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General James Webb Telescope Detected Artificial City-Like Lights on Proxima B?

Spinward Scout

Spinward Scout

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A video was posted on YouTube yesterday saying the telescope detected artificial light at Proxima B. About 4.25 lightyears from Earth Proxima B is a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system.

Mysterious events in the universe are challenging our understanding of science. The James Webb Space Telescope has detected strange signals on Proxima B, an exoplanet just 4 light-years away. These city-like lights have baffled scientists, raising questions about the possibility of intelligent life on a nearby planet, an interstellar society, or even a powerful lava flow.
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James Webb Telescope Detected Artificial City-Like Lights on Proxima B!

Can't confirm this. Has anyone else seen this?

The most I can find is an almost identical title from April.

James Webb Telescope Just Detected Artificial Lights On Proxima B!

But it's not the same video. Confusing. And possibly fake.
 
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Found this
ui.adsabs.harvard.edu

Detectability of Artificial Lights from Proxima b

We investigate the possibility of detecting artificial lights from Proxima b's dark side by computing light curves from the planet and its host star. The two different scenarios we consider are artificial illumination with the same spectrum as commonly used LEDs on Earth, and a narrower spectrum...
ui.adsabs.harvard.edu ui.adsabs.harvard.edu
Looks like NASA said it was possible if they rolled the skill check with outstanding success (grin), not that it had happened
 
anglerfish%20finding%20nemo.jpg.webp
 
Here's a copy of a picture of the ice giant Neptune inside the Terra solar system.

Kj9YPH6.jpg


If Neptune was the Proxima Centauri star (instead of being a planet) ... and Proxima b (an exoplanet) was one of the moons of Neptune (pick one, your choice) ... do you think that James Web could spot a "city sized artificial light" on any of the moons with sufficient resolution to image that "artificial light" to identify it definitively as being lighting from an artificial city so as to falsify any other possible explanation?

Using Occam's Guillotine :rolleyes: ... it sounds like the links you've cited @Spinward Scout are basically clickbait for credulous people.

A far more likely interpretation of any data results regarding Proxima b would be that there is some kind of photochemistry and/or light reflection from the surface of Proxima b (which is unlikely to have a surviving atmosphere) rather than some kind of "city sized artificial lighting" on the exoplanet.
 
Spinward Flow said:
A far more likely interpretation of any data results regarding Proxima b would be that there is some kind of photochemistry and/or light reflection from the surface of Proxima b (which is unlikely to have a surviving atmosphere) rather than some kind of "city sized artificial lighting" on the exoplanet.
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The only way to be sure is to build a Bussard Ramjet and go there. ;)
 
Factoid:
Total cost of APOLLO program was about $250 Billion (57 billion credits) in 2020 dollars.
Federal COVID relief spending was $4,600 Billion (1042 billion credits) in 2020 dollars.

This is not a political discussion, but just saying … we can afford to build a Bussard Ramjet to Proxima b if we really wanted to (We spent 18x the 10 year Apollo Program in 2 years when we decided to).
 
mike wightman said:
Since they don't actually work there is little point.
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Do you have a reference?

I mean, I was under the impression that it was purely theoretical. Was there ever any (dis)“proof of concept” experimentation or data? ;)

[EDIT]: I found the Wikipedia data (but am always wary of that source).

Since the time of Bussard's original proposal, it has been discovered that the region surrounding the Solar System has a much lower density of hydrogen than was believed at that time (see Local Interstellar Cloud). In 1969, John Ford Fishback made an important contribution, describing the details of the required magnetic field.[2]​
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In 1978, T. A. Heppenheimer analyzed Bussard's original suggestion of fusing protons, but found the Bremsstrahlung losses from compressing protons to fusion densities was greater than the power that could be produced by a factor of about 1 billion, thus indicating that the proposed version of the Bussard ramjet was infeasible.[3]However, Daniel P. Whitmire's 1975 analysis[4] indicates that a ramjet may achieve net power via the CNO cycle, which produces fusion at a much higher rate (~1016 times higher) than the proton–proton chain.[citation needed]​
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Robert Zubrin and Dana Andrews analyzed one hypothetical version of the Bussard ramjet design in 1988.[5]They determined that their version of the ramjet would be unable to accelerate into the solar wind.[citation needed]​
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A 2021 study found that, while feasible in principle, the practical construction of a useful Bussard ramjet would be beyond even a civilization of Kardashev type II.[6][7]​
 
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Ramscoops are passive hydrogen collectors that operate automatically whenever a starship is manoeuvring in normal (non-jump) space. Ramscoops require several weeks of continuous operation to obtain enough hydrogen to fill the tanks of a typical ship. The ship must be actively manoeuvring during this time, enabling the ramscoops to extract hydrogen from the interstellar medium. Ramscoop ships do not need fuel scoops, nor do they need fuel processors since the hydrogen is processed and purified as it is collected. The advantage of this technology is that it enables a starship to make as many jumps as desired without ever visiting a starport or gas giant for refuelling.
 
Spinward Scout said:
A video was posted on YouTube yesterday saying the telescope detected artificial light at Proxima B. About 4.25 lightyears from Earth Proxima B is a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system.



James Webb Telescope Detected Artificial City-Like Lights on Proxima B!

Can't confirm this. Has anyone else seen this?
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Seen? Yes.
Find it credible? No.
Way too many fake science channels on youtube.

JWST isn't an optical range scope, either. It's almost purely infrared.
Optical light and radio are more likely to be the indicators.
And IR is emitted by almost everything known. Natural vs Artificial, heat is heat.
 
Webb can't image small terrestrial planets near their host stars. The fake science channels on YouTube make Omni magazine seem like a scientific journal.

In a Goldilocks situation Webb could potentially maybe detect artificial lights on a transiting exoplanet. That's not the same as saying it has done so or can do so in the general case.
 
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