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Comment by aqme28 | Hacker News Reader

Are we more likely to find alien tech in a "mathematically perfect" star system? Why?

The article doesn't mention it.

They might not be planets but planet-sized, artificially-created cities/machinery/engineered objects. Think about it: If you were tasked with creating a planet-sized thing why would you give it anything less than a perfect orbit? You'd also put it in orbit around a super stable dwarf star to maximize the useful life of the project.

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).

Makes me think of how the Puppeteers in Niven's Known Space escaped the explosion at the center of the galaxy by moving 5 planets in this configuration

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer_rosette

with an inertialess drive that (I think) they bought from the Outsiders.

I thought they mortgaged the drive, and were more than a little upset at how onerous the terms were.

The implication is that is the star system had potentially been artificially modified or even designed. Any entity capable of performing such a feat that must logically possess advanced technology. That's all.

If they had any real intelligence, they would keep quiet about it!

Makes me think about the blunder from the first season of Star Trek: Picard. A mysterious, unknown star system, hidden deep in Romulan space[0], with 8 stars and a habitable-ish planet suspended in the middle. Clearly engineered. But I can't imagine how it could stay hidden; I'd expect it to stick out like a sore thumb from across the galaxy on any star survey, even with present-day telescopes...

[0] - An antagonist space empire in the franchise.

(Haven't seen it)

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

Fair point. Unfortunately, the lore says 200-300k years ago, which is enough time for information about it to cross the galaxy 2-3 times.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Eightfold_Stars

Now, while it's quite away from the Federation, the system sits in or close to Romulan space, so it makes zero sense for it to be a mystery that only the secret police inside the secret police of the Romulan Star Empire knows about it. I mean, it's like suppressing the existence of Mount Everest from citizens of Nepal. I can't imagine how strong the intelligence/counterintelligence apparatus would have to be to actually pull it off, given most people in that country can probably see it with their bare eyes on most days.

(And of course this only matters for real-life telescopes; Star Trek sensors work FTL (except when it would have inconvenient consequences)).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens

There is no stealth in space. The Dark Forest makes little sense.

Seems like they're missing something, eh?

This title is pure clickbait which preys on peoples ignorance about astronomy + millennia of unscientific ideology about the Golden Ratio.

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...

Upvoted ya cuz you’re correct. However, I’d add that while nature can absolutely create straight lines, it is often advisable to investigate for prior human activity if you stumble upon a straight line in a cave or under the ocean.

My point is that the phrase "mathematically perfect" is very misleading because it makes us think of straight lines and perfect circles but this simply is not the same kind of mathematical "perfection." I suspect this is more like an unusually high-quality gemstone than it is an perfectly round rock - very rare but not particularly mysterious. In particular this is an example of the six-body problem and orbital resonance might be a steady state if all the planets have similar mass.

The gemstone comparison is quite apt. Hadn’t thought of it that way. Of course, humans will place meaning in anything/everything if they don’t train themselves not to do so. I’d love someone to do a blog where all it is is tearing apart junk articles. That’d be a fun Sunday morning read.

I'm guessing the assumption is that it was manipulated by an intelligent actor into the described 'perfection'.

if you don’t mention why - it can’t be under scrutiny!

Trying to find a signal in the noise

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