What’s going on with KIC 8462852? This distant star, in between the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra, has been detected emitting a “bizarre” pattern of light, as if some objects were, at times, partially obstructing it. Normally, that’s a key way astronomers have “discovered” exoplanets – if a star’s light periodically dims, that suggests there’s something orbiting around it, hampering our view. But the pattern, if there is one, of whatever’s in the way, does not correspond to orbits as we know them. As Ross Andersen at The Atlantic discusses, nor does the data correspond to any other explanation more likely than, well, aliens. And it’s not aliens, insist the authors of a recently published paper that finds every conceivable “natural” explanation of this phenomenon to have serious flaws. Most probably not aliens. In all likelihood – not aliens. But these are the terms astronomers are using – not ones like “doubtlessly.” But whether there are forms of intelligent life orbiting around KIC 8462852 or not (and presumably not), this is still part of a longer-term historical process that has been going on since (at least) Copernicus: our own particular planet becoming less central, unique, or special.
Jan Mayen Maps
Jan Mayen is an isolated island in the northern Atlantic, lying between 70-72° North and 8-9° West, about 550 kilometers northeast of Iceland and 500 kilometers east of Greenland. It is entirely uninhabited, but it was the destination for the Austro-Hungarian contribution to the First International Polar Year (1882-1883). I discuss the history of its cartography in “Void into Meaning: Geophysics and ‘Imperial’ Cartography in the Far North, in Holt Meyer, Susanna Rau & Katharina Waldner, eds., SpatioTemporality: Practices – Concepts – Media (De Gruyter, forthcoming in 2016). Below you can find the maps I talk about:
Johann Blaeu, “Insula Qvæ Ioanne Mayen nomen sortita est” (c. 1670)
Henrik Mohn & C. Wille, “Originalkarte von Jan Mayen nach Zorgdrager,Scoresby und der Aufnahme der Norwegischen Nordmeer-Expedition,” in Petermann’s Geographische Mittheilungen 24 (1878), Table 13.
Adolf Bóbrik von Boldva, “Jan Mayen nach der Aufnahme der österreich. arct. Beobachtungsstation,” in Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. Die internationale Polarforschung 1882-1883. Die österreichische Polarstation Jan Mayen (Vienna: kaiserlich-königliche Staatsdruckerei, 1886). Photograph by the author.
Stephen A. Walsh 