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dalmatians-on-europa · 6 years ago

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Whales on Europa part 24

Altima listened as her team mates discussed various ridiculous rescue missions. She knew there was no way she was getting out of this without the help of who, or what, ever had sent the ball.

“Wait! Everyone stop talking. Something’s changing.” Altima focused on the ice. She could pick out more details now. The light hadn’t changed. “I think I’m slowing down.” She could pick out a lot more details. And her stomach was rising inside her. “Yeah, I’m slowing down. Make sure you are recording all this.”

“We haven’t stopped recording since you stepped outside.” Ito had stepped up as the lead communicator with Altima. Altima suspected it was so the steady Japanese woman could calm her down if she started panicking. “And Doctor Lazurne is following your vitals. Since your initial panic.”

“My understandable panic,” Altima interjected.

“Yes, since your understandable initial panic all of your vitals are in the normal range.”

“Thank you, Ito.” Altima could almost hear the other woman bowing towards the microphone on her end. “Yeah, I’m definitely slowing down. I can see what you mean about the ice looking like a sled track.” The ice was clear enough now that only the dim blue light kept her from seeing the ice clearly.

The ball stopped. Altima was grateful for the straps that secured her in the middle of the ball as she barely felt ball jerk to a stop. Preparing herself for anything she looked down. “I’ve stopped. It looks like I’ve landed in water, liquid water. It’s too dark for me to see much more than, wait. Something changed in the water. There’s a light beneath me. The light is getting closer. That is more than one light. It is some sort of machine. It looks like those deep ocean submersibles. The kind they take down to the Titanic or the Mariana trench. It has an arm, no, no that is a claw. It has a claw.” Altima stopped her narration as two fingers of the claw broke the surface of the water. All four of the claws fingers seemed to be made of flexible metal and they wrapped around the ball reminding Altima of an octopus. “Shit. It’s pulling me under.”

“Commander Zabel, Doctor Lazurne advises that you try to control your breathing. Your heart rate is spiking dangerously high.”

Altima bit back the biting remark that first came to her mind. Instead she tried to count her breaths as the water climbed her small sanctuary. The water climbed higher,swirling around the protective glass. As the water climbed above her eyesight Altima could finally see the the owner of the strange lights and claw. It looked like a giant metal teardrop. The claw came out of the fat end, which was pointed up at Altima. From Altima’s distorted view it appeared to narrow to a point farther beneath her. Half of the end pointed at her looked to be the same glass that made up her strange submarine. With the lights pointed at ehr she couldn’t see inside the machine.

“I feel like a scientific sample.”

“Then we had better hope its a biologist. They keep their samples alive longer than geologists do.” Garcia’s joke fell flat on both end of the headset.

The arm pulled Altima down below the machine. The sudden darkness blinded her. “What’s going on? I can’t see shit.”

“The submarine opened up. they’re pulling you towards the opening.” Ito’s voice was almost rushed.

Altima blinked quickly. “Okay, I can see again. I’m entering the submarine.” The arm pushed Altima and her ball into the teardrop. The inside was dark. The arm let go and drew away beyond Altima’s eyesight. Above her lights flicked on. Bathed in the same blue that lit her ball, but brighter Altima was finally able to see details of her surroundings. The room was large and empty except for Altima. Across from her a panel in the door slid open. “I’m about to meet my hosts.”

Through the open panel swam what first looked like two whales. The whale on the right had deep purple skin. Four dark spots that each looked like a pupil lined the front of the whale’s face. It had three wide fins along each side and four tentacles under what must have been it’s mouth. The thin line that she assumed was its mouth opened less than a hand span. The whale to left was a slightly paler purple with small navy spots. As they entered Altima could see that their tales ended in fins like a shark’s.The first whale started to whistle. Just as the first note registered in Altima’s ear the straps that bound her feet and wrists let loose. With a thud Altima hit the bottom of the ball.

“What was that?” Ito’s question rushed through the headset.

“The straps let go. I’m now on the bottom of the ball. I’m unhurt. Everything’s fine.” Altima could barely answer. She was right. This was intelligent life.

The whistles changed, lowering to a deeper octave. Slowly the back of her head started to itch and grow warm. “Can someone check my suit’s specs? The back of my helmet is getting hot.”

“Everything is reading normal.” Ito sounded confused.

A wash of music flowed through Altima’s head. A cello sonata. A lullaby. A violin solo. The roll of a drum. A choir.

“What the?” The sounds spun together inside her head. “I can’t. What? I don’t understand.”

“Altima! Commander Zabel! What is going on?”

Altima couldn’t answer. She closed her eyes. Maybe if she couldn’t see the whales she could make some sort of sense of the sounds pulsing through her head. The drums were growing. A bass started to thrum. The pressure grew. Altima pushed her hands against her helmet. The pressure grew. She couldn’t hear. The pressure grew. She couldn’t open her eyes. The pressure grew.

Her ears popped. Cool fresh water poured through her mind. The pressure was gone. The music was gone. With a gasp Altima opened her eyes. She could hear Ito asking questions. “Ito. I need you to stop talking. I’ll explain in a minute.” The water pooled behind her eyes. From the water came another song. This one rose and fell through the octives till it settled in a bass an opera singer could be proud of. *Welcome.* The gentle voice echoed through Altima’s mind. *You are welcome here.*

Altima looked back up at the whales. “I’m glad to be here. I represent the people of Earth, the third planet out from the star we all orbit.”

*We can not understand the words you make with vibrating sound. Please project your thoughts as we do.* This voice was more lyrical.

Altima tried to center herself. The voices in her head sounded as if they came through a pool of water behind her eyes. If she could send her thoughts through the same puddle maybe the whales would hear her. Taking a deep breath she tried. *My name is Altima Zabel. I’m the commander of the team sent from Earth, the third planet out from our star. We came in response to your signal.*

The deeper voice echoed in response, *Welcome. Welcome Altima Zabel of Earth. We are Purwhalen and Whalithosdor of what you call Europa.*

#whales on europa #original story #science fiction #Finally there are aliens!

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This microscope could look for life on Europa

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/this-microscope-could-look-for-life-on-europa/

This microscope could look for life on Europa

Earth, far off now, looks like an unpopulated set of continents surrounded by empty ocean. You’d never know that all kinds of life—from staph to elephants to humans—move all over its surface. I just spent two years in a wide orbit around the blue marble, the first step in a circuitous journey toward Jupiter. We circled around the globe in this Space Launch System cargo capsule until our position was just right for Earth’s gravity to fling us toward the Jovian planet.

That isn’t meant to be my new homestead, though. I’m headed for Europa, a smaller sphere. Its exterior is sheathed in a miles-thick layer of ice. But underneath, enwombed like I am in this lander, there might be an ocean. Scientists say that with its water and its chemistry, it could be the place in the solar system (besides Earth) most likely to have life. Other spacecraft carrying other instruments have floated past it: Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo (great names, right?). Looking down with their farsighted cameras, they didn’t see any beings waving white flags. In fact, no human-made device has ever spotted definitive signs of alien existence. But maybe they simply didn’t—or couldn’t—look close enough.

I can. Hello, I’m Shamu. (Isn’t that another great name?) Seeing things close up is my raison d’être. I’ll land on Europa’s icy surface and a drill will cut down into the moon. I’ll suck up its liquid essence and spy magnified details that no one has seen before. Maybe my view will show only water, neat, no microbes. But maybe not.

Although willing and able to travel, Shamu—formally named the Submersible Holographic Astrobiology Microscope with Ultraresolution—is still very much on Earth, in a basement lab of the Science, Research and Teaching Center at Portland State University, where science writers can meet it. A rugged field instrument, Shamu uses lasers to create 3D movies of microorganisms moving in a liquid sample. While similar tools exist, the ones that boast high definition are too delicate to take into the wilderness, and the tough ones aren’t precise enough to see small bacteria. Shamu’s fans, meanwhile, think it’s well-suited to investigate not just weird life in Earth’s extreme environments, but also whether there is life beyond our planet.

Shamu occupies a small space in the lab of scientist Jay Nadeau. One Friday in March, Nadeau is at work, leaning against a high rolling chair with two sweaters swung on its back. She wears another sweater (it’s the Pacific Northwest, after all), featuring a set of alpacas marching around her torso. There’s a Ridley road bike she uses for commuting stashed against the wall, and a helmet next to a CPU. Nadeau is small in all dimensions, and intense, with short curls springing from her head. She walks past the wet-lab benches, to a back room where a graduate student sits at a computer and mostly ignores her.

There, Nadeau puts her hand against a mesh cage a few feet by a few feet. Inside sits a squirt bottle filled with 70 percent sterilizing ethanol solution, a roll of orange tape, and a Thorlabs temperature controller that resembles a cassette deck. But the primary occupant is a mysterious tube-like object, about 2 feet long and as wide as a wine bottle, bolted to a silver beam attached to the bottom of the cage.

This, Nadeau says, is “The Microscope.”

To be honest, Shamu looks pretty unassuming—like a toy spy glass. And the team Nadeau works with has created even simpler-looking versions. “We’ve made one that would fit inside a soda can,” she says, “with electronics the size of a few packs of cards.” For now, Shamu is grounded, relegated to looking at ice-cold water from Earth’s Arctic regions, super-salty desert water, and the wiggling extremophiles unlucky enough to be trapped there. Someday, though, Nadeau hopes it might get a peek at Europan liquid.

Shifting her view from one place to another is nothing new for Nadeau. She got her doctorate in theoretical physics and moved into the life sciences at Caltech after that. When she walked into her first biology lab, the newness was almost overwhelming. “Everything looks like vials of clear liquid,” she says. The first time another lab sent her a DNA sample, she couldn’t find the genes. They had sent her an almost-empty envelope. “There was nothing inside it except a pencil circle with a couple of notes on it and a piece of filter paper,” she says. The DNA, of course, was on the paper, and she had to soak it to coax the sample into solution.

Thrown into the chilly deep end, she eventually learned what she was doing and moved her research to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she stuffed microbes with luminescent nanoparticles that stuck to different chemicals, allowing Nadeau to track them. JPL was interested in how to obtain information about life on other planets. That quest starts with understanding life on Earth. And so Nadeau became part astrobiologist, and eventually a biomedical engineering professor at McGill University in Canada.

Around the time she started, in 2004, the country was doubling down on astrobiology—the study of signs of life off-Earth. The Canadian government had just funded a research network to identify various sites in northern North America that resemble other planets.

“You write a proposal of why you want to go, and you can go,” Nadeau says. And she did—to Nunavut territory, where cold springs flow from the permafrost, carrying strange little life-forms. On her regular trips to these Martian-like locations, she took along a fluorescence microscope to test its capabilities for an extreme, alien landscape—and to see what might live in such a place. To use it, she injected each sample with fluorescent dye, which stained specific chemical targets. The microscope beamed high-intensity light at the sample, illuminating the dye, and the instrument’s optics produced a magnified image of the specimen, its relevant molecules shining bright.

The microscope could handle only small samples, however, making it harder to find the organisms she was looking for. And the instrument itself was both fragile and difficult to miniaturize, making it unsuitable for the otherworldly backcountry. Plus, if those dyes someday were to spill on the Martian surface, NASA’s planetary protection office might be all over her.

Next, she considered holographic microscopes because they could make 3D movies that played in real time, and didn’t require contaminating dyes or anyone to focus them. These instruments shoot lasers at the samples and, based on the way the samples scatter the light, construct an all-dimensions digital movie of what’s inside.

At first, Nadeau and her team used a commercially available scope, but it didn’t provide crisp-enough footage. When, in 2014, she remarked to colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that she wished somebody could build a better one, they responded, “We can.”

Together they developed Shamu. She and the JPL engineers discuss the specs that each iteration should have, and then they build it. After, Nadeau schleps it into the field to see if it works. You don’t have to focus it, and it slurps up a lot of liquid. That’s a plus if the population is sparse and the sample isn’t teeming with life, which can be the case in harsh environments.

Simple though Shamu might seem on the outside, it contains hidden depths. It’s different from other field-ready holographic microscopes, which have just a single laser. Shamu splits one into two: One is the so-called reference beam, which shoots straight through a sample of pure water, encountering nothing. The other is the science beam, which passes through the sample—of glacier melt, or salty water, or (maybe someday) Europan ocean water—and changes based on what it encounters. The microscope combines and compares the two rays: The difference between the nothing beam and the something beam equals the living somethings inside. The process happens instantaneously, leaving microbes swimming in your vision. As Nadeau puts it, “We know life when we see it.”

More specifically, Nadeau believes that we know life when we see it moving, thus giving up seemingly indisputable evidence of its existence. “Our visual systems are probably better than any possible method of saying if this is alive or not.” We need, she believes, to just look.

Nadeau would prefer if we looked for alien life using Shamu, of course. She pats the copper mesh and goes over to the computer, where she tries to find a white paper she co-authored called “Just Look!” As in, look for actual extraterrestrial microbes, not just for indirect evidence of living beings, like chemicals that result from metabolism.

Nadeau can’t find the paper but reiterates the idea behind it like so: When scientists wanted to see what was swimming around the Mariana Trench, they put a chunk of bait on a stick and watched with a camera. Marine beasts swam out of their hiding spots and came up to investigate. The scientists caught it on film, and so learned that beings lived way down there. “This is exactly what we’re trying to do, but on the microbe scale,” Nadeau says.

On Europa, a drill would bore more than 10 centimeters into the ice—far enough to reach liquid that seeps through the surface cracks—and Shamu would have a look. But before the JPL-Nadeau team could try to persuade NASA to give the scope a shot, they needed to try it out on more-familiar territory. Like Greenland. Which they did, in 2015.

Sheathed in my case—bright-orange plastic, with a killer whale painted in black on it—I couldn’t see anything. But I’d heard we were going to Greenland, by way of Iceland. At the airport, someone sent me on a conveyor belt through a metal detector. Words came muffled through my walls. “It’s a scientific instrument,” someone said. Other voices asked so many questions about what I was, and what I was here to do, it made me existential.

Soon enough, there was a rumble. Thrust. Lift. Then stillness. I imagined it was my launch into space, until a voice came over the plane’s PA. “We’ll have you in Reykjavik shortly,” it said.

Eventually, the humans set me down somewhere and began asking more questions. Not to me, but about me. They were nervous. “Is this going to work?” they asked. And then they just left!

After what seemed like hours, they returned and shot cloudy water into my sample holder to test me. I found out they’d been to a place called the Blue Lagoon. It was gross, they said. You could see the skin cells from all the bathing people. And trash on the bottom. So of course there were microbes feeding out there.

I quickly showed them a hologram. They sounded relieved, and we continued to the Greenland Climate Research Center for some real work. It was freezing out, and the humans put on orange-and-black puffy jumpsuits. Their arms were as big as their legs. In a place they called “the swimming pool,” but which they never would have swum in, they cut 6 inches or so into the ice with a drill that looked like a pogo stick. “Not enough, not enough,” they kept saying, as they pulled frozen cylinders from the drill’s mouth, checking for the ice’s depth.

Finally, apparently, there was enough. They stuck me into a shallow hole they’d dug, to keep me at the same cold temperature as the environment, and fed me a sample. Again, as always, I made them a movie. Later I learned this was yet another test, not what we were really here to do.

At last, we went to Malene Bay. In a white, flat landscape surrounded by white, pointy mountains, the orange-swaddled people-blobs found a suitable spot, sucked out a cylinder of ice, set me down in the hole, and fed me a sample with a syringe. In a minute, they all exclaimed, “Ooooo!” They could see something—algae, diatoms, marine bacteria—swimming.

I could do this all day, and I did, showing them again and again what had been there the whole time, waiting for us to find it.

At her computer, Nadeau pulls up a SpaceNews article from the day before, a story that would cast doubt on Shamu’s future itinerary: “Europa lander concept redesigned to lower cost and complexity,” reads the headline. The text describes a presentation that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Kevin Hand, a deputy chief scientist in the solar system exploration directorate, made on March 28 to the National Academy of Sciences. According to Hand, the lander doesn’t need to look directly for actual life on the icy moon. “That’s a very high bar,” Hand said. “That bar runs the risk of setting expectations too high, perhaps.”

There’s historical context for that attitude. NASA has been hesitant to look explicitly for life ever since it sent the Viking missions to Mars, in 1976. Those landers carried several experiments to look for biosignatures. Two came back negative, but one study showed possible evidence that microbes were there metabolizing. The problem was that a promising chemical signature could come from, say, geology and not biology. Ultimately, scientific consensus settled on “not aliens.”

The agency has steered away from life detection ever since. “NASA has been kind of gun-shy about adding a mission that’s looking for life,” astrobiologist Alison Murray says. She co-chaired the Europa lander’s science definition team, and has been close to the mission-planning process. It’s partly to save face. But it’s also partly because that quest is hard.

“There’s no one thing you can look at and say, ‘Aha, life,’” says Curt Niebur, the lander’s program scientist. Unless, he continues, a fish swims in front of the camera.

Niebur doesn’t think that seeing small life swimming is the same thing. “Just looking” for and at moving specks isn’t enough. Instead, multiple lines of evidence need to provide the same biological answer.

Nadeau will get a chance to convince NASA of Shamu’s worthiness, though. In late May, the agency released an official call for Europa mission instrument proposals. Nadeau has been ready for months to submit hers.

It will be a while before the agency makes its final decision. Sometimes, big missions like this one seem to exist only in the perpetual future, like science fiction. There’s a 2013 movie called Europa Report in which humans go to the Jovian moon and discover single-celled organisms and a strange light beaming underneath the ice. It turns out to be a macro predator. Nadeau has seen the movie, and she thinks it reaches into reality. “Everybody’s saying, ‘We’re going to look for these molecular-scale biosignatures,’” she says. “In the back of their minds, they’re really hoping to see a sea monster.”

I’ve been in space for five years by the time anything exciting happens. When NASA sends up astronauts, it gives them movies and books and games and music. When NASA sends a microscope and a spectrometer to space, we get nothing.

So, like some prisoner in solitary, I think about what I’ll do when I get out. Slurp up samples. Shoot lasers at them. Use my software to find any swimmers. Beam data nearly 400 million miles to Earth. Do that for 20 days. Then die alone on an alien planet.

Near my transit’s end, I haven’t seen anything—big or small—in a long time. But I can feel the tugs from every mass out there.

When I sense the first shift after years of the constant, one-directional slog, I know it’s Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, slowing me down so I’m not going too fast relative to Europa.

For the next 18 months or so, another moon, Callisto, and Ganymede tug on the lander and spiral me toward Europa. I get closer and closer and closer and slower and slower and slower, till Europa finally swings me into its own orbit.

The long voyage is almost over. I coast toward the surface, and a thruster fires backward to slow the lander down. Its camera looks at the ice, and a laser fires, hunting for a flat spot. Then the lander faces straight down, and a sky crane lowers me 60 feet toward the icy crust.

The surface looks like a giant agar plate, full of bacteria that have spawned in global lines of streaked Staphylococcus. It’s an illusion, though. The grooves are actually cracks in the frozen glaze where water might burst through. Maybe a sea monster swims below. Or perhaps some single cells. Or only inanimate molecules. Regardless, I’m going to find out. So good night and good luck: I have work to do now.

This article was originally published in the Fall 2018 Tiny issue of Popular Science.

Written By Sarah Scoles

#Science

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dalmatians-on-europa · 6 years ago

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Whales on Europa part 23

The ice flashed past the glass in front of Altima. The light quickly faded into blackness. Without a noise the glass started to glow. The faint illumination lit the cracks and shelves of ice that seemed to fall past the falling ball. Altima almost wished the light would go out. She hadn’t felt this close to throwing up since the very early days of her training. The little voice in the back of her mind was screaming over the headset with a number of familiar voices. Collins, Ito, Garcia, and Felix were screaming in three different languages. Behind their screams Ito could hear other muffled voices.

The ball was falling much faster than it had risen in the ice. The blur of ice spun past Altima’s eyes threatening to shatter her resolve and her life on one misplaced shard. Pulling on the straps she closed her eyes. Slowly her stomach started to settle. Opening her eyes she tried to find anything identifiable in the ice outside.

Wait. What was that? With the odd shadows and dim lighting, less tan an angler fish had to hunt with, she couldn’t fully make out what she through she saw in the ice. But, yes, that part of the ice was smoother than the rest. Why was it so smooth? Ice did not separate that smooth.

Altima took a shaky breath. “I need you to stop yelling. How deep am I?” The screams stopped immediately. In the silence she realized their was another sound in her ball. It wasn’t the scrape of metal or glass on ice that she would expect. Beyond the rough sounds of her own ragged breaths an frantic heartbeat was a soft humming. “What’s that sound? Is the microphone picking it up?”

“Commander, you are quickly approaching 1000 meters. We likely won’t be able to track your depth after that. We are getting the sound through your microphone. It, it’s,” Garcia broke off.

“Dios mio! It’s the radio signal!” Felix broke in. “It’s the same sound, just different hertz.”

Altima could hear the faint crackle through her headset that indicated the connection hadn’t dropped. Letting that reassuring sound fade into the silence she focused on the humming. It rose and fell almost like a lullaby. She was reminded of songs her father had sung to her when trying to get her to sleep, Billy Joel, Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and even Leonard Cohen. It was comforting. So comforting she caught herself attempting to hum along.

“Commander, you just passed 1000 meters. My scanners can’t see you now. Can you still hear us?”

“Loud and clear, Garcia, you’re loud and clear. Can you still hear me?”

“We can hear you and we’re still receiving the feed from your camera. NASA should be receiving our message now.” Ito’s voice lacked all of its usual laughter. Altima had never heard the steady woman sound like this.

“Does some of that ice look unusually smooth to you too? I’ll point my feed at it now.” Forcing herself to focus on the blurring ice Altima pointed her helmet at the ice where she could still catch glimpses of too smooth ice.

“Let me see. Let me see.” Ito mumbled to herself. “I’m going to slow down the footage and see what we can see, ow.”

“What was that?”

“As soon as I froze the footage it looks different. That is not normal ice. Not at all. It looks like the tracks the sleds use at the Olympics.”

“What?”

“You are correct that the ice is smooth. It has been shaped. Beyond the, are we still calling it a ball? Yes? Okay, beyond the ball the ice is rough, as we would expect. But nearer to you it is smooth as if it were shaped and polished. How does your ride feel? Are you bouncing? Is it smooth?”

“Other than feeling like I dropped through the ceiling of hell it is surprisingly smooth. I haven’t hit any bumps at all.”

“Good description boss. Keep that humor up.” Felix interjected.

“Garcia, is there anyway this sort of ice could form naturally?” Altima didn’t finish the thought. Was there any way this wasn’t a booby trap set by native Europans?

“I mean, there is always a possibility. The probability is just,” The Arizonian geologist sighed. Altima could picture her attempting some absurd mental math. “The probability is prohibitive. But there is always a possibility.” Her voice raised in a helpless hopeful attempt to calm the captain.

#whales on europa #original story #science fiction

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A frozen super-Earth is just six light years away

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/a-frozen-super-earth-is-just-six-light-years-away/

A frozen super-Earth is just six light years away

As of November 8, humanity has confirmed the existence of 3,837 exoplanets—quite an extraordinary feat, considering that before this decade the number was less than 500. Most, unfortunately, are hundreds or even thousands of light-years away, and it’s highly unlikely we’ll be able to study these worlds directly any time soon. But a handful are a little closer to home—including a frozen super-Earth just six light-years away, recently found thanks to a new technique for tracking and identifying exoplanets close to our neighborhood.

In a paper published in Nature on Wednesday, an international team of astronomers report finding a new exoplanet orbiting Barnard’s star, the second closest neighboring star system to Earth (after Alpha Centauri’s triple star system), and long thought to be devoid of any planets of its own. Named Barnard’s star b (or GJ 699 b), the planet is a hefty 3.2-times the Earth’s mass, with a 233-day orbit around the star itself.

It’s also a freezing hellscape, sitting far from its host star and removed from any decent chance to collect meaningful rays. The authors of the paper suspect temperatures average out to an ungodly -238 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s more than 100 degrees colder than the most frigid reading ever taken on Earth.

“I think it is a stretch to call this planet potentially habitable,” says Johanna Teske, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and a co-author of the new paper. “It is too cold to have liquid water on the surface, which is basically the definition of the habitable zone,” the orbital region around a star where temperatures would be moderate enough for liquid water to exist. Liquid water is generally considered a crucial component in the evolution of life, or at least life as we know it.

That’s a bit of a downer, but it doesn’t sully the importance of Barnard’s star b’s discovery, which has been quite a few years in the making.

“There was a hint of a signal in the data prior to 2015, at which point more intensive observing campaigns were initiated to confirm the signal,” says Teske. A major push to finally resolve what these signals were coming from the detection of Proxima b, the closest exoplanet to Earth and one that might actually be habitable to life, even if those chances have slimmed in recent years. “Based on results from the Kepler mission, we know think many stars probably host small planets. So, why not look at the nearest stars?”

Paul Butler, another Carnegie institute researcher who worked on the investigation, calls Barnard’s star the “great white whale” of planet hunting. “For most of the past 100 years, the only technique by which astronomers could look for extrasolar planets was the astrometric technique,” in which researchers look for the host star to wobble in the plane of the sky relative to background stars. The new study moves beyond the limits of astrometric techniques and provides a glimpse into how exoplanet hunters might find more Earth-like worlds moving forward.

The investigation of Barnard’s star b was dampened by a few challenges, namely the planet’s long orbital period (which made it harder to study based on stellar transition), and small amplitude of the object’s signal. The team needed to amass a large amount of data in order to isolate the signal and study it, and ended up pouring over 20 years of data collected by seven different instruments. Altogether, it’s one of the largest datasets ever used to find an exoplanet, and part of the reason the team is more than 99 perfect confident Barnard’s star b is a planet. “The truly impressive part of this study is the amount and high quality of the data,” says Teske.

They found Barnard’s star b using what’s called the radial velocity technique, which detects and analyzes wobbles created by gravitational forces acting between star and planet during their orbital dance. Although this technique has been used plenty of times before to find hundreds of other exoplanets, it’s never before been used to find one so small and distant from its star.

What about the planet itself? Unfortunately, there’s still not a whole lot we really know about Barnard’s star b, besides the fact that it exists. “We don’t know whether Barnard’s star b has an atmosphere or even its average composition,” says Teske. And its distance from its host star makes it unlikely it could support life—at least life as we know it.

Still, that mystery goes both ways and could be reason to hold out onto a tiny bit of extraterrestrial hope. “It could be possible that the surface is a bit warmer and could host liquid forms of some molecules, maybe like methane,” says Teske. “And we know of moons in our solar system that are covered in a thick layer of ice but have liquid oceans underneath,” like Europa and Enceladus. Barnard’s star itself is an old red dwarf and not very active, with means there wouldn’t be much concern that it would be inundating any nearby planets with too much stellar radiation. And although it’s a super-Earth, it’s still in the range of planetary masses we think could support life. It’s all speculative, but the prospects of habitability on Barnard’s star b aren’t totally diminished.

Teske, Butler, and others will continue to study Barnard’s star b, and are particularly interested in using the new exoplanet as a target to test out next-generation instruments like NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, which could actually assess whether there’s an atmosphere present or not. “Those types of observations are years down the line,” says Teske. “But personally, I’m still an ‘early career’ astronomer. I can be patient.”

Written By Neel V. Patel

#Space

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