iStockphoto
Instead of high-tech spacecrafts, are intelligent aliens using stars to travel around the galaxy? That’s what a new research paper suggests.
According to Dr. Clement Vidal, a philosopher from Vrije University Brussels in Belgium, believes two stars binary systems, spidar pulsars and redback pulsars, are the most likely to be used by aliens to travel the galaxy. Pulsars are created when a supernova explodes.
“Since about half the stars in our galaxy are in binary systems where life might develop too, we introduce a model of a binary stellar engine,” Vidal wrote in his research paper. “We apply the model to candidate systems, spider pulsars, which are binary stars composed of one millisecond pulsar and a very low-mass companion star that is heavily irradiated by the pulsar wind.”
Universe Today breaks down in layman terms how aliens could possibly use a spidar pulsar to travel through space.
A spider pulsar is a pulsar with a companion, usually a red dwarf, a brown dwarf, or even a planetary-mass object. They’re called spider pulsars because it’s as if the pulsar spins a web of powerful beams of radiation that strips away the companion’s mass, eventually destroying it.
Vidal’s paper describes the payload as a pulsar with about 1.8 solar masses and the propellant as its low-mass companion star with between 0.01 and 0.7 solar masses.
In essence, the gravitationally bound binary system is the vehicle, and the smaller companion star is the propellant. The spider pulsar generates thrust by expelling propellant out of the gravitational system, and the propellant is the matter stripped from the companion.
The binary pair orbits a common center of gravity. The idea behind this binary stellar engine (BSE) is that as they orbit, the pulsar’s radiation strikes the companion or propellant star. A close binary is more effective because the closer the pulsar is to the propellant, the more thrust is generated. The assumption is that a Type II civilization would have the technology to moderate this thrust to serve their purposes by timing the radiation and heating the outer layers of the propellant star with X-ray or gamma radiation.
“A long-lived civilization will inevitably have to migrate towards a nearby star as its home star runs out of nuclear fuel,” Vidal wrote. “One way to achieve such a migration is by transforming its star into a stellar engine, and to control its motion in the galaxy.”
It’s not just science fiction. As research professor in astrophysics at SUNY Stony Brook University and the Flatiron Institute Paul M. Sutter explained for Live Science, “Amazingly, there are real systems in the universe that match these kinds of characteristics, like the ‘black widow’ pulsar PSR J0610-2100 and the ‘redback’ pulsar PSR J2043+1711. Both of those systems have significant accelerations.”
By traveling through space in this fashion, Vidal posits, an intelligent alien race could move its entire solar system.
“If the civilization were to place the machinery on or near the neutron star, where the strong gravity could provide a ready source of energy, they could steer the binary system by carefully cycling the machine off and on,” Sutter wrote.
“For example, if they activated the machine only at the exact same point in the orbit, they would send the binary system in one direction. If they left the machine activated slightly longer, they would adjust their course, pointing their movement in any direction they wished along the orbital plane.”
Whether aliens are really doing such a thing is still, obviously, unknown, but Vidal views the findings in his research “as promising starting points and clues that require further attention, observation, modeling, and follow-up.”
Vidal also isn’t alone in his thinking. In March 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, then the director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), and former Harvard Astronomy Department Chair Professor Avi Loeb wrote in their research paper, “An artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions.”