Extraterrestrial Cognitive Dissonance?

Quartz had a recent interesting article that talks to the popularity of the science of searching for extraterrestrial life. Their initial example of the media sensation regarding Oumaumau, the unusual object that was observed within the Solar System, is revealing on how scientific information along with speculation can be distorted. Sutter and Siegel calling Bialy and Loeb's paper (2018) insulting and/or sensationalist was too extreme in my opinion (deGrasse Tyson as well). The authors were clearly speculating which warrants more investigation rather than anger. The paper is well structured, scientific and worth a look.

The more significant problem is that scientific speculation gets mixed with popular extraterrestrial theories and UFOs by those with what the article calls 'cognitive dissonance'. This mix can be easily remedied by clear, logical scientific defense of evidential speculation. Academic institutions are going to have to give in sooner or later to this as younger scientists enter the mainstream.

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TESS and the Super Earth

BD-17 588A in double binary system labeled A

I keep meaning to talk about the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) that came online this spring. I will dig deeper into the mission but saw that there was a recent discovery of a rocky exoplanet around the hierarchical binary BD-17 588A, a very cool M3.0 red dwarf about 6.87 parsecs distant (to do the distance calculation yourself just go to the link for 588A and find the parallax in milliarcseconds or mas, convert to arcseconds and take the reciprocal of the value).

The rocky exoplanet is about 1.35 times larger than Earth and an orbital period of 5.35 days. Another interesting aspect to this discovery was the secondary observation utilizing the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) to measure the slight spectral doppler shifts to determine its upper mass limit of 8.4 times the mass of Earth. (More to come on HARPS as well). This is considered one of the closest exoplanets as a prime candidate for a future study of its atmosphere.

You can find the paper here.

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A Visualization of Exoplanets

This interesting video of exoplanet discoveries by year was just published by System Sounds utilizing NASA data. The perspective shows each exoplanet position relative to the galactic plane.

The colors present the detection types - pink for radial velocity, purple for transits, orange for direct imaging and green for microlensing. A great visualization!

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Nematodes Awaken after 40000 Years

In an amazing article by Shatilovich et al. (2018) multicellular organisms (in this case nematodes or small roundworms) were thawed back to life from Siberian permafrost demonstrating the amazing survivability of life in extreme conditions. As speculation, it certainly seems quite feasible that meteor impacts could eject simple life to other planets/moon in the Solar System.

Read the research article here - Viable Nematodes from Late Pleistocene Permafrost of the Kolyma River Lowland

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The Threat of Gamma Ray Bursts

Recently I stumbled into a paper estimating the number of supernovae (SN) in our galaxy (Adams et al. 2013). This reminded me of the number of news outlets that latched onto the potential of gamma ray bursts (GRBs) to create a catastrophic extinction event on Earth (here are some examples: Did Deadly Gamma-Ray Burst Cause a Mass Extinction on Earth?, Asteroids are not the only threat to life from space,  and shockingly from Nature -- 'Death Star' found pointing at Earth - that's a serious level of click-bate from such a prestigious journal).

You are welcome to read those articles and I'm not going to go into any deep detail in this post on GRB physics or planetary impacts. However, I did want to do some simple napkin math on what the probability of a direct gamma ray burst from a specific subset of core collapse SN might be on Earth. We're indebted to Dr. Enrico Cappellaro's dedicated research into SN rates within galaxies (see Cappellaro, Evans & Turatto 1999 and associated citations for newer work) for some of the broader rough estimates. There are a number of ways to determine the SN rate, but the most obvious way is to utilize observations across multiple galaxy surveys to measure the rate by look-back time. Other methods include measured pulsar birth rates (some percentage of SNs), the amount of SN remnant isotopes and future neutrino detection.

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