SETI Institute Newsletter Menu
SETI Institute Welcome Page
Inside This Issue
Do planets commonly form around solar-like stars, or is our solar system unusual? The detection of other planetary systems would spawn entire scientific disciplines, such as exobiology, exogeology, exometeorology, and planetary-system morphology. Finding planetary systems would also encourage SETI searches as the compulsory and tantalizing follow-up experiment that even the uninitiated would perceive as crucial. Recently, those prospecting for planets struck pay-dirt.
On October 6, at a meeting in Florence, Italy on cool stars, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz presented Doppler data that indicated a planet was orbiting another solar-like star. They had monitored the Doppler shift of the visible light of 51 Pegasus for more than one year and found the shift to vary in a periodic fashion. Every 4.23 days, the star completed one full cycle of motion, moving away and then toward us. The sinusoidal variation in Doppler shift was the quintessential signature of a star in circular orbit. But what is 51 Peg orbiting around? Standard astronomical dynamics provided the immediate answer.
Kepler's third law predicts a 4.23 day period if the star is orbited by an unseen companion at a distance of 1/20 of the Earth-Sun distance. The observed "reflex" velocity wobble of the star, amounting to 60 m/s, would result from the gravitational pull of a planet having a mass of 0.46 Jupiter masses, assuming the orbital plane is viewed edge-on. The still-uncertain quantity is the trigonometric sine of the orbital inclination which has an average value of p/4 from mathematics. So the final estimate of the mass of the companion is 0.6 Jupiter masses. This beast is almost certainly a planet, a little less massive than our Jupiter, and is the first planet ever discovered around a normal star.
Many burning questions leap from this discovery. Are the Doppler measurements correct? My collaborator, Paul Butler, and I immediately used the Lick Observatory's 3 m Shane telescope to verify, with exquisite precision, the Doppler periodicity. We find clear and incontrovertible evidence for a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting 51 Peg.
Could life exist there? The temperature of the planet's surface would be about 1000 C due to the blazing light from its nearby sun. Neither liquid water nor organic molecules can exist at such temperatures, so life seems implausible, notwithstanding the possibility of oddball lifeforms. Can the planet itself survive there? The 1000 C temperature of the atmosphere (if any) could encourage the escape of the lighter gases. But theoretical calculations by Peter Bodenheimer (Lick Observatory) show that the planet remains largely intact for billions of years.
How could the planet form so close to its star? One possibility is that it formed in a dense gaseous protoplanetary disk (as did our planets) which caused viscous loss of orbital angular momentum. The planet could have spiraled inward, coming to rest at its present orbital distance. The rapidly spinning youthful star, 51 Pegasus, might have provided the breaking mechanism (its tidal spin torque) to keep the planet from crashing into the star.
What is the name of this first planet ever discovered around a normal star? The choice is: 51 Peg b. The 'b' stands for Bellerophon, the mythical hero who died tragically while riding on the back of the winged horse Pegasus toward the gods on Mount Olympus. While this scorching first planet orbits lifelessly around 51 Pegasus, we mortals can only wonder if it trumpets the existence of cooler and less hostile planets elsewhere. If so, Bellerophon may be represent a watershed both for SETI and for extraterrestrial science.
Recently, Marcy and Butler announced the discovery of planets orbiting the solar-type stars 70 Virginis and 47 Ursa Majoris. Both planets are several times the mass of Jupiter. Distance to these systems is 35 light-years. — Ed.
Marcy is a Professor at San Francisco State University.
The two new planets just reported by Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler at the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Antonio, Texas are somewhat more hospitable than the world found around 51 Peg. The planet orbiting 47 Ursa Majoris has a mass of at least 2.8 times that of Jupiter, an 1,100 day period, and a temperature estimated to be similar to that of Mars. 70 Virginis' planetary companion is at least 6.4 times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting at about half the distance from its sun as does Earth. Its temperature is thought to be about 80 C, not incompatible with the existence of liquid water. Both host stars are of spectral type G, similar to the Sun.
On October 30, 1995, the next major step in The Planetary Society's SETI program began. Called BETA, for Billion-Channel Extraterrestrial Assay, its 250 million channel Fourier spectrometer covers the Water Hole (1400-1720 MHz) in eight hops of 40 MHz each — the equivalent of 2 billion channels.
BETA replaces the Society's META I system at the 26-meter (84-foot) radiotelescope of the Harvard/Smithsonian Agassiz Station in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts. BETA does 40 billion operations/second and makes a 300-fold improvement on META.
Members of the Society joined scientists, journalists, and busloads of schoolchildren to see the event. Harvard physicist Paul Horowitz, designer of META and BETA, presided with his usual wit and enthusiasm. Featured speaker Frank Drake, president of the SETI Institute, reminisced about working on this antenna when he was a graduate student.
The switch was thrown by Society member Jim Burke of Newton, Massachusetts, together with Kevin Duesman of Micron Technology, which provided $100,000 worth of memory chips for BETA. The antenna rose until aimed at the same point our Argentine colleagues were observing with the Society's META II system.
To cover the Water Hole — not just the magic frequencies of META — BETA uses a 0.5 Hz bandwidth, much broader than META's 0.05 Hz. Searching much more of the spectrum entails far more interference. BETA uses a novel 3-beam antenna to fight it.
Normally the dish is stationary, with Earth's rotation scanning the sky. Two beams look skyward, aligned east-west; a third looks at the Earth. A true signal should display a "first east, then west, never terrestrial" signature, a powerful "spatial filter" discriminant against interference. If it passes the test, BETA automatically re-observes the target.
Additional major support for BETA came from the Bosack/Kruger Charitable Foundation, NASA, and Society members who met Micron's challenge to match its donation. Dan Werthimer of Berkeley's Project SERENDIP provided essential technical contributions.
META II will continue to be operated by the Argentine Institute of Radioastronomy. The Planetary Society is now searching for scientists and facilities to use META I.
McDonough is SETI Coordinator for The Planetary Society.
I saw Barney for the first time in 1973. I'm not sure I met him. Sebastian von Hoerner had invited me to a costume party in Green Bank, West Virginia, where I was a postdoc. I knew everyone at the party except for a man of imposing dimensions, armed with a million-dollar voice, and dressed as a satyr. They told me he was Barney Oliver, and I found him so curious that I took his picture.
When I joined the SETI Institute nearly two decades later, I soon took a great liking to Barney. I was pleased to note that he was interested in the same things I was. He was a kindred soul. I quickly learned that Barney was interested in everything, and that my interests were simply a subset of his. That made him a renaissance man, and me a dilettante.
It amuses me to note that my first impression of Barney was correct. He was curious, but not in the way I originally thought. G. Trevelyan wrote that "intellectual curiosity is the life-blood of real civilization." Well, that made Barney a one-man blood bank. He perceived the world not as so many of us are condemned to do, through a glass, darkly, but with uncanny, and exhilarating insight.
I admire the things that Barney did. But what I really miss are all the things he was going to do.
In the area of fund raising, I want to relay to you the good news that we now have firm commitments for gifts totaling $3 million a year for the next five years. We are working hard to make this $4 million a year. This figure will allow Project Phoenix to continue according to plan until the year 2000.
It turns out, however, that a modest increment in donations, beyond the $4 million a year over these five years, would increase the "figure of merit" of the search out of all proportion to the increment. We are, therefore, establishing a new fund raising goal of an additional $1 million a year for five years as our top priority for the immediate future. This would enable the construction of a second Phoenix system, of much greater power and reliability, incorporating all the newest developments in signal detection technology. The new system would operate in conjunction with our existing system on the world's largest radio telescopes. The probability of detection would rise dramatically.
Please consider making a donation. Whatever the size of your gift, it will be most valuable in helping us to get started on this new endeavor. Should you wish to consider including us in your estate planning, let us know. We can provide you with expert advice should you need it.
Billingham is Senior Scientist at the SETI Institute.
One of the many research projects under the aegis of the SETI Institute is an investigation of the way small particles aggregate into large clusters as a result of electrostatic forces between them. The clumping of particulate clouds is a fundamental process that occurs in interstellar and protostellar dust clouds, in planetary rings, in dust palls created by bolide impact and volcanic eruptions, and in dust storms created by winds on Earth and Mars. The Earth and Sun were presumably made by such aggregation processes.
As the SETI Institute's Principal Investigator on the Particle Dispersion Experiment (PDE) aboard Space Shuttle Columbia, I recently returned from Marshall Space Flight Center where I monitored the PDE's performance. The experiment flew in the Second US Microgravity Laboratory (USML-2), and was operated by astronaut crew member Fred Leslie. This was the second flight of the PDE, the first having taken place only three years ago on USML-1. SETI Institute researcher Friedemann Freund is a co-investigator on the experiment.
The PDE was designed to study the way in which small particles aggregate into large clusters as a result of electrostatic forces. The microgravity environment of the Shuttle provides a perfect way to keep particles suspended for sufficient time to allow observable aggregate growth, and the absence of gravitational force enables the coulombic force to be studied as an isolated variable.
The experiment collected valuable data about the electrical interaction of particulate materials typical of interstellar clouds and the potential for them to undergo rapid or even catastrophic collapse as a consequence of aggregation. The results suggest that dense particulate clouds might collapse or dissipate an order of magnitude more rapidly than predicted in some current models. But the PDE also yielded some unforeseen results, including the startling discovery that both conducting and non-conducting particles exhibit similar behavior during aggregation. This lends support to the universality of the aggregation process and will provide the basis for further laboratory investigations.
Marshall Space Flight Center chose the PDE as a highlight of the USML-2 mission and featured the experiment on two "NASA Select" television shows. The experiment lasted for six hours, during which time I supervised the operations from the Payload Operations Control Center at Marshall by a more-or-less continuous interaction with the astronaut performing the tests. The experiment was being viewed and recorded on the ground in real time, and the ground-to-space interaction allowed the astronaut to optimize the performance of the PDE and to ensure that the best data were collected.
Marshall is a Principal Investigator for the SETI Institute.
Sometime in the early fall, Project Phoenix will resume its scrutiny of Sun-like star systems using the 140 foot radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. "That's the plan now," says Peter Backus, a radio astronomer who is a member of the Phoenix team. "The initial observations will be tests — making sure our software can reliably control the pointing of the telescope and so forth — but ultimately we will continue observing the one thousand star systems that comprise Phoenix's targets."
The 140 foot telescope has been a major instrument of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory for three decades, but will be decommissioned for astronomical research once the new 100 meter Green Bank Telescope, now being erected nearby, is completed. Thereafter, the SETI Institute hopes to use the 140 foot for full-time Phoenix observations. The telescope will ultimately be operated in a remote observing mode, with only one person on-site to monitor system performance and replace components. The researchers will remain in Mountain View, California.
Just as was done for the Phoenix observations in Australia, a second, smaller telescope will be used to follow up detected signals at Green Bank, and weed out pesky terrestrial interference. "We're hoping to use a 105 foot telescope in Woodbury, Georgia, owned by Georgia Tech," according to Backus.
Additional future Phoenix observing sites include the mammoth Arecibo 1000 foot telescope, in Puerto Rico, and possibly the Owens Valley 130 foot dish and the large French radio telescope in Nançay.
Of the several people behind the scenes at SETI News, Christine Neller has the most direct influence. Chris, as she's known at the Institute, handles the newsletter's layout, and much of the production and distribution work. She creates the publication's 'face.'
Although born in the corrugated foothills of California's gold country, Chris has spent most of her life in the Bay Area cities of Palo Alto and Los Altos, near to where the Institute is located. As a student, she studied marine biology and oceanography, "but astronomy was my favorite subject."
A long stint at Hewlett-Packard and other organizations finally brought Chris to the NASA SETI Office, at Ames Research Center, in 1989. The group of scientists and engineers busy with extraterrestrial eavesdropping appealed to her. "I remember sitting in on an early meeting with the technical team — all these geniuses — and although it was a rather hectic experience, it was very exciting. I also remember feeling how lucky I was to be a part of this incredible enterprise."
In her role as Assistant to the Director of Project Phoenix, Chris tackles work that would otherwise fall between the cracks. She can function as travel agent, conference coordinator, technical publications director, and media interface all in a single morning.
But as Chris notes with a smile, "what I really do is keep these people in line."
It is with great sadness that we report the death of Bernard M. (Barney) Oliver, a Senior Technical Advisor to Project Phoenix, and a Board member of the SETI Institute. Barney died of heart failure at his Los Altos Hills, California home on Thanksgiving eve. He was 79.
Trained as an electrical engineer, Barney was pivotal in the flowering of modern technology in the Silicon Valley, and he directed research at the Hewlett-Packard Corporation for nearly four decades. Later in his career, he turned his attentions to SETI.
Upon completing his studies at Stanford and the California Institute of Technology, where he received his doctorate in 1940, Barney joined the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York. He initially worked on schemes for improving the quality of then-new television systems, but shifted his attentions to radar after America became involved in the Second World War.
His enthusiasm for this work caused him initially to reject an invitation by fellow Stanford alumni William Hewlett and David Packard to join their growing electronics company in Palo Alto, California. But a year later, in 1952, Barney became Hewlett-Packard's Director of Research. In 1957, he was named a Vice-President, and joined the Board of Directors.
Holding over fifty patents, Barney was the architect of much of the ground-breaking technical development at Hewlett-Packard. He is probably best known for his work on the HP-35, the first hand-held calculator. The possibility of such a device occurred as engineers were considering what product should follow the successful HP 9100A, a programmable desktop electronic calculator built from discrete components. In 1970 integrated circuits, which combined many such components in one package, were just becoming available. "We realized that if we took the 9100 and converted it to integrated circuits, we could miniaturize it and carry it in our shirt pockets," Barney said later. Hewlett liked the idea, and gave Oliver's group a year to develop the product. Today, its successors are used by millions of people. For this work, Barney received the nation's most prestigious science accolade, the National Medal of Science.
At the same time he was developing miniaturized calculators, Barney co-directed a summer study at NASA's Ames Research Center on a scheme to use radio telescopes to search for evidence of advanced extraterrestrial societies. The study, called Project Cyclops, became the basis for much of the modern SETI effort. When NASA began its own SETI program, Barney served as a senior manager. In 1993, congressional action ended the NASA effort, but Barney was instrumental in finding philanthropic funding to continue part of the search as Project Phoenix.
Barney Oliver's intellect, imagination, and broad interests will be missed. He was one of those few individuals capable of both conceiving grand plans, and bringing them to fruition.
Leaders make things possible. Exceptional leaders make them inevitable.*
Last year the SETI Institute lost two exceptional leaders — two of the finest gentlemen on the planet.
You have read elsewhere in this issue of the untimely death of Barney Oliver. Barney was my friend, and one of the greatest minds in the history of humankind. The sense of loss I feel in his absence is immense. For the past 35 years, Barney was the world's foremost thinker on the subject of SETI. Since the demise of the NASA SETI effort, Barney had been a member of the Board of Directors of the SETI Institute, and was the impetus behind our success in raising the necessary funds to conduct Project Phoenix. Barney himself contributed major financial resources to our effort. He was a leader. He was one of a kind. It is our job now to carry on without him, to carry out his vision.
Also last year, on September 11, the Institute lost another great leader, Dr. Roger Heyns. Roger and his wife Esther were cruising the Greek isles when Roger was struck down by a heart attack. Many readers will be familiar with Roger's career. After a lengthy academic tenure he served as Chancellor of U.C. Berkeley, then President of the American Council on Education, and then President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, retiring from that position in 1993. Roger was a founding member of the SETI Institute Board of Directors, a position he held until his death. Roger was a very important mentor to me, and to other members of the Institute Board. You've heard the adage "When E.F. Hutton speaks, everybody listens." Well, Roger was our E.F. Hutton. I can truthfully say that in the three dozen or so times that I met with him, everything he had to say presented the opportunity for me to learn something important. A wonderful and always self-effacing man, Roger often declared amazement that we were interested "in what little he, a mere social scientist, had to offer" to a high tech science enterprise. In fact, Roger's eminence as a social scientist made possible the important Cultural Aspects of SETI workshop series that he co-chaired with John Billingham in 1991 and 1992. The almost two dozen top-rate social scientists who took several man-months each out of their careers to participate in this important activity did so without hesitation upon learning Roger was the Chairman. In fact, I recall that not a single invitee declined.
The bottom line is that the SETI Institute would not be where it is today without Barney's dynamic and demanding leadership and Roger's patient and wise guidance. Our Board of Directors will soon fill the vacancies left by these two wonderful leaders. However, they will never be replaced.
*Quote from Time Magazine Man of the Year issue, 12/25/95.
Pierson is Executive Director of the SETI Institute.
Leading SETI researchers will present the latest news on radio searches and future strategies at the upcoming American Association for the Advancement of Science's Annual Meeting. The SETI Symposium will take place February 11 at the Baltimore Convention Center. For information, contact the symposium organizer, Lori Marino, Department of Biology, Rollins Research Center, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, Fax: (404) 727-2880, lmarino@biology.emory.edu.
As part of the SPIE (International Society for Optical Engineering) 1996 Photonics West Symposium, there was a conference on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Optical Spectrum beginning January 31. The two-day OSETI event took place at the San Jose Convention Center in California. Approximately two dozen papers were presented, and Ronald Bracewell was the keynote speaker. For information, contact the Conference Chair, Stuart Kingsley, Columbus Optical SETI Observatory, 545 Northview Dr., Columbus, OH 43209-1051, Fax: (614)-258-7459, skingsle@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu or use the SPIE contact address PW96@spie.org.
The Society for Amateur Radio Astronomy, SARA, held its Western Regional Meeting at the SETI Institute in November. Those readers who might be interested in learning more about amateur radio astronomy should contact Bob Lash, at 262 Diablo Avenue, Mountain View, CA 94043, Tel: (415) 967-9332, bob@irsociety.com.
SETI Institute Newsletter Menu