'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech

https://www.space.com/alien-technosignatures-exoplanet-mathematically-perfect-orbits

by pixelesque • 2 years ago

434 324 2 years ago

belter• 2 years ago

Just your regular resonant planetary system...Nothing to see here...Call me back when you find one where they orbit the star with periods that are a sequence of prime numbers....

"Resonance in the planetary system HD 110067" - https://www.dlr.de/en/latest/news/2023/04/six-planets-in-res...

hef198989• 2 years ago

Or one with three planet sharing the same orbit, perfectly spaced!

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

Well, perfectly spaced is the only way 3 planets can share the same orbit.

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.

bloopernova• 2 years ago

3 planets orbiting a common barycentre would be very cool. I think something like that was mentioned in the Peter F Hamilton "Night's Dawn" trilogy of sci-fi books.

TeMPOraL8• 2 years ago

Or a planet with 13 moons evenly-spaced on the same orbit? C.f. Ilus IV / New Terra in The Expanse.

rob74• 2 years ago

Not convinced until they find a Dyson sphere...

mapt• 2 years ago

This is dynamically unstable; Any miniscule imperfection ends up being magnified by the forces involved. The angular momentum of the system is conserved, but resonances build chaotically and are likely to eventually concentrate enough in a smaller body to throw it off past escape velocity.

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.

angiosperm2• 2 years ago

They offer no hint why transiting the star could help us pick up radio transmissions. If they mean the planet going behind the star (being "occulted") would cut off the radio signal while it is back there, they should say that instead.

martinclayton• 2 years ago

The piece seemed a bit wooly to me. This bit caused a little twinge of pain:

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?

madcaptenor• 2 years ago

If we're going to look into every resonant system shouldn't we start with the moons of Jupiter?

vonjuice3• 2 years ago

Are we not looking already?

trumbitta2• 2 years ago

Or one where vertically aligning planets is easy with CSS

sirsinsalot3• 2 years ago

Flexbox will be seen by aliens as alien technology, our peak, our absolute pinnacle before collapse.

btown• 2 years ago

Cascading Stellar Sheets: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/379854/fulltext/2...

dclowd9901• 2 years ago

I’m not sure I want to meet the alien species that can arrange a star system into a prime sequence.

arein3• 2 years ago

The longer time you get to do that the less energy is required

Keegs• 2 years ago

Especially if the universe really is a dark forest. Although, if you wanted to stay undetected, why would you advertise your solar system like this?

aqme28• 2 years ago

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

The article doesn't mention it.

JohnMakin• 2 years ago

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

dwighttk• 2 years ago

Trying to find a signal in the noise

kekebo• 2 years ago

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

RockCoach• 2 years ago

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.

Lance_ET_Compte• 2 years ago

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

tossit444• 2 years ago

Seems like they're missing something, eh?

riskable• 2 years ago

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).

PaulHoule2• 2 years ago

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.

nicklecompte2• 2 years ago

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...

BirAdam3• 2 years ago

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.

pavel_lishin10• 2 years ago

Reminds me of a bit from a novel I read (won't be naming the title to avoid spoilers) where one of the minor twists is that the gigastructure of galaxies that we observe in the universe - the thing that's conducive to things like "star formation" and "life" - is an art project by intelligent species who've been alive since around the time of the Big Bang.

(No, it's not part of the Xeelee Sequence :P)

philomath_mn2• 2 years ago

You're talking about the ending of Men in Black, right? ;)

52-6F-62• 2 years ago

Hermes?

digging2• 2 years ago

Well, on an unrelated note, do you have any scifi author recommendations?

pavel_lishin10• 2 years ago

I have so many. In real life, this is where I get a very intense look in my eye, and about 50% of the time, I can see that the person I'm speaking with has realized that they're now trapped in an hour-long conversation with 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.

justusthane• 2 years ago

If you would recommend it, could you email the title to j@justus.ws? I’m on a sci-fi kick lately and always looking for good recs.

pavel_lishin10• 2 years ago

Will do. I also recommended some authors in another comment in this thread, and I try to keep my Goodreads mostly up to date, including ratings: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4016206-pavel-lishin

Ecoste• 2 years ago

Comment the title is base64 to avoid spoilers because ChatGPT does not recognize what book this is.

pavel_lishin10• 2 years ago

Good idea!

Um9iZXJ0IEogU2F3eWVyIC0gU3RhcnBsZXgK

tempaway167412• 2 years ago

This article is clickbait

barbazoo• 2 years ago

Was this comment worth a new account though?

tempaway167412• 2 years ago

my usual one is locked by the noprocrast setting ; )

jb1991• 2 years ago

What is the "mathematically perfect" aspect of this system? I don't see it in the article.

aliceryhl• 2 years ago

The caption for the picture says this:

The six planets orbit their central star HD 110067 in a harmonic rhythm with planets aligning every few orbits.

tromp2• 2 years ago

As detailed in the companion article [1], for every 54 orbits of planet 1, planets 2..6 orbit 36, 24, 16, 12, and 8 times respectively, giving successive ratios of 2/3, 2/3, 2/3, 3/4 and 3/4. After those 54 planet 1 orbits, all planets are in the same relative position.

[1] https://www.space.com/six-sub-neptunes-found-100-light-years...

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 2 years ago

If a K1.5 wanted to do that just for shits and giggles, is there a viable way to slow down or speed up orbits of rocky planets? Like, wouldn't they be shooting a bunch of mass out of their system to even attempt this? If one could build a Dyson sphere, is that more difficult or less difficult than engineering a system like this? The sphere/swarm has some absurd amount of mass all in a very uniform orbit around the sun, and most of that mass didn't start there... so it sort of seems like it's equivalent (but if so, they're much closer to K2 than K1).

swores2• 2 years ago

After those 54 planet 1 orbits, all planets are in the same position.

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?

jamiek882• 2 years ago

Easily explained by natural and common resonance. A good keyword is entrainment.

hermitcrab3• 2 years ago

It is not at all clear to me why the harmonics makes it any more worth searching for aliens than any other solar system. a) Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to engineer this? b) Isn't it vastly more likely to occur naturally as some sort of resonance effect?

Animats• 2 years ago

Neat. Is this something that tends to happen if there are large planets close to the star? In our solar system, the inner planets are small and the big outer planets are too far out to affect each other much.

neilkk2• 2 years ago

The last ratio should be 2/3 again.

not2b• 2 years ago

This could be a natural phenomenon. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance

MagicMoonlight• 2 years ago

If something has been orbiting something else for billions of years I feel like they’d end up in some sort of pattern.

We used to think shells and flowers must have been made by gods because they have patterns.

layer8• 2 years ago

All six planets orbit in resonance, with ratios of 54:36:24:16:12:9, or three times 3:2 and two times 4:3.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_110067#Planetary_system

redder233• 2 years ago

"alien" is just clickbait. I believe in aliens out there somewhere but nothing any human has ever seen.

Ensorceled2• 2 years ago

I don't understand why "alien" is clickbait. If the system was artificially created, do you think it is more likely that humans are doing it?

redder233• 2 years ago

Neither humans nor aliens created it, obviously.

akira2501• 2 years ago

'Mathematically perfect' click bait being investigated for potential corrupt motivations.

throw12346512342• 2 years ago

tldr:

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.

GordonS• 2 years ago

This may be a silly question, but is it even possible to detect radio signals from 100ly away?

throw12346512342• 2 years ago

The short answer is no. Not even from Alpha Centauri 4ly away. A lot of people have misconceptions that we would immediately detect these signals - we would not. MAYBE from Alpha Centauri with a LOT of additional funding and effort, but not as is. Details here:

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/22617/can-we-commu...

ThrowawayTestr• 2 years ago

Is the implication that we're seeing the actions of a species that can alter the orbits of planets?

doktrin• 2 years ago

I think that’s the only reasonable implication here. The alternative would be to speculate that “mathematically perfect” star systems are inherently more conducive to the development of life - which doesn’t really track.

SamBam3• 2 years ago

I remember reading a book by some kook with "PhD" in the author line, proving that the pyramids were alien technology.

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..."

KingOfCoders• 2 years ago

Probability.

seanhunter3• 2 years ago

From what I have heard, pretty much every star system astrophysicists look at is investigated for potential anomalies given how big a deal it would be to actually find strong evidence of alien tech.

orblivion• 2 years ago

Do the philosophical arguments against "Intelligent Design" as a field of scientific inquiry apply here?

saalweachter• 2 years ago

No, maybe, yes.

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.

denton-scratch4• 2 years ago

radio waves from satellites and telescopes beaming out in the plane of our solar system

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.

JohnClark1337• 2 years ago

Not to mention if we did pick up an alien signal it would have been sent a very very very long time ago

Sohcahtoa822• 2 years ago

Yeah, if we ever actually received an alien signal, it wouldn't change much, other than some people going wild about knowing that extraterrestrial life exists.

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.

Kubuxu• 2 years ago

We use some radio telescopes for radar astronomy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_astronomy

denton-scratch4• 2 years ago

Thanks for that link. Oddly, it doesn't seem to have come to my attention before.

calebm• 2 years ago

This is a great video on why planetary orbits tend to sync up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyn64b4LNJ0. Ultimately, it comes down to the concept of entrainment (the same reason metronomes on the same surface tend to sync up).

onetimeuse92304• 2 years ago

I think the authors do not understand how planetary resonances work and how precise (or imprecise) the orbits need to be for the resonance to hold.

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.

bilekas2• 2 years ago

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

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"?

darkmarmot• 2 years ago

He's saying that tidally locked bodies are products of simple physics and you can't extrapolate deeper meanings from them.

aptwebapps• 2 years ago

The article does not claim anything like that even though the headline could be interpreted that way, and maybe that was not accidental.

Scientists are investigating the system simply because it has properties that might make it easier to detect signals from.

rendall• 2 years ago

What is the mechanism by which orbiting bodies exchange energy?

empath-nirvana3• 2 years ago

Gravitational waves.

empath-nirvana3• 2 years ago

The reason they're _actually_ looking at that system is that we're looking directly down on it so we can see the orbits of all the planets at once. It has nothing to do with thinking the orbits are unnatural.

usefulcat• 2 years ago

Are you sure? TFA states "HD 110067 is viewed edge on from Earth", which doesn't sound like what you're describing. Of course they could have made a mistake; I don't know either way.

bunabhucan• 2 years ago

HD 110067 (TIC 347332255) is a bright K0-type star with a mass about 80% that of the Sun, located at 12h39m21fs50, 20°01'40farcs0 (J2000). Breakthrough Listen (BL) is observing additional targets selected from the Exoplanet Follow-up Observing Program for TESS (ExoFOP-TESS) in addition to the nearby star sample described by Isaacson et al. (2017). 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).

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.

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

I think the authors do not understand ...

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.

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

And here is the apparent answer to the mystery:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39543532

DrBazza• 2 years ago

To paraphrase Pratchett: million to one chances happen nine times out of ten.

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.

cbsmith• 2 years ago

Yeah... feels like someone isn't familiar with the law of large numbers...

empath-nirvana3• 2 years ago

I think it's mostly that people didn't read the article. The planets are interesting to study because of the angle we're looking at them and for no other reason. They happened to be aligned in such a way that we can get interesting measurements from them.

the_shivers• 2 years ago

Reminds me of Omphalos by Ted Chiang.

kloch• 2 years ago

Wiki page for the star system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_110067

alienicecream• 2 years ago

Imagine there are no aliens intelligent in the way humans are, and nature doesn't care about us any more than it cares about a species of gnat, and that knowledge and discovery is not the purpose of life.

NooneAtAll3• 2 years ago

Reminds me of Titius–Bode law[1], where simple equation correctly gave orbits of all the known planets, while predicting one more in asteroid belt and correct distance to Uranus. Only was considered disproven when Neptune didn't work.

I would not trust these relations even existing (other than by pure chance). Even less I'd trust any intelligent design behind it

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titius%E2%80%93Bode_law

stronglikedan• 2 years ago

other than by pure chance

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.

beambot• 2 years ago

Why would it be an equally good chance that only one exists?

jamiek882• 2 years ago

I don’t understand how one follows from the other there?

roenxi• 2 years ago

And with mathematically significant orbits, there is also the chance that some process stabilises to them which increases the chance of seeing them significantly. It is like being impressed by fractal designs in plants. The plant isn't intelligent and doesn't know about fractals, it is just that repeating patterns are easier for evolution to stabilise on.

But hey, if the job is staring at planets they may as well stare at these interesting planets.

nyrikki• 2 years ago

The non-clickbait studies suggest that this is expected with planet formation.

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."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17775

firebaze• 2 years ago

I'd suppose the astronomers behind this study know that "law" also, and ruled it out.

Not very far fetched, in my opinion.

tjpnz• 2 years ago

What's the correct distance to Uranus?

dr_dshiv• 2 years ago

I thought that, absent perturbation, accretion rings and planets would form at mathematical intervals due to orbital resonance effects. It’s just a very low energy state. Similar to how vibrational modes tend to be integer harmonics (actual overtone patterns are not perfect integer harmonics due to nonlinearities).

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...

ianai2• 2 years ago

That law reads like a good starting point for the lifetime evolution of matter around a star, but too simple to be expected to capture the full range of possibilities. Probably shouldn’t be used to refute hypotheses.

primer42• 2 years ago

What is a "mathematically perfect" orbit?

seanhunter3• 2 years ago

It obeys Kepler's laws really really well. As opposed to those mathematically imperfect orbits that sometimes get the signs wrong when they do integration by parts and end up sending the planet spinning off in the wrong direction.

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.

thereisnoself2• 2 years ago

I've often thought planet TrEs-2b [0], the darkest planet ever discovered orbiting a star, would be the best candidate for extra terrestrial life. My theory is that its darkness is down to the fact that the civilisation there has figured out a way to harness solar energy to near 100% capacity, along the lines of a Dyson sphere [1].

[0] https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/1716/tres-2-b [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

dmazin• 2 years ago

That’s an interesting exoplanet, though not sure how someone would live on a gas giant.

thereisnoself2• 2 years ago

I don't think it makes sense for a humanoid species, but silicon based, perhaps? Iain M Banks' The Algebraist [0] has a near immortal species called Dwellers that manage it somehow :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Algebraist#:~:text=Dweller....

downWidOutaFite• 2 years ago

Presumably gas planets have a layer dense enough that a solid would float.

wongarsu2• 2 years ago

Maybe they don't. They might live on a rocky planet further out and just use TrES-2b as a place to run their solar farm because it's extremely close to their star and (due to being uninhabited) didn't have any NIMBYs opposing large-scale construction projects.

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.

exe344• 2 years ago

In accelerando by Charlie stross, they live on raft that covers a large percentage of the planet's sky.

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

Maybe they live on a moon or two.

julienchastang• 2 years ago

The NASA exoplanet visualizer is very cool. Did not know about that. Thanks for sharing. I imagine those hypothetical visualizations will improve over time as our understanding of the exoplanet data gets better. It is amazing what you can derive from a single pixel of light.

PoignardAzur• 2 years ago

Not sure why, but the visualizer is giving me a strong urge to boot Outer Wilds again.

lisper7• 2 years ago

My theory is that its darkness is down to the fact that the civilisation there has figured out a way to harness solar energy to near 100% capacity, along the lines of a Dyson sphere [1].

Very unlikely, in light of the fact that "the air of this planet is as hot as lava".

bloggie• 2 years ago

Isn’t that the expected outcome when energy production eventually outpaces the planet’s ability to dissipate energy into space?

aylmao• 2 years ago

I wonder how temperature is measured for an object this far away. If it's calculated based on the expected energy absorption of a planet with this level of reflectivity, the measurement would be wrong anyway, assuming alien tech.

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?

holoduke• 2 years ago

That would be a strong alien to deal with 1.5 Jupiter gravity :)

ars2• 2 years ago

My theory is that its darkness is down to the fact that the civilisation there has figured out a way to harness solar energy to near 100% capacity, along the lines of a Dyson sphere

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.

bjelkeman-again• 2 years ago

Take incoming energy and make antimatter. Store for use outside of the sphere. That will be my premise for the book I am writing. ;)

samatman• 2 years ago

Harvesting energy is a misnomer, what we want is the syntropy: the available work.

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.

31carmichael2• 2 years ago

Nope, we are alone....

uiuiiuiui• 2 years ago

This is about as exciting as the Face on Mars, and for the same reasons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(Mars)

kypro• 2 years ago

What's the reasoning to suspect aliens here?

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?

duxup• 2 years ago

We make a lot of observations, doesn't it make sense that we would see some improbable stuff?

HumblyTossed• 2 years ago

Yes.

cal85• 2 years ago

Yes, and it makes sense that we take a closer look at the improbable stuff in case it's aliens.

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

For those saying that resonance explains the phenomenon, the paper doesn't seem to say that the 'mathamatically perfect' orbits are signs of intelligence:

... 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).

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ad235f

tim_hutton• 2 years ago

Two orbital things we might look for:

1. Activity in geostationary orbits.

2. Orbits where the planet's year is exactly divisible by its day, eliminating leap years.

jl6• 2 years ago

Are you suggesting #2 is sufficiently unlikely to occur naturally that it becomes a likely technosignature of an alien race whose programmers got so fed up with calendrical calculations that they megaengineered their planet’s rotation as a way of streamlining their datetime libraries?

psychlops• 2 years ago

Programmers with that amount of political power are definitely a sign of an advanced race.

yencabulator• 2 years ago

Based on our experience on Earth so far, that seems to be the easier route to correct code.

infogulch2• 2 years ago

The Planets Are Weirdly In Sync - Steve Mould - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyn64b4LNJ0

"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."

phkahler• 2 years ago

But that's also what causes the gaps in Saturn's rings. So rubble can't stay in those orbits but planets get locked in them?

infogulch2• 2 years ago

It's an equilibrium effect that occurs with at least one body is in an elliptical orbit. In this case it causes all the rubble particles to make their way towards the line of elliptical symmetry, but since its loose rubble (i.e. not enough gravity to maintain its shape), the individual rocks knock each other out of orbit. This is discussed in the video.

unrealp• 2 years ago

Clickbait. Isnt this just orbital resonance?

My solution to fermi paradox is intelligent civilizations realize futility of life and get enlightened and just die out. Similar to moksha in hinduism.

MattRix• 2 years ago

The entire civilization comes to the belief that life is futile? Seems absurd.

throaway920181• 2 years ago

There's no way average intelligence gets high enough for that to happen.

inference-lord• 2 years ago

I love this talk from Alan Watts, compliments your idea in my opinion. https://youtu.be/zpDj9Flz-lA?si=WTu3uxb9Q-v3LK9v&t=224

31carmichael2• 2 years ago

We are alone....

biggestlou• 2 years ago

I’m still looking for intelligent life on this planet

'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech

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