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.'"

Comments

Ok That's Pretty Freaky

[Greyfox]

But this is sort of thing that was the reason behind all the early mathematicians being batshit crazy. Math is man's model of the universe and it's always been a good enough model that you start discovering all sorts of stuff in math that exactly mirrors the world around us. You start to think maybe there's some hidden power there, that maybe math can predict everything. Then you form a cult and start attracting followers and have to be put down by the government of the time. Er, or something. And that's just some one-trick hack with a lever or a screw or something. Imagine what would have happened if one of those guys had stumbled across hyperbolic geometry. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it was a very nice lever, but it didn't even go into the 4th dimension! I mean... er... what were we talking about again?

Well it's better than blasting out a radio signal

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, a radio signal that's readily detectable by primitive civilizations like ours, assumedely the only reason to blast out a fantastically strong signal at all in all directions instead of a tightbeam, would take more energy than all of human civilization produces slammed into one radio transmitter just to be "heard" as it were. A huge engineering product just to say "Hello World" or "Hello Galaxy" as it were.

On the other hand, we already look at stars as it is, and all they do is blast out radiation. If you could fluctuate it to a noticeable degree that would save a lot of energy versus actually producing all that energy yourself, and besides all the energy being flung out by the star is going to be lost as it is. Might as well use it for something.

Not much of a coincidence

[Celarent Darii]

The two numbers Phi and Pi are actually related by trigonometry, so it is hardly surprising that they would show up in a ratio concerning the rotation of stars.

If you divide a circle into 5 sections of 2*Pi/5 each you will get the five points of a pentagon, whose dimensions are all based on phi relationships [i.e. the Golden Mean]. Thus one can state:

2 * cos (Pi / 5) = Phi or
2 * sin (Pi / 5) = sqrt ( 3 - Phi )

or even better:

Pi = 5 arccos (Phi / 2)

that is,

Phi = 1 - 2 * cos (3 * Pi / 5)

So it is not entirely strange that the simple harmonic motion of a star could be expressed as some ratio of Phi.

It's all numbers, numbers all the way down.