600 light years away, in the constellation of Auriga, there is a star in some ways similar to our Sun. It’s a shade hotter (by about 800° C), more massive, and older. Oddly, it appears to be laced with heavy elements: more oxygen, aluminum, and so on, than might be expected. A puzzle.

Then, last year, it was discovered that this star had a planet orbiting it. A project called WASP – Wide Area Search for Planets, a UK telescope system that searches for exoplanets — noticed that the star underwent periodic dips in its light. This indicates that a planet circles the star, and when the planet gets between the star and us, it blocks a tiny fraction of the starlight.

The planet is a weirdo, for many reasons… but it won’t be weird for too much longer. That’s because the star is eating it.

What WASP 12b may look like.

OK, first, the planet. Called WASP 12b, it was instantly pegged as an oddball. The orbit is only 1.1 days long! Compare that to our own 365 day orbit, or even Mercury’s 88 days to circle the Sun. This incredibly short orbital period means this planet is practically touching the surface of its star as it sweeps around at over 220 km/sec (130 miles/sec)! That also means it must be very hot; models indicate that the temperature at its cloud tops would be in excess of 2200°C (4000° F).

Not only that, but other numbers were odd, too. WASP 12b was found to be a bit more massive and bigger than Jupiter; about 1.8 times its size and 1.4 times its mass. That’s too big! Models indicate that planets this massive have a funny state of matter in them; they are so compressible that if you add mass, the planet doesn’t really get bigger, it just gets denser. In other words, you could double Jupiter’s mass and its size wouldn’t increase appreciably, but since the mass goes up, so would its density.

But WASP 12b isn’t like that. In fact, it has a lower density than Jupiter, and is a lot bigger! Something must be going on… and when you see a lot of weird things all sitting in one place, it makes sense to assume they’re connected. In this case it’s true: that planet is frakking hot, and that’s at the heart of this mess. Heating a planet that much would not exactly be conducive to its well-being. When you heat a gas it expands, which would explain WASP 12b’s big size. It’s puffy! But being all bloated that close to a star turns out to be bad for your health.

Astronomers used Hubble to observe the planet in the ultraviolet and found clear signs of all sorts of heavy elements, including sodium, tin, aluminum, magnesium, and manganese, as well as, weirdly, ytterbium^*. Moreover, they could tell from the data that these elements existed in a cloud surrounding the planet, like an extended atmosphere going outward for hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

That’s a long way from the planet. Any atom of, say, manganese that far from the planet would be caught in a tug-of-war between the gravity of the planet and the star… and the star would win. The gravity of the star is drawing material off the planet in a vast stream, or, in other words, the planet is getting slowly eaten by its star. If astronomers ever get around to giving this planet an actual name, I suggest Sarlacc^†.

This explains the peculiar high abundance of heavy metals in the star I mentioned at the beginning of this post; they come from the planet! But not for long. Given the mass of the planet and the density of the stream, it looks like it has roughly ten million years left. At that point, supper’s over: there won’t be anything left for the star to eat. In reality it’s hard to say exactly what will happen; there may be a rocky/metal core to the planet that will survive. But even that is so close to the star that it will be a molten blob of goo. The way orbits work, the way the dance of gravity plays out over time, the planet itself may actually be drawn inexorably closer to its star. Remember, too, the star is old, and will soon start to expand into a red giant. So the planet is falling and the star is rising; eventually the two will meet and the planet will meet a fiery death.

All in all, it sucks to be WASP 12b.

But it’s cool to be an astronomer! Only 15 years ago we had no idea that there were other planets orbiting Sunlike stars, and now we know of over 400, and a lot of them are really, really bizarro. When I was a kid I watched Star Trek and read a lot of science fiction, and I remember thinking that the planets in them were too weird; there was no way anything like them could actually exist.

Ha! The Universe, as usual, is smarter and more clever than we are. There’s a lot of strange out there, and the more we look, the more we find.

^† Yes, I know, Star Wars fanbois, that that would be a better name for the star and not the planet, since Sarlacc was the creature that did the digesting, and was not itself digested. But if the star were Sarlacc, the planet would have to be named Boba Fett, and that’s just silly.

Artwork credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

Large Hadron Collider physicists have heard the voice of the "god particle," the Higgs boson, and it sounds a bit like a child’s music box. Lily Asquith, a physicist searching for the Higgs boson--the elementary particle believed to give everything in the universe mass--is using more than her eyes. With artists and other physicists, she started the LHCsound project to hear subatomic particles. New Scientist reports that the idea arose from a conversation between Asquith and percussionist Eddie Real:
“I was actually doing impersonations of different particles and trying to get him to develop them on his electronic drum kit.”
They decided to use real data about particles (and theoretical data for the yet unseen Higgs) to make some noise. In the process that Asquith calls “sonification,” the researchers match, for example, the particle’s momentum and energy to pitch and volume. The project's various simulations demonstrate that Higgs won’t be auditioning for Glee anytime soon. Still, Asquith believes that physicists might use her particle music as an analysis tool, since human ears can detect small differences in a sound's direction (within around three degrees) and frequency (around 0.3 percent). The aim of the project is to combine each particle's data from the LHC’s ATLAS detector into ...

Two males red-eyed tree frogs square off over a female. Fisticuffs will soon ensue and as a final challenge to each other, the males… er… vigorously shake their bums at each other. Their quivering buttocks shake the plants they sit on, sending threatening vibrations towards their rival. This secret line of communication has just been uncovered by Michael Caldwell from Boston University. To decipher these messages, he has used a hi-tech combination of infrared cameras, saplings rigged with accelerometers and even a cybernetic Robofrog.

During mating season, male red-eyed tree frogs gather in the rainforests of Panama to compete for females with dramatic multimedia performances, involving calls and visual signals. Studying these messages can be difficult because the frogs communicate at night. A white lamp would kill their natural behaviour, prompting males to become far more restrained than usual, save in the presence of females. Instead, Caldwell watched them under an infrared light. He pitted 38 pairs of frogs against each other, on plants fitted with accelerometers.

The frogs made two types of calls (chuckles and chacks), raised their bodies off their leaves and kicked out with their legs. And in every aggressive encounter, they also rapidly shook their bums, producing vibrations with a consistent high-pitched tone. The contests would last for anywhere from a minute to an hour. If the signalling didn’t work, the time was talk was over and violence ensued. Males would wrestle with each other, sometimes for hours on end (see right).

The vibrations, or ‘tremulations’, were clearly very important and were usually the last line of negotiation before battle commenced. The victor almost always shook for more time, created longer-lasting vibrations and was more likely to have the last shake. The frequencies of the vibrations were fairly constant although victors tended to produce higher-pitched tremulations if they were smaller than their rivals or similarly sized.

Of course, the sight of a frog shaking its bum is also quite striking, but Caldwell found that a male was no more likely to tremulate when his opponent was facing him than when he was turned away. This strongly suggests that the vibrations themselves were carrying information. In fact, every part of the male’s repertoire sends distinctive tremors through the plant, including his chuckles. Even the kicking legs seem to brush past the plant stems in the style of a musician plucking a guitar string.

Caldwell’s observations had been informative but he wanted to test the frogs’ behaviour. Enter Robofrog – a model equipped with an electric shaker and a prime directive is to provoke other males. When he made his own vibrations, living males responded accordingly and aggressively. By contrast, nothing happened when he sat still, when he made visual signs without tremulating, or when Caldwell exposed the test frogs to white noise vibrations in Robofrog’s absence.

All in all, these experiments show that competing red tree frogs use a secret channel of communication that most human observers would be completely unaware of. Vibrations are an excellent way of conveying messages in the rainforest, when the combination of darkness and dense foliage might prevent the conversers from seeing each other clearly. Exactly what they say is unclear, but they could provide information about the contender’s motivation or size. And they’re undoubtedly aggressive – the tree frog’s version of smack-talk.

So far, the red-eyed tree frog is the first back-boned animal that’s been clearly shown to communicate by shaking the surface it sits on. But Caldwell suspects that it’s far from the only one, especially since many other species are highly sensitive to vibrations. Tree-dwellers are probably particularly good at this, especially ones with larger bodies that can shake their supports more strongly.

Candidates include the male veiled chameleon, which shakes the branches it sits on in the presence of a female, and the female South Asian common tree frog, which seems to attract mates by tapping her toes on the plants that encircle their breeding sites. On the ground, and on a much bigger scale, elephants could also use vibrations as a sort of ‘seismic signal’. Nature is probably full of such hidden conversations, spoken in rumbles and tremors.

Reference: Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.03.069

Photos and videos by Michael Caldwell

More on frogs:

• Seven habits of highly successful toads
• South African wildlife – Foamy nest frog
• Common pesticide is good news for parasites, bad news for frogs
• ‘Wolverine’ frogs pop retractable claws from their toes
• First lungless frog discovered in Borneo

These boys are all dressed up with no place to go.

Two weeks from today, a team—made of three Russians, two Europeans, and one Chinese (with a Russian as an alternate)—will begin the longest trip to nowhere any of them has ever taken. These men will be locked in isolation for 520 days to simulate what astronauts would endure on a trip to Mars, part of a project called Mars500. It follows a 105-day test that the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) ran last year.

“The biggest risk of such an isolation is psychological,” said researcher Alexander Suvorov who is leading the experiment at the IBMP. “Of course relations between the crew will not always be harmonious, some will get on with others, others will not. But the priority is to be able to carry out tasks in spite of this” [AFP].

Five hundred and twenty days. By the time the team emerges from its five-module, 18,000-square foot cocoon located on the outskirts of Moscow, it’ll be early November 2011. Here in the United States, next year’s World Series will be wrapping up. The 2012 presidential candidates will be hitting the campaign trail in force. The isolation weary-crew may re-enter a world filled with high-pitched squeals as the new “Twilight” book and film come out.

The six-man crew of the Mars-500 project, which is partly funded by the European Space Agency, will spend the first 250 days in a mock spaceship to replicate the amount of time it would take to reach Mars with current technology. After reaching the [simulated] planet, three crewmembers will spend 30 days “exploring and colonizing” the planet before returning to the ship for the 240-day flight home, (deputy project leader Mark) Belakovsky said [BusinessWeek].

The simulation will introduce other difficulties expected with a Mars mission, like communication lag. The crew members can email the outside world, but they’ll experience disruptions and delays of up to 40 minutes. Even inside the complex it won’t be easy.

All crew members have a varying command of English, but not all speak Russian, another working language during the trip. “If we fail to understand each other, we will employ body language,” quipped Russian crew member Sukhrob Kamolov [ABC News].

Nevertheless, 6,000 people from 40 countries applied to be test subjects; it doesn’t hurt that the “astronauts” will all make at least $99,000 for their troubles. However, none of the participants from last year’s 105-day mission applied for this one, so perhaps being locked in the isolation of pretend space once is enough.

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80beats: Traveling to Mars? You’ll Need This Miniature Magnetic Force-Field
DISCOVER: Russia’s Dark Horse Plan to Get to Mars
DISCOVER: For the Love of Mars explores the Mars Society’s frontier vision

Image: IBMP/Oleg Voloshin

NEXT> If you feel like Christmas keeps creeping earlier every year, consider the companies who are trying to get their products ready for the holiday season. Yesterday, May 19, many companies showed off their wares at the Holiday Gift Guide Show in Times Square. There are plenty of new gizmos to buy when the calendar turn to December, don't worry. But we wanted to bring you a few of the delightfully odd or unexpected entries now. Why wait? Some are old, some are new, some are resurrected, and one is, well, blue. Thanks to the Forever White headset by Beaming White, my dream has finally come true: I can listen to the White Stripes while I whiten my teeth, all without whitening strips. Just put the hydrogen peroxide gel on your teeth, then strap on the headset and subject the gel to blue LED. All the while you can be pumping music through the headset. NEXT>

As of this writing, the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” Facebook page has nearly 83,000 likes and is rising steadily. Presumably, none of those fans are in the government of Pakistan, as the page prompted the conservative Muslim country to block first Facebook, but then also YouTube, parts of Wikipedia, and other Web sites—more than 450 in all.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) keeps itself busy scanning the Internet for material that it says would offend its population, the second-largest Muslim population of any country. Two years ago it temporarily banned YouTube until the site removed cartoons of Mohammed. Typically the PTA bans particular links, but this week it complained that the amount of objectionable material on Web was increasing and decided to cut off it citizens from some of the biggest sites on the Web. The ban is said to run through the end of May, giving Web sites the chance to remove offending materials if they choose.

Social networking sites are extremely popular in Pakistan, a country of 170 million, where more than 60 percent of the population is under the age of 25. Pakistan has about 25 million Internet users, almost all of them young, according to Adnan Rehmat, a media analyst in Islamabad [The New York Times].

The Facebook page in question, which itself was prompted by the South Park controversy in which Comedy Central censored an episode that would have depicted the Muslim prophet, encourages people to draw Mohammed today in a show of free speech.

Islam strictly prohibits the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous and Muslims all over the world staged angry protests over the publication of satirical cartoons of Mohammed in European newspapers in 2006 [AFP].

Also, extremists threatened South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone over the episode. From the description on the “Everybody Draw Mohammad” Facebook page:

We simply want to show the extremists that threaten to harm people because of their Mohammed depictions, that we’re not afraid of them. That they can’t take away our right to freedom of speech by trying to scare us to silence.

If you’re over at Facebook today, check out Discover Magazine’s page.

Related Content:
80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, or We Leave
80beats: Facebook Adds Location Feature, Subtracts Privacy (Again)
80beats: Facebook and Myspace Kick Out Thousands of NY Sex Offenders
80beats: Italian Court Convicts Google Execs for Hosting Illegal Video
80beats: Iran Blocks Gmail; Will Offer Surveillance-Friendly National Email Instead

Image: flickr / benstein

Last week, I wrote about a second investigation clearing climate change scientists from any wrongdoing in the horrid manufactured controversy of climategate. In that post, and an earlier one, I mentioned that Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli was starting a witch hunt, investigating the work of scientist Michael Mann while he was at the University of Virginia. Cuccinelli’s actions are transparently driven by political bias; Mann has been shown repeatedly to have worked honestly and above-board.

I’m not the only one who thinks that. Chris Mooney at The Intersection has quotes and links from a scathing Washington Post editorial, condemning Cuccinelli for his actions. And the Post doesn’t hold back, even calling UVa out, telling them to get a spine and stand up to this attack. Chris put up a second post about how scientists themselves have picked up this banner. Oh, and here’s a third post about the AAAS condemning Cuccinelli as well.

Ironically, Cuccinelli claims his investigation is because he thinks tax money was wasted or that Mann defrauded the tax payers… but it’s Cuccinelli’s investigation that’s the true waste of taxpayer money. This attack by him started after Mann was already exonerated, making Cuccinelli’s motives pretty clear. Oh, did I say "ironically"? I meant Orwellian.

On top of the Washington Post’s call, over 250 members of the National Academy of Sciences — the U.S.’s premier and most prestigious organization for science — have publicly condemned these attacks as well:

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. I urge everyone to read both the WashPo article and the full statement by the NAS.

And for you deniers who plague the comments of every blog post I make on this topic, loading it with obfuscation, noise, and distraction from the actual topic: these posts by me are not politically driven. In fact, given the opportunities for new businesses and new technology, preventing global climate change should be a major plank of the Republican Party, which claims to stand for such things.

So instead of blindly assaulting me with trivially ridiculous accusations, you might want to examine the motivations behind the political attacks on real science. Many of you claim to be skeptics. Well then, be skeptical, but be real skeptics. I am, and always have been — I’ve examined the claims, the science, and the techniques, and have come to the conclusion that global warming is real, and that humans are overwhelmingly the most likely cause of its recent acceleration.

I know I can say this all I want and it won’t help; the Noise Machine is impervious to logic and reality. But when you read those comments, you might want to keep this image in the back of your mind: