Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Imaging Hot Young Jupiters

Episode Date: October 6, 2015

Franck Marchis is on the team that has delivered an actual image of a young, hot world about 100 light years from Earth. We talk with him on the 20th anniversary of the first exoplanet discovery.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Want to see a hot, young Jupiter? You can, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Astronomer Frank Marchese is back, this time to tell us about the first actual image of a Jupiter-like world circling a distant star. Bill Nye and I will compare notes on the Martian, and Bruce Betts will get all his heavenly bodies in a row for this week's What's Up. But we begin with senior editor Emily Lachtwalis' take on the latest images from New Horizons.

This time, it's an utterly spectacular image of Pluto's companion, Charon. Emily, it appears we have found yet another gorgeous little world. Yeah, who knew Charon was going to be so interesting? I mean, I was looking forward to seeing it. I knew it would be different from Pluto, but wow, how different it is and how different it is from anything else you've ever seen before. I was just staring once again, I'm doing it again now, at this beautiful image that has been returned. This is such a rich surface. Yes, it has so many different colors, and it's really not that common in the solar system

for there to be surfaces that are a wide variety of different colors on the same surface. But here we have Charon. It's generally, overall, it's gray, like many of the icy moons in the outer solar system, but it has these patches of red in different locations and patches of darker blue or gray, and this stunningly red pole that really sticks out. It's just fascinating. Why did it make you think of Mars?

Well, it made me think of Mars not because of its color, although the red there certainly reminds you of Mars, but it has this belt running around it, this seam, this fracture. It looks like there's a dichotomy between the kind of terrain you have in its northern hemisphere and what you have in the southern hemisphere. And those two are separated by this steep scarp. And Mars has exactly the same thing. It's got a crustal dichotomy that separates the northern lowlands from the southern highlands. So there's some global scale geology that happened here. I'm not sure what it was yet, but it's going to be interesting to investigate. Okay, so even though you were thrilled to see these newest images,

you also thought with a sigh about the moons of another world. Yeah, you know, Charon is very similar in size to four of the moons of Uranus. And these are worlds that we saw only at great distance because Uranus, like Pluto, is tilted on its side with respect to the rest of the solar system. And that meant that Voyager had to make a choice of passing close to only one of the moons. And it passed close to Miranda and returned amazing images. But there are these four other worlds, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon, that all have surfaces that are multicolored that seem to have kind of fissures or cracks running across them that have very colored craters.

I think that if we saw them up close, they would be just as interesting as Charon. And I hope we get a chance to see those things soon. All right, I'll leave you with this bit of speculation or opportunity to speculate. Any idea what that red is on both Pluto and Charon? Well, the fact that it's both dark and red hints at a very likely organic-related composition. We're very far in the outer solar system, where everything that's volatile in the inner solar system is just icy and solid in the outer solar system. And so it's probably some dark, organic, rich gunk, probably

some tholins, the same kind of stuff that makes Titan atmosphere orange. I imagine that scientists would just love to be able to get a sample of that stuff in their gas chromatograph mass spectrometers. We'll have to wait for the next Pluto lander mission. I'm afraid that may be a while. Emily, thank you very much. I'm glad it won't be too long before we get to talk again. Thank you, Matt. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. We were inspired by her blog entry of October 2nd,

which ends with really what is a visual catalog from the Pluto system, still in progress. You can find it at planetary.org. Bill Nye is up next. Those were some potatoes, weren't they, Bill? They were delicious. They could sustain you for years, or salts. You enjoyed The Martian as much as I did? Oh, yes.

I don't know if anyone could enjoy it as much as you did, Matt, but yes, I loved it. I think it's great. And for those of you who haven't seen it or haven't heard of it, it talks about how this guy survives on this extraordinarily inhospitable world. And he pulls it off. I don't want to shock everybody, but he does pull it off. I guess everybody knows he grows potatoes. There's a little too much wind than you'd really have, but it was cool. It's cool. Come on. It's so cool. Well, and the guy, he does everything he's got to do. As he says, he has to science the heck out of that planet, a paraphrase.

And he does. And I say, for me, this is a couple of things. First of all, the Planetary Society has a scheme or has found at least one scheme that would work if you were to send humans to Mars in 2033, which we believe we should do. On the current NASA budget, all I have to do is adjust it for inflation, which is extraordinary. For me, it's really an allegory or a metaphor, a big metaphor for climate change. Inespittable situation. And science is going to be your way out.

Nothing else. No wishful thinking. No cavalry coming over the hill, no surprise army of the dead to resolve all your problems at the last moment. You've got to use science. You've got to be careful. You have to continually do calculations based on what you know about chemistry, based on what you know about botany, and all the little mechanical engineering things our hero continually does to get himself around.

It's very cool. And I'll tell you my real hero. It's our new friend, our new buddy, Andy Weir, the author, who's going to join us at the 35th anniversary. He'll be at the 35th. It's going to be very exciting. And today I was musing, if we have humans orbiting Mars in 2033, that will be the 53rd anniversary of the Planetary Society. And I hope you and I are around to see it. I'm going to put it on my calendar.

Well, it's on my calendar. If we can continue to advocate and bring people around to the possibility of doing this, the key is the funding. In the space community, there is the will to go to Mars. And when you see this movie, and my understanding is the last movie to do this well in October was another space movie. Yep. Gravity. The public enthusiasm for space is there. We just have to harness the money as well as the technology. And by the money, I mean the funding for exploration, the funding for I mean the funding for exploration, the funding for discovery, the funding for adventures on a new frontier. And who knows, Matt, as I so often say, if this water that flows seasonally on Mars turns out to be as real a deal

as it certainly seems to be, it is not crazy to suggest that there's still something alive on Mars, some Martian microbe. It is an extraordinary time for the confluence of these events. It's really exciting. Very nice talking to you, Bill. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. Let's change the worlds. The CEO of the Planetary Society, as Mars happy as any of us. He's Bill Nye. When I was a kid, the astronomy textbook said we'd never see a star as more than a point.

Now we are beginning to see the planets orbiting those stars. It was 20 years ago, this week, that the first exoplanet was discovered. We will celebrate by talking once again with Frank Marchese of the SETI Institute. As you'll hear, Frank is part of the team that recently announced, and then provided even better evidence, that humans have imaged, actually photographed, Humans have imaged, actually photographed, an exoplanet known to science as 51 Eridani or Eri B, a world that is nearly 100 light years from our own. That's exciting. That's the result of 15 years of work.

And as you say, it's a large team of people. I mean, I'm just speaking here on behalf of 95 researchers who are co-authors of this paper that's been published in Science. Amazing. I noted that there are 14 different international agencies and projects credited in this newer paper, and that the researchers come from 25 different institutions. Now, we want to talk about this planet, but does this kind of global involvement tell us anything about this sort of research and its future? That's a very good question. In fact, I think this is where science is going. Science is becoming more and more participative. To do this kind of project, to build an instrument like that, and also to be capable of doing these large surveys, you need to have a large team of people behind it.

of doing these large surveys, you need to have a large team of people behind it, helping, providing students, making sure that we do the right stuff at the telescope. What you can see here is that a lot of people are involved, a lot of different institutions from different countries, and they also bring different sources of funding, which provides stability on the long period of time.

We do have Skype calls often, telecoms, and when we observe, we also have Skype doing observations. So I can hear my phone basically beeping every 20 seconds and nobody observing. Well, it's nice to know that the tool that we're using to conduct this interview is also helping to directly further science. All right, tell us about this world, 51 Eridani or Eri B. So 51 Eri B is basically the first major discovery of the Gemini Planet Imager, which is an instrument located on the Gemini South Telescope in Chile. It's the first planet that really looks like a young Jupiter. We discovered it in December 2014, and we announced it only now because we did some analysis to confirm its existence and to basically get information about the planet and the system itself. So it's a relatively young Jupiter. It's like a baby

Jupiter. It's 20 million years old only. And it's orbit around an F-type star, which is slightly more massive than the Sun, twice the mass of the Sun. This is a very young star as well as a very young planet. I mean, they're both kind of infants compared to our solar system, right? Yes, because GPI was designed to look for those planets. When we decided to build GPI, we wanted to be able to see young planets to understand how planets form, because that's still a mystery. In fact, we wanted to be able to see young planets to understand how planets form, because that's still a mystery. In fact, we still don't really understand how planets form in the galaxy. So we focus our interest on these young planets because they're easier to find, because they're bright, still they're hot, so they glow in the near infrared. So the difference of brightness

between the star and the planet is lower than if you were trying to observe something like Jupiter. So we focused our attention on those bright, young, close-by stars. We selected 600 of them. They are the chosen ones. And we basically started the survey in November, and we are now observing, we observed already 100 of them. Around one of them, and maybe more, I can tell you more, but around one of them, we discovered this tiny spot, this speckle of light that was very barely visible. In fact, it's a million times fainter

than a star. And this speckle of light ended up being 51 Eri B, which is the name of this planet, the official name of this planet. We will post that image. It is colorful and it is quite amazing to see, to realize that we are now finally imaging planets circling other stars. There's much more to this. What does it take to discover a world that is circling next to something that is so much brighter than this planet itself? A lot of time, a lot of ingenuity, and a lot of stable source of funding, I will say.

And then you put together a bunch of astronomers who have been working together on adaptive optics for years. So the secret here is like we basically use eight meter class telescopes. There is not many of them. And on this eight meter class telescope, we install an adaptive optic system that correct in real time the effect of the atmospheric turbulences. On the top of that, we place in front of this star a coronagraph, a small piece of metal that will allow us to see faint features nearby bright stars. And you need to imagine that this is fact, this instrument, which is the size of a star, is at the bottom of a telescope. So it's moving with the telescope. And the tolerance we have here is a few nanometers over the night. So it's a very stable instrument with optical

mechanical structure, which makes it extremely stable. And then finally the photons coming from the stars and from the planets are being recorded by what we call an integral field spectrograph, which is an instrument that collects at the same time an image and a spectrum. That's Frank Marchese. He'll return with more about imaging hot Jupiters in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here inviting you to the Planetary Society's 35th anniversary celebration. It's Saturday, October 24th in our hometown of Pasadena, California. I'll lead the party with special guests, a great many of them. No kidding,

these people are the real deals. You can't believe how much fun this is going to be. The details are at planetary.org slash 35th. That's easy, right? Planetary.org slash 35th. Join us as we change the world. Casey Dreyer here, the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy. The New Horizons Pluto encounter was NASA at its best. But did you know that it was almost canceled twice? It was saved Welcome back to Planetary Radio. Sign our petition to Congress today at planetary.org slash stand up. Pluto was just the beginning. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Astronomer and planetary scientist Frank Marchese of the SETI Institute is telling us about 51 Airy B,

a so-called exoplanet about twice the size of Jupiter, that one of our greatest telescopes has now directly revealed. It did it through the power of the Gemini Planet Imager, also known as GPI. But GPI is not just a camera, it's a spectrograph, able to return the spectrum of light emanating from distant hot worlds. That spectrum is also critical to these findings because it has begun to tell you not just that 51 Eri B is there, but what it's made of. Yes, that's the point of the spectrograph. The reason we managed to publish this paper so quickly, considering that we discovered this planet in December 2014, is because we have also information on the nature of this atmosphere. And we've detected water as well as methane. So we detected an atmosphere which is very close to the atmosphere on Jupiter.

So that's confirmed quite quickly that what we were seeing was not a star in the background, faint because distant, but in fact an object which is orbiting around this bright star, a planet. And from this analysis, from the spectrum itself, as I said, we derived the composition, but also derived the temperature. So the temperature we have at the moment is roughly 400 degrees Celsius. So it's still hot compared to our own Jupiter, which is minus 120 Celsius. But it's one of the closest bodies we have seen similar to Jupiter. You mentioned that this is only the first discovery of a planet, the first image of a planet,

in this search underway of 600 different stars. I'm going to bet that there is more in store. I don't know if you can talk about that, but do you expect we'll be hearing more announcements like this one? Well, there will be more. I'm hoping so. As I say, we're going to talk about it now because the survey is in process, but it's a three-year survey, which is most likely going to be extended to a few more years.

So we will be able to see more of this exoplanet. And ultimately, in the future, we may be able to move this instrument to the other twin, the Gemini North Telescope, and do the same kind of survey from the northern stars to see even more planets. stars, to see even more planets. This is, and I think I've asked you this before, an enormously exciting time to be in this field, isn't it? Yeah, we really have the feeling every day when we look at those data that we are looking something unique and something that may change the way we see our own solar system in this galaxy.

I mean, we have seen now Jupiter-like exoplanets. I hope to find more and more of those. I should also mention that GPI have been detecting as well rings around stars. So we have a lot of data coming, and we have a lot of papers in the pipe that will basically be useful for us to understand how the solar system, how the planets, sorry, form around stars. In fact, this star, 51 Eridani, haven't you found a ring of dust,

or maybe more than one, circling this star? So we did not find this ring of dust. It was, in fact, inferred from the mid-infrared observation. Mid-infrared observations are used to characterize the surrounding of a star. If there is dust, and if the dust is into structures like rings, from models, they can derive basically the orientation of the system and how this dust is distributed around the star.

And that's also a strong indication of a young system. And that's the reason we targeted 51-ary system, because we knew that it would be a young system from the mid-infrared observation. As marvelous as this discovery is, it is still a long ways from being able to image exoplanets that are like our own, right? Not too hot, not too cold, and roughly the same size. Do you see that coming? Yes, I'm very confident that this is the generation of astronomers that will basically collect the first image of an Earth-like planet. How we're going to do that, it's still in discussion right now. But we have been learning a lot thanks to instruments like GPI and other instruments

like SPHERE at the VLT or SCEXEO at the Subaru telescope. The next step is to send the same kind of technology in space, and that's basically going to be the W-first AFTA telescope. It's going to be equipped with a chronograph and a deformable mirror similar to GPI, and it will be able to as well image planets. What kind of planet is still unclear, there is still some design to do, but it will be able to image planets fainter than 51 Erie B. And then the next step is to build bigger telescopes, 30-meter-class telescopes, and

those may be able to detect exoplanets like Earth in orbit around M-type stars. And they are coming, right? 30-meter telescope, the giant Magellan telescope. We're on our way. We're on our way. In fact, the TMT construction already started in Hawaii. GMT already has three mirrors on the sex, seven. And the ELT, they already started the construction as well.

So yeah, those projects are becoming reality and they will be online in 2000, let's say 1820. So much to look forward to, but plenty of reason for us to once again congratulate you and the rest of this very large global team that has begun to make these discoveries using the gpi the gemini planet imager and much more to come we think thank you frank very much and in one more reason to congratulate you you told me just before we started recording that you are now the chair of

what is essentially the exoplanet research group at the SETI Institute. So, again, congratulations. Thank you very much, Matt. That's Frank Marchese. He is a senior scientist and does a lot of science outreach for the SETI Institute up there in Northern California near the Bay Area. He has joined us in the past and no doubt will join us again, probably to talk about our increasing knowledge of our galaxy

and the many, many planets that lie within it. And someday we're going to find one like our own, perhaps one that has signs of life. We will look for signs of life much closer to home with our friend Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, and he's here with us again. Welcome back. Thank you. What's up? Anything worth looking at? Nope. The sky is black.

No, there's great pre-dawn eastern planet party. And so if you look in the pre-dawn in the east, you will see from top to bottom super bright Venus, reddish Mars, much dimmer, bright Jupiter. And then if you can get a view clear to the horizon, you can even catch Mercury very low to the horizon over the next week or so. And if you're out there on October 8th, 9th, or 10th, there's a crescent moon dancing in between them. And there's also Leo's bright star Regulus, which is dancing around near Venus. Really,

Venus is dancing around near Regulus. So it's a pre-dawn planet party. Yeah, that's no shortage at all. You made me think of there was an original Star Trek episode where they leave the galaxy and the sky is black, except for the Andromeda galaxy off in the distance. It was pretty fun. I don't think it was accurate, but it was fun. Cool. On to this week in space history. It was 1959 that the Soviet Luna 3 sent back the first images of the lunar far side. Another great Soviet accomplishment.

On to, wait, you've got someone, something, some introduction for the next segment, don't you? I sure do. I collected this just before we all watched The Martian. I was with a bunch of our buddies from Yuri's Night, and there were some Planetary Society people there, and asked them if they'd like to participate. Here you go. Where do we want to go? Mars! When do we want to go there? Now! Random Space Pack! That was wonderful. Big fans. And saved my voice. Thank you. So over the next few weeks as we lead up to our Planetary Society 35th anniversary celebration, I thought I'd focus on what's changed since 1980 when the Planetary Society was started. And we'll start today with in 1980, five and a half planets had been explored with spacecraft.

My half going to Mercury because we'd only imaged half of it until Messenger got there in 2008. Now we've explored all eight or nine depending on how you define Pluto. I like it. I like this new concept. All right. Well, we'll come back to it in the next trivia question. But first, let's go to the last trivia question with a fun word that I couldn't believe I hadn't put in a trivia question before.

What word generally refers to three celestial bodies in a line? For example, during an eclipse, but a general term for three celestial bodies in a line, for example, during an eclipse, but a general term for three celestial bodies in a line. How did we do, Matt? Very nice response to this. Our winner, at least as chosen by random.org, I think a first-time winner, but I didn't actually check. It's Wes Potts from Elizabethton, not town, but ton, Elizabethton, Tennessee, from Elizabethton, not town, but ton, Elizabethton, Tennessee,

who said that that word you're looking for is syzygy? How do you pronounce it? Zyzygy. Zyzygy. Syzygy. Syzygy, I suppose. Okay. You know, it's just syzygy.

S-Y-Z-Y-G-Y. Syzygy. It's not a spelling bee. It's okay. You don't have to repeat the word. Wes did come up with that. Could you use it in a sentence, please? Well, here it is in a sentence.

Wes said, syzygy, which is apparently from the ancient Greek, meaning yoked together. Mostly just because it sounded fun. Congratulations, Wes. You are the winner, the second one, of Extronaut, that board game from Dante Loretta and some of his colleagues that allows you to mount your own planetary science missions across the solar system. You're going to get the prototype. You can join a phone call with Dante, and you'll get the full version when it's released commercially as well. Dante is very happy about all that. Dante, of course, also the PI for the

OSIRIS-REx mission to an asteroid that'll be leaving soon. We'll be talking about that in future shows. I got some other fun ones for you. This from Ray Bozenski in Shelby Township, Michigan. I'm not even sure I understand this. He says, Syzygy, believed to be an ancient word meaning down in front. I see. Because you see the one object passes in front of the other object, passes in front of the other object, and they're trying to watch something. Maybe the Martian. Now I get it. Samantha Glick is in Minneapolis.

She said, Syzygy happens to be my favorite word. It's the only English word with three Ys, except perhaps, she adds, for Kashyik, Kashyik, Kashyik, the name of the original home of the Wookiee. You knew that. Yes, indeed. Well, there goes that possible future trivia question. And finally, somebody else who also appreciates the word, Martin Hajofsky. He says it's a 22-point word in Scrabble. He knows because he won a game with it. Science rules. Probably had to prove it was a real word. He did. He had to look it up. He had to prove it. Okay. How about next time? Well, I don't know if this will help you as much with your scrabble, but here's your question.

As of 1980, and also then as of 2015 each, how many planets had been orbited by spacecraft? Orbited by spacecraft, how many in 1980, how many in 2015, celebrating Planetary Society's 35th anniversary? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. And you have until the 13th, October 13th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer this time around. You might win yourself not just a gorgeous Planetary Radio t-shirt, but how about a Planetary Society asteroid? Amaze your friends, a little rubber asteroid. You can beam people with something that's fallen from space. And I have. It's not actually fallen

from space. Well, I mean, in some broad star stuff kind of way, I guess. You have beamed many people. I have seen you hurl these at countless people from here to Italy. It was a long throw. But I'm... Okay, say goodnight, Bruce.

Alright, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about if computer mice were larger, would they be called rats? Would you need a rat pad? Thank you, and goodnight. A rat pad. I knew some people who had a rat pad. I used to visit them there now and then. He's Bruce Betts.

He's not part of a syzygy, but I think he's been past zizics. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its world-building members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.