Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Kepler Discovers Hundreds of Extrasolar Planets!

Episode Date: February 21, 2011

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Kepler finds Earth-sized planets, and lots of them, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. New data from the Kepler spacecraft indicates that our warm and life-friendly world may be just one of thousands upon thousands like it in the Milky Way galaxy. That's just one piece of the big news from William Barucki, Kepler's principal investigator. Bill returns to our show with an incredibly exciting report. Speaking of excitement, we'll hear from Planetary Society Science and Technology Coordinator Emily Lakdawalla

about a picture-perfect flyby of Comet Tempel 1. Or perhaps I should say picture and sound perfect, as you'll hear in a minute. Bill Nye joins us from Georgia Tech University with his commentary this week, and we'll drop in on Bruce Betts for a gander at that crowded night sky, along with a new space trivia contest. Emily, we need to talk about Stardust next this week, of course, but I hope can spend more time talking about it next week. We'll try and give it some special coverage and include you in that conversation, if that's okay. But give us your initial impressions and tell us

a bit about all the wonderful stuff you've put up on the blog. Well, I think that my initial impressions are kind of like Joe Viverka's. He's the PI on the mission. He said this flyby was not 100% successful. It was 1000% successful. I love it. It was really quite amazing. You know, this is a really old spacecraft. They were trying to downplay expectations about what it might be able to do. It was running on fumes. And yet, when those images came back, they were sharper than the images that we got from VILT-2, which was its original target. You could immediately see the two circular craters on Temple 1 that were the sort of landmark for where Deep Impact had struck it. And then in the outbound images, you saw a whole new landscape. And then in the outbound images, you saw a whole new landscape. So it was really spectacular what the data that came back with just the imaging. And then there, of course, there's a whole lot of other instruments going on. Did anybody expect to get images of this quality? Nobody did. I don't think anybody expected it. The images are really just about as good as what Deep Impact got, except they're not quite as high resolution, but they cover much more of the comet. So it's really pretty great. Now, you've put something else up on the website. This mission came not just with beautiful images, but with sound.

Give us an introduction. Well, what we're going to hear in just a second is the sounds from one of the dust sensors on the spacecraft. Stardust was originally a spacecraft designed to fly through a comet's tail and collect material from the comet. So it was really all about dust. And these particular sensors are measuring how much dust is striking the spacecraft as it flies through the coma, and they managed to convert that data into sound. All right, let's listen to that now. So there it is, the sound of a comet, or at least particles of that comet coming off of it,

hitting the Stardust Next detectors. Those little pings come in groups. That's right, and I asked the instrument scientist, Don Brownlee, who was talking about this data, I asked him if that represented, was the instrument turning off and turning on at different times, and he said, no, that's a real feature of the data. That's how clumpy the dust is around the comet. Well, we'll leave it at that for now and just say that people need to go to planetary.org slash blog where you have continuing coverage and they must see this beautiful video, a morphine video put together by one of your colleagues. The mission put all of the images straight up onto the web so that a lot of the amateur image processors that I talked to a lot

were able to do some really great work with the data, and the animations are just spectacular. One other quick mention for today, and that is your latest poster, which is available from the Planetary Society. That's right. You know, MESSENGER is going to be entering Mercury orbit in less than a month, and one of the things that they have just released is an amazing view That's right. You know, Messenger is going to be entering Mercury orbit in less than a month. And one of the things that they have just released is an amazing view of the entire solar system from

the inside. They're in a unique position now close to the sun. So they were able to look out from the sun and see most of the planets. Uranus and Neptune were too faint, but they compensated for that by getting some of the Milky Way in there. It was just an amazing panorama. And it reminded me of the Voyager 1 panorama, the solar system family portrait, the one that led to Carl Sagan's famous quote about the pale blue dot of Earth sitting there in a shaft of sunlight from the sun. So I put the two together on a very nice poster that's available from the Planetary Society. It is a very nice piece of work. Emily, we're out of time. We'll talk to you again next week, and hopefully have a longer conversation about Stardust.

Looking forward to it, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Back in just a moment to talk about Kepler. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy, this week talking to you from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm visiting the Planetary Society's first college chapter, and we have some great rocket science going on here with Professor David Spencer in charge, and Georgia Tech is going to help monitor the Planetary Society's light sail spacecraft. Going to help do some telemetry, maybe some signal processing and so on, setting up our own mission

center here at Georgia Tech. Very exciting. Great baseball stadium. Saw a great game this weekend. Now, with that said, I am quite concerned about the United States Congress. Now, you could be a listener, you could be a Planetary Society member, you could be somebody living in somewhere else in the world besides the United States. But the United States Congress right now is claiming that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is spending too much time on climate change and not enough time on human exploration. And they want to curtail somehow the climate change research at NASA. I got to say, this is probably a very bad thing.

Climate change is going to affect billions of people. And we need to know as much about the Earth's climate as possible, no matter which side of the issue you might be on. So we need to study the Earth's climate and we need to continue to use humans to explore space. Nobody's better at exploring than humans. These two things are not incompatible. What we're asking people around the world to do is support human space exploration and support climate research so that we can understand our place in space. Please think it over no matter where you live and support human space exploration. I've got to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy.

William Beruki could only tease us the last time we talked. His spacecraft, Kepler, had already discovered scores of extrasolar planets, but Bill made clear there was much, much more he hoped to announce before long. Well, the bombshell dropped just a few weeks ago. Keep in mind that we humans already knew of something over 500 planets orbiting other stars. The Kepler principal investigator and his team may have upped that total by more than 1,200. And what an incredible diversity of worlds. We knew we'd have to get Bill back on the show to share the details

and give us a hint of what is still to come. He has spent his entire professional life, nearly 50 years, working at NASA's Ames Research Center in Northern California. And that's where we got him on the phone last week. Bill, the main word that I want to say to you is wow. Congratulations. Thank you. It has been a wonderful experience to see all these many planetary candidates up here. Many of them look very, very good. So we're just absolutely delighted with what we're finding. Yeah, thank you for perhaps tripling the number of potential extrasolar or exoplanets in our galaxy.

Anybody who is a regular listener to this show knows that we've been celebrating this for ever since the announcement was made early this month. I'm really blown away. I said to some people over the weekend, some other space enthusiasts, I think there ought to be a national holiday for this. Well, it may get to the point when we start actually confirming Earth-sized planets that you may want to revisit that possibility. What are you most proud of with this data? Is it the sheer grandiosity of the number of potential planets,

or is it all the way down to those five that are Earth-sized in the habitable zone? By far the thing that we're most happy about and delighted about are the fact that we're finding many Earth-sized candidates. They're not all in the habitable zone, but the worry has always been that when you had the giant planets, you know, you found them in short-period orbits, that they would migrate toward their stars and they would destroy all the small planets in their path. The small planets would be hurled into the star or thrown out of the planetary system. That's not what we're finding.

We're finding many, many of these Earth-sized candidates, mostly fairly close into their star, toward their star, but of, that's what we expect. One emission that's just starting up, so we have just several months of data that we've analyzed properly so we can actually talk about it. We have more data, of course, but we're still analyzing. We're still trying to understand how to fully calibrate it. And basically, we're trying to take that data and take the segments and attach the segments in such a fashion that we can search for longer patterns from planetary transits.

But right now, we're just so delighted. We have some 68, believe it or not, Earth-sized candidates, which is just a tremendous number. And some 288 super Earth-sized. And these are candidates where, you know, very likely if they were in habitables on an atmosphere you could walk around on, they'd be twice the size of the Earth. You'd weigh a little bit more. But, you know, it would be nothing surprising. So it's just marvelous to see such huge numbers of these smaller rocky candidates.

And, of course, the fact that we found such a very large number has also been delightful. And, of course, the fact that we found such a very large number has also been delightful. And if you keep moving up the scale through the classes of planets that you found, lots of Neptune-sized, lots of Jupiter-sized, but not too many that are bigger than Jupiter. Was this a surprise? The opposite's a surprise. We're surprised if we find anything that's substantially larger than Jupiter. It wasn't that long ago that the theory was such that if you had Jupiter and you added mass to it,

you threw bricks into it or hydrogen into it, this object would get denser all the time until ultimately you formed a star. It wouldn't get much bigger. In fact, Jupiter and some small stars are about the same size. So the fact that we're finding objects bigger than Jupiter really surprises. And there are a fair number of them. We're finding something like 19 are about one and a half times Jupiter, up to twice the size of Jupiter. There's an additional 15 that are even bigger than that, up to twice, up to, well, we're not quite sure, but just bigger than Jupiter. And so we're not quite sure what these are. They're certainly

big for Jupiter, bigger than some stars. There has been a lot of talk recently about how it's not enough to have an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone, but you need a Jupiter-sized planet to protect those of us in here closer to the star. Have you found any evidence that would indicate, I don't know how you would use evidence from Kepler to indicate that that's true or not, but have you found some of these big Jupiter-sized planets in systems with the Earth-sized ones? That's a very good question, Matt. I need to check and see if we have any like that. Most of the time when you talk about a massive planet like a Jupiter,

you're talking about it fairly far out. That means it would have an orbital period of, you know, like our Jupiter's 12 years. Well, we're never going to see any of those until we look for 12 years. But we might find one that's with an orbital period of a few years that would protect a planet in, inner to it with orbital, with a shorter orbital period. On the other hand, the theoreticians are beginning to ask themselves now, you know, Jupiter could fling out comets and asteroids that might come in and strike the Earth, but it could also fling some of them in toward the Earth. And so we're not quite sure how helpful Jupiter would really be. I think that's beginning to be an open question as theoreticians try to understand these better.

Back to these Earth-sized planets. By necessity, as you've just said, having a lot to do with the orbital period, most of these planets are in pretty close to their stars, and so I guess these are fairly dim stars to be that close and still be in the habitable zone? That's right. That's exactly right. Most of these stars are quite a bit smaller than our sun, quite a bit cooler.

Temperatures, you know, get down to 3300 Kelvin. Well, not quite as low as some of the planets we found, but still surprisingly low temperatures. And having a star that's almost at the distance of Pluto, you'd have a hard time seeing it. Those are really dim stars, and they're small. Some of them are as small as Jupiter. One thinks back to both the book and the movie 2010, where Arthur Clarke actually managed to turn Jupiter into a star, but that's a topic for another day.

Is it safe to call these results from this tiny patch of sky that Kepler has been staring at, that that patch might represent our entire galaxy in terms of the distribution of planets? That's right, because Kepler looks at 1,400th the entire sky. And so what it sees is probably typical of the entire sky. So 400 times the 1,200 that we have found is 480,000 candidates that are out there, implying that Earth is just one planet in sort of an ocean surrounded by planets.

Earth, a tiny planet in the middle of an ocean. It's incredibly exciting. A lot of candidates out there. And as we learn more and more about these small ones, I think the chances are higher and higher that we're going to find them in the habitable zone. That's my hope. That's William Barucki, principal investigator for the Kepler mission, that continues to uncover evidence of extrasolar planets.

We'll hear more from Bill when Planetary Radio continues. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world

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Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. The Kepler spacecraft may have more than tripled the number of extrasolar or exoplanets known to humanity, and it has found the first Earth-sized planets in the so-called habitable zone, where liquid water may be abundant and ready to support life.

As you've already heard from Principal Investigator William Berucki, Kepler has discovered far more than this in its small patch of sky. Yet Kepler is just the pathfinder. Other scientists and other telescopes now must take the work forward, studying the incredibly rich harvest of worlds that have been uncovered. That's where my recent conversation with Bill picked up. You're getting a lot of excitement from the other astronomers working with these Earth-based scopes who now have their hands full following up on your results?

That's right, because we find not only, of course, these rather strange objects and these rather typical objects and such a variety of objects, but we talked about a moment ago these very giant planets. What could they be? What could cause them to be so inflated? One of the first planets that we discovered and announced was one that had a density much lower than that of Jupiter.

Jupiter has a density well over that of water, 1.3 grams per cc. We found something that was 0.17. That is to say it had a density, this enormous planet had a density of styrofoam, which is just astounding. How could that be? We found a Neptune-sized object, a planet, that was about the size of Neptune, about the density of Neptune, and yet it was so close to where stars, we saw 40,000 times as much flux on it

so it should have just heated up and just inflated into a big balloon-like thing but it didn't and we found strange stars a pair of stars that when we first saw them we thought this was a black hole but it wasn't it was just two stars

that are almost like collision courses they come hurtling toward each other just barely miss each other the edges of the two stars that are almost like collision courses. They come hurtling toward each other, just barely miss each other. The edges of the two stars come within one diameter of a star. That must be an exciting solar system to live in. I also wonder about the speculation on the part of our own Bill Nye from the Planetary Society about some of these really big planets that are in the habitable zone. Who knows? Maybe one of them has a moon that could someday be called Pandora.

Not only that, but, you know, when you talk about moons, you often talk about systems of moons. Jupiter doesn't have one. It has four bright ones and a lot of small ones. You can certainly imagine a Jupiter in a habitable zone, which means that all the moons, all of them, would be in a habitable zone, which means that all the moons, all of them, would be in a habitable zone. And if there were four like Jupiter and they were all Earth-sized, they could have atmospheres, and they're close together.

You could go on a vacation from one moon to another. I like that. Go visit your family that live on a different moon. So space travel might be very common. So much to look forward to. Now, what's next from Kepler? First of all, what's the health of the spacecraft? I know you had one of these scares that we hear about from other mission folks all the time, one of these safe mode events. That's right. Whenever the

spacecraft gets confused, what it does is it sort of points the solar panels toward the sun, and it starts spinning around the axis point at the sun. So it's very stable. It's very happy and content here. Nothing can bother it. And sending back a little radio message saying, you know, help, help. And we pick up that message. We download the data a little at a time, then orient it so the antenna points at us instead of just spinning in space,

and ask it, you know, what it's found, what's disturbing it. I'll download all the engineering data, and it tells us what was strange that went wrong that caused it to basically protect itself by going into the safe mode. And so generally what happens is that it has on board two star trackers that sort of track the stars. They're generally not used during the regular operations, but they're kept on just to make sure if something goes wrong that it can use those to properly orient itself. And the star trackers sometimes, I think, see dust come from the spacecraft.

Little meteors hit the spacecraft, and that causes dust and material to fly off the spacecraft, and that dust looks like sparkling stars. And, of course, that causes the star trackers to say, something's unusual here. Let's go into safe mode. But everything's fine now? Everything is just dandy.

Excellent. So what is next? What can we look forward to over the next few years of Kepler's operation? Well, as we go further on, one of the things that we do is we get a longer data string, longer periods of data, and that tells us about planets that have longer periods. And these planets are cooler planets. These are planets closer to the habitable zone. And so we'll see more and more planets in the habitable zone. Not just among cool stars, but stars closer to that, like that of the sun.

So year by year, we should see more small planets, and we should see more in the habitable zone. And we should see confirmations, not just candidates, but confirmations. And that will be the most difficult of all. Not just to find the candidate, but to prove it's a planet, not some eclipsing binary star or some strange thing. And that will be the hardest thing that we will do is make these confirmations. Bill, I so look forward to your next visit and your next big announcement.

I hope you'll come back to Planetary Radio after that happens. I would be happy to talk with you. It is always a pleasure. Congratulations once again. Bill Berucki is the principal investigator, as you've heard, as we've heard several times on this program, for the Kepler mission. And he has spent essentially

his entire professional life beginning with developing heat shields at the NASA Ames Research Center. 49 years up there now. You're going to have quite a golden anniversary, aren't you, Bill? Yes, that's true. Maybe I'll get a watch. With a nice planet, Earth-sized planet on it, I hope.

We're going to move on to looking around our own solar system a bit more, and elsewhere maybe, with Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. That's just a few seconds away. The Skype connection appears to be functioning properly. We are ready to speak with the Planetary Society's Director of Projects, Bruce Betts, because it's time for What's Up. Hi there. Hello.

Bruce Betts, because it's time for What's Up. Hi there. Hello. We have a nice response to the contest later, and I think it's because people wanted this solar system for iPad, but we'll get to that a little bit later. It's a nice, exciting response. Must be a lot of people with those machines out there.

Cool. Let's talk about the night sky. We've got Jupiter still bright, getting lower and lower over in the west after sunset. Brightest star-like object there. And actually a little ahead, March 6th, we got a crazy pre-dawn sky coming up, but it's a couple months away. All the planets, and there actually is a kitchen sink. But I'll let you know when that's coming. All right. And then Saturn is rising in the evening now over in the east, looking yellowish. It is above the bright blue-white Virgo star Spica.

And that's what's going on in our sky. To this week in space history. In 1966, Cosmos 110 was launched, setting the record for dogs in space! 22 days. It's rumored, but still

not confirmed, that the day before they launched a Frisbee. That's what the Bugs were chasing. Okay. I kept them up there so long. Ba-dum. 1987. Supernova.

1987. A. Exploded. Real live supernova in our lifetime. We move on once again. And anything exciting or do I get to belt it out? I think it's all up to you, big guy. There were some interesting side effects, sound effects that seemed to come along with that.

I mean, I don't know. There was something NASCAR-ish about that. I don't know why. I can't put my finger on it, but... Random space. That's good. In the history of the U.S. space program, we're talking U.S. here, 339 astronauts have been selected to date. That's a lot.

That's more than I might have expected. I just, I wonder if the majority of those have not flown, have not been on a mission. No, most of them have flown. Most of them do get a chance. Because I know there are a few who wait a long time and actually retire regretfully without getting a flight. So I hope there aren't too many of those. The vast majority of that number have flown. Well goodness i'm relieved i'm glad okay i didn't want you to be worried the trivia contest uh with that that ipad nodule and i asked you what are the

names of neptune's rings how'd we do matt a terrific we got a lot of answers we sure did a terrific response i you know you hear that they're selling millions of those iPad-y things. Apparently, we have a whole bunch of listeners who either have them or know somebody they care enough about to give them a nice app. Actually, a book, because that's what this is. Solar System for iPad, written by Marcus Chown. It comes to us from Touch Press. Very interesting. You played with it, right, with your boys?

Yes, they loved it. It's very cool, and it's more than just a static book. You can spin the planets and moons and do other stuff, zooming in, zooming out. It's great. I want one, but then I guess I'd have to get an iPad too, wouldn't I? Well, here's somebody else who wants one. It's April. April Ard of Gaston, South Carolina. April came up with, here are the rings, Adams, Gall, Arago, wasn't he in Lord of the Rings? Lassell and Le Verrier. Yeah, they actually all were in the Lord of the Rings. All the others were dwarves. Okay.

And then apparently there's a sixth ring that a number of people mentioned, one of them being Steve Castleman. This sixth faint unnamed ring coincident with the orbit of Neptunian moon Galatea. And then is there something more you said to the Adam's ring? We're thinking about Frodo. Yes, Adam's has, as they were originally discovered, people weren't even sure they were full rings. They were ring arcs, but they are, it is a full ring, but it has, they've actually named the prominent arcs

the denser portions of the ring. Liberty, equality, and fraternity. And you said that the Cowardly Lion named a fourth one that I wasn't aware of. Is that Courage? Thank you. That just tickles me.

What have they got that I ain't got? Courage. I love him. Bert Lahr. Gotta love him. Listen, April, we're going to send you Solar System for iPad. And we're going to give away another one of those next week. And what have you got for a brand new contest?

What are we giving away for this contest, Matt? I think we should go back to, should we stick with the Year in Space calendar or go back to t-shirts, or what? Where are we? We're in February. Let's give away one more calendar. We still have ten months. Sounds good. But this one, I don't know, might be an easy one.

Besides Temple 1, which was just visited, of course, by Stardust Next last week and had been visited by Deep Impact and brutally attacked one time before, what is the only other comet to have been visited by more than one spacecraft? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. I haven't the slightest, but you may, and if you do, get it to us by the 28th. That'd be Feb 28 at 2 p.m. Pacific time. And who knows, you might win a 2011 year in space calendar. Okay, everybody go out there, look up the night sky and think about slimy, gooey things you don't

want on your body. Thank you and good night. I don't know, these aliens or something? I leave that to the listener. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects. What slime do you fear the most? The slime creatures of I think the Neptunian moon Galatea. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects

for the Planetary Society and he joins us every single week here for What's Up. Next week, a special conversation about Stardust Next at Comet Temple 1. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society

in Pasadena, California and made possible in part by a grant from the William T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова