Web Concepts

Posts Tagged ‘earth-like’

Listening to places where conditions are right for life

The SETI Institute is looking at Earth-like (rocky) planets with a focus on those with temperatures between 0 and 100 °C (32° and 212 °F), where liquid water can exist. As far as our Earth-biased science can tell us, that’s a crucial ingredient for life.

SETI has been listening to parts of the sky for decades, but pointing directly at Kepler findings stands among the project’s best-informed attempts yet. The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico looks at stars like the sun, hoping they might have planets around them.

“But we’ve never had a list of planets like this before,” said physicist Dan Werthimer, director of the SETI project at Arecibo, in an interview with AFP.

In February, Kepler scientists announced they had found 1,235 potential planets orbiting sun-like stars in the Milky Way, including 68 approximately Earth-size and 288 super-Earth-size. Scientists have been verifying and refining the measurements in the months since.

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope will gather 24 hours of data on each of 86 planets identified this spring by the Kepler space telescope science team as potential Earth-like planets in “Goldilocks” orbits, where conditions are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.

SETI has its own telescopes, too, but apparently they’ve gone dark for a lack of funding, according to the AFP — SETI announced last month it was shutting down its 42-dish Allen Telescope Array because of a budget shortfall, AFP reports. While the 4-year-old, $50 million project is on hiatus, the Green Bank telescope will assume its responsibilities.

While Arecibo will also keep listening, Green Bank can hear a lot more — it scans 300 times the range of frequencies that Arecibo can, so it can collect as much data in one day as Arecibo could in one year.

The Kepler listening project will take about a year, AFP reports. SETI@home users will help crunch the data; the program uses small bits of unused processing power from idle Internet-connected computers to run calculations. You can find out more, and sign up to help, by clicking here.

[AFP]

Listening to places where conditions are right for life

The SETI Institute is looking at Earth-like (rocky) planets with a focus on those with temperatures between 0 and 100 °C (32° and 212 °F), where liquid water can exist. As far as our Earth-biased science can tell us, that’s a crucial ingredient for life.

SETI has been listening to parts of the sky for decades, but pointing directly at Kepler findings stands among the project’s best-informed attempts yet. The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico looks at stars like the sun, hoping they might have planets around them.

“But we’ve never had a list of planets like this before,” said physicist Dan Werthimer, director of the SETI project at Arecibo, in an interview with AFP.

In February, Kepler scientists announced they had found 1,235 potential planets orbiting sun-like stars in the Milky Way, including 68 approximately Earth-size and 288 super-Earth-size. Scientists have been verifying and refining the measurements in the months since.

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope will gather 24 hours of data on each of 86 planets identified this spring by the Kepler space telescope science team as potential Earth-like planets in “Goldilocks” orbits, where conditions are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.

SETI has its own telescopes, too, but apparently they’ve gone dark for a lack of funding, according to the AFP — SETI announced last month it was shutting down its 42-dish Allen Telescope Array because of a budget shortfall, AFP reports. While the 4-year-old, $50 million project is on hiatus, the Green Bank telescope will assume its responsibilities.

While Arecibo will also keep listening, Green Bank can hear a lot more — it scans 300 times the range of frequencies that Arecibo can, so it can collect as much data in one day as Arecibo could in one year.

The Kepler listening project will take about a year, AFP reports. SETI@home users will help crunch the data; the program uses small bits of unused processing power from idle Internet-connected computers to run calculations. You can find out more, and sign up to help, by clicking here.

[AFP]

Listening to places where conditions are right for life

The SETI Institute is looking at Earth-like (rocky) planets with a focus on those with temperatures between 0 and 100 °C (32° and 212 °F), where liquid water can exist. As far as our Earth-biased science can tell us, that’s a crucial ingredient for life.

SETI has been listening to parts of the sky for decades, but pointing directly at Kepler findings stands among the project’s best-informed attempts yet. The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico looks at stars like the sun, hoping they might have planets around them.

“But we’ve never had a list of planets like this before,” said physicist Dan Werthimer, director of the SETI project at Arecibo, in an interview with AFP.

In February, Kepler scientists announced they had found 1,235 potential planets orbiting sun-like stars in the Milky Way, including 68 approximately Earth-size and 288 super-Earth-size. Scientists have been verifying and refining the measurements in the months since.

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope will gather 24 hours of data on each of 86 planets identified this spring by the Kepler space telescope science team as potential Earth-like planets in “Goldilocks” orbits, where conditions are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.

SETI has its own telescopes, too, but apparently they’ve gone dark for a lack of funding, according to the AFP — SETI announced last month it was shutting down its 42-dish Allen Telescope Array because of a budget shortfall, AFP reports. While the 4-year-old, $50 million project is on hiatus, the Green Bank telescope will assume its responsibilities.

While Arecibo will also keep listening, Green Bank can hear a lot more — it scans 300 times the range of frequencies that Arecibo can, so it can collect as much data in one day as Arecibo could in one year.

The Kepler listening project will take about a year, AFP reports. SETI@home users will help crunch the data; the program uses small bits of unused processing power from idle Internet-connected computers to run calculations. You can find out more, and sign up to help, by clicking here.

[AFP]

The Kepler telescope team announces a trove

Today’s results more than double the exoplanet-candidate population, bringing the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler to 1,235. NASA needs to conduct follow-up observations to be sure their candidate planets are actually planets. So far, they are certain about 15 of them.

"The fact that we've found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting sun-like stars in our galaxy," said William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., the father of Kepler and its principal investigator.

Small, Earth-like planets are apparently more common than gas giants like Jupiter, according to today's announcement. Sixty-eight of the new planet candidates are approximately
Earth-size, and another 288 are super-Earth-size; 662 are Neptune-size; 165 are the size of Jupiter and 19 are larger than Jupiter, NASA said.

NASA said today that 54 planet candidates are in their stars’ Goldilocks zones — not too hot, not too cold, not too far, not too old — which means they might have liquid water, and therefore a key ingredient for life. Of those 54, five are near the size of Earth. Pretty stunning news when you think about it: In one tiny slice of the sky, scientists have found five other planets that may very well resemble our own.

Since launching in 2009, Kepler has been staring at a bunch of stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, looking for small blips in their brightness that would indicate a planet circling around them. Kepler astronomers released data on about 156,000 stars last summer, allowing competing scientists to check them out. The team saved some potentially promising star systems for further study, and those are among the data announced today.

Kepler team members have said they wanted to check and double-check the promising stars so they don’t have any false positives. Other physicists say they’ve been pretty good at this so far — the telescope has had an accuracy rate of at least 80 percent, according to a review by astrophysicists at Caltech. Taking a high-resolution picture of a possible exoplanet candidate can help with follow-up observations, they say. Scientists will want to check out NASA's new findings, and physicists would like some statistical models to help them sift through all that data.

Even before today's announcement, new planet discoveries have been trickling out in the past few months, including the recent news of Kepler’s smallest, rockiest find to date: Kepler 10b, just 1.4 times the size of Earth. That fiery world is much too close to its star to harbor water, and therefore unlikely to harbor life (at least the kind we understand).

In the new data, there are at least 170 exo-solar-systems harboring multiple planets, NASA said. Kepler-11, located 2,000 light years from Earth, includes six planets in a tight orbit around a yellow dwarf star. New research on Kepler-11 will be published in the Feb. 3 issue of Nature. Other findings are being published in Astrophysical Journal.

Now benchmarks are only benchmarks – like the Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting 11,000, the 500th exoplanet will be no more significant than finding number 499 or 501 from a scientific point of view. But it does speak to the rate at which research is producing results. The first definitive exoplanet was confirmed in 1992, and it’s taken us almost two decades to cross the 500 threshold. But given the drastic uptick in discoveries and the increased scientific emphasis on exoplanet discovery, some researchers think we’ll log number 1,000 in the next few years.

How? Better technology has allowed astronomers to assert with far greater certainty that a flicker in a star’s brightness or a small wobble in its position is indeed caused by an orbiting body. That in turn has spawned increased interest in exoplanet research that has fueled the hunt. Dedicated instruments like NASA’s Kepler mission, launched just last year, are turning up candidate planets at an extremely rapid pace.

While Kepler has only confirmed seven new alien planets thus far, it has located more than 700 potential worlds that are being further probed by other ground-based and orbital instruments. As researchers dig into Kepler’s trove of candidates to separate the false leads from the true exoplanets, a cascade of confirmed discoveries could occur. The data and discoveries are pouring in at such pace that two mathematicians have predicted that – if their numbers are to be believed – we’ll confirm the existence of a habitable, Earth-sized planet orbiting in its star’s goldilocks zone in May of next year.

All that science is exciting, even if we haven’t figured out how to travel throughout our own solar system just yet, much less to planets orbiting neighboring stars. Finding a potentially life-harboring rock out there would be monumentally significant regardless of whether it’s exoplanet number 500, number 1,000, or any number in between.

[SPACE]

How does this math work exactly? The details, of course, are complicated and contain a lot of subscript variables and other mathematic acrobatics that we won’t get into here (a PDF of Professors Samuel Arbesmans and Gregory Laughlins, of Harvard and Cal Santa Cruz respectively, is available here), but essentially they look at the properties of exoplanets discovered thus far by instruments like NASA’s Kepler observatory. From that data, they’ve devised what they term the “habitability metric,” a value representing a planet’s temperature and mass that determines whether or not it can support life.

What the habitability metric tells us, if we chart the values for all the planets already discovered, is that a) we’ve found a lot of planets thus far, mostly gas giants but some smaller icy rocks like Neptune, and b) with every planet we find we’re statistically closer to finding that orbiting chunk of debris with a habitability value of 1, or a match for Earth-like conditions.

Depending on how you want to weigh all that data, you can draw different conclusions. Following the long tail, we find that there’s a 66 percent probability we’ll find a habitable planet by 2013, and a 75 percent probability by 2020. But the median date of discovery is somewhat closer. To quote Arbesman and Laughlin’s paper: “Using a bootstrap analysis of currently discovered exoplanets, we predict the discovery of the first Earth-like planet to be announced in the first half of 2011, with the likeliest date being early May 2011.”

A bold call, sure, but an interesting one on several levels. Obviously it’s exciting to think about locating a planet in the galaxy that could be the target of a future mission and all the ramifications such a discovery might have. But further, as Tech Review points out, Kepler is all set to reveal it’s scientific findings in February. Which means, if these two are to be believed, that someone besides the researchers at NASA’s flagship exoplanet hunter will earn the distinguished distinction as the astronomer who found the first habitable planet outside our solar system.

[Technology Review]

In a blog post today, Sasselov clarifies that that wasn't exactly what he meant. "At this time we have found only planet candidates . . . Planet candidates are just that: 'candidates.'" Meaning that while the odds of finding Earth-like planets remain strong -- and PopSci remains optimistic -- confirmation is, despite yesterday's hopes, still pending, as to whether the sightings are a) actually planets and b) actually Earth-like.