[Podcast] || Canis Major

Broadcasting live from Socorro at the VLA, this is Gathering of Parallels, and I am your host today, Lee Vinsant. Before we get into this very exciting show today, we have a few announcements.

Eli Rice, the original host of this podcast, is taking a leave of absence to focus on his work in Hawaii. He is currently applying to PHD programs around the United States, and has asked me to sub in for today’s special broadcast.

We here at Gathering of Parallels would like to remind you that we are funded with your donations, and wouldn’t be able to record without your support. If you are interested in giving to the podcast, you can visit us at our website, www.gatheringofparrallels.com, where you can find previous podcasts, contact information for our staff here, exclusive interviews, and more. Once again, that’s www.gatheringofparrallels.com to donate and join our online community.

Now onto the story for today.

It’s a calm mid-April evening in the northern hemisphere, with low atmospheric turbulence and no clouds in the dry air. You’re likely to recognize Orion’s belt after a few minutes of searching, but that isn’t the part of the sky we want to examine.

You’ll want to look closer to the horizon. What you’ll find will be a bright object, bright enough that you may, for a few minutes, think it is a planet making a lonely traverse across the sky.

But it isn’t. Assuming you found the right star, you’re going to be looking at Alpha Canis Majoris, commonly known as Sirius. Sitting at an apparent magnitude of minus-one-point-five, Sirius beats out Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star, and is two times brighter than the second brightest star, Canopus.

It may shock you to learn that Sirius is actually a binary star system, meaning that there are two stars orbiting each other. Originally thought to be a single star, the pair was named Sirius, but after further study in 1844, the pair was cleverly named Sirius A and Sirius B. Sirius A and B are both wildly different stars with the same origin: both A and B were likely two bright blue stars, but B began to take material off of A and grew into a red giant before shedding off the material to become a white dwarf. Sirius A is now a main sequence A-1-V star, while Sirius B remains a faint dwarf star is classified as a D-A-2 star.

It’s two in the morning, and for the researchers present, it’s been a long night at the Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico. The VLA is one of few homes for the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program, or SETI. There, SETI makes use of 27 antennas, all of which measure 82 feet in diameter. Everyday, the antennas scan the sky, day and night, for sources of radio waves that seem out of the ordinary.

It had never found anything of note. Not until 2:00 am on April 19th of 2019.

They had aimed their sights and Canis Major at the formal request of a grad student at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. The grad student, Clara Winter, was present that night, checking the data as it came in. “I wasn’t looking for any data in particular,” Winter tells me candidly. “I had always wanted to visit the very large array, and had an interest in investigating one of our close stellar neighbors.”

She said she knew something was different even before the readings had come in. the moment they got the signal though, it was all hands on deck. Clara describes the chaos, saying, “It was as if we could sense it coming, we just sprang into action, started recording, messaged other radio research centers, aimed more antennas towards Canis, called management, the government. For only three or four people, we made quite the ruckus.”

This incident wasn’t addressed formally or even announced until two weeks later, when the government revealed the discovery of the audio from the VLA. In their statement, they say, “Scientists across our great nation are currently examining the audio to try and decipher it further and discover if the source is intelligent.” Along with their statement, they release exactly 15 seconds of the sound.

Everybody weighs in. Celebrities and scientists alike try to make sense of the clip. But in doing so, they jump to conclusions about the sound. Clara has found this, not dealing with the government, to be the most frustrating part about the audio.

“I think people are always searching for answers. In this case there isn’t one, but people have came up with some to feel more comfortable,” she tells me. Clara is a skeptic, much like the rest of the scientific community. “Obviously I hope that it’s more than space noise. But I don’t want to treat it as anything more than data until we can prove it’s entirely out of the ordinary,” she tells me.

She brings up the book and film titled Contact, where a doctor named Ellie Arroway discovers a signal coming from a distant star while at the VLA. Arroway then goes on one of the most fascinating science fiction journeys ever put to writing. Clara says it’s difficult not to get her hopes up. “I just keep thinking about what might happen if it is from another world. I mean, what does that mean for us? As a species? Who are we if not lonely organisms in space? Where will we go if we know what lies outside our solar system? Who will we meet? It’s exciting and terrifying,” she remarks.

In world-colliding situations like these, where our understanding of the universe threatens to get a little bigger, it’s hard to recall people like Clara, who listened to the void for hours on end only to get thirty minutes of weird noise. She says that she got lucky that night. She says she almost wishes she hadn’t caught it. “I’m just a grad student,” she laughs. “There are people who have waited their entire life, who have died in pursuit of a sound like this.”

“We just have to wait, I think,” she tells me. “To listen a little harder, to think a little more critically. I have hope, but I’m ready to relinquish it when more evidence arrives.”

On our website you can find more of my interview with Clara Winter, as well as some papers on the clip of audio that has been released. We’d love to hear you sound off online about what you think the sound is.

Next week we will delve deeper into what a civilization is as we examine the Kardashev scale, dyson spheres, megastructures, and the power of language. All that and more, I’m Lee Vinsant on Gathering of Parallels, and with that, I bid you happy stellar searching.

 

Reflection ||

I wanted to take a more scientific spin with the podcast. It was a medium where I could convey a lot of technical information while also pulling in fantastical elements. Rather than focus on the myth or shape of the constellation, I examined the stars it contained and created a story based upon the constellations’ brightest star, Sirius. I came up with a podcast that did stellar research, which I titled Gathering of Parallels. The title was meant to sound occult and cheesy, while also seeming pseudo-profound. I wanted it to seem like it was made in some college dorm room by a group of friends with the same interest. With the title and theme in place, I researched the star for context and sought out a space sound to base my story off of. I decided on a sound from the Hubble Telescope that NASA sampled (can be found here, https://soundcloud.com/nasa/hubble-treasure-trove-sonification), which I found eerie and inexplicably patterned.

I found that leaning into this medium allowed me to have more fun with tone. I created a Ira-Glass-like persona for my space show, and developed a plot that had been touched on by Carl Sagan. All of these factors together, from the research to the recording, made for a very interesting exploration into the world of podcasts.