Tale of a Doomed Galaxy

8 November, 2015

Part 1




We haven’t actually seen this yet. The light and gravitational waves from the disaster are still speeding towards us. They should reach us in roughly 100,000 years. We’re not sure when.

Right now, we see the smaller black hole still orbiting the big one, once every 5 years. In fact it’s orbiting once every 4 years! But thanks to the expansion of the universe, PG 1302-102 is moving away from us so fast that time on that distant galaxy looks significantly slowed down to us.

Orbiting once every 4 years: that doesn’t sound so fast. But the smaller black hole is about 2000 times more distant from its more massive companion than Pluto is from our Sun! So in fact it’s moving at very high speed – about 1% of the speed of light. We can actually see it getting redshifted and then blueshifted as it zips around. And it will continue to speed up as it spirals in.

What exactly will happen when these black holes collide? It’s too bad we won’t live to see it. We’re far enough that it will be perfectly safe to watch from here! But the human race knows enough about physics to say quite a lot about what it will be like. And we’ve built some amazing machines to detect the gravitational waves created by collisions like this—so as time goes on, we’ll know even more.

Part 2


This is a picture of Centaurus A, a much closer galaxy with a quasar in it. A quasar is huge black hole in the middle of a galaxy—a black hole that’s eating lots of stars, which rip apart and form a disk of hot gas as they spiral in. ‘Hot’ is an understatement, since this gas moves near the speed of light. It gets so hot that it pumps out intense jets of particles – from its north and south poles. Some of these particles even make it to Earth.


And these jets create lots of radiation, from radio waves to X-rays. That’s how we can see quasars from billions of light years away. Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe, except for short-lived catastrophic events like the black hole collisions and gamma-ray bursts from huge dying stars.

It’s hard to grasp the size and power of such things, but let’s try. You can’t see the black hole in the middle of this picture, but it weighs 55 million times as much as our Sun. The blue glow of the jets in this picture is actually X rays. The jet at upper left is 13,000 light years long, made of particles moving at half the speed of light.

A typical quasar puts out a power of roughly 1040 watts. They vary a lot, but let’s pick this number as our ‘standard quasar’.

But what does 1040 watts actually mean? For comparison, the Sun puts out 4 x 1026 watts. So, we’re talking 30 trillion Suns. But even that’s too big a number to comprehend!


Or, we can work out how much energy would be produced if the entire mass of the Moon were converted into energy. I’m getting 6 x 1039 joules. That’s a lot! But our standard quasar is putting out a bit more power than if it were converting one Moon into energy each second.

But you can’t just turn matter completely into energy: you need an equal amount of antimatter, and there’s not that much around. A quasar gets its power the old-fashioned way: by letting things fall down. In this case, fall down into a black hole.


There are short-lived events much more powerful than a quasar. For example, a gamma-ray burst, formed as a hypergiant star collapses into a black hole. A powerful gamma-ray burst can put out 10^44 watts for a few seconds. That’s equal to 10,000 quasars! But quasars last a long, long time.

So this was life in PG 1302-102 before things got really intense – before its two black holes spiraled into each other and collided. What was that collision like? I’ll talk about that next time.


Part 3




First the black holes orbit each other, closer and closer, as they lose energy by emitting gravitational radiation. This is called the ‘inspiral’ phase.

Then comes the ‘plunge’ and ‘merger’. They plunge towards each other. A thin bridge forms between them, which you see here. Then they completely merge.

Finally you get a single black hole, which oscillates and then calms down. This is called the ‘ringdown’, because it’s like a bell ringing, loudly at first and then more quietly. But instead of emitting sound, it’s emitting gravitational waves—ripples in the shape of space!

In the top picture, the black holes have the same mass: one looks smaller, but that’s because it’s farther away. In the bottom picture, the black hole at left is twice as massive.

Here’s one cool discovery. An earlier paper had argued there could be two bridges, except in very symmetrical situations. If that were true, a black hole could have the topology of a torus for a little while. But these calculations showed that – at least in the cases they looked at—there’s just one bridge.

So, you can’t have black hole doughnuts. At least not yet.



It probably requires a lot of computer power, too. These calculations are very hard. We know the equations; they’re just tough to solve. The first complete simulation of an inspiral, merger and ringdown was done in 2005.

The reason people want to simulate colliding black holes is not mainly to create pretty pictures, or even understand what happens to the event horizon. It’s to understand the gravitational waves they will produce! People are building better and better gravitational wave detectors—more on that later—but we still haven’t seen gravitational waves. This is not surprising: they’re very weak. To find them, we need to filter out noise. So, we need to know what to look for.

The pictures are from here:

• Michael I. Cohen and Jeffrey D. Kaplan and Mark A. Scheel, On toroidal horizons in binary black hole inspirals, Phys. Rev. D 85 (2012), 024031.

Part 4

Let’s imagine an old, advanced civilization in the doomed galaxy PG 1302-102.




Namely, the supermassive black holes!




Let’s imagine a civilization that was prepared. Natural selection has ways of weeding out civilizations that are bad at long-term planning. If you’re prepared, and you have the right technology, a quasar could actually be a good source of power.




I don’t know exactly what this will be like. I haven’t found papers describing this kind of event in detail.

One expert told the New York Times that the energy of this explosion will equal 100 million supernovae. I don’t think he was exaggerating. A supernova is a giant star whose core collapses as it runs out of fuel, easily turning several Earth masses of hydrogen into iron before you can say “Jack Robinson”. When it does this, it can easily pump out 1044 joules of energy. So, 100 millon supernovae is 1052 joules. By contrast, if we could convert all the mass of the black holes in PG 1302-102. into energy, we’d get about 1056 joules. So, our expert was just saying that their merger will turns 0.01% of their combined mass into energy. That seems quite reasonable to me.

But I want to know what happens then! What will the explosion do to the galaxy? Most of the energy comes out as gravitational radiation. Gravitational waves don’t interact very strongly with matter. But when they’re this strong, who knows? And of course there will be plenty of ordinary radiation, as the accretion disk gets shredded and sucked into the new combined black hole.



And then what?





• Dennis Overbye, Black holes inch ahead to violent cosmic union, New York Times, 7 January 2015.

Part 5

When distant black holes collide, they emit a burst of gravitational radiation: a ripple in the shape of space, spreading out at the speed of light. Can we detect that here on Earth? We haven’t yet. But with luck we will soon, thanks to LIGO.


Sounds easy, eh? Not when you run the numbers! We’re trying to see gravitational waves that stretch space just a tiny bit: about one part in 1023. At LIGO, the tubes are 4 kilometers long. So, we need to see their length change by an absurdly small amount: one-thousandth the diameter of a proton!


• They bounce the light back and forth many times, effectively increasing the length of the tubes to 1800 kilometers.

• There’s no air in the tubes—just a very good vacuum.

• They hang the mirrors on quartz fibers, making each mirror part of a pendulum with very little friction. This means it vibrates very well at one particular frequency, and very badly at frequencies far from that. This damps out the shaking of the ground, which is a real problem.

• This pendulum is hung on another pendulum.

• That pendulum is hung on a third pendulum.

• That pendulum is hung on a fourth pendulum.

• The whole chain of pendulums is sitting on a device that detects vibrations and moves in a way to counteract them, sort of like noise-cancelling headphones.





They never saw anything. So they kept improving the machines, and now we’ve got Advanced LIGO! This should now be able to see collisions up to 225 million light years away… and after a while, three times further.


In fact, there’s a rumor that they’ve already seen one! But they’re still testing the device, and there’s a team whose job is to inject fake signals, just to see if they’re detected. Davide Castelvecchi writes:

LIGO is almost unique among physics experiments in practising ‘blind injection’. A team of three collaboration members has the ability to simulate a detection by using actuators to move the mirrors. “Only they know if, and when, a certain type of signal has been injected,” says Laura Cadonati, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta who leads the Advanced LIGO’s data-analysis team.

Two such exercises took place during earlier science runs of LIGO, one in 2007 and one in 2010. Harry Collins, a sociologist of science at Cardiff University, UK, was there to document them (and has written books about it). He says that the exercises can be valuable for rehearsing the analysis techniques that will be needed when a real event occurs. But the practice can also be a drain on the team’s energies. “Analysing one of these events can be enormously time consuming,” he says. “At some point, it damages their home life.”


Aargh! The disappointment would be crushing.

But with luck, Advanced LIGO will soon detect real gravitational waves. And I hope life here in the Milky Way thrives for a long time – so that when the gravitational waves from the doomed galaxy PG 1302-102 reach us, hundreds of thousands of years in the future, we can study them in exquisite detail.

For Castelvecchi’s whole story, see:

• Davide Castelvecchi Has giant LIGO experiment seen gravitational waves?, Nature, 30 September 2015.

For pictures of my visit to LIGO, see:

• John Baez, This week’s finds in mathematical physics (week 241), 20 November 2006.

For how Advanced LIGO works, see:

• The LIGO Scientific Collaboration Advanced LIGO, 17 November 2014.



• Ravi Mandalia, Black hole binary entangled by gravity progressing towards deadly merge.


• NASA, NASA’s Hubble shows Milky Way is destined for head-on collision, 31 March 2012.

Let’s get ready! For starters, let’s deal with global warming.

Scholz’s Star

19 February, 2015

100,000 years ago, some of my ancestors came out of Africa and arrived in the Middle East. 50,000 years ago, some of them reached Asia. But between those dates, about 70,000 years ago, two stars passed through the outer reaches of the Solar System, where icy comets float in dark space!

One was a tiny red dwarf called Scholz’s star. It’s only 90 times as heavy as Jupiter. Right now it’s 20 light years from us, so faint that it was discovered only in 2013, by Ralf-Dieter Scholz—an expert on nearby stars, high-velocity stars, and dwarf stars.

The other was a brown dwarf: a star so small that it doesn’t produce energy by fusion. This one is only 65 times the mass of Jupiter, and it orbits its companion at a distance of 80 AU.

(An AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance between the Earth and the Sun.)

A team of scientists has just computed that while some of my ancestors were making their way to Asia, these stars passed about 0.8 light years from our Sun. That’s not very close. But it’s close enough to penetrate the large cloud of comets surrounding the Sun: the Oort cloud.

They say this event didn’t affect the comets very much. But if it shook some comets loose from the Oort cloud, they would take about 2 million years to get here! So, they won’t arrive for a long time.

At its closest approach, Scholz’s star would have had an apparent magnitude of about 11.4. This is a bit too faint to see, even with binoculars. So, don’t look for it myths and legends!

As usual, the paper that made this discovery is expensive in journals but free on the arXiv:

• Eric E. Mamajek, Scott A. Barenfeld, Valentin D. Ivanov, Alexei Y. Kniazev, Petri Vaisanen, Yuri Beletsky, Henri M. J. Boffin, The closest known flyby of a star to the Solar System.

It must be tough being a scientist named ‘Boffin’, especially in England! Here’s a nice account of how the discovery was made:

• University of Rochester, A close call of 0.8 light years, 16 February 2015.

The brown dwarf companion to Scholz’s star is a ‘class T’ star. What does that mean? It’s pretty interesting. Let’s look at an example just 7 light years from Earth!

Brown dwarfs


Thanks to some great new telescopes, astronomers have been learning about weather on brown dwarfs! It may look like this artist’s picture. (It may not.)

Luhman 16 is a pair of brown dwarfs orbiting each other just 7 light years from us. The smaller one, Luhman 16B, is half covered by huge clouds. These clouds are hot—1200 °C—so they’re probably made of sand, iron or salts. Some of them have been seen to disappear! Why? Maybe ‘rain’ is carrying this stuff further down into the star, where it melts.

So, we’re learning more about something cool: the ‘L/T transition’.

Brown dwarfs can’t fuse ordinary hydrogen, but a lot of them fuse the isotope of hydrogen called deuterium that people use in H-bombs—at least until this runs out. The atmosphere of a hot brown dwarf is similar to that of a sunspot: it contains molecular hydrogen, carbon monoxide and water vapor. This is called a class M brown dwarf.

But as they run out of fuel, they cool down. The cooler class L brown dwarfs have clouds! But the even cooler class T brown dwarfs do not. Why not?

This is the mystery we may be starting to understand: the clouds may rain down, with material moving deeper into the star! Luhman 16B is right near the L/T transition, and we seem to be watching how the clouds can disappear as a brown dwarf cools. (Its larger companion, Luhman 16A, is firmly in class L.)

Finally, as brown dwarfs cool below 300 °C, astronomers expect that ice clouds start to form: first water ice, and eventually ammonia ice. These are the class Y brown dwarfs. Wouldn’t that be neat to see? A star with icy clouds!

Could there be life on some of these stars?

Caroline Morley regularly blogs about astronomy. If you want to know more about weather on Luhman 16B, try this:

• Caroline Morley, Swirling, patchy clouds on a teenage brown dwarf, 28 February 2012.

She doesn’t like how people call brown dwarfs “failed stars”. I agree! It’s like calling a horse a “failed giraffe”.

For more, try:

Brown dwarfs, Scholarpedia.

Earth-Like Planets Near Red Dwarf Stars

14 February, 2015

Can red dwarf stars have Earth-like planets with life?

This is an important question, at least in the long run, because 80% of the stars in the Milky Way are red dwarfs, even though none are visible to the naked eye. 20 of the 30 nearest stars are red dwarfs! It would be nice to know if they can have planets with life.

Also, red dwarf stars live a long time! They’re small—and the smaller a star is, the longer it lives. Calculations show that a red dwarf one-tenth the mass of our Sun should last for 10 trillion years!

So if life is possible on planets orbiting red dwarf stars—or if life could get there—we could someday have very, very old civilizations. That idea excites me. Imagine what a galactic civilization spanning the 80 billion red dwarfs in our galaxy could do in 10 trillion years!

(No: you can’t imagine it. You don’t have time to think of all the amazing things they could do.)

Proxima Centauri

Let’s start close to home. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, is a red dwarf. If we ever explore interstellar space, we may stop by this star. So, it’s worth knowing a bit about it.

We don’t know if it has planets. But it could be part of a triple star system! The closest neighboring stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, orbit each other every 80 years. One is a bit bigger than the Sun, the other a bit smaller. They orbit in a fairly eccentric ellipse. At their closest, their distance is like the distance from Saturn to the Sun. At their farthest, it’s more like the distance from Pluto to the Sun.

Proxima Centauri is fairly far from both: a quarter of a light year away. That’s about 350 times the distance from Pluto to the Sun! We’re not even sure Proxima Centauri is gravitationally bound to the other stars. If it is, its orbital period could easily exceed 500,000 years.

If Proxima Centauri had an Earth-like planet, there’s a bit of a problem: it’s a flare star.

You see, convection stirs up this star’s whole interior, unlike the Sun. Convection of charged plasma makes strong magnetic fields. Magnetic fields get tied in knots, and the energy gets released through enormous flares! They can become as large as the star itself, and get so hot that they radiate lots of X-rays.

This could be bad for life on nearby planets… especially since an Earth-like planet would have to be very close. You see, Proxima Centauri is very faint: just 0.17% the brightness of our Sun!

In fact many red dwarfs are flare stars, for the same reasons. Proxima Centauri is actually fairly tame as red dwarfs go, because it’s 4.9 billion years old. Younger ones are more lively, with bigger flares.

Proxima Centauri is just 4.24 light-years away. If explore interstellar space it may be a good place to visit. It’s actually getting closer: it’ll come within about 3 light-years of us in roughly 27,000 years, and then drift by. We should take advantage of this and go visit it soon, like in a few centuries!

Gliese 667 Cc

Gliese 667C is a red dwarf just 1.4% as bright as our Sun. Unremarkable: such stars are a dime a dozen. But it’s famous, because we know it has at least two planets, one of which is quite Earth-like!

This planet, called Gliese 667 Cc, is one of the most Earth-like ones we know today. But it’s weirdly different from our home in many ways. Its mass is 3.8 times that of Earth. It should be a bit warmer than Earth—but dimly lit as seen by our eyes, since most of the light it gets is in the infrared.

Being close to its dim red dwarf star, its year is just 28 Earth days long. But there’s something even cooler about this planet. You can see it in the NASA artist’s depiction above. The red dwarf Gliese 667C is part of a triple star system!

The largest star in this system, Gliese 667 A, is three-quarters the mass of our Sun, but only 12% as bright. It’s an orange dwarf, intermediate between a red dwarf and our Sun, which is considered a yellow dwarf.

The second largest, Gliese 667 B, is also an orange dwarf, only 5% as bright as our sun.

These two orbit each other every 42 years. The red dwarf Gliese 667 C is considerably farther away, orbiting this pair.

What could the planet Gliese 667 Cc be like?

Tidally locked planets

Since a planet needs to be close to a red dwarf to be warm enough for liquid water, such planets are likely to be be tidally locked, with one side facing their sun all the time.

For a long time, this made scientists believe the day side of such a planet would be hot and dry, with all the water locked in ice on the night side, as shown above. People call this a water-trapped world. Perhaps not so good for life!

But a new paper argues that other kinds of worlds are likely too!

In a thin ice waterworld, an ocean covers most of the planet. It’s covered with ice on the night side, maybe 10 meters thick. The day side has open ocean. Ice melts near the edge of the ice, pours into the ocean on the day side… while on the night side, water freezes onto the bottom of the ice layer.

In an ice sheet-ocean world, there’s a big ocean on the day side and a big continent on the night side. As in the water-trapped world, a lot of ice forms on the night side, up to a kilometer thick. But if there’s enough geothermal heat, and enough water, not all the water gets frozen on the night side: enough melts to form an ocean on the day side.

Needless to say, these new scenarios are exciting because they could be more conducive to life!

Read more here:

• Jun Yang, Yonggang Liu, Yongyun Hu and Dorian S. Abbot, Water trapping on tidally locked terrestrial planets requires special conditions.


For a waterworld we find that surface winds transport sea ice toward the day side and the ocean carries heat toward the night side. As a result, night-side sea ice remains about 10 meters thick and night-side water trapping is insignificant. If a planet has large continents on its night side, they can grow ice sheets about a kilometer thick if the geothermal heat flux is similar to Earth’s or smaller. Planets with a water complement similar to Earth’s would therefore experience a large decrease in sea level when plate tectonics drives their continents onto the night side, but would not experience complete day-side dessication. Only planets with a geothermal heat flux lower than Earth’s, much of their surface covered by continents, and a surface water reservoir about 10% of Earth’s would be susceptible to complete water trapping.

From a technical viewpoint, what’s fun about this new paper is that it uses detailed climate models that have been radically hacked to deal with a red dwarf star. Paraphrasing:

We perform climate simulations with the Community Climate System Model version 3.0 (CCSM3) which was originally developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research to study the climate of Earth. The model contains four coupled components: atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, and land. The atmosphere component calculates atmospheric circulation and parameterizes sub-grid processes such as convection, precipitation, clouds, and boundary- layer mixing. The ocean component computes ocean circulation using the hydrostatic and Boussinesq approximations. The sea-ice component predicts ice fraction, ice thickness, ice velocity, and energy exchanges between the ice and the atmosphere/ ocean. The land component calculates surface temperature, soil water content, and evaporation.

We modify CCSM3 to simulate the climate of habitable planets around M stars following Rosenbloom et al., Liu et al., and Hu & Yang. The stellar spectrum we use is a blackbody with an effective temperature of 3400 K. We employ planetary parameters typical of a super-Earth: a radius of 1.5 R, gravity of 1.38 g, and an orbital period of 37 Earth-days. The orbital period of habitable zone planets around M stars is roughly 10–100 days. We set the insolation to 866 watts per square meter and both the obliquity and eccentricity to zero. The atmospheric surface pressure is 1.0 bar, including N2, H2O, and 355 parts per million CO2.

And so on. Way cool! They consider a variety of different kinds of continents and oceans… including one where they’re just like those here on Earth—just because the data for that is easy to get!

Here’s a question I don’t know the answer to. To what extent can models like Community Climate System Model version 3.0 be tweaked to handle different planets? And what are the main things we should worry about: ways Earth-like planets can be different enough to seriously throw off the models?

We live in exciting times, where just as we’re making huge progress trying to understand the Earth’s climate in time to make wise decisions, we’re discovering hundreds of new planets with their own very different climates.

The Pentagram of Venus

4 January, 2014







days. Venus orbits the Sun once every


days. So, Venus orbits the Sun in

224.701 / 365.256 ≈ 0.615187

Earth years. And here’s the cool coincidence:

8/13 ≈ 0.615385



13 – 8 = 5


8 – 5 = 3

steps ahead of the last one. Check to make sure:

That’s why they call it the pentagram of Venus!





Now, I’m sure you’ve noticed that these numbers:

3, 5, 8, 13

are consecutive Fibonacci numbers.

Puzzle 3: Is this just a coincidence?







I got the above picture from here:


This website is defending the Freemasons against accusations of Satanism!




But it’s not perfect! Every 8 years, Venus goes around the Sun 13.004 times. So the whole pattern keeps shifting. It makes a full turn about once every 1920 years. You can see this slippage using this nice applet, especially if you crank up the speed:


Also, the orbits of Earth and Venus aren’t perfect circles!



Talk at the SETI Institute

5 December, 2013

SETI means ‘Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’. I’m giving a talk at the SETI Institute on Tuesday December 17th, from noon to 1 pm. You can watch it live, watch it later on their YouTube channel, or actually go there and see it. It’s free, and you can just walk in at 189 San Bernardo Avenue in Mountain View, California, but please register if you can.

Life’s Struggle to Survive

When pondering the number of extraterrestrial civilizations, it is worth noting that even after it got started, the success of life on Earth was not a foregone conclusion. We recount some thrilling episodes from the history of our planet, some well-documented but others merely theorized: our collision with the planet Theia, the oxygen catastrophe, the snowball Earth events, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, the asteroid that hit Chicxulub, and more, including the global warming episode we are causing now. All of these hold lessons for what may happen on other planets.

If you know interesting things about these or other ‘close calls’, please tell me! I’m still preparing my talk, and there’s room for more fun facts. I’ll make my slides available when they’re ready.

The SETI Institute looks like an interesting place, and my host, Adrian Brown, is an expert on the poles of Mars. I’ve been fascinated about the water there, and I’ll definitely ask him about this paper:

• Adrian J. Brown, Shane Byrne, Livio L. Tornabene and Ted Roush, Louth crater: Evolution of a layered water ice mound, Icarus 196 (2008), 433–445.

Louth Crater is a fascinating place. Here’s a photo:

By the way, I’ll be in Berkeley from December 14th to 21st, except for a day trip down to Mountain View for this talk. I’ll be at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute talking to Eliezer Yudkowsky, Paul Christiano and others at a Workshop on Probability, Logic and Reflection. This invitation arose from my blog post here:

Probability theory and the undefinability of truth.

If you’re in Berkeley and you want to talk, drop me a line. I may be too busy, but I may not.

The Search For Budget-Conscious Life

18 May, 2013









The cost analysis is here:



The Planck Mission

22 March, 2013











Here is some of what they’ve learned:





Planck 2013 results. XVI. Cosmological parameters.


A lopsided universe, with a cold spot?








For a lot more detail, see this paper:








Particle physics










n_s=0.972 \pm 0.013


n_s = 0.9603 \pm 0.0073






Time, as usual, will tell.