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.

Planet flow versus low tidal friction in the star?

Are planets flowing into the star? I just got back from presenting my arguments at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Beijing, China. My poster was well received by those who came by, though we needed more people to go see the posters. So I will put up my poster here, now with all the design improvements thanks to Emily.
After I begun wondering last summer if the distribution of the shortest period Kepler planets was influenced by new planets coming in (which I presented twice in 2011), there was a paper by Socrates et al. (2011) promoting the idea of a flow of giant planets creating the three-day pile-up of "hot Jupiter" planets. I am now proposing that the origin of many of the shortest period planets is caused by this flow either "coming through" or "spilling out" of the three-day pileup. If so, then we do not need to invoke unexpectedly low friction to explain such close planets as WASP-18b. A flow of new planets from far might do it. Even though these closest planets have eccentricities close to zero now, they earlier must have had higher eccentricities, as part of the "high eccentricity migration" discussed by Socrates et al. (2011).

I am presenting a poster on how there is a flow of planets migrating into stars. I will present this in Beijing at the International Astronomical Union meeting this week and next.
Tell me what you think, and if I should make changes.

Cheer me on in my effort to return to astronomy!
I have worked long and hard to use "planet destruction" as a project to start over and contribute to astronomy.
I am making this a campaign to support participation for every contributing member of the science community.