Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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Could gamma ray bursts explain Fermi's paradox?

 

 

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Is the reason the Universe is silent when it should be full of life because such extinction events are relatively frequent?

 

 

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Invader

 

"Finding a stable planetary system with a potentially habitable planet orbiting one of the very nearest stars in the sky is mind blowing. This is one more piece of evidence that nearly all stars have planets, and that potentially habitable planets in our galaxy are as common as grains of sand on a beach."

Dr Pamela Arriagada, Carnegie Institution

 

 

16,000 light years from the sun is Omega Centauri, a globular cluster of very ancient stars.

 

 

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They are the remnants of a dwarf galaxy that was absorbed and torn apart by our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

 

 

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Stars from the dwarf galaxy were scattered throughout the Milky Way.

 

 

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One such is Kapteyn's star, a "red dwarf" cooler than the Sun, named after Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn who discovered it at the end of the 19th century. It can be seen in the southern constellation of Pictor with an amateur telescope and sits in the "galactic halo", an extended cloud of stars orbiting the Milky Way. It is moving in the opposite direction to the rotation of the other stars in our galaxy

 

 

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Kapteyn's star is the 25th nearest star to the sun. It is just 13 light years away.

 

 

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And it has planets.

 

 

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Astronomers found the planets by using specialised instruments on telescopes in Chile and Hawaii to measure tiny "wobbles" of the star caused by their gravity.

 

 

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Shifts in the colour of star light due to the wobbles allowed them to work out properties of the planets such as their masses and orbital periods. Astronomers have calculated that Kapteyn's star's planets could be 11.5 billion years old - more than twice the age of the Earth and only around two billion years younger than the universe itself. The larger, Kapteyn c, is furthest from it's star and thought to be too cold to support liquid water.

 

 

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But Kapteyn b, is only five times heavier than Earth and orbits in the star's "habitable zone" where conditions are mild enough to permit watery oceans.

 

 

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It is the first potentially habitable planet from another galaxy ever found. Whether life has evolved there remains open to speculation - but if so, given the planet's age it could be far more advanced than on Earth.

 

 

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It is even conceivable that the planet seeded life from another galaxy on other worlds in the Milky Way.

 

 

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Perhaps even our own...

 

 

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Dr Guillem Anglada-Escude, one of the scientists from Queen Mary University of London who discovered them, said: "It does make you wonder what kind of life could have evolved on those planets over such a long time."

 

 

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Witness

 

'Behind the drapes. There's something there. There's something in the room... Ooh, I can't move my arms anymore. Now one, two, three, there's four and five. They're taking me outta bed. I won't let them. I won't let them take me outta bed.'

 

Budd Hopkins was part of the circle of New York artists that in the 1950s and ’60s included Willem DeKooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell.

 

 

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His work — which by the late ’60s included Mondrian-like paintings of huge geometric forms anointed with flat planes of color — is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the British Museum, among others.

 

 

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According to Hopkins, he had spotted a U.F.O. on Cape Cod in 1964, which he described as something flat, silver, airborne and unfathomable.

 

 

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He went on to investigate the case of a badly shaken neighbor who had reported seeing a spaceship with nine or ten small beings land in a park near Fort Lee, New Jersey.

 

 

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Hopkins wrote a story about it for The Village Voice that was picked up by Cosmopolitan. He was soon being thronged by abductees, whom he examined under hypnosis. Starting with his book Missing Time, in 1981, and its 1987 sequel, Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods he became known as the father of the alien-abduction movement.