Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration

One of the great joys of science is taking something that seems beyond reach and figuring out a way to do it. We can use a coronagraph, for example, to screen out much of the light of a star to see planets around it, but coronagraphs can only do so much, as planets too near the star are still hidden from view. Now scientists have used an unusual observation to deduce information about one such hidden planet and its interactions with a circumstellar disk.

Announced at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society, the work involves 18 years of archival observations with the Hubble Space Telescope, which have yielded an intriguing shadow sweeping across the disk of the TW Hydrae system. We’re evidently looking at a young planetary system in formation, as the star — slightly less massive than the Sun and about 192 light years away in the constellation Hydra — is only about 8 million years old. Helpfully for our work, the TW Hydrae disk is seen face-on from our perspective.

Image: These images, taken a year apart by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, reveal a shadow moving counterclockwise around a gas-and-dust disk encircling the young star TW Hydrae. The two images at the top, taken by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, show an uneven brightness across the disk. Through enhanced image processing (images at bottom), the darkening becomes even more apparent. These enhanced images allowed astronomers to determine the reason for the changes in brightness. The dimmer areas of the disk, at top left, are caused by a shadow spreading across the outer disk. The dotted lines approximate the shadow’s coverage. The long arrows show how far the shadow has moved in a year (from 2015-2016), which is roughly 20 degrees. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Debes (STScI).

We have no other circumstellar disk with an archival dataset this rich, allowing the effect to be studied in depth. John Debes (Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore) was able to put observations from Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) together with images from different observing runs, some of which included the Hubble Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS).

The STIS observations use the instrument’s coronagraph to look close to the star, but the coronagraph still can’t reveal an image of the planet itself. The shadow, however, is another matter. It has swept around the disk counter-clockwise until returning in 2016 to the same position it was in in 2000. The disk’s slow rotation ruled out a feature that was itself a part of the disk, implicating a shadow caused by a tilt to the inner disk relative to the outer. Observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) at submillimeter wavelengths backed the idea.

Debes believes a hitherto unseen planet is the most likely cause of the twisted inner disk, pulling material out of the disk plane to block light from the star, thus producing the shadow sweeping across the outer disk. If this is the case, we are talking about a planet roughly 160 million kilometers from the star, too close to observe even with STIS, which can penetrate as close to the star as the orbit of Saturn (roughly 1.5 billion kilometers).

Image: This diagram reveals the proposed structure of a gas-and-dust disk surrounding the nearby, young star TW Hydrae. The illustration shows an inner disk that is tilted due to the gravitational influence of an unseen companion, which is orbiting just outside the disk. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI).

To produce the effects Hubble has noted, the planet would need to be about the size of Jupiter. Recent work on TW Hydrae with ALMA has confirmed a gap in the disk about 14.5 million kilometers from the star, perhaps the signature of another planet clearing the inner disk. Thus we are working with a phenomenon that allows us to study early planet formation in an inner system that is otherwise inaccessible, simply by measuring these broad effects.

“What is surprising is that we can learn something about an unseen part of the disk by studying the disk’s outer region and by measuring the motion, location, and behavior of a shadow,” Debes said. “This study shows us that even these large disks, whose inner regions are unobservable, are still dynamic, or changing in detectable ways which we didn’t imagine.”

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Moving groups are collections of stars that share a common origin, useful to us because we can study a group of stars that are all close to each other in age. Among these, the Beta Pictoris moving group is turning out to be quite productive for the study of planet formation. These are young stars, aged in the tens of millions of years (Beta Pictoris itself is between 20 and 26 million years old). Within the moving group, we’ve detected planets around 51 Eridani and Beta Pictoris, while infalling, star-grazing objects have been found around Beta Pictoris.

Evidence of comet activity around another of these stars was discussed at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Texas. The star HD 172555, 23 million years old and about 95 light years from Earth, shows the presence of the vaporized remnants of cometary nuclei, marking the third extrasolar system where such activity has been traced. All the stars involved are under 40 million years old, giving us a glimpse of the kind of activity that happens during the era when young terrestrial planets have begun to emerge in their systems.

Image: This illustration shows several comets speeding across a vast protoplanetary disk of gas and dust and heading straight for the youthful, central star. The comets will eventually plunge into the star and vaporize. The comets are too small to photograph, but their gaseous spectral “fingerprints” on the star’s light were detected by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The gravitational influence of a suspected Jupiter-sized planet in the foreground may have catapulted the comets into the star. This star, called HD 172555, represents the third extrasolar system where astronomers have detected doomed, wayward comets. The star resides 95 light-years from Earth. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild and G. Bacon (STScI).

Carol Grady (Eureka Scientific/NASA GSFC) led the study reported on at the AAS. Her thoughts:

“Seeing these sun-grazing comets in our solar system and in three extrasolar systems means that this activity may be common in young star systems. This activity at its peak represents a star’s active teenage years. Watching these events gives us insight into what probably went on in the early days of our solar system, when comets were pelting the inner solar system bodies, including Earth. In fact, these star-grazing comets may make life possible, because they carry water and other life-forming elements, such as carbon, to terrestrial planets.”

The deflection of comets by the gravitational influence of a massive gas giant in an emerging planetary system is a vivid picture, one clarified by Grady and team’s work with the Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) in 2015. The team’s spectrographic analysis, using Hubble data collected from two observing runs separated by six days, detected carbon gas and silicon in the light of HD 172555 moving across the face of the star at a speed of 160 kilometers per second.

This work follows up a French study that first found exocomets transiting the same star in archival data from the HARPS spectrograph. That work detected signs of calcium. Grady and team have extended the analysis with a spectrographic analysis in ultraviolet light. They believe they are seeing gaseous debris left behind as comets disintegrated, vaporized materials that contain large chunks of the original comet. Helpfully, the disk around HD 172555 is seen almost edge-on from Earth, offering Hubble a clear view of the highly dispersed activity.

“As transiting features go, this vaporized material is easy to see because it contains very large structures,” Grady said. “This is in marked contrast to trying to find a small, transiting exoplanet, where you’re looking for tiny dips in the star’s light.”

To confirm that they are seeing the disintegration of icy comets as opposed to rocky asteroids, Grady’s researchers hope to use the STIS again to search for oxygen and hydrogen, a composition that would add further weight to these conclusions.

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Breakthrough Starshot, the research and engineering effort to lay the groundwork for the launch of nanocraft to Alpha Centauri within a generation, is now investing in an attempt to learn a great deal more about possible planets around these stars. We already know about Proxima b, the highly interesting world orbiting the red dwarf in the system, but we also have a K- and G-class star here, either of which might have planets of its own.

Image: The Alpha Centauri system. The combined light of Centauri A (G-class) and Centauri B (K-class) appears here as a single overwhelmingly bright ‘star.’ Proxima Centauri can be seen circled at bottom right. Credit: European Southern Observatory.

To learn more, Breakthrough Initiatives is working with the European Southern Observatory on modifications to the VISIR instrument (VLT Imager and Spectrometer for mid-Infrared) mounted at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Observing in the infrared has advantages for detecting an exoplanet because the contrast between the light of the star and the light of the planet is diminished at these wavelengths, although the star is still millions of times brighter.

To surmount the problem, VISIR will be fitted out for adaptive optics. In addition, Kampf Telescope Optics of Munich will deliver a wavefront sensor and calibration device, while the University of Liège (Belgium) and Uppsala University (Sweden) will jointly develop a coronagraph that will mask the light of the star enough to reveal terrestrial planets.

Image: Paranal at sunset. This panoramic photograph captures the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) as twilight comes to Cerro Paranal. The enclosures of the VLT stand out in the picture as the telescopes in them are readied for the night. The VLT is the world’s most powerful advanced optical telescope, consisting of four Unit Telescopes with primary mirrors 8.2 metres in diameter and four movable 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs), which can be seen in the left corner of the image. Credit: ESO.

According to the agreement signed by Breakthrough Initiatives executive director Pete Worden and European Southern Observatory director general Tim de Zeeuw, Breakthrough Initiatives will pay for a large part of the technology and development costs for the VISIR modifications. Meanwhile, the ESO will provide the necessary telescope time for a search program that will be conducted in 2019. The VISIR work, according to this ESO news release, should provide a proof of concept for the METIS instrument (Mid-infrared E-ELT Imager and Spectrograph), the third instrument on the upcoming European Extremely Large Telescope.

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What effect does the composition of a star have on the planets that form around it? Enough of one that we need to take it into account as we assess exoplanets in terms of astrobiology. So says a study that was presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Texas last week, looking at ninety specific stars identified by Kepler as having evidence of rocky planets.

We know about the composition of these stars because they are part of the 200,000 star dataset compiled by APOGEE, the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment spectrograph mounted on the 2.5m Sloan Foundation telescope in New Mexico. APOGEE allows us to examine the spectra of stellar atmospheres to identify their elements.

Modeling the formation of planets around these stars shows us the implications for astrobiology. Johana Teske (Carnegie Observatories) explains:

“Our study combines new observations of stars with new models of planetary interiors. We want to better understand the diversity of small, rocky exoplanet composition and structure — how likely are they to have plate tectonics or magnetic fields?”

At the AAS meeting, Teske described how the team of astronomers and geoscientists she is working with focused on Kepler 102 and Kepler 407, the former a star slightly less luminous than the Sun hosting five known planets, the latter hosting two planets orbiting a star of roughly the Sun’s mass. The APOGEE data show that in terms of chemical composition, Kepler 102 is similar to the Sun, while Kepler 407 is much richer in silicon.

Geophysicist Cayman Unterborn (Arizona State) ran computer simulations of planet formation incorporating the APOGEE data. The result:

“We took the star compositions found by APOGEE and modeled how the elements condensed into planets in our models. We found that the planet around Kepler 407, which we called ‘Janet,” would likely be rich in the mineral garnet. The planet around Kepler 102, which we called ‘Olive,’ is probably rich in olivine, like Earth.”

Image: The picture shows what minerals are likely to occur at several different depths. Kepler 102 is Earth-like, dominated by olivine minerals, whereas Kepler 407 is dominated by garnet, so less likely to have plate tectonics. Credit: Robin Dienel, Carnegie DTM.

In Unterborn’s view, the difference is significant because garnet, a far stiffer mineral than olivine, flows more slowly, implying a garnet planet would be unlikely to have long-term plate tectonics. Like the Earth, the planet around Kepler 102 could sustain tectonics, which are thought to be essential for life because atmospheric recycling through geological processes like volcanoes and ocean ridge formation regulates the atmosphere’s composition. Without such geological processes, life would not necessarily have the chance to evolve.

Centauri Dreams’ take: The interplay of the two datasets — APOGEE and Kepler — is deeply productive, but we’re only at the beginning of the analysis. APOGEE’s 200,000 stars include others known to host small planets, so similar methods can now be put to work on the mineral content of these worlds. Those most Earth-like in their mineral content would rank higher on our list for further astrobiological study, helping us refine our targets for future observation.

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