The Weirdest Star in the Universe

Does Przybylski’s Star Prove the Presence of Extraterrestrial Life?

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About 360 or so light-years from Earth shines a “chemically peculiar” star (referred to as an ‘Ap’). Named for its discoverer, Antoni Przybylski, this star possesses a number of curiosities that have kept researchers intrigued for decades. It spins extremely slowly; over almost 200 years it completes only one rotation upon its axis. By comparison, our sun conducts a full rotation in about 35 days. All the elements in Przybylski’s star’s atmosphere are visible and the complexion of them varies significantly from other stars observed across the universe. Despite its discovery back in 1961, scientists today refer to the star as “even weirder than we realized. ” Its formal designation is HD 101065.  

Ap stars are odd, as stars go, but Przybylski’s is especially so. It contains unusually high amounts of heavy elements, including strontium, cesium, neodymium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, and thulium. Jason Wright from Penn State University says that the presence of these elements is not just ‘weird,’ it is nearly impossible. He says so because many of these elements have half-lives of only a few thousand years or less. In cosmological terms, this equates to mere passing moments. The presence of these elements suggests that nuclear reactions are (or at least were) happening on the surface of the star on a regular basis. Scientists think this because a nuclear reaction is the only known or observed way these elements come into being. Moreover, with such short half-lives compared to the probable age of the star (at least a few billion years), nuclear reactions must occur regularly for there to be any chance that scientists here on earth would detect these materials. But, how is that possible?

V. A. Dzuba, V. V. Flambaum, and J. K. Webb propose a novel alternative idea. They write: “We suggest that these unstable elements may be decay products of a ‘magic’ metastable nucleus belonging to the island of stability where the nuclei have a magic number of neutrons N = 184.” Do not be confused by their use of the word ‘magic,’ their approach is scientific. While heavy metal elements possess notoriously short half-lives, scientists have long suspected that the periodic table may contain as-yet undiscovered superheavy elements that survive for orders of magnitudes longer. These authors query whether the short-lived elements discovered around Przybylski’s star may be remnants of the decay of these theoretical superheavy elements, as opposed to byproducts of ongoing nuclear reactions. Jason Wright notes that under this idea, astrophysicists would see a “steady-state concentration dictated by the lifetime of the isotope[s]” of the superheavy elements. Meaning, the theory is plausible… if superheavy elements do, in fact, exist. Furthermore, if Dzuba’s team is correct, it might indicate that these superheavy elements are abundant in the universe, but just not on Earth.

Dzuba’s team’s hypothesis remains speculative. So far, little evidence supports the existence of superheavy elements. As such, the presence of strontium and the others—typically generated through nuclear reactions—has led some to consider another possibility: Aliens… Yes, merely mentioning the word invokes a collective grown among many people. But the idea is not completely far-fetched, and some of our world’s most brilliant minds have not been so quick to dismiss the idea.

Przybylski’s Alien Dumpster?

In 1980, two physicists from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Daniel P. Whitmire and David P. Wright, considered whether oddities detected in various stellar spectra indicate that “galactic civilizations” use nearby stars as radioactive landfills. As crazy as some might think that sounds, plenty of researchers have nonetheless cited their paper since, and Whitmire and Wright are not even the first—or most renown—to ponder the notion. Scientists refer to deliberately adding unusual isotopes to stars as “salting.” Famous astrophysicists Carl Sagan, Frank Drake (creator of the now famous Drake Equation), and J. S. Shklovsky proposed all the way back in the 1960s that civilizations might salt their planetary system’s star to allow others to detect and locate them. Richard A. Carrigan Jr. pondered numerous other reasons, including waste disposal. Scientists seem to have taken Whitmire and Wright’s idea seriously partly because of a particular prediction they made—that we would find evidence of galactic civilizations’ salting specifically in Ap stars, of which Przybylski’s star is one. Walker et. al. argue that the detection of certain elements “not produced naturally… has been proposed as a possible indicator of a technological civilization, since creating [them] requires knowledge of nuclear physics.”

Adam Stevens et. al. observe that the presence of these unusual elements could provide evidence that either a living or extinct species salted a star. After all, even the ‘short’ half-lives of some heavy metals far outlast human lifespans, and possibly the lifespans of alien species. This relates to a popular question about our failure to encounter alien life so far. The Fermi Paradox essentially asks if the universe is so large, and logically must teem with life, why have we not detected any? One answer: maybe they are already dead and gone.

The Gaian Bottleneck has been proffered as one potential solution to the Fermi Paradox. Aditya Chopra and Charley Lineweaver, astrobiologists from the Australian National University who first crafted this solution, state that (i) extinction is the cosmic default for most life that has ever emerged on the surfaces of wet rocky planets in the Universe and (ii) rocky planets need to be inhabited to remain habitable. They note that the materials required for life on Earth to evolve—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous—are among the most abundant in the universe. For them, it stands to reason that the universe contains plenty of amenable conditions for life to arise and thrive, so some other hurdle must thwart galactic colonization. They posit the idea that “unregulated evolution of planetary environments away from habitable conditions constrains the duration of life’s existence on the planet.” In other words, intelligent life’s inattention to balancing the health of the environment with society’s needs leads to the erosion or obliteration of the livability of the environment. Could items detected in Przybylski’s star be the remnants of an interstellar society that tried to preserve its planet by dumping pollution into it? Did they purposely salt the star to get attention? In either case, are they still there but we simply have not detected them yet? Or, did they fail to maintain the habitability of their planet despite their efforts at incinerating their refuse? Did some other disaster befall them altogether? More nefariously, could extraterrestrial life be purposely hiding from earth inhabitants and simply did not expect humans to detect their star salting?

The Dark Forest Solution

A science fiction novel written by Liu Cixin operates on a plot that supposes that because lifeforms cannot know for sure whether other civilizations represent a threat, it is safest not to reveal themselves to them. Glen David Brin, from the California Space Institute, wrote in 1982:

Let us say many advanced ETIS [extraterrestrial intelligence] get the robot-emissary idea, and ship out first-generation probes as Tipler suggests, to replicate and fill the void with messages of brotherhood. Then suppose that for every 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 ‘sane’ ETIS, there is one that is xenophobic, paranoid even. Such a race might programme its self-replicating emissaries to add powerful bombs to their repertoire, and command them to home in on any unrecognized source of modulated electromagnetic radiation…

It need only happen once for the results of this scenario to become the equilibrium condition in the galaxy. We would not have detected extraterrestrial radio traffic—nor would any ETIS have ever settled on Earth—because all were killed shortly after discovering the radio.

Scotty Hendricks, writing on the Big Think website, points out that the strength of Brin’s thought exercise and Liu’s fictional expansion of it is that it only requires a “single advanced race” to act in this violent way to achieve the result. Hendricks also suggests that this is why we have not, or may never detect alien radio signals; no one is brave enough to transmit them. Stephen Hawking repeatedly asked why we would assume that an advanced alien civilization would behave any better than humans, who have proven themselves particularly craven in their treatment of each other. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) takes this concern seriously as well, constantly evaluating its response policies (should it ever receive a verifiable alien signal to respond to) in the context of the “interest of humankind as a whole.”

If Przybylski’s star served as a repository for some civilization’s junk, and the dark forest solution holds, then whoever was dumping there may be dead or in permanent hiding. The society engaged in salting may have been working to clean up its planet, but inadvertently showed itself to another society during the process. If either of these societies adopted the belief that any external civilization represents an existential threat, one might have immediately destroyed the other. Regardless of who killed who, the remaining group might then have chosen to remain hidden to avoid risking another such conflict in the future. Having abandoned feeding their nuclear waste into Przybylski’s star for fear of revealing themselves to other potential enemies, all we here on Earth are left with is the detection of the later stages of decay of the last materials dumped.

The dark forest solution illustrates how an intelligent external threat provides a possible obstruction toward discovering ETIS. A different kind of external lethal danger, however, could include a non-intelligent life form. Aaron J. Berliner et. al. note that little research exists on the potential of extra-planetary viruses. They point to three features of viruses that make them possible galactic serial killers: their tolerance to extreme environments, their genomic diversity, and their evolutionary longevity. These traits elevate the odds that if any living thing proliferates across the universe, viruses might be the most popular. As a virus would be stubbornly difficult to detect in advance, a society who finally progressed far enough to manage a migration to a nearby planet could nonetheless easily succumb to a virus novel to that society’s natural immunities, effectively wiping it out.

Is Przybylski’s star evidence of the Great Filter?

The Great Filter describes some phenomenon, natural or not, that inevitably prevents intelligent species from progressing sufficiently far enough to engage in interstellar communication. It differs from the dark forest because it postulates that whatever the phenomenon is, it entirely throttles interstellar activity by a species. (Note that interstellar refers to escaping one’s planetary system, not simply reaching space itself). While the Great Filter theory offers various possibilities that inhibit or end the development of organisms throughout different periods of their evolution, a late-stage manifestation could be described as ‘self-destruction.’ Climate change on Earth illustrates one possibility of this kind. Evolutions of intelligent species may invariably correlate with their numerical rise. On Earth, humans have coopted most of the world’s resources to satisfy the needs and wants associated with explosive population growth, to the detriment of most other creatures and ecosystems on the planet. Adam Frank and his team studied “resource-harvesting technological civilizations” to determine the “generic behaviors” most engage in. They then examined how those behaviors affect the planetary environment and the trajectory of civilizational evolution. They note that young civilizations (like ours) necessarily build energy-consuming infrastructure that feeds back on the planet on which they live. They predict only four probable outcomes from this, and three of them lead to severe diminishment or annihilation of the population. In most cases then, before society can develop the technologies and techniques to successfully engage in interstellar efforts, the probability is high that self-inflicted localized problems will overtake any progress on them.

Technological ‘advancement’ might invoke the filter in a different way than pure environmental devastation. In its rush to develop and monetize artificial intelligence (AI) or some other invention, a society could destroy its ability to function from the destabilization produced by unintended effects of that new technology; an example includes the proliferation of convincingly false information. On Earth, the problem is apparent in the publication of research. One (unpublished) study found at least 400,000 research papers in academic journals that exhibited the hallmarks of fraud. Frighteningly, this constituted 3% of all medical and biological papers published in 2022. Some of these have been cited in other legitimate literature, meaning researchers relied upon false information. Fake social media accounts purporting to represent experts can reach millions of people very quickly, rapidly swinging public opinion on issues of critical importance. Fabricated audio or video, often called ‘deepfakes,’ are already evading detection mechanisms, and easily fool hapless humans into believing false things. As online platforms—including search engines—increasingly become powered by AI, and that AI receives its datasets from misinformation generated by itself or other shoddily designed programs, people start to lose their grasp on reality, and have no reliable place to turn for help. Even on issues long-before settled, such as the efficacy of vaccines or the shape of the planet, uncritical dupes change their views after feeding upon a diet of nonsense, proliferated by profiteers and power-seekers. The continuation of this cycle over several generations will ultimately root out any last shred of real, verifiable knowledge—including knowledge contained within the memory of people themselves. In effect, society becomes too confused or stupid to manage its own survival.

Przybylski’s Population

If the analyses of the makeup of Przybylski’s star are correct, and the underlying cause is not superheavy elements, then it is reasonable to consider that some civilization elected to dump nuclear material there. That brings us back to the question: where are they? It is possible that the activity itself ignited the dark forest solution; the anomalies from the nuclear reactions in the star alerted another advanced civilization to the presence of the one triggering the reactions, leading to a swift brutal war between the two, and ultimately obliterating one of them. But this opens a whole host of other questions. Where is the victorious group? How did they find and destroy this one society, but not ours? Where is the evidence of such a (presumably) large-scale conflict? It seems to me that the more plausible explanation tracks the problems humans are currently experiencing here. Allow me to illustrate the Great Filter at work.

Only one global society existed in Przybylski’s star system. Its poorly constructed social hierarchy allowed a tiny minority of low-intelligence leaders, plagued by insatiable avarice, to bewilder its subjects with copious amounts of misinformation that fooled them into obediently accepting innumerable, but eminently correctible, harms. Having substituted education with mythical dogma, only a few protested the obvious decline of the ecological environment. Leveraging the vast amount of wealth this cackle stole from generations of its cohabitants-turned-vassals, the self-described elite class attempted to placate the world’s diminishing network of very talented scientists with patchwork, diddly responses to serious scientific problems. When that inevitably failed, the last resort involved the process of shipping some of the toxic material byproducts of the society’s largess into the nearby star in an attempt to mitigate the rising issues on the ground. This worked long enough to quiet the largely apathetic populace, itself wholly confused about reality. Brainwashed by the proliferation of lies across the public space, and its long-lost ability to think critically, the populace disbelieved the science community that regularly protested in horror at the idea of salting a star in lieu of solving the root problems, warning of significant repercussions to come. Because the consequences of the scientists’ admonitions took some years longer than originally predicted to emerge, still fewer of the mindless public heeded their cries even when the very disasters began regularly occurring.

The day came when the salmagundi of bad omens tipped over a critical point and exploded into a full-blown emergency. From then, society lost the ability to cope with the onslaught of calamities wrought by a shattered ecosystem. It began breaking down with severe rapidity. No longer did it have the resources to leave the ground, let alone the atmosphere, to continue dumping waste into the star. Indeed, the barrage of continued and amplified tragedies gobbled up resources so swiftly that ultimately not enough remained to sustain mere survival. Before long, the last remaining intelligent creatures succumbed to the planetary collapse. The elements secreted into the star provided the last traces of the society, their half-lives leaving them traceable for some centuries yet to come.

Astrophysicists on Earth happened to turn their gaze in the direction of that heavenly body during just the right window of time to notice the trace evidence tucked within its spectra. The discovery triggered a flurry of research, blog posts, and assorted speculations. The society that originally created that evidence had vanished well before Earth’s inhabitants invented the first telescope, never to be seen by an earthling’s eye. Located so many light-years away, humans on Earth were destined to succeed at little more than conjecture, regardless. For, their own scientists would eventually turn away from gazing into the heavens, bereft of any chance at unlocking any more mysteries of the great void of space. They would be forced to focus instead on the terrestrial hell created by their society’s own self-destructive habits and failed leaders, ferociously but futilely warning of, and working against, humanity’s own pending filter.

For another space mystery some believe may have an alien origin, click below.

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I am a Certified Forensic Computer Examiner, Certified Crime Analyst, Certified Fraud Examiner, and Certified Financial Crimes Investigator with a Juris Doctor and a Master’s degree in history. I spent 10 years working in the New York State Division of Criminal Justice as Senior Analyst and Investigator. Today, I teach Cybersecurity, Ethical Hacking, and Digital Forensics at Softwarica College of IT and E-Commerce in Nepal. In addition, I offer training on Financial Crime Prevention and Investigation. I am also Vice President of Digi Technology in Nepal, for which I have also created its sister company in the USA, Digi Technology America, LLC. We provide technology solutions for businesses or individuals, including cybersecurity, all across the globe. I was a firefighter before I joined law enforcement and now I currently run the EALS Global Foundation non-profit that uses mobile applications and other technologies to create Early Alert Systems for natural disasters for people living in remote or poor areas.