'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech
space.com
space.com
I would not trust these relations even existing (other than by pure chance). Even less I'd trust any intelligent design behind it
If I use classical language, this is the claim that there are harmonies in math itself that manifest as harmonies in the physical cosmos [1]. Arguably, it’s more weird that we don’t see more physical harmonies — it seems this is due to the incredible complexity of the nonlinear interactions.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240587262...
Barring intelligent design, there's an extremely good chance that at least one of these systems exist, and an equally good chance that only one exists, and we're just lucky enough to have observed it.
I fail to see how you arrived at this conclusion give the text that precedes it.
Throw a d6 seven times and we expect a configuration to come up twice, even though the distribution is uniform.
A better example wouldn't involve a probability that can achieve 1; maybe ask about the probability of rolling a 3, or of rolling another 3 given you've already observed one 3.
None of those will match the comment above; it isn't well posed.
But hey, if the job is staring at planets they may as well stare at these interesting planets.
What makes this one unique is that it seems to have avoided disruptive events. Intelligent design and aliens get the pop science web hits while unperturbed defaults do not.
"The current delicate configuration of the
planetary orbits in HD 110067 rules out any violent event over the billion-year history ...making it a rare “fossil” to study migration mechanisms and the properties of its protoplanetary disk in a pristine environment."
Not very far fetched, in my opinion.
"Consider the three largest moons of Jupyter. Europa takes exactly twice as long as IO to orbit Jupyter, and Ganymede takes exactly twice as long as that. How can that be? This is an example of synchronization, but what's the mechanism? That's what this video is about: it's an explanation of something called orbital resonance."
[1] https://www.space.com/six-sub-neptunes-found-100-light-years...
In spite of the title no one is wondering if aliens moved planets around to park them in special orbits. It's infinitely more likely the resonances developed naturally.
Also, none of the planets are in the habitable zone, so it's unlikely there's life on them.
Which is a shame, because if the star was much dimmer and they were in the habitable zone, the views would make a stunning tourist attraction.
Why would somebody want to live on the arms of a clock??
I'm in school for digital design at the moment, and stuff like oscillators and frequency dividers are at the very base/root of almost all electronic circuits.
One guess could be that alignments of planets in specific ways could be used to generate specific impulses of gravitational waves, the way we generate signals in binary. Imagine an alien race who uses gravitational effects from orbiting bodies as the basic building block of their "mega processors" that are the size of galaxies. So one solar system that has a division cycle of "2/3, 2/3, 2/3, 3/4 and 3/4" could be their representation of a value/"bit pattern" but written with planets in orbital mechanics, just like how we represent decimal 10 in binary 1010.
as an aside, it is very easy to also ask "why would humans spend so much energy taking silicate sand and turning it into intricate patterns at the size of angstroms and nano meters just to consume power? wouldn't it be easier to just let the sand organize itself into components as needed?" of course, the answer seems obvious to us, but the question is analogous to yours.
If one alien entity/organism is actually the size of a galaxy, a single solar system would be on the scale of maybe a transistor at 20-30 nm to us.
At that scale it's no longer performance art, but maybe a small part of a engine of some sort.
What I'm saying is thought patterns like "what is it for" "this is inefficient" or "that would be way too big" ... etc is only defined from our point of view.
So there are these great big buildings in Egypt...
Moving planets out of existing orbit is another level. I can only imagine this is possible for a race who can plan multi million year projects and thus you can probably use rockets to do small gravitational slingshots each day and rely on some compounding effect.
Maybe they built the system, and being lazy like we are they chose some simple numbers
> b) Isn't it vastly more likely to occur naturally as some sort of resonance effect?
Alien intelligence may be less likely than a natural effect, but alien intelligence in this system is much more likely than in a random system.
You can fly something massive near a target planet, while using some kind of engine to keep a distance. Gravity will do the rest. It may take some time of course, but all you need is to do maintainance on an engine regularly.
> Like, wouldn't they be shooting a bunch of mass out of their system to even attempt this?
It depends on a type of an engine. If you use solar sail for example it is not the mass but light will be thrown out.
> one could build a Dyson sphere, is that more difficult or less difficult than engineering a system like this?
Sphere seems to me more difficult. Not in a sense of energies involved, but from a standpoint of engineering.
Could you please explain what you mean by this, as to my layman's ears that sounds like either a confusingly-worded sentence, or an impossibility (multiple planets in the same location at the same time). Do they just all pass through one specific same location once per orbit but at different times? Or something else I'm not imagining?
The researchers hypothesize that this is sufficiently improbable to point toward an embodied intelligence as the cause.
We used to think shells and flowers must have been made by gods because they have patterns.
[1] https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/DEAyqYXn7pfD7ZboApakhe-120...
> The six planets orbit their central star HD 110067 in a harmonic rhythm with planets aligning every few orbits.
[0] https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/1716/tres-2-b [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Very unlikely, in light of the fact that "the air of this planet is as hot as lava".
Instead of the energy being absorbed as heat by the planet, it'd instead be stored in some other form or used for interstellar travel, construction etc, right?
From the black body radiation spectrum.
[UPDATE] It turns out that the temperature of TrEs-2b is not directly measured, but extrapolated from other measurements (at least according to Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrES-2b#Temperature ).
> Instead of the energy being absorbed as heat by the planet, it'd instead be stored in some other form or used for interstellar travel, construction etc, right?
Yes, exactly. So the only possible impact of energy harvesting would be to make the planet cooler than it otherwise would be. How much cooler depends on the efficiency of the harvesting. But one way or another, an extremely hot planet is very unlikely to harbor an advanced civilization.
There are no other discovered planets in the system, but perhaps there are some, or at least moons.
The problem with an atmosphere hotter than lava is that very few materials are solid at those temperatures, and it's hard to imagine how a civilization could build an energy harvester without solid materials.
But when the rocks start to melt you have problems.
That being said, it’s never actually aliens in astronomy. So far, anyway.
[UPDATE] I don't actually know if current exoplanet observing technology is capable of detecting such a temperature gradient, but given what I know we can observe I'd be a little surprised if it couldn't. A planet-sized energy harvester would make a pretty big dent in the passive thermodynamics, and detecting that should not be too hard. And it would be Really Big News.
I can't think of anything that would make a difference in the long run. Anything they do is still subject to the Second Law and the limits of Carnot efficiency. They can shunt a little bit of the energy off to the side and store it for a while, but it all has to end up as heat sooner or later.
Doesn't all the non-heat work eventually just become heat? Or am I misunderstanding your usage? Like a car with a solar panel still ends up radiating work as heat, by either air resistance (heat) or brake friction (heat).
That doesn't work quite the way you think. If you harness all the energy your planet will start to glow, first red, then white. Eventually becoming as hot as your star, at which point you stop gaining energy.
Unless they are somehow converting that energy to matter, the laws of thermodynamics mean that all that energy eventually becomes heat.
If we turned the Earth into a black body and used all Solar radiation to run computers or move stuff around at the theoretical limit, we'd still need the surrounding space to radiate off the heat as our cold well. So the temperature would be at whatever that equilibrium condition is, but wouldn't steadily increase. The equilibrium condition could be all over the place and would be largely determined by the composition of the atmosphere.
For the record I'm not in favor of paperclipping the planet like this. If anyone was wondering.
>For the record I'm not in favor of paperclipping the planet like this. If anyone was wondering.
We should do this with Venus instead. It isn't doing anything useful at the moment, and is closer to the Sun than Earth. Mercury might be easier though.
Like Starget ZPM.
Note how far out from the planet's orbit NASA expects the habitable zone. We aren't very good yet at finding planets that aren't huge or nearly hugging their star, so there might be planets out there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Algebraist#:~:text=Dweller....
Resonances are very common. We have lots of resonances in our Solar system in all different places between bodies.
For the resonance to be stable, two bodies do not need to have mathematically precise orbits in relation to each other. There is quite a wide margin for error. Once two planets are close enough to the resonance, the resonance may become stable due to feedback. What happens is planets will exchange energy back and forth on each orbit in a way, that preserves the resonance. A substantial input needs to be provided to break up the resonance.
What is actually interesting about this particular system is the long chain of resonances. But that is also nothing super special -- once you know how resonances form you can see how all of the planets, when they are close enough to the resonance, will transfer energy between themselves to snap into it and then continue on their resonant orbits.
There is absolutely no reason to suggest that a resonance like this must have come from unnatural origin. It would be like saying that because the period of our Moons rotation is so precisely the same as period of its orbit around Earth that it always faces Earth with one side, that somebody must have put the Moon on the orbit. That's obviously false, these resonances form easily and naturally.
The authors are scientists from SETI, Berkeley, Oxford, and NASA. Probably they understand anything you (or I) understand about the topic, and quite a bit more. (A funny phenomenon is that if they posted here, starting their comment with 'SETI researcher here ...', we would all listen to them and ask questions. If they 'post' a paper to a journal, a paper they spent years researching and revising, alongside other scientists, we disregard them.)
Like many similar HN comments, I think there's a valid question in there. IMHO it's a mistake to immediately conclude that, perceiving some inconsistency, the other person must be wrong, obviously ridiculous, etc. That doesn't make sense unless I am omniscient: the inconsistency between my idea and theirs could just as easily be a problem on my end - much more easily when comparing my ideas of orbital physics with those authors. Here is how I have learned to think of it (using this example):
To me, it seems clear that planetary resonances explain the observed phenomenon. Obviously the authors thought of that; how did they address that issue?
Humility is truth, unless you are a god.
Scientists are investigating the system simply because it has properties that might make it easier to detect signals from.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ad235f
Nobody is suggesting the resonances are unnatural. The edge on aspect helps the search in other ways.
I don't think that's the implication though. Life on earth would not be the same without the moon's orbit to provide stable ocean current rides. I would imagine not having that would add extra complexities to establish long term growth of "life"?
See for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyn64b4LNJ0
... the star HD 110067 has six sub-Neptune planets, all of which orbit their host star in a stable resonant chain. As the brightest star known to have at least four planets, with all planets in a remarkably ordered orbital configuration, HD 110067 offers an unprecedented opportunity to study the orbital evolution of planetary systems and the atmospheric compositions of sub-Neptunes. Three of the planets have low densities which suggest large, hydrogen-rich atmospheres. Sub-Neptune planets are one of the most common types of exoplanet discovered to date, so the question of whether they could support liquid water is crucial for target prioritization in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
...
... HD 110067 is valuable as a technosignature target not only because of its interest for biosignature searches. First, Earth views the system edge-on, which increases the likelihood of detecting radiation from any transmitters present whether intentional (Traas et al. 2021) or resulting from planet-to-planet transmissions which could be observed by their "spillover" during planet–planet occultations (Ashtari 2023); second, the large number of planets regardless of their position in the star's habitable zone increases the likelihood that an advanced civilization could have spread technology to neighboring planets, as has happened in our own solar system (Wright et al. 2022).
Surely radio telescopes don't "beam out" radio waves? They receive them. If they are configured to transmit, like the Deep Space Array, they don't beam in the plane of the solar system; they beam at whatever spaceship they are trying to communicate with.
Satellites even less; they have to conserve power, so they don't send radio waves into outer space. Their antennae point at the Earth.
Also, the sentence containing that fragment has no main verb, so I had to read it several times to figure out what it meant.
We'd never be able to make meaningful contact. At best, we could send a high-powered signal aimed at where the aliens are, but by the time they received it, we'd likely already be extinct. Heck, they're probably extinct by the time we even receive their signal.
Many earthbound lifeforms have lifetimes in the tens of decades, and might be expected to survive as a species for thousands of years. And there are many "interesting" star-systems within 100 LY, so in those cases perhaps extinction isn't an issue. But I think humans would have difficulty when an exchange like "Earth to Aliens: come in please", "Aliens to Earth: receiving, go ahead" takes 2 lifetimes.
No, in that case, timing is.
FWIW, I'm operating under a dystopian and pessimistic assumption that any civilization will destroy itself within a few thousand years of discovering radio. At some point, there will be massive wars over dwindling resources and eventually a weapon (or the combined power of multiple weapons) causes so much damage that it ends up wiping out all life on the planet.
This means that a civilization will only broadcast a signal for other planets to pick up for a few thousand years. In a galactic scale, that's incredibly short. It's basically the blink of an eye.
I completely agree that the duration during which a civililization can be expected to broadcast radio is extremely short, in galactic terms. So I think the likelihood is that if you do detect a radio transmission from outside the Solar System, by the time you receive it, the sender is dead; all his descendants have died; his planet's climate has changed, so that his species has been compelled to evolve (or die out); and his electronics-supporting civilization is long gone.
So I don't carry much water for SETI.
(No, it's not part of the Xeelee Sequence :P)
Um9iZXJ0IEogU2F3eWVyIC0gU3RhcnBsZXgK
Me: Um9iZXJ0IEogU2F3eWVyIC0gU3RhcnBsZXgK ChatGPT: "xxxx" is a science fiction novel by Robert x xxxx. It explores themes of discovery, the nature of the universe, and the potential for cooperation among diverse life forms. The story revolves around a space station, xxxxxx, and its crew as they encounter mysterious wormholes, alien species, and cosmic phenomena, challenging their understanding of the universe and their place within it.
ps. I don't know what is there to spoil by sharing a book title but whatever :)
I’m just surprised it hit all the steps properly rather than hallucinating a response.
Maybe I’m just old and amazed, but that seems pretty cool (terrifying?) to me.
I'll make it a short list of recent authors I've liked:
- Adrian Tchaikovsky. He's best known for his Children of Time series, but his other scifi books are also excellent; I haven't read the fantasy ones. "The Expert System's Brother" is particularly excellent.
- James Cambias. "A Darkling Sea" is a tremendously cool novel set at the bottom of an ocean under a moon's icy surface. Arkad's World has some very interesting world-building & aliens. And Corsair is a fun near-future technothriller about near-space and moon mining.
- Stephen Baxter (author of the Xeelee Sequence) writes very good books, but just about none of them have a happy ending, and they're mostly grim - but very interesting.
- It's not HN if I don't recommend Greg Egan, Peter Watts, and Neal Stephenson.
I'm also surprised to see somebody recommend A Darkling Sea! I don't think I've ever met someone else who's read it and recommended it before. The somewhat odd sidestory of the aliens who communicate through sex has turned off the couple people I've recommended it to from the story, pun not intended.
I'm working through The Final Architecture series right now, it's got some absolutely great SF.
That particular novel isn't the author's best work, but it's decent - his other stuff is much, much better imo.
One of the key pieces of evidence was that the three great pyramids perfectly line up in the way that the three stars in Orion's Belt line up.
The three stars are such a perfect straight line that they must have been pushed into position by a hyper-advanced alien race. (You know, to get them to line up perfectly from the Earth's perspective, which clearly would be important.)
But wait, that's not all. Not only are they so perfectly lined up, but they also put ONE of the stars just out of alignment, to show us exactly which star they came from, so we could go visit them.
Even as a twelve year old I was like, wait... any three points form a "perfectly straight line with one point out of alignment..."
1. Activity in geostationary orbits.
2. Orbits where the planet's year is exactly divisible by its day, eliminating leap years.
The philosophical argument against intelligent design is unfalsifiable (any evidence could have been created by an omnipotent creator for ineffable reasons), it is unnecessary to account for any of the evidence we have so far, and its proponents are not arguing in good faith.
"Could X be an alien megastructure?" isn't necessarily unfalsifiable, could be an attempt to account for evidence that doesn't fit in current theory, and could be in good faith, but it could also be proposed by people who just believe there are aliens out there in cases where there are obvious explanations and will just move on to a different "but this is definitely aliens" if the first doesn't pan out.
The article doesn't mention it.
Even if they are planets, imperfect orbits lead to problems in the looooooong term. An alien civilization may forcibly alter the orbits of the planets in their solar system in order to stabilize it. E.g. before turning their star into an engine that moves everything along with it across the universe (e.g. out of the way of an incoming problem like a black hole or to prevent an astronomical collision).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer_rosette
with an inertialess drive that (I think) they bought from the Outsiders.
--
[0] - An antagonist space empire in the franchise.
Engineered when? Just because they can send information and travel faster than light doesn't mean that the light from there has reached federation space. A survey would have to have been done nearby to see it
If they are brave they might build something like that in order to attract attention, it is starting to look feasible to not just inspect solar systems in detail but to send and receive messages using methods like
Orbital resonance is a common phenomenon - the Galilean moons of Jupiter are in resonant orbits - and I suspect this system is interesting but not unique. In fact a quick search found a different system with 5 resonant orbits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOI-178 Orbital resonance is quite common with young solar systems so the interesting thing about HD 110067 is that it has remained in orbital resonance for billions of years. It is childish to think that aliens moved the planets around.
The paper itself[1] only briefly mentions the resonant property. Nobody is directly claiming that the aliens caused the planets to do this because making such a claim with zero evidence is ridiculous. But they certainly understand what they're doing with the clickbait title :(
[1] https://www.space.com/alien-technosignatures-exoplanet-mathe...
Are we hypothesising Aliens could be anal for mathematical perfection, or is it that there's some utility in having a mathematically perfect star system such that an advanced alien civilisation might decide to engineer their star system in this way?
In case you do not know, the speed of light is just a made up number, so how the fuck do they're even measuring some solar system? THEY DON'T!
It's all clickbait, end of story "aliens, perfect math ..." I know this without reading it.
I mean I guess it could be worse "We found a mathematically perfect alien star system, and then..."
But seriously others in the various threads above have explained but it's to do with the orbital periods forming precise ratios so the planets align very pleasingly every now and then.
My solution to fermi paradox is intelligent civilizations realize futility of life and get enlightened and just die out. Similar to moksha in hinduism.
1. Star system 100ly away.
2. Piqued interest of astronomical community, because "The six planets orbit their central star HD 110067 in a harmonic rhythm with planets aligning every few orbits"
3. No accurate data on masses of planets.
4. No radio signals or other "technosignatures" detected.
So, super unclear what #2 means and why this is interesting at all / whether it's uncommon.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/22617/can-we-commu...
"Resonance in the planetary system HD 110067" - https://www.dlr.de/en/latest/news/2023/04/six-planets-in-res...
But humanity is dissatisfied. With no existential threats arising, people cannot find value in life. AI-generated entertainment satisfies no one, and because no algorithm can quantify "originality," no machine would ever advise additional human involvement.
There is only one area of human civilization where AI is not involved, and that's designing the CSS specification. "But what if I want to position this element so that the ultraviolet radiation is displayed with variable additional intensity based on the size of the 3d projection on the latest gen virtual assistant, but only on Tuesdays? You can't possibly make me use javascript to account for something that common," bemoans one forum poster.
What follows is chaos. Everyone has an opinion, some thinking that the treatment infrared got in 2190 was unfair to people with unmodified vision, others believing that the accessibility option prefers-visible-spectrum more than makes up for it. Still others want more robustness than simply prefers-visible-spectrum; there should be a native way to specify the exact wavelengths of light that one can see. Minimalists argue that when experiences are delivered directly to your brain, none of this matters, but no one likes that argument.
The world hasn't experienced this large a conflict in hundreds of years, and it is unprepared. As people flock to the Great CSS Debate, they finally find a cause to believe in, even if they have no real opinion on the matter. Tempers escalate and battle lines are drawn. The AI don't possess enough training data to deal with the situation.
In the midst of the final collapse, a package is delivered late. Just one package, and just one hour late, but such a thing is unheard of. Distracted from the CSS Wars, people flock to real-time trackers of all mail delivery. Are the weather models breaking down? Did Moore's Law finally stop, and as a result the AI infrastructure cannot keep up with the power needed in today's world?
This new drama captivates the world's population so deeply that the apocalypse is avoided. And the scientific outpost of the Vrexon goes back to observation mode to await the next crisis.
"We have come to warn you. In your effort to create space for node_modules, you will consume the galaxy."
Signals from such a transmitter placed on a planet spinning around a foreign star would drift in time when observed from Earth, "the same as when an ambulance goes past you, the sound of it shifts from very high to very low"
What's wrong with saying Doppler, frequency, or pitch maybe?
Spaced-out resonant triplets of bodies in the same plane are often dynamically stable - an imperfect ratio is damped by various orbital forces until it approximates a perfect ratio.
Why they'd do this, though, would be a mystery.
And if we go for a gas giant and two small planets, there are probably many of those out there. We almost got one such trio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point
You want L4 and L5 for that.
At equal mass the separation increases until they are all equidistant from each other assuming a completely circular orbit.
Edit as a general response: Question answered, multiple times, thank you! Also, there my basic physics knowledge resurfaces, thank you for that as well!
A Dyson swarm will keep you safe from any threat smaller than another Dyson swarm — and while you may not be able to "pack it up", you can use one to run to other galaxies… in fact, almost all of them… at close enough to the same time that light cones matter… and get the settlers moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light… and have a lot of redundancy.
If the point of a Dyson sphere is to collect energy, wouldn't it be enough to just use it or store it?
If you're K2 just take the star and solar system with you. Stellar engines can be used to move stars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
Shkadov thruster:
> After a period of one million years this would yield an imparted speed of 20 m/s, with a displacement from the original position of 0.03 light-years. After one billion years, the speed would be 20 km/s and the displacement 34,000 light-years, a little over a third of the estimated width of the Milky Way galaxy.
Caplan thruster:
> Caplan estimates that the Bussard engine would use 10^12 kg of solar material per second to produce a maximum acceleration of 10^−9 m/s2, yielding a velocity of 200 km/s after 5 million years.
Svoronos Star Tug:
> The Svoronos Star Tug can, in principle (assuming perfect efficiency), accelerate the Sun to ~27% the speed of light (after burning enough of the Sun's mass to transition it to a brown dwarf).
[Citation Needed]
Space is big, really big, etc. so it's no surprise we've found something like this just through chance alone. One of the planets is probably Bethselamin.