[PHOTO] Off Jersey Avenue

This side alley off of Jersey Avenue, south and east of Bloor and Christie, looked very picturesque in the light just before midnight. This is the best shot I got, demonstrating that--maybe--a two-megapixel camera has its limits.

[CAT] Shakespeare, as if posing

[BRIEF NOTE] On the discovery of a possible super-Earth at Gliese 667

james_nicoll is one blogger of many who pointed to the discovery of a superterrestrial world that could support Earth-like conditions, as described in the arXiv-hosted paper "A planetary system around the nearby M dwarf GJ 667C with at least one super-Earth in its habitable zone".

GJ 667C is an M-class dwarf, part of a triple star system some 22 light years from Earth. Hearing rumors that a ‘super-Earth’ — and one in the habitable zone to boot — has been detected around a nearby triple star system might cause the pulse to quicken, but this is not Alpha Centauri, about which we continue to await news from the three teams studying the prospect of planets there. Nonetheless, GJ 667C is fascinating in its own right, the M-dwarf being accompanied by a pair of orange K-class stars much lower in metal content than the Sun. The super-Earth that orbits the M-dwarf raises questions about theories of planet formation.

In the context of astronomy, "metal" refers to all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. If stars that have relatively few heavy elements aren't barred from having planets, but--maybe--just have smaller ones, this has obvious implications for planets across the universe.

See Sol Station and Wikipedia for more on the Gliese 667 system.

[LINK] "Russian team closes in on Lake Vostok"

The impending exploration of the hitherto sealed sublgacial Antarctic Lake Vostok is going to be quite worth watching.

After twenty years of drilling, a team of Russian researchers is close to breaching the prehistoric Lake Vostok, which has been trapped deep beneath Antarctica for the last 14 million years.

Vostok is the largest in a sub-glacial web of more than 200 lakes that are hidden 4km beneath the ice. Some of the lakes formed when the continent was much warmer and still connected to Australia.

The lakes are rich in oxygen (making them oligotrophic), with levels of the element some 50 times higher than what would be found in your typical freshwater lake. The high gas concentration is thought to be because of the enormous weight and pressure of the continental ice cap.

If life exists in Vostok, it will have to be an extremophile -- a lifeform that has adapted to survive in extreme environments. The organism would have to withstand high pressure, constant cold, low nutrient input, high oxygen concentration and an absence of sunlight.

The conditions in Lake Vostok are thought to be similar to the conditions on Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus. In June, Nasa probe Cassini found the best evidence yet for a massive saltwater reservoir beneath the icy surface of Enceladus. This all means that finding life in the inhospitable depths of Vostok would strengthen the case for life in the outer solar system.

Back on planet Earth, the team at Vostok are running short on time. Antarctica's summer will soon end and the researchers need to leave their remote base while they still can. Temperatures will drop as low as -80C, grounding planes and trapping the team.

They missed their chance last year. "Time is short, however. It's possible that the drillers won't be able to reach the water before the end of the current Antarctic summer, and they'll need to wait another year before the process can continue," we wrote in January 2011. The drill halted in February.

Meanwhile, Russian engineers are planning to venture into the lake itself, with swimming robots. In the Antarctic summer of 2012 to 2013, they plan to send a robot into the lake to collect water samples and sediments from the bottom. An environmental assessment of the plan will be submitted at the Antarctic Treaty's consultative meeting in May 2012.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the Wow! Signal

The Wow! signal is fascinating.

The Wow! signal was a strong narrowband radio signal detected by Dr. Jerry R. Ehman on August 15, 1977, while working on a SETI project at the Big Ear radio telescope of The Ohio State University then located at Ohio Wesleyan University's Perkins Observatory, Delaware, Ohio. The signal bore expected hallmarks of potential non-terrestrial and non-solar system origin. It lasted for the full 72-second duration that Big Ear observed it, but has not been detected again. The signal has been the subject of significant media attention.

Amazed at how closely the signal matched the expected signature of an interstellar signal in the antenna used, Ehman circled the signal on the computer printout and wrote the comment "Wow!" on its side. This comment became the name of the signal.

Why "Wow?" Well, the signal's characteristics matched the hypothesized characteristics of a signal by a technological civilization pretty well.

The circled alphanumeric code 6EQUJ5 describes the intensity variation of the signal. A space denotes an intensity between 0 and 1, the numbers 1 to 9 denote the correspondingly numbered intensities (from 1.000 to 10.000), and intensities of 10.0 and above are denoted by a letter ('A' corresponds to intensities between 10.0 and 11.0, 'B' to 11.0 to 12.0, etc.). The value 'U' (an intensity between 30.0 and 31.0) was the highest detected by the telescope, on a linear scale it was over 30 times louder than normal deep space. The intensity in this case is the unitless signal-to-noise ratio, where noise was averaged for that band over the previous few minutes.

Two different values for its frequency have been given: 1420.356 MHz (J. D. Kraus) and 1420.4556 MHz (J. R. Ehman). The frequency 1420 is significant for SETI searchers because, it is reasoned, hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, and hydrogen resonates at about 1420 MHz, thus extraterrestrials might use that frequency on which to transmit a strong signal. The frequency of the Wow! signal matches very closely with the hydrogen line, which is at 1420.40575177 MHz. It is worth noting that the two different values given for the frequency of the Wow! signal (1420.356 MHz and 1420.4556 MHz) are the same distance apart to the hydrogen line - the first being about 0.0498 MHz less than the hydrogen line, and the second being about 0.0498 MHz more than the hydrogen line. The bandwidth of the signal is less than 10 kHz (each column on the printout corresponds to a 10 kHz-wide channel; the signal is only present in one column).

The signal seemed to come from a point in interstellar space within the constellation Sagittarius, far from any bright stars that would have been plausible transmission sources.

Centauri Dreams and the Planetary Society Blog both review--the Planetary Society Blog's Amir Alexander in great and enlightening detail--a new book, Robert Gray's The Elusive Wow: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, that describes Gray's efforts to track down the signal. Gray claims to have found some unusual radio signals coming from the hypothesized vicinity of the Wow! signal's origins, though nothing obvious.

I wonder. And you?

[LINK] "Dyson Spheres Make the Fermi Paradox Worse"

t his weblog, futurist Anders Sandberg links to an interesting if unsettling presentation to Oxford University's Physics department by one Stuart Anderson, co-authored by Sandberg himself, that suggests that the Fermi paradox--"Where are the aliens, they should be here already?"--is much more challenging a question that people have thought. Not just interstellar but intergalactic colonization seems technologically imaginable, making the question of where the extraterrestrials are that much more compelling.

The YouTube abstract:

The Fermi paradox is the contrast between the high estimate of the likelihood of extraterritorial civilizations, and the lack of visible evidence of them. But what sort of evidence should we expect to see? This is what exploratory engineering can tell us, giving us estimates of what kind of cosmic structures are plausibly constructable by advanced civilizations, and what traces they would leave. Based on our current knowledge, it seems that it would be easy for such a civilization to rapidly occupy vast swathes of the universe in a visible fashion. There are game-theoretic reasons to suppose that they would do so. This leads to a worsening of the Fermi paradox, reducing the likelihood of "advanced but unseen" civilizations, even in other galaxies.

Sandberg's abstract:

The main finding is that intergalactic expansion is likely doable using local resources and a very high branching factor, and that makes the solar neighbourhood accessible to at least millions of times more potential alien civilizations. So either alien civilizations have to be even rarer than we think, they have to approach some non-visible behavioural attractor with very high fidelity, or they are here and hiding efficiently (in this case likely because the first expanding civilization used its probes to enforce some set of rules for everybody else).