09/08/2004
Small Planets and a Dubious Signal
Last week, two items concerning deep space intrigued me. One of them, a “mysterious” signal from deep space, was touted as a possible signal from an advanced civilization. The other was a major step forward towards finding a planet capable of supporting a civilization that might send such a signal.
On August 31, NASA announced the discovery of two new planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. A few years ago, the discovery of planets outside our solar system would have been front-page news. However, well over a hundred such planets have been found, and two more might be greeted with a yawn. But these two planets are different – they’re small. At only 10 – 20 times larger than Earth, they’re roughly the size of the planet Neptune. This might not seem small except for the fact that all the known planets outside our own solar system have been giants, roughly the size of Jupiter or larger. Jupiter is over 300 times the size of Earth.
Like Jupiter, those monstrous planets are gaseous and obviously aren’t places where life as we know it could flourish. The new Neptune-size planets aren’t great candidates for life either. However, their size makes it possible that they could be rocky and/or icy planets, a step towards being livable places. Both the new planets are much closer to their stars than we are to the Sun and have very short years, completing their orbits around their suns in less than three days. If you lived there, you’d get to be a thousand years old pretty quickly!
One of the new planets is special. It orbits the star 55 Cancri in the constellation Cancer, 41 light years away. It’s special because it joins three other planets orbiting 55 Cancri. This makes 55 Cancri the only star other than our Sun known to have a planetary system with at least four planets circulating around it. While the new planet zips around 55 Cancri in a bit less than three days, the outermost gaseous giant planet is at roughly the same distance from 55 as Jupiter is from the Sun. It takes it 4,520 days to orbit 55. You can bet this is one planetary system that will get lots of attention in years to come.
Turning to that mystery signal, it’s highly unlikely that it will be anything significant but I found it interesting to read about the science behind the signal’s detection and evaluation. A brief Reuters news item posted on AOL News cited a report dated September 1 by Eugenie Reich in New Scientist magazine (and on its Web site) about a mystery radio signal from deep space. The signal was picked up by the huge Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. For many years, one of this telescope’s missions has been its involvement in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI. SETI has been listening in on the universe, trying to detect any sign of a signal transmitted by another intelligent civilization.
If there indeed is such a signal, SETI has to pick it out of all the noise, interference and natural radio emissions from space. For six years, SETI has also enlisted the support of anyone willing to join in the search by downloading on their computers SETI software designed to sift through the plethora of data. This effort is called SETI@home. When the computers are resting in the screensaver mode, the software kicks in and analyzes data supplied from the Arecibo telescope.
Over a year ago, the Arecibo telescope was pointed to regions in the sky from which radio signals of interest had been detected on previous occasions. After analyzing the data, all but one have disappeared, according to the New Scientist Web site article. That signal has been picked up on three separate occasions and is at an interesting frequency, 1420 megahertz. This frequency corresponds to one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, emits and absorbs energy. Astronomers believe this would be a logical frequency for an advanced civilization to use to advertise its presence to the universe.
Of course, if this signal were truly from another civilization, it would be the biggest news story ever. However, the total time the signal has been observed is less than a minute! Dan Werthimer, of UC Berkeley and the chief scientist of SETI@home, says that they’re not “jumping up and down” but they plan to continue to observe the mystery signal. The New Scientist article discusses other possible sources of the signal. Could hackers either have modified the software to return a spurious signal, somehow generate a signal bearing the hallmarks of an alien transmission or resort to some other nefarious scheme to dupe the scientists?
Another suggested possibility is that the telescope has to be pointed to the same spot in the sky to get the signal. Could that particular position of the telescope somehow reflect a signal from the ground into the detectors or could it be that there’s a source on the ground emitting this signal that only gets picked up in this specific position? Or, is the signal originating from some unknown stellar source hitherto undetected? Jocelyn Bell Burnell is cited as pointing to her discovery of the pulsar, thanks to an anomalous signal from deep space. (We discussed her work in the column of 5/19/2004.)
An Unexpected Diversion: Writing a column can be a weird experience. When I typed SETI@home, Microsoft Word automatically colored it blue and underlined it, mistakenly assuming it was a Web site address. In trying to de-underline it and color the font black, I inadvertently clicked while a little hand was showing. Suddenly I was online and was led to the actual SETI home site. This in turn led me to The Planetary Society Web site and two articles by Amir Alexander, one titled “Reports of SETI@home Extraterrestrial Signal Highly Exaggerated” is dated September 2, 2004. The title is essentially a quote attributed to the above-mentioned SETI scientist, Dan Werthimer.
The other article dated May 17, 2004 by Alexander, “Pulses, Triplets and Gaussians: Rescoring Reobservations”, describes in detail the SETI search for and the “scoring” of candidate signals for further observation and evaluation. There are literally billions of points in the sky where unusual signals have been detected. One criterion SETI uses to dismiss the vast majority of these points is to look at those same spots in the sky again and see if the signals are still there. If they aren’t, out they go.
SETI looks for pulses at a fixed frequency that stand out above the noise and triplets, which are sets of three equally spaced pulses. There are also steady celestial signals that aren’t pulses. The Arecibo telescope sweeps the region of the sky where these steady signals are found. As you would expect, the signal becomes strongest at the center of the beam and dies out as the telescope sweeps away from the center. If you plot the signal strength, or power, during a sweep you therefore get a bell- shaped curve, known in the trade as a “gaussian” curve.
The mystery signal is a gaussian. But there’s a problem. It drifts in frequency. If the Arecibo telescope had been a few seconds later it would have missed the signal. If I understand correctly, I imagine it would be as if our New York radio station WOR began broadcasting with a drifting frequency around its normal 710 on our radio dials. If we tuned in at the wrong time we’d miss it! But wait a minute; our Earth is moving and so would any planet harboring a civilization trying to reach us. This means that as the distant planet and we rotate, the frequency will shift due to the Doppler effect, just as the horn changes frequency as an auto speeds by.
How clever would an advanced civilization be? Some at SETI think they would purposely drift the transmitted frequency to compensate for their planet’s motion so we would receive it as a single frequency. Hey, if they’re that clever, I’m impressed! The SETI software people can correct for our own Earth’s motion and they look at these gaussian signals corrected and uncorrected. The mystery signal that has caused all the commotion is a corrected signal but it still drifts. Bottom line – Werthimer doubts that this signal will prove to be “the real thing” but they’ll keep watching for it.
Down here on Earth, as I write this, Frances has arrived in our area of New Jersey with gobs of moisture. We were happy to hear from a number of our Florida friends that they survived Frances’ wrath with little or no damage. Let’s hope Ivan goes somewhere else and in a weakened state.
Allen F. Bortrum
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