As detailed in the companion article [1], for every 54 orbits of planet 1, planets 2..6 orbit 36, 24, 16, 12, and 8 times respectively, giving successive ratios of 2/3, 2/3, 2/3, 3/4 and 3/4. After those 54 planet 1 orbits, all planets are in the same relative position.
It's mentioned in the preceding article and the two papers that are linked.
In spite of the title no one is wondering if aliens moved planets around to park them in special orbits. It's infinitely more likely the resonances developed naturally.
Also, none of the planets are in the habitable zone, so it's unlikely there's life on them.
Which is a shame, because if the star was much dimmer and they were in the habitable zone, the views would make a stunning tourist attraction.
I’m getting the sense they can be too close to form life, but can form further out with the right planetary characteristics. How often favorable atmospheres form would be interesting.
Taken another way: Venus’ atmosphere would get more “tame” further out. That might make it more conducive to life. But would its atmosphere still form at those distances? (Clearly it’s not impossible.)
The article seemed to imply such a system may be interesting as a "communication relay" for extraterrestrial civilizations. No matter what the system may attract anyone's attention
It is not at all clear to me why the harmonics makes it any more worth searching for aliens than any other solar system. a) Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to engineer this? b) Isn't it vastly more likely to occur naturally as some sort of resonance effect?
"Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to engineer this" Is a very similar answer to why humans would make microprocessors out of logic gates.
I'm in school for digital design at the moment, and stuff like oscillators and frequency dividers are at the very base/root of almost all electronic circuits.
One guess could be that alignments of planets in specific ways could be used to generate specific impulses of gravitational waves, the way we generate signals in binary. Imagine an alien race who uses gravitational effects from orbiting bodies as the basic building block of their "mega processors" that are the size of galaxies. So one solar system that has a division cycle of "2/3, 2/3, 2/3, 3/4 and 3/4" could be their representation of a value/"bit pattern" but written with planets in orbital mechanics, just like how we represent decimal 10 in binary 1010.
as an aside, it is very easy to also ask "why would humans spend so much energy taking silicate sand and turning it into intricate patterns at the size of angstroms and nano meters just to consume power? wouldn't it be easier to just let the sand organize itself into components as needed?" of course, the answer seems obvious to us, but the question is analogous to yours.
Or maybe, instead of using radio or a golden disc, the aliens decided to synchronize planets of some system (not necessarily theirs), in order to try to communicate intelligent life using the gravitational waves, so the message can reach much further - maybe even to other universes (there are various theories, that we might communicate with other universes in the multiverse using gravity, or maybe with the previous universe before the Big Bang... As well as an idea that the dark matter is another universe that we interact with only gravitationally).
I studied EE and identity with what you’re saying, but I suppose the natural follow-up questions would include an interrogation of the relative benefits of scale. In other words, why build a solar system sized oscillator? Surely, if one simply needs to maintain a clock—and if one has sufficient advanced knowledge and technology to influence the motion of planetary orbits on a large scale—why bother, when the decay of cesium atoms is readily available? The fun answer is because the intelligence responsible for such an endeavor exists on a scale such that this solar system is its equivalent of a cesium atom. But other smarter folks have already established the more likely scenarios elsewhere in this thread. It’s just fun to think about.
I can understand that it could be done as some sort of cosmic scale performance art. But I find it hard to understand that it would have any practical use. But, there again, aliens are likely to have very different thought processes.
yes exactly, the entire goal of my post was to describe how aliens could have entirely different thinking processes and/or scales than humans.
If one alien entity/organism is actually the size of a galaxy, a single solar system would be on the scale of maybe a transistor at 20-30 nm to us.
At that scale it's no longer performance art, but maybe a small part of a engine of some sort.
What I'm saying is thought patterns like "what is it for" "this is inefficient" or "that would be way too big" ... etc is only defined from our point of view.
For what it’s worth, all your comments on this perspective along with the silicon analogy are excellent and were eye opening for me. I too was dismissive and it took me a sec to really understand your analogy and point but I get it now. Nicely stated!
Moving planets out of existing orbit is another level. I can only imagine this is possible for a race who can plan multi million year projects and thus you can probably use rockets to do small
gravitational slingshots each day and rely on some compounding effect.
So these ancient granite constructions exhibit tool markings of computer-aided design precision, laser cutting, and power drilling. These enormous granite obselisks weigh more than even modern cranes can lift. But they were allegedly "hand-chiseled" and lifted from quarries by a dozen men with ropes. Yet no-one with actual modern computers and lasers and drills and cranes has been able to replicate any of it. Oh and every ancient structure is "ceremonial" that these stone age people built in their spare time.
>So these ancient granite constructions exhibit tool markings of computer-aided design precision, laser cutting, and power drilling.
Ok, I'll bite. Says who?
From the photos I have seen, the blocks look hand cut, not laser cut. I understand the blocks were cut with copper chisels and that archeologists found copper chisels in the quarries.
It is entirely believable that hundreds of men using ramps, ropes, grease and rollers could move these large blocks.
Don't let this distract you from the the fact that in 1966, Al Bundy scored four touchdowns in a single game while playing for the Polk High School Panthers in the 1966 city championship game versus Andrew Johnson High School, including the game-winning touchdown in the final seconds against his old nemesis, "Spare Tire" Dixon.
Maybe we are looking at a case of alien artificial intelligence, e.g. the classic hollywood scenario where an alien society was eventually replaced by sentient AI(e.g. kaylons, cylons, etc).
I would lean towards this as well. There are countless examples of interesting mathematical patterns in nature. One can get pulled down this rabbit hole by watching some of Randall Carlson's videos [1] and I can see why people could be intrigued by the intelligent patterns. Having said that I am not discounting the possibility of something or someone creating these patterns only that they are replete throughout the universe and even found in natural objects on Earth. There is probably a formula one could use if the mass and composition of the star and planets were known that would explain the orbits.
If a K1.5 wanted to do that just for shits and giggles, is there a viable way to slow down or speed up orbits of rocky planets? Like, wouldn't they be shooting a bunch of mass out of their system to even attempt this? If one could build a Dyson sphere, is that more difficult or less difficult than engineering a system like this? The sphere/swarm has some absurd amount of mass all in a very uniform orbit around the sun, and most of that mass didn't start there... so it sort of seems like it's equivalent (but if so, they're much closer to K2 than K1).
There's some principle that for a chaotic system, if the accuracy with which you can measure it is smaller than the largest perturbations you can make to it, you are willing to wait many Lyapunov times, and you have enough compute; then you can control the system. With this after a few dozens of millions of years you could control the small bodies of the solar system using relatively small thrusters and a big radar installation, and then put them all on aldrin cycler orbits to move momentum between the larger bodies.
> is there a viable way to slow down or speed up orbits of rocky planets?
You can fly something massive near a target planet, while using some kind of engine to keep a distance. Gravity will do the rest. It may take some time of course, but all you need is to do maintainance on an engine regularly.
> Like, wouldn't they be shooting a bunch of mass out of their system to even attempt this?
It depends on a type of an engine. If you use solar sail for example it is not the mass but light will be thrown out.
> one could build a Dyson sphere, is that more difficult or less difficult than engineering a system like this?
Sphere seems to me more difficult. Not in a sense of energies involved, but from a standpoint of engineering.
> After those 54 planet 1 orbits, all planets are in the same position.
Could you please explain what you mean by this, as to my layman's ears that sounds like either a confusingly-worded sentence, or an impossibility (multiple planets in the same location at the same time). Do they just all pass through one specific same location once per orbit but at different times? Or something else I'm not imagining?
The planets have nice harmonics, so that rather than planet 1 and planet 2 having some irrational ratio (planet 1 goes around every 2.64782362 times for planet 2) it's round fraction like 1/2. When you string the whole thing, the lowest common multiple of revolutions is 54, so that only every 54 planet-1-years, realignment returns.
The researchers hypothesize that this is sufficiently improbable to point toward an embodied intelligence as the cause.
The Devs thought this solar system was outside our render distance, so they used default placeholder values for everything. Should be patched in the next release.
The same thing said different.
Every 54 planet-one orbits,
a line from the star to planet-one would continue on through the rest of the planets.
(* assuming they are nominally on the same plane)
Neat. Is this something that tends to happen if there are large planets close to the star? In our solar system, the inner planets are small and the big outer planets are too far out to affect each other much.
[1] https://www.space.com/six-sub-neptunes-found-100-light-years...