This is Spacetime Series twenty nine, episode fifty six, for broadcast on the eleventh of May twenty twenty six. Coming up on space Time, discovery of twenty seven new exoplanets. And they're all circumbinary worlds. In other words, they're like tato wine NASAs Mars Curiosity rover starts a new drilling campaign on the Red planet and the maiden flight for the Russian Federal Space Agency's news So use five rocket. All that and more Coming up on space Time. Welcome to space Time with Stuart Gary. Well, we don't see them very often, but astronomers have just discovered twenty seven new circumbinary planetary candidates, that is, planets that or but two stars, by using a new method to search for planets that would otherwise be difficult to find. So far, astronomers have discovered more than six thousand extra solar planets, that is, planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. The first fifty one Paghassi was discovered way back in nineteen ninety five. There are thousands more which have been identified and are just waiting to be confirmed. But until now, almost all of these exoplanets have been detected in single star systems like the one we're in. The problem is, most star systems are made up of modible stars, such as our nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri, which is a triple star system. Yet only eighteen exoplanets have ever been detected in multiple star systems, including at least two and possibly three exoplanets in the Alpha Centauri system, and all that raises an interesting question. Is it a case of the more complex gravitational perturbations in multi star systems planets from forming or remaining in those systems, or is it simply due to observational bias because it's harder to detect a planet in a multistar system. The most common ways of finding exoplanets are the transit method, gravitational microlensing, and the radial velocity method. The transit method involves light from a star being temporarily blocked out seen by an observer due to a passing or transiting planet eclipsing that light. Gravitational microlensing involves the mass and gravitational field of a foreground star bending and magnifying the light from a more distant background star. That lensed background star's light can then be further magnified periodically by the added gravitational field and mass of a planet orbiting the fore ground star. Then there's the radial velocity or wobble method. This involves a slight Doppler shift in a star spectroscopic signature due to the ever so slight gravitational pull of an orbiting planet, causing the host star to wobble ever so slightly. The new method, apsidal procession, involves monitoring how binary stars are orbiting one another, which can be done by observing them when they eclipse each other, and that eclipse changes over long periods of time through procession. Now, if there's a variation in the normal rate of procession eclipse which can't be explained by general relativity or stellar interactions, it means a third object could be influencing the star's orbits, and that body could be a planet. Now, because the twenty seven newly discovered circumbinary planets were reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on May the fourth, Star Wars Day, May the fourth be with You, the authors are playfully referring to them as Tatooine planets, after the homeworld of Luke Skywalker and the birthplace of Attaicant Skywalker aka Darth Vader. Epsidal procession has been used to characterize binary stars before, but not in the large scale search for planets. The new findings were made using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey satellite tests, a space telescope launched in twenty eighteen with the mission of searching for and confirming exoplanets. One of the studies authors, Ben Monte from the University of New South Wales, says that with more than half of all star systems being binary, astronomy has really only painted half the picture of planets so far, and the other half of the canvas remains completely blank. This new method helps astronomers detect planets that might otherwise have been missed, thereby helping to build science as understanding of the types of environments which can support planetary development. By learning more about the different types of planets, astronomers can better understand how planets form and evolve, especially in complex environments with more than just one star. Now, these twenty seven newly discovered planets are referred to as candidates for now. That's because the authors still need to confirm or deny their plant panetary status. That'll require additional observations. The newly found planetary candidates range from objects that could be as small as the mass of Neptune up to ones that are ten times the size of Jupiter. The closest is about six hundred and fifty light years away, and the furthest some eighteen thousand light years distant. Monte says. Even though the candidates stretch across Immen's distances, they're still relatively close to our stellar neighborhood. Monte says, as the state, he found twenty seven planetary candidates out of some one thousand, five hundred and ninety binary systems observed. That suggests a rate of almost two percent of binary systems which could potentially host planets, and that implies there could potentially be thousands or tens of thousands of possible planets out there waiting to be found. Astronomers still have lots of questions about planetary formation in binary systems, and this new planet hunting method could help fill some of those knowledge gaps, including how common these planets are overall and whether or not they could be habitable. Says, if circumbinary planets do to that to be habitable, it means life could be anyway. Next, the authors will be studying the spectrum of these binary systems using the Anglo Australian Telescope and far western New South Wales studying their spectra well hope the authors rule out whether these bodies are in fact high mass objects like stars, brown dwarves, white dwarves, or even black holes. In the meantime, Montane colleagues are planning to apply the same planet research method on a larger sample size, and they're running simulations to better understand how the planetary candidates form and how they're luckly to evolve over time. This is really exciting for us because there's not that many circumbinary planets that have been known before, and they've all been found via a similar methods, really the transit method. And so in this case is you're mostly from Kepler, a few from tests, but these are objects that are just lined up along our line of site, so that we see the planet go in front of the two stars blocks from the light from each are in turn happens over and over and so we can tease out how big the planet is and how far away from its star. This is great. We found thousands of planets this whey on single stars, but in the context of circumbinary planets, the planets that go around two stars, now we need kind of two alignments. We need the stars to be lined up and the planet to be in that plane as well. So we can really only find these very flat systems, these ones that all orbit in the same plane, and we don't understand much about the overall architecture of these systems as a whole. Do we only see these because these are the only ones that exist, or are we missing lots of ones that are tilted a little bit where the planet goes around in a different access from the stars. And so this is our first chance to just try to start finding those planets instead by looking for a different method, looking at the actual gravitational perturbations on the stars instead of actually looking at the detection of the planet itself. Yeah, for a long time there, I was getting very worried, Oh, may we about to hit for a three body system that locked best calculations at all. You're using a method which sounds quite simple really. You look at the two stars orbiting each other, and you watch how they process, and then you see if there's any change in that. That's exactly right, and so this is something that's been used for a long time to understand triple star systems. The math is complicated, but the observation is actually very simple. That if you have three objects orban each other, two in an inner orbit and a third much further out, it causes the orbit of the inner system to shift in times. This happens in our Solar system Mercury and Earth process because of Jupiter, for example. And so if you see that the orbit, the relative timing between the two primary eclipses and the secondary, so how long it takes the two stars to come around is shifting a little bit, changing in time. That tells us that there's something else in the system. Now, there are other explanations for those, because general relativity does the same thing, and tidal effect on the two stars can also change the orbits, but those we can really measure precisely. We know exactly how big those effects should be, and so if we see any extra procession beyond that, that tells us that there's a third body in the system. And so now, really for the first time, because of missions like Kepler and tests where we have super high precision and a long baseline. So test has been observing the same stars for seven years. Now we can start to tease out effects that are subtle enough to be caused not just by stellar triples, but by planets. We look at the nearest star system to our own, Alpha Centaury. It's a triple star system. We know there are two planets opening Proximus Sensory, but Proximus Sentory is a long way away from the Alpha sentaory A the double star system, and so this was easier to find, but we think they may be it's at least one planet opening around Alpha Scentory A. Yeah, that's absolutely right, And it's slightly different there because those stars are still A and B are closer to each other than Proximately is, but they're still decently separated. And so when we talk about the planets around Alpha sen those are not circumbinary. They go around one star and then the other binary or the binary companion goes around that system. There's two types for the S type and P type for historical reasons, but essentially it's do you go around two stars with the two stars and in the middle, or does one scroll around the star and planets of stuff. So slightly different architecture, but still lots of interesting questions about planet formation. And I'm involved in a project led by Sydney UNI called Tolman, which will launch soon as a small space telescope to try to measure to look for more planets around alph Centauri by just measuring very very precisely the distance between those two stars A and B. If one of them has a planet around it, it will wobble back and forth because of the planet's gravity, and so we'd see the distance between those two stars subtly changing in time. So in the next couple of years we should know the kind of Canada planets there are they actually real, and if there are any kind of Earth size one au planets, we should have the sensitivity to find those as well. And that's really the next step, isn't it working out what these twenty seven candidate planets allot to to Babe, these are all different distances and the old different sizes, that's right. So right now what we have is that the procession is consistent with a planet sized mass companion, but the size of the procession depends on how far away the planet is and how massive it is. In a very predicti regular way, but it means that there's a degeneracy there. So there's there's different solutions that would exist, and so for these it could be you know, for the typical system that we're looking at, maybe it's a Jupiter mass planet at one AU or a five Jupiter mass planet at two WAU, or a kind of Neptune sized planet at half an AU, and we can't separate those out right now given the data that we have, but those would look very different in radio velocities the dampus shift from these over in art which would look very different. And so we are right now doing a campaign to qualities up. We're starting with the aat the Anglo Australian Telescope and COUNA Virabront to do a kind of first vetting make sure none of them have massive signals to do you expect from a stellar stellar mass third body, and then any of that survive that. We go to the ELT, the very Large telescope in Chile, and we're following those up with HARPS and Espresso. Espresso on the VLT and Harps is on a four meter telescope there to really try to measure those masses precisely and figure out exactly what these planets look LIKEY So the smallest one we have could be the smallest Neptune. And we know that from the transiting binary population most planets, most circumminary planets tend to be very very close to that inner stability limit, So we expect that many of these will be close to our low mass estimates rather than our high mass estimates. So the smallest could be as small as Neptune, and in more time, as we get more data and become sensitive to smaller procession signals, hopefully were able to get down into rocky planets as well. We also know that for they're all going to be at least in AU away, they're not these kind of hot Jupiter planets. And we know certainly that in our Solar System, giant planets out at a few AU have lots and lots of moons, very common to have many moons there. And so even if none of these planets aren't necessarily habitable, you have surfaces, even it's very plausible to imagine that any of them could have moons. Now, what would you like to do next? Would you like to find more of these planets your candidates. If you want to firm up what you've got, you want to do both at once. What's the plan It's a little bit of both. So the first sample here, this twenty seven planet catalog was from a kind of pilot study, or are let's look at the low hanging fruits, see what we can find. Take the kind of fifteen hundred best most characterizable binaries and tests and see what we can do and really demonstrate that the method works well. But tests has observed tens of thousands of eclipsing binaries, and in the next few years we're going to know many, many more LSST. The Reuben Observatory has just begun operations if they expect they're going to find twenty five million eclipsing binaries, and the Argus Observatory in the Northern Hemisphere from the SMID observatory system, it's going to have a similar number. So we can really expand this to be one hundred one thousand times the samples that we currently have and really start keying in on the distribution not just individual planets, but what does the statistics look like of second binary planets, What is their mass distribution? How do they compare to the single star population and that will really start telling us about how planets form in binary systems and how it's different than around single stars. So it's an exciting thing to be thinking about, to be working on. And we'll finow as well. So we've got all projects going on in our team. Right now. I'll tell you what the universe really looks like in the way, won't it. Absolutely. That's Associate Professor Ben Monte from the University of New South Wales. And this is space Time. Still to come a new draw campaign for the Mars Curiosity Rover on the Red Planet, and the ros Cosmos says it's new next generation. Soyer's five rocket has completed a successful maiden flight. All that and more still to come on Space Time. This is Mars Curiosity Rover has commenced a new drilling campaign at a site called Atacama in the Red Planet scale crater. The six wheel car sized mobile laboratory is targeting layered sulfate bedrock situated on the crater's five and a half kilometer high central peak, mout Sharp. It's the first such material the rovers encountered since departing the box work terrain we discussed last week mission managers are planning a six martian day of salts program round the drill site, with three salts dedicated just to drilling alone. But drilling on the Red Planet isn't like drilling. To put a picture hook in the wall, the work includes targeting a likely drill contact location, then using the alpha particle X ray spectrometer do you want to take a series of observations? Well coordinated microscopic image of observations are also carried out under varying light conditions to determine any changes between the data sets. Meanwhile, Curiosity's mass camp acquired stereo mosaics documenting the drill site, as well as investigating bedrock variations at a site called kim Zashatta and characterizing layering within a feature known as Paneri Butte now All. This was followed by the actual drill sequence, which included sample portion characterization activities. The masscam also targeted several nearby features, including a laminated rock with an exposed edge which has been dubbed Ween of the Andes, a rock with polygonal fractures that was broken during a rover drive over which has been named Coraco, and additional coverage of the drill target curiosities also continued tracking atmospheric dust levels, studying cloud movements, and documenting local dust devil activity, and its Kemcam laser based remote sensing instrument was set to autonomously select to targets for future analysis. Fission managers are now delivering a portion of the Atacama drill sample into the kemin instrument, which uses X ray of fraction to identify a mineral's composition. Scientists want to compare the mineralogy of the laid sulfate unit at a camera against the results from the rovers' previous drilling operations at the mineral King site, some one hundred and sixty meters lower down on the slopes of Mount Sharp that should Reville House sulfate mineralogy varies across different elevations of the stratigraphic sequence, the Rovers. Being a set. This is space time still to come. Russia's new next generation launch vehicle, the Soyuz five, successfully completes its maiden flight, and later in the Science Report and You study warns that a third of Australians aren't getting enough sleep. All that and more still to come on space time. Russia's new next generation launch vehicle, the Soyuz five has successfully completed its made in flight. The Russian Federal Space Agency at os Cosmos says the inaugal flight was launched from the bike and Or Cosmodrome in the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan on a suborbital trajectory. The new three stage rocket is designed to replace the Ukrainian built Zenet launch vehicle. They're no longer available to Moscow following the Kremlins invasion of you. The Soyuz five is designed to compete directly against the new Vulcan Centaur rocket from the United States, the Ariane six from Europe, and China's along March five. It's capable of carrying payloads of up to eighteen tons into lower orbit and five tons into higher geo stationary transfer orbits. For the test flight, the vehicles first stage fired for two minutes and fifty nine seconds, heading in the generally Northwoods direction. The second stage ignited prior to stage separation in a planned hot staging maneuver. Five seconds after hot staging, the payload firing separated successfully and the vehicle turned east in a cir called dogleg maneuver before finally splashing down as planned in the North Pacific Ocean. The booster's engine was cut off around six and a half minutes into the flight, just short of orbital velocity, allowing it to begin its descent and re entry into its atmosphere. Los Cosmos confirmed the flight went as scheduled, with the first and second stages working as planned and the mass and sized marker payload delivered as planned on a suborbal trajectory. This space time and that to take a brief look at some of the other stories making use in science this week With a science report, A new study is confirmed that nearly a third of Australian adults get far less than the recommended seven hours sleep at night, with eighteen to thirty four year olds the most sleep deprived of all. The findings reported in the journal Australian Psychologist claims the key disruptors include late night technology use, worry and stress, and an overactive mind often unrecognized as a treadill problem. The authors also found that fewer than one percent of adults suffer from clinical insomnia had received the recommended first line treatment, cognitive behavioral therapy, with many unaware that effective non medication treatments are out there. A Curtain University led study has revealed the extraordinary biodiversity hidden deep in underwater canyons off the western Australian Ningaloo Coast. These include species previously undetected in the area, such as the elusive giant squid, and others thought to be completely new to science. The findings are based on using environmental DNA, that's the genetic material naturally shed by animals at the seawater. Scientists can use this to document which species live at these deep habitats without needing to actually see or capture them. You can read the study in full in the journal Environmental DNA. A new study claims that by the late Neolithic, the brains of domestic dogs had shrunk by some forty six percent compared to their wild wolf counterparts. The findings, reported in the journal the Raw Society Open Science, investigated casts of the skulls of one hundred and eighty five modern and twenty two prestoere dogs and wolves spanning some thirty five thousand years. They found the earliest proto dogs actually had larger brains than their wolf relatives, probably a result of adapting to living alongside humans, but by five thousand years ago, that increased brain size had reversed dramatically, and dog's brains now are some forty six percent smaller than their wolf cousins. The authors think the smaller brains may have made dogs more alert and weary, essentially making them better guard dogs, so early owners may have selectively bred their dogs to emphasize these qualities, leading to tinier brains. A new study claims people who endorse authoritarian political ideologies are also more likely to believe in the paranormal. The findings, reported in the journal Social Psychology, show that those who relied heavily on intuitive thinking were far more likely to believe in the supernatural compared to those who were more objective and analytical in their way of looking at the world. The study involved one one hundred and thirty night adults who were asked about their beliefs in topics which focused on concepts that violate basic scientific principles, such as mind reading, witchcraft, lucky charms, ghosts, and astrology. Participants were also tested on how much they enjoyed deep thinking and how much they rely on intuition. They found that people who relied heavily on intuitive thinking tended to have stronger paranormal beliefs, as do those who scored higher in authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. They assumed that a lack of analytical thinking was the primary reason individuals with authoritarian views leaned towards the paranormal, but instead the results showed that authoritarian ideology and cognitive styles independently contributed to paranormal beliefs. The skeptics, Tim Mendon points out that this has already been evidenced by the interest in the supernatural displayed by leading figures in the Nazi Party, although he points out it's just as prevalent in the far left as the far right. Yeah, yes, the same hypren himself. Actually, they're very interested in nostrodermis and people like that, and they were using it to try and encourage people. Actually notra Damer says we're going to win sort of, which is probably why they lost. They were definitely sort of into that sort of stuff, which is why I think partially this article went into the idea for authoritarians, and it did come from a German university. I'm not sure that's meaningful or not. A lot of articles on psychology and sociology and things that seemed to have a lot of holes in them, or they don't think a lot about what they're doing. This one is not bad. It's from the Journal of Social Psychology, pretty well referenced and explained, and basically they were trying to see if people with an authoritarian the enter it was sort of a social dominance bent had a higher belief in paranormal phenomena. They did quite a large survey and it seemed to be a well structured survey. They covered a lot of aspect trying to see one with sort of philosophical or political waywardess or sort of bent they had, and they're also seeing has sort of belief in various sort of paranormal things like witchcraft and lucky charms and ghosts, astrology, that sort of stuff. And they found a bit of a link that would they admit that the correlation is moderate through weak, but very robust, which means it's not very good link, but it's as clear thing. So I mean it's a bit of a strange outcome. I think they would actually had this high hopes of actually finding that authorit theory in belief, which is they define also as a bit intuitive was a stronger belief in paranormal than a belief which is evidence dates proper critical thinking assessment, which is true that people who do analyze these things tend not to believe so much. Saying it's a right wing thing might be drawing a long bow, because I'm sure there are lots of far left et cetero, who are equally intuitive, not necessarily very logical. You also believe it's sort of paranormal things. But the thing that comes out of it is I think that the thing that's sort of probably well known the skeptic is that if you think about something more clearly, some proper assessment, not necessarily to your own research, but to proper assessment of the claims and things, will be less inclined to believe them. Whereas if you are the sort of person who says it feels good, it feels right for me, it seems okay. This person seems very convincing of that sort of thing that you will tend to believe more in in the parent normal. The Germans are actually very good at looking at their own history and learning from it, something that I think others could probably take a message from. The Researchency is sort of sort of admit that it's a pretty decent survey, pretty fairly decent number of people involved, pretty comprehensive, quite a lot of farriers to sort of loose thinking, if you like. They did a lot of different ways of looking at the subject. But they would like the same thing to the other countries because they fear that there may be psychological for historical feeling that people are more right wing in Germany than say they are in other countries. So what they say is that it's a shared desire for security and control, which tends to make people believe in the paranormal, and that's true everywhere, regardless of political belief or everything. Overall, what they did say was that disbelief in the paranormal was generally more common than belief, at least among the participants they have, which is good news to getting that the news that the world's population is going sort of silly. Men, older individuals, and those with higher levels of education was less likely to believe. I think the higher indication of the TECs because education does make you think, supposedly and be critical about things, and you could do that through paranormal phenomena, and you're probably less likely to believe. That's the skeptics timendum, and this is Spacetime, and that's the show for now. Spacetime is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through at bites dot com, SoundCloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider, and from space Time with Stuart Gary dot com. Space Time's also broadcast through the National Science Foundation, on Science Own Radio and on both iHeartRadio and tune In Radio. And you can help to support our show by visiting the space Time Store for a range of promotional merchandising goodies, or by becoming a Spacetime Patron, which gives you access to triple episode commercial free versions of the show, as well as lots of bonnus audio content which doesn't go to war, access to our exclusive Facebook group, and other rewards. Just go to space Time with Stewart Gary dot com for full details. You've been listening to space Time with Stuart Gary. This has been another quality podcast production from bytes dot com.
