Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Verified: More Than 700 New Worlds

Episode Date: March 4, 2014

SETI Institute researcher and member of the Kepler team Jason Rowe helps us dig into the latest big announcement about hundreds of planets in solar systems like our own.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ho hum, another 700 new worlds confirmed, 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. We live in amazing times. Another 715 exoplanets have been confirmed by the team behind the Kepler spacecraft. We'll visit with Jason Rowe, a member of that team. Have you seen Bill Nye's selfie with Neil deGrasse Tyson and the President of the United States? We'll talk with him about it. Bruce Betts is waiting in the wings for what's up

as the Planetary Society senior editor takes the stage. That's Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, more pretty pictures in this relatively new entry in the blog at planetary.org. Some really pretty pictures of craters. And I guess, like lightning, meteors can hit in the same place twice? Well, they can. And it looks like that's what's happening with these craters that I'm showing in this blog entry. But in fact, that is not the explanation that scientists think explains how these craters within craters formed. We're actually looking at an impact into a layered surface. On the moon, that happens all the time because you have this broken up stuff called regolith on top of bedrock. the time because you have this broken up stuff called regolith on top of bedrock. When an impactor hits that, it's very easy to blast away the loose dirt, the loose soil and regolith. It's

much harder to blast away solid rock. And so what you wind up with is a big crater with a flat floor and then a smaller crater in the bottom of that flat floor. And that's because of the layers in the subsurface. Now on Mars, the layers are caused by something else. In the blog interview, I explain how you can tell that in this particular location on Mars, that the layering is caused by ice in the Martian subsurface, which is always an exciting topic on its own. I particularly like this close-up with a terrific resolution that shows these beautiful polygons on the surface. And these are related to what you're talking about? That's right. Polygonal terrain is actually pretty common on Mars. It wasn't easy to recognize until

we got a camera in orbit at Mars that had the resolution necessary to see it. I'm talking, of course, about the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HIRISE, on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It can take photos up to 25 centimeters per pixel resolution, which is, if you think about it, the size of your foot, most people. And so you're looking at unimaginably detailed features on the surfaces of another planet. And really just diving into any one of HiRISE's images is an exercise in visualizing beauty in geology on another world. And these polygons are especially cool. They tell you about the way that the surface has cracked as it's frozen. And then the cracked surface, the little polygons get wedged apart by ice over time.

And they make this very recognizable terrain that tells you that there's ice in the subsurface. Beautiful stuff. It is in a February 27 entry in the blog at planetary.org. We will not talk to you next week, Emily, because we're going to get a special report on the brand new NASA budget, which will have been released by then. In fact, will have been released by the time most people hear this. So we'll check back with you in a couple of weeks. When I'll be at Houston at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Always exciting to get those live reports. Thanks a lot, Emily. Thank you, Matt. She is the Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist for the Planetary Society

and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is the CEO of the Planetary Evangelist for the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. Bill, I just got to say, epic selfie, dude. Oh, it, like, was so out there. Truly. It's like Neil deGrasse Tyson and, like, me and the President of the United States. Yeah, it was pretty cool. He was very gracious.

The president, he looks like he's into it. Oh, yeah, he had fun. Yeah, well, you know, we engaged him briefly about the importance of space exploration. It was for an event at the Weisshaus they called the First Annual White House Film Festival. Kids, students, who had created films on electronic media. The films were about the technology, how it helps them learn, how it engages them with people on the other side of the world. And it's a very cool little idea.

And clearly, say what you will, the president believes in it. He thinks technology is important for students and for the future of, well, of the world. So it was a cool little moment that Neil deGrasse Tyson and I were able to get with him. By the way, Neil is, you know, I don't know if you know, is Mr. Tech Head. And he's always setting up a little network during our board meetings. He's running about. He's always pulling out these crazy pens with all this fabulous technology. He takes out his phone, which has a camera, and it's running about. He's always pulling out these crazy pens with all this fabulous technology. He takes out his phone, which has a camera, and it's not working.

So Uncle Bill has to work fast, and I got her done. I just don't understand these gearheads. Yeah, yeah, you of all people. Man, for those of you in the audience who don't know, Matt has got a monkey on his back when it comes to any sort of electronic thing. With that said, the films are very cool. They're online at whitehouse.gov slash film fest, I guess. But we talked to him briefly about the importance of space exploration. And what I reminded the president of the United States was the thing about it, space exploration at any level, whether you're talking about human space exploration, planetary exploration, weather, climate science, whatever it is, it's inherently optimistic.

When we go exploring space, it empowers us. It makes everybody in society believe we can accomplish great things. And this is priceless. So those couple moments with him meant a lot to me. I'm sure he remembers at some level. But it was very cool. And the event was cool. And then at the end of it, Matt, they showed a 25-minute sample of the new Cosmos series.

Just what I was going to get to. I imagine your friend Neil might be a little anxious about this. Well, it's cool. And Andran was there. And Mitch it's cool. And Andrean was there and Mitch and the producer and Brennan Braga, they were all there and it was a big deal. It was cool.

We're counting down to March 9th for the premiere of Cosmos. Bill, thank you very much and nice work there in D.C. It was good. And I wore the pin, Matt. I wore the Planetary Society logo. It's great. I've got to fly.

Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. And he's also the CEO of the Planetary Society. Up next, the latest stunning revelation. More than 700 new and confirmed planets in our galaxy. We'll talk about Kepler. The Kepler spacecraft has done it again. This time the credit also goes to a team of scientists who used a new technique to verify over 700 planets orbiting 305 distant stars. Their papers will be in the March 10th edition of the Astrophysical Journal. Jason Rowe is a research scientist at the SETI Institute

in Northern California. He's also a member of the Kepler Science Office and one of the leaders of this work. He was hired seven years ago by Bill Berucki, the man who conceived of Kepler and fought for years to get it into space. Jason Kepler does it again. Congratulations to you and the rest of this team that has, what, confirmed the existence of how many more worlds in our galaxy? Thank you very much. It's certainly an exciting time, and we are pleased to announce the verification of an additional 715 planets outside of our solar system. So getting close to 2,000 now, this is, I mean, I shouldn't be surprised, right? Because there are obviously billions more out there waiting for us. Is that

the right inference? That's the right inference. Kepler finds planets through the transit technique, and that means we only find the tip of the iceberg of the number of planets that are out there. Of course we've talked about this many times in the past including with the man who's most responsible for this spacecraft and all of this data, Bill Berucki, and I'll I'll come back to that. So out of this 700 and something can you characterize them and most important is there the second Earth? Is Earth 2 in this crowd?

So of the 715 planets, as I mentioned, we observed them through transits. We're watching the planet move in front of its star from our perspective. So the bigger the planet is, the more light it's going to block out. So by measuring the depths of the transits, we can infer the size of the planets. That immediately told us that we were not finding lots of large planets, which is what a majority of the previous discoveries were. But most of our planets, in fact, 94% of them, are smaller than Neptune, with a good fraction of those even about Earth-sized and even smaller. Wow. And many of them sort of in this super-Earth class that are maybe the size of Neptune or smaller? Yeah, so we have a real range of sizes.

There's ones that are the size of the moon, other ones that are the size of the Earth. The majority of ours are in that so-called super-Earth class, where, as you mentioned, they're about twice the size of the Earth. But any planets roughly the size of ours in the so-called Goldilocks zone, you know, not too hot, not too cold? No, we don't have those yet. And the reason for that is we've only looked at the first two years of data. This was a statistical verification. And in order to remove any potential biases from the numbers that we were computing, we restricted ourselves to the first two years of data. That meant that we can't find the Earth-like analog because that requires

observing it at least three times, which takes at least three years of observations. So you're saying that that data may be out there waiting to be analyzed, that that second Earth might be hiding in the data? We've already begun analyzing the full four-year data set. And I'm sure some very interesting candidates are going to pop up from that. And we're trying, I say trying, we're working very hard to be able to pull out those Earth candidates and then try to verify them.

And I'm willing to bet that you're not telling everything you know. And that's fine because that's good science. But you guys all have to promise to come back on the show when more of that data has been analyzed. We don't try to be super secretive about this. We actually publish our candidate lists on a very regular basis. So, in fact, our four-year candidate list has already been posted online that anybody from the public can start sorting through. And if people sort through them, they probably can find some very interesting candidates that look a lot like Earth. The next step now is the verification process, which is turning those candidates into planets, much like

we did with the 715 that we recently announced. So I momentarily forgot that there were, what, over 3,000 of these candidates, and now you have determined that a little more than half of those, there really are the planets there. That's right. And even from the candidate list, we've tried to do a very good job of removing the obvious problem cases, and the fidelity of the 3,000 or so candidates is probably about 90%. So this is getting a lot of well-deserved press coverage.

One of the things that I don't think is being talked about in most of the major media, though, is this apparently new and very effective technique. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I can talk about that. So when Kepler was envisioned, it was always thought of as a statistical mission. Its primary goal is to figure out the frequency of Earth-like planets, not just find one. So it's statistics.

So early on, when we got our first batch of planets in, it was noticed that there were a lot of what we call multi-planet systems. And that's where you don't just see one planet transiting its host star, you see many. Most of the cases are where you see two planets, but we have upwards where you see seven. The frequency at which the multi-planet systems were occurring was actually really high. When we started to get a bit of ground-based observations to try to follow up on them and determine if there were problem cases or if there were planets, in every case, almost

every case, it turned out that we were seeing what looked like genuine planets. So then we started to dive into the statistics side of the argument to say, can we actually figure out what the occurrence rate of multi-planet systems is telling us? So the method of verification by multiplicity works by looking at the occurrence rates of multiple planet systems that Kepler has observed. For example, eclipsing binaries are randomly scattered across the nighttime sky and typically produce only one eclipse because it's two stars going around each other. If those are randomly scattered across nighttime sky, it's rare that you're going to see two of them overlap on top of one another. However, when you look with Kepler data, you see that there's lots of multiple events occurring,

all these multi-planet systems, at a much higher rate than you'd expect just from a random occurrence. That's Jason Rowe of the SETI Institute. He'll share more exciting exoplanet news in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. He'll share more exciting exoplanet news 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. Your name carried to an asteroid. How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your cat, we're inviting everyone to travel along on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash b-e-n-n-u.

You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash Bennu. Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list. The Planetary Society, we're your place in space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Jason Rowe is a research scientist at the SETI Institute and a member of the Kepler Science Office. He's also an author of the about-to-be-published work that provides convincing evidence for another 715 worlds circling other stars.

What's more, the new technique used to verify these worlds works with solar systems that have multiple planets, just like our own. You, apparently on the team, you're calling these multiple planet systems pretty commonly now multis. Yeah, we do that. Is it becoming apparent that most of these extrasolar systems do have multiple planets. The way to think about multiplanet systems and how often you would see them is to think about our own solar system. If you were an alien planet observing our solar system from a distance, you would not

see eight planets transiting our star. You would probably see at most two. And although our solar system is quite flat, all the planets are aligned within a few degrees, it doesn't take much mismatch in your orbital planes to have a non-transiting planet. The fact that we see large numbers of multi-planet systems with Kepler tells us that, first of all, the planetary orbits are quite flat,

and that it's very likely that multi-planet systems are the norm, that they're very common. You're looking at basically pancake solar systems rather than sort of atomic or atoms with, you know, electrons swirling around every which way in that classical view of the atom. I think that's also a remarkable observation, that if I tell you that planets are small and that they're in circular orbits and that their orbital planes are aligned and flat is that it immediately reminds us of our inner solar system. So what we're finding with Kepler is as we dig into smaller planets at longer orbital periods, we're finding more and more planetary systems that remind us at home, which is very different

than the first discoveries, which were all these sort of large, hot Jupiter objects, which were very, very exotic and very strange to us when we first discovered them. By the way, what are those two planets that if you were on that distant world and you used this technique to look over our way, what would they be? I mean, my immediate impression would be Jupiter and Saturn, but would it be something closer to the sun? It's going to be the closer planets. You can actually have different configurations of two planets that you would see, because you can always align two orbital planes, but not three.

You could have the Earth and Venus. You could have the Earth and Mars or Earth and Jupiter, but you can't get three of them. And then there's outer ones you can't get, for instance, Jupiter and Neptune both transiting. So as we find these generally larger-than-Earth worlds, and multiples of them in a solar system, can anything be inferred, maybe just from their orbits, about the possibility of planets that are closer to our size in the habitable zone? Or is that really too much of a reach? No, not at all.

Part of our study was to not only verify the planets, but we spent a lot of time also characterizing the stars themselves. The better you know the star, the better you know the planet. For instance, I told you that the transit depth tells you the radius of the planet, but that radius is only as good as you know the size of the star. So rather than using a lot of, say, Keck nights to verify planets, we used nights observing with the Keck telescope to instead characterize the stars. With a good characterization of the star, we can now determine where the Hubble zone is around these potential solar systems. So that combined with Kepler's law, with the orbital period that's well measured,

we're able to figure out which of the planets of the 715 are in their potential Hubble zone. That's a reminder of how aptly named this spacecraft is. What comes next? I mean, obviously you guys, as you said, have much more data to analyze. But are you looking forward to the appearance of much bigger Earth-bound telescopes and, of course, the James Webb Space Telescope, fingers crossed, to take us even farther? Yeah, we really are on the cusp of the, well, I didn't say cusp. I think we're right now

in the middle of an exoplanet revolution that is going to take its next giant steps with future missions. First is TESS. So TESS will be an all-sky survey. Kepler looked at a small patch of the sky, about the width of your hand, extended all the way out, whereas TESS is going to look at the entire sky at the brightest stars. What that will do is find the stars that are closest to us and the stars that are brightest, which are easiest for follow-up. That means that when the James Webb Space Telescope is launched, it will have great targets that were found by TESS to search for atmospheres. So if we find an Earth-like planet around a nearby star,

JWST will be able to determine what is in the atmosphere of that planet. How long have you been on this search? I've been on the search for quite a while. I've been involved with Kepler since 2007. And before that, I worked on a Canadian mission called MOST, which is a 15-centimeter space telescope that was designed for aststerisk seismology that we also used to characterize the reflectivity of giant planets. Would you say something about the guy whose perseverance really is responsible for the Kepler mission and for the fact that we have all this data to work with? And that, of course, is Bill or William Barucki. Sure. So when I graduated from UBC, I saw that there was a job at Kepler for someone who

knew something about space telescopes. So I sent in my application and Bill Barucki responded and said, we'd love to have you on the team. All my years of working with him have been outstanding. Bill is a very patient person and that has been incredibly important for getting Kepler to launch. and that has been incredibly important for getting Kepler to launch. He started thinking about Kepler before anyone knew much about planets. In fact, he was thinking about Kepler before the first exosolar planets were even found. And he proposed Kepler multiple times to NASA, being rejected multiple times and making incremental steps along the way to prove that a spacecraft such as Kepler would both be technologically

feasible and produce amazing results. And it's shown. And he has been excellent at both interpreting the results and as well as sharing his love of exoplanets and the universe with the general public. Congratulations once again on this. And I and so many others are looking forward to more, maybe equally momentous announcements that await us in the future. I'm sure Kepler is nowhere near done. There are plenty of announcements to come. Some of them I probably know about. Some of them I have no clue about. It's going to go on for a while yet.

All right. We'll be here. Thank you, Jason, very much. Thank you. Jason is a research scientist nowadays at the SETI Institute. He has been a member of the Kepler team for a long, long time. He is currently also a member of the Kepler Science Office. And without any surprise, his interests include exoplanets and stellar characterization,

because that's a good way to learn more about the planets that are very likely to be circling those stars. Let's talk about some more planets and maybe a few stars with Bruce Betts in this week's edition of What's Up. Guess who's on the other end of the skypline? That's right. It's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. No prize involved with that, but we will get to the space trivia question in a moment or two. Any supernova up there for us to look at, be blinded by?

No, not to be blinded by. Not even to see with your unaided eye. There is at least one you can see with a decent amateur telescope, but nothing you're going to pick out with the naked eye. All right, I know this is going to come up again later, that is super nove, but tell us what is up that we can see with that naked eye first. You can stay up all night and watch planets just pop up over the horizon. We start out in the early evening with Jupiter hanging out in the east and south looking like a super bright star. It is making a lovely picture with the moon on March 9th and 10th. Then Mars coming up in the east around 9 and it keeps getting brighter as we move towards

opposition. That'll be in mid-April. And one thing to look for is it's near the bluish star Spica. So you get a nice red-blue contrast, and Spica is actually, because Mars keeps brightening, Spica is actually significantly dimmer, even though it's still a pretty bright star. We've got Saturn coming up a couple hours later, and then Venus low in the pre-dawn east, looking like a super bright star. We've got Saturn coming up a couple hours later, and then Venus low in the pre-dawn east,

looking like a super bright star. You might, if you have a clear view to the horizon, be able to check out Mercury towards the lower left of Venus in the pre-dawn. We move on to this week in space history. 45 years ago, Apollo 9 launched. That was the test in Earth orbit of the lunar module, command module, and separating and linking up. And then 35 years ago, Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter and revolutionized our view of that system. Still blows my mind, especially to think that just last week on this show, we were again talking to Ed Stone, who's been working on that mission for, well, he was working on it seven years before this milestone that you just mentioned, 42 years. That is impressive. You don't get a lot of long-term jobs like that in the planetary world. No, man. Good job, security.

But who knew at the time? Yeah. So speaking of mind-blowing things. Random space fact. Oh, that was kind of sweet. Like a cartoon kitten there. All right, you ready to have your mind blown again, Matt? All right, wait a minute.

I'm going to brace myself. Go ahead. Uranus is larger than Neptune, but Neptune is more massive than Uranus. Oh, dude. Cool. And all the more appropriate since we were just talking about finding all these Neptune-sized and less than Neptune-sized planets that our galaxy seems to be just lousy with. Lousy with.

All right, we move on to the trivia contest. Lousy wit. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. What was the brightest supernova as observed and recorded historically from Earth, and approximately how bright was it estimated to be in magnitudes? We got lots of entries once again. Our winner this time, I believe a first-time winner. I don't have her location, but I can tell you that it was Nicole Vasquez. Nicole Vasquez, who said, as did I think everybody else except for one entry,

who came up with that one in 1054 that we all have also heard of. That was a good one. Yeah, and this wasn't that long before. They had a real run. SN1006. Catchy name. In the year 1006. No coincidence there0-6. Catchy name. In the year 1006. No coincidence there.

1-0-0-6. It was April 30th to May 1st. The magnitude, man, oh man, this is bright, isn't it? Minus 7.5. Yeah, it's ridiculously bright. Well over 100 times brighter than the brightest star in the sky, Sirius. And significantly, many, many times brighter than Venus in the sky. So that would have been noticeable.

And just because it's kind of creepy, we got this message from John Anderson. He says, he remembers it was so bright he could read his papyrus scroll at night. Wow, that is bright. Okay. I just want to mention this other one because it's a complaint from Mark Smith. He says, it's more than a little cruel that the universe hasn't provided us with a good supernova, something brighter than even a fifth magnitude, since 1604. And he wants to know if you can do something about this.

I want to say, Mark, be careful what you ask for. Yeah, well, I'll look into it. We'll try to get something moderate to keep Matt happy. But yeah, I'll do what I can, exactly as much as I can. Yeah, just keep it thousands and thousands of light years away, please. Nicole won the same thing that we're going to give away next time, which is the terrific Beyond Earth Letterpress poster from Chop Shop with all those really cool sort of reverse silhouettes of spacecraft on it. You can have fun trying to figure out which one is which. And it really is, it is a really,

really nice poster. And we're going to give one again to whoever wins the contest that Bruce is about to get started right now. Well, I got bored and you'll see that in this question. So you have to have to listen carefully. What Curiosity Rover instrument has an acronym name that when pronounced backwards gives you one of the things the instrument measures? Wow. How about a quick repeat of that? What Curiosity rover instrument

has an acronym name that when pronounced backwards, so spell backwards and pronounce it, gives you one of the things that instrument measures? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest, find out how to enter. Get us your entry. It'll be great. When do they need to get that in by now? By the 11th. That'd be Tuesday the 11th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. I love this. Something a little different. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about where your car keys are right now.

Thank you, and good night. Wait a minute. Sound effects. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who 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 the members of the Society who have the keys to the universe. Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова