Don't find the star. Design the experiment.
In development
Astronomy can look but not touch. If the physics really is one unbroken chain, a measurement made on a lab bench can be carried all the way out to a star.
Astronomy has always been brilliant at observing and unable to touch. To study something, you search the sky for a star where it happens to be going on, hope the conditions are right, look at it through a shifting atmosphere, and work backwards from the light.
What if you didn’t need to find the right star?
The same physics, a long way from home
The way electrons respond to light is the same whether they sit in a butterfly wing or in the atmosphere of a star. The mathematics that describes how charge is arranged in a molecule is the same mathematics used for far larger things.
So the chain that takes the engine from an atom to a colour does not stop at the edge of the laboratory. Change the conditions at each step, to the heat, pressure and density of a stellar atmosphere, and the same chain predicts what an astronomer should see through a telescope.
That turns the question around. Design the experiment on Earth, with the instruments a lab already has. Measure what you can touch and control. Let the engine carry the result outward.
You stop depending on luck, and start depending on what you can build.
Three puzzles we would like to point it at
These are open problems in astronomy. We have not solved any of them. They are where this approach would be tested hardest.
Unidentified molecules between the stars
Starlight passing through interstellar space arrives with more than 500 dark absorption features in it, called the diffuse interstellar bands. They were first noticed about a century ago. So far only one molecule responsible has been firmly identified, a charged form of the football-shaped carbon molecule C60.
Each candidate molecule is hard to make and measure in the cold, empty conditions of space. The engine could screen candidates first, predicting what each would absorb, so that laboratory effort goes to the likeliest ones.
White dwarfs whose light doesn’t line up
Some white dwarf stars show absorption lines that are shifted and broadened by more than the standard explanations account for. Understanding them needs to know how atoms behave under pressures no laboratory can hold steady.
The approach: measure the atom undisturbed on Earth, then let the engine apply the star’s conditions and see whether the observed shift appears.
The iron in the Sun
Experiments recreating conditions inside the Sun measured iron blocking considerably more light than the standard theoretical models predict. The disagreement matters, because those models underpin our picture of how stars work.
A calculation of iron built up from physics alone could be compared against both the experiment and the models, to help find which assumption fails. The engine cannot yet handle atoms like iron. Extending it that far is substantial work, and we think it is doable.
How we would know we are wrong
- Run forwards, the chain should predict known astronomical measurements within their published uncertainty.
- Run backwards, from starlight to atoms, it should recover the same atomic properties that laboratories measure directly.
- Every step, run forwards and then backwards, should return to where it began.
If any of these fails, the failure points at a particular step, because each step records what it assumed.
An invitation
This one needs company. If you measure spectra, study white dwarfs, work on opacity, or simply enjoy finding where a chain of reasoning breaks, we would be glad to hear from you.