I often give updates on strange stars on this channel that have no ready explanation, such
as Boyajian's star and the possibility that it might indicate alien activity.
But there is another star that also may be an indicator of an alien civilization that's
currently making the rounds on several science blogs, links in the description below.
And it may even be a better candidate for being a potential detection of alien life
than Boyajian's star.
The difference between the two is that while KIC 8462852's strange dimming events could
indicate alien megastructures blocking light from the star, that's probably not the case,
see the other videos dedicated to that star on this channel.
Its much more likely that what we're actually seeing an incredibly rare natural event, such
as the star recently having ingested a planet.
But, while the explanation for Boyajian's star is going to be interesting whatever it
might be, it's probably going to be a variant of something we've seen before or expected
to be going on in the universe and won't require a rethink of a whole area of science.
This circumstances of this other star, however, are very different.
Now, I tend to try to get the naming of the celestial objects I talk about on this channel
as correct as I can get them, or I simply default to the official catalog numbers if
there is ambiguity surrounding it.
After all, KIC 8462852 is also known as the WTF star, Tabby's Star, Boyajian's star, the
alien megastructure star and so on, though it seems to be settling on Boyajian's star
as a matter of giving proper scientific naming credit to the lead investigator.
But with this star I fall completely short, this star does have an accepted name and I
apologize to any Polish speakers in the audience in advance.
The pronunciation for this star is all over the place on the internet, and the best I
could do was ask a person I know that speaks a bit of Polish.
I'm told that something close to the proper pronunciation for this star is Przybylski’s
Star.
I'm sure I got that wrong, Polish words are about as tough to pronounce as it gets for
native English speakers, but at least I didn't chicken out and tried.
But, for the sake of clarity, I will run and hide for the rest of the video and use the
catalog name for the star, which is HD 101065.
But we could also call this star the Plutonium Star because it apparently contains it, along
with a bunch of other ultra heavy elements that are both highly unstable, and very short-lived.
Those should not be there and can mean one of three things: elements exist that we did
not really expect to see in nature, the detection of the ultra-heavy elements is a mistake,
or aliens made them artificially and dumped them into this star.
Now, these elements are at the very end of the periodic table, a mysterious place where
we know comparatively little about the chemistry of the transuranic elements and some of them
have only relatively recently been synthesized artificially in the lab.
Outside the lab, we see these elements, so far, nowhere in the universe other than in
this type of weird star.
In fact, these heavy elements are so far up the table that some physicists and chemists
are skeptical that they can exist in nature and can only be artificially synthesized.
Given that they seem present in this star it means that we either need to rethink the
mechanisms for which heavy elements can be produced in nature, or we must consider the
possibility that aliens put them there.
HD 101065 is chemically weird in many ways.
First studied in 1961 by the aforementioned Polish-Australian scientist whose name is
in the title of the video, apologies to him and his original paper is also listed in the
description, the star features very low iron and nickel but comparatively high amounts
of heavy elements like thorium and uranium.
Now, these do occur in nature, so it's really the ratios that are strange.
But it also seems to contain actinide elements heavier than uranium that don't make a whole
lot of sense for being there.
These include, reportedly, in ascending order, americium, curium, berkelium (only about one
gram of that element has ever been created on earth), californium and einsteinium.
There is some ambiguity as to whether those are really there, only more study will clear
that up, but also present are the lighter but still radioactive elements technetium,
which has no stable isotopes and is extremely rare in nature, but may be related to the
presence of the uranium, and promethium which also has only radioactive isotopes.
Plus, lots of other rare elements that you don't hear much about.
Yet, HD 101065 has them in comparative abundance, apparently impossibly so.
In fact, as Jason Wright of Pennsylvania state university notes in his blog, this star has
more praseodymium -- how often do you hear about that element -- than iron.
This could be somewhat illusory however.
Dr. Wright details how those elements might get concentrated in the star's atmosphere
in layers due to the very strong, somewhat mysteriously so, magnetic fields of this type
of peculiar star.
I highly recommend those wishing to dig deeper into this story check out his blog and the
other related materials which I have included links and citations for in the description
below.
So how do all of these strange elements end up in a star's upper atmosphere?
A 2008 paper by Vera Gopka and colleagues, link below, details that they might be produced
by a nearby neutron star.
Trouble is, HD 101065 does not appear to have a nearby neutron star.
Strike that explanation.
The next explanation has to do with the periodic table.
Now here is where we get into scientific rethink territory.
The heavy actinide elements do not like to exist.
The nuclei of these atoms are truly huge and essentially fall apart or decay into more
stable atoms releasing energy along the way.
This allows you to do interesting things, such as easily split atoms of uranium, this
yields nuclear energy, but also unfortunately allows for the creation of nuclear weaponry.
But above the unstable actinides there is hypothesized to be what is called "the island
of stability" where there could be more stable, but really heavy atoms.
We've never seen any of these yet, but the nuclear physicists do keep synthesizing heavier
and heavier elements and seem set to eventually explore this area of the periodic table and
confirm the properties of these atoms.
But a paper from March 13 by V.A.
Dzuba and colleagues proposes that such elements might be produced in a certain type of supernova
and that the weirdness of HD 101065 might be the result of the decay of more stable,
but still radioactive, elements located in the island of stability leading to all these
short-lived unstable actinides and rare elements.
If this is the case, it would be revolutionary for both nuclear physics and chemistry that
such elements could exist in nature.
But, I suspect this one will be contentious because conventional thinking has been that
these elements are not likely to be present in nature.
And a further question would be that if a supernova was responsible, where is all the
iron that is normally associated with supernovas?
So to explain this star, we must rely on hypothetical elements decaying after being created by a
hypothetical mechanism that counter intuitively didn't produce much iron, or that iron is
somehow obscured in this star's makeup.
Messy indeed.
And that leads us into alien origin territory.
In 1980 Daniel Whitmore and David Wright, again citations below, advanced a rather extraordinary
proposition.
They suggested that a civilization using nuclear energy might dump the waste into their star.
The problem with this though is that it seems unlikely that a civilization with the ability
to dump that waste into their star would still be using nuclear fission but instead would
have moved onto fusion.
After all, we're getting close to that ourselves and within 100 years fission as an energy
source seems likely to go obsolete.
That takes us to another possibility.
In 1966 Sagan and Shklovskii suggested that one way to announce your presence to the universe
is to dump a bunch of artificial elements into your star.
They might rightly assume that other civilizations in varying stages of advancement would be
doing astronomy and actively looking at the spectra of stars.
So rather than blast out huge, energy consuming radio signals it might be simpler to use the
heavy elements to inform others that they are not alone.
That doesn't really convey much information, unfortunately but if it turns out that island
of stability elements cannot be naturally created then this will be one of the biggest
stories in the history of science.
In the end, however, it's always safest to assume that a natural explanation will eventually
be found and aliens are a very broad explanation and always the least likely.
If you have to bet, bet on nature.
But out of all the weird potential alien-related material that I cover on this channel, this
is the weirdest I have yet seen.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently inching closer to
opening my second channel which will focus on science fiction and sure to check out my
books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channel for regular, in-depth
explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in
which we live.