What is science for? On the one hand, it’s about making things we need: new medicines, new forms of transportation etc. On the other hand, science is really about blowing your mind. That’s what today’s post is about. Blowing up your mind.
Today I’m going to do it with Lava Worlds.
When I was a graduate student we didn’t know if there were any planets other than the ones in our solar system. The Universe could have been impoverished when it came to alien worlds. Now we know every star in the sky hosts a family of worlds (we call them exo-planets). Even more amazing is the diversity of those exoplanets. We’ve found entire classes of worlds that don’t exist in our solar system.
Last week, when I was visiting Prof Lisa Kaltenegger at Cornell University, I got a deep dive into the exo-planet “species” known as Lava Worlds. These are rocky planets orbiting so close to their star that their surfaces rise above 3500 degrees F (for reference, room temperature is 65 oF and a pizza oven is only about 800 oF). At temperatures like 3500 oF, the entire planetary surface melts into what’s called a magma ocean.
A planet eternally engulfed in deep lava seas is a wicked and wild idea on its own. What would it be like to orbit such a nightmare world? Would you see currents of red-hot glowing magma swirling across the globe? We don’t know because we don’t know anything about Lava Worlds (other than that they exist).
Is that what a Lava World looks like? No one knows.
So to learn something about them, scientists like Kaltenegger and her post-doctoral researcher Jonas Biren need to do experiments. They need to melt rocks and see how they behave under conditions different from Earth.
One way to do this is with … wait for it now … a Levitation Furnace. I didn’t know what a Levitation Furnace was when Jonas introduced me to the idea. I did know the name sounded epic! It could be a new evil weapon for the Death Star.
The idea is, however, beautifully simple and far less dangerous. Use a powerful jet of air to get a small chunk of rock floating in the air. Then use lasers to zap the rock into a floating ball of magma. This is how researchers can use the Levitation Furnace to, for example, study what gases escape from magma. These gases can then form an atmosphere around the Lava world. Such atmospheres are the exact kind of thing we might see with the James Webb or other telescopes.
Later, as I talked with Kaltenegger and Biren, we hit on the most mind blowing idea of all. What if an advanced alien civilizations wanted to take a rocky world (like the Moon or Mercury) and do large scale metallurgy on it. This would mean turning an entire planet into a forge for industry (like the planet Mustafar in Star Wars). In that case, the aliens might purposely melt large areas of the planetary crust creating rivers of magma.
What does that sound like?
It’s an industrial version of a Lava World (or at least a partial Lava World). The cool thing about this idea is it might be easy to see such an industrialized planet (we call it a Service World) from across interstellar distances. What you’d see is a planet that should not be a Lava World (becuase it’s too far from its star) exhibiting all the properties of a Lava World. Detecting a world like this would be a clear indication of an advanced civilization at work. It’s a very, very cool idea and we are beginning to flesh it out into a research paper right now.
From Star Wars, Darth Vadar’s hell world of Mustafar
Lava Worlds, Service Worlds, Mustafars: who knows what’s out there right now as we here on Earth worry about whatever it is we have to worry about today. The Universe is full of wonders we can barely imagine. That, to me, is the real point of science. So… word of the day is… Levitation Furnace!
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PS If you have specific questions or issues you want me to address leave a comment on the website or email me at [email protected]
PPS I could not get this proof-read so please excuse typos etc.
— Adam Frank 🚀
