E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
NASA
An artist's interpretation shows NASA's Kepler space telescope observing a distant planetary system (alien star and planet not to scale).
Months of data from more than 150,000 stars are due to be dumped upon the scientific community today, and planet hunters are ready to sift through those readings in search of the signatures of alien worlds.
NASA's Kepler spacecraft has been monitoring all those stars for the telltale dips of light that occur when a planet passes over the disk of a faraway star. The $600 million mission has already identified nine confirmed planets, based on earlier releases of data. Still more findings are due to be announced at a news conference to be televised by NASA TV at 1 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
The Kepler mission is all about being able to find Earth-size planets in Earth-type orbits around sunlike stars. But it will take a few years to make confirmed detections of such planets: Kepler's scientists want to see three instances of planetary transits before they add a particular prospect to their list of planetary candidates — which means it would take up to three years to detect a planet exactly like Earth.
And that's not the end of the process: Kepler can tell scientists how wide a planet (or something else, such as an eclipsing binary star) appears to be. But in order to confirm an object's planetary status, the scientists would like to know how massive that object is — either by analyzing the gravitational wobbles it creates in its parent star, or by even more subtle methods. Such methods are how the scientists make sure that the candidates are really planets rather than variable stars or data glitches.
This is why the Kepler team has confirmed only nine planets so far, even though the probe was launched almost two years ago. When the mission's first set of readings was released, last June, the Kepler scientists said they had found 706 potential planets. The scientists held back the detailed data about the 400 most promising candidates, however, to give themselves the first chance to confirm their planetary status. (That created a stir among astronomers who weren't part of the Kepler team.)
The "Kepler 400" are to be made public as part of this week's data release, along with the mission's raw data from June to September 2009. Other planet-hunters are on the trail as well, and you can join them in the search.
Planet Hunters on the case
PlanetHunters.org is a citizen-science project backed by Zooniverse (the creators of the galaxy-sifting effort known as Galaxy Zoo) as well as Yale University's exoplanet program. The Planet Hunters team already has enlisted thousands of Internet users to look for the signals of planetary transits in Kepler's light curves.
Over the past month or so, users have made 1.2 million light-curve classifications, and the team leaders used those assessments to winnow the database of 150,000 stars down to 90 possible planets and 42 possible eclipsing binaries. John M. Brewer, a graduate student in Yale's astronomy program and one of the project leaders, explains the process today in a blog post.
Those candidates will be subjected to further data analysis, and eventually the confirmed planets (or eclipsing binary stars) will become the subject of scientific papers. Brewer told me that the first papers to be published would likely look at "statistics on how people are doing on finding these."
Brewer said the Planet Hunters team is also ready to add this week's fresh Kepler readings to its database, at the rate of roughly 5,000 stars a day. Last year's data release took in only about a month's worth of readings. This new release will add three more months of observations — which means you and other planet hunters are in for not just double the fun, but four times the fun. Check out the Zooniverse and take your pick from the Planet Hunters, Galaxy Zoo, Moon Zoo and all the other offerings for citizen scientists. Then, on Wednesday, check back with us to learn all about Kepler's latest and greatest.
More on the planet quest:
- Join a worldwide planet search
- Probe finds planetary 'missing link'
- Planets spotted in changing orbits
- Kepler finds five lightweight worlds
- Millions of Earths? Talk causes a stir
- Doubt cast on existence of super-Earth
- More about planets from Cosmic Log
Update for 2:15 p.m. ET Feb. 2: Earlier reports suggested that the Kepler team would hold back some planet candidates from the latest data release, but researchers say all of the new candidates have been released this time around. The mission's science team leader, William Borucki, told me that the team found some "false positives" among the Kepler 400, which helped them improve the selection process for the new candidates. The current crop of candidates has been "much more heavily vetted," he said.
Here are Wednesday's stories about the fresh results from Kepler:
Join the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the blog's Facebook page or following b0yle on Twitter. For more about the planet search, click into the website for my book, "The Case for Pluto."
Leave a Comment:
Another amusing photo caption: "Alien star and planet not to scale"
Whew! Thanks for clarifying. Keep those photo captions coming!
They've better hurry up because we only have less than two years before dooms day arrives on 12/21/12 {[:-)~
Funny how they picked a date with three 1s & three 2s, Almost like someones idea of an April Fools plank.
Can you see the fnords from where you are? I hear they're lovely this time of year.
I hope to live past 2012. Living is good.
Since the actual date is 12/21/2012, there are three 1's, four 2's and one 0. Not so peculiar when you look at it that way.
LOL. Someone on NPR went to the Yucatan and found an old Indian Shaman and asked him about the Aztec Calendar. He was aware of the date system because it is still in use in religious practice by some descendants of the Aztecs. They asked him if the world would end in 1012 when the calendar ran out. The look of puzzlement on his face was classic. Then, in a patient and slow voice, as though explaining something to a child, he asked, "Does the world end when your calendar runs out on December 31st. No you just go get a new calendar. Why would you think that the world would end? The calendar runs out because they ran out of room to carve it on the stone. If they had used a bigger stone, it would have lasted longer. If the Aztecs were still alive, they would have already carved a new calendar to keep track of religious events and history."
It is amazing that an 80-year-old Mexican Indian shaman can project more common sense and information that supposedly well-educated Americans.
150000 pared down to 90....I am kinda relieved by that....Personally I believe we will discover that planets orbit at least 80% if not more of that 150,000 so hopefully amature astronomers for centruries to come will be able to gather the scraps overlooked by the big government, instituitional surveys...not that I dissaprove of the big sweeps, just that I was afraid in the long run it would spell the end for the casual and amature astronomer. It just is so natural that gravity works in favor of orbiting systems...even in our non descript system we have moons with moons, the whole universe seems to have the basic structure of something at the center being orbited by something not at the center of some sort of system, from tiny atoms up to large multigalctic structures....90 out of 150000? to me it is obvious....I can't wait to hear about the ones they feel confident enough to mention tomorrow though....I plan to tune in here for the best news yet so far this year!!...thanks alan.
@ray smith,
Kepler can only find planets in solar systems that are precisely edge-on to us. Only then do the planets pass between the system's sun and the satellite. That represents a very thing slice of the stars that are out there. You really don't have anyone looking for these planets with eyes (such as we do in looking for planetoids in our solar system as an example.) These planets are looked for by computers which analyze variations in the brightness of the light coming from the star and slight wobbles in the axis of the star (which shift the color of the light slightly.) It is very time consuming to clean up the data and set it up for computer programs to analyze and there are no all that many astronomers to do it. There will be plenty of opportunities for computer geeks of all sorts to do lower-level analysis of the data. But it will still be only a tiny percentage of the stars that can be analyzed.
Its not that these scientists are missing possible planets because of incompetence, they miss them because the technology needed to provide the level of detail required to find the smallest planets simply doesn't exist. Below a certain data resolution, there's too much random junk data resulting from the turbulent nature of the stars they're observing to be able to identify the signatures of a planet in orbit.
This is nothing new, there are new facts and details being pulled out of data collected during the moonwalks only being fully understood to modern science with another 40 years of technology to extract the information from the old data.
@James Buchanan
You are somewhat incorrect. It isn't the technology. It's the issue that in order to find planets, the star's planetary plane must be exactly edge-on to us. This represents less than 1 out of every 200 Sol-like stars, or about 1 in 60,000 stars. These is plenty of resolution (and more) to find earth-sized planets at an earth-distance from a sun. But first you have to narrow it down to Sol-like stars and they have to be edge-on to us.
Remember that if you were somewhere far away looking for Earth, you would have to be located edge-on to our solar system, and you would have to wait as long as 4 years for the Earth to transit the sun 3 times. So it takes a long time to find a planet and longer the further it is from the sun and the smaller it is. The gas-balls very close to a sun are found very quickly because they have a large occulting effect, create a large wobble and have orbital years as short as a few days.
I do agree that data analysis (and especially noise reduction algorithms) will improve over time and the data will continue to yield new information over coming decades. But the sensors on Kepler have plenty of resolution. But the problem is that the photoscope must be wide-field enough to simultaneously monitor over 100,000 stars for a continuous period of 3.5 years at an absolute minimum. This ain't your mama's digital camera --- this is a supercooled whizbang!
If you want to read more about it:
http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/QuickGuide/
vaguely amusing to think about
interesting to speculate but bottom line, no one is goin there to look, EVER
that is unless the aliens come here and give us their FTL drive plans and that depends
on us being able to read and understand them and have similiar materiels and abilities to copy
their designs