Abstract
I apply the thermodynamics of radiation to Dyson spheres as machines that do work or computation and examine their observational consequences. I identify four properties of Dyson spheres ...that complicate typical analyses: globally, they may do no work in the usual sense; they use radiation as the source and sink of energy; they accept radiation from a limited range of solid angles; and they conserve energy flux globally. I consider three kinds of activities: computation at the Landauer limit; dissipative activities, in which the energy of a sphere’s activities cascades into waste heat, as for a biosphere; and “traditional” work that leaves the sphere, such as radio emission. I apply the Landsberg formalism to derive efficiency limits in all three cases and show that optical circulators provide an “existence proof” that greatly simplifies the problem and allows the Landsberg limit to be plausibly approached. I find that for computation and traditional work, there is little to no advantage to nesting shells (as in a “Matrioshka Brain”); that the optimal use of mass is generally to make very small and hot Dyson spheres; that for “complete” Dyson spheres, we expect optical depths of several; and that in all cases the Landsberg limit corresponds to a form of the Carnot limit. I explore how these conclusions might change in the face of complications, such as the sphere having practical efficiencies below the Landsberg limit (using the endoreversible limit as an example), no use of optical circulators, and swarms of materials instead of shells.
ABSTRACTGood explanations for the unusual light curve of Boyajian's Star have been hard to find. Recent results by Montet & Simon lend strength and plausibility to the conclusion of Schaefer that in ...addition to short-term dimmings, the star also experiences large, secular decreases in brightness on decadal timescales. This, combined with a lack of long-wavelength excess in the star's spectral energy distribution, strongly constrains scenarios involving circumstellar material, including hypotheses invoking a spherical cloud of artifacts. We show that the timings of the deepest dimmings appear consistent with being randomly distributed, and that the star's reddening and narrow sodium absorption is consistent with the total, long-term dimming observed. Following Montet & Simon's encouragement to generate alternative hypotheses, we attempt to circumscribe the space of possible explanations with a range of plausibilities, including: a cloud in the outer solar system, structure in the interstellar medium (ISM), natural and artificial material orbiting Boyajian's Star, an intervening object with a large disk, and variations in Boyajian's Star itself. We find the ISM and intervening disk models more plausible than the other natural models.
Many articulations of the Fermi Paradox have as a premise, implicitly or explicitly, that humanity has searched for signs of extraterrestrial radio transmissions and concluded that there are few or ...no obvious ones to be found. Tarter et al. and others have argued strongly to the contrary: bright and obvious radio beacons might be quite common in the sky, but we would not know it yet because our search completeness to date is so low, akin to having searched a drinking glass's worth of seawater for evidence of fish in all of Earth's oceans. Here, we develop the metaphor of the multidimensional "Cosmic Haystack" through which SETI hunts for alien "needles" into a quantitative, eight-dimensional model, and perform an analytic integral to compute the fraction of this haystack that several large radio SETI programs have collectively examined. Although this model haystack has many qualitative differences from the Tarter et al. haystack, we conclude that the fraction of it searched to date is also very small: similar to the ratio of the volume of a large hot tub or small swimming pool to that of the Earth's oceans. With this article, we provide a Python script to calculate haystack volumes for future searches and for similar haystacks with different boundaries. We hope this formalism will aid in the development of a common parameter space for the computation of upper limits and completeness fractions of search programs for radio and other technosignatures.
As a guide for astronomers new to the field of technosignature search (i.e. SETI), I present an overview of some of its observational and theoretical approaches.
I review some of the various ...observational search strategies for SETI, focusing not on the variety of technosignatures that have been proposed or which are most likely to be found, but on the underlying philosophies that motivate searches for them.
I cover passive versus active searches, ambiguous versus dispositive kinds of technosignatures, commensal or archival searches versus dedicated ones, communicative signals versus “artifacts”, “active” versus derelict technologies, searches for beacons versus eavesdropping, and model-based versus anomaly-based searches. I also attempt to roughly map the landscape of technosignatures by kind and the scale over which they appear.
I also discuss the importance of setting upper limits in SETI, and offer a heuristic for how to do so in a generic SETI search. I mention and attempt to dispel several misconceptions about the field.
I conclude with some personal observations and recommendations for how to practice SETI, including how to choose good theory projects, how to work with experts and skeptics to improve one’s search, and how to plan for success.
•Overview of observational strategies for SETI.•Rough map of the landscape of possible technosignatures.•Discussion of the importance of and strategies for placing upper limits on technosignatures.•Recommendations for those seeking to enter the field.
Abstract
A planet’s history dictates its current potential to host habitable conditions and life. The concept of the continuously habitable zone (CHZ) has been used to define the region around a star ...most likely to host planets with long-term habitability. However, definitions of the CHZ vary in the literature and often conflict with each other. Calculating the fraction of habitable zone planets in the CHZ as a function of stellar properties, we find that the quality of a star as a host for planets with long-term habitability and biosignatures depends strongly on the formulation of the CHZ used. For instance, older M stars are either excellent or suboptimal hosts for CHZ planets, depending on whether one’s definition of habitability prioritizes the total time spent in the habitable zone or the continuity of habitable conditions from the delivery of volatiles to its current age. In this study, we focus on belatedly habitable zone (BHZ) planets, i.e., planets that enter the habitable zone after formation due to the evolution of their host star. We find that between ∼29% and 74% of planets in the habitable zone belong to this class of BHZ planets, depending on the timescale for the delivery of volatiles. Whether these planets can retain their volatiles and support habitable conditions is unclear. Since BHZ planets comprise a large portion of the planets we expect to survey for biosignatures with future missions, the open question of their habitability is an important factor for mission design, survey strategies, and the interpretation of results.
Most stars become white dwarfs after they have exhausted their nuclear fuel (the Sun will be one such). Between one-quarter and one-half of white dwarfs have elements heavier than helium in their ...atmospheres, even though these elements ought to sink rapidly into the stellar interiors (unless they are occasionally replenished). The abundance ratios of heavy elements in the atmospheres of white dwarfs are similar to the ratios in rocky bodies in the Solar System. This fact, together with the existence of warm, dusty debris disks surrounding about four per cent of white dwarfs, suggests that rocky debris from the planetary systems of white-dwarf progenitors occasionally pollutes the atmospheres of the stars. The total accreted mass of this debris is sometimes comparable to the mass of large asteroids in the Solar System. However, rocky, disintegrating bodies around a white dwarf have not yet been observed. Here we report observations of a white dwarf--WD 1145+017--being transited by at least one, and probably several, disintegrating planetesimals, with periods ranging from 4.5 hours to 4.9 hours. The strongest transit signals occur every 4.5 hours and exhibit varying depths (blocking up to 40 per cent of the star's brightness) and asymmetric profiles, indicative of a small object with a cometary tail of dusty effluent material. The star has a dusty debris disk, and the star's spectrum shows prominent lines from heavy elements such as magnesium, aluminium, silicon, calcium, iron, and nickel. This system provides further evidence that the pollution of white dwarfs by heavy elements might originate from disrupted rocky bodies such as asteroids and minor planets.
SETI in 2020 Wright, Jason T.
Acta astronautica,
January 2022, 2022-01-00, 20220101, Letnik:
190
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In the spirit of Trimble’s “Astrophysics in XXXX” series, I very briefly and subjectively review developments in SETI in 2020. My primary focus is 75 papers and books published or made public in ...2020, which I sort into six broad categories: results from actual searches, new search methods and instrumentation, target and frequency selection, the development of technosignatures, theory of ETIs, and social aspects of SETI.
•A subjective survey of nearly all of the literature in SETI in 2020.•A categorization of the kinds of papers in the field.•A look ahead to 2021.
Abstract
Several recent works have proposed a “stellar relay” transmission system in which a spacecraft at the focus of a star’s gravitational lens achieves dramatic boosts in the gain of an outgoing ...or incoming interstellar transmission. We examine some of the engineering requirements of a stellar relay system, evaluate the long-term sustainability of a gravitational relay, and describe the perturbations and drifts that must be actively countered to maintain a relay-star-target alignment. The major perturbations on a relay-Sun-target alignment are the inwards gravity of the Sun and the reflex motion of the Sun imparted by the planets. These ∼m s
−1
yr
−1
accelerations can be countered with modern propulsion systems over century-long timescales. This examination is also relevant for telescope designs aiming to use the Sun as a focusing element. We additionally examine prospects for an artifact SETI search to observe stellar relays placed around the Sun by an extraterrestrial intelligence and suggest certain nearby stars that are relatively unperturbed by planetary systems as favorable nodes for a stellar relay communications system.
Pisces-Eridanus (Psc-Eri), a nearby (d 80-226 pc) stellar stream stretching across 120° of the sky, was recently discovered with Gaia data. The stream was claimed to be 1 Gyr old, which would make it ...an exceptional discovery for stellar astrophysics, as star clusters of that age are rare and tend to be distant, limiting their utility as benchmark samples. We test this old age for Psc-Eri in two ways. First, we compare the rotation periods for 101 low-mass members (measured using time-series photometry from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) to those of well-studied open clusters. Second, we identify 34 new high-mass candidate members, including the notable stars λ Tauri (an Algol-type eclipsing binary) and HD 1160 (host to a directly imaged object near the hydrogen-burning limit). We conduct an isochronal analysis of the color-magnitude data for these highest-mass members, again comparing our results to those for open clusters. Both analyses show that the stream has an age consistent with that of the Pleiades, i.e., 120 Myr. This makes the Psc-Eri stream an exciting source of young benchmarkable stars and, potentially, exoplanets located in a more diffuse environment that is distinct from that of the Pleiades and of other dense star clusters.
Abstract
We used high-precision radial velocity measurements of FGKM stars to determine the occurrence of giant planets as a function of orbital separation spanning 0.03–30 au. Giant planets are more ...prevalent at orbital distances of 1–10 au compared to orbits interior or exterior of this range. The increase in planet occurrence at ∼1 au by a factor of ∼4 is highly statistically significant. A fall-off in giant planet occurrence at larger orbital distances is favored over models with flat or increasing occurrence. We measure
14.1
−
1.8
+
2.0
giant planets per 100 stars with semimajor axes of 2–8 au and
8.9
−
2.4
+
3.0
giant planets per 100 stars in the range 8–32 au, a decrease in occurrence with increasing orbital separation that is significant at the ∼2
σ
level. We find that the occurrence rate of sub-Jovian planets (0.1–1 Jupiter masses) is also enhanced for 1–10 au orbits. This suggests that lower-mass planets may share the formation or migration mechanisms that drive the increased prevalence near the water–ice line for their Jovian counterparts. Our measurements of cold gas giant occurrence are consistent with the latest results from direct imaging surveys and gravitational lensing surveys despite different stellar samples. We corroborate previous findings that giant planet occurrence increases with stellar mass and metallicity.
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