Joel Kontinen
Some exoplanets are weird. And some have become even weirder.
“A pair of stars about 360 light years away experienced 28 dips in their light over the course of 87 days, measurements that would normally indicate an orbiting system of planets – except that the timings of the dips seem totally random. Astronomers are completely stumped.”
They first thought aliens were the result of this.
“The stars, collectively called HD 139139, were spotted behaving strangely by the Kepler space telescope before it ran out of fuel and ceased observations. Kepler hunted exoplanets by watching for regular decreases in stars’ light caused by a planet passing between the star and the telescope on its orbit. These passes are called transits.
The dips in HD 139139’s light look just like transits, all similar in size and shape, but when Andrew Vanderburg at the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues took a closer look at the data, they found that their timings seemed totally random – the researchers calculated that no more than four of the dips could be caused by the same orbiting object.
Then Leah Crane put some of her alien reading skills into the picture. She claims “variations might be caused by a huge alien structure that has been constructed around the stars.”
However, Vanderburg and his colleague Osborn think it’s not. They say that we might easily put something we can’t explain to be achieved by aliens until a reason or two for saying in wasn’t them after all.
This has happened in the quest for exoplanets. Complex life might require a very narrow habitable zone.
Some sightings will tend to be become failures and some will even define how we could interpret planet formation theories, For instance, hot exoplanets challenge planet-formation theories.
What is obvious is that Earth is a unique planet, just like Genesis said. Some astronomers are willing to admit that there’s no place like home in the entire universe.
Source:
Crane. Leah. 2019. The weirdest stars we've ever seen have astronomers utterly baffled. New Scientist (2 July).
Posts
