The science fiction trope that often comes to mind in conjunction with the interstellar ark idea is of the crew that has lost all sense of the mission. Brian Aldiss’ Non-Stop (1958), published in the US as Starship, is a classic case of a generation ship that has become the entire world. The US title, of course, gave away the whole plot, which is sort of ridiculous. Have a look at the British cover, which leaves the setting mysterious for most of the book, and the American one, which blatantly tells you what’s going on. I wonder what Aldiss thought of this.

Be that as it may, interstellar arks are conceived as having large crews and taking a lot of time to move between stars, usually on the order of thousands of years. We can trace the concept in the scientific literature back to Les Shepherd’s famous 1952 paper on human interstellar travel, a key paper in the evolution of the field. An interesting adaptation of the paper appeared in Science Fiction Plus in April of the following year (see The Worldship of 1953). Alan Bond and Anthony Martin, whose names will always evoke Project Daedalus, likewise discussed interstellar arks, and Greg Matloff, whose presentation we looked at in the last post, has been working the numbers on these craft for much of his career.

Let’s look, then, at what Matloff and Joseph Meany say in their paper on aerographite. Here we’re talking about a sailcraft driven by solar photons rather than beamed energy, one that is based on an inflatable, hollow-body sail (itself a concept that goes back at least to the 1980s). Working with Roman Kezerashvili, Matloff has in the past addressed hollow-body sails made of beryllium as well as graphene, last discussing the latter in an interstellar ark concept in 2014. Here he and Meany set up an aerographite-graphene variant using a 90% absorptive and 10% reflective layer of aerographite that effectively pushes against the Sun-facing surface of graphene.

We’re in the realm of big numbers again. The radius of the sail is 764 kilometers, with the sail massing 5.49 X 10⁶ kilograms. The as yet unpublished paper on this work shows that the payload mass (2.56 X 10⁷ kilograms) is considerably higher than would be possible using a hollow-body sail made only of graphene. It’s interesting that for the close solar pass envisioned in the ‘sundiver’ maneuver for the sail, Matloff chooses a perihelion of 0.1 AU in order to hold down the g forces for the human crew. The point came up in the question session after his Montreal talk, for there do seem to be technologies for sustaining (for a short period) g-forces of 3 g and beyond, which would allow for a closer perihelion pass.

In any case, our ark reaches Alpha Centauri in about 1375 years carrying a crew of several hundred. If that figure seems exasperatingly high, consider that in the past few decades we’ve gone from the routine assumption that an interstellar mission would take millennia to the now plausible suggestion that we can get it down to a century or so. Massive arks, of course, take much longer, but this number isn’t bad. NASA’s Les Johnson told me in 2003, when I mentioned a thousand-year mission, that he would love to see a plan for one that could make the journey that fast. But here we are, discussing materials and techniques that can go well below that for unmanned probes. And then there is that Breakthrough Starshot concept of 20 percent of lightspeed…

We are, in other words, making progress. But so much remains to be done with regard to this particular material. Indeed, the work on graphene reminds us how little we know about the physical properties of aerographite. The paper lays out some large questions:

• Will what we know of aerographite’s properties be sustained when we reduce the thickness to a single micron?
• Will aerographite be stable at the temperatures demanded by our perihelion calculations?
• Will aerographite equal the performance of graphene when exposed to the space environment?
• What about trajectory adjustment for a non-reflecting surface like aerographite?

Thus the paper’s conclusion:

It is wise to consider the above discussion as very preliminary. There are many unknowns regarding aerographite and graphene that must be addressed before the missions discussed can be considered feasible.

One unknown is the closest feasible perihelion distance. Just because the Parker Solar Probe will likely survive its close perihelion pass does not mean that a carbon hyper-thin sail will do the same. It is necessary for some researcher to perform an exhaustive study of the effects of the near-Sun space environment upon these substances. A good consideration of the issues to be addressed is the exhaustive study for beryllium solar-photon sails performed by Kezerashvili [9].

One last note on early aerographite sails: What interesting problems they pose for tracking. We’d have to use infrared to follow their course, and a space-based telescope to do that because of infrared absorption in Earth’s atmosphere. Heller and team figured out in their aerographite paper that JWST could track a 1 m aerographite sail out to 2 AU. But swarm configurations (and we’ll be talking about this concept again in the near future) produce a signature that could be detected well beyond the Kuiper Belt. An onboard laser would greatly simplify the problem if we could find ways to power it up aboard the highly miniaturized craft that would be our first experiments.

The paper is Matloff & Meany, ”Aerographite: A Candidate Material for Interstellar Photon Sailing,” submitted to JBIS and ultimately to be published as part of the proceedings of the Interstellar Research Group’s 2023 symposium. The 2014 paper on graphene arks is “Graphene Solar Photon Sails and Interstellar Arks,” JBIS Vol. 67 (June 2014), 237-246 (abstract). The paper on beryllium sails by Roman Kezerashvili is “Thickness Requirements for Solar Sail Foils,” Acta Astronautica 65 (2009), 507-518 (abstract).

A material called aerographite offers options for solar sails that transcend the capabilities of both beryllium and graphene, the latter being the most recent candidate for fast sail missions outside the Solar System. Developed at the Technical University of Hamburg and refined by researchers at the University of Kiel, aerographite came to the attention of the interstellar community in 2020 thanks to a groundbreaking paper by René Heller (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen), working with co-authors Guillem Anglada-Escudé (Institut de Ciencies Espacials, Barcelona), Michael Hippke (Sonneberg Observatory, Germany) and Pierre Kervella (Observatoire de Paris).

I’ve written about aerographite before, in Aerographite: An Advance in Sail Materials with Deep Space Implications and Solar Sails: Deeper into the Aerographite Option, both of which are in the archives along with several other posts on the subject. But here I need to pause for a brief administrative moment: The recent changes to the website inadvertently resulted in a data overwrite in the archives that replaced some specialized characters used in scientific notation with question marks. Not good! I have a crack programmer working the fix using my backups, but at the moment the articles I’ve just mentioned do contain several missing characters. This will be remedied soon.

Back to aerographite, where I’m pleased to see this work receiving the further scrutiny it deserves, for this is a highly unusual material, not what you would expect when conceiving deep space missions. As Gregory Matloff and Joseph Meany explain in a new paper discussed at the Interstellar Research Group’s Montreal symposium, aerographite is both extremely low density and utterly opaque. The normal assumption is that an effective solar sail will be reflective (and indeed, graphene concepts include ways to introduce reflectivity, which could be achieved by adding substrates or doping graphene with alkali metals, thus increasing mass).

Image; A detail of the world’s lightest material: aerographite. Open carbon tubes form a fine mesh and offer a low density of 0.2 milligram per cubic centimetre. The picture was taken with a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Credit: TUHH.

But the startlingly black aerographite so effectively absorbs photons that in sail configuration it will be pushed into interstellar space. Indeed, Guillem Anglada-Escudé told me three years ago that absorbance works quite well for solar sailing, less effective than a highly reflective material by no more than a factor of 2. As Matloff (New York City College of Technology, CUNY) and Meany (Savannah River National Laboratory) explain in the paper growing out of their work, aerographite is produced by a chemical vapor deposition process that yields a synthetic foam connected by carbon microtubes, one whose opacity is complemented by its light weight. Indeed, the teams that developed it called aerographite “the lightest known material.”

At Montreal, Matloff explored how the material might be deployed in two classes of interstellar missions, looking at such factors as the maximum temperature of the sail at various perihelion distances (for possible ‘sundiver’ missions), the sail’s thermal emissivity, and the peak acceleration that can be achieved, along with payload mass limitations for a 1-micron spherical sail shell and a thin-film payload. The work also probes the characteristics of aerographite under laser beaming conditions, and goes on to examine how it might be deployed in futuristic manned interstellar ‘arks.’ You can see Matloff’s presentation at Montreal here.

Aerographite’s visible photon absorption approaches 100 percent, with high tensile strength and an extremely high melting point. Matloff and Meany’s research involves a hypothetical sail with maximum operational temperature of 3,500 K and a payload mass that is one-tenth of the sail’s. For the purposes of their calculations, they lower the sail’s absorptivity to sunlight to a perhaps more realistic 0.9. Here Matloff’s experience in graphene sails comes in handy, allowing him to use the same analytical tools he and colleague Giovanni Vulpetti have worked out over years of solar sail analysis. Of particular note is the ‘lightness factor,’ which measures solar radiation against acceleration, and which for aerographite works out to an exceptionally high value.

An aerographite sail, in other words, is extremely efficient at converting sunlight into acceleration. The numbers are striking in comparison to previous estimates for solar sailing (as opposed to beaming) technologies. The performance figures in the table below are for an interstellar probe whose sail is unfurled at perihelion during a close solar approach. If you check the perihelion figures used for the analysis, you’ll see that the 0.04 AU figure matches the closest approach of an existing spacecraft, the Parker Solar Probe. And it turns out that 0.06 AU is close to the closest perihelion distance assumed for a beryllium sail. Matloff’s previous analysis of graphene (in a 2014 paper) had assumed a 0.1 AU perihelion for a graphene sail in the same kind of mission.

Our probe reaches Proxima Centauri within a millennium for all cases, with the 0.04 AU perihelion probe cutting the travel time to two centuries, a striking figure for a solar sail. The further good news is that according to these calculations, the aerographite at no point exceeds its melting point. Note the huge peak acceleration for the 0.04 AU perihelion pass: 319 g! A sail that makes it through the perihelion pass at 0.04 AU achieves an interstellar cruise velocity of roughly 0.02 c, which we can then stack up against a laser-launched sail along the lines of what Breakthrough Starshot envisions.

Here we run into trouble. From the paper:

It is not clear that an aerographite sail could withstand the enormous accelerations necessary to propel a Project Starshot terrestrial-launched laser-photon sail. Also, such a sail must either have an appropriate curvature to remain within the beam because the beam source moves with Earth’s rotation or be implanted with an appropriate diffraction pattern to optically simulate an appropriately curved sail surface. Also, because aerographite is absorptive rather than reflective, the enormous required beam power on the sail to achieve an ~0.2c interstellar cruise velocity might be fatal.

Which is why Matloff and Meany studied the effects of a sail powered by the beam from a space-based laser array rather than a terrestrial one, using a 100 meter sail for the analysis. I will send you to the paper (or the video) for the details of these calculations, but a laser transmitter of approximately 1.8 kilometers is modeled, with the Sun-orbiting laser at 1 AU from the Sun. Here the craft achieves a velocity of 0.033c given the constraints applied to the beaming technology, which the authors note may be fewer than those imposed on the Starshot array. Indeed:

Constructing sail, sunlight-collection optics and the laser/transmitter are challenging as is the necessity of keeping the sail within the beam during the ~3-hour acceleration run. But these challenges are considerably less than is the case for the Project Starshot relativistic-velocity sails accelerated by a terrestrial laser array.

Those who know Greg Matloff’s work know how he rejoices in stretching ideas out to their maximum potential, much in the mode of Robert Forward. Thus it’s no surprise that the next idea considered here is an aerographite sail capable of carrying humans aboard an interstellar ark. That’s a discussion in itself, and so is the question of the best path forward for aerographite research, two subjects I’ll be taking up in the next post.

The paper is Matloff & Meany, ”Aerographite: A Candidate Material for Interstellar Photon Sailing,” submitted to JBIS and ultimately to be published as part of the proceedings of the Interstellar Research Group’s 2023 symposium. The Heller, Anglada-Escudé, Hippke & Kervella paper is “Low-cost precursor of an interstellar mission,” Astronomy & Astrophysics Vol. 641 (September 2020), A45 (abstract).

Let’s talk about fusion fuels in relation to the recent discussion of building a spacecraft engine. A direct fusion drive (DFD) system using magnetic mirror technologies is, as we saw last time, being investigated at the University of Maryland in its Centrifugal Mirror Fusion Experiment (CMFX), as an offshoot of the effort to produce fusion for terrestrial purposes. The initial concept being developed at CMFX is to introduce a radial electric field into the magnetic mirror system. This enhances centrifugal confinement of the plasma in a system using deuterium and tritium as fusion fuel.

Out of this we get power but not thrust. However, both UMD’s Jerry Carson and colleague Tom Bone told the Interstellar Research Group’s Montreal gathering that such a reactor coupled with a reservoir of warm plasma offers prospects for in-space propulsion. Alpha particles (these are helium nuclei produced in the fusion reaction) may stay in the reactor, further energizing the fuel, or they can move upstream, to be converted into electricity by a Standing Wave Direct Energy Converter (SWDEC). A third alternative: They may move downstream to mix with the warm plasma, producing thrust as the plasma expands within a magnetic nozzle.

Image: The fusion propulsion system as shown in Jerry Carson’s presentation at IRG Montreal. Thanks to Dr. Carson for passing along the slides.

We also know that fusion fuel options carry their own pluses and minuses. We can turn to deuterium/deuterium reactions (D/D) at the expense of neutron production, something we have to watch carefully if we are talking about powering up a manned spacecraft. The deuterium/tritium reaction (D/T) produces even more neutron flux, while deuterium/helium-3 (D/He3) loses most of the neutron output but demands helium-3 in abundances we only find off-planet. Tom Bone’s presentation at Montreal turned the discussion in a new direction. What about hydrogen and boron?

Here the nomenclature is p-11B, or proton-boron-11, where a hydrogen nucleus (p) collides with a boron-11 nucleus in a reaction that is aneutronic and produces three alpha particles. The downside is that this kind of fusion demands temperatures even higher than D/He3, a challenge to our current confinement and heating technologies. A second disadvantage is the production of bremsstrahlung radiation, which Bone told the Montreal audience was of the same magnitude as the charged particle production.

The German word ‘bremsen’ means ‘to brake,’ hence ‘bremsstrahlung’ means ‘braking radiation,’ a reference to the X-ray radiation produced by a charged particle when it is decelerated by its encounter with atomic nuclei. So p-11B becomes even more problematic as a fuel, given the fact that boron has five electrons, creating a fusion plasma that is a lively place indeed. Bone’s notion is to take this otherwise crippling drawback and turn it to our advantage by converting some of the bremsstrahlung radiation into usable electricity. To do this, it will be necessary to absorb the radiation to produce heat.

Bone’s work at UMD focuses on thermal energy conversion using what is called a thermionic energy converter (TEC), which can convert heat directly into electricity. He pointed out that TECs are a good choice for space applications because they offer low maintenance and low mass coupled with high levels of efficiency. TECs operate off the thermionic emission that occurs when an electron can escape a heated material, a process Bone likened to ‘boiling off’ the electron. An emitter and collector in the TEC thus absorb the heat from the bremsstrahlung radiation to produce electricity.

Image: A screenshot from Dr. Bone’s presentation in Montreal.

I don’t want to get any deeper in the weeds here and will send you to Bone’s presentation for the details on the possibilities in TEC design, including putting the TEC emitter and collector in tight proximity with the air pumped out between them (a ‘vacuum TEC’) and putting an ionized vapor between the two (a ‘vapor TEC’). But Bone is upfront about the preliminary nature of this work. The objective at this early stage is to create a basic analytical model for p-11b fuel in a propulsion system using TECs to convert radiation into electricity, with the accompanying calculations to balance power and efficiency and find the lowest bremsstrahlung production for a given power setting.

The scope of needed future work on this is large. What exactly is the best ratio of hydrogen to boron in this scenario, for one thing, and how can the electric and magnetic field levels needed to light this kind of fusion be reduced? “It’s not an easy engineering problem,” Bone added. “It’s certainly not a near-term challenge to solve.”

True enough, but it’s clear that we should be pushing into every aspect of fusion as we learn more about confining these reactions in an in-space engine. Experimenting with alternate fusion fuels has to be part of the process, work that will doubtless continue even as we push forward on the far more tractable issues of deuterium/tritium.

I want to drop back to fusion propulsion at this point, as it bears upon the question of a Solar System-wide infrastructure that we looked at last time. We know that even chemical propulsion is sufficient to get to Mars, but clearly, reducing travel times is critical if for no other reason than crew health. That likely puts the nuclear thermal concept into play, as we have experience in the development of the technology as far back as NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application), and this fission-based method shows clear advantages over chemical means in terms of travel times.

It’s equally clear, though, that for missions deep into the Solar System and beyond, the high specific impulse (ISP) enabled by a theoretical direct fusion drive sets the standard we’d like to meet. In his presentation at the Interstellar Research Group’s Montreal symposium, Jerry Carson discussed the ongoing work at the University of Maryland on creating fusion conditions using deuterium/deuterium (D/D) and deuterium/tritium (D/T) fuel with centrifugal mirror confinement. D/T fusion will likely drive our first fusion engines, but its higher neutron flux will spotlight the advantages of helium-3 when the latter becomes widely available, as shielding the crew on a fusion-powered spacecraft will be a critical factor.

Image: The Centrifugal Mirror Fusion Experiment at the University of Maryland at Baltimore (principal investigator Carlos Romero-Talamás, University of Maryland, Baltimore County). The plan is to achieve fusion conditions (D/D) by 2025. Credit: UMD.

Let’s dig into the centrifugal mirror (CM) concept. The beauty of plasma is that it is electrically conductive, and hence manageable by magnetic and electric fields. Hall thrusters use plasma (though not fusion!), as do concepts like Ad Astra’s VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket). In a centrifugal mirror, the notion is to confine, compress and heat the plasma as it is spun within a fusion chamber, as opposed to the perhaps more familiar compression methods of inertial fusion, or the magnetic field structures within tokamaks. Carson argues that the CM makes for a more compact reactor and greatly reduces radiation and momentum loss.

The Maryland work implements this effect using magnetic ‘mirrors’ to create the rapid spin that imposes radial and axial forces on the plasma, confining it into a ‘well’ where fusion can be attained. The fuel is bouncing back and forth along the lines of force between the two magnets, a method first explored in the 1950s, when research indicated that mirrors of this kind are leaky and cannot maintain the plasma long enough to ignite fusion. Carson said that it is the addition of an electric field via a central electrode in the UMD design that spins the ‘doughnut’ around its axis, so that the plasma is held in place both axially as well as radially. The basic diagram is below.

Image: Centrifugal mirror confinement of a high energy plasma. Credit: UMD.

The ongoing work at Maryland grows out of an experimental effort in the 2000s that has led to the current Centrifugal Mirror Fusion Experiment (CMFX). The latter is designed with terrestrial power generation in mind, so we are talking about adapting a power-generating technology into a spacecraft drive. To do that, we fire up a centrifugal mirror fusion reactor in tandem with warm plasma (likely a reservoir of hydrogen, though other gasses are possible), so that high-energy fusion products escape the reactor downstream and deposit their energy in the plasma, causing it to expand as it passes through a magnetic nozzle to produce thrust. The reactor also uses energy leaving the upstream mirror to continue its own operations.

A direct fusion drive of this kind could, Carson said, make the round trip to Mars in 3 months, and reach Saturn in less than three years, a sharp contrast to nuclear electric methods. Even nuclear thermal methods would take over a year to make the Mars mission. Looking further out, the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP), which is being considered as a flagship mission for the upcoming Decadal Survey, would make for a 12 year journey using chemical propulsion and a gravitational assist at Jupiter, while DFD-CM in these specs could do a considerably larger mission to more distant Neptune in as little as 3 years. A second generation Interstellar Probe (50 years to the heliopause in the NASA concept) could reach 1000 AU in 30-35 years using DFD-CM.

We’re not quite through with the University of Maryland, because Carson’s colleague Tom Bone has been analyzing a unique way to take advantage of otherwise problematic bremsstrahlung radiation, which complicates foperations with various kinds of fusion fuels. I’ll run through that work in the next post. Turning this challenging radiation into usable energy is conceivably a possibility, but requires fuel other than the deuterium/tritium combination examined for the DFD-CM drive. Bone’s choice is intriguing, to say the least, but more about this next time.

The question of infrastructure haunts the quest to achieve interstellar flight. I’ve always believed that we will develop deep space capabilities not only for research and commerce but also as a means of defense, ensuring that we will be able to change the trajectories of potentially dangerous objects. But consider the recent Breakthrough Starshot discussion. There I noted that we might balance the images we could receive through Starshot’s sails with those we could produce through telescopes at the Sun’s gravitational focus.

Without the infrastructure issue, it would be a simple thing to go with JPL’s Solar Gravitational Lens concept since the target, somewhere around 600 AU, is so much closer, and could produce perhaps even better imagery. But let’s consider Starshot’s huge photon engine in the Atacama desert not as a one-shot enabler for Proxima Centauri, but as a practical tool that, once built, will allow all kinds of fast missions within the Solar System. The financial outlay supports Oort Cloud exploration, fast access to the heliopause and nearby interstellar space, and planetary missions of all kinds. Add atmospheric braking and we can consider it as a supply chain as well.

Robert Freeland, who has labored mightily in the Project Icarus Firefly design, told the Interstellar Research Group’s recent meeting in Montreal about work he is doing within the context of the British Interplanetary Society’s BIS SPACE project, whose goal is to consider the economic drivers, resources, transportation issues and future population growth that would drive an interplanetary economy. That Solar System-wide infrastructure in turn feeds interstellar capabilities, as it generates new technologies that funnel into propulsion concepts. A case in point: In-space fusion.

To make our engines go, we need fuel, an obvious point and a telling one, since the kind of fusion Freeland has been studying for the Firefly design is limited by our current inability to extract enough Helium-3 to use aboard an interstellar craft. Firefly would use Z-pinch fusion – this is a way of confining plasma and compressing it. An electrical current fed into the plasma generates the magnetic fields that ‘pinch,’ or compress the plasma, creating the high temperatures and pressures that can produce fusion.

I was glad to see Freeland’s slides on the fusion fuel possibilities, a helpful refresher. The easiest fusion reactions, if anything about fusion can be called ‘easy,’ is that of deuterium with tritium, with the caveat that this reaction produces most of its energies in neutrons that cannot produce thrust. Whereas the reaction of deuterium with helium-3 releases primarily charged particles that can be shaped into thrust, which is why it was D/He3 fusion that was chosen by the Daedalus team for their gigantic starship design back in the 1970s. Along with that choice came the need to find the helium-3 to fuel the craft. The Daedalus team, ever imaginative, contemplated mining the atmospheres of the gas giants, where He3 can be found in abundance.

The lack of He-3 caused Icarus to choose a pure deuterium fuel (DD). Freeland ran through the problems with DD, noting the abundance of produced neutrons and the gamma rays that result from shielding these fast neutrons. The reaction also produces so-called bremsstrahlung radiation, which emerges in the form of x-rays. Thus the Firefly design stripped down what would otherwise be a significant portion of its mass in shielding by going to what Freeland calls ‘distance shielding,’ meaning minimal structure that allows the radiation to escape into space.

A starship using deuterium and helium-3 minimizes the neutron radiation, so the question becomes, when do we close the gap in our space capabilities to the point that we can extract helium-3 in the quantities needed from planets like Uranus? I see BIS SPACE as seeking to probe what the Daedalus team described as a Solar System-wide economy, and to put some numbers to the question of when this capability would evolve. The question is given point in terms of interstellar probes because while Firefly had been conceived as a starship that could launch before 2100, it seemed likely that helium-3 simply wouldn’t be available in sufficient quantities. So when would it be?

To create an infrastructure off-planet, we’ll need human migration outward, beginning most likely with orbital habitats not far from Earth – think of the orbital environments conceived by Gerard O’Neill, with their access to the abundant resources of the inner system. Freeland imagines future population growth moving further out over the course of the next 20,000 years until the Solar System is fully exploited. In four waves of expansion, he sees the era of chemical and ion rocketry, and perhaps beamed propulsion, to about 2050, with the second generation largely using fission-powered craft, in a phase ending in about 2200. 2200 to 2500 taps fusion energies (DD), while the entire Solar System is populated after 2500, with mining of the gas giants possible.

Let’s pause for a moment on the human population’s growth, because the trends noted in the image below, although widely circulated, seem not to be widely known. We’re looking here at the growth rate of our species and its acceleration followed by its long decline. As Freeland pointed out, the UN expects world population to peak at between 10 and 12 billion perhaps before the end of this century. After that, increase in the population is by no means assured. So much for the scenario that we have to go off-planet because we will simply overwhelm resources here with our numbers.

Image: In both this and the image below I am drawing from Freeland’s slides.

You would think this Malthusian notion would have long ago been discredited, but it is surprisingly robust. Even so, orbital habitats near Earth can potentially re-create basic Earth-like conditions while exploiting material resources in great abundance and solar power, with easy access to space for moving the wave of innovation further out. BIS SPACE looks with renewed interest at these O’Neill habitats in its first wave of papers.

The larger scenario plays out as follows: In the second half of our century, we move development largely to high Earth orbit, with materials drawn mostly from the Moon, using transport of goods by nuclear-powered cargo ships. The third generation creates orbital habitats at all the inner planets (and Ceres) and perhaps near-Earth asteroids using DD fusion propulsion, while the fourth generation takes in the outer planets and their moons. At this point we can set up the kind of aerostat mining rigs in the upper gas giant atmospheres that would enable the collection of helium-3. Here again we have to make comparisons with other technologies. Where will beamed spacecraft capabilities be by the time we are actively mining He-3 in the outer Solar System?

I’ve simplified the details on expansion greatly, and send you to Freeland’s slides for the details. But I want to circle back to Firefly. Using DD fusion, Firefly’s radiator and coolant requirements are extreme (480 tonnes of beryllium coolant!) But move to the deuterium/helium-3 reaction and you drop radiation output by 75 percent while increasing exhaust velocity. Beryllium can be replaced with less expensive aluminum and the physical size of the vessel is greatly reduced. This version of Firefly gets to Alpha Centauri in the same time using 1/5th the fuel and 1/12th the coolant.

In other words, the sooner we can build the infrastructure allowing us to mine the critical helium-3, the sooner we can drop the costs of interstellar missions and expand their capabilities using fusion engines. If such a scenario plays out, it will be fascinating to see how the population growth curves for the entire Solar System track given access to abundant new resources and the technologies to exploit them. If we can imagine a Solar System-wide human population in the range of 100 billion, we can also imagine the growth of new propulsion concepts to power colonization outside the system.

If we’re going to get to the stars, the path along the way has to go through an effort like Breakthrough Starshot. This is not to say that Breakthrough will achieve an interstellar mission, though its aspirational goal of reaching a nearby star like Proxima Centauri with a flight time of 20 years is one that takes the breath away. But aspirations are just that, and the point is, we need them no matter how far-fetched they seem to drive our ambition, sharpen our perspective and widen our analysis. Whether we achieve them in their initial formulation cannot be known until we try.

So let’s talk for a minute about what Starshot is and isn’t. It is not an attempt to use existing technologies to begin building a starship today. Yes, metal is being bent, but in laboratory experiments and simulated environments. No, rather than a construction project, Starshot is about clarifying where we are now, and projecting where we can expect to be within a reasonable time frame. In its early stages, it is about identifying the science issues that would enable us to use laser beaming to light up a sail and push it toward another star with prospects of a solid data return. Starshot’s Harry Atwater (Caltech) told the Interstellar Research Group in Montreal that it is about development and definition. Develop the physics, define and grow the design concepts, and nurture a scientific community. These are the necessary and current preliminaries.

Image: The cover image of a Starshot paper illustrating Harry Atwater’s “Materials Challenges for the Starshot Lightsail,” Nature Materials 17 (2018), 861-867.

We’re talking about what could be a decades-long effort here, one that has already achieved a singular advance in interstellar studies. I don’t have the current count on how many papers have been spawned by this effort, but we can contrast the ongoing work of Starshot’s technical teams with where interstellar studies was just 25 years ago, when few scientific conferences dealt with interstellar ideas and exoplanets were still a field in their infancy. In terms of bringing focus to the issue, Starshot is sui generis.

It is also an organic effort. Starshot will assess its development as it goes, and the more feasible its answers, the more it will grow. I think that learning more about sail possibilities will spawn renewed effort in other areas, and I see the recent growth of fusion rocketry concepts as a demonstration that our field is attaining critical mass not only in the research labs and academy but in commercial space ventures as well.

So let’s add to Atwater’s statement that Starshot is also a cultural phenomenon. Although its technical meetings are anything but media fodder, their quiet work keeps the idea of an interstellar crossing in the public mind as a kind of background musical riff. Yes, we’re thinking about this. We’ve got ideas and lab experiments that point to new directions. We’re learning things about lightsails and beaming we didn’t know before. And yes, it’s a big universe, with approximately one planet per star on average, and we’ve got one outstanding example of a habitable zone planet right next door.

So might Starshot’s proponents say to themselves, although I have no idea how many of those participating in the effort back out sometimes to see that broader picture (I suspect quite a few, based on those I know, but I can’t speak for everyone). But because Starshot has not sought the kind of publicity that our media-crazed age demands, I want to send you to Atwater’s video presentation at Montreal to get caught up on where things stand. I doubt we’re ever going to fly the mission Starshot originally conceived because of cost and sheer scale, but I’m only an outsider looking in. I do think that when the first interstellar mission flies, it will draw heavily on Starshot’s work. And this will be true no matter what final choices emerge as to propulsion.

This is a highly technical talk compressed into an all too short 40 minutes, but let’s just go deep on one aspect of it, the discussion of the lightsail that would be accelerated to 20 percent of lightspeed for the interstellar crossing. Atwater’s charts are worth seeing, especially the background on what the sail team’s meetings have produced in terms of their work on sail materials and, especially, sail shape and stability. The sail is a structure approximately 4 meters in diameter, with a communications aperture 1 meter in size, as seen in the center of the image (2 on the figure). Surrounding it on the circular surface are image sensors (6) and thin-film radioisotope power cells (5).

Maneuvering LEDs (4) provide attitude control, and thin-film magnetometers (7) are in the central disk, with power and data buses (8) also illustrated. A key component: A laser reflector layer positioned between the instruments that are located on the lightsail and the lightsail itself, which is formed as a silicon nitride metagrating. As Atwater covers early in his presentation, the metagrating is crucial for attitude control and beam-riding, keeping the sail from slipping off the beam even though it is flat. The layering is crucial in protecting the sailcraft instrumentation during the acceleration stage, when it is fully illuminated by the laser from the ground.

How to design lensless transmitters and imaging apertures? Atwater said that lensless color camera and steerable phased array communication apertures are being prototyped in the laboratory now using phased arrays with electrooptic materials. Working one-dimensional devices have emerged in this early work for beam steering and electronic focusing of beams. The laser reflector layer offers the requisite high reflectivity at the laser wavelength being considered, using a hybrid design with silicon nitride and molybdenum disulfide to minimize absorption that would heat the sail.

I won’t walk us through all of the Starshot design concepts at this kind of detail, but rather send you to Atwater’s presentation, which shows the beam-riding lightsail structure and its current laboratory iterations. The discussion of power sources is particularly interesting given the thin-film lightweight structures involved, and as shown in the image below, it involves radioisotope thermoelectric generators actually integrated into the sail surface. Thin film batteries and fuel cells were considered by Breakthrough’s power working group but rejected in favor of this RTG design.

So much is going on here in terms of the selection of sail materials and the analysis of its shape, but I’ll also send you to Atwater’s presentation with a recommendation to linger over his discussion of the photon engine, that vast installation needed to produce the beam that would make the interstellar mission happen. The concept in its entirety is breathtaking. The photon engine is currently envisioned as an array of 1,767,146 panels consisting of 706,858,400 individual tiles (Atwater dryly described this as “a large number of tiles”), producing the 200 gW output and covering 3 kilometers on the ground. The communications problem for data return is managed by scalable large-area ground receiver arrays, another area where Breakthrough is examining cost trends that within the decades contemplated for the project will drive component expenses sharply down. The project depends upon these economic outcomes.

Image: What we would see if we had a Starshot-class sailcraft approaching the Earth, from the image at two hours away to within five minutes of its approach. Credit for this and the two earlier images: Harry Atwater/Breakthrough Starshot.

Using a laser-beamed sail technology to reach the nearest stars may be the fastest way to get images like those above. The prospect of studying a planet like Proxima b at this level of detail is enticing, but how far can we count on economic projections to bring costs down to the even remotely foreseeable range? We also have to factor in the possibility of getting still better images from a mission to the solar gravitational lens (much closer) of the kind currently being developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Economic feasibility is inescapably part of the Starshot project, and is clearly one of the fundamental issues it was designed to address. I return to my initial point. Identifying the principles involved and defining the best concepts to drive design both now and in the future is the work of a growing scientific community, which the Starshot effort continues to energize. That in itself is no small achievement.

It is, in fact, a key building block in the scientific edifice that will define the best options for achieving the interstellar dream. And while this is not the place to go into the complexities of scientific funding, suffice it to say that putting out the cash to enable these continuing studies is a catalytic gift to a field that has always struggled for traction both financial and philosophical. The Starshot initiative has a foundational role in defining the best technologies for interstellar flight that will lead one day to its realization.

One of the great problems of lightsail concepts for interstellar flight is the need to decelerate. Here I’m using lightsail as opposed to ‘solar sail’ in the emerging consensus that a solar sail is one that reflects light from our star, and is thus usable within the Solar System out to about 5 AU, where we deal with the diminishment of photon pressure with distance. Or we could use the Sun with a close solar pass to sling a solar sail outbound on an interstellar trajectory, acknowledging that once our trajectory has been altered and cruise velocity obtained, we might as well stow the now useless sail. Perhaps we could use it for shielding in the interstellar medium or some such.

A lightsail in today’s parlance defines a sail that is assumed to work with a beamed power source, as with the laser array envisioned by Breakthrough Starshot. With such an array, whether on Earth or in space, we can forgo the perihelion pass and simply bring our beam to bear on the sail, reaching much higher velocities. Of the various materials suggested for sails in recent times, graphene and aerographite have emerged as prime candidates, both under discussion at the recent Montreal symposium of the Interstellar Research Group. And that problem of deceleration remains.

Is a flyby sufficient when the target is not a nearby planet but a distant star? We accepted flybys of the gas giants as part of the Voyager package because we had never seen these worlds close up, and were rewarded with images and data that were huge steps forward in our understanding of the local planetary environment. But an interstellar flyby is challenging because at the speeds we need to reach to make the crossing in a reasonable amount of time, we would blow through our destination system in a matter of hours, and past any planet of interest in perhaps a matter of minutes.

Robert Forward’s ingenious ‘staged’ lightsail got around the problem by using an Earth-based laser to illuminate one part of the now separated sail ring, beaming that energy back to the trailing part of the sail affixed to the payload and allowing it to decelerate. Similar contortions could divide the sail again to make it possible to establish a return trajectory to Earth once exploration of the distant stellar system was complete. We can also consider using magsail concepts to decelerate, or perhaps the incident light from a bright target star could allow sufficient energy to brake against.

Image: Forward’s lightsail separating at the beginning of its deceleration phase. Laser sailing may turn out to be the best way to the stars, provided we can work out the enormous technical challenges of managing the outbound beam. Or will we master fusion first? Credit: R.L. Forward.

But time is ever a factor, because you want to reach your target quickly, while at the same time, if you approach it too fast, you’re incapable of creating the needed deceleration. Moreover, what is your target? A bright star gives you options for deceleration if you approach at high velocity that are lacking from, say, a red dwarf star like Proxima Centauri, where the closest terrestrial-class world we know is in what appears to be a habitable zone orbit. In Montreal, René Heller (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research), a familiar name in these pages, laid out the equations for a concept he has been developing for several years, a mission that could use not only the light of Proxima itself but from Centauri A and B to create a deceleration opportunity. You can follow Heller’s presentation at Montreal here.

Remember what we’re dealing with here. We have two stars in the central binary, Centauri A (G-class) and Centauri B (K-class), with the M-class dwarf Proxima Centauri about 13000 AU distant. Centauri A and B are close – their distance as they orbit around a common barycenter varies from 35.6 AU to 11.2 AU. These are distances in Solar System range, meaning that 35.6 AU is roughly the orbit of Neptune, while 11.2 AU is close to Saturn distance. Interesting visual effects in the skies of any planet there.

Image: Orbital plot of Proxima Centauri showing its position with respect to Alpha Centauri over the coming millennia (graduations are in thousands of years). The large number of background stars is due to the fact that Proxima Cen is located very close to the plane of the Milky Way. Proxima’s orbital relation to the central stars becomes profoundly important in the calculations Heller and team make here. Credit: P. Kervella (CNRS/U. of Chile/Observatoire de Paris/LESIA), ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2, D. De Martin/M. Zamani.

Using a target star for deceleration by braking against incident photons has been studied extensively, especially in recent years by the Breakthrough Starship team, where the question of how its tiny sailcraft could slow from 20 percent of the speed of light to allow longer time at target is obviously significant. Deceleration into a bound orbit at Proxima would be, of course, ideal but it turns out to be impossible given the faint photon pressure Proxima can produce. Investing decades of research and 20 years of travel time is hardly efficient if time in the system is measured in minutes.

In fact, to use photon pressure from Proxima Centauri, whose luminosity is 0.0017 that of the Sun, would require approaching the star so slowly to decelerate into a bound orbit that the journey would take thousands of years. Hence Heller’s notion of using the combined photon pressure and gravitational influences of Centauri A and B to work deceleration through a carefully chosen trajectory. In other words, approach A, begin deceleration, move to B and repeat, then emerge on course outbound to Proxima, where you’re now slow enough to use its own photons to enter the system and stay.

Working with Michael Hippke (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen) and Pierre Kervella (CNRS/Universidad de Chile), Heller has refined the maximum speed that can be achieved on the approach into Alpha Centauri A to make all this happen: 16900 kilometers per second. If we launch in 2035, we arrive at Centauri A in 2092, with arrival at Centauri B roughly six days later and, finally, arrival at Proxima Centauri for operations there in a further 46 years. That launch time is not arbitrary. Heller chose 2035 because he needs Centauri A and B to be in precise alignment to allow the gravitational and photon braking effects to work their magic.

So we have backed away from Starshot’s goal of 20 percent of lightspeed to a more sedate 5.6 percent, but with the advantage (if we are patient enough) of putting our payload into the Proxima Centauri system for operations there rather than simply flying through it at high velocity. We also get a glimpse of the systems at both Centauri A and B. I wrote about the original Heller and Hippke paper on this back in 2017 and followed that up with Proxima Mission: Fine-Tuning the Photogravitational Assist. I return to the concept now because Heller’s presentation contrasts nicely with the Helicity fusion work we looked at in the previous post. There, the need for fusion to fly large payloads and decelerate into a target was a key driver for work on an in-space fusion engine.

Interstellar studies works, though, through multiple channels, as it must. Pursuing fusion in a flight-capable package is obviously a worthy goal, but so is exploring the beamed energy option in all its manifestations. I note that Helicity cites a travel time to Proxima Centauri in the range of 117 years, which compares with Heller and company’s now fine-tuned transit into a bound orbit at Proxima of 121 years. The difference, of course, is that Helicity can envision launching a substantially larger payload.

Clearly the pressure is on fusion to deliver, if we can make that happen. But the fact that we have gone from interstellar flight times thought to involve thousands of years to a figure of just over a century in the past few decades of research is heartening. No one said this would be easy, but I think Robert Forward would revel in the thought that we’re driving the numbers down for a variety of intriguing propulsion options.

The paper René Heller drew from in the Montreal presentation is Heller, Hippke & Kervella, “Optimized Trajectories to the Nearest Stars Using Lightweight High-velocity Photon Sails,” Astronomical Journal Vol. 154 No. 3 (29 August 2017), 115. Full text.

Be aware that the Interstellar Research Group has made the videos shot at its Montreal symposium available. I find this a marvelous resource, and hope I never get jaded with the availability of such materials. I can remember hunting desperately for background on talks being given at astronomical conferences I could not attend, and this was just 20 years ago. Now the growing abundance of video makes it possible for those of us who couldn’t be in Montreal to virtually attend the sessions. Nice work by the IRG video team!

There is plentiful material here for the interstellar minded, and I will be drawing on this resource in days ahead. But let’s start with fusion, because it’s a word that all too easily evokes a particular reaction in those of us who have been writing about the field for some time. Fusion has always seemed to be the flower about to bloom, even as decades of research have passed and the target of practical power generation hovers in the future. In terms of propulsion, I’ve long felt that if we had so much trouble igniting fusion on Earth, how much longer would it be before we could translate our knowledge into the tight dimensions of a drive for an interstellar spacecraft?

But if you’ll take a look at Helicity Space’s presentation at the Montreal symposium, you’ll learn about a tightly focused company that approaches fusion from a different direction. Rather than starting with fusion reactors designed to produce power on Earth, Helicity’s entire focus is building a fusion drive for space. NASA’s Alan Stern, of New Horizons fame but also a veteran of decades of space exploration, is senior technical advisor here, and as he puts it, “our goal is not to power up New York City but to push spacecraft.” Stern appeared at Montreal to introduce a panel including Stephane Lintner, the company’s CEO and chief scientist Setthivoine You.

Let’s assume for a moment that at some point in the coming years – we can hope sooner rather than later – we do develop in-space propulsion using fusion. The easiest approach is to contrast working fusion with the methods available to us today. New Horizons was, shortly after launch, the fastest spacecraft ever built; it crossed the orbit of the Moon in a scant 9 hours, but it took a decade to reach Pluto/Charon. We can use gravity assists to sling a payload to the Kuiper Belt, perhaps a craft like JHU/APL’s Interstellar Probe concept, but here we’re dependent on planetary geometry, which isn’t always cooperative, and doesn’t provide the kind of boost that fusion could.

Image: Setthivoine You, co-founder and chief scientist at Helicity Space.

I’m a great advocate of sails, both solar sails and so-called ‘lightsails’ driven by beamed energy, but if reaching a distant target fast is the goal, we’re constrained by the need for a large laser installation and the likelihood, in the near future anyway, of pushing sails that are tiny. New Horizons would take two centuries to reach the Sun’s gravitational lens, a target of JPL’s SGL mission, which will use tight perihelion passes of multiple craft to get up to speed. We continue to talk about decades of travel time, even within the Solar System. As for interstellar, Breakthrough Starshot’s tiny craft, perhaps sent as a swarm to Proxima Centauri, might reach the target in 20 years if all goes well, but data return is a huge problem, and the mission can only be a flyby.

Helicity boldly sketches a future in which we might combine Interstellar Probe and the SGL mission into a single operation using a craft capable of taking a 5 ton payload to the gravitational lens (roughly 600 AU) in a little over a decade. Pluto becomes reachable in some of the Helicity concepts in about a year, with a craft carrying far heavier payloads than New Horizons and abundant power for operations and communications. All this in craft that could be carried into space by existing vehicles like Falcon Heavy or the SLS. The vision reminds us of The Expanse – imagine 4 months to Mars carrying 450 tons of payload as one step along the way.

All of this is a science fictional vision, but the work coming out of Helicity’s labs is solid. It involves so-called peristaltic magnetic compression to compress plasma and raise energy density. The method relies on specific stable behaviors within the plasma, a type of ‘Taylor State’ – these describe plasma within strong magnetic fields – discovered by You. These confine the plasma, while magnetic reconnection heating preheats it in the first place. Setthivoine You describes all this in the video, noting that what Helicity is developing is a method that we can consider magneto-inertial confinement, one producing a plasma jet stabilized through shear flows within the plasma itself. The firm’s computer simulations, in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratories, show four jets merging in a double-helix fashion inside the magnetic nozzle. You’s slides, available in the video, are instructive and dramatic.

What emerges from these results is scalable performance, allowing a path forward that the firm hopes to test as early as 2026 in a demonstration flight in orbit, with the possibility of a functional spacecraft at TRL 9 within roughly a decade. The scalable design points to the possibility of compact, reusable spacecraft with the unique feature of continuous thrusting. Think of the Helicity system, Stern has suggested, as a kind of afterburner put onto an electric propulsion system, and one that can scale into a working fusion drive. The concept scales by adding more fusion jets, allowing higher and higher efficiency, until the engine eventually becomes self-sustaining – the energy required to sustain the thrust is less than what the fusion begins to generate.

Does Helicity’s technology have the inside track, or will a contender like the UK’s Pulsar Fusion get to in-space fusion first? The latter is working on a study with Princeton Satellite Systems to examine plasma characteristics in a fusion rocket engine. Helicity’s founders are appropriately cautious about their work and stress how much needs to be learned, but they are continuing to develop the concept in their prototypes. With its laboratory in Pasadena, the company is privately funded and maintains active collaborations with Caltech and Los Alamos as well as UMBC and Swarthmore. Grants from the Department of Energy and other sources have likewise contributed. Have a look at the Montreal video to get a sense of where this exciting research stands, and also a glimpse of the kind of future that in-space fusion propulsion could produce.

The idea that we might take an active, working spacecraft in the Kuiper Belt and not only repurpose it for a different task (heliophysics) but also dismiss the team that is now running it is patently absurd. Yet this appears to be a possibility when it comes to New Horizons, the remarkable explorer of Pluto/Charon, Arrokoth, and the myriad objects of the Kuiper Belt. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, responding to a 2022 Senior Review panel which had praised New Horizons, is behind the controversy, about which you can read more in NASA’s New Horizons Mission Still Threatened.

So absurd is the notion that I’m going to assume this radical step, apparently aimed at ending the Kuiper Belt mission New Horizons was designed for on September 30 of 2024, will not happen, heartened by a recent letter of protest from some figures central to the space community, as listed in the above article from Universe Today. These are, among a total of 25 planetary scientists, past Planetary Society board chair Jim Bell, Lori Garver (past Deputy Administrator of NASA), Jim Green (Past Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division), Candice Hansen-Koharcheck (Past chair of the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences and Past Chair of NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group), author Homer Hickham, Wesley T. Huntress (Past Director of NASA’s solar system Exploration Group), astrophysicist Sir Brian May, and Melissa McGrath (past NASA official and AAS Chair of DPS).

Needless to say, we’ll keep a wary eye on the matter (and I’ve just signed the petition to save the original mission), but let’s talk this morning about what New Horizons is doing right now, as the science remains deeply productive. I like the way science team member Tod Lauer spoke of the spacecraft’s current position in a recent post on the team’s website, a place where “It’s still convenient to think of neat north and south hemispheres to organize our vista of the sky, but the equator is now defined by the band of the galaxy, not our spinning Earth, lost to us in the glare of the fading Sun.”

Places like that evoke the poet in all of us. Lauer points out that the New Horizons main telescope is no more powerful than what amateur stargazers willing to open their checkbooks might use in their backyards. Part of the beauty of the situation, though, is that New Horizons moves in a very dark place indeed. While I have vivid memories of seeing a glorious Milky Way bisecting the sky aboard a small boat one summer night on Lake George in the Adirondacks, how much more striking is the vantage out here in the Kuiper Belt where the nearest city lights are billions of kilometers away?

Image: A Kuiper Belt explorer looks into the galaxy. Credit: Serge Brunier/Marc Postman/Dan Durda

The science remains robust out here as well. Consider what Lauer notes in his article. Looking for Kuiper Belt objects using older images, the New Horizons team found that in all cases, even objects far from the Milky Way’s band appeared against a background brighter than scientists can explain, even factoring in the billions of galaxies that fill the visible cosmos. The puzzle isn’t readily solved. Says Lauer:

…we then tried observations of a test field carefully selected to be far away from the Milky Way, any bright stars, clouds of dust – or anything, anything that we could think of that would wash out the fragile darkness of the universe. The total background was much lower than that in our repurposed images of Kuiper Belt objects – but by exactly the amount we expected, given our care at pointing the spacecraft at just about the darkest part of the sky we could find. The mysterious glow is still there, and more undeniable, given the care we took to exclude anything that would compete with the darkness of the universe, itself. You’re in an empty house, far out in the country, on a clear moonless night. You turn off all the lights everywhere, but it’s still not completely dark. The billions of galaxies beyond our Milky Way are still there, but what we measure is twice as bright as all the light they’ve put out over all time since the Big Bang. There is something unknown shining light into our camera. If it’s the universe, then it’s just as strong, just as bright, as all the galaxies that ever were.

Only New Horizons can do this kind of work. How far are we from Earth? Take a look at the animated image below, which is about as vivid a reminder as I can find.

Image: Two images of Proxima Centauri, one taken by NASA’s New Horizons probe and the other by ground-based telescopes. The images show how the spacecraft’s view, from a distance of 7 billion kilometers, is very different from what we see on Earth, illustrating the parallax effect. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Las Cumbres Observatory/Siding Spring Observatory.

With 15 more dark fields slated for examination this summer, New Horizons remains active on this and many other fronts. In his latest PI’s Perspective, Alan Stern notes the eight-week period of observations taking place now and through September. include continued observations of KBOs, imaging of the ice giants, dust impact measurements, mapping of hydrogen gas in the outer heliosphere, analysis using the ultraviolet spectrometer to look for structures in the interstellar medium, and spatial variations in the visible wavelength background. Six months of data return will be needed to download the full set for the planetary, heliospheric and astrophysics communities.

According to Stern, new fault protection software will allow New Horizons to operate out to 100 AU. That assumes we’ll still be taking Kuiper Belt data. Given the utterly unique nature of this kind of dataset and the fact that this spacecraft is engaged in doing exactly what it was designed to do, it is beyond comprehension that its current mission might be threatened with a shakeup to the core team or a reframing of its investigations. I’ve come across the National Space Society’s petition to save the New Horizons Kuiper Belt mission late, but please take this chance to sign it.

Trans-Neptunian Objects, or TNOs, sound simple enough, the term being descriptive of objects moving beyond the orbit of Neptune, which means objects with a semimajor axis greater than 30 AU. It makes sense that such objects would be out there as remnants of planet formation, but they’re highly useful today in telling us about what the outer system consists of. Part of the reason for that is that TNOs come in a variety of types, and the motions of these objects can point to things we have yet to discover.

Thus the cottage industry in finding a ninth planet in the Solar System, with all the intrigue that provides. The current ‘Planet 9 Model’ points to a super-Earth five to ten times as massive as our planet located beyond 400 AU. It’s a topic we’ve discussed often in these pages. I can recall the feeling I had long ago when I first learned that little Pluto really didn’t explain everything we were discovering about the system beyond Neptune. It simply wasn’t big enough. That pointed to something else, but what? New planets are exciting stuff, especially when they are nearby, as the possibility of flybys and landings in a foreseeable future is real.

Image: An artist’s illustration of a possible ninth planet in our solar system, hovering at the edge of our solar system. Neptune’s orbit is show as a bright ring around the Sun. Credit: ESO/Tom Ruen/nagualdesign.

But a different solution for a trans-Neptunian planet is possible, as found in the paper under discussion today. Among the active researchers into the more than 1000 known TNOs and their movements are Patryk Sofia Lykawka (Kobe University) and Takashi Ito (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan), who lay out the basics about these objects in a new paper that has just appeared in The Astronomical Journal. The astronomers point out that we can use them to learn about the formation and evolution of the giant planets, including possible migrations and the makeup of the protoplanetary disk that spawned them. But it’s noteworthy that no single evolutionary model exists that would explain all known TNO orbits in a unified way.

So the paper goes to work on such a model, and while concentrating on the Kuiper Belt and objects with semimajor axes between 50 and 1500 AU, the authors pin down four populations, and thus four constraints that any successful model of the population must explain. The first of these are detached TNOs, meaning objects that are outside the gravitational influence of Neptune and thus not locked into any mean motion resonance with it. The second is a population the authors consider statistically significant, TNOs with orbital inclinations to the ecliptic above 45 degrees. This population is not predicted by existing models of early Neptune migration.

The paper is generous with details about these and the following two populations, but here I’ll just give the basics. The third group consists of TNOs considered to be on extreme orbits. Here we fall back on the useful Sedna and other objects with large values for perihelion of 60 AU or more. These demand that we find a cause for perturbations beyond the four giant planets, possibly even a rogue planet’s passing. Any model of the outer system must be able to explain the orbits of these extreme objects, an open question because interactions with a migrating Neptune do not suffice.

Finally, we have a population of TNOs that are stable in various mean motion resonances with Neptune over billions of years – the authors call these “stable resonance TNOs” – and it’s interesting to note that most of them are locked in a resonance of approximately 4 billion years, which points to their early origin. The point is that we have to be able to explain all four of these populations as we evolve a theory on what kind of objects could produce the observable result.

What a wild place the outer Solar System would have been during the period of planet formation. The authors believe it likely that several thousand dwarf planets with mass in the range of Pluto and “several tens” of sub-Earth and Earth-class planets would have formed in this era, most of them lost through gravitational scattering or collisions. We’ve been looking at trans-Neptunian planet explanations for today’s Kuiper Belt intensely for several decades, but of the various suggested possibilities, none explained the orbital structure of the Kuiper Belt to the satisfaction of Lykawka and Ito. The existing Planet 9 model here gives way to a somewhat closer, somewhat smaller world deduced from computer simulations examining the dynamical evolution of TNOs.

What the authors introduce, then, is the possibility of a super-Earth perhaps as little as 1.5 times Earth’s mass with a semimajor axis in the range of 250 to 500 AU. The closest perihelion works out to 195 au in these calculations, with an orbit that is inclined 30 degrees to the ecliptic. If we plug such a world into this paper’s simulations, we find that it explains TNOs that are decoupled from Neptune and also many of the high-inclination TNOs, while being compatible with resonant orbit TNOs stable for billions of years. The model thus broadly fits observed TNO populations.

But there is a useful addition. In the passage below, the italics are mine:

…the results of the KBP scenario support the existence of a yet-undiscovered planet in the far outer solar system. Furthermore, this scenario also predicts the existence of new TNO populations located beyond 150 au generated by the KBP’s perturbations that can serve as observationally testable signatures of the existence of this planet. More detailed knowledge of the orbital structure in the distant Kuiper Belt can reveal or rule out the existence of any hypothetical planet in the outer solar system. The existence of a KBP may also offer new constraints on planet formation and dynamical evolution in the trans-Jovian region.

A testable signature is the gold standard for a credible hypothesis, which is not to say that we will necessarily find it. But if we do locate such a world, or a planet corresponding to the more conventional Planet 9 scenarios, we will have ramped up our incentive to explore beyond the Kuiper Belt, an incentive already given further impetus by our growing knowledge of the heliosphere and its interactions with the interstellar medium. But to the general public, interstellar dust is theoretical. An actual planet – a place that can be photographed and one day landed upon – awakens curiosity and the innate human drive to explore with a target that pushes all our current limits.

The paper is Lykawka & Ito, “Is There an Earth-like Planet in the Distant Kuiper Belt?,” Astronomical Journal Vol. 166, No. 3 (25 August 2023) 118 (full text).

We’re living in a prime era for studying the Solar Systems’ movement through the galaxy, with all that implies about stellar evolution, planet formation and the heliosphere’s interactions with the interstellar medium. We don’t often think about movements at this macro-scale, but bear in mind that the Sun and the planets are now moving through the outer edges of what is known as the local interstellar cloud (LIC), having been within the cloud by some estimates for about 60,000 years.

What happens next? I always think about Poul Anderson’s wonderful Brain Wave when contemplating such matters. In the classic 1954 tale, serialized the year before in Space Science Fiction during the great 1950s boom in science fiction magazines, Brain Wave depicts the Earth’s movement out of an energy-damping field it had moved through since the Cretaceous. When the planet moves out of this field at long last, everyone on the planet gets smarter. What will happen when we leave the LIC?

Nothing this dramatic, as far as anyone can tell, but we’re moving into the so-called G-cloud, a somewhat denser region we’ll get to know within a few thousand years (Alpha Centauri is already within the G-cloud). The LIC appears to be about 30 light years across, sporting somewhat higher density hydrogen than the interstellar medium around it and flowing from the direction of Scorpius and Centaurus. We seem to be moving through its outer edge.

Image: That’s a Richard Powers cover on the first edition of Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave, illustrating a novel Anderson considered one of his best.

The word ‘denser’ has to be kept in perspective. Consider that about half of the interstellar gas – hydrogen and helium for the most part – takes up 98 percent of the space between the stars and is thus extraordinarily low in density, The other half of this gas is compressed into 2% of the volume and is found in molecular clouds, mostly molecular hydrogen, that include some carbon monoxide and higher concentrations of dust than the surrounding ISM.

We’d like to know more about the G-cloud, and in particular such factors as its temperatures and density, for just how the heliosphere reacts to this changing environment, presumably through compression, could have effects upon its shape and thus its shielding effects from cosmic rays. Thus the importance of the Interstellar Probe mission (ISP) out of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory that we’ve discussed often in these pages (I’ll point you to Mapping Out Interstellar Clouds for more on the subject). One thing I noted in an article last year was that there are alternative models to the Sun’s nearby cloud environment, some challenging the idea that the LIC and the G-cloud are distinct regions. Interstellar Probe would help in the investigation.

Image: Our solar journey through space is carrying us through a cluster of very-low-density interstellar clouds. Right now the Sun is inside of a cloud (Local cloud) that is so tenuous that the interstellar gas detected by the IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer mission) is as sparse as a handful of air stretched over a column that is hundreds of light-years long. These clouds are identified by their motions, indicated in this graphic with blue arrows. Credit: NASA/Goddard/Adler/U. Chicago/Wesleyan.

The fate of Interstellar Probe is the hands of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which prioritizes in its decadal studies where we are going in space exploration over ten year periods. We find out next year whether ISP has been selected among several strong candidates for the Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics (Heliophysics) 2024-2033. Until then, I continue to scout the literature both for Interstellar Probe as well as JPL’s Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) mission, a candidate for the same study. These are huge decisions in space science.

Be aware of a new paper tackling the issues of heliospheric and dust science that a mission like Interstellar Probe could examine, with a solid backgrounder on the kind of instrumentation that would make this first dedicated interstellar probe a game-changer in our understanding of the local interstellar environment. The paper, by lead author Veerle J. Sterken (ETH Zürich) and colleagues, was originally submitted to the heliophysics Decadal, and is here available in a modified version (citation below) that includes the new instrumentation discussion among other modifications.

I won’t run through the entire paper; suffice it to say that its discussion of interstellar dust in and around the heliosphere is comprehensive and its analysis of how best to study changing environments in the interstellar medium is highly informative. The benefit of a probe explicitly designed to examine the transition between dust and gas states along its trajectory are clear. From the paper, which notes here the particular importance of heliopause passage:

ISP will fly throughout approximately 16 years, more than a solar cycle, while passing through interplanetary space, the termination shock, the heliosheath, up to the heliopause and beyond, making it an optimal mission for studying the heliosphere-dust coupling and using this knowledge for other astrospheres. Beyond the heliopause, the tiny dust with gyro-radii of only a few to 100 AU (for dust radii < 0.1 μm…), will help study the interstellar environment (magnetic field, plasma) and may detect local enhancements of smaller as well as bigger ISD [interstellar dust]. The strength of the mission lies in flying through all of these diverse regions with simultaneous magnetic field, dust, plasma and pickup ion measurements. No mission so far has flown a dedicated dust dynamics and composition suite into the heliosheath and the vast space beyond.

Analyzing the interaction between the heliosphere and interstellar dust acts as a probe into the history of our own Solar System, since we know that some of this material was affected by near-Earth supernovae, still raining down in the form of dust today. Mid-sized dust particles in the range of 0.1 to 0.6 μm in radius can make it through the heliosphere into the Solar System. Some smaller particles (30-100 nm) as well may escape filtering, but the authors note the limitations of our knowledge: “The exact lower cut-off size and time-dependence of particles that can enter the solar system is not yet exactly known, but Ulysses and Cassini already have measured ISD particles with radii between 50 and 100 nm.”

Thus we have markers for stellar and galactic evolution as factors in this study. But I’ll also remind those interested in interstellar flight that assessing dust density and the size distribution of particles will play a major role when we reach the point where we can send craft at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Larger particles in the local interstellar environment could cause catastrophic failure, while Ian Crawford has pointed out that other properties of this region could inform propulsion concepts like the interstellar ramjet.

Something else I learned from Ian Crawford (University of London) and wrote about twelve years ago (see Into the Interstellar Void) is that a spacecraft moving at 0.1c could make daily measurements 17 AU apart, which is roughly half the radius of the Solar System. So as we develop the fastest probe we can manage today in the form of designs like Interstellar Probe, we can see a larger picture in which such studies assist as we develop future technologies capable of actually making a crossing to Alpha Centauri, sampling widely along the way two different interstellar clouds and the boundary between them.

The paper is Sterken et al., “Synergies between interstellar dust and heliospheric science with an Interstellar Probe,” submitted as white paper for the National Academies Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics 2024-2033 and available as a preprint here.

Centauri Dreams regular Dave Moore just passed along a paper of considerable interest for those of us intrigued by planetary systems around red dwarf stars. The nearest known exoplanet of roughly Earth’s mass is Proxima Centauri b, adding emphasis to the question of whether planets in an M-dwarf’s habitable zone can indeed support life. From the standpoint of system dynamics, that often comes down to asking whether such a planet is not so close to its star that it will become tidally locked, and whether habitable climates could persist in those conditions. The topic remains controversial.

But there are wide variations between M-dwarf scenarios. We might compare what happens at TRAPPIST-1 to the situation around Proxima Centauri. We have an incomplete view of the Proxima system, there being no transits known, and while we have radial velocity evidence of a second and perhaps a third planet there, the situation is far from fully characterized. But TRAPPIST-1’s superb transit orientation means we see seven small, rocky worlds moving across the face of the star, and therein lies a tale.

The paper Dave sent, by Cody Shakespeare (University of Nevada Las Vegas) and colleague Jason Steffen, picks up on earlier work Shakespeare undertook that probes the differences between such scenarios. We know that conditions are right for a solitary planet, unperturbed by neighbors, to orbit with a spin rate synchronous with its orbital rate, the familiar ‘tidal lock.’ On such a world, we probe questions of climate, heat transport, the effects of an ocean and so on, to see if a planet with a star stationary in its sky could sustain life.

Image: This illustration shows what the TRAPPIST-1 system might look like from a vantage point near planet TRAPPIST-1f (at right). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

But as TRAPPIST-1 shows us in exhilarating detail, multi planet systems are not uncommon around this type of star, and now we have to factor in mean motion resonance (MMR), where the very proximity of the planets (all well within a fraction of Mercury’s orbit of our Sun) means that these effects can perturb a particular planet out of its otherwise spin-orbit synchronization. Call this ‘orbital forcing,’ which breaks what would have been, in a single-planet system, a system architecture that would inevitably lead to permanent tidal lock.

The results of this breakage produce the interesting possibility that planets like TRAPPIST-1 e and f may retain tidal lock but exhibit sporadic rotation (TLSR). Indeed, another recent paper referenced by the authors, written by Howard Chen (NASA GSFC) and colleagues, makes the case that this state can produce permanent snowball states in the outer regions of an M-dwarf planetary system. What is particularly striking about TLSR is the time frame that emerges from the calculations. Consider this, from the Shakespeare paper:

The TLSR spin state is unique in that the spin behavior is often not consistently tidally locked nor is it consistently rotating. Instead, the planet may suddenly switch between spin behaviors that have lasted for only a few years or up to hundreds of millennia. The spin behavior can occasionally be tidally locked with small or large librations in the longitude of the substellar point. The planet may flip between stable tidally locked positions by spinning 180°so that the previous substellar longitude is now located at the new antistellar point, and vice versa. The planet may also spin with respect to the star, having many consecutive full rotations. The spin direction can also change, causing prograde and retrograde spins.

Not exactly a quiescent tidal lock! Note the term libration, which refers to oscillations around the rotational axis of a planet. What Shakespeare and Steffen are analyzing is the space between long-lasting rotation and pure tidal lock. Indeed, the authors identify a spin scenario within the TLSR domain they describe as prolonged transient behavior, or PTB. Here the planet moves back and forth in a ‘spin regime’ that is essentially chaotic, so that questions of habitability become fraught indeed. Instead of a persistent climate, which we usually assume when assessing these matters, we may be looking at multiple states of climate determined by present and past spin regimes, and their necessary adaptation to the ever changing spin state.

Such global changes are reminiscent, though for different reasons, of Asimov’s fabled story “Nightfall,” in which scientists on a world in a system with six stars must face the social consequences of a ‘night’ that only appears every few thousand years. For here’s what Shakespeare and Steffen say about a scenario in which TSLR effects kick in, a world that had been tidally locked long enough for the climate to have become stable. The scenario again involves TRAPPIST-1:

Such a planet in the habitable zone around a TRAPPIST-1-like star could have an orbital period of around 4-12 Earth days – the approximate orbital periods of T-1d and T-1g, respectively. Due to the TLSR spin state, this planet may, rather abruptly, start to rotate, albeit slowly – on the order of one rotation every few Earth years. The previous night side of the planet, which had not seen starlight for many Earth years, will now suddenly be subjected to variable heat with a day-night cycle lasting a few years. The day side would receive a similar abrupt change and the climate state that prevailed for centuries would suddenly be a spinning engine with momentum but spark plugs that now fire out-of-sync with the pistons. In this analogy, the spark plugs and the subsequent ignition of fuel correspond to the input of energy from starlight. The response of ocean currents, prevailing winds, and weather patterns may be quite dramatic.

Not an easy outcome to model in terms of climate and habitability. The authors use a modified version of an energy release modeling software called 1D EBM HEXTOR as well as a model called the Hab1 TRAPPIST-1 Habitable Atmosphere Intercomparison (THAI) Protocol as they analyze these matters. I send you to the paper for the details.

Science fiction writers take note – here is rich material for new exoplanet environments. Notice that the TLSR spin state is different from the one-way change that occurs when a rotating planet gradually becomes tidally locked over large timescales. This is a regime of sudden change, or at least it can be. The authors consider spin regimes lasting less than 100 Earth years, with the longest regimes (these are classified as ‘quasi-stable’) lasting for 900 years or more and perhaps reaching durations of hundreds of thousands of years. The point is that “TLSR planets are able to be in both long-term persistent regimes and PTB regimes -– where frequent transitions between behaviors are present.”

We learn that all tidally locked bodies experience libration to some degree even if no other bodies are found in the system being examined. Four spin regimes are found within the broader spin state TLSR. Tidal lock with libration can occur around the substellar point, as well as around the substellar or antistellar point, or as noted a planet may be induced into a slow persistent rotation. Much depends upon how long any one of these ‘continuous’ states lasts; given enough time, a stable climate could develop. The chaotic behavior of the fourth state, prolonged transient behavior (PTB), induces frequent transitions in spin. Such transitions would be expected to produce extreme changes in climate.

The spin history of a given system will depend upon that system’s architecture and the key parameters of each individual planet, an indication of the complexity of the analysis. What particularly strikes me here is how fast some of these changes can occur. Here’s a science fiction scenario indeed:

The more extreme change is in the temperature of different longitudes as the planet transitions from a tidally locked regime to a Spinning regime or after the planet flips 180 and remains tidally locked. Rotating planets experience temperature changes at the equator of 50K or more over a single rotation period. The exact effects require more robust climate models, like 3D GCMs [Global Circulation Model], to properly examine. However, using comparisons with climate changes on Earth, it is likely that erosion of land masses would increase and major climate systems would experience significant changes.

As if the issue of habitability were not complex enough…

The paper is Shakespeare & Steffen, “Day and Night: Habitability of Tidally Locked Planets with Sporadic Rotation,” in process at Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and available as a preprint. The Chen paper referenced above is “Sporadic Spin-Orbit Variations in Compact Multi-planet Systems and their Influence on Exoplanet Climate,” accepted at Astrophysical Journal Letters (preprint).

As a book-dazzled kid growing up in St. Louis, I had the good fortune to be surrounded by books from previous generations, and specifically those belonging both to my father and my half-brother, who had died long before I was born. Among these was a multi-volume encyclopedia from the 1920s I’ve never been able to identify. All I have is the memory of looking through its musty volumes and realizing that Pluto was not listed in it, as the publication date was a few years earlier than Clyde Tombaugh’s epic search for the world.

I do remember thinking that without Pluto, the Solar System only had eight planets, and musing in my teenage boy way about how odd this incomplete view of the Solar System was. Little did I know how much more was in store! As to that eighth planet, Neptune was a puzzler not only to the encyclopedia but to science fiction writers of the Gernsback era. Thus James Morgan Walsh’s “The Vanguard to Neptune,” published in Wonder Stories Quarterly in the Spring, 1932 issue. In the cover by Frank R. Paul, that’s Neptune hanging in the sky, looking for all the world like a terrestrial planet, here seen from Triton. The explorers assume the blue areas are ice until they cross to the planet.

Image: Frank R. Paul’s cover illustration for J. M. Walsh’s “The Vanguard to Neptune.” Walsh (1897-1952) was an interesting figure in his own right for those of us who spent a career living off the printed word. Settling in the UK, the Australian novelist would pen an astounding 94 novels across a wide range of genres and under a variety of pseudonyms. It was possible to do that kind of thing in the pulp era.

Spurring these recollections are images of Neptune revealed in a new study on the planet’s cloud cover and its relation to the solar cycle. They’re so stunning that I wanted to reproduce them here, thinking about how our knowledge of the Solar System has advanced since my first acquaintance with the planet in that encyclopedia as no more than a speck of light amongst countless others. There’s also a bit of the Voyager 2 thrill as the craft approached Neptune back in 1989 deep in the summer night here. To see new worlds open before us. Astonishing.

I suppose one day we’ll get so completely accustomed to imaging exoplanets that such thrills will seem commonplace, or maybe not, given their sheer diversity. But the images below still work for me, the first set from Hubble.

Image: This sequence of Hubble Space Telescope images chronicles the waxing and waning of the amount of cloud cover on Neptune. This nearly-30-year-long set of observations shows that the number of clouds grows increasingly following a peak in the solar cycle – where the Sun’s level of activity rhythmically rises and falls over an 11-year period. The Sun’s level of ultraviolet radiation is plotted in the vertical axis. The 11-year cycle is plotted along the bottom from 1994 to 2022. The Hubble observations along the top, clearly show a correlation between cloud abundance and solar peak of activity. The chemical changes are caused by photochemistry, which happens high in Neptune’s upper atmosphere and takes time to form clouds. Credit: NASA, ESA, LASP, Erandi Chavez (UC Berkeley), Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley).

I don’t mean to neglect the import of the paper that features these observations, which comes from astronomers at UC-Berkeley, or their conclusions, which use the numerous changes in the patterning of Neptune’s clouds to point to the connection with the flip in the Sun’s magnetic field every eleven years. It’s intriguing to learn that when the Sun emits more intense ultraviolet light, and in particular the strong hydrogen Lyman-alpha emission, there is increasing cloud cover on Neptune fully two years later.

Imke de Pater (UC-Berkeley) is senior author on the study:

“These remarkable data give us the strongest evidence yet that Neptune’s cloud cover correlates with the Sun’s cycle. Our findings support the theory that the Sun’s UV rays, when strong enough, may be triggering a photochemical reaction that produces Neptune’s clouds.”

We see 2.5 cycles of cloud activity on Neptune recorded over a 29-year period in observations not only from Hubble but Keck Observatory and Lick Observatory, in which it also becomes clear that there is a relationship between the number of clouds and the planet’s observed brightness. Below is the Keck imagery.

Image: A dramatic change in Neptune’s appearance was observed in late 2019 and has persisted through June 2023. As shown by this compilation of images at 1.63 µm (microns) obtained with the NIRC2 and adaptive optics system on the Keck II Telescope, Neptune had numerous cloud features organized in latitudinal bands from before 2002 through late 2019. Afterwards, clouds appeared almost absent except near the south pole. The images are displayed using a Asinh function which, like a log-scale display, decreases the contrast between the features; if displayed on a linear scale, only the brightest features would be visible. Credit: Imke de Pater, Erandi Chavez, Erin Redwing (UC Berkeley)/W. M. Keck Observatory.

This is tricky analysis, because as the paper points out, clouds not related to photochemical reactions, as for example those produced by storms rising up from the deep atmosphere, would complicate correlations with the solar cycle. More recent imagery from the summer of this year has begun to show more clouds in the northern latitudes and at high altitude, which de Pater says reflects the observed increase in the solar ultraviolet flux in the past two years. It’s chastening to realize that even with 30 years of high resolution data covering almost three solar cycles, we have still covered only 20 percent of Neptune’s orbit. Oh for an ice-giant orbiter to depict up close the chaotic actions on a planet whose winds are the strongest known in the Solar System.

The paper is Chavez et al., “Evolution of Neptune at near-infrared wavelengths from 1994 through 2022,” Icarus Vol. 404 (1 November 2023), 115667 (abstract).

Interstellar studies toy with our expectations. Those of us who think about sending probes to other stars share the frustration of the long time-scales involved, not just in transit times but also in arriving at the technologies to make such missions happen. But the other half of interstellar studies, the observation and characterization of targets, is happening at a remarkable rate, with new instruments coming online and an entire class of extremely large telescopes in the pipeline. Exoplanet studies thrive.

In between, upcoming events are encouraging. Having identified two interstellar objects – 1I/ʻOumuamua and comet 2I/Borisov – in our own Solar System, we will shortly be able to expand the number of such confirmed interlopers enormously. That puts us in position to build intercept missions to study and sample material from another stellar system in relatively short order. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), being planned for the now under construction Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, should be able to detect interstellar materials passing through our system in abundance.

Image: An artist’s impression of a small, rocky interstellar object hurtling from the upper right toward the inner Solar System. The orbits of the four inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) are fully visible, drawn as teal concentric circles around the bright ball of the Sun at the center. We see the orbits from a slightly elevated angle, so that the circular paths appear oval. The black background is sprinkled with points of starlight. The interstellar object looks like an elongated potato above the Sun, streaming toward the Sun from the upper right, with a short tail of gas and dust trailing behind. Credit: Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. daSilva.

The LSST has crept into almost every discussion we’ve had in these pages about our two known interstellar visitors, along with the lament that had we found these objects sooner, we would have had been able to collect much more data from them. A 10-year survey of the southern sky (from the El Peñon peak of Cerro Pachón in northern Chile), the survey will use a large-aperture wide-field instrument called the Simonyi Survey Telescope (SST) to study half the sky every three nights in six optical bands. It will deploy the largest digital camera ever constructed, with a 9.6 square degree of view.

Using three refractive lenses, the LSST Camera will take a pair of 15-second exposures of each field, operating throughout the night. Astronomers plan over 5.2 million exposures in ten years, creating views that will be sensitive to redshifts up to z=3. Recall the terminology: z=3 means that the observed wavelength of light from a distant object is three times longer than the rest wavelength (when the light was emitted).

Because the z parameter represents the stretching of wavelength owing to the expansion of the universe, higher values of z represent more distant (and hence older) objects, receding from us at a significant percentage of the speed of light. I’ve seen a redshift of z=0.0043 for the galaxy M87, which is roughly 55 million light years from Earth. A redshift of z=3 implies an object whose light has been traveling 11 billion years to reach us. That would make the actual distance to the object today over 18 billion light years because of the continuing expansion of the universe as the light travels. Las Cumbres Observatory offers an excellent backgrounder on all this.

Forgive the digression – this is how I learn stuff. But the point is that what the LSST will create is what its planners call a ‘movie,’ one summing that decade of observation and exposures and sensitive to extraordinarily distant objects. To get a sense of this, consider that the LSST project will take 15 terabytes of data every night, yielding an uncompressed data set of 200 petabytes. And with this kind of sensitivity, interstellar objects moving into our own Solar System should appear with some regularity.

Michele Bannister (University of Canterbury, NZ), a member of the Rubin Observatory/LSST Solar System Science Collaboration, comments:

“Planetary systems are a place of change and growth, of sculpting and reshaping. And planets are like active correspondents in that they can move trillions of little tiny planetesimals out into galactic space. A rock from another solar system is a direct probe of how planetesimal formation took place at another star, so to actually have them come to us is pretty neat. We calculate that there are a whole lot of these little worlds in our Solar System right now. We just can’t find them yet because we aren’t seeing faint enough.”

Image: This image captures not only Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, but one of the celestial specimens Rubin Observatory will observe when it comes online: the Milky Way. The bright halo of gas and stars on the left side of the image highlights the very center of the Milky Way galaxy. The dark path that cuts through this center is known as the Great Rift, because it gives the appearance that the Milky Way has been split in half, right through its center and along its radial arms. In fact, the Great Rift is caused by a shroud of dust, which blocks and scatters visible light. This dust makes the Great Rift a difficult space to observe. Fortunately, Rubin is being built to conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). This survey will observe the entire visible southern sky every few nights over the course of a decade, capturing about 1000 images of the sky every night and giving us a new view of our evolving Universe. Rubin Observatory is a joint initiative of the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy (DOE). Once completed, Rubin will be operated jointly by NSF’s NOIRLab and DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to carry out the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Credit: RubinObs/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/B. Quint.

The LSST has uses far beyond interstellar interlopers, of course, with implications for the study of dark energy and dark matter as well as the formation of the Milky Way and the trajectories of potentially hazardous asteroids. But its emergence, beginning with first operations in late 2024, puts us on the cusp of studying planet formation using materials from other stellar systems. That brings intercept missions into the discussion, a topic we’ve considered in these pages before through the work of my friend Andreas Hein (University of Luxembourg). On a broader level, consider that expansion into the Solar System already has interstellar aspects, as I’ll discuss soon with a look at what we are learning about interstellar dust, and how missions beyond the heliosphere can inform our views of the local bubble in which we move.

“It seems that destiny has taken a hand.” Thus Humphrey Bogart, in a pivotal scene from the iconic 1942 film Casablanca. In Bogart’s case, destiny had to do with the sudden arrival of Claude Rains and the gendarmerie at Rick’s Café Américain, with profound implications for his relationship with Ilsa. In my case, fate was more jejune, involving the failure of my PC’s power supply just as I was asking myself whether it was now time for my August vacation. The power supply left little doubt. Surely a sign from the cosmos that after all the recent work reconfiguring the site’s software, I should take some time off?

That’s how I plan to interpret it, in any case. In the meantime, I’ll get the PC problem resolved. As to the still developing work on the site, a couple of things to note:

1) I am all too aware that the mobile experience is problematic, depending on what phone you use. I find this bewildering, as many people see the site correctly on their phones, whereas people like me see a very skinny column of text with huge side margins. So that is right up there on the list, and I plan to work on it during my time off. Since I can’t travel anywhere right now, I will be staying put. I will be on the site each day, moderating comments and also trying to work out glitches. But I will not be posting new material under my byline for approximately two weeks.

2) Speaking of glitches, this one came out of nowhere. I’ve learned that older posts have comment sections that are not formatting correctly. This too needs to be fixed, and part of my time off will be spent in the quest for answers on that matter.

Otherwise, in the next couple of weeks, I plan to watch old movies and read the novels now at the top of my fiction reading stack. These include books by Richard Ford, Alastair Reynolds, Graham Greene and Emily St. John Mandel, although I have to finish up Alan Furst’s wonderful The World at Night before proceeding to the first of these.

One last thing: Every now and then I get a message from someone who has had trouble trying to leave a comment with the new interface. Here’s the method: To comment, what you need to do is click on the title of the post, which will open the same post with the comment section in place at the end of the text.

As I say, keep the comments coming, as I’ll be here to put them through. Thanks to all for your patience and suggestions re the site changes. More to come.

How to approach finding life on other worlds will continue to be a challenging issue, but how useful that even as we work out strategies for studying exoplanet atmospheres, we have planets we can actually reach right here in our own Solar System. And if the hunt for life has turned up empty thus far on Mars, we can keep searching there even as we consider the exotic possibility of life in the clouds of Venus. We’ve looked at Venus Life Finder before in these pages. This series of missions is now known as Morning Star, all designed to probe the clouds for signs of a kind of life that would have to endure the most hellish conditions we can imagine. In today’s post, Alex Tolley examines the Morning Star Missions and how they might proceed, depending on the results of that all important first sampling of the atmosphere.

by Alex Tolley

“To boldly seek life, where no terrestrial life has gone before”

The “Morning Star Missions” (formerly Venus Life Finder) group had previously outlined their plans for early life-detecting missions in the possibly habitable, temperate, but highly acidic Venusian clouds, at altitudes of 48-60 km above the searingly hot surface. The first mission, now slated for a 2025 launch, includes an Autofluorescing Nephelometer (AFN) that can detect organic materials, a prerequisite for living organisms. [1] The instrument emits laser light that causes certain carbon bonds to fluoresce and be detected (in this case, 440 nm is the selected detection wavelength). If no organic material is detected in the cloud droplets, that would eliminate life as we know it. However, there would still be ambiguities regarding whether organic material was detected or not as not all organic matter will fluoresce when stimulated by light. Typically aromatic carbon ring structures fluoresce, whilst linear carbon chains do not. A double-membraned cell wall that could contain a prebiotic metabolic system would probably fail to register. This might well be considered a false negative for what could be a very interesting finding.

It is well known that sulfuric acid (H2SO4) has a deleterious effect on organic matter, and highly concentrated sulfuric acid (CSA) that is expected in the Venusian clouds will rapidly break down organic matter and therefore it would appear that terrestrial life would rapidly succumb to this level of acid condition. [An acid bath is a traditional means by which murderers dispose of the victim’s body.] This would seem to rule out life of a terrestrial nature even in the Venusian clouds.

What about a positive result? Carbon aromatic rings that readily fluoresce may be very common in the clouds as simple carbon molecules are converted as the compounds fall towards the hotter surface. Polyaromatic hydrocarbons [PAH] are common in space and it has been hypothesized that they may be common in Venus’ clouds [2].

Apart from the simple destruction of living organisms like plants by pouring CSA onto them, prior work [3] has shown that organic material identified in terrestrial metabolisms is a little more stable than all naturally occurring organic compounds in CSA but far less stable than the space of manufactured organic compounds, as shown in figure 1.

A database of organic compounds and their reactivity to H2SO4 shows compounds with ring structures, especially those with unsaturated carbon-carbon bonds [5]. This implies that any extant organic compounds with these structural features will be more prevalent in the clouds, which includes PAHs. If abiotic aromatic ring carbon compounds are most likely to be resistant to CSA reactions, these abiotic organic molecules may create a false positive result. The search for life must therefore be sure that some biological molecules are resistant to CSA and could theoretically be part of a positive organic molecule detection. Otherwise, this search approach would be futile. That about 10% of the extracted core metabolism compounds are resistant to CSA for greater than 3 years provides support for the possibility that biology may exist in the Venusian clouds.

Which biotic molecules are resistant to CSA and therefore could be present in the clouds? An answer to this issue is provided in a new paper by Seager et al in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [4] which examines whether any core biological molecules can survive the acid conditions. Information polymers such as DNA and RNA are a central component of terrestrial life. They are composed of nucleic acids of two types: purines (Adenine, Guanine) and pyrimidines (Cytosine, Thymine, Uracil), linked by a sugar (ribose in RNA, and deoxyribose in DNA) and phosphate. As shown in figure 2, the core structures have unsaturated bonds and very limited exposed bonds that could be attacked by CSA. The purpose of the paper was to determine if these nucleic acids are resistant to CSA and therefore possible detectable molecules on Venus.

The researchers performed several tests, including changes in UV spectra, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to detect changes in C-H bonds, NMR to detect the replacement of the hydrogen atoms with deuterium, and NMR to detect the donation of hydrogen ions, H+, to the nucleic acid molecules by the CSA (protonation).

The first series of tests placed these nucleic acids in CSA and tested how the UV spectrum changed over a period of up to 2 weeks in acid concentrations up to 98%. The spectra for the treated nucleic acids were very similar to those in aqueous solutions, indicating that there was no fundamental change in structures or breakdown of the compounds.

The next series of experiments ran NMR tests on the nucleic acids. This detects the state of the carbon atoms and their bonds which are shown by chemical shifts (ppm) in the hydrogens. Once again, the sharp spectral peaks were very similar to the controls, indicating that the structures and identified carbon and nitrogen bonds had not been changed. Figure 4 shows the results.

The last series of experiments used deuterated sulfuric acid [D2SO4] as well as C13 and N15 isotopes in the nucleic acids to determine if any of the bound hydrogen atoms had been replaced, indicating that the structures were capable of having the C-H bonds broken. Again, there was no evidence of bond-breaking and H atoms replacement.

“Taken together the NMR data confirms that the purine ring structure remains intact in 98% w/w D2SO4 in D2O.“

As the nucleic acids were in CSA where H+ ions were abundant, there is the question of whether these ions protonate the compounds. This protonation of the nitrogen and oxygen atoms was detected by NMR. As hydrogen bonds are important in biological functions, most notably the base pairing between purines and pyrimidines in DNA, and pairing of bases in the same RNA strands, protonation would impact these interactions. Figure 5 shows how protonation disrupts this pairing.

Figure 5. The base pairings in aqueous solutions and the impact of H2SO4 protonation that breaks the hydrogen bonds and pairing. Source: Seager et al 2023 [4]

The conclusion is that the purines and pyrimidines of terrestrial information molecules will remain stable in the Venusian clouds in the habitable region. As these molecules will fluoresce, a positive result of organic molecule detection could include these molecules, but follow-on missions would be needed to determine whether these molecules are present.

In summary, these experiments demonstrate that terrestrial information molecules using the core purine and pyrimidine structures are stable in CSA and therefore could potentially be present in the Venusian clouds. Therefore if organic carbon is detected in the first mission, a 2nd mission to characterize the carbon compounds is supported as the presence of organic carbon could include biological molecules.

While the detection of these nucleic acids would be very interesting, it is important to note that to be useful information molecules, they must polymerize in a way that allows their informational function to operate. Otherwise, the nucleic acids are like an alphabet that cannot be composed in text, as the sugar-phosphate links between them would not be stable in CSA. Other molecules would need to be used. Currently, possible linker molecules have not been identified and remain an area of work.

We already know that amino acids are not stable in sulfuric acid, which rules out proteins as the main functional type of molecule of terrestrial life, existing in the Venusian clouds without some mechanism to neutralize the pH.

If amino acids were stable, could the first mission detect them? Amino acids with cyclic rings such as tryptophan fluoresce, albeit with a peak well below the 440 nm detection wavelength of the AFN to be included in the first mission. If subsequently confirmed by other instruments on later missions, it would indicate that the cloud droplet environment is not as unfavorable as assumed. As a side note, the somewhat controversial detection of phosphine suggests the known rapid oxidation by CSA is at least partially avoided, perhaps by either avoiding the cloud droplets or the droplets having a higher pH, or both.

What are the implications for life if nucleic acids are confirmed and in polymer form? The authors offer 3 scenarios:

1. Life may have emerged during the early wet age in Venus’ oceans. As the planet became the hot dry world it is today, that life could have evolved to adapt to the new cloud-borne, temperate, but concentrated sulfuric acid conditions. The DNA/RNA would have had to change links between the nucleic acids to retain their function.

2. During its evolution to the current conditions, life may have evolved the ability to neutralize the acid by excreting ammonia. This would allow it to retain the existing nucleic acid sugar-phosphate links in DNA and RNA, as well as allow proteins to remain stable.

3. Lastly, the abiogenesis of new life in the clouds. Perhaps this is limited to a pre-biotic state with nucleobases only.

In my opinion, scenario 2 seems most likely if there is evidence that terrestrial-analog cellular life exists in the cloud droplets, using polymerized nucleic acids as their information molecules. This is because we know from the evolution of terrestrial life that core metabolism, information storage, and transcription and translation to functional proteins, have remained almost unchanged over billions of years. Extremophiles have been unable to change their core replication and growth biology, despite adapting to their current environments. What they do instead is tinker with the relative production of certain proteins, and evolve new enzymes and pathways to produce new molecules to adapt to the new conditions. Therefore being able to produce ammonia to neutralize the CSA seems a more likely evolutionary path.

If however nucleic acids are found and in a polymerized, functional state, but without accompanying amino acids and functional proteins, is it possible that Venus is in the equivalent condition of the hypothetical pre-biotic RNA World? In this scenario, RNA acts as both the information and functional molecule. We see evidence for its metabolic function as RNA can act as a catalyst and also autocatalyze itself to replicate. On Venus, the RNA analog may be pre-biotic or possibly degenerate, the remaining functional mechanism in a hostile pH environment. Despite this last speculation, it raises the question “How would these ‘nucleic acid bases’ be formed in the clouds?” While these nucleic acids have been shown to have the ability to form from simple molecules like HCN and formamide in aqueous conditions, there is as yet no evidence that they can form in CSA. Unless they can, this would seem to rule out this pre/post-biotic scenario. (See also Bain paper on H2SO4 as a solvent [3])

In summary, the nucleic acids used in the information molecules DNA and RNA are stable in the acid conditions expected in the Venusian clouds. However, they would not be functional as information molecules unless they can effectively polymerize in a way that allows an analog of the stable form that would allow natural selection to operate. They would need different linker molecules than the sugar-phosphate ones on Earth. Furthermore, protonation of the nitrogens in the nucleic acids would disrupt the hydrogen bonding mechanism for the base pairings. This is another important issue that further constrains the possibility of life on Venus unless it can neutralize the pH of the cloud droplets, with a metabolism that relies on methanogenesis of CO2 like terrestrial archaea, or organic molecules produced in the atmosphere.

If organic molecules are detected in the first 2025 scheduled mission, the stability of nucleic acids in CSA indicates that there is potential for their direct detection in a follow-up mission, holding out the possibility of some sort of life or pre-biotic chemistry on Venus.

References

Tolley, A (2022) “Venus Life Finder: Scooping Big Science” Centauri-Dreams https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2022/06/03/venus-life-finder-scooping-big-science/

Špaček, J (2021) “Organic Carbon Cycle in the Atmosphere of Venus”, arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.02286.

Bains W, Petkowski JJ, Zhan Z, Seager S. Evaluating Alternatives to Water as Solvents for Life: The Example of Sulfuric Acid. Life (Basel). 2021 Apr 27;11(5):400. doi: 10.3390/life11050400. PMID: 33925658; PMCID: PMC8145300.

Seager, S et al (2023) “Stability of nucleic acid bases in concentrated sulfuric acid: Implications for the habitability of Venus’ clouds” PNAS 2023 Vol. 120 No. 25 e2220007120 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2220007120

Database of H2SO4 effects on molecules. Reactivity V4.1- release.xlsx Url: https://zenodo.org/record/4467868/files/Reactivity%20V4.1-%20release.xlsx

Two new techniques for examining interesting SETI signals come into view this morning, one out of Breakthrough Listen work at UC-Berkeley, the other from researchers working with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), the so-called ‘Heaven’s Eye’ instrument located in southwest China. In both cases, the focus is on ways to screen SETI observations from disruptive radio frequency interference (RFI), which can appear at first glance to flag a signal from another star.

The Chinese work relies upon FAST’s array of receiving instruments, each acting as a separate ‘beam’ to cover slightly different portions of the sky. FAST’s currently operational L-band receiver array consists of 19 beams, to which researchers led by Bo-lun Huang (Beijing Normal University) apply a technique called MultiBeam Point-source Scanning (MBPS). Here the instrument scans the target star sequentially with different beams of the instrument, setting up the possibility of cross-verification and allowing researchers to identify local interference quickly and accurately.

The paper on this work points to the SETI ON-OFF strategy as a more conventional way to analyze a target star. In this case, the star is observed for a short time, followed by a different target six or more beamwidths away from the primary. These become the ‘ON’ and ‘OFF’ of the method, the assumption being that an authentic signal from another civilization would appear only in the ON set of observations. MBPS, on the other hand, can be used by any radio telescope with a multibeam receiver and requires the telescope to slew during the observation periods to provide ongoing comparisons between each beam.

Let me quote the paper on this:

…we are effectively adding new parameters and the observation data can thus be interpreted from different perspectives. The additional parameters introduced by the MBPS strategy include the duration of signals in a single beam, intensity variation of signals, and the difference in central frequencies of different beams which are the results of the observation method of the MBPS. With the three newly introduced parameters, we are then able to put in the most rigorous restrictions on the RFI/ETI identifications by confining the characteristics of an ETI/RFI signal in a new multi-parameter space.

Having run a re-observation campaign on TRAPPIST-1 using this strategy (this followed a set of observations taken in 2021), the team was able to retrieve all 16,645 received signals (!) as RFI. The authors’ confidence level in the technique is high:

We speculate that it would be exceedingly rare for the MBPS strategy to return any suspicious signals, even over the course of several years, because the types of false positives found by other strategies are easily identifiable with the MBPS strategy. However, when a genuine narrowband ETI signal does arrive on Earth, the MBPS strategy is capable of identifying it even amidst a substantial influx of RFI.

Image: An illustration shows how FAST receives radio waves emitted by distant pulsars, the rapidly rotating cores of dead stars. At left, a photo shows the huge telescope in Guizhou province. Can the new methods in the Bo-lun Huang paper help us weed radio interference out of signals from another civilization? Credit: China Daily.

At UC-Berkeley, Bryan Brzycki and team have been analyzing interstellar ‘scintillation,’ the refraction or bending of electromagnetic waves that pass through cold plasma in interstellar space. Rising and falling in amplitude, the waves interfere when they reach Earth by different paths. The phenomenon has been well studied through analysis of pulsars and other distant radio sources, and an obvious analog occurs in the twinkling of starlight created by Earth’s atmosphere. In the case of interstellar scintillation, Brzycki has come up with algorithms that can analyze narrowband signals for this effect, quickly selecting for those that show the phenomenon and thus are not local.

On first glance, this appears extraordinarily useful, as co-author (and Brzycki thesis adviser) Imke de Pater (UC-Berkeley) points out:

“This implies that we could use a suitably tuned pipeline to unambiguously identify artificial emission from distant sources vis-a-vis terrestrial interference. Further, even if we didn’t use this technique to find a signal, this technique could, in certain cases, confirm a signal originating from a distant source, rather than locally. This work represents the first new method of signal confirmation beyond the spatial reobservation filter in the history of radio SETI.”

Image: The Green Bank Telescope, nestled in a radio-quiet valley in West Virginia, is a major listening post for Breakthrough Listen. Credit: Steve Croft, Breakthrough Listen.

A useful tool indeed, though bear in mind that it proves useful only for signals originating more than 10,000 light years from Earth, for to produce the needed scintillation, the signal must do a lot of traveling. If we do make a SETI detection with the aid of scintillation, in other words, it will not be of a civilization we’ll be likely to converse with (unless, of course, we find a way someday to actually visit it).

The Brzycki paper dovetails nicely with the FAST work, as witness its discussion of the ON-OFF strategy discussed above. The italics below are mine:

…RFI can also appear in only ON observations. For example, RFI signals could exhibit intensity modulations that follow the observational cadence of 5 minutes per pointing, a false positive that would pass the directional filter. While we observe false positives like this in practice, having directional requirements still serves as an interpretable basis for determining candidates, which would induce follow-up observations for potential re-detection.

This begs the question: can we differentiate narrowband signals as RFI based on morphology alone? Since ETI signals must travel to us through interstellar space, are there effects that would be observable and sufficiently unique compared to RFI modulations?

Thus the important result: The effect of scintillation does indeed provide a way to single out RFI simply because no local interference will produce the effect. Indeed, as the authors note, ETI might well consider the presence of scintillation in an artificial, narrowband signal as an announcement: ‘we are here.’ Where this work points is to further analysis of radio emission – the authors single out polarization, which they say is only beginning to be studied in the SETI context. Who can doubt their conclusion?

Whether it is because certain effects are stochastic or because human radio emission exploits every facet of radio light possible for communication, extracting non trivial information from a radio signal’s detailed morphology has been and will remain difficult. We may need to push the limits of detectability along hitherto unexplored axes to discover the first technosignature.

The paper from FAST is Bo-lun Huang et al., “A solution to persistent RFI in narrowband radio SETI: The MultiBeam Point-source Scanning strategy,” currently available as a preprint. The paper on scintillation is Brzycki et al., “On Detecting Interstellar Scintillation in Narrowband Radio SETI,” Astrophysical Journal 17 July 2023 (full text).

If we ever thought it would be easy to tell whether a planet was ‘habitable’ or not, Stephen Dole quickly put the idea to rest when he considered all the factors involved in his study Habitable Planets for Man (1964). In this second part of his essay on habitability, Dave Moore returns to Dole’s work and weighs these factors in light of our present knowledge. What I particularly appreciate about this essay in addition to Dave’s numerous insights is the fact that he has brought Dole’s work back into focus. The original Habitable Planets for Man was a key factor in firing my interest in writing about interstellar issues. And Centauri Dreams reader Mark Olson has just let me know that Dole appears as a major character in a novel by Harry Turtledove called Three Miles Down. It’s now in my reading stack.

by Dave Moore

In Part I of this essay, I listed the requirements for human habitability in Stephen Dole’s report, Habitable Planets for Man. Now I’ll go over what we’ve subsequently learned and see how this has changed our perspective.

Dole, in calculating the likelihood of a star having a habitable planet, produced his own ‘Drake equation.’

Image: Dole’s ‘Drake Equation.’

Dole assigns the following probabilities to his equation: P_HP=Nsub>S P_p P_i P_D P_M P_e P_B P_R P_A P_L:

P_p = 1.0, P_i = 0.81, P_M = 0.19, P_e = 0.94, P_R = 0.9, P_L = 1.0, P_B = 0.95 for a star taken at random, 1.0 if there is no interference with the other star in a binary system. He calculates that for stars around solar mass there is a 5.4% chance of having a habitable planet.

I’ll only summarize his calculations as this is not the primary thrust of this essay. Some of his estimates such as P_p = 1.0, the number of stars with planets, have held up well. Others need adjusting, but by far the biggest factors that determine the likelihood of a planet being habitable for humans are those he didn’t consider in depth.

Since Dole’s report, we’ve learned a lot more about the carbonate-silicate cycle and atmospheric circulation. The carbonate-silicate cycle provides a stronger negative feedback loop over a wider range of insolation than thought at the time of his report. Atmospheric and oceanic heat transport have been shown to work more efficiently also. This leads to a more positive assessment to the range of habitability. Planets with high axial tilts and eccentricities, which Dole had excluded, are now considered potentially habitable; and more importantly, there’s the possibility that tidally-locked planets around M-dwarf stars may be habitable. M-dwarf stars being the most common in the galaxy, this makes a big difference to the number of potentially habitable planets. Nsub>S, the mass range of stars, is now opened up. P_i, the range of inclination, is probably 1.0, and P_D, the probability that there is a planet in the habitable zone, which he gave as 0.63 and is still a good estimate, is now extended to M dwarfs. And given that tidally locked planets are no longer excluded, P_R, the rate of rotation is not a limiting factor.

On P_M, Dole’s assumptions for the size of a habitable Earth-like world have held up well. His calculations on atmospheric retention and escape conclude that planets between 0.4 Earth mass and 2.35 Earth mass could be Earth-like. Planets below 0.4 Earth mass would lose their atmospheres. Planets above 2.35 Earth mass would retain their primordial Hydrogen and Helium atmospheres and become what we now call Hycean planets or Super-Earths.

This gives a range of surface gravities, assuming a composition similar to Earth’s, of between 0.68 and 1.5 G, which would mean from a gravitational perspective most of the range is within what humanity could handle. Dole puts the upper limit at 1.25 G based on mobility measurements made in centrifuges from that time. I would agree with him even though there are a lot of people walking around today with one and a half times their ideal weight. The limiting factor for high G is heart failure at an early age, a condition extremely tall people here on Earth suffer from. If you are a six-foot person on a 1.5 G world, your heart is pumping blood equivalent to that of a nine-foot person. In this case, people of short stature have a distinct advantage. A five-foot person would have the blood pressure equivalent of being seven foot six on a 1.5 G world and six foot three on a 1.25 G world.

However, when it comes to the frequency of Earth-sized worlds in the habitable zone, Dole’s guess at P_M = 0.19 is probably too high even when we now include tidally-locked planets around red-dwarf stars. He, like the rest of us until recently, had no clue that sub-Neptunes and super-Earths would be the most frequently-sized planets in the habitable zone of a roughly Sol-mass star.

From our observations, Dole’s guess on orbital eccentricity, P_e, looks like it’s in the ballpark, again due to the inclusion of red-dwarf stars with their tidally circularized orbits. With a lot of these factors, though, slight changes in probability do not make a big difference in the frequency of habitable planets. The big differences come from those he didn’t consider.

Dole noted that water coverage on a planet could determine its habitability. He did not go over this in any detail, however, mainly I suspect because he had no information to go on. He didn’t include a term for it in his calculations. But, we do know from density determinations of transiting Earth-sized planets that there’s a significant possibility that a large percentage of them may be excluded due to being covered by deep oceans. This would mean, even if they had breathable atmospheres, they would not meet Dole’s criteria for habitability.

While Dole went carefully over the range of breathable atmospheres humans could tolerate, he essentially assigned a probability of 1.0 to the formation of this atmosphere once life appears on the planet, P_L, and sufficient time has passed, P_A, to which he arbitrarily assigns a period of 3 billion years. He made no consideration of how likely it would be for this process to go off the rails.

Yet, if you consider the range of possible atmospheric compositions and pressures on Earth-like planets, those that meet the requirements of human habitability are narrow. This is the one factor that is most likely to winnow the field with the possible exception of average water composition.

When considering what percentage of Earth-like planets could have a breathable atmosphere: Oxygen between 100 and 400 millibars, Nitrogen less than 2.3 bar, CO₂ less than 10 millibars, and no poisonous gasses, we are helped by a natural connection of these parameters. Oxygen destroys most poisonous gasses. The Carbonate-Silicate cycle will draw down CO₂ to low levels. With Nitrogen we note that Venus has 3 bars of Nitrogen. Earth has a similar stock, but most of it is either dissolved in the oceans or mineralized as nitrates. Mars still has a 2.6% by volume trace of its primordial Nitrogen atmosphere. This points to a certain consistency for terrestrial planets with regard to their Nitrogen stock; however, Oxygen to Nitrogen ratios do vary from star to star. Getting the level of Oxygen within breathable parameters is more problematic, though. It’s a reactive gas that disappears with time. I can see two possible pathways that can lead to a breathable atmosphere, one abiotic and one biotic.

On the abiotic front, there’s a robust mechanism available for generating Oxygen. If the planet is warm enough to have significant quantities of water vapor in the upper atmosphere or has a steam atmosphere, then photolysis and subsequent Hydrogen escape will result in the build-up of Oxygen.

Planets less massive than the Earth-like range lose their atmospheres. Planets more massive retain their primordial Hydrogen, which means any Oxygen resulting from photolysis will recombine to form water. Intermediate-sized planets, however, can build up Oxygen via Hydrogen escape.

How much it builds up depends on the balance of production and removal. The amount produced depends on stratospheric water vapor and UV levels. The rate of removal is determined by three main processes: Oxygen escape, which is dependent on planetary mass, magnetic field strength and the strength of plasma wind from its primary; chemical reaction with reducing gasses, which is proportional to the level of volcanic emissions; and the oxidation of exposed regolith due to volcanism and weathering, the first being proportional to the level of volcanism and the second being proportional to the planet’s temperature.

Abiotic Oxygen atmospheres are probably transitory in nature over geological time periods, but I do see sufficient Oxygen being generated at various stages in an Earth-like planet’s history. The first is from the time when a planet’s red-dwarf primary is sliding down its Hayashi track towards its position on the main sequence. Due to the star’s greater luminosity at this time, an Earth-like planet destined for the habitable zone will spend 100 million to a billion years with a steam atmosphere. Models of this process indicate it could lose up to several Earth oceans of water through photolysis and Hydrogen loss. The loss of an Earth ocean translates into roughly 300 bar of Oxygen, most of which, as with Venus, will finish up oxidizing the crust. If, however, the various factors balance out, so that when the planet’s steam atmosphere condenses as the star arrives at its main sequence position, the water fraction is sufficient to provide both oceans and continents, and the Oxygen production and removal hove balanced out to produce a breathable but non-toxic level of Oxygen, then we should get a habitable planet, albeit one with a highly oxidizing surface chemistry like Mars.

If this all sounds highly unlikely, you are probably right, but there are a lot of red dwarf stars in our galaxy.

Image: Artist’s impression of the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 from the surface of one of its planets. We’re beginning to learn whether the inner worlds here have atmospheres, but will we find that any of the seven are habitable? Credit: ESO.

Oxygen generation through photolysis occurs anytime an Earth-like planet has a high level of water loss. Mars is thought to have lost an ocean of water corresponding to 1.4% of Earth’s ocean early in its history, which translates into a total partial pressure of 4.2 bar of Oxygen (under 1 G.) This Oxygen generation would have occurred over a long period, so the partial pressure at any given time was probably low; but you’ll notice that the mineralogy of Mars from around 4 billion years ago is highly oxidizing whereas Earth’s surface didn’t become oxidizing until 2.2 billion years ago.

Also an Earth-like planet suffering from runaway greenhouse such as Venus did two billion odd years ago would also experience a build-up in Oxygen.

If the presence of life in the galaxy is sparse, then this mechanism may result in more planets having Oxygen in their atmospheres than those that get it through biotic means, so Oxygen lines in the spectra of a planet’s atmosphere would not be a good indication that it harbors life.

We are familiar through descriptions of the history of life on how the biotic process leads to a breathable atmosphere. This has implications, however. To frame this, I’ll use a model in which planets become habitable at the rate of one per million stars starting nine billion years ago. (The figure I selected is arbitrary. You are welcome to adjust it and see what sort of results you get.) Given that star formation in our galaxy is about one star per year (star formation rates have varied over time but an average of one per year will suffice for this model), this will result in the total of 9000 planets that will be habitable to humans at some point in their lifetime. There may well be many more life-bearing planets than this, but this model is only interested in the ones that become habitable to humans.

If we assume these planets have a similar evolutionary track to Earth, then the youngest 5% of these will be at the prebiotic stage. Until about 2.2 billion years ago Earth was dominated by anaerobic life, so the next 20% will have anaerobic atmospheres full of toxic gasses. Hydrogen Sulfide in particular is lethal, killing at 1000 ppm. Intrepid explorers will have to live in sealed habitats with airlocks and go around on the surface in spacesuits. Does this meet your definition of habitable?

About 2.2 billion years ago on Earth, photosynthetic aerobes got the upper hand in Earth’s chemistry and the surface became oxidized with an atmosphere of 1-2% of oxygen. If their timeline is similar to Earth’s, then 20% of these planets would fit this condition.

These planets would be a far more pleasant place to explore. Toxic gasses would be removed by the Oxygen. You could probably go around with just an oxygen concentrator on your back feeding a tube to your nose. Habitats wouldn’t need airlocks; double doors would do. How would you classify these planets?

Then 500 million years ago Earth became fully habitable when the Oxygen concentration crossed 15% and the air became breathable. This period represents 5% of the sample. However, there’s a side effect to this. Oxygen is not very soluble in water and O₂ concentrations fall off rapidly with distance. This is why the macroscopic lifeforms from the Pre-Cambrian age (>500 mya) were either flat leaf-like shapes or sponges, both of which give short diffusion distances throughout the organism. Once the oxygen concentration rose, however, lifeforms could develop thickness, and with thickness, they could develop organs such as hearts and circulatory systems, which could then circulate an oxygenated fluid throughout their bodies. A breathable atmosphere allows for the development of complex macroscopic life.

And, over time, complex macroscopic life gives rise to the second side effect of breathable Oxygen levels – sapience. This has often been considered a rare possibility, a fortuitous combination of circumstance, and in the Drake equation it is assigned a low fractional value, but the idea that intelligent life is rare and unique derives from our historical and religious concept that mankind is something unique and apart from the animal kingdom. However, studies show a steady increase in encephalization over time and its widespread occurrence in different phyla and classes: octopi in the mollusks, parrots and corvids in the birds, and dolphins, elephants and apes in the mammals.

Varying levels of communication signaling have been found in numerous species. Just recently, a troop of Chimpanzees has been found to have a 390-word vocabulary constructed by combining grunts and chirps in various sequences. It therefore seems that our ability with language is merely a development of existing trends rather than something that came out of nowhere. And language is the abstract representation of an object or action, so the manipulation of language leads to abstract reasoning.

Encephalization is a tradeoff between the energy consumption of neurons and the benefits they produce in reproductive fitness. Increasing the number of neurons in an organism is easy. A simple mutation in the precursor cells allowing them to divide one more time will do this; however, organizing those extra neurons into something useful enough to justify their extra metabolic cost is a lot more difficult. But increases in neural complexity can lead to more complex behaviors, which can increase fitness or allow the creature to colonize new niches. In addition, neurons, over time, have evolved to become more efficient. Moore’s law operates, but with a doubling time on the order of 100 million years. Parrots’ neurons are both smaller and three times more energy efficient than human ones. So, not only does encephalization increase with time, but the tradeoff moves in its favor. However, like any increases in biological complexity and sophistication, this does take time.

This points to the conclusion that on planets habitable to humans, the evolution of sentience is not so much a case of if, but when.

An atmosphere breathable to humans is also flammable over most of its range, so a good proportion of these sapients would have access to fire allowing smelting technology to develop. What the model I used implies is that 50% of habitable planets will by now have had intelligent life forms evolve on them, a majority of which could develop technology.

I would support this argument by applying the Law of Universality that states that no matter where you are in the universe the laws of nature operate in the same way. This means that a planet like Earth would produce intelligent life forms. There is a certain contingent element in evolution, so the timing and the resulting life forms would not be identical; however, the broad driving forces of evolution would produce something similar. This can be seen in the many cases of convergent evolution that have occurred on Earth. How different from Earth a planet has to be before it stops producing intelligent life forms is a matter of conjecture, but if these changes cripple the evolution of intelligent lifeforms, there’s a good chance they cripple the formation of a breathable atmosphere.

What these intelligent life forms would do to their planet over the eons is a matter of speculation, but if for some reason intelligent life did not arise, then complex life could thrive and the planet would be habitable for another billion years or more – depending on the star’s spectral type – before the star’s increasing luminosity sets off a runaway greenhouse. This means that of the planets that are habitable for humans at some stage in their life approximately 15-25% will be habitable at any given time. (The upper bound assumes that there are a high proportion of them around lower mass stars with longer lifetimes.)

If, however, intelligent life develops on planets as a matter of course, then the model indicates that for every habitable planet we have now (5% of the total) approximately ten planets had intelligent lifeforms at some stage in their history (50% of the total.) And if intelligent life is a side effect of habitability, then there will be a correlation between the number of habitable planets and the number of exosolar technological civilizations in our galaxy. So, in an inversion of the usual order of things, we can estimate the number of planets habitable for humans from the number of alien civilizations in the galaxy. The model I’ve been using points to them being within an order of magnitude of each other.

Adding in the fact that we have no information on the evolution of intelligent life on non-habitable planets, then calculating the number of habitable planets from evidence of alien civilizations is an upper bound. On the other side of the scales, there’s the number of planets that are habitable through abiotic means. Planetary atmospheric spectra within the next couple of decades may give us some indication of this. If, however, we use Hanson’s estimate where he deduces that from the lack of evidence of alien civilizations in our galaxy that the number of technological life forms is just one – us – then this would also point to the number of habitable planets in our galaxy being just one: Earth.

As a final point I would like to add that while I have not done a full literature search, I have read widely in this field and have not come across as rigorous consideration as Dole’s work on defining habitability for humans and considering the likelihood of finding planets that match that criterion. The field’s general mindset seems to focus on finding the conditions upon which life arises; then it just assumes evolution will automatically lead to a habitable planet for humans. We have learned a lot since Dole wrote his paper, but there does not seem to have been much reexamination of the topic. It is perhaps time we applied our minds to it.

References

Stephen Dole, Habitable Planets For Man, The Rand Corporation, R414-R
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2005/R414.pdf

Dave Moore, “’If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare’: A review”
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2022/05/20/if-loud-aliens-explain-human-earliness-quiet-aliens-are-also-rare-a-review/

Robin Hanson, Daniel Martin, Calvin McCarter, Jonathan Paulson, “If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare,” The Astrophysical Journal, 922, (2) (2021)

Dave Moore is a Centauri Dreams regular who has long pursued an interest in the observation and exploration of deep space. He was born and raised in New Zealand, spent time in Australia, and now runs a small business in Klamath Falls, Oregon. He counts Arthur C. Clarke as a childhood hero, and science fiction as an impetus for his acquiring a degree in biology and chemistry. Dave has kept up an active interest in SETI (see If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare) as well as the exoplanet hunt. In the essay below, he examines questions of habitability and how we measure it, issues that resonate in a time when we are preparing to evaluate exoplanets as life-bearing worlds and look for their biosignatures.

by Dave Moore

In this essay I’ll be examining the meaning of the word ‘habitable’ when applied to planetary bodies. What do we mean when we talk about a habitable planet or a planet’s habitability? What assumptions do we make? The first part of this essay will look into this and address the implications that come with it. In part two, I’ll focus on human habitability, looking at the mechanisms that could produce a habitable planet for humans and what this would imply.

If you look at the Wikipedia entry on habitable planets, the author implies that “habitability” refers to the ability of a planetary body to sustain life, and this is by far the most frequent use of the term, particularly in the literature of popular science articles.

Europa has sulfate deposits on it, which indicates that its surface is oxidizing. If the hydrothermal vents in the moon’s subsurface ocean are like those on Earth, they would release reducing gases such as H₂S, and Methane. A connection between the two would provide an electrochemical differential that life could exploit. So it’s quite plausible that Europa’s ocean could harbor life, and if it does, would this now make it a “habitable” moon? If we find subsurface Methanogens on Mars, does Mars become a habitable planet? Traces of Phosphine in Venusian clouds point to the possibility of life forms there. If that’s so, would Venus now be considered habitable?

Andrew LePage on his website is more careful in defining what a habitable planet is. On his Habitable Planet Reality Check postings, he has the following definition:

…the best we can hope to do at this time is to compare the known properties of extrasolar planets to our current understanding of planetary habitability to determine if an extrasolar planet is “potentially habitable.” And by “habitable,” I mean in an Earth-like sense where the surface conditions allow for the existence of liquid water – one of the presumed prerequisites for the development of life as we know it. While there may be other worlds that might possess environments that could support life, these would not be Earth-like habitable worlds of the sort being considered here.

By Andrew’s definition, a habitable planet is first a body that can give rise to life. He then narrows it by adding that the type of life is “life as we know it,” which is life that needs an aqueous medium to evolve. If life evolved in some other medium, say Ammonia, then this would be life as we don’t know it; and the planet would not be classified as habitable. But this is not the only definitional constraint he makes. The planet must also be Earth-like in a sense that its surface conditions allow for liquid water. Europa would be excluded even if it had life in its oceans as its surface conditions do not allow for liquid water. His definition also implies that the planet must be in the habitable zone as defined by Kopparapu, which is thought to be the zone of insolation that allows for surface water on “Earth-like” planets. Would an ocean world with an ocean full of life fit his definition of habitable? Would a Super-Earth with a deep Hydrogen atmosphere (sometimes called a Hycean world) outside the habitable zone but with both oceans and continents and a temperate surface at moderate temperature be habitable? I do note however that his definition does not include human survivability as a requirement because elsewhere in his post he talks about the factors that have kept Earth habitable over billions of years, and Earth’s atmosphere has only been breathable to humans over the last 500 million years.

I’m not picking on Andrew in particular here; he has put more thought into the matter of defining habitability than most. Why I am using him as an example is to show just how fraught defining habitability can be. It’s a word that is bandied about with a lot of unexamined assumptions.

This may seem picayune, but the study of life on other worlds has very little data to rely on, so hypotheses are made using logical inference and logical deduction. And if your definitions are inexact, sliding in meaning through your logical process, then you are likely to draw invalid conclusions. Also, if the definition of habitable is that of a planet that could have life evolve on it, why include this arbitrary set of exclusions?

The answer becomes obvious from reading articles in the popular press. A habitable planet is not just one that is life-bearing, but a planet in which life gives rise to conditions that may be habitable for humans.

The assumption that life leads to human habitability is strongly ingrained from our historical experience. By the early 19th century, it was known that oxygen was required to survive and plants produced oxygen, hence the idea of life and human habitability became intertwined. Also, our experience of exploring Earth strongly influenced our perception of other planets. We found parts of Earth hot, parts cold, others wet and others dry. Indigenous inhabitants were almost everywhere, and you could always breathe the air. And this mindset was carried over to our imaginings of planets. They would be like Earth, only different.

For instance, H. G. Wells, an author known for applying scientific rigor to his stories, in The First Men in the Moon (1901), postulates a thin but breathable atmosphere on the moon and its native inhabitants. This is despite the lack of atmosphere on the moon being known for over a 100 years prior. Such was our mindset about other planetary bodies. Pulp SF before WWII got away with swash-buckling adventures on pretty much every body in the solar system without the requirement for space suits. Post WWII, until the early sixties, both Venus and Mars were portrayed as having breathable atmospheres, Mars usually as a dying planet as per Bradbury, Venus as a tropical planet as for example in Heinlein’s Between Planets (1951.)

When the first results from Mariner 2 came back in 1962 showing the surface of Venus was hot enough to roast souls, there was considerable resistance in the scientific community to accepting this and much scrambling to come up with alternative explanations. In 1965 Mariner 4 flew by Mars showing us a planet that was a cratered approximation of the moon and erased our last hopes that the new frontiers in our solar system would be anything like the old frontier. Crushed by what our solar system had served up, we turned to the stars.

Our search for life is now two-pronged: the first part being a search for signals from technological civilizations, which we regard as a pretty good indication of life; the second being the search for biomarkers on exosolar planets. We’re searching for biomarkers because, in the near future, characterizing exosolar planets will be by mass, radius and atmospheric spectra. Buoyed by our knowledge of extremophiles, we continue to search the planets and moons of our solar system for signs of life, but now it is in places not remotely habitable by humans. If the parameters for the search for life touch on habitable conditions for humans, they are purely tangential. These two elements once fused together in our romantic past have now become separate.

This divergence has led to a change in goals to the search for life. We look now for the basic principles that govern the emergence of life and under what conditions can life evolve and/or allow for panspermia? This leads to the concept of planetary habitability being secondary. Life, once evolved, in its single-celled form, is tough and adaptable, so it is likely to continue until there’s a really major change in the state of a planet; habitability is a parameter of life’s continuity, not its origins. So when describing planets, terms like life-potential or life-bearing become more pertinent. This latter term is now starting to be used in preference to the description habitable.

If we now look at the other fork, the idea of habitability when applied to humans, we note that the term has been used in a loose sort of way since the 17th century. Even the idea of the habitable zone was first raised in the 19th century, but it was Stephen Dole with his report, Habitable Planets For Man, under the auspices of the Rand Corporation in 1964 that put a modern framework to it by precisely defining what a habitable planet was for humans. The book can be downloaded at the Rand site.

This report has held up well considering it was written at a time (1962) when Mercury’s mass had not been fully established and Venus’s atmosphere and surface temperature were unknown.

Image: PG note: Neither Dave nor I could find a better image of the cover of the original Dole volume than the one above, but Stephen Dole’s Planets for Man was a new version of the more technical Habitable Planets for Man, co-authored by Isaac Asimov and published in 1964. If you happen to have a copy of the earlier volume and could scan the cover at higher resolution, I would appreciate having the image in the Centauri Dreams files.

Dole first defines carefully what he means by habitability (material omitted for brevity):

“For present purposes, we shall enlarge on our definition of a habitable planet (a planet on which large numbers of people could live without needing excessive protection from the natural environment) to mean that the human population must be able to live there without dependence on materials bought from other planets. In other words, a planet that is habitable can supply all of the physical requirements of human beings and provide and environment in which people can live comfortably and enjoyably…”

You’ll note that Dole’s definition contains echoes of the experience of American settlement where initial settlement is exercised with minimal technology and living off the land. There is emphasis on self-sustainment. It’s the sort of place you’d send an ark ship to.

I take a view of habitability as more of a sliding scale on how much technology you need to survive and live comfortably. On some parts of Earth, the level of technology needed to survive is minimal: basic shelter, light clothes and a pair of flip-flops will do the job. Living at the South Pole is a different story. You must have a heated, insulated station to live in, and when you venture outside, you need heavily insulated clothing covering your entire body and goggles to prevent your eyeballs from freezing. Move to Mars and you need to add radiation protection and a pressurized, breathable atmosphere. The more hostile the environment the more technology you need. By stretching the definition, you could say that an O’Neill colony makes space itself habitable.

I contrast my definition to Dole’s to show that even when dealing with what makes a planet “habitable for humans” you can still get a significant variation on what this entails.

Dole does however itemize carefully the specific requirements necessary to meet his definition. They are:

Temperature: The planet must have substantial areas with mean annual temperatures between 32°F and 86°F. This is not only to meet human needs for comfort, but to allow the growing of crops and the raising of animals. Also seasonal temperatures cannot be too extreme.

Surface gravity: up to 1.5 g.

Atmospheric composition and pressure: For humans, the lower limit for Oxygen is a partial pressure of 100 millibars, below which hypoxia sets in. The upper limit is about 400 millibars at which you get Oxygen toxicity, resulting in things like blindness over time. For inert gasses, there is a partial pressure above which narcosis occurs. This is proportional to the molecular weight of the molecule. The most important of these to consider is Nitrogen, which becomes narcotic above a partial pressure of 2.3 bar. For CO₂, the upper limit is a partial pressure of 10 millibars, above which acidosis leads to long term health problems and impaired performance. Most other gasses are poisonous at low or very low concentrations.

Image: Original illustration from Dole’s Report. You may notice the lower level of O₂ set at 60 mm Hg. This is the blood level minimum not the atmospheric minimum. There is a 42 millibar drop in O₂ partial pressure between the atm. and the blood.

Other factors he considered were having enough water for oceans but not enough to drown the planet, sufficient light, wind velocities that aren’t excessive or too much radioactivity, volcanic activity or meteorite in-fall.

Dole then went on to discuss general planetology and how stellar parameters would affect habitability—something we now know in much greater detail–and he finishes up by calculating the likelihood of a habitable planet around the nearest stars in a manner similar to the Drake equation.

You will notice that these requirements listed bear little resemblance to the parameters used when discussing habitability with regard to life. The two have gone their separate ways.

Using Dole’s report as a basis for examining the habitability of a planet, in Part II of this essay, I will note how our current state of knowledge has updated his conclusions. Then I will look at how you could produce a planet habitable for humans and the consequences of those mechanisms.

——–

Wikipedia Planetary Habitability Definition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_habitability

Andrew LePage: Habitable Planet Reality Check: TOI-700e
https://www.drewexmachina.com/2023/01/23/habitable-planet-reality-check-toi-700e-discovered-by-nasas-tess-mission/

Manasvi Lingam, A brief history of the term ‘habitable zone’ in the 19th century, International Journal of Astrobiology, Volume 20, Issue 5, October 2021, pp. 332 – 336.

Stephen Dole, Habitable Planets For Man, The Rand Corporation, R414-R
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2005/R414.pdf

A search for liquid water on a planetary surface may be too confining when it comes to the wide range of possibilities for supporting life. We see that in our own Solar System. Consider the growing interest in icy moons like Europa and Enceladus, where there is no possibility of surface water but a potentially rich environment under a thick layer of ice. Extending these thoughts into the realm of exoplanets reminds us that our calculations about how many life-bearing worlds are out there may be in need of revision.

This is the thrust of work by Lujendra Ojha (Rutgers University) and colleagues, as developed in a paper in Nature Communications and presented at the recent Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Lyon. What Ojha and team point out is that radiogenic heating can maintain liquid water below the surface of planets in M-dwarf systems, and that added into our astrobiological catalog, such worlds, orbiting a population of stars that takes in 75 percent or more of all stars in the galaxy, dramatically increase the chances of life elsewhere. The effect is striking. Says Ojha:

“We modeled the feasibility of generating and sustaining liquid water on exoplanets orbiting M-dwarfs by only considering the heat generated by the planet. We found that when one considers the possibility of liquid water generated by radioactivity, it is likely that a high percentage of these exoplanets can have sufficient heat to sustain liquid water – many more than we had thought. Before we started to consider this sub-surface water, it was estimated that around 1 rocky planet every 100 stars would have liquid water. The new model shows that if the conditions are right, this could approach 1 planet per star. So we are a hundred times more likely to find liquid water than we thought. There are around 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. That represents really good odds for the origin of life elsewhere in the universe.”

Image: This is Figure 2 from the paper. Caption: Schematic of a basal melting model for icy exo-Earths. a Due to the high surface gravity of super-Earths, ice sheets may undergo numerous phase transformations. Liquid water may form within the ice layers and at the base via basal melting with sufficient geothermal heat. If high-pressure ices are present, meltwater will be buoyant and migrate upward, feeding the main ocean. The red arrows show geothermal heat input from the planet’s rocky interior. b Pure water phase diagram from the SeaFreeze representation illustrating the variety of phases possible in a thick exo-Earth ice sheet. Density differences between the ice phases lead to a divergence from a linear relationship between pressure and ice-thickness. Credit: Ohja et al.

The effect is robust. Indeed, water can be maintained above freezing even when planets are subject to as little as 0.1 Earth’s geothermal heat produced by radiogenic elements. The paper models the formation of ice sheets on such worlds and implies that the circumstellar region that can support life should be widened, which would take in colder planets outside what we have normally considered the habitable zone.

But the work goes further still, for it implies that planets closer to their host star than the inner boundaries of the traditional habitable zone may also support subglacial liquid water. We also recall that the sheer ubiquity of M-dwarfs in the galaxy helps us, for if water from an internal ocean does reach the surface, perhaps through cracks venting plumes and geysers, we may find numerous venues relatively close to the Sun on which to search for biosignatures.

The key factor here is subglacial melting through geothermal heat, for oceans and lakes of liquid water should be able to form under the ice on Earth-sized planets even when temperatures are as low as 200 K, as we find, for example, on TRAPPIST-1g, which is the coldest of the exoplanets for which Ojha’s team runs calculations.

Such water is found to be buoyant and can migrate through this ‘basal melting,’ a term used, explain the authors, for “any situation where the local geothermal heat flux, as well as any frictional heat produced by glacial sliding, is sufficient to raise the temperature at the base of an ice sheet to its melting point.” Subglacial ice sheets are found on Earth in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Greenland and possibly the Canadian Arctic, and the paper points out the possibility of the mechanism at work at the south pole of Mars.

The authors’ modeling uses a software tool called SeaFreeze along with a heat transport model to investigate the thermodynamic and elastic properties of water and ice at a wide range of temperatures and pressures. Given the high surface gravity of worlds like Proxima Centauri b, LHS 1140 b and some of the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, water ice should be subjected to extreme pressures and temperatures, and as the paper points out, may evolve into high-pressure ice phases. In such conditions, the meltwater migrates upward to form lakes or oceans. Indeed, this kind of melting and migration of water is more likely to occur on planets where the ice sheets are thicker and there is both higher surface gravity as well as higher surface temperatures.

Image: A frozen world heated from within, as envisioned by the paper’s lead author, Lujendra Ojha.

Beyond radiogenic heating, tidal effects are an interesting question, given the potential tidal lock of planets in close orbits around M-dwarfs. Yet planets further out in the system could still benefit from tidal activity, as the paper notes about TRAPPIST-1:

…the age of the TRAPPIST-1 system is estimated to be 7.6 ± 2.2 Gyr; thus, if geothermal heating has waned more than predicted by the age-dependent heat production rate assumed here, tidal heating could be an additional source of heat for basal melting on the TRAPPIST-1 system. On planets e and f of the TRAPPIST-1 system, tidal heating is estimated to contribute heat flow between 160 and 180 mW m⁻². Thus, even if geothermal heating were to be negligible on these bodies, basal melting could still occur via tidal heating alone. However, for TRAPPIST-1 g, the mean tidal heat flow estimate from N-body simulation is less than 90 mW m⁻². Thus, ice sheets thinner than a few kilometers are unlikely to undergo basal melting on TRAPPIST-1 g.

So we have two mechanisms in play to maintain lakes or oceans beneath surface ice on M-dwarf planets. The finding is encouraging given that one of the key objections to life in these environments is the time needed for life to evolve given that the young planet should be bombarded by ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, a common issue for these stars. We put in place what Amri Wandel (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), who writes a commentary on this work for Nature Communications, calls ‘a safe neighborhood,’ and one for which forms of biosignature detection relying on plume activity will doubtless emerge building on our experience at Enceladus and Europa.

The paper is Ojha et al., “Liquid water on cold exo-Earths via basal melting of ice sheets,” Nature Communications 13, Article number: 7521 (6 December, 2022). Full text. Wandel’s excellent commentary is “Habitability and sub glacial liquid water on planets of M-dwarf stars,” Nature Communications 14, Article number: 2125 (14 April 2023). Full text.