Tag Archives: Astrobiology

Proxima Centauri b

After a week of controversy and embargo-breaking, the actual science behind the detection of Proxima Centauri b is finally here (published in Nature). And it, honestly, is a breathtaking discovery. A terrestrial planet around the closest star to our sun. It proves what Kepler showed: Earth-like planets really are everywhere, including around the star next door. But should we believe it? And is it all that it is hyped up to be?
The star:

As you can probably tell from the name, Proxima is the closest star to Earth. Located only 4 lightyears away in the Alpha Centauri system, it is a tiny red speck of light, only visible in a telescope. The reason for it’s lackluster brightness is that the star itself is dimunative. Only 12% of the size of the Sun, it is also 100 million times fainter. Although that may sound bizarre, M-dwarfs like it are the most common type of star in our galaxy.

The signal:

HARPS at the 3.6mMany people have hunted for planets around Proxima before. These usually involve monitoring the star’s radial velocity, it’s to-and-fro speed, and searching for the tell-tale tug of a gravitationally bound exoplanet. But until 2016, there had been no luck. That’s when the Pale Red Dot team decided to throw everything they could at the star to try to do what others had not.

Using the HARPS instrument on La Silla (which I am currently sat only 50m from), they took observations nearly every night for 3 months. And, as we found out yesterday, that kitchen-sink technique paid off. They found a 1.5m/s (that’s brisk walking pace) with an 11.2 day signal. And it had a 99.9999% chance of being real. And they found the same signal, hidden just below detectability in the past data too.

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A strong signal in the HARPS data

 

Activity and detection:

When the rumours were flying, I urged caution on this potential discovery. One of the reasons being that Proxima is not a quiet sun-like star. It is instead a turbulent M-dwarf. That manifests itself in large star-spots, strong stellar flares and varying shapes in the spectral lines (the bar-code like lines we observe in the colours of the star). All of these cause confusion in the radial velocities, and there have been a few planets (some of which were discovered by this very team) which are now assumed to be simply variability.

But, they have convinced me. One way they have done this is with simultaneous photometry. That means not just observing the star with a spectrograph, but also simultaneously measuring its brightness with an imaging telescope. This photometry also gives a view of the activity of the star, but without any of the doppler signal from the planet. And what the team see is that the photometry (the trends in brightness) matches up perfectly with the activity that is suggested by certain features in the spectra. And that this signal is completely different to that from the planet.

So, I have to say it: it seems unlikely that the strong signal comes from the star itself, and much more likely that we are indeed seeing the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet.

Caveats:

Firstly, we only have a minimum mass for the planet. What this means is that, it could not be less than 1.3Me, but it certainly could be more. That is because the signal from a small planet with its orbit observed edge-on has the same signal as a larger planet observed more obliquely (pole-on). So do not be surprised if it turns out to be larger than this first measurement

M-dwarfs and habitability:

kepler_438bAnother caveat is that the planet probably isn’t habitable. I know that flies in the face of every news headline, but hear me out. Firstly, as I’ve said before, Proxima Centauri throws out an abundance of flares. These are so numerous and so strong that they are clearly seen four times in the ~80 nights of photometry. With a planet only 0.05AU away (1/20th the distance of Earth), these flares would have the potential to do damage to any organic molecules on the surface. The paper itself suggests the sterilising X-ray flux could be 400 times that experienced by Earth; and are likely to have been much higher in the past.

Another problem is that any body that close to another, larger body is likely to be tidally locked. Just look at the moon. This proves problematic for habitability. The large temperature gradient from day to night a tidally locked planet sucks the atmosphere (with supersonic winds) to the cold side of the planet. There, atmosphere can gets frozen and be lost. You can break this cycle, but that involves having a very thick (and equally un-earthlike) atmosphere.

Further planets:

One interesting remark was that there seems to be another signal in the data from a more massive outer planet. Now, this signal might be closer to the rotational (and therefore activity) cycle of the star so could more easily be a false positive. But it would not be surprising if, like our own terrestrial planet, it had bigger siblings lurking slightly further out.

Exploration:

As with any exoplanet result, it seems like everything besides a few key details is speculation ( I have even seen some press speculating on the number of continents proxima has!). In fact, details such as its true mass aren’t completely tied down just yet. And even 1.3Me planets can still be un-earthlike; look at KOI-314c for example.

But, unlike most of the ‘earthlike’ planets we have found, there’s a pretty good chance we could actually answer these questions directly. And I don’t just mean with giant telescopes (although those would obviously work too) – I mean actual in situ observations. Crossing 4 lightyears of space currently no more than a pipe-dream, but it’s not inconceivable to think that, within our lifetimes, a probe might set off to see just how earthlike these exoplanets really are. And there’s no question where it will be going first; towards a Pale Red Dot…

For more information visit the Pale Red Dot website: http://www.palereddot.org
For more information visit the Pale Red Dot website: http://www.palereddot.org

Looking for Life – Part I

“Why do astronomers look for Earth-like planets in their hunt for life in the universe. Why couldn’t life exist in all manner of ways that we are incapable of contemplating?”

I see this question, put in a variety of different ways, all the time. And to first glance, it is a valid question. Why should we focus on finding Earths? What if, by searching for only the ‘twin’ of Earthlife, we’re missing a plethora of friends and family? I hold the opinion that we’re not. That life formed of carbon, oxygen & hydrogen atoms suspended in water is in all likelihood the most common, and maybe the only, way that the universe is able to ‘do’ life. And that, while the habitable zone (the zone where an Earthlike planet would have liquid water on it’s surface) is not the only place in the universe that these ingredients can get together, it is both most likely and most likely to be detectable there.

So I will lay out my argument here in a series of posts that are almost certainly better explained elsewhere.

What is life?

A question famously posed by Schrödinger in the 1940s, it is also the first key question on our path: To find life, we need to know what we’re looking for…

Defining life may, to first glance, seem obvious. But the boundary between the living and the lifeless is hard to define – just ask any virologist. Definitions of life tend to focus on the fact that all lifeforms are structures capable of self-replication (ie reproduction), movement, growth, and the ability to evolve. But these properties, themselves, are not unique among the natural world. Crystals can replicate themselves and even respond to the environment. Bubbles of fat can inorganically grow and replicate. And anything capable of near-perfect self-replication is likely to feel the process of natural selection.

One of Schrödinger’s great insights about Life is that it does not die. It “evades the decay to equilibrium”, instead exchanging material with the environment to keep alive for much longer than an ordinary lump of matter might. In Schrödinger’s words, life feeds on ‘negative entropy’ (order in the environment) and produces positive entropy (in waste and heat).

But just how valid is this definition? Are we focussing too much on earth-life and leaving out a whole universe of possibilities. Could life be simple, rather than complex; electrical rather than chemical; or even gaseous rather than semi-solid? Give each point a bit of thought and the alternative, to my mind, sound implausible:

Complex – Picture an airless world covered in fine, unstable sand. One day, maybe thanks to a meteorite hit, a cavity is created and a small cascade begins, slowly eating its way into the surface like a wave. I can see this cascade steadily feeding off the gravitational energy of the raised sand, increasing entropy in the low sand left behind. It might even grow over time and then split into two or more such cascades. But is this system alive? My thought would be ‘no’, because of the final argument for life – that it must undergo evolution by natural selection. A single simple process such as this, while ticking all the boxes for life, cannot adapt. The cascade of sand is not determined by any in-built mechanics, but simply the result of disequilibrium.

There is also no easy way to turn one molecule into another and energy. Even the simplest chemical pathways have an energy barrier to get over, such that stored energy and catalysts are needed just to make more energy and avoid death. Then there is the apparatus needed to reproduce not just all that energy-making machinery, but also the structures that hold this all in one place. Life, by its very definition, seems to need to be more complex that the environment it feeds on to evolve.

Chemical – The universe has plenty of other ways of making and transferring energy, as the example above shows. But life requires not only creation of energy, but also to store and use that energy too. While electrical, thermal or even light energy could likely be used (indeed life on earth does), this energy cannot itself form its own storage facility; Light cannot conjure its own mirror. For that, it needs to interact with chemistry. Only the chemistry of complex molecules has the dexterity to perform these storage and reproduction tasks.

Semi-solid – Specifically, life must have a barrier to it’s environment. Just to avoid death and decay, all life on earth continually cycles through its own body weight in energy and resources once every day or so. This is only possible thanks to the fact that our bodies have a semi-solid barrier to the surroundings, with the molecules of metabolism able to leave by diffusion. If metabolism excreted solids (like FeS or SiO), these products would build up and suffocate the organism. If an organism were fully liquid or gaseous, all the important self-replicating machinery would drift away due to diffusion. Life needs to be self-contained, and it likely needs a liquid solvent in which to live…

I hope I’ve shown you that, by simply starting at the definition of life and applying physics, we can get a decent handle on what life in the universe must be like. It seems like that life must be more complex that it’s surrounding; it must be a chiefly chemical system and it must be self-contained. That is a surprisingly narrow conclusion, but surely there could be a myriad of ways to assemble a chemical system such that it fits the criteria for life? We shall explore that next in “The Ingredients of Life”.

 

Further Reading:

Erwin Schrodinger – What is Life (pdf version here)

Nick Lane – The Vital Question (review)

From Nuclear Weapons to Death Stars

A low autumn sun illuminates white-tinted grasses and lichens, each covered in beads of ice from the first deep frosts of winter. A lone Arctic Fox treads lightly on freshly fallen snow, making its way south towards the treeline where the last minks might be grazing. This is the desolate Kola Peninsula in northern Russia which, on October 30th 1961, witnessed the single most destructive force humanity has ever released.

Tsar_photo11

It was named the Tsar Bomba: a 58 megaton nuclear bomb. When it exploded 4km above Siberia, it released more than 2000 times more energy than the weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, sent a mushroom cloud to the edge of space, broke windows 900km away and sent seismic waves around the earth more than three times. This was the single most energetic event in human history, releasing as much energy as the UK uses in more than 10 weeks in the blink of an eye.

While such a destructive event is not cause for celebration, it is remarkable to think about the rapid technological advancement that led led to it. It was only 50 years previously that the nucleus of atoms been discovered. 100 years earlier and electricity and magnetism were still mysterious, far-from-unified concepts that could capture public imaginations but certainly seemed to have little public applications.

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From this rapid development, it would seem to be that our species is likely in its infancy as a technologically capable civilisation. The vastness of space, and remarkable frequency of earth-like planets in the universe, also suggest that we are not the only ones. With trillions upon trillions of potential habitable worlds in the universe, it is almost impossible to conceive that other, remarkably advanced civilisations are not out there.

Given the track record of our own species, and our ability to turn technology into devastatingly destructive weapons, it only takes a short leap of the imagination to picture hyper-intelligent aliens doing the same. Except, rather than the desolate russian tundra, they might use interstellar space for their weapons testing grounds. While I would be the first to admit that this sounds like science fiction, there is certainly a case that such explosions might well be observable. In that one fateful second in 1961 the Tsar Bomba generated millions of times more energy than all of the power stations on Earth. Maybe, shining like a short-lived new star, there could be evidence of these interstellar ballistic missiles out there in the cosmos.

deathstar-sanctuary-moon

The interesting thing is that we haven’t seen anything of the sort. Famously the Fermi Paradox asks why, if intelligent life is out there, hasn’t Earth been colonised yet? Maybe the non-detection of great alien weapons, or Death Star Paradox, has a simpler answer: either hyper-intelligent civilisations wipe themselves out in adolescence, or they don’t seem too intent on destruction. And, with the world becoming a more peaceful place over the last few decades, we can be hopeful the answer is the latter.

Habitable Lifetimes: 50 Billion Years of Summer

For 4 billion years our planet has been a willing host to life; nurturing it as it evolved from the first primitive single celled organisms through to large, intelligent life forms such as ourselves. Over time our sun, too, has evolved; growing in brightness by perhaps as much as 30%. And someday in the distant future Earth’s long glorious summer will end; our fuel-hungry sun glowing ever brighter until the planet we call home is scorched beyond recognition.
habfuture
Media favourite: a dead, uninhabited Earth (in 4bn years)

That is certainly a disappointing conclusion for us Earth-dwellers, but not exactly the one myself and colleagues at the University of East Anglia came up with in a paper published in Astrobiology this morning (despite the mainstream news outlets you might have read).

The slow expansion of our sun has long been predicted by astrophysicists, who revealed the clockwork of stellar evolution as far back as the 1970s. Other developments in the 1990s confirmed this by estimating the range of distances from the sun (and hence temperatures) over which an Earth-like planet would retain liquid water at the surface. The idea of this Habitable Zone has since been the go-to tool for assessing whether a planet could support life, and for as long as it has existed it has been known that the Earth is edging closer and closer to the too-hot-for-life ‘inner edge’.

By using recent models of how stars expand and brighten over time, we were able to put a new (if somewhat uncertain) estimate on when such a transition might happen: between 1.75bn to 3.25bn years from now. But while that might be as far as the papers read, the real science goes much deeper…

By the time Earth is toast, our blue planet will have dwelled for between 5 and 7 billion years in this glorious goldilocks zone. This is the Habitable Lifetime, and by anyone’s standards it is astoundingly long. Without it, life on Earth would have never had time to evolve from inorganic soup into the wonderful range of complex and intelligent creatures we see today.

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Numerous habitable zone planets have now been discovered

But Earth is not the only potentially life-supporting planet out there, and instead our research was focused on how long these other planets might remain habitable. Before the sun had brightened, Venus may have enjoyed 1.3bn years of balmy temperatures, while Mars may spend a few billion years bathing in similar sunshine near the end of the sun’s 10bn year lifetime. Almost 1000 alien planets have also now been found including a handful near their star’s habitable zone, not to mention a further 3000 Kepler candidates waiting in the wings.HabLifetimes

Computing the habitable lifetimes of these exoplanets is a more difficult task, however, as every star evolves at a different rate. Luckily stars only change brightness based on one thing: their size, and this can be found for the majority of stars. The 34 planets produce a large range of habitable lifetimes from 0.1 to 20bn years. One particular case is Kepler-22b which will remain in the habitable zone for 4.3bn and 6.1bn years; almost the same as Earth.

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All stars <35% the size of the sun will give 50bn year habitable lifetimes

However, for the planet Gliese 581d things get a little interesting: it has a habitable zone lifetime of around 50 billion years! That is more than 10 times the age of the Earth and almost 4 times longer than the age of the universe. This unbelievable timescale is due to a simple quirk of nature. While the brightest stars live fast and die young, some of the smallest stars can survive for hundreds of billions of years; dozens of times older than our sun will ever manage. What’s more these small stars evolve extremely slowly, allowing a well-placed planet to be habitable for much longer than planets in our solar system. If Earth could allow such a plethora of unique and complex species in only 4 billion years, imagine what could happen on an earth-like planet similar to Gliese 581d with 50 billion years of summer?

What all this goes to show is that we already know of places in the universe where life may be able to take hold and survive for billions of years. Some of these planets may be lifeless until long after the Earth is toast, only to warm up and spend 50 billion years in the planetary sweet spot. And even in our solar system life-friendly temperatures may have existed on Venus and may yet occur on Mars, springing new possibilities of life. As I’m sure you’ll agree; that’s a much better message to spread than ‘The Earth is Doomed’.

PS: This was the first scientific paper ever to be published with my name on. To be able to write “myself and colleagues at the UEA came up with in a paper published in Astrobiology” and to say my handiwork is currently being studied by readers of dozens of news outlets makes me as giddy as a small child on christmas.

PPS: My contribution to the paper was to take complex models of how all stars evolve and produce a mathematical function allowing the luminosity for any time period and any stellar mass to be immediately calculated. This is the first step to working out how the habitable zone migrates and hence the habitable lifetime of any planet sat in it’s path. The majority of the work was performed by Andrew Rushby (who wrote a similar blog today) and Mark Claire, both of whom I am incredibly grateful to for the chance to be involved in this work.