SPACE, SANITY, PREJUDICE AND UFOs

Graphical representation of one of the ubiquitous black triangle UFO sightings, this time near Amsterdam, Holland and during daylight hours, Black triangles feature in a large number of reported sightings.

ByANDY FLEMING

Immediately your friends, acquaintances and colleagues discover that your hobby is amateur astronomy, you can prepare for the two main predictable questions: what do you think about black holes, and have you ever witnessed a UFO? Well here’s what I think: I love black holes though I’ve never directly witnessed such a beast, and yes, I’ve seen a UFO that may or may not have originated on another world. Oh, and I believe in them both despite never observing the former with my own eyeballs. There you are, a sceptical amateur astronomer who is prepared to place his lack of professional reputation and total lack of funding on the line and lose nothing apart from any meagre credibility in the astronomical community.

My friends’ former question about black holes is, of course a perfectly commendable scientific query about an actual astronomical entity, although still the subject of much speculation rather than fact. On the other hand, the enquiry about UFOs raises another subject altogether. It’s commonly referred to, often in a derogatory fashion as ‘ufology’ and involves a whole battery of educational disciplines including, physics, astronomy, biology, sociology, psychology, history and religion, not to mention some aeronautical engineering, just thrown in for some good measure. Just like religion on its own, it may well be that astronomers, whether amateur or professional are not necessarily the best qualified individuals to comment and encroach on another field of research.

Granted, ufology generally conjures up a whole smorgasbord of fact, fiction, wild speculation, the paranormal, the super-natural, hearsay, conspiracy theories, vivid imaginings, plain old charlatanry and sheer profiteering by certain so-called ‘experts’, but these are not the exclusive domains of ‘ufology’. It may well turn out that what we think of as our current scientific grasp on reality (whatever that word means) may not be so firm after all. There is, of course the whole cosmos set out before us. But there is also a whole cosmos set out within. As Carl Sagan (1980) noted we are the Cosmos with consciousness. In defining reality, we really need to establish which reality we’re talking about as the cosmos has surprises and characteristics that look increasingly beyond our measure.

On the subject of black holes, astronomers are qualified to make valid professional comments as their field of study has gathered overwhelming (albeit indirect) observational proof of the existence of them, and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, one of the foundations of modern physics, has predicted their existence since 1915. Indeed, most astronomers now believe that there is a black hole of super-massive proportions at the centre of each galaxy, including our very own Milky Way. The enormous velocities of stars at its centre as they rotate around something with a gargantuan mass is indirect evidence from mathematical calculations that this object, known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced ‘A-star') must be something with the density of a black hole.

Leaving astronomy to one side for now, my thoughts, views and beliefs about UFOs, unlike my studies of black holes go one step further. I’ve actually seen one, in the flesh, perhaps not up close and personal, but a “Close Encounter of the First Kind” in the night sky nonetheless. So what did it look like, this object over my home area of Teesside in north east England? Well, I’ve made a graphical representation for illustration purposes using free Stellarium Planetarium software, a favourite tool for amateur astronomers. In the true spirit of astronomy and science one has to be sceptical before making extraordinary claims. Such claims do after all, require extraordinary evidence.

Before I go further, I’d better repeat the commonly held definition of the acronym 'UFO': a guided spacecraft of non-human origin, emanating from either beneath the Earth, its oceans or an alien world. The proper definition of 'natural or unnatural unidentified aerial phenomena' is somewhat more useful.  As I mentioned earlier, it is probable that what I saw may very much have been of terrestrial origin, but as an amateur astronomer I can certainly discount what I know it wasn't.

KEPLER'S 715 EXOPLANET BONANZA

This image from NASA's Kepler mission shows the field of view possessed by the space telescope. In particular, an expansive star-rich patch of sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra stretching across 100 square degrees, or the equivalent of two side-by-side dips of Ursa Major, the Plough or Big Dipper. 

A cluster of stars, called NGC 6791, and a star with a known planet, called TrES-2, are outlined. The cluster is eight billion years old, and located 13,000 light-years from Earth. It is called an open cluster because its stars are loosely bound and have started to spread out. TrES-2 is a hot Jupiter-like planet known to cross in front of, or transit, its star every 2.5 days. Kepler has spent four years hunting for transiting planets that are as small as Earth. (Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech).

The important news in the exoplanet hunting community at the moment is that NASA has recently announced that its Kepler space telescope mission has discovered no fewer than 715 new planets in multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system.

Most of them are smaller than Neptune, which is almost four times the size of Earth. This

discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small-sized planets more akin to the Earth. John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate said, "That these new planets and solar systems look somewhat like our own, and portend to a great future when we have the James Webb Space Telescope in space to characterize the new worlds.”

Since the discovery of the first planets outside our solar system roughly two decades ago, verification has been a laborious planet-by-planet process. Now, scientists have a statistical technique called multiplicity that can be applied to many planets at once, when they are found in systems that harbour more than one planet around the same star. It relies in part on the logic of probability, it is a process that ultimately verifies multiple planet candidates in bulk and is unveiling a veritable bonanza of new worlds." These multiple-planet systems are fertile grounds for studying individual planets and the configuration of planetary neighbourhoods. This provides clues to planet formation.

THE LOST WORLD OF BARNARD'S STAR

Fomalhaut b is a confirmed, directly-imaged extrasolar object and candidate planet orbiting the A-type main-sequence star Fomalhaut, approximately 25 light-years away in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus. The object was initially announced in 2008 and confirmed as real in 2012 from images taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the Hubble Space Telescope. It has a 2,000-year highly elliptical orbit and as of May 25, 2013 it is approximately 110 Astronomical Units (AU – Sun-Earth distances) from its parent star.

byANDY FLEMING

These days, it is accepted as a scientific fact that we live in a universe teeming with planets orbiting other stars. Indeed, as of 24 September, there are 490 worlds that we know of orbiting stars other than our Sun. Detecting these planets has become a routine voyage of discovery engaging well-tested and accepted methods.

The primary methods include radial velocity (Doppler displacement of spectral lines in the star's light due to the star 'wobbling' as it orbits the common centre of mass of the star and its planetary companion), and the transit method (a dip in starlight as an exoplanet moves across the disc of the star, thus reducing the amount of starlight). Other successful methods include astrometry, where there are minuscule changes over time in a star's precise co-ordinates in the night sky because of its orbit around the stellar system's centre of mass, and microlensing (a bending of light from a distant star due to the gravity of the foreground star and its associated planet – see below).

Finally, of course, there's the most spectacular method, one that will become more important as detectors improve -- that of direct imaging, as in the cases of Fomalhaut b and Beta Pictoris b and associated stellar debris discs, as observed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST).