. According to the theory of inflation, the early and rapid expansion of the universe created huge regions of the cosmos with relatively uniform properties. This region is thought to be much larger than the observable universe. The cutoff indicates that, at the scale R, inflation stopped just at the point where it created a region as large as we now currently observe. If, in fact, inflation ‘switched off’ just at the point where it created the cosmos as large as we currently observe, then some physical mechanism must have been responsible for selecting this unique time to stop. This seems incredibly improbable, since nothing in the physics of inflation says anything about scales on the order of 10 billion light years.

Said another way, if inflation produced a largely uniform universe, then it likely produced uniformity on scales much larger than we observe. Thus, the patterns produced by inflation, the small fluctuations, should be visible beyond the present size of the universe. Instead – what the data indicate is that these fluctuations stop above the scale R.

Another indication that new physics may occur at scales on the order of R is an apparent asymmetry in the distribution of hot and cold spots in the CMB dubbed the ‘Axis of Evil’. This observation was first made in 2005 by Kate Land and Joao Magueijo of Imperial College London. A number of independent studies have confirmed this apparent alignment of anisotropies in the CMB.

There are additional phenomena associated with the scale R that are worth discussing. One way we can explore R is to combine it with additional constants of nature. An interesting place to start is to combine it with the speed of light, c, to give us R/c. Dimensionally, R/c gives us a time, and that time corresponds to the present age of the universe. Taking the reciprocal of this, c/R, gives a frequency, a profoundly low ‘note’ which has completed one oscillation in the entire lifetime of the universe.

Going one step further, we can explore c²/R which, dimensionally, gives us the units of acceleration. Remarkably, this number is the acceleration produced by the cosmological constant. This is the same acceleration that we currently believe dark energy is responsible for and is on the order of 10^-10 m/s. This also happens to be the roughly the same anomalous acceleration that the Pioneer probes are currently experiencing!

The c²/R also crops up when we examine rotational velocity of orbiting stars in galaxies. Recall that stars are seen to rotate at a velocity that would, according to Newtonian Mechanics, be too fast for them to be held in a stable orbit. The contemporary fix for this problem is to introduce dark matter. This is not the only fix, however. For spiral galaxies, in which stars move in circular orbits, anomalous velocities (orbital velocities that, according to Newtonian Mechanics, should not be possible) are only apparent beyond a certain orbit. Within this ‘special’ orbital distance Newtonian gravity works perfectly. Because stars move in a circular orbit they experience an angular acceleration which is related to their velocity (a=v²/r). The breakdown of Newtonian gravity occurring at this ‘special’ orbital distance occurs when the stars are rotating with an angular acceleration of 1.2×10^-10 m/s², almost identical to the scale c²/R. This is thoroughly fascinating, and this string of relationships which appear to be related to the scale R represent tantalizing hints at physics beyond what is currently studied and practiced within the mainstream academic community.

Today, nobody knows for certain what this new physics is (if it really is new physics), and nobody has written down a theory codifying its behavior. Mike McCulloch, however, is arguably helping to increase momentum within this curious and remarkable area of research.

The paper is McCulloch, “Minimum accelerations from quantised inertia,” Europhysics Letters Vol. 90, No. 2 (20 May, 2010). An abstract is available, with full text here. The paper by Rueda, Haisch and Puthoff is “Inertia as a Zero Point Lorentz Force,” Physical Review A, Vol 49, No 2 (February 1994), pp.678-694.

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