Nautilus coven.

Allegedly 876 (a suspicious number) ft - a bit less than 300m - down in the Pacific near Palau.

Lighting is suspiciously bright. 

Original pic

My reading.

Slashdot Aug-Sept 21

Slashdot Submissions – Aug 2021

It has been a while since I posted anything, and the potential submissions have been piling up. 

Arxiv Ref	Title	Comments
2108.09868	The Orbit of Planet Nine	Probably the most interesting to the general reader.
2108.07207	(216) Kleopatra, a low density critically rotating M-type asteroid	Partly the “M-class” (no, not Star Trek), but in itself interesting because quite large asteroids can get spun up to the point of shedding matter from their extremities.
2108.03343	On the Need for a Classification System for Consistent Characterization of the Composition of Planetary Bodies	An actual planet classification.
2108.03323	Warm terrestrial planet with half the mass of Venus transiting a nearby star	New competitor for lightest planet known – check on Exoplanets.org
2108.05321	Ross 19B: An Extremely Cold Companion Discovered via the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Citizen Science Project	Its the citizen science that is most interesting.
2108.01422	The interior of hairy black holes in standard model physics	Funny phrase – save it for next time someone is whinging about Uranus.
2108.01471	What’s inside a hairy black hole in massive gravity	ditto
2108.01783	Comment on “Observation of a Neutrino Burst from the Supernova SN1987A”	There was a 7.3 second gap during the records of neutrinos from SN1987A at Kamiokande. This is suggested to be a hardware eror, when the tape staging recorder experiences a write error and performs a rewind-reset, which takes about this period of time.

1 - Planet Nine

Ever since the demotion of Jupiter, any mention of "Planet Nine" invariably attracts a swarm of comments about how, for some people, "Planet Nine will always be 134340 Pluto. Well, that battle has been fought and lost, and @plutokiller (Professor Mike Brown of Caltech, USA) himself has moved on to trying to find a new Planet Nine. In 2016 an analysis of the orbits of the largest, most distant "minor bodies" of the Solar system suggested that there may be a large planet "out there", controlling the distribution of these (relatively) large, distant bodies orbits, and from that inferring where they think their suggested planet would be seen on the sky.

Such efforts have a patchy history. Certainly LeVerrier is famous for predicting the position of Neptune from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus (cue whooping from the peanut gallery), but equally certainly he was working with an inaccurate data for the masses of solar system bodies (Uranus, particularly), and his result was correct by luck, not judgement. Similarly, the calculations which led to the discovery of 134340 Pluto were also based on inaccurate mass data leaving the mass of 134340 Pluto uncertain between the mass of Earth and "very small". The fly-by of a spacecraft - Voyager 2 - greatly improved the measurement of Uranus's mass, which is crucial to understanding the motions of the rest of the Solar system.

Since Brown (and others) started discovering multiple bodies of mass comparable to that of 134340 Pluto, orbiting in the same region of space, the identity of 134340 Pluto as a planet has been challenged, resulting in it's demotion to a "dwarf planet" in 2006. But since then, the discovery of more, and more distant, dwarf planets (including by Brown) has led to suggestions that they may hint at the presence of something big, "out there". Which Brown and colleagues have been looking for for several years, securing observing time on very large telescopes to carry out this work.

Their current best estimate of properties for Planet Nine is mass 6.2 (average: spread 8.4 - 4.9) Earth masses ; semi-major axis 380 (520- 300) AU ;  inclination 16 (21 - 11) degrees and an argument of perihelion of 300 (440 - 240) degrees (centred on Capricorn, but with a wide spread).

Hopefully they'll find it soon, because not finding it would only prove that they were looking in the wrong place at the wrong times, not that it doesn't exist.

This one posted 2021-09-02

2 - Kleopatra and planet classification.

3 – Ross 19b – a relatively nearby planet discovered by a Citizen Science project.

Slashdot posting, 1950 astronomical transient

"Exploring nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th 1950"

A new (potential) Slashdot submission. This is my working copy.

Working Title : Did you see that?

Paper : https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.11780.pdf

9 authors, including one un-person (Geoff Marcy) from 10 institutions from the USA, via Spain (Gran Canaria), Sweden and the Ukraine, and ending up in India. In other words, the usual international football team.

A paper just published on Arxiv, the astronomy/ physics/ computing/ mathematics preprint service, describes studies into old astronomical data sets, to prepare the ground for the "transient" phenomena which will be discovered by new "repeated survey" telescopes. These will photograph the whole sky every few days, capturing novae and supernovae, many new Solar system bodies, the new "mega-constellations" of thousands of satellites, and other, more surprising "transient" phenomena.

In the early 1950s the then-new "200 inch" Hale telescope at Mt Palomar was employed in performing a sky survey. They would take a plate (literally, a glass plate ; this was long before electronic image capture) with a blue-sensitive emulsion, then a plate with a red-sensitive emulsion ; six days later, another red plate covered the same area (by planned overlap). The middle red plate showed a cluster of 9 objects, covering about a tenth of the full Moon's apparent size, which weren't visible in the previous blue plate, nor in the subsequent red plate. The simplest astronomical explanation is that 9 objects of red colour appeared and disappeared in that time interval.

As astronomers get more short-interval surveying of the sky, they get a better idea of how often such "transients" occur. Individual transients (novae, unidentified Solar system bodies, etc) are not, themselves, rare. But nine, in such a small area, in such a short time period - that is rare.

A sceptic's first question would be - is the data good? Photographic plates are a mature technology - and were around a century old at the time of taking. Nobody knows of a similar "contamination" process. Millions of plates have been scanned into computers after the glassware was replaced with CCD detectors - again, nobody has found a similar set of contamination marks. Ideas such as grains of dust from the Alamagordo atomic tests getting onto the plates (and being washed off in the processing) were considered, but it is very unlikely that no other plates for the same manufacturer show similar defects. Human events (matches producing "flares" in spectroscopic observations ; the infamous "Fast Radio Burst" microwave oven) were considered, such as an astronomer with hayfever spraying the plate with snot droplets. But again, why haven't comparable artefacts been found on other plates - and people have looked, digitally, for them! Water drops and processing chemical streaks have characteristic sizes, which these images don't. 

A fragmenting asteroid ("small body") was considered. But that would leave images substantially elongated by the Earth's motion - and only one of the 9 "transients" showed signs of elongation. Some astronomers used to refer to asteroids as "the vermin of the skies" referring to their common occurrence on the sky - invariably through the middle of what you were really trying to photograph. The term is being re-purposed for satellite megaconstellations.

What about a meteor fragmenting in the atmosphere above the telescope? They take too long, and produce even longer streaks than asteroids. They are photographed often enough to be well understood, and this image isn't one of those.

A satellite might produce a short enough "glint" of reflected sunlight. But ... the first satellite was launched 7 years after this image. Unless the launch records from Area 51 say differently.

One event, with 8 reflections from some nearby objects, could work. But with the plate exposure being 50 minutes, the maximum spacing of the reflecting objects is about 30 light minutes, and the size of the spread means the object is about 0.02 light years away. Comfortably beyond the Voyager probes, launched over 20 years later. Unless the launch records from Area 51 say differently.

 

The obvious next step is to look at existing images of the area taken with newer technology. That has been done. The Pan-STARRS survey (2010 to "continuing" ; to 3.4 magnitudes dimmer than the plates managed - a factor of about 23-fold in brightness) saw nothing there. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS, 2000 to "continuing"), to 16-fold dimmer than the plates, saw nothing there.  

To mis-quote Capt.Brody [no, Quint!], "We're gonna need a bigger telescope!" And that is what this report is about. Using the GTC (Gran Telescopio Canaria, 10.4m, ~409in) they photographed the region to a brightness (dimness) of 250-fold compared to the original plates. And they found a number of matches. That's not unexpected : the astronomers estimate the odds of getting such matches by chance as about 17% - far from impossible, but not terribly likely. 

Still, nobody knows what there objects were (or even if the 1950 observation was real)

 (The authors also consider the possibility that in the 70 years between observations, the original objects have drifted out of the field of study - in itself, that would mark them as likely outer Kuiper Belt objects, or Oort Cloud objects. In which case, the question of the simultaneous movement of 9 close objects remains a question. Cue the "I'm not saying it was aliens, but ..." video clip.)

 

This is a first draft. I'll post it to Slashdot after editing it down a bit.

Two planets around Kapteyn’s star

 G. Anglada-Escud ́e et al, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.0818.pdf with a small football team of co-authors.

I noticed the paper while searching for something else on Arxiv ; the title hooked me, but on second reading I'm realising it's old (2014) work.

Kapteyn's Star is one of the closest stars to the Solar system (well known) ; it's a red dwarf with a parallax of 0.25 arcsec (4 parsecs). It is considered a halo star - a star passing through the Milky Way's disc, but generally residing in the galaxy's halo). Proper motion just under 9 mas/year. Discovered about 1897 in compilation of the Cape photographic Durchmusterung. It has a low spectroscopic rotational speed (v.sin(i) <~3km/s) and low metallicity. It is considered a pretty ancient star, and possibly derived from the Omega Centaurus galaxy's halo into the Milky Way's halo, stripped off during the collision.

Located in Pictor, southern hemisphere. It moves, relatively quickly.

Between 1999 and 2013, using several devices, a sequence of spectra were taken and yield a periodic drift with two period peaks of 121 and 48.6 days.

With a low-mass primary, and relatively large planets (4.8 and 7.0  Msin(i)_earth) the orbits seem stable on the 10 Gyr timescale (appropriate for a merger star).

This work has been challenged several times, but seems to survive it reasonably well.

Beringia Bathymetry

The question of the "peopling of the Americas" has arisen - again. A claim of a 30-odd kyr collection of worked points suggesting a very pre-Clovis occupation. Interesting, but the "tools" aren't wonderfully convincing.
A while ago, I looked at the seabed of Beringia - I think some idiot (Musk? or one of his hangers-on?) had suggested tunnelling a "hyperloop" from Anchorage to Vladivostok or some such stupidity. Well, here's the seabed topology :

(Figure made with GeoMapApp (www.geomapapp.org) / CC BY, using GMRT data from Ryan, W. B. F., S.M. Carbotte, J. Coplan, S. O'Hara, A. Melkonian, R. Arko, R.A. Weissel, V. Ferrini, A. Goodwillie, F. Nitsche, J. Bonczkowski, and R. Zemsky (2009), Global Multi-Resolution Topography (GMRT) synthesis data set, Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst., 10, Q03014, doi:10.1029/2008GC002332.)

From the tunnelling point of view, the shortest route involves a sump at 40 or so metres below sea level, plus some actual rock thickness below sea bed - unless you want your tunnel/tube exposed to wave activity, which is a whole 'nother world of engineering fun. The Musk-o-philes don't seem to think of things like that - they're seriously disconnected from reality. Oh, the tunnel is evacuated, which is goign to make every extra 10m of water quite a significant load for collapse loads.
To the state of Beringia at the alleged time of the settlement of the Americas, the southern margin seems to have been a complex of small islands - good for island-hopping by small craft ("kayaks" or equivalent) and that would have been the case for a long time before and after the sea level low stand, but the islands changing in detail.

Humans probably had raft, if not small craft technology from around 60kyr BP, when humans made it to Australasia. Combining that with sewing - for making tailored clothing - and most subsequent humans would have had most of the technologies to island hop along the south coast of Beringia and/ or the Aleutian islands without making any irreversible "leap of faith" journeys. Since humans had been doing this along the preceding 10,000km of the Asian-Pacific coast, it's almost surprising that it took so long for humans to reach the Americas.

Sector collapse

When we were doing the Vulcanology trip to Tenerife, a couple of the stops were to examine the faults bounding the Guimar (SE coast) and Santa Cruz (N coast) collapses. Always worth thinking about, even without the fears stirred up by that Portsmouth (?) hazard research centre.
Well, Prof Ceiling Cat Emeritus has been posting about his current jaunt around Hawai'i, and one look at the geography of Oahu made me think "sector collapse" again.

Oh dear, that's not good looking. That looks like lumps of islands 10km by 20km which have broken off and slid over 50km down the seabed slope.
What does the profile look like? (following the white line in the bathymetry plot)

10km NE-SW by 20km NW-SE by 1.5km thick. That's a big chunk of rock. The tsunami that hit the Pacific coasts (and particularly the British Columbia to Washington section) would have been ... unhealthy to see. I wonder what the date was.

For comparison, here's the most recent slump from the North side of Tenerife.

(250m bathymetry contours, bolded at 1000m intervals, for all images) The characteristic "lumps on the sea floor" of a slump can be seen. In the profile you can estimate the thickness of the largest lump, though this slump seems to have fragmented more than the Hawai'i example above.

 To a first approximation, say 5km by 3km by 0.25km. More detailed mapping with sonar shows that a lot of the seabed has rough areas which are interpreted as earlier generations of slump. Upwards of 20 slumps have been identified around the Canaries archipelago. 
Probably the most recent slump around Tenerife (unless it has "gone" while I'm typing) is from the side of the island facing Gran Canaria.

 The profile shows how steeply the islands drop off away from the volcanic centres.

Note the level of the inter-island gap - 2.5km below sea level - compared to the abyssal plain to the North at over 3.5km below sea level. There is around a kilometre of fill in this gap which hasn't accumulated to the North.

 Since the turn of the millennium there has been considerable speculation about the possibility of major landslides from the flanks of volcanic islands in general, and the Canary archipelago in particular. While concern about the particular claims concerning a West-flank collapse of La Palma have somewhat abated, there are certainly major landslip features around ocean islands. The recent (22 December 2018) flank collapse of Anak Krakatoa in the Indonesian archipelago killed over 400 people, making the point that these things do indeed happen.  

Slashdot submission : An alternative, but common, astronomical habitable zone

Another interesting paper caught my attention.

Yet another provocative paper emerges onto Arxiv from Harvard's Lingam and Loeb.

Today they estimate the volume of space occupied by habitable zones (regions where liquid water is stable) in brown dwarf not-quite stars. They find that it could be orders of magnitude greater than the volume in the atmospheres of Earth-size planets.

Brown dwarfs are masses of gas which are too small to sustain nuclear fusion (so, they're not stars), but can have a brief period of fusion of deuterium or lithium shortly after formation (so they're not planets ; the boundary size is under debate). After this burst of energy, they slowly cool, for billions of years. This leads to a large volume of the star's outer body — or atmosphere — with potentially attractive temperature and pressure. If the brown dwarf is orbiting with a larger star, there may be enough light to allow photosynthesis. Supply of chemicals is uncertain, but not impossible.

While this paper is speculative, the prospects for detecting such life by spectroscopy are plausible with observational instruments being designed at the moment.

Previous work on abiogenesis and the origin(s) of life has speculated that life could persist in the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter, using comparable pressure-temperature arguments. In this respect, the proposal is more conventional.

I don't know what they're putting in the water at Harvard, but Abraham Loeb is producing a lot of interesting stuff over the last year or so. 

If Slashdot take up the submission, I'm expecting the nerd-claimants there to raise questions about the availability of chemical elements. I don't see that much of a problem, since the relatively gentle convection on Jupiter (driven by the heat release of helium settling down though the hydrogen) is enough to put interesting amounts of hydrocarbons, ammonia, sulphur compounds up to almost the tops of the clouds, producing the visible colour bands and belts of the planet. If anything, the convection on a brown dwarf would be stronger, bringing heavier elements to higher in the body's structure. (Like Jupiter, unlike Venus, it probably doesn't have a fluid-to solid "surface".)

There remains a "dilution problem", but life managed to get around that on Earth, so I don't see that as a killer argument. 

Quite similar arguments about internal temperatures were being knocked around when Brown and Batygin produced their "planet nine" proposal in early 2016, and people were trying to work out if it would be detectable in infra-red detectors. That Brown is now (2019) getting surveying time on the Subaru telescope says what the rest of the astronomical community thought about that. 

Planet Nine (BB2016 ; there are others in the literature) is estimated to be around 10 Earth-masses (about 1/32 Jupiter-masses) so will have cooled a lot faster than a Jupiter-mass planet, let alone a 30 Jupiter-mass (mid--range) brown dwarf. So that proposed planet isn't a credible life habitat. Well, it's less credible than Europa.

Slashdot Submission, A second Interstellar object?

In the aftermath of the recognition of 1I/`Oumuamua as an object originating from outside the Solar system, people have been trawling through the archives for other possible similar events. One such archive is CNEOS, which incororates a list of fireballs - objects that have hit the Earth's atmosphere such as the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, or the powerful event over Russian Kamchatka in December of last year.
Searching this database a small event (about 100tons TNT equivalent) of 2014 stood out - the orientation of it's path, time and date allowed it's trajectory to be worked out and back-tracked, showing that it probably came to Earth from outside the Solar system. Before entering the Solar system, the object had a velocity of some 43.8km/s with respect to the Sun and was slightly accelerated by the Earth's gravity before impact. When compared to the "Local Standard of Rest" (LSR, the vector of objects orbiting the galactic centre with the Sun), the object's computed speed was some 60km/s, and at This implies that it was never bound to the Sun. Unlike 1I/`Oumuamua, the bolide was also at a considerable angle to the LSR. If accepted as an interstellar object, this second such body starts to flesh out the size and frequency distribution of such events. The possible power-law distributions within these limits are compatible with the distribution of small Kuiper Belt Objects, which includes objects liable to be scattered from the Solar system in future stellar encounters.
The location of the fireball - above the Pacific Ocean NE of Papua New Guinea does not make finding remains very likely. However, the last word of the paper's Discussion is "panspermia" so "Aliens" graphics can be used.

I need to do a bathymetry for this one too.

Put onto Slashdot as a submission.

I've done the bathymetry. The red star shows the location of the fireball ; the white line is the line of the profile.

Data is from GMRT and CNEOS, plotted using www.GeoMapApp.org.