How ‘The Goblin’ may unravel the mystery of Planet Nine
Around Halloween in 2015, astronomers discovered 'The Goblin'. Now, it's leading us to what some call Planet X.
Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit NASA.
MICHELLE THALLER: It may surprise you to know that we are still learning about our own solar system; even the question about how many planets are there is kind of a funny one—take Pluto.
Pluto was classified as a dwarf planet, and there are other dwarf planets as well. In fact, the largest of the asteroids, Ceres, is now classified as a dwarf planet. A lot of these dwarf planets actually exist farther beyond the orbit of Pluto, and we're just finding them now. And one of my favorite discoveries recently has been something called The Goblin. Now, The Goblin is a dwarf planet—it's actually much smaller than Pluto; it's only about a fifth of the diameter of Pluto, and it is really, really far out there. It's in a highly elongated orbit; the closest it ever gets is about twice as far away as Pluto is, and the farthest it gets is about 2,300 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun; it goes way, way, way out there. This orbit takes it about 40,000 years to go once around the Sun. It's really, really incredible. It doesn't surprise me that these objects are only recently being discovered because most of them are so distant. They are so faint, and if they're at the very far part of their orbit they're moving very, very slowly—very, very hard to detect.
Now, The Goblin is really interesting in a number of ways. One of the things that I love about it is that it does actually seem to hint that there may be something larger out there—we've been noticing this for the last couple of years. These distant icy bodies are called Kuiper Belt objects, and often they're on elongated orbits that come close to the Sun—and by close I mean about the orbit of Pluto and then much, much farther away into the very outer reaches of the solar system. We now know of dozens of these objects, and there are probably many more out there we haven't discovered. The interesting thing is we began to observe how their orbits were aligned in our solar system, and there's something called perihelion, which is the closest pass an object makes to the Sun. And amazingly, all of these objects all over this sky seem to have perihelions—closest approaches to the Sun—that were beautifully lined up together. There is no reason for that to be the case. If they were independent orbiting bodies there's no way their closest approach to the Sun should match. So the idea is there's a larger body out there somewhere, a larger planet, and as it orbits it lines up, kind of shepherds all these smaller objects into its orbit. The evidence for this really is pretty compelling. We don't know of any other way to explain the lined up orbits of these Kuiper Belt objects. So then the question is: Where is this bigger planet?
Our estimates put it at least three to five times the mass of the Earth, maybe even a little bit more massive than that. It could be something on the order of the size of Neptune. This is a big planet we're talking about, and honestly, it's a little embarrassing that we've missed an entire big planet in our solar system. We are now so good at detecting planets we can see them around other stars, so how is it we've missed this planet? Well, if it really is very far away from us in its orbit right now; even a big planet would be tiny to the most powerful telescopes, so we could have missed it. It also would be moving so slowly that maybe we didn't notice that it was a planet. Maybe people assumed it was a distant star. So telescopes all over the world are scanning the sky for any sense that there's an object out there moving very, very slowly that could be evidence of this giant planet.
Judging from the way these orbits are lined up I think it is very likely there could be a big planet out there, and I am going to be really happy when we have something else to add to our knowledge of the solar system.
There's also something kind of wonderful happening January 1st of 2019, it's coming up pretty soon—and that is that we're going to visit one of these Kuiper Belt objects for the very first time. The New Horizons spacecraft a couple years ago flew by Pluto. Hopefully, you remember the beautiful images of Pluto that have returned. Then we aimed it at one of these distant Kuiper Belt objects. We call it MU69, or it's been nicknamed Ultima Thule, which means "farthest frontier."
Now, hopefully, you remember the New Horizons spacecraft from its spectacular flyby of Pluto a couple of years ago. So after it flew by Pluto we aimed it even farther out to encounter one of these distant icy objects. It's the first time we will ever see what one of these objects is like. After January we will finally have a picture of a part of the solar system we've never seen before.
- 'The Goblin' is a dwarf planet known more formally as '2015 TG387'. It was nicknamed The Goblin because of the 'TG' in its title, and because of the time of year it was discovered: Halloween.
- The Goblin has an extreme orbit: far-flung and elongated. It takes 40,000 years to make a complete orbit around the Sun.
- This cosmic anomaly is a clue. Astronomers hypothesize that The Goblin is being pulled into the gravitational field of a 'Super-Earth' planet in our solar system that is believed to exist but has never been seen: the mysterious Planet Nine or Planet X.
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‘Designer baby’ book trilogy explores the moral dilemmas humans may soon create
How would the ability to genetically customize children change society? Sci-fi author Eugene Clark explores the future on our horizon in Volume I of the "Genetic Pressure" series.
- A new sci-fi book series called "Genetic Pressure" explores the scientific and moral implications of a world with a burgeoning designer baby industry.
- It's currently illegal to implant genetically edited human embryos in most nations, but designer babies may someday become widespread.
- While gene-editing technology could help humans eliminate genetic diseases, some in the scientific community fear it may also usher in a new era of eugenics.
Tribalism and discrimination
<p>One question the "Genetic Pressure" series explores: What would tribalism and discrimination look like in a world with designer babies? As designer babies grow up, they could be noticeably different from other people, potentially being smarter, more attractive and healthier. This could breed resentment between the groups—as it does in the series.</p><p>"[Designer babies] slowly find that 'everyone else,' and even their own parents, becomes less and less tolerable," author Eugene Clark told Big Think. "Meanwhile, everyone else slowly feels threatened by the designer babies."</p><p>For example, one character in the series who was born a designer baby faces discrimination and harassment from "normal people"—they call her "soulless" and say she was "made in a factory," a "consumer product." </p><p>Would such divisions emerge in the real world? The answer may depend on who's able to afford designer baby services. If it's only the ultra-wealthy, then it's easy to imagine how being a designer baby could be seen by society as a kind of hyper-privilege, which designer babies would have to reckon with. </p><p>Even if people from all socioeconomic backgrounds can someday afford designer babies, people born designer babies may struggle with tough existential questions: Can they ever take full credit for things they achieve, or were they born with an unfair advantage? To what extent should they spend their lives helping the less fortunate? </p>Sexuality dilemmas
<p>Sexuality presents another set of thorny questions. If a designer baby industry someday allows people to optimize humans for attractiveness, designer babies could grow up to find themselves surrounded by ultra-attractive people. That may not sound like a big problem.</p><p>But consider that, if designer babies someday become the standard way to have children, there'd necessarily be a years-long gap in which only some people are having designer babies. Meanwhile, the rest of society would be having children the old-fashioned way. So, in terms of attractiveness, society could see increasingly apparent disparities in physical appearances between the two groups. "Normal people" could begin to seem increasingly ugly.</p><p>But ultra-attractive people who were born designer babies could face problems, too. One could be the loss of body image. </p><p>When designer babies grow up in the "Genetic Pressure" series, men look like all the other men, and women look like all the other women. This homogeneity of physical appearance occurs because parents of designer babies start following trends, all choosing similar traits for their children: tall, athletic build, olive skin, etc. </p><p>Sure, facial traits remain relatively unique, but everyone's more or less equally attractive. And this causes strange changes to sexual preferences.</p><p>"In a society of sexual equals, they start looking for other differentiators," he said, noting that violet-colored eyes become a rare trait that genetically engineered humans find especially attractive in the series.</p><p>But what about sexual relationships between genetically engineered humans and "normal" people? In the "Genetic Pressure" series, many "normal" people want to have kids with (or at least have sex with) genetically engineered humans. But a minority of engineered humans oppose breeding with "normal" people, and this leads to an ideology that considers engineered humans to be racially supreme. </p>Regulating designer babies
<p>On a policy level, there are many open questions about how governments might legislate a world with designer babies. But it's not totally new territory, considering the West's dark history of eugenics experiments.</p><p>In the 20th century, the U.S. conducted multiple eugenics programs, including immigration restrictions based on genetic inferiority and forced sterilizations. In 1927, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that forcibly sterilizing the mentally handicapped didn't violate the Constitution. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes wrote, "… three generations of imbeciles are enough." </p><p>After the Holocaust, eugenics programs became increasingly taboo and regulated in the U.S. (though some states continued forced sterilizations <a href="https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/" target="_blank">into the 1970s</a>). In recent years, some policymakers and scientists have expressed concerns about how gene-editing technologies could reanimate the eugenics nightmares of the 20th century. </p><p>Currently, the U.S. doesn't explicitly ban human germline genetic editing on the federal level, but a combination of laws effectively render it <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jlb/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jlb/lsaa006/5841599#204481018" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">illegal to implant a genetically modified embryo</a>. Part of the reason is that scientists still aren't sure of the unintended consequences of new gene-editing technologies. </p><p>But there are also concerns that these technologies could usher in a new era of eugenics. After all, the function of a designer baby industry, like the one in the "Genetic Pressure" series, wouldn't necessarily be limited to eliminating genetic diseases; it could also work to increase the occurrence of "desirable" traits. </p><p>If the industry did that, it'd effectively signal that the <em>opposites of those traits are undesirable. </em>As the International Bioethics Committee <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jlb/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jlb/lsaa006/5841599#204481018" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">wrote</a>, this would "jeopardize the inherent and therefore equal dignity of all human beings and renew eugenics, disguised as the fulfillment of the wish for a better, improved life."</p><p><em>"Genetic Pressure Volume I: Baby Steps"</em><em> by Eugene Clark is <a href="http://bigth.ink/38VhJn3" target="_blank">available now.</a></em></p>These are the world’s greatest threats in 2021
We look back at a year ravaged by a global pandemic, economic downturn, political turmoil and the ever-worsening climate crisis.
Billions are at risk of missing out on the digital leap forward, as growing disparities challenge the social fabric.
Image: Global Risks Report 2021
<h3>Widespread effects</h3><p>"The immediate human and economic costs of COVID-19 are severe," the report says. "They threaten to scale back years of progress on reducing global poverty and inequality and further damage social cohesion and global cooperation."</p><p>For those reasons, the pandemic demonstrates why infectious diseases hits the top of the impact list. Not only has COVID-19 led to widespread loss of life, it is holding back economic development in some of the poorest parts of the world, while amplifying wealth inequalities across the globe.</p><p>At the same time, there are concerns the fight against the pandemic is taking resources away from other critical health challenges - including a <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/charts-covid19-malnutrition-educaion-mental-health-children-world/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">disruption to measles vaccination programmes</a>.</p>Columbia study finds new way to extract energy from black holes
A new study explains how a chaotic region just outside a black hole's event horizon might provide a virtually endless supply of energy.
- In 1969, the physicist Roger Penrose first proposed a way in which it might be possible to extract energy from a black hole.
- A new study builds upon similar ideas to describe how chaotic magnetic activity in the ergosphere of a black hole may produce vast amounts of energy, which could potentially be harvested.
- The findings suggest that, in the very distant future, it may be possible for a civilization to survive by harnessing the energy of a black hole rather than a star.
The ergosphere
<p>The ergosphere is a region just outside a black hole's event horizon, the boundary of a black hole beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. But light and matter just outside the event horizon, in the ergosphere, would also be affected by the immense gravity of the black hole. Objects in this zone would spin in the same direction as the black hole at incredibly fast speeds, similar to objects floating around the center of a whirlpool.</p><p>The Penrose process states, in simple terms, that an object could enter the ergosphere and break into two pieces. One piece would head toward the event horizon, swallowed by the black hole. But if the other piece managed to escape the ergosphere, it could emerge with more energy than it entered with.</p><p>The movie "Interstellar" provides an example of the Penrose process. Facing a fuel shortage on a deep-space mission, the crew makes a last-ditch effort to return home by entering the ergosphere of a blackhole, ditching part of their spacecraft, and "slingshotting" away from the black hole with vast amounts of energy.</p><p>In a recent study published in the American Physical Society's <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.023014" target="_blank" style="">Physical Review D</a><em>, </em>physicists Luca Comisso and Felipe A. Asenjo used similar ideas to describe another way energy could be extracted from a black hole. The idea centers on the magnetic fields of black holes.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Black holes are commonly surrounded by a hot 'soup' of plasma particles that carry a magnetic field," Comisso, a research scientist at Columbia University and lead study author, told <a href="https://news.columbia.edu/energy-particles-magnetic-fields-black-holes" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Columbia News</a>.</p>Ergosphere representation
<p>In the ergosphere of a rotating black hole, magnetic field lines are constantly breaking and reconnecting at fast speeds. The researchers theorized that when these lines reconnect, plasma particles shoot out in two different directions. One flow of particles shoots off against the direction of the spinning black hole, eventually getting "swallowed" by the black hole. But the other flow shoots in the same direction as the spin, potentially gaining enough velocity to escape the black hole's gravitational pull.</p><p>The researchers proposed that this occurs because the breaking and reconnecting of magnetic field lines can generate negative-energy particles. If the negative-energy particles get "swallowed" by the black hole, the positive particles would theoretically be exponentially accelerated.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Our theory shows that when magnetic field lines disconnect and reconnect, in just the right way, they can accelerate plasma particles to negative energies and large amounts of black hole energy can be extracted," Comisso said. "It is like a person could lose weight by eating candy with negative calories."</p>Black hole
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
<p>While there might not be immediate applications for the theory, it could help scientists better understand and observe black holes. On an abstract level, the findings may expand the limits of what scientists imagine is possible in deep space.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Thousands or millions of years from now, humanity might be able to survive around a black hole without harnessing energy from stars," Comisso said. "It is essentially a technological problem. If we look at the physics, there is nothing that prevents it."</p>Archaeologists identify contents of ancient Mayan drug containers
Scientists use new methods to discover what's inside drug containers used by ancient Mayan people.
- Archaeologists used new methods to identify contents of Mayan drug containers.
- They were able to discover a non-tobacco plant that was mixed in by the smoking Mayans.
- The approach promises to open up new frontiers in the knowledge of substances ancient people consumed.
PARME staff archaeologists excavating a burial site at the Tamanache site, Mérida, Yucatan.
Credit: WSU
A psychiatric diagnosis can be more than an unkind ‘label’
A popular and longstanding wave of thought in psychology and psychotherapy is that diagnosis is not relevant for practitioners in those fields.
