Announcement to Astronomers of Campaign for Crowdfunding

I am posting the following announcement to "Astronomers" and "Scientists" groups to get support for my "Crowdfunding Campaign for Participation" starting with a campaign for help to go to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington DC starting January 3, 2014:

Dear Astronomers:

I ask the astronomy community for support for my rockethub crowdfunding campaign for participation in the AAS conference next week in Washington, DC to present the evidence for planets migrating into their stars. Please share my campaign so that I can pay my registration and not have to stay outside the meeting.

I ask you help me find support due to me having the courage to present an exciting and creative project done all alone with no support, as a means to take back being a full participant in astronomy research by presenting my work showing how planets migrate into the stars.

Please help me get whatever attention possible to seek philanthropists who support science who could pay my registration and meals, and pay back for me to not have to use my savings for travel and a place to stay. A couch in your hotel room, or taking me out for a meal would be greatly appreciated. I am willing to stand outside until I get help paying the registration, which scares me since my talk is Monday morning. Please help me go into the conference, and please help me to “stop the pile from dwindling.”

Can you share my campaign by forwarding my crowdfunding page on rockethub to friends? It is at http://www.rockethub.com/projects/37614-smashing-hot-balls-of-gas-as-planets-crash-into-stars ? Share my blog, too!: astrostuart.blogspot.com. Subscribe to my videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/astrostuart . I will be regularly updating and improving both sites, placing new blogs and videos all while I am also both job searching and preparing my talk. I seek media coverage of me making a major public effort to stay a part of the science I chose to do, with the hope of attracting a documentary filmmaker to document my campaign for participation in science.

I am campaigning for the civil right of a scientist to maintain his belonging in those projects he has contributed to with the expectation of being part presenting the results of the group. Nothing takes away your sense of belonging more than randomly being told “no one wants to talk to you,” and I ask the community to support my refusal to stand for this! I have been campaigning to take back my participation in the UCSB-affiliated observatory in order to resume being a part of the transit validation program I started. Keeping me off makes it look to potential employers as if I didn't finish when applying for a new job, when the reality is I have been offered to see the data only after those who came later have a chance to finish it first, in which case the astronomer who had actually been at the telescope first becomes required to confirm his results have been previously presented by those who merely sent in subsequent online observation requests to the robotic scheduler. Keeping me off the first papers is how this observatory has kept me unemployed for years. I have published a request to collaborators to “go around the observatory” (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.3283v1.pdf). I loved having been this observatory’s first astronomer, and it is a matter of my civil rights to declare I choose not to leave. The reasons were random and personal in a way most unwelcome, and my appointment still had a year remaining, and showed this institution does not support its members to stay employed by encouraging participation all the way to finished papers. I ask you help me take back my participation!

I have shown determination and grit to submit papers on projects done all by myself so to stay a part of discovering the patterns of exoplanets. It is an ethical matter of the greatest importance that someone not be forced to leave science in any arbitrary manner as I have been. Please share this with those who can help me make my $1500 rockethub challenge to go to the AAS meeting as a means to launch support for me to get my papers through peer review so that I have a chance at a job.

Help me with whatever resources you can to stand for what is right: To be allowed and encouraged to participate in science.

Gratefully,

Stuart

S.F. Taylor

Hong Kong and Cottonwood, AZ  

Seeking sponsors: Campaign for participation kickoff speech

I am presenting my project on "planets going into stars" at a public talk that I arranged and am even paying for the rent myself. I am seeking philanthropic support first to go to the American Astronomical Society scientific meeting and second to have time to finish my paper.

Presenting my research and campaign in a talk has been an all-out effort, from practicing my talk at several Toastmasters clubs as well as to friends and family. It has been hard to put together a talk that is both about my campaign for participation and about my research findings, but I believe I have done it by presenting my history of seeking to be part of finding new planets, and then interpreting the patterns that have shown up now that we have over 1000 confirmed planets, as well as thousands of candidate planets from Kepler.

The first thing I will do after my talk is to develop a polished means crowdfunding better than my "donate" button on this blog or asking people to contact me. Contacting me right now is the best means for a "major supporter" to donate for me to go to the scientific meeting in early January and to finish my paper. I will post whether I choose to go through Kickstarter, Rockethub, or another crowdsourcing website.

Getting support in this manner is a sort of research itself. I hope to prove the value of public speaking by giving a bold and interesting talk tonight!

Taking back my sense of belonging with new planet results!

There's nothing that takes away your sense of belonging more than officially being told, "No one wants to talk to you." But I have refused to go quietly and give up being part of the group.

Today I have presented new results that planets migrate into their stars. (See http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.3283 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.5197.) I present evidence of planets polluting stars with planetary material. I have been deriving these results from data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft as well as ground-based observatories. I have been doing this all alone while all the time visiting astronomers and begging not to be kept out of the thrills of the discovery of planets, just because one private observatory reneged early on my appointment for reasons so funny I took up stand-up comedy to learn how to tell the story. (I have posted videos of me presenting the humorous story, “Laugh at my date, laugh at my boss.”)

Astronomers are finding new planets which could be places for new life in the universe, but one astronomer has been struggling to get support just to start his own family. With two successful papers now on public display, I launch my campaign to “Return the Missing Participant” and ask for the public's support of me being an astronomer able to make a long-delayed return to being a fully participating astronomer.

I am struggling to be a part of finding the planets that show how giant, medium, and small planets migrate differently in planetary systems. I have been kept out of being an author on planet-finding publications that use my work, but I am willing to take a public stand to demand that no observatory group can ever refuse a member from staying involved. My mottos are, “Participation is the purpose of science. Participation is the purpose of life.” Every work-place bully wants silence, but I will make the noise it takes to get the science community to support me staying involved, because I really do believe that the right of a scientist to participate is something worth living or dying for.

Please support me by following my blog where I will not only discuss the migration of planet into destruction by falling into their stars, but also present my struggle for belonging in the astronomy community.

Acceptance and involvement are universal values. We believe in helping everyone feel that they can belong. Fighting for participation is a worthy cause for which I am willing to devote my life. Supporting my participation is a worthy value for which I am willing to go to the public and ask for help.

Support the "Return of the Missing Participant" Campaign!

There's nothing that can disrupt your sense of belonging more than an official letter stating, "No one wants to talk to you." But I am not the kind of person to let a whole group of people not talk to me, especially when I was the first scientist to contribute to this observatory, and especially when this is a UCSB-affiliated observatory that is supposed to be a professional Science Observatory. In academic research, no respectable university-affiliated observatory can ever be allowed to act this way. I challenge UCSB to require that all UCSB scientists encourage the careers of everyone else, rather than allowing the name of UCSB to be associated with unprofessional behavior.

I am announcing my new campaign, "The Return of the Missing Participant," as the name of my campaign for participation. I am campaigning to the science community to require support for standards of encouraging involvement. Scientists must demand that scientists always be willing to work together. Scientists must welcome and never block other scientists from making every contribution they can towards finishing and presenting their research together.

I will start with the "Showdown at the Planets Conference", where I am seeking to have Documentary Filmmakers attend as media to film me facing off eye-to-eye with the scientists made by their bosses to keep me from participating in the science I started. I am taking out newspaper announcements to attract filmmakers. I hope to document my campaign to return to science by filming my years-long struggle to get back into astronomy after having been expelled before my appointment expired. I want the public to see me talking face to face with the scientists who have kept me out, and who have not let me finish my work with the rest of the group. I demand credit where credit is due. I demand participation in the projects where my participation is due, so I can have the chance to have credit due me just like all the other UCSB scientists at the observatory.  All the other UCSB astronomers came to the observatory after me, but all have been made by the Directors to finish our work without letting me be involved. Instead, I've been officially told to stay away and not even apply for observing time. I will not stand for this, but need your help showing me protest this obstruction.

In addition to seeking filmmakers, I ask help to give a public talks in and around Mountain View, California prior to the conference, to seek long-term support for my "Return of the Missing Participant" Campaign to take back my career in science. After six years of unemployment caused by the UCSB Observatory not only reneging early on my appointment but also blocking me from having any reasonable record upon which to job search, I am reaching out to the public for support for me to continue my research into how scattered giant planets are sent down to their destruction into the star.

I have prepared for giving this talk through comedy and storytelling, because it really is a funny story how my billionaire boss bungled my appointment. You can follow me on YouTube, where my latest comedy is a humorous presentation of my NASA proposal, at http://youtu.be/NV_5ZKACEmM and my latest storytelling is at http://youtu.be/w-XBs3P5H4g.

I don't have the support of anyone other than my own dwindling life savings to attend the Kepler Science Conference November 3-8, in Mountain View, California. I seek support to go to the conference, and also support to speak in California the week beforehand (Oct 29 to Nov 1). If you can help with support or filming, please contact me through this blog.

Participation Challenge to Refuse Being Banned from the LCOGT Network Paper

Follow my Campaign Standing Up Against Being Banned from Participation!

I ask your support of me taking back my participation in science from the observatory I helped start by signing my petition at http://www.change.org/petitions/ucsb-astronomy-journals-starting-with-pasp-and-the-astronomy-community-stop-excluding-me-from-science-i-helped-start?share_id=YMRITJsPRe&utm_campaign=friend_inviter_chat&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=share_petition&utm_term=permissions_dialog_false.
I choose to continue doing Global Telescope science using the resources I helped create, and no one should stop me. I am LCOGT's banned astronomer: banned only for the false pretense that my personal life is, to quote the Director, "we can't have this kind of behavior." I expect the science community help me in telling LCOGT that "we can't have this kind of behavior": of stopping someone passionate about science from doing the research he helped start as the first LCOGT astronomer.

I reject the idea to just go somewhere else. It does not work that way in science, but more important, I never was willing to quit my research.

I first ask for support to persuade science journals that they must uphold the principle of giving credit for work done. I challenge the astronomy journal "PASP" to not expect that only those who have made "critical" contributions be allowed to be author, especially when this is not the standard used for everyone else. More important, I challenge PASP to recognize the responsibility of all authors to promote the opportunity of every author to increase their contributions. PASP must recognize that for any group to reduce one author's contribution leads to a dishonest evaluation of what that author contributed.

I choose to to included, so am required to seek the help of the public and science community to overturn hostile expulsion, exclusion, and isolation by a rogue observatory that has made itself answerable to no one. Everyone has experienced someone or some group wanting to make someone go away, to get one person out of the group. Respectable organizations, however, do not allow people to be expelled for arbitrary reasons. In science, a normal group would never use false pretense to take away one scientist's work and give it to others to take over. Expulsion, exclusion, and isolating a scientist go against the science community's collegial values of inclusion, participation, and sociability.

I also am seeking help in finding support from those willing to support a scientist who has been left unemployed not just because he is standing by his principles, but because he has had a lifelong passion for science and believes that it would be a crime against science for him to accept being forced to leave under these circumstances. I need support for going out and doing my speaking, giving both professional and public talks. I need support to last until I can publish my own new research on planet migration. While I do ask help in finding people who can use the "Donate" button, but I also ask for help in my campaign, especially from people good at writing, or who can help with an online campaign. I ask for the involvement of people who love astronomy, because I believe that there are interested members of the public who can become involved in the research I am doing on planet migration.

I am grateful to all who will follow me not only on this campaign, but also as I go out and give talks, both to other astronomers and to public talks.

Collaborators Sought: Binary stars with planets have more iron than single stars with planets!

Who expected this?!!!: Binary stars with planets have more iron than single stars with planets! This one is a little harder to explain than the last correlation I found in 2012: The iron abundance of stars with planets is correlated with orbital eccentricity, in a manner depending on the orbital period (See 2012 September 5 post at http://astrostuart.blogspot.hk/2012/09/planet-flow-versus-low-tidal-friction.html.)

I am seeking collaborators on this new paper which I am now passing around for comments from colleagues in final preparation for submission.

Iron Abundances Correlation Planet Loss Paper as Passed Around to Colleagues 2013-05-17

Are Falling Planets “Polluting” Stars With Metals?

Are Falling Planets “Polluting” Stars With Metals?

After finding evidence that giant planets fall into stars at higher rates than expected, I now have found evidence suggesting that the inward migration of giant planets disrupts smaller planets into the star. At least, that was the hypothesis I used to guide me to find a correlation between the planet's orbital eccentricity and the star's iron fraction, expressed as “Fe/H”. My hypothesis was that perhaps the planets with the highest eccentricities have more recently begun their migration to towards the star, and so may have more recently scattered other planets into the star. The planets that are already “hot Jupiters”, that is, planets that have already migrated into the short period orbits that have been largely circularized, have already had more time pass since disrupting any planets into the star. The star has had more time to mix the pollution from these planets deeper into the star, so since I have found that the stars with the highest eccentricity planets have higher Fe/H, my explanation is this high Fe/H is in a surface layer having been deposited by recent planet infall.

I expected that the pattern would be different for planets in longer orbits that would not have disrupted planets into the star, and I find that over 200 days, this is the case: the correlation breaks down. It also expect that low mass planets may not be as effective in disrupting planets into the star, so I make a cut of 0.1 Jupiter masses. The data for low mass planets is not as good, so I will either work on more careful analysis or wait for better data before saying whether this is the case.

My two recent papers on this are here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.1984

http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.4229

Could whole-planet pollution be a significant contributor to measurements of stellar Fe/H? This is an important question for which I am looking at whether the numbers of planets is high enough. I am intrigued by a paper by Zhungmu Li (astro-ph 1302.0099.) in which he shows how the tracks of Fe/H in clusters don't follow a one-population track like you would expect from a single population in a cluster. Perhaps when stars are young and in clusters, these stars' metallicities are also affected by the infall of whole planets.

What will smart extraterrestrials look like?: A cold papaya introduction.

As I was peeling a cold papaya a rush of discomfort went through my hand, which got me thinking how might it be a bit of a bad design that mammals have to keep their bodies in such a close temperature range? Why did evolution make our bodies put so much effort into continuously keeping our temperatures constant? Is it really worth all the precision sweating or putting on coats to keep the body's chemical buffering agents in proper balance? Or, might it have been better to have designed more tolerance for temperature changes, given that we live on a planet with frequent changes in temperature? Might dinosaurs have evolve more robust bodies with more temperature change tolerant brains if they had not been replaced by mammals?

Mammals won over dinosaurs, however, so all this mammal design must have virtue. Which brings me to think that I should write about, "What would extraterrestrials look like, if we mean ETs that we find by establishing communication?" Let's call them "smart" extraterrestrials, meaning not like the tiny life that might be found on Mars, or even any fish-like creatures that we can still dream might exist under Europa's ice before better data keeps us from knowing better. I mean like the technological life that could send out radio or similar signals to share some social media banter across the galaxy.

Smart life so defined would most likely have two arms and two legs, I think, if it evolved on land not water, because to build a radio you need two hands with fingers. Perhaps one hand with fingers and two without, like a mini-elephant working equipment with four fingers on a trunk that it props up on two elephant forelegs would do, but then you have the question of whether there would be more fingers on the forelegs, but that might disrupt walking on four legs. Do you really want three arms if you walk upright. But as much as a hand closer to the head would encourage technological development, I do think that two arms and two legs works best. An insect design of six legs seems only to work for insect sizes. No, unless the smart extraterrestrial is underwater so has many arms like a squid, I think two arms and two legs would be best.

What about the many other human features? Evolution seems to have tried fewer fingers and more fingers, but five does seem to work best. Then on to the body: permanent female breasts are apparently mostly on humans, so unless something about doing sex from the front is common, we should consider ET women to usually be flat chested. I suppose a big question would be egg births versus live births using a placenta. Not all ETs might have belly buttons, though that is not significant.

Hair is of course of cosmetic importance. Is there something valuable in having bare skin, such as using skin color to communicate emotion, or just how clothes require less body resources, that would make most ETs largely hairless, with a residual patch on the head (and a few other patches), like us?

Perhaps the design change I would like the most would be found: simple eyes in the back of the head. If you think about all the effort mammalian brains have to put into trying to use hearing coupling with the ability to turn the head, all just to compensate for no vision in back, you would agree that wouldn't it be wonderful to have two, four, or six insect eyes in the back of the head? Simple eyes, like on the head of a bee, could dramatically increase alertness for any mammal, reptile, or bird. Even fish for that matter might benefit if the earliest fish had not gone for just two eyes, though perhaps it was the water environment that limited eyes for all future generations. Simple supplementary eyes would only need to see vague shapes, and could be so small that they could easily be re-grown if injured, and they might dramatically change the full design of other world animals, including our social media ET friends.

So that is it: Regardless of whether ET's hands get chilled by refrigerated fruit, they might look different mostly because they have compound eyes like those of insects in the back of their heads. How wonderful it would be to see all around, even vaguely. The idea may be a fun fancy that cannot be checked by hard data any time soon, with the most immediate use being to design attention-getting Halloween costumes, but it would be fun to anticipate what our descendants might see when they discover our first different part of the galaxy friends. I wonder if after imagining this, if when we first see ET, how much will we be surprised? We may be surprised less than they are. We may find that us humans are more used to surprise than they are, because none of us have eyes in the backs of our heads.