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Strange Stars Pulse To the Golden Mean
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from an article at Quanta Magazine:
What struck John Learned about the blinking of KIC 5520878, a bluish-white star 16,000 light-years away, was how artificial it seemed. Learned, a neutrino physicist at the University of Hawaii, Mnoa, has a pet theory that super-advanced alien civilizations might send messages by tickling stars with neutrino beams, eliciting Morse code-like pulses. "It's the sort of thing tenured senior professors can get away with," he said. The pulsations of KIC 5520878, recorded recently by NASA's Kepler telescope, suggested that the star might be so employed.
A "variable" star, KIC 5520878 brightens and dims in a six-hour cycle, seesawing between cool-and-clear and hot-and-opaque. Overlaying this rhythm is a second, subtler variation of unknown origin; this frequency interplays with the first to make some of the star's pulses brighter than others. In the fluctuations, Learned had identified interesting and, he thought, possibly intelligent sequences, such as prime numbers (which have been floated as a conceivable basis of extraterrestrial communication). He then found hints that the star's pulses were chaotic. But when Learned mentioned his investigations to a colleague, William Ditto, last summer, Ditto was struck by the ratio of the two frequencies driving the star's pulsations. "I said, 'Wait a minute, that's the golden mean.'"
A "variable" star, KIC 5520878 brightens and dims in a six-hour cycle, seesawing between cool-and-clear and hot-and-opaque. Overlaying this rhythm is a second, subtler variation of unknown origin; this frequency interplays with the first to make some of the star's pulses brighter than others. In the fluctuations, Learned had identified interesting and, he thought, possibly intelligent sequences, such as prime numbers (which have been floated as a conceivable basis of extraterrestrial communication). He then found hints that the star's pulses were chaotic. But when Learned mentioned his investigations to a colleague, William Ditto, last summer, Ditto was struck by the ratio of the two frequencies driving the star's pulsations. "I said, 'Wait a minute, that's the golden mean.'"
Isn't the only noteworthy thing about the golden ration that it appears so often in our world? So what's surprising about it showing up in a different location of the same world?
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Whoa, dude. Tenured professor? I dunno, maybe you should aim for something more achievable -- like, an astronaut, or a world-famous basketball star.
I'm only exaggerating a little. :b
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Clearly, we're seeing 5 stars in mutual orbit.
With a six hour orbit?
Yeah, wild guess.
Very wild. The aliens are more plausible.
A species that advertises its existence to the unknown is not an intelligent species.
The golden ratio has been observed in nature , in flowers etc . It could be a natural occurrence . One thing is for sure , the star must be one beautiful star .
Being a tenured prof facilitates blue sky thinking, but you are still expected to do all that other stuff such as sit on endless committees, do proper research, teach people, write papers and bring in research money. It is not all fairy lights and golden means!