A couple of months ago, 15 September to be precise, marked the end of an era in the human exploration of our solar system. The Cassini spacecraft was programmed to crash into Saturn’s upper atmosphere and burn up, thus ending an almost two-decade journey and exploration of Saturn and its moons. I was in middle school when this mission launched in 1997, and at that point, even reaching Saturn in 2004 seemed eons away. Twenty years later, perhaps it’s time to look back at some of the amazing insights we’ve gained.

Cassini is actually a shortened name for the Cassini-Huygens mission, and comprises the main spacecraft — Cassini — designed to travel as a satellite in the Saturn planetary system, and a small lander — Huygens — designed to actually land on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

Giovanni Cassini was an Italian mathematician and astronomer, and discovered four of Saturn’s moons — Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys and Dione. The Cassini spacecraft was the first to observe all four of these moons. Christiaan Huygens was, of course, a famous Dutch astronomer and scientist, and discovered — but of course — Titan, then the first known moon of Saturn. (He also invented the pendulum clock, was mentor to Gottfried Leibniz, studied optics and the wave nature of light, and derived the modern formula for centripetal force.)

Saturn by Cassini (via Wikipedia).

Of the many discoveries made by Cassini, I’ll focus on just two stories: those of Saturn’s largest moon Titan, and Saturn’s hexagon. Both of these fascinate me to no end, and I think reflect the best of Cassini’s contributions.

Saturn's Polar Hexagon

Jupiter is famous for its Great Red Spot; Saturn has its own atmospheric phenomenon that’s equally fascinating. Saturn’s Hexagon was first discovered by the Voyager missions, but now Cassini has had the chance to see it from up close.

Technically, the Hexagon is a persisting cloud pattern formed by jet streams around Saturn’s north pole, but its sheer size and perfect symmetry make it unique. Each side of the hexagon is about 13800km long (to compare, Earth’s diameter is about 12700km), and its winds travel at around 300km/h. It’s been there since the Voyager missions in the 1980s, so we know its long-lived.

Saturn - North polar hexagon and vortex as well as rings (April 2, 2014) (via Wikipedia).

On Earth, our jet streams are forced to bend and move in response to Earth’s surface features such as mountains. Saturn is much larger than Earth (Saturn diameter is about 116000km) but has a rocky core that’s similar in size to Earth, and so its jet streams have no such problems, and can keep flowing in their own orderly and symmetrical fashion.

The hexagon is essentially a quirk of fluid mechanics. Here on Earth, scientists have been able to create (here, and here) such regular shapes by rotating a circular tank of liquid at different speeds at its center and outer edge. Due to the difference in speeds, a turbulent region is created where such regular shapes can be observed. The regular shape is not always a hexagon (shapes with three to eight sides, i.e. from a triangle to an octagon, are produced) but a hexagon is the most commonly occurring. However, the phenomenon only occurs when the speed differential and fluid properties fall under certain small margins, and therefore the hexagon phenomenon is not observed everywhere where its possible (such as Jupiter, or even the south pole of Saturn).

At the center of the Hexagon, right at the north pole, is a humongous storm, with a definite and easily observed eye wall. The south pole has such a storm as well, although it doesn’t display a Hexagon. In each case, the eye of the storm is about 50 times wider than a hurricane would be on Earth.

As much as the Hexagon is an atmospheric and scientific phenomenon, explained and replicated under lab conditions, it’s one of our solar system’s most beautiful sights, and something I’ll keep looking for in photos of Saturn, now that I know it’s there.

False color image of storms at Saturn’s north pole (via JPL/NASA).

Titan

Titan is Saturn’s largest moon, and of special interest to us: Titan is the only known moon with an atmosphere, and the only one other than Earth whose atmosphere is majority nitrogen. Moreover, its atmosphere is denser and more massive than ours, and is opaque at many wavelengths of light. This means that, like Venus, we had no idea of what the surface of Titan looks like until we had a probe that could land on the surface of Titan. Thanks to Cassini and Huygens, we know a lot more today about Titan than we did in 2004.

Titan, we know now, has an active weather system, including wind and liquid rain, just like on Earth. Of course, the liquid that rains is different from Earth: it rains liquid methane on Titan. Nevertheless, its nitrogen atmosphere and presence of liquids means that Titan’s methane cycle is analogous to Earth’s water cycle. Titan’s upper atmosphere is also affected by ultraviolet light from the Sun, whereby atmospheric methane is broken down and reconstituted into a diverse mix of complex hydrocarbons.

We’re not done yet with the comparisons with Earth! Titan has lakes and oceans, comprised of methane, ethane, and dissolved nitrogen; this makes Titan only the second object in the Solar System (after Earth) to have stable liquids present at ambient temperatures. It most likely also has volcanoes, and is affected by tidal effects from Saturn’s massive gravity. Titan’s surface, specifically where Huygens landed, looks uncannily like Earth, with ‘globules’ about 10-15cm in size, made probably of water ice.

Huygens’ view of Titan’s surface (via Wikipedia).

It’s almost as if Titan is an analogue of Earth— only much colder. In fact, in very specific ways it’s not even colder by much thanks to Titan’s greenhouse effect and tidal heating from Saturn. Cassini has performed numerous gravity measurements of Titan, which reveal that there is a hidden, internal, ocean of liquid water and ammonia beneath Titan’s surface.

So, to summarize, Titan has: an active weather system, large quantities of complex hydrocarbons (Titan is much, much richer in hydrocarbons than Earth), tidal effects from Saturn, and interaction of its atmospheric methane with ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, and even and underground ocean of liquid water and ammonia. A question is begging to be asked at this point: what are the chances of life (past, present or future) on Titan?

Scientists think Titan definitely has the potential to contain habitable environments. Similar to Earth in its infancy, Titan today has the pieces needed for new life to possibly form. Whether it already has, or the extent of future possibility, can only be understood with even better exploration. Indeed, quite a few ideas for future missions dedicated to Titan have been proposed, but none have really gotten off the ground (pun intended) yet.

The most promising of them all is a design to send a submarine to Titan that can explore the seas of Titan, but even this idea is in relatively early stages.

So Much More...

I’ve really just scratched the surface here of how much the Cassini mission gleaned from the Saturn system. There’s so much more: Saturn’s rings and their composition; the moon Enceladus and its jets of icy particles and subsurface ocean of salty water; the moon Iapetus and its equatorial ridge; the moon Mimas and its crater that gives it the Death Star look… trust me, if you don’t take an interest yet, you will once you start reading.

The Cassini-Huygens mission really gave us glimpses into a planetary system that provides great opportunities for scientific discovery, amazing new and diverse worlds, and even — dare we dream? — possibilities of places that can harbor life.

It’s time to say adios to Cassini, but of course, we humans have a long way to go before we can say we know our own solar system.

Saturn’s moon Mimas, with the crater Herschel visible prominently (via Wikipedia).

(This piece first appeared in the 2017 edition of Sharod Sombhar, an annual magazine from the Bengali Students’ Association at Virginia Tech.)

I know this can be hard to picture in your head, but the beauty of it is that once you do, this map sings. You can instantly see what’s what: the motion of the gas, where it’s more dense than other locations, how it’s distributed. It also shows our location in the galaxy! All those changing velocities depend on the Sun’s velocity, the velocity of the gas, but also the direction of the Sun’s motion and its position in the Milky Way’s disk. That’s a stunning amount of information.

This is fascinating.

They call it Tabby’s star. It is a main sequence star quite similar to our Sun, and is about 1500 light years away from us, in the region of the constellation Cygnus. And it’s a particularly odd one. It was studied using the Kepler Space Observatory, which is the space telescope used for identifying planets orbiting distant stars. All of the exoplanet discoveries in the news over the past few years is due to Kepler.

To understand what’s odd about Tabby’s star, we need to know how Kepler operates. What it does is measure — very accurately — the apparent brightness of stars over time. If the apparent brightness of a star changes, that data is used to find patterns in how much and when the brightness changes occur.

Consider what happens with a planet revolving around a star. The apparent brightness of the star dips every time the planet passes in front — i.e. to observers here on Earth — of the star, and the amount and duration of the dip correlates with the size and velocity of the planet. This process works well, and has helped in the discovery of many, many exoplanets revolving around numerous star systems.

Now that we know the basics, here’s why Tabby’s star is so intriguing. Tabby’s star shows small dips in brightness that are both frequent and non-periodic. It has also shown two large recorded dips separated by two years time. How large are the large dips? Where a Jupiter sized planet would have obstructed the star by about 1%, the large dips obscure the star by as much as 15% to 22%. Whatever is blocking the star light during the major dips is not a planet — it is obscuring almost half the width of the star.

That’s not all. It turns out, even without the obscuring, the light output from Tabby’s star seems to be diminishing over time. It turns out, we have observational data about this star since 1890 (via numerous photographs that contain this star in the image), and it seems to have faded by 20% from 1890 to 1989! Even if such old and long-term data is deemed inaccurate, Tabby’s star has definitely diminished in the recent past, in the era of modern measurements. It seems to dim at a slow steady rate, with one short period of a more dramatic fading.

What could be causing such behavior? A number of hypotheses have been proposed, but none of them fully explain the observations. Could it be a young star with coalescing planetary material floating around it? Nope; no such evidence found. Could there be debris from planets that have collided and created clouds of debris and dust? Nope; this is not supported by observations. Could it be a huge number of disintegrating comets orbiting the star? Nope: they wouldn’t obscure the star’s luminosity by as much as 22%.

Well, could it be aliens?

We on Earth are starting to realize how important it is to harness the Sun’s energy as much as we can. We as a civilization have already fantasized about the creation of a huge structure that captures solar energy from every direction, not just from Earth, and using that energy as our planetary energy needs soar. Such a structure is a sphere that “covers” the Sun, and is called a Dyson Sphere, after the scientist who wrote a paper about it in 1960.

Dyson speculated that such a structure would become inevitable as a civilization advances and its energy needs escalate. Realistically, of course, the “sphere” wouldn’t be an actual sphere (imagine how big the sphere would have to be, and how it would revolve around the Sun!), but a “swarm” of smaller objects revolving around the Sun, like satellites. Collectively, they would serve a similar purpose.

What if the observations of Tabby’s star are the tell-tale signs of an alien civilization building a Dyson Swarm? It would explain the long-term fading, and also the sharp dips in its brightness. It would not be a planet; it’d be an artificial mega-structure being slowly constructed. Such construction projects could very easily — by design — obscure 22% of the star’s luminosity.

It’s an idea, and it’s a pretty fantasy for earthlings in the infancy of space-flight, but this idea does have its caveat. An advanced civilization would most likely have a lot of radio signal emissions (we do too — our TV and radio signals are propagating into space at the speed of light) that we should be able to detect. The SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project spent two weeks studying the star system in October 2015, but did not find any technology-related radio signals in multiple frequency spectra.

If you can’t contain your excitement about the possibility of alien life, you still have hope. Whatever the caveat, and however slim the chances, scientists have not been able to rule out this possibility. More studies are planned that will devote resources — including that of SETI — towards studying Tabby’s star and its surroundings, and we will know more in 2017. If they’re really an advanced alien civilization, for all we know, they might have decided (and have the capability) to stop their radio signals from propagating into deep space!

If you’re apprehensive about finding aliens capable of — and in need of! — harnessing all of its star’s energy, you still have hope. What are the chances? For all the advancements we have made in astronomy and the study of the heavens, we really do yet have a lot to learn. When we observe anomalous behavior through our telescopes, the anomaly is due to limitations in our technology or understanding. What are the chances that this is the one case where our knowledge is perfect and the observations are unnatural?

Either way, this is one star we are certain to keep in our sights. The next few years will tell us more — about how little we know about the stars, or about how we’re not alone in the universe.

Updates:

• This recent paper confirms that Tabby’s Star has faded throughout the duration of it being observed by Kepler. Other stars were also observed at the same time, and none of them fade at such a drastic rate. (doi:10.3847/2041-8205/830/2/L39)
• The “Breakthrough Listen” project, backed by Prof. Stephen Fleming Hawking (oops, bad typo!) and funded by $100 million, will be used to observe Tabby’s star.

(This piece first appeared in the 2016 edition of Sharod Sombhar, an annual magazine from the Bengali Students’ Association at Virginia Tech.)

This post contains spoilers. Please go watch the movie, and then read this. Seriously, go watch. This is an all-time movie, and I have a feeling this will stand the test of time and gain even more popularity as time goes on. This one is that good.

I just had to jot down some thoughts about the movie — and particularly the science therein. One, I’m interested in this stuff, and can’t help it. But also, two, I heard people pooh-poohing it away, and I didn’t like that at all. So here goes.

In summary: I loved it. This is what science-fiction is supposed to look like — a combination of adventure and extrapolation of real science into the unknown. I’ve been reading and hearing some of the negative ‘reviews’, and it seems to me that most of it revolves around “hey, that’s not science, it’d never work that way!” The great thing about this movie is most of the ‘extrapolations’ are in directions that are truly unknown, and until science does cover those areas, your, mine, and the Nolans’ imagination is as good as anyone’s.

• I loved the scientific accuracy. I usually hate it when films get their premises wrong. This one got the science right — mostly. (We’ll go into details soon.)
• I loved that a wormhole near Saturn wouldn’t just appear out of thin vacuum. I loved that they didn’t create some bunkum theory for man to create a wormhole, and just went with “we don’t know”.
• I loved that tidal wave on the first planet. That wasn’t just there as a plot point — being near a black hole is supposed to cause that. Giant tidal forces should be a norm near a black hole, and it was.
• I did NOT like the fact that a planet could exist so near to a black hole. I think they showed the planet to be basically situated right near the ‘edge’ of the black hole, and at that distance, with a planetary mass, the tidal forces should work on the solids too, and basically tear the planet apart. Crucially, it’s not impossible, though. (Here again, they’re stretching the limits of the science, at most. Lovely.)

• I did NOT like the fact that 23 years elapsed on the spaceship in orbit, when only a few (three?) hours elapsed on the surface of the first planet.

  Remember, it’s not the gravity of the planet that’s causing the time-dilation, but the nearby black hole. So the premise is that they ‘parked’ the orbiting space craft at such a distance that time dilation effects were negligible, when compared to that at the planet surface.

  Now remember that they took 8 months to travel to Mars, and 2 years to travel to Saturn. Granted, they were using gravity assists and not direct thrust, so the interplanetary voyage took longer. But it gives an idea of the orders of magnitude involved here. Let’s say that using direct thrust of the smaller craft they can travel the distance between Earth and Saturn in 3 hours. Fair? (If I’m doing the math right, Earth-Saturn is about 1.5 light-hrs, so light would take 1.5hrs to get there.)

  There’s no way that that distance causes a relative time-dilation of 23 years in the vicinity of a black hole, and does not pulverize the planet itself. That right there was all wrong. - I did NOT like that Coop is thrown back into 3D space through the same wormhole that they originally went through. A wormhole is supposed to be like a tunnel. You go in one end; you come out another end. They went in one end (Saturn), and came out somewhere in the vicinity of the black hole, but not out of the black hole itself.

  If so, why would another wormhole originating inside the black hole lead back to an opening to a separate wormhole near Saturn?! That did not sit well with me. - I loved the black hole and event horizon sequences and visualizations. I’ll trust Dr. Kip Thorne and Cornell University grad students that they got the details right. It all looked amazing. - I loved the treatment of time as “just another dimension to travel through”. Seriously, we don’t really know what happens inside black holes, and one possibility is indeed that 4-dimensional spacetime can be mashed together. Beyond that, as I mentioned earlier, it’s an artist’s realm, and I liked what they did with it. It was convenient, of course, that the particular area of spacetime that Coop confronted from within the black hole was precisely the spacetime that he needed to confront, but we can allow that much cinematic coincidence, can’t we? - I did NOT like the idea of conveying through Morse code, via the seconds hand of a wrist watch, no less, experimental data regarding quantum mechanics and relatively. (What other ‘data’ would the robot ‘collect’ from within a black hole?!) I wish they could find a more ingenious way to achieve this. - I am okay with the idea that they only needed experimental data from within the black hole to complete their theory of quantam gravity. Perhaps they had a bunch of ‘general solutions’ and the experimental data allowed them to arrive at ‘particular solutions’. Not beyond the imagination, by any stretch. - Hans Zimmer, take a bow. Such a brilliant score! - I have to watch the movie again. I don’t think I’ve taken it all in, in one sitting. Christopher Nolan, keep making movies.

Remember the Russian spacecraft—headed for Mars—that failed mysteriously recently not long after takeoff? There were a few suggested reasons for the failure—such as effects due to cosmic rays from the sun, and the result of exposure to US radars

Well, turns out the reasons were more prosaic than that–the craft failed due to a programming error! Two channels of the onboard computer rebooted simultaneously—which evidently they were not supposed to do.

Amazing how the most complex missions can be undone by relatively simpler errors—remember the NASA Mars mission that failed due to a mistake in the units used?