Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Tasting the Air of Distant Worlds

Episode Date: June 3, 2013

There will soon be one thousand confirmed exoplanets, but how do we learn more about such distant worlds? We talk to the leader of a team that has recently developed technology capable of revealing the spectra of these planets, which allows us to tease apart their composition. Emily Lakdawalla invites you to find the next “face” on Mars, while Bill Nye says another asteroid flyby is good news. Our special What’s Up space trivia contest prize will put your picture in orbit!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello again, podcast people. Just wanted to give you a heads up about an opportunity that will be mentioned during the What's Up segment with Bruce today. As space geeks, you probably know about planetary resources, and you may have heard my recent conversation with the company's president and chief engineer, Chris Lewicki. So you probably know that they are closing in on their Kickstarter goal of $1 million for the ARCID 100 Citizen Space Telescope. Now, what you may not know about is a special benefit for everyone who contributes $99 or more. In addition to getting an HD quality space selfie, you get a one-year membership in the Planetary Society. Yay! So now you know why I've brought this up. You can learn more by going to kickstarter.com

and searching for the ARKYD campaign. That's A-R-K-Y-D. We've also got a link on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. Just one more news note. One or more of you out there nominated Planetary Radio for a Parsec Award. So now we're in the running.

Thank you so much. Here's this week's show. Tasting the air of distant worlds, 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. You know what's absolutely stunning? Our progress in identifying and even beginning to describe exoplanets, worlds circling other stars.

Today we'll hear about a new technique that is beginning to reveal the spectra of these distant planets, our guest will be astrophysicist Ben R. Oppenheimer. Bill Nye shares his thoughts about yet another close encounter with an asteroid and the growing concern about near-Earth objects. Later, Bruce Betts and I will have a very special prize for the winner of this week's Space Trivia Contest. The fun begins right now as we call on Planetary Society's senior editor and planetary evangelist, Emily Lakdawalla.

Emily, a couple of fun ones today. I thought we'd start with this challenge that you've given to your readers. Yeah, so there was a story circulating last week about how some people saw a lizard, some people saw a rat on Mars. And everybody who's listening to this podcast knows that there's not really a lizard or a rat on Mars. And everybody who's listening to this podcast knows that there's not really a lizard or a rat on Mars. Lord, I hope so. Maybe one stowed away on MSL. I don't know. But you know, it's kind of hard. Sometimes I try to debunk some of these by showing multiple images taken at different times from the rover and stuff.

But the most effective response I've ever seen was this one guy on unmanned spaceflight posted a panorama from Spirit. This was years ago, identifying all the other crazy stuff he saw in the panorama, including my favorite, the high speed turtle, which was this turtle shaped rock that had like a trail running behind it. Speed whiskers, I think they call those. Right. So I challenged my readers, I put up a curiosity panorama and I said, OK, guys, what do you see in here? And I've had probably a dozen responses so far. Some of them make me scratch my head. But there's somebody found a really awesome looking whale and a fortune cookie and more lizards. So I'll have a good selection of wildlife and artifacts to show people when I finally get this all together. All right, folks, the challenge has been issued. You can read more about it in a May 30 entry from Emily. I got a call from the TV show Inside Edition last week, and I put them together with our colleague Bruce Betts so that he could comment about this to that audience.

So we're doing our job at the Planetary Society. Somebody else is doing a great job. And this is a little late that we're getting to this because of our live coverage last week from the Space Tech Expo. But say something about this great song that you've discovered. Well, I've always wanted to learn Tom Lehrer's The Elements song. And I've tried a couple of times, but I just haven't been able to manage it. Well, a girl named Hope Johnson and her ukulele have produced an homage to Lehrer,

except instead of singing the elements, she is singing the names of all of the named moons in the solar system. It's really pretty adorable. And anybody in the comments who comments that she has missed a moon here or there is just totally not getting the point. I couldn't agree more.

Well, we'll go out with that, with Hope's tune, as we transition over to the next segment with Bill Nye. We'll just thank Hope for this great tribute to one of my heroes, Tom Lehrer. Emily, you're a hero, too. Thanks very much for joining us again. Thank you, Matt. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine.

Here's Hope Johnson. Zounds, Bill. Asteroids in the news once again. And it's a good thing. It was asteroid 1998QE2, 2.7 kilometers long, mile and a half long. It's so extraordinary to my way of thinking. It has its own moon, has its own smaller asteroid

that orbits it. Anyway, it came within 15 lunar diameters of the Earth, which sounds like a long way when you get into the millions of kilometers. But in solar systemic terms, I mean, it's right next door. Yeah, we got much closer, of course, to our old friend 2012 DA14. But this one was really

hulking. And I'm kind of glad it wasn't any closer. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But here's the thing. any closer. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But here's the thing. The White House had a they had a hangout and and I hung out. It had Lori Garver, deputy administrator of NASA, Peter Diamandis from the Arquette Telescope Project, where people can buy their own time on their own orbiting telescope and get a picture of themselves on a screen in the foreground of a picture of the Earth. Oh, it's cool. And they claim that they'll be able to turn the telescopes and detect certain bright asteroids. We'll see about that. But Ed Liu was on the call from the B612 Foundation on the Hangout.

And we talked about asteroids for 45 minutes. And this did not used to happen. But it is very, to me, very consistent. It is part of the Planetary Society's long message, long, many year long message. The asteroids are a serious threat. And they are, Matt, what, the only natural disaster? That is preventable. Yes. Yes. So what we got to do is get people to invest. And I say people, governments, and in this case, some of the private sector. They've got some cool ideas. Each of these organizations, B612, ARCID, NASA, and the Planetary Society, each has a role in this.

And we hope to work together to, dare I say it, save the world. At least save the world for humans. The world was still here after the ancient dinosaurs were knocked out by an asteroid or a collection of asteroids. But I don't want to go that way. And speaking of ARKID, that telescopic satellite that the Planetary Resources... A flotilla of these things. Yes.

It's going to come up again later. It has everything to do with this week's space trivia contest with Bruce Bett. So stay tuned, people, as you may just get an opportunity related to ARKID. So everybody keep watching the skies. Be aware of asteroids. And let's all work together as taxpayers and voters. If you're a space scientist, if you're a space scientist if you're a space engineer or you want

to be one keep in mind that asteroids are something that humankind has to keep working on sooner or later we're going to need to deflect one and we're the first generation of people that could do something about it i gotta fly bill nye the planetary guy he's the ceo of the planetary society and he'll be back again with us next week up Up in a moment, we're going to take a look at the atmospheres of exoplanets, planets circling other stars. Project 1640. It may sound like the title for a movie about a secret government effort, but it's actually software and hardware that promises to reveal the secrets of exoplanets. A recent paper in the Astrophysical Journal celebrated Project 1640's amazing success

in examining four planets circling a star known as HR 8799. Ben R. Oppenheimer is its lead author. Ben is associate curator and chair of the astrophysics department at New York's American Museum of Natural History. I talked to him a few days ago before he headed back to the Palomar Observatory to continue his work. Ben, thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio, and congratulations on your work as lead author of this paper that is beginning to tell us more about exoplanets than that they're just simply out there. That's right.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's an exciting period in this field of research, which is really quite new. The idea of actually studying exoplanets in detail has been one that's obviously been around for a long time, but we're finally building the capability to do this in a routine manner and to study the atmospheres of these things with a bit more precision than we've ever been able to do before.

So that's the exciting aspect of this new work that we've presented. Your profile page at the American Museum of Natural History, one of my favorite spots on Earth, says that you are a comparative exoplanetary scientist. Now that is, I suppose, fairly self-explanatory, but what does it mean to you? Well, from the point of view of planetary science, for decades, well, for all time up until quite recently, all we had to study was the planets of our own solar system. The general direction of the kind of work that I do right now is ultimately to come up with some kind of overall theory from which you can understand planets in general, not simply the ones of our own solar system. In order to do that,

you've got to study planets that are outside our solar system. Study as broad a range of planets as you possibly can. And from there, compare them to each other. For example, what do 50 different Jupiter mass planets look like? Are they different around different types of stars? Are they different if they have different orbits? Are their salient properties, the chemical composition of their atmospheres, are they all the same? These are the kinds of questions that we seek to answer. And ultimately, to come up with a general theory of how planets form, how they evolve, what's their great diversity of properties,

which we are now learning is actually much larger than we thought. From that point of view, I use that term comparative exoplanetary science. Really, it should be just comparative planetary science, because you have to include the ones in our own solar system, of course. I'm trying to think of what might be a newer subfield in science, in astronomy, and I'm not sure

that there are any. Well, I think one that would compete maybe is dark energy. Oh yes, I suppose. We don't even have the faintest notion of what it is. At least we know what planets are to some extent, although there's an endless debate over the word and what it means and how to apply it to the classification of objects.

But we know they're there. We know dark energy is there, but we don't really know how to look for it or sense it. Yeah, whereas we have now confirmed hundreds and hundreds of planets. But this work that you are part of, which is beginning to tell us not just that they're there, as I said up front, but kind of what they're made of. I mean, this is really new. That's right. The key to understanding any object in astrophysics is to obtain a spectrum of it,

to measure its brightness as a function of wavelength or color. From the spectrum, you can deduce the composition of whatever you're looking at, whether it's atomic gases or molecular gases or other types of materials, dust, for example. And it's from these spectra that we can actually measure with a fair bit of precision how much methane is there in a particular object, how much water is there, carbon dioxide, for example. And it's through the mixtures of these various chemicals that we can learn a lot more about the atmospheres of these things. Are they very active? atmospheres of these things. Are they very active? For example, do you see traces of chemical imbalances, which could be due to physical processes like giant winds or convection in these atmospheres? And that's really the key. Once you know it's there, yeah, you can determine

things such as mass, maybe if you're lucky, a few colors of these things, but the spectroscopy is key. The essence of the problem is this. You have this incredibly bright star, and right next to it on the sky is a very, very faint little planet. And so the key is to remove the starlight without damaging the light of the planet. You know, when you're standing on a stage and you have a bright light shining in your eye, you can't see the audience. But if you hold your hand up and block out that light, you can then suddenly see everybody. And this is, in essence, what we're doing with a star in a somewhat more precise way than just holding our hands up. But that's what we do, and try to see these things directly.

This, the device that I think we have mentioned that you're talking about, which has come up a couple of times in the past on this program, is called a chronograph. And you've developed one that is apparently much more effective than what has been used in the past. That's right. for quite some years now and testing various permutations of it using new types of optics that we've invented and come up with a far more precise method than has been employed before. In addition to that we have at our disposal one of the most powerful adaptive optics systems in the world. Adaptive optics is a technique for removing the blurring effects of the atmosphere on astronomical images. That's at Palomar Observatory on the Hale telescope.

So behind this very nice correcting system, we put our very precise coronagraph, and then we're able to suppress the light of the star that we point the telescope at, at a level that's probably better than anyone else has ever done before. So that lets us see much fainter objects right next to the stars. Astrophysicist Ben R. Oppenheimer. He'll tell us more about analyzing exoplanets in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012,

the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from, and are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do, and together we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds.

Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the

opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're not just finding hundreds of exoplanets, we're beginning to learn what they're made of. Some of the most promising revelations are coming from work done by a collaboration that includes the American Museum of Natural History, the California Institute of Technology, and the Jet Propulsion Lab. Our guest is astrophysicist Ben R. Oppenheimer, lead author of an exciting new paper about this team's success.

Tell us about this star, HR 8799, that you have pointed the Hale telescope at with all this great new instrumentation and what you've been able to learn about it. Yeah, it's an exciting system. It was actually discovered a couple years ago by some of my colleagues, Christian Marois, among others, using the Keck telescope, which is a much larger telescope than the Palomar telescope is,

but they used a technique to actually see the planets orbiting this thing. Now, they found four such planets, but they were not able to obtain spectra of them. Only recently were some spectra obtained of the outer two planets. What we were able to do is, in one hour, obtain spectra of all four simultaneously. And that's a really cool thing, because that is looking at a system of planets where you can study this is a true comparative

planetary science here because you're looking at force for planets that are presumably formed the same way in in this solar system they orbit the same star we're observing them simultaneously so we can really look at well how do these things differ the shocking thing is that they are all different from each other. Even though they're believed to be about the same temperature and about the same brightness, their spectra are very different from each other. That's exciting news. It is all the more amazing, to me anyway, that this is happening not with one of the current largest telescopes on Earth,

but this instrument that was, yes, admittedly, for many, many years, the largest telescope on our planet, but now has been outclassed by a number of other instruments, like the Keck that you mentioned. Does this say something about the promise of this technique for other instruments? Absolutely. I think that's one of the really wonderful things about this. The technique is what's critical here, not the actual telescope size. Obviously, you can't do this on a very small telescope. You need some reasonable amount of sensitivity. But the real issue is filtering out the starlight. The technique of how one does that with coronagraphs and adaptive optic systems and various other sensors and

corrective elements. That's the key. What's residual in the image, once you block out most of the light of the star, are a bunch of what we call speckles. They look like little bumps and wiggles in the image. Those are the same regardless of what telescope you use. I mean, not exactly how they appear, but you have speckles no matter what kind of telescope you use. And the real key is controlling them, getting rid of them, because the little planets are hundreds of times fainter than the speckles themselves. So that really isn't an issue of telescope size rather than total control or as precise the control of the telescope optics as you possibly can get. So it's not an issue of size, it's an issue of quality, if you will. So these are, while they may be tiny compared to

the star they circle, these are big planets. Can you now see a path toward being able to do this kind of work with more Earth-like planets, rocky little guys like us that are not nearly so hot? Yes, absolutely. I mean, this is where it's all headed. Everyone wants to see a planet like Earth orbiting another star and then ask the question, well, if we can get a spectrum of it, can we see the telltale signs that there's biological activity going on on that thing? Yes, there is a clear path. It probably won't be achieved with ground-based telescopes. When I was talking about precisely controlling the light from the star,

the level of precision that you need in order to see something like Earth is a thousand times better than what we're doing right now. And that, unfortunately, probably has to be done from space in a much quieter, colder environment, one where you don't have minor earthquakes going on all the time or the atmosphere in the way. But there is a clear plan. We know how to do this. In fact, there was a NASA mission that was being studied for many years called the Terrestrial Planet Finder. I was part of the science team on that. We have a very clear way to do it. We understand what technology is involved. And I think it's really a matter of time. Although that thing has been canceled, there are some budget issues, as you may be well aware of.

Oh, yeah. We talk about those a lot. Yes, they're rather frustrating, especially when you think about the scale of this stuff compared to what we actually spend our money on. In any case, that's a whole other subject. I think that this question is so compelling and of such public interest that it's inevitable that such a mission of some kind, it won't exactly be what we studied back in 2006 or 2007, it has to happen. I think that people really want to know, is there another place like Earth out there? And if there is, what's there? What is its atmosphere like? Is there life there? And we can actually make those measurements. We know how to do it. Well, from your mouth to many ears, I hope, in Washington. In the meantime, Ben, you, as people

hear this, you may already be back up on top of the mountain in Palomar making more observations at another of my favorite places on Earth. Do you enjoy going up there? I love Palomar. I was a graduate student at Caltech, and I spent many, many nights up there. In fact, so many, I wished I could have saved on the rent that I was paying on my apartment back down in Pasadena. But yeah, it's a marvelous place.

Like you, it's one of my favorite places on Earth. That observatory, even though it's 60-some-odd years old, is still one of the best on Earth. And it just works. It's beautiful. It's like a cathedral to science. Yes. Going to the dome. And, yeah, we have a three-year survey.

So the spectroscopy of these planets around the star HR 8799 is kind of a kickoff to the survey. And we're going to try to find similar sorts of objects around about 200 other stars that we are surveying regularly now. Ben, best of luck. Good hunting and clear skies. Many thanks. Thank, best of luck. Good hunting and clear skies. Many thanks. Thank you for having me. Ben R. Oppenheimer. His profile says he's a comparative exoplanetary scientist, but his title at the American Museum of Natural History is Associate Curator, Division of Physical Sciences in Astrophysics.

He's an associate professor at the Richard Gilder Graduate School. We'll be back with one of his classmates, actually. They were in different departments, apparently, but might have been at Caltech. And even visiting Palomar around the same time, that's Bruce Betts. He'll be here for this week's edition of What's Up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome back.

Thank you. Did you see that nice lineup of planets that you were talking about, that triumvirate? It was way too overcast where I was. I saw it on a couple different nights over the last week, yeah. Yeah, that's the advantage of living a little bit farther from the coast. Oh, well. So now what's up and interesting in the sky? Oh, there's all sorts of groovy stuff. You can still catch at least two of those planets if you can get a view low to the west shortly after sunset. We've got Venus looking super bright and Mercury considerably dimmer currently above Venus in the west.

And you might, right after this airs, still possibly catch Jupiter below Venus, but it's getting awfully low. But there's another pretty third object you can work in there. On June 10th, the moon, the crescent moon, will join Mercury and Venus low in the west. So look for that, Matt. Go someplace dry. I'm going to try. The forecast for the next week is not good. Yeah, at least it's cool.

You've also got Saturn over in the east, southeast in the early evening and staying up most of the night. We move on to this week in space history. In 1965, Ed White took the first American spacewalk. And he had that funny little handheld gun with the little jets that stuck out about three feet on each side. It was a very odd looking little thing. I use those sometimes when I walk. It would be better if you were on skates.

You could shoot right along like a fire extinguisher. Brilliant. shoot right along like a like a fire extinguisher brilliant we move on to random space doppler effect a neutron star those freaky freaky things can spin as fast as 43 000 rpm 43 000 times per minute i don't know how they do it. You'd think they'd get tired. It's really impressive. That is just beyond belief. Except it's real. The term would be mind-boggling. Or, whoa. Alright, we move on to the trivia question. And I asked you, which planet

has the longest solar day, the longest time for the sun to go from the overhead at noon to the sun being overhead again for a given location on those planets? How did we do, Matt? Boy, did you trip up a lot of people because most of our responses, this is very rare, that most of the people who entered had the wrong answer. They said Venus. Would they have been correct if you had not specified solar day? Yes, particularly if I had specified sidereal day. That's what Venus has the longest of. Sidereal day is how long it takes the planet to rotate relative to the fixed stars, relative to a fixed reference system. Whereas solar day takes in not only that rotation in

space, but also the revolution of the planet around the sun. And the combination of the two is what's required to create the length of a solar day. So Mercury has a solar day of about 176 Earth days, whereas for Venus, it is a smaller number. It's really, solar day is what we're used to on Earth as our normal 24-hour day. Well, thank you. That's actually very instructive, since I constantly forget what sidereal refers to. We're sorry, folks, but those of you who came up with Mercury, you were in a decidedly smaller pool, and that pool included our winner for this week, Maeve Hamrick. Maeve Hamrick of Felton, California, a past and actually fairly recent winner who did

say Mercury. Excellent. Well done. So, Maeve, we're going to send you Bill Nye's voice on your answering system. I don't think that that's gone out to Maeve up until this point. I just want to mention one other person, Wojtek Nawylek, another recent winner, who is one of those people who said Mercury. But I love his special response. He said, boy, wouldn't it be great if you were a

Mercurian and you could just, I'll paraphrase here slightly, you could just tell your, I could tell my wife, don't worry, honey, I'll get to it tomorrow. Yeah, there'd be a lot more time to get to it tomorrow. All right, so next, go ahead, tell us what the question is. We got a very special prize. Special question totally unrelated to our special prize. And I'm sure many of you have it on the tip of your tongue about how many jellyfish flew on board the space shuttle flight STS-40. How many jellyfish were on STS-40 approximately? You have to get fairly close, but not necessarily exact. Go to, what do you want them to do to enter here, Matt?

You know what? We're going to let people enter the old-fashioned way and the newfangled way. What's that webpage they should go to? Planetary.org slash radio contest. Or if you prefer, send us email. Go ahead. Send it to planetary radio at planetary dot org. And you have until the 10th of June, Monday, the 10th at 2 p.m. Pacific time. Now,

you want to know about that special prize, don't you? I do. Okay. Well, as you do know very well, Planetary Resources, that company run by Chris Lewicki, who was on the show not long ago, Planetary Resources, that company run by Chris Lewicki, who was on the show not long ago, talking about the company. They're the people who eventually want to mine asteroids. But they have this Kickstarter campaign for the first stage of their effort, which is to put maybe a fleet of these little telescopes in orbit that they call ARKYD, A-R-K-Y-D. And they have a Kickstarter campaign that was going incredibly well. And it just happens that at the $99 or more level, not only do you support ARKYD, but you get an HD space selfie. That is your picture.

They put it up on a little must-be LCD screen that's on the spacecraft, and they have a camera that looks at that screen, sees your face, and behind your face, the planet Earth. And so they're giving these away at everything like $25 and up level. But you get a high-def one at $65, but at $99 or more, you also become a member of the Planetary Society. Now, Chris, I called him up yesterday, said, Chris, can we give away an HD selfie or a selfie? And he said, hey, yeah, sure, no problem. Do an HD one.

So if you are the winner for this coming week, you will get your picture in space from our kid. Now, it's going to be a while. They're not going to offer these until it's in orbit. And that's probably going to be like 2015. They're not going to offer these until it's in orbit, and that's probably going to be like 2015, but it might be worth waiting for. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about

multivitamins. Huh. I should go take mine. Thank you, and good night. That's vitamin B2 for Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week for What's Up? Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society, who joins us every week for What's Up? Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation,

and by the spectrally spectacular members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies..