Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - One Planet, Two Stars, With Laurance Doyle

Episode Date: November 1, 2011

Multidisciplinary scientist Laurance Doyle led the team that has announced discovery of the first extrasolar planet circling two stars. He also talks about his plan to analyze communication by and among other species.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A newly discovered world circling two stars, 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. Today, Lawrence Doyle will take us to Kepler-16b, the first planet found in a binary star system. We'll also talk to Lawrence about his intriguing plan to analyze communication among other species on our own planet. All our regulars are ready for their close-ups, including Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, we both had adventures last week.

They weren't quite synchronous, though. Just at the moment that you were watching a launch, I think I was driving north out of Roswell, New Mexico. No alien sightings, by the way. Oh, they just erased your memory of the alien sightings. Oh, gosh, I should have known. Well, you have great memories of your experience up at Vandenberg. I do. This is only the second launch that I've ever seen. And the previous one, which was Spirit on a Delta II, was in daylight. And this one was at night. And I have to say, I was unprepared for the spectacle.

It was in the wee hours of the morning. The launch happened right around 3 a.m. And we could see all the way to the launch pad about three or four kilometers away, which I understand is pretty rare in that part of the country. I understand it's usually very foggy there. but we had a gorgeous view. I could see the Milky Way overhead, Jupiter was blazing away. And I was just staring at this launch pad waiting

for it to go. And of course, we counted down and there it went. And it was so incredibly bright, not only did it like sear into my eyes, but it actually washed out all of the stars. It was only like Jupiter and a couple of bright stars were visible in the sky while this thing was launching. And then it kind of arced. It was actually arcing toward Jupiter. And slowly, as it got farther and farther away, the stars came back, which it was really quite a spectacle. Who took that spectacular photo of the launch? One of the other tweeters?

No, that was Ben Cooper of launchphotography.com, who is my absolute favorite launch photographer. He sets up cameras that trigger. I don't know how they trigger. Maybe it's the noise or something. I'm not even sure. But the way that he frames the shots to catch the flames and the smoke and slightly fisheye view, it's just every single one of his photographs is spectacular. It really was. And I'm also envious of you getting so close to that rocket before it lifted off.

I'm surprised they let you get that close. I am, too. And actually, we were even doubly fortunate. We were supposed to get that close, but it was supposed to be after the tower rollback. But it just so happened that the rollback was delayed by two hours, so we got there right on time. And it's amazing how fast the tower pulls back from that tall rocket. And then there it was. I think the Delta II is one of the prettiest of rockets. It has that nice Delta blue color, which is kind of sad, actually, because this was the last Delta II launch on their manifest.

They've got a couple more rockets built, but so far none of them sold. And that'll be it for the Delta family after, or the Delta II, I should say, after 151 launches. I know you got to see some other cool stuff up there on your tour of Vandenberg Air Force Space, and I guess you'll be writing about those? I will. I'll write about a lot of it, but I'll just mention very quickly that I saw several of the different space launch complexes. This launch that I saw was at SLC-2. They call them all SLC.

I also saw SLC-6, which was originally built for Vandenberg to launch space shuttles. And their first launch was supposed to be in October of 1986. And if you can do the math, you can figure out what happened in March of 1986. The Challenger blew up and that was the end of any plans to launch from Vandenberg. But now they're actually using that same pad to launch Delta 4 heavies. So that's pretty cool. Say a word about the whole point of bringing you all up there, the spacecraft that is now orbiting the Earth. That's right. I almost forgot what was actually on top of that rocket. It's a satellite called NPP, which I won't even bother to explain what the acronym stands for, but it's the latest in a long series of Earth-observing spacecraft.

It's sort of an update of Terra and Aqua, and it's a predecessor for a new system that's going to be coming online in a few years called JPSS. But one of the things that I learned about the Earth observing spacecraft is that each one is not radically different from previous ones, that in fact, the most value to be made in creating and taking Earth orbital data is to try to take data that's taken by instruments that are pretty similar to each other. So you can establish a longer and longer and longer term record of your understanding of weather and climate. And that's very different from deep space missions. Well, it's good to hear that you helped get a new eye in the sky over our own planet off to a good start. We'll be talking to you about other planets, I'm sure, again next week, Emily, and look forward to that.

See you then, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next, Bill Nye, the Executive Director of the Planetary Society, who's also been on the road. Bill, you gave us a little preview last week.

You mentioned that you were going to be going to a meeting of SEDS. Remind us what that stands for. The Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. I like that. In Boulder, Colorado. They had their international meeting in Boulder, Colorado. Matt, it's just really exciting to see all these young people

being graduated largely in aerospace engineering. Some are in systems design. Others are in spacecraft design, mechanical design. Others are software people. And there are a lot of astrodynamicists, people that navigate the solar system and the stars with gravity and so on. It was really exciting. I did a little talk. It was great to meet everybody. And we debuted the Space Geek campaign. Everybody's wearing their Space Geek buttons, and we had a good time, because these people are the future of space exploration. They are going to make the next

discoveries. They are going to find the next thing after relativity. They are going to investigate stuff like that claim or that concern that there were particles going faster than light from Switzerland to Italy. They're going to be the people making these investigations and these new discoveries. It was great. I want one of those space geek buttons real soon, by the way. Well, I know where to get one. You know, there's a guy who does a radio show who's going to be coming to work full time at the Planetary Society.

Yeah, I haven't talked about that, but that would be me. Yes, very exciting, everybody. Matt Kaplan starts full-time with the Planetary Society on the 1st of November, this Tuesday. And Matt, I know you're going to tear it up. You're going to help us get the word out. Dare I say it changed the world. I left Boulder, and I went to Louisiana. I went to New Orleans, Nolens, if you will. For the Committee for

Skeptical Inquiry, the organization that is derived entirely from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, PSYCOP. The former PSYCOP, yes. Yeah, well, PSYCOP was just too much of a mouthful, so they shortened it. And this is an organization of which Carl Sagan was

one of the original members. Fellows. I got the Praise of Reason Award. It's very cool. Congratulations. So I got an award from the students for my promotion of science education, and I got an award from the skeptics. It was a big week for me, Matt. But you're going to have a big week, and we're going to work to get everyone in the world excited about space exploration for a better tomorrow for all humankind. Is that such a big week, and we're going to work to get everyone in the world excited about space exploration for a better tomorrow for all humankind. Is that such a big deal? It is, and I'm looking forward to joining you there at Planetary Society headquarters. Bill, thanks very much.

Thank you, Matt. He is the executive director of the Planetary Society and my new full-time boss, and he's also the science and planetary guy who joins us every week here on the radio show. I'll be right back in just a moment with Lawrence Doyle to talk about Kepler-16b, otherwise known as Tatooine. Lawrence Doyle has one of those questing minds that can't be satisfied with just one field of study. Someday soon we'll have to talk to him about quantum astronomy, but the topic could as easily be optics, life in the universe, the history of science, or Native American history.

A principal investigator at the SETI Institute for almost 25 years, Lawrence is the lead author of a paper in science announcing the discovery of something long speculated about, but never before actually detected. Remember the sunset a rather forlorn Luke Skywalker stood under on the desert planet Tatooine? There were two stars above that horizon. Lawrence, congratulations to you and your team on the discovery of this first confirmed planet in a two-star system.

I hate to follow the line of the rest of the mass media, but how close are we to looking at Tatooine? Well, it's two-thirds of a Tatooine system, I would say. The planet, of course, is Saturn-mass, so we don't expect it to be habitable, but it is half rock and half gas. And it's also just outside the habitable zone, but the habitable zone for a circumbinary planet, you know, a planet that goes around two stars, varies. Unlike a single-star hab zone, which is a certain distance from the star,

the stars are changing their distance from the planet. As far as the stars go, they definitely produce a double sunset. So say if you could stand on the surface of Kepler-16b, or say in the upper atmosphere, you would see a double sunset, but it would be different each time because the stars are changing their orientation to each other. So it's kind of interesting. They move around each other as they set. So sometimes you get the red star setting first and sometimes the orange star. Sometimes they set together during eclipses. And of course, the size of the star that sets would be different depending on if it was farther away or closer.

Things get really complicated very quickly when you have two stars. Quite fascinating to take a look at it from the viewpoint of this planet, but also from high above this solar system. You know, I always envisioned that if there was a planet in a binary system like this, that it would just be this frightfully complex orbit. But really this thing, it looks like it's just sort of circling the center of gravity of these two stars from quite a bit farther out. Yes, the planet's actually in a circular orbit. It's more circular than the Earth's orbit. We know the Earth has pretty uniform weather and climate.

So Kepler-16b's circle around the two stars' barycenter, that is, the center of mass of the two stars, is more circular than the Earth's. Also, it's closer to the plane of the two stars' orbit around each other, within one-third of a degree. And that's closer than the planets in our own solar system line up with the equator of the Sun. So altogether, this is going to be a very difficult system to model because, first, it's measured so accurately. It's probably the most accurately measured planet outside the solar system. Also, it's so exquisitely poised.

You know, it's built with super precision. The two orbits line up. The star orbits around each other with the planet orbit, and the primary star, the big star, is also lined up. Its equator is lined up with the same plane as the orbits. But I have to say, the idea of calling it Tatooine, it was kind of, when we knew it was a circumbinary planet, I emailed around, hey, we should ask George Lucas if we could nickname it Tatooine.

Aha! But the NASA folks took it upon themselves and contacted Industrial Light and Magic, and their representative, who's the director of Industrial Light and Magic, John Knoll, came and was part of a press conference. But they only knew about it at the last minute, so all the graphics were actually produced by NASA and also by Josh Carter, the second author of the paper, who's also an artist, amateur artist.

He did an outstanding job. It's quite beautiful, and we will put up links to those animations where people can hear this show at planetary.org slash radio. Did you suspect for a long time that it was only a matter of time before we found a planet in a system like this? Yeah, I thought so, because, you know, half the stars are double stars, and one in 70 are eclipsing double stars, that, you know, basically one star goes in front of the other. And I didn't see any reason why planets couldn't form around both.

However, the theorists were split on this. Half of them would say, well, you know, the two stars, as the protoplanetary disk starts to form, the two stars would shake it up and dissipate the disk, so you'd never get accretion of particles in the planets. Whereas the other half of the theorists said, well, no, what happens is the two stars actually send a kind of density wave through the protoplanetary disk, and so material accretes more rapidly.

Well, the exquisitely aligned planes of the planet with the two stars actually argues for the protoplanetary disk to be very gently forming into a planet, you know, without hardly any disturbances at all. So we would say that, you know, half the folks have to go back to the drawing board, and the other folks have a problem with getting this kind of precision. In other words, you know, when the moon rocks are brought back, all the theories of the moon were essentially wrong. Some theories are so good they could fit almost everything, but the potassium-argon ratio or so, you know, you had such exquisite detail that no one theory accounted for everything anymore. And Kepler-16 is challenging theorists on this basis.

I love stories like this, these challenges to science. Yeah. Well, you know, it answers a lot of questions, but the theorists are going to be playing catch-up for some time with this system, which is great fun. The other fun thing about Kepler, which you may not know, is that Kepler-16b transits both stars now, but the transits are going to go away for a while and then come back. So there's even a Halley's Comet aspect to the system. In 2018, this planet going across the big star will go away, and it'll come back in about 24 years. So even expect folks to be looking for the transit of Kepler-16 to come back,

you know, late into this century. More from Lawrence Doyle on Kepler-16b in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. 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 and gets people directly involved with real space missions.

It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. 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. Lawrence Doyle of the SETI Institute and UC Santa Cruz is lead author of a paper announcing the discovery of Kepler-16b, the first planet ever found in a system with two stars. I simply had to ask him about a science fiction story written 70 years ago. Here's a shot in the dark.

Ever read a story by Isaac Asimov called Nightfall? Yeah, classic. I love it. I read it about once every year or so just because it's so cool. Yeah, it stayed with me ever since I was a kid. And this, of course, was about a world that I forget how many stars it found its way around. Had to be at least four. Almost never, I mean virtually never, saw night. Until, of course, this cataclysmic event happens when night falls.

Can you imagine going beyond binary systems? Because they're out there as well, right? Oh, absolutely. We're about to publish a catalog, a Kepler catalog, on triple systems. They produce triple eclipses. We've compiled a bunch of those as well. And then looking for planets around all three stars? I don't know.urs are going to have a blast with that one. But right now, we're actually putting together the first triple eclipsing trinary star catalog. Wow. Well, as we have heard from Bill Barucki, the hits just keep coming from Kepler. And here is another great example.

And I'm sure your work will continue in this area. But I'm also curious about another project, which we just started to talk about before I started recording. I think it's great evidence of the vast array of interests that you have. This one having a tie-in to SETI, but also to earthbound creatures, our fellow animals here on Earth. earthbound creatures, our fellow animals here on Earth? Well, yes. The idea, you know, astrobiology studies the extremes of biology on Earth with the idea of saying, okay, if you're going to look for extreme biology in space, then study the extreme biology on Earth.

And that makes sense. So they go to the psychrophiles in the bottom of the ocean or they go to hot ocean vents. Well, I just thought, well, if we're going to detect an extraterrestrial communication from space, then we should understand all the communication systems on Earth. And so I just drew the direct analogy. Let's face it, all animals communicate. I think even grasshoppers send messages to other grasshoppers to mate or feed or something. So given that all animals communicate, what are the general rules

of intelligent and complex communication? For example, we know that whales had a complex communication system, a global communication system, before we did. Yeah, their own internet. before we did. Yeah, their own internet. Yeah, exactly. And bees have a communication system that's probably symbolic. That is, they dance the distance and angle and so on to the honey source, but they're doing it in a hive where no flowers are visible. So they're communicating something that isn't present.

Basically, if we study the communication systems, especially the extreme ones on Earth, then we should be able to derive a filter for intelligent life communicating that we can use for SETI. And so far, our tool has been what's called information theory. It's a kind of mathematics developed to see how many phone lines Bell Labs is going to have to put between houses and so on. But it's now used by computers to compress data and so on. But we use it to calculate the number of bits that different animals are communicating to each other. And I've even used it to quantify a communication between the plant and animal kingdoms.

Is there a sort of citizen science angle to this project, at least as it's forming in your head? Yes, it turns out that, for example, the sonograms, that's a plot of frequency with time, of dolphin and humpback whales and so on, are as well classified by eye as they are by computer. As a matter of fact, some of this stuff is pretty tricky. Some of these sonograms are pretty tricky.

But humans can learn to recognize them and compare the shapes and so on because we're really good at seeing patterns. So the idea would be to have people help us classify the different signals from different animals and create animal signal databases, and then we could do the information theoretic analysis on them to see how much information they're transmitting between each other and maybe even across species, with the idea of eventually producing an intelligence filter for SETI

when we get a SETI signal. How long do you think it might be before folks can add this to their computer at home, just like they have SETI at home? Maybe sometime early next year, because we have all this stuff. We need, you know, all the equations and so for information theory. It's just a matter of putting it into packets that people can then download to do distributed computing with. Absolutely fascinating, Lawrence. And there is much more that we could talk about, but we are more than out of time. I hope that we can pick this discussion up again another time,

whether it's about animal communications or some of the other things that you've dealt with in the history of science, perhaps, or quantum physics, and certainly continuing to look for those planets circling binary stars out and about in our galaxy. It's been my pleasure. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much. Boy, we still have to talk about Cambria and our favorite restaurant there, but we'll do that another time, too. Lawrence Doyle actually grew up in the city of Cambria, California,

which I shouldn't mention because I don't want more people to go up there. But since 1987, he's been a principal investigator with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. He is also a participating scientist, as you heard, on the NASA Kepler mission team. He has responsibility for detection of extrasolar planets around eclipsing binary systems, and that is exactly what has happened. He is the lead author of this paper that is appearing in Science Magazine about the discovery of Kepler-16b in the system called Kepler-16, the 16th discovered by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. We'll be right back, try and do a few discoveries of our own,

naked eye ones from the night sky over our planet. That'll be when we join Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. Bruce Betts is back on the Skype line to bring us all the best from the solar system and beyond because it's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Hi, welcome back. Good to be back. Yeah, me too. So you had a trip.

I had quite a trip, and people are going to be hearing about it in some upcoming shows. The climax was the visit to Carlsbad Caverns, and we climbed around in Slaughter Canyon Cave with some of the world's foremost cavers. Penny Boston, you know about her, right? Yes. She's so cool. Just a great person. But a lot of great people were there, and it was just a blast.

By the way, I make it a practice never to go anywhere called things like Slaughter Canyon. It's okay. It was just a guy named Slaughter who owned it. It wasn't actually the site of a massacre. Okay. Up in the sky. First, let me tell you about something that's hard to see. Not the usual naked eye thing, but interesting. On November 8th, asteroid 2005 YU55 will approach, will fly by

Earth closer than the moon's distance. This is a big guy. It's a 400 meter sized object. Wow. Some serious regional destruction were to hit, but it's not going to, not even close. It will reach only a brightness of about 11th magnitude for those of you who play in such things. So you'll need a telescope and need to follow it, but it is an interesting object and certainly another reminder of things flying around our solar system and in a shooting gallery kind of a way. Why you? I don't know.

Why not? Exactly. Exactly. Easier to see in the sky. We've got Jupiter right around opposition, meaning it's on the opposite side of the sun. Sorry, opposite side of the Earth from the sun, meaning it rises around sunset and sets around sunrise. Also, in the middle of the night, we've got Mars coming up and it's high overhead looking

dim and reddish in the south during the pre-dawn. All right, we're going to move straight to random space fact. Thank you, Mr. Lugosi. You ready for your close-up? I'm dead. I'm dead. Mars and Mercury have nearly identical surface gravities. I find this fascinating. It's one of those things of just the right parameters cancel out,

because, of course, Mars is larger than Mercury. But when you factor in radius squared distances and different densities, you end up both of them almost identical if you're standing on the surface of those planets, both about 30% of Earth's surface gravity. Hmm. Given a choice, I'd rather stand on Mars. Okay. If we have that choice, I will keep that in mind. We go on to the drunken butler segment of our show, as we do every week. No, we go on to the trivia contest. We ask you what moon in the solar system is named for a drunken butler in a Shakespeare play. How did we do, Matt?

Well, first let me tell you how my daughter Claire did, the Shakespearean actor and aficionado. It took her a while, but she figured it out within about five minutes. It was Stefano of the planet Uranus, where I guess all the moons, almost all of them, are named after Shakespearean characters. And Stefano was out of The Tempest. At least that's what we heard from this week's winner, Logan Clucky. Logan Clucky.

Yes, pronounced just as it appears, he says. Logan is 13 years old. He had to use Dad's email account because he doesn't have one yet. They live, he lives in Oregon, Ohio. No, not two states, a city called Oregon in Ohio. And he says he really likes our show and he hopes to be an astronomer. So, Logan, we like you, too. Congratulations. You've won yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Cool. Congratulations.

So let's give more people a chance. Here's the question for next time. How long is each pole of Uranus, sticking with the Uranian system, in darkness during each of its years? So as Uranus goes around the sun, how long is each of them in darkness at each of its years. So as Uranus goes around the Sun, how long is each of them in darkness at the poles? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. I'm willing to bet it's a really long time,

but you can send your precise answer to us by Monday, November 7 at 2 p.m. Pacific time. And you might win yourself a shirt, a Planetary Radio t-shirt to be exact. You want a funny story? Always. So when you recorded me a couple weeks ago, I, of course, was just coming off Dungeon Mastering and just about to do that now. Those following my Twitter know this, but it was kind of fun

because Bruce Cordell turns out Listen Store Show all the time as a game designer for Wizards of the Coast. And actually designed the game that I'm taking people through right now. He's one of the co-designers and he listens to Planetary Radio. And dogs are excited about it. I can tell. You want to hear a sad story? No.

We didn't tell people the answer last week. We named the winner. We did everything but tell them that the answer was Triton. Well, that was intuitively obvious. I see. Yeah, so there really was no need with our sophisticated audience. The question, by the way, was what is the only moon in the solar system between

2,000 and 3,000 kilometers in diameter? Thank you for that. All right, well, now that we have all that cleared up, you can say goodnight. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about your favorite maps., you can say goodnight. Alright everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about your favorite maps. Thank you, and goodnight. Take it from a guy who just spent a lot of time with maps of New Mexico. He's

Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Did you know maps backwards is spam? I just realized that. I did not know that. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society.

Clear skies. Thank you.