[LINK] "White Dwarfs and Habitable Planets"

The idea of a habitable world orbiting a white dwarf--a stellar ember, what our Sol will become after it completes its burning of its hydrogen and other fuels--was raised a decade ago by a reader of this blog. Centauri Dreams has picked up on a paper exploring this theme.

An interesting paper from Eric Agol (University of Washington) takes a look at exoplanet possibilities around white dwarfs, and draws some surprising conclusions. We have, of course, searched for habitable planets primarily around stars that are much younger, assuming that a planetary system that had undergone the transformation of a red giant into a white dwarf would be unlikely to provide a suitable home for life. But Agol isn’t so sure.

Remember the process: Stars like the Sun eventually exhaust their nuclear fuel and at some point lose their outer envelope, leaving only the hot core behind. The core, now a hot white dwarf at temperatures exceeding 100,000 Kelvin, will begin a long process of cooling. A typical white dwarf might be half as massive as the Sun, but not much larger than the Earth in size, and as this NASA article points out, that means it’s extremely dense, perhaps 200,000 times as dense as the Earth itself. When it comes to matter, only neutron stars surpass that density.

Agol points out that the most common white dwarfs have surface temperatures in the range of 5000 K, which leads to his calculation that a planet would need to orbit no closer than about 0.01 AU to be at a temperature where liquid water could exist on the surface. What’s intriguing from the standpoint of finding such planets is that a potentially habitable world like this, Earth-sized or even smaller, would in principle be detectable because of the small size of the host star. The white dwarf, in fact, could be completely eclipsed by a habitable planet that orbits it.

But how does a planet survive the preceding red giant phase? One possibility is that new planets could form out of gases near the white dwarf, especially in binary systems where gravitational interactions could play a helpful role. We know of two neutron stars that have planets that conceivably formed from the disk created after a supernova event. Moreover, the pulsar 4U 0142+61 has been shown to have a circumstellar disk thought to have been formed from supernova debris. Planetary capture or migration can’t be ruled out, either.

Agol's paper, "Transit surveys for Earths in the habitable zones of white dwarfs", is available for reading here, abstract as follows.

To date the search for habitable Earth-like planets has primarily focused on nuclear burning stars. I propose that this search should be expanded to cool white dwarf stars that have expended their nuclear fuel. I define the continuously habitable zone of white dwarfs, and show that it extends from ~0.005 to 0.02 AU for white dwarfs with masses from 0.4-0.9 solar masses, temperatures less than 10,000 K, and habitable durations of at least 3 Gyr. As they are similar in size to Earth, white dwarfs may be completely eclipsed by terrestrial planets that orbit edge-on, which can easily be detected with ground-based telescopes. If planets can migrate inward or reform near white dwarfs, I show that a global robotic telescope network could carry out a transit survey of nearby white dwarfs placing interesting constraints on the presence of habitable Earths. If planets were detected, I show that the survey would favor detection of planets similar to Earth: similar size, temperature, rotation period, and host star temperatures similar to the Sun. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) could place even tighter constraints on the frequency of habitable Earths around white dwarfs. The confirmation and characterization of these planets might be carried out with large ground and space telescopes.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On ""No Irish Need Apply":`A Myth of Victimization"

Those of you who've read me may know that I tend to be exasperated by ethnic myths. This, you'll not be surprised to know, is particularly true where the ethnicity concerned is one that I could conceivably lay claim to (#ohmybelovedhomeland). Thanks why I'm thankful that Facebook's Tom linked to Richard Jensen's 2002 paper from the Journal of Social History which takes apart the myth that "No Irish Need Apply" signs in the United States were regularly used to keep young Irish and Irish-American men from finding work. What signs, Jensen asks?

The fact that Irish vividly "remember" NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one. This is especially strange since signs were primarily directed toward these others: the signs said that employment was available here and invited Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. The courts are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through the window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend?

The NINA slogan seems to have originated in England, probably after the 1798 Irish rebellion. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries it was used by English to indicate their distrust of the Irish, both Catholic and Protestant. For example the Anglican bishop of London used the phrase to say he did not want any Irish Anglican ministers in his diocese. By the 1820s it was a cliché in upper and upper middle class London that some fussy housewives refused to hire Irish and had even posted NINA signs in their windows. It is possible that handwritten NINA signs regarding maids did appear in a few American windows, though no one ever reported one. We DO have actual newspaper want ads for women workers that specifies Irish are not wanted; they will be discussed below. In the entire file of the New York Times from 1851 to 1923, there are two NINA ads for men, one of which is for a teenager. Computer searches of classified help wanted ads in the daily editions of other online newspapers before 1923 such as the Booklyn Eagle, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune show that NINA ads for men were extremely rare--fewer than two per decade. The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably zero such signs were seen at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters etc. anywhere in America, at any time. NINA signs and newspaper ads for apartments to let did exist in England and Northern Ireland, but historians have not discovered reports of any in the United States, Canada or Australia. The myth focuses on public NINA signs which deliberately marginalized and humiliated Irish male job applicants. The overwhelming evidence is that such signs never existed.

Irish Americans all have heard about them—and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The myth had "legs": people still believe it, even scholars. The late Tip O'Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw them when growing up. Historically, physical NINA signs could have flourished only in intensely anti-Catholic or anti-Irish eras, especially the 1830—1870 period. Thus reports of sightings in the 1920s or 1930s suggest the myth had become so deeply rooted in Irish-American folk mythology that it was impervious to evidence. Perhaps the Irish had constructed an Evil Other out of stereotypes of outsiders—a demon that could frighten children like the young Ted Kennedy and adults as well. The challenge for the historian is to explain the origins and especially the durability of the myth. Did the demon exist outside the Irish imagination—and if not how did it get there? [T]he myth originated and will explore its long-lasting value to the Irish community as a protective device. It was an enhancement of political solidarity against a hostile Other; and a way to insulate a preindustrial non-individualistic group-oriented work culture from the individualism rampant in American culture.

I like this summary of the paper's import:

In History and Memory, Geoffery Cubitt talks of “distorted memories,” memories that assimilate memory detail from one experience into the context of another, often imbued with additional meaning.[2] Such is the case with NINA signs. As Jensen notes, Irish-America harbors deep beliefs in their victimization in the United States, including job discrimination, stemming from the trials of the Irish Potato Famine. In the United States, the Irish needed to foster a new ethnic community and identity, one that did not place the villains of their story as the distant and overseas British. That villain became Americans holding access to jobs. The NINA sign embodies that transference, a distorted memory with deep symbolic meaning that overshadows the historical record.

Anti-Irish racism certainly did exist--I blogged this Sunday just past about how some Victorians believed in the "negrescence" of the Irish and other Celts--but it's also important to actually use, you know, facts when you're talking about history. Unless you're not talking about objective reality, but that's a separate matter.

And if you're curious, Irish Canadians seem to have undergone similar experiences of alienation, particularly in the urban areas where they settled following the island's social and economic breakdown, where they became one of the first distinctive, feared, urban underclasses.

Canadian cities and larger towns quickly developed Irish sections or wards. The Anglo-Protestant majority measured the Irish contribution economically and the Irish deficiencies socially, religiously and racially. On the one hand, many of the Irish created a labour force ready and able to fill the seasonal employment demands of a newly expanded canal system, lumber industry and burgeoning railway network; on the other hand, because of their low income, their Catholicism, the seasonal separation from their families and differences in their way of life, they were a conspicuous minority group. They filled working-class neighbourhoods and inflated majority fears of social evils previously dismissed as peculiar to the US.

For some years the Irish supplied the base of a working-class labour force necessary for the slow advance of communication, commerce and industry, but they remained an adjunct to, rather than a central component of, mainstream North American economic and social life - the basis of which was commerce and agricultural activity. Policy tied population increase to land settlement. Gradual commercial and industrial development usually serviced the agricultural sector, and, because many Irish were not farmers, Irish labourers were seen as rootless.

Toronto's neighbourhood of Cabbagetown, named after the vegetable the Irish-Canadians labourers grew in their yards to supplement their diets, was one of these districts.

[URBAN NOTE] On the Orange Order in Toronto

I blogged before about the strength of the Orange Order locally in Toronto. Canadian Orange Ordeer was surpriusingly strong, and as this study of the distribution of Orange Order members worldwide shows, Ontario was quite prominent.

Canadian (including Newfoundland) membership exceeded that in Ireland by the turn of the century, despite having a similar Protestant population base. Canadian membership peaked in 1920, at which time Canada accounted for almost sixty percent of international membership (if we exclude the smaller jurisdictions of the United States, Australasia and Eire it is 61.6 percent). The Canadian lodges also had twice the membership of their Northern Irish counterparts at this point! Sharp membership decline in much of Canada outside Newfoundland in the 1920-38 period reduced the Canadian advantage so that by the end of the Second World War, Northern Ireland had edged ahead of Canada. The 'Ulsterization' of the Order continues to this day with over 60 percent of members now based in Northern Ireland. The Canadian organization has experienced such heavy decline that there is now little difference in size between the Scottish, English and Canadian branches of the organization!

In Canadian terms, Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland have been the leading Orange provinces. Yet New Brunswick's prominence belongs more to the nineteenth than the twentieth century. Its 11 percent share of Canadian membership in 1901 had declined to six percent by 1918. In the 1918-25 period, New Brunswick's membership was again cut in half, and it never recovered. On the other hand, Ontario and Newfoundland generally comprised around three-quarters of the membership in the twentieth century, though Newfoundland became increasingly important after World War II and now makes up half the Canadian membership (5).

At the beginning of the 20th century, Ontarians constituted two-thirds of the membership of the Orange Order in Canada. Here in Toronto, the Orange Order was visible at the level of municipal government--all of Toronto's mayors were members for decades--and in the neighbourhood level, for instance in Cabbagetown as described in one account. This Anglo-Celtic neighbourhood, substantially Irish but mixed between Roman Catholic Irish and Protestants of various British background, was riven.

Inherently linked both with the politics and the dominant sentiments of this society was the Orange Order. A recent work on the Order in Canada, by Cecil Houston and William Smyth, demonstrates that its membership was widespread across later Victorian Toronto, with lowest density in the upper class residential tracts of Jarvis Street and Rosedale, but highest density in Cabbagetown. No doubt the numerous Ulster Irish in that neighbourhood had much to do with the case. Yet Houston and Smyth confirm that the Order drew widely on English and Scottish stocks also, and it had strong followings in all three major Toronto Protestant churches-Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian, especially the first two-which were also the largest in Cabbagetown. Smaller Protestant denominations like Baptists or Lutherans were much less evident in Orangeism; as they were again in Cabbagetown. At the same time, the Order crossed class lines and kept a substantial middle-class component, even if the bulk of its members came from the lower classes.

Orange lodges pervaded the district, but a main meeting-place for their members was the eastern Orange Hall on Queen Street. Here was a forum for their views on public issues, and a headquarters for political transactions. The Orange vote in Toronto mattered municipally, provincially and federally. Orangemen were perennial among civic politicians and plentiful in city employment, whether at City Hall, the works department or in the police force, for all of which Cabbagetown residents offered a goodly quota. It is unnecessary, however, to view this as some dark conspiratorial net, a King Billy underground. Orange ties, for better or worse, operated pretty openly; and it would have been hard to impugn the respectability of the Order' s stands on British loyalty and Protestant freedom to majority Toronto then.

Cabbagetowners marched on the Orange celebration day, July 12, but almost as virtuously as in a temperance or trades union parade. Granted there long were fights and uproars in Toronto associated with the Glorious Twelfth or Hibernian St. Patrick's Day, still, violence chiefly occurred in more turbulent and crowded areas of the city. For our neighbourhood, Orangeism broadly implied order rather than disorder.

Furthermore, it has well been pointed out that Toronto's denser residential districts really contained religious admixtures, and there were no great separate, terraced confines of either Protestants or Catholics as in Belfast, mass citadels for religious warfare. In Cabbagetown, assuredly, Protestants had many Catholic street neighbours; the converse was equally true in adjacent, prevalently Catholic Cork Town south of Queen Street and on below King Street. There was not the same tight territorial basis for major sectarian combat. Sparring there might be, as when an Orange band trumpetted and coat-trailed into a largely Catholic street; yet this local version of "chicken" was a fairly minor fringe sport. The Cabbagetown community then was not an ethno-religious enclave-for all its Orange display-or a politically sequestered compound.

(The above account was written in 1984.)

And then the Orange Order began to fall apart, as Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn wrote last September. The old British order fell apart.

For the first half of the twentieth century, one prerequisite to be a serious contender for the mayor’s chair in Toronto was membership in good standing with the Orange Order. As 1954 dawned, it didn’t appear that the situation would change much: Orangeman Allan Lamport had won a third term and the challenger most likely to run against or in place of him that December, Leslie Saunders, was a high-ranking official in the Order. Yet 1954 wound up being the beginning of the end of Orange dominance over civic affairs, thanks partly to a series of snafus by Saunders. The municipal election of 1954 not only proved a key element in breaking the Order’s hold, but showed that antagonizing the press wasn’t a good idea and that you didn’t have to be Protestant to take the mayor’s chair, even if it took you three efforts.

Our story begins at the Toronto Transit Commission, where the combination of an expanded administrative board and the death of Chairman W.C. O’Brien left several key vacancies. Sensing the prospects of steadier employment with the TTC than at the whim of voters, Mayor Lamport resigned from office in June to make himself available as a candidate for O’Brien’s job (he wound up as Vice-Chairman when William G. Russell won the top spot). On June 29, Saunders, a veteran member of the Board of Control who was serving as president of City Council, assumed the mayoralty amid general respect for his abilities as an administrator.

Saunders’s honeymoon was short-lived. Shortly after assuming office, Saunders was also named Deputy Grand Master of the Orange Lodge, just in time for the annual Orange parade in early July to celebrate William III’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Saunders decided the parade would be the perfect opportunity to issue a statement to Torontonians "reminding them of their British heritage" by stressing how important that the battle was as a victory for democratic and religious freedoms for all (even if some of faiths were deemed less worthy than others). Amid its glorification of the Orange Order, the statement requested citizens "to thank God for those whose courage against wrong hastened the dawn of freedom," and compared the triumph of Protestants over Catholics to more recent victories against "the Hun, the Nazi and the Fascist." One problem: Saunders issued the statement on official city stationery.

To Catholic councillors and other Orangemen in the city government whose views were less fervent than Saunders, the statement was received like an intolerant slap against citizens who weren’t connected to the Order. Controller David Balfour felt that the mayor should represent all faiths; in response, local Orange Order Secretary B.G. Louden challenged the Catholic Balfour to run for mayor. Saunders did not apologize for issuing the statement. "I’m proud," he said, "to be able to make a statement of this kind to the people of Toronto on this great day in Orange history." His statement did not find favour among the press, whose views were best summed by an editorial in the Telegram which noted that "the only rivers that Leslie Saunders is expected to concern himself with as Mayor of Toronto are the Don and the Humber."

Watching from the sidelines was former city councillor Nathan Phillips, who was taking a rest from elected office after a quarter of a century as an alderman and two unsuccessful mayoral runs against Lamport in 1951 and 1952. As controversy about Saunders’s statement grew, Phillips was contacted by Star reporter Bob McDonald to see if he would consider a third run for the mayor’s chair. Phillips decided he would, but only if his wife supported another run (she did) and if he could secure more newspaper support beyond the Star, which had backed his previous campaigns. He soon contacted Telegram publisher John Bassett, who indicated that Phillips could soon tell anyone he "damned well pleased" that he had Bassett’s full support. That Phillips was Jewish would make for an interesting angle in editorials in all of the city’s papers criticizing Saunders for trying to provoke religious strife. Upon hearing of Phillips’s entry, Saunders told the press on July 10 that when all the ballots were counted, he would be "be sitting right where I am now."

As it happened, the Jewish Nathan Phillips ended up being elected mayor in 1955, notwithstanding said decidedly non-Orange Order ethnoreligious background, heralding the transition of Toronto from a city where Irish Canadians constituted a somewhat stigmatized minority to one where Irish is just another flavour of the increasingly broad and at least somewhat less relevant category of "white". Would Toronto have handled the shift as well if the Orange Order had stayed in power longer?

[BRIEF NOTE] The Orange Order on Prince Edward Island

Notwithstanding the survival of sectarian representation in the provincial legislative assembly into the 1990s, and of informally religiously segregated schools into the 1980s, at least by the time I was born Prince Edward Island's historic of sectarian religious conflict wasn't spoken of. A 2006 paper of an Island acquaintance of mine originally published in 2006 in the CCHA Historical Studies journal, Ryan O'Connor, explores one noteworthy manifestation of these tensions I'd not heard of, the attack on the Orange Order headquarters in Charlottetown in 1877. The essay's title? "'…you can beat us in the House of Assembly but you can’t beat us in the street': The Symbolic Value of Charlettown’s Orange Lodge Riot".

Such [sectarian] violence long bypassed Prince Edward Island. While the neighbouring colonies had all suffered through similar experiences, the diminutive colony of 94,021 entered the 1870s relatively unscathed by such eruptions. This absence of denominational violence is especially intriguing given the colony’s religious makeup: fifty-five per cent Protestant, forty-five per cent Roman Catholic. Such an evenly matched population, one might suspect, would lend itself to the violence endemic elsewhere. However, notes historian Ian Ross Robertson, the “surprising circumstances for a colony so evenly divided was the dearth of religious hostilities.”

Such a peaceful co-existence would not last. On 12 July 1877 the Island’s record of religious non-violence came to a dramatic end when the Charlottetown headquarters of the Loyal Orange Order, its members just returned from a day of recreation, bore the brunt of an angry mob. Why did this unfortunate action occur? Why, thirty years after the peak of Orange-Green conflict in British North America did such an event transpire in Charlottetown?

At one point, O'Connor notes, Catholic-Protestant tensions were bridged by the common opposition of Islanders to the bizarre system of absentee land tenure that saw absentee landlords own all land and maintain tenants. That the conflicts following the collapse of this pre-modern landholding system suggests that, on the Island as elsewhere, ethnic tensions were worsened by modernization. Here, the creation of a publicly funded school system that at one point included Bible readings in the Protestant tradition without comparable representation from Roman Catholicism was key.

From 1856 to 1877 the Island was beset with politico-religious conflict during which the Roman Catholic minority repeatedly failed to have its interests acted upon. Despite spirited Catholic protests, legislation was passed in 1860 that made Scripture readings a mandatory part of a schoolteacher’s job. In the ensuing years, despite the Catholic population’s repeated efforts, the government failed to legislate funding for sectarian schools. This effort died in 1876 when Premier Davies enshrined the non-sectarian nature of the school system in the Prince Edward Island Education Act.

The one victory that the Roman Catholics could boast of would turn sour. Having successfully petitioned the Duke of Newcastle to disallow the Orange Incorporation Act of 1863, this manoeuvre galvanized the Protestant community and led to a rapid expansion of Order lodges. A powerful lobby group that represented all that the papists were not, the Orange Order were an obvious target for Catholic aggression.

The timing of the Charlottetown lodge’s attack is also significant. The centrepiece of the Orange calendar, 12 July marks the annual commemoration of King William’s seventeenth-century victory over Catholic forces at the Boyne. This event represents a claim of Protestant supremacy wherever it is celebrated. Charlottetown’s Catholics would have greeted this annual event with disdain; however, there is no record of violence in the city on this day prior to 1877. Having recently lost the conclusive battle for sectarian education, the culmination of twenty years of public conflict, it appears that by 1877 members of the Charlottetown Catholic community could no longer take reminders of their subjugation without action. That one of the riot’s instigators, Nicholas Collins, was quoted as saying “Damn you, you can beat us in the House of Assembly, but you can’t beat us in the street,” testifies to this connection between political frustration and public action.

And it was overlooked:

Although the 1877 riot was a significant event in the history of Prince Edward Island, it has long been overlooked. A survey of relevant literature reveals only four items that discuss the riot. The first published was Reverend John C. Macmillan’s History of the Catholic Church in Prince Edward Island from 1835 to 1891. While it provides useful insight into the Church’s response to the violence, this partisan account of the riot contradicts contemporary testimony. Andrew Robb’s “Rioting in 19th Century P.E.I.,” summarizes the events of 12 July 1877 in three paragraphs. Likewise, Boyde Beck’s light-hearted Prince Edward Island: An Unauthorized History handles the event in a similarly superficial manner. Anecdotal rather than academic, these works explain what happened on the day in question, but fail to provide insight into why the riot occurred. More significantly the leading academic text on nineteenth-century Prince Edward Island, the Francis W.P. Bolger edited Canada’s Smallest Province, does not mention the Orange Order’s existence. Nonetheless, the book does help shed light on the religio-politico tensions that dominated Island society between 1856-1877, especially as they impacted local elections. However, coverage of “the elemental animosity [that emerged] between [the] Protestant and Catholic” population is largely a backdrop to the book’s central focus – Prince Edward Island’s entry into Canada in 1873. The riot at the Orange lodge is not mentioned in an academic text until Brendan O’Grady’s Exiles and Islanders: The Irish Settlers of Prince Edward Island was released in 2004. Handling the event in three pages, O’Grady connects the event to the tensions between Irish Catholics and the Orange Order elsewhere, but does not establish a local context that explains why the riot occurred.

It's true that a community is defined by what it chooses not to remember at least as much as by what it chooses to keep in active memory.

Read the entire essay: O'Connor did great work.

[MUSIC] Sinéad O'Connor, "Fire on Babylon"

The music of Sinéad O'Connor in the prime of her career, in the decade after and including her 1987 debut The Lion and the Cobra, includes some of my favourite pop music songs. At the time--not later in her career, I fear--O'Connor took her voice and her songwriting abilities to an intimate place that clicked, massively, with people around the world. The 1994 album Universal Mother was less commercial than the others of its type, but it still had that appeal, with songs like the Irish Famine song "Famine" and the angry--and Michel Gondry-filmed--"Fire on Babylon".

"Toronto Raptors Celebrations, Church and Carlton" (Watch on YouTube)

I mentioned the excellence of Sinéad O'Connor's music, but the shock of her presentation also accounts for her fame. Yes, she was an Irishwoman, but she was an angry Irishwoman, a woman who didn't fit the norms for Irish womanhood that: pious, quiet, fundamentally unchallenging. "Fight the enemy", remember? She was Irish, but Irish in a different way. Ireland had evolved.

Today's St. Patrick's Day. Had I wanted, I could have claimed some sort of Irish-Canadian identity with a moderate degree of credibility, through my father's side. More than a quarter, certainly. But leaving blood quanta aside--yes, please--how could I conceivably lay claim to any kind of meaningful Irish identity? Irish-Canadian identity would be enough of a stretch, I suppose, long since assimilated into a general "Prince Edward Island-ness".

There are many, many diasporas out there, but very frequently ethnic identity in any particular diaspora community isn't felt the same way as ethnic identity in the homeland. The communities have been cleaved, and evolved differently. We got a bit of this today when Irish Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore spoke disapprovingly about the New York City St. Patrick's Day parade's ban on gay groups: "What these parades are about is a celebration of Ireland and Irishness. I think they need to celebrate Ireland as it is, not as people imagine it. Equality is very much the center of who we are in our identity in Ireland. This issue of exclusion is not Irish, let's be clear about it. Exclusion is not an Irish thing, I think that's the message that needs to be driven home." But then, if the parade organizers accepted that their organization and quite possibly themselves weren't meaningfully Irish in that basic dimension, where would they and their community be?