Featured image of Pluto, taken by New Horizons during its flyby of the dwarf planet. Courtesy NASA, which has a spectacular gallery of other images too.

This week on These Vibes Are Too Cosmic, we interview Aida Behmard, a post-baccalaureate scholar at Princeton, whose research involves finding exoplanets and postulating about the types of extremophile alien life that might live there.

Aida has been digging through a trove of data from the HATNet project, a series of ground-based telescopes pointed up at swaths of the sky to try and find stars with planets orbiting around them. She searches through the history of telescope measurements, trying to find the moment when a planet orbits right in front of a star. When the star’s brightness decreases incrementally, the researchers can tell that a planet has blocked some starlight and thus can learn about the eclipsing planet. And it works–so far, the project has discovered 56 exoplanets around distant stars!

Motivated by the origins of life, Aida hopes to learn about the atmospheres of these new exoplanets and thus narrow down what kind of life might live there. These extremophile organisms, maybe used to harsh atmospheres and even radiation, could exist in many different forms surprisingly different from the kind of life we’re used to on Earth. To understand the possibilities, Aida communicates with biologists about what living structures might exist so far away.

We talked a bit about the wild astrophysical spirals that can exist around the centers of galaxies, active galactic nuclei. These insane structures have materials spinning inward into massive black holes, which produces violent amounts of radiation all over the spectrum–from radio waves to X-rays and beyond. Since these signals are so widespread (even including visible light, like the NASA image shown), it’s easy to see light from galactic nuclei all over the sky, through all kinds of telescopes that we use to observe outer space.

Finally, Aida is the director of a new outreach project at Princeton, Open Labs. This program organizes science talks aimed at different grade levels, and it brings in classes from local schools to hear about all kinds of research going on at Princeton. Check it out!

After Aida left, we went on to talk about the new observations of Pluto by NASA’s New Horizons mission. The new knowledge we have about Pluto’s geography is stunning, and will keep planetary geophysicists busy for years to come. The surface of the dwarf planet is mostly made of 40 Kelvin (supercold!) nitrogen and water, which are both solids at this temperature. Their consistency is different, though: the nitrogen ice is soft, like quicksand, and the water is rock-hard. Thus, Pluto has frozen features like Sputnik Planum, shown to the right. It’s a massive nitrogen sea, with glaciers and mountains of rock-ice floating around it and inside it. Still, there’s tons more to learn about Pluto, since the low-bandwidth connection we have with New Horizons means it will be months more before we harvest all its wonderful images.

To end the show, Stevie talked all about SIGSALY, a system of cryptography used in World War II that kept messages secret with vinyl records. These massive stations would be set up at important military bases around the world, and then two matching records (one message, one decoder) had to be played in unison for a highly-secret message to be understood. This technique, which involved briefcases of decoder records and 55 tons of high-tech processing equipment per station, paved the way for modern cryptographic techniques and data processing (that allows us to communicate in war and for you to use your cell phone).  Learn all about it here!

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Image courtesy The Nature Conservancy.

This week’s interview features  Dr. Paul Gauthier, an Associate Research Scholar in the Department of Geosciences here at Princeton University. As a plant physiologist, he’s an expert in plant behavior, including respiration and photosynthesis. Specificially, Paul researches the connection between environmental stresses and carbon balance within plants — how much carbon do they store (via photosynthesis) and how much do they exhale (via respiration)?

A key point that Paul stresses is the delicate balance most plants maintain between storing energy and releasing it. Like us, all plants have to breath all the time, expelling CO2 into the atmosphere. While the trunk, roots, and branches all respire, the leaves of the plant photosynthesize energy out of sunlight to store new energy for further growth. Every plant invests years and years of energy into stores for later growth: just check out this video of an acorn, which shows the slow growth from seed to shrub of an oak tree. All this energy had to be produced and saved by the parent tree that produced the acorn!

Paul’s science analyzing the carbon balance within plants goes from the lab (where sunflowers are his favorite specimen) to the natural forests of Sweden. There, Paul and his group can investigate the strange effect that 24-hour days can have on plants–imagine staying awake without a rest for two months on end, as all trees north of the Arctic Circle must do. Such stresses introduce interesting adaptations into the plants genes, which help them respire less, and thus hold on to their carbon more efficiently.

As climate change transforms the environment around us, plants are especially susceptible to small changes. Paul explains that a drought in California, made more common by climate change’s dramatic effects, can deplete a plant’s storage of carbon and energy. A particular tree may seem healthy as soon as extreme weather ends, but in reality it will take many years to bounce back from using up all its invested energy. In this way, it’s hard to measure the immediate impact of climate change on forests: detrimental effects may not appear for 8-10 years.

You can keep up on Paul’s research by following him on Twitter! @LabGauthier

Finally, Stevie and Brian end the show with a re-cap of gravity waves (which you’ve been hearing about all over the news this week, and as Stevie predicted on our previous show). The LIGO experiment successfully detected a faint signal of spacetime fluctuations, which match Einstein’s predictions exactly. Somewhere a billion light-years away, two massive black holes collided and caused a ripple in the fabric of our space to propagate toward the Earth–just in time for us to measure it! Physicists are hugely excited about the new possibilities this discovery gives us for understanding our universe, and we hope you’ll pay attention for new developments. Who knows what we’ll eventually find.