Measurements from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have enabled astronomers to greatly improve their understanding of the bizarre environment of KELT-9 b, one of the hottest planets known.
“The weirdness factor is high with KELT-9 b,” said John Ahlers, an astronomer at Universities Space Research Association in Columbia, Maryland, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s a giant planet in a very close, nearly polar orbit around a rapidly rotating star, and these features complicate our ability to understand the star and its effects on the planet.”
Explore KELT-9 b, one of the hottest planets known. Observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have revealed new details about the planet’s environment. The planet follows a close, polar orbit around a squashed star with different surface temperatures, factors that make peculiar seasons for KELT-9 b.Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
The new findings appear in a paper led by Ahlers published on June 5 in The Astronomical Journal.
Located about 670 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, KELT-9 b was discovered in 2017 because the planet passed in front of its star for a part of each orbit, an event called a transit. Transits regularly dim the star’s light by a small but detectable amount. The transits of KELT-9 b were first observed by the KELT transit survey, a project that collected observations from two robotic telescopes located in Arizona and South Africa.
Between July 18 and Sept. 11, 2019, as part of the mission’s yearlong campaign to observe the northern sky, TESS observed 27 transits of KELT-9 b, taking measurements every two minutes. These observations allowed the team to model the system’s unusual star and its impact on the planet.
KELT-9 b is a gas giant world about 1.8 times bigger than Jupiter, with 2.9 times its mass. Tidal forces have locked its rotation so the same side always faces its star. The planet swings around its star in just 36 hours on an orbit that carries it almost directly above both of the star’s poles.
KELT-9 b receives 44,000 times more energy from its star than Earth does from the Sun. This makes the planet’s dayside temperature around 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit (4,300 C), hotter than the surfaces of some stars. This intense heating also causes the planet’s atmosphere to stream away into space.
Its host star is an oddity, too. It’s about twice the size of the Sun and averages about 56 percent hotter. But it spins 38 times faster than the Sun, completing a full rotation in just 16 hours. Its rapid spin distorts the star’s shape, flattening it at the poles and widening its midsection. This causes the star’s poles to heat up and brighten while its equatorial region cools and dims — a phenomenon called gravity darkening. The result is a temperature difference across the star’s surface of almost 1,500 F (800 C).
With each orbit, KELT-9 b twice experiences the full range of stellar temperatures, producing what amounts to a peculiar seasonal sequence. The planet experiences “summer” when it swings over each hot pole and “winter” when it passes over the star’s cooler midsection. So KELT-9 b experiences two summers and two winters every year, with each season about nine hours.
“It’s really intriguing to think about how the star’s temperature gradient impacts the planet,” said Goddard’s Knicole Colón, a co-author of the paper. “The varying levels of energy received from its star likely produce an extremely dynamic atmosphere.”
KELT-9 b’s polar orbit around its flattened star produces distinctly lopsided transits. The planet begins its transit near the star’s bright poles and then blocks less and less light as it travels over the star’s dimmer equator. This asymmetry provides clues to the temperature and brightness changes across the star’s surface, and they permitted the team to reconstruct the star’s out-of-round shape, how it’s oriented in space, its range of surface temperatures, and other factors impacting the planet.
“Of the planetary systems that we’ve studied via gravity darkening, the effects on KELT-9 b are by far the most spectacular,” said Jason Barnes, a professor of physics at the University of Idaho and a co-author of the paper. “This work goes a long way toward unifying gravity darkening with other techniques that measure planetary alignment, which in the end we hope will tease out secrets about the formation and evolutionary history of planets around high-mass stars.”
TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia; NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.
Banner image: This illustration shows how planet KELT-9 b sees its host star. Over the course of a single orbit, the planet twice experiences cycles of heating and cooling caused by the star’s unusual pattern of surface temperatures. Between the star’s hot poles and cool equator, temperatures vary by about 1,500 F (800 C). This produces a “summer” when the planet faces a pole and a “winter” when it faces the cooler midsection. So every 36 hours, KELT-9 b experiences two summers and two winters. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA)
Where Sir James Dyson failed, Sir Jim Ratcliffe hopes to succeed. Both self-made billionaire entrepreneurs have ploughed millions of their own money in to producing their dream project of a great British car.
The Grenadier is set to go into production in South Wales in 2021 (Image: Supplied)
Dyson had to withdraw from the battle late last year, but Ratcliffe – one of the UK’s richest men – hopes he will triumph with his “Grenadier” 4×4 rugged off-road vehicle. Unveiled today, the Grenadier’s no-nonsense styling is just what Sir Jim wanted. “It needs to be an uncompromising off-roader,” he said at the start of the project. Set to go into production in South Wales in 2021, it will create hundreds of jobs in the hard-pressed British car industry.
CEO Dirk Heilmann is undaunted by launching a brand new car in the wake of a global pandemic economic crisis.
“I’m not nervous,” says the chief of Ineos Automotive, the car-making division of Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s petrochemical global empire. “We’re not deterred by what’s going on at the moment because we believe this vehicle has a place. It’s durable, reliable and very capable. A tool you need to go exploring, pursue adventures you want to conquer.”
Dyson spent £500 million of his own fortune before scrapping his car.
“We are beyond conceptual phases now,” insists Heilmann. “We are investing a £1,000m in this venture and made the decision very early on that we are going all the way with this. We’ve invested significantly in our supply chain already and are going all the way to bring this vehicle to market.”
It was the expense of battery power development that eventually defeated Dyson, but Ratcliffe’s Grenadier contains a state-of the-art BMW Twin-Power six-cylinder turbocharged petrol and diesel engine.
“In time the electric motor will take over, “says Heilmann, “but as Mr Dyson and others have found out, if you want an electric motor you need to solve the problem with the energy, and for this kind of vehicle we feel it needs to be powered by more than battery because that would eat into our payload, costs and weight.”
Sir Jim Ratcliffe outside Grenadier pub that inspired name of new car (Image: Supplied)
In the future Ineos Automotive plans to develop hydrogen fuel cells but in the meantime “you have to be sensible with your solutions and the infrastructure needs to be there. In the middle of nowhere it’s very hard to find a plug.”
“The internal combustion engine still has a place and we’ve made sure we’ve got the most efficient and economically viable power plant.”
On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created over the past 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.
I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.
But as an energy expert asked by the US congress to provide objective testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to serve as a reviewer of its next assessment report, I feel an obligation to apologise for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.
Here are some facts few people know:
* Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
* The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
* Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
* Fires have declined 25 per cent around the world since 2003
* The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
* The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
* Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany and France since the mid-1970s
* The Netherlands became rich, not poor, while adapting to life below sea level
* We produce 25 per cent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
* Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
* Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels, and Preventing future pandemics requires more, not less, “industrial” agriculture.
The author’s new book.
I know the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism. In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and other leading scientific bodies.
Some people will, when they read this, imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s co-operatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.
Green beginnings
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $US90bn into them. Over the past few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions.
But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilisation, and called it a “crisis”.
The author second from right in Brazil in 1985. Picture: Michael Shellenberger
But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.
I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke Jr, a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favour of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse. But then, last year, things spiralled out of control. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “climate change kills children”.
Turning point
The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilisations”. Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world”, and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.
As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.
Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.
I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence. And so my formal apology for our fearmongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany and France since the mid-1970s.
It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialisation, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.
Some highlights from the book:
* Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
* The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
* The most important thing for reducing pollution and emissions is moving from wood to coal to petrol to natural gas to uranium
* 100 per cent renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5 per cent to 50 per cent
* We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
* Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4 per cent
* Greenpeace didn’t save the whales — switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
* “Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300 per cent more emissions
* Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon, and
* The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants.
Why were we all so misled? In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable”. And status anxiety, depression and hostility to modern civilisation are behind much of the alarmism.
The most important thing for reducing pollution and emissions is moving from wood to coal to petrol to natural gas to uranium.
Reality bites
Once you realise just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavoury motivations, it is hard not to feel duped. Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it. The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop. The ideology behind environmental alarmism — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.
But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.
A real crisis
The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, COVID-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.
Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicisation of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform. Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.
Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.
The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilisation is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilisation that climate alarmists would return us to.
Greenpeace didn’t save the whales — switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did.
The invitations from IPCC and congress are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment. Another one has been to the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science, Tom Wigley.
“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love’: a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”
That is all I hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist and progressive felt the need to speak out against the alarmism. I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.
Michael Shellenberger is president of Environmental Progress, an independent research and policy organisation. He is the author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, published by Harper Collins
Renewables zealots tout Germany as the benchmark for the ‘inevitable transition’ to wind and solar, but its energy system is a complete debacle.
Germany’s so-called Energiewende (energy transition) has turned into a power pricing and supply calamity. Which was as perfectly predictable as it was perfectly avoidable.
Germany’s obsession with intermittent wind and solar was never going to end well. Power prices are now the highest in Europe, if not the world. But paying for power is only a problem for those Germans who are lucky enough to be supplied with it.
As Francis Menton points out below, anyone claiming that we’re well on our way to an all wind and sun powered future has probably spent too much time in the sun. Moreover, those relying on Germany to bolster their claims about an ‘inevitable transition’ to wind and solar should start looking for another example.
Reality Is Gradually Catching Up To Green Energy
Manhattan Contrarian
Francis Menton
8 June 2020
If you dutifully read your U.S. mainstream media, you undoubtedly have the impression that “clean” and “green” energy is rapidly sweeping all before it, and soon will supplant fossil fuels in powering our economy. After all, many major states, including California and New York, have mandated some form of “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, or in some cases even earlier. That’s only 30 years away. And reports are everywhere that investment in “renewables,” particularly wind and solar energy, continues to soar. For example, from Reuters in January we have “U.S. clean energy investment hits new record despite Trump administration views.” In the New York Times on May 13 it’s “In a First, Renewable Energy Is Poised to Eclipse Coal in U.S.” The final victory of wind and solar over the evil fossil fuels must then be right around the corner.
Actually, that’s all a myth. The inherent high cost and unreliability of wind and solar energy mean that they are highly unlikely ever to be more than niche players in the overall energy picture. Politicians claim progressive virtue by commissioning vast farms of wind turbines and solar panels, at taxpayer or ratepayer expense, without anyone ever figuring out — or even addressing — how these things can run a fully functioning electrical grid without complete fossil fuel backup. And the electrical grid is the easy part. How about airplanes? How about steel mills? I’m looking for someone to demonstrate that this “net zero” thing is something more than a ridiculous fantasy, but I can’t find it.
To stay grounded in reality, there is no better source than the multiple-times-weekly email from the Global Warming Policy Foundation. If you do not already receive these emails, you can go here to subscribe. As is typical, today’s email searches out back pages and specialized sources to bring us multiple pieces showing green energy running into its inevitable wall, with no known way to get past. (Full disclosure: I am on the Board of the GWPF’s American affiliate.)
The German program that’s spurred the nation’s switch to green power is buckling under the weight of surging costs and needs an urgent fix. That’s the assessment of one of the scheme’s chief designers, Hans Josef Fell. . . . Yet the system’s increasing costs have become glaring in the during the coronavirus pandemic, the veteran Green Party lawmaker said. High and guaranteed payments made to investors in clean power plants are the problem Fell said in an interview.
It seems that to get its wind and solar facilities built, Germany put in place guaranteed payments to producers that would kick in if market prices for power were insufficient. The guaranteed payments are divvied up and added to consumer electricity bills. This year, with prices for alternative fossil fuels plummeting, the guaranteed payments are projected to come in at some 26 billion euros — which is around $100 per month for every German household, on top of electricity prices that were already about triple the U.S. average. Of course, Chancellor Merkel is proposing a “fix,” which is a government bailout as part of a supposed coronavirus relief package. That may work for a little while. Then what?
Also from Germany, we have a piece from the Financial Times of June 8 with the headline “Environmentalists on back foot as Germany’s newest coal plant opens.” What?? — Opening a new coal power plant right in the midst of a transition away from fossil fuels?? What happened here is that they are closing all their nuclear plants, and they need something that works all the time, unlike the wind and the solar. Just in January, Germany enacted legislation to completely phase out coal power generation by 2038; and then in May, they went right ahead and opened this new Dateln 4 coal plant. The Financial Times piece quotes Greenpeace activist Lisa Göldner as calling the new plant a “climate crime.” Meanwhile, the crew members of a barge bringing coal to the plant are described as “whooping and whistling in mockery” at environmental protesters seeking to block the opening of the plant.
The fact is that Germany has nowhere further to go by building more wind and solar facilities. When the wind blows on a sunny day, they already have more power than they can use, and they are forced to give it away to Poland (or even pay the Poles to take it). On a calm night, no matter how much wind and solar they build, it all produces nothing. Without the coal plant, the lights go out. Talk about climate virtue all they want, but no one has yet even begun to work on a solution to get past this hurdle.
Which brings me to the most important piece in the GWPF email, from Cambridge Professor Michael Kelly, appearing in something called CapX on June 8, with the headline “Until we get a proper roadmap, Net Zero is a goal without a plan.” Kelly makes the point that seems to me obvious, but that somehow has slipped past the New York Times and all the rest of the MSM, which is that if wind and solar energy are ever going to surpass niche status, there is a gigantic engineering problem to solve. Somebody has to engineer an electrical system based on the intermittent sources that works 24/7/365. But in fact, even as major states and countries have piously proclaimed commitment to “net zero” energy, nobody has even started the engineering project. And as soon as you start to consider the question, you quickly realize that the whole endeavor is almost certainly impossible. As an example, Kelly addresses batteries:
Take batteries. It is estimated that current battery manufacturing capabilities will need to be in the order of 500-700 times bigger than now to support an all-electric global transport system. The materials needed just to allow the UK to transition to all electric transport involve amounts of materials equal to 200% the annual global production of cobalt, 75% of lithium carbonate, 100% of neodymium and 50% of copper. Scaling by a factor of 50 for the world transport, and you see what is now a showstopper. The materials demands just for batteries are beyond known reserves. Would one be prepared to dredge the ocean floor at very large scale for some of the material? Should securing the reserves not be a first priority?
And that’s just one of the issues. Others include vast costs constituting a multiple of current energy costs; the environmental impact of mining and transporting huge amounts of materials; need for vast amounts of rare elements, far beyond known world reserves; incredibly huge amounts of material to recycle when facilities wear out; and on and on.
Read enough of this stuff and you gradually realize that almost everything you read about supposed solutions to climate change is completely delusional. Manhattan Contrarian
Iowa Climate Science Education 