Possible Big News from Kepler

[PPI Karl]

I'm on pins and needles about this.



NASA to Reveal Big News From Planet-Hunting Spacecraft Thursday
By Denise Chow
SPACE.com Staff Writer
posted: 23 August 2010
04:56 pm ET

NASA is expected to make an announcement Thursday on the progress of its Kepler spacecraft, which has been staring at one patch of space for evidence of other worlds.

The space agency has scheduled an afternoon teleconference with reporters to announce the results from Kepler, which include the "discovery of an intriguing planetary system," NASA officials said Monday.

Participating in the teleconference will be senior NASA scientists and Kepler mission researchers, including principal investigator William Borucki, at the space agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

The Kepler space observatory hunts for Earth-like planets around other stars. In June, mission scientists announced it had found over 700 candidates, including five systems that appear to have more than one transiting planet.

The spacecraft monitors stars for subtle changes in their brightness, which could indicate that alien planets are passing in front of them as seen from Earth. To date, astronomers have discovered more than 400 planets lurking around stars beyond our solar system.

NASA launched the $600 million spacecraft in March 2009. It is currently staring at a patch of the Milky Way that contains over 156,000 stars ? a star field in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.

Astronomers have been using the data from Kepler to determine whether orbiting planets are responsible for the variation in brightness of several hundred stars.  Follow-up observations are necessary to distinguish between actual planets and false alarms such as binary stars, which are two stars that orbit each other.

[PPI Tracy]

This is very exciting indeed. 

[PPI Karl]

NASA will be holding its media conference at 10:00 a.m. (1:00 EST).  Presumably, there's a live broadcast of this on NASA TV, but I've never been able to find that channel on Cox Cable San Diego.  If anyone can gimme a clue, I'd be grateful.  Meanwhile, a link to live streaming audio of the press conference will be available on this page shortly before 10:00 a.m.:

http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html.

Panelists include:
--Jon Morse, Director, NASA Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington
--William Borucki, Kepler Mission Science Principal Investigator, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
--Matthew Holman, Associate Director, Theoretical Astrophysics Division, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.
--Alycia Weinberger, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington

[PPI Tracy]

Karl,
I just called and spoke with Cox and asked specifically about the NASA channel for El Cajon service area.  They told me they didn't have one.  I have come across the NASA channel a few times but it has been intermittent. I'm thinking that possibly channel 3 (which is more of a local / "pbs type" station was where i saw it.

I am so excited about this.  I'm going to try and watch this from the link you posted.  I wonder if CNN or MSNBC will carry it. 

[PPI Karl]

Karl,
I just called and spoke with Cox and asked specifically about the NASA channel for El Cajon service area.  They told me they didn't have one.  I have come across the NASA channel a few times but it has been intermittent. I'm thinking that possibly channel 3 (which is more of a local / "pbs type" station was where i saw it.

I am so excited about this.  I'm going to try and watch this from the link you posted.  I wonder if CNN or MSNBC will carry it. 

Tracy, that was so sweet!  You didn't have to do that!  But, THANK YOU!  Now I know the truth. (  I've had students who have recommended the NASA Channel to me over the last couple of years, but they must live out of the area.  Oh well. 

I think NASA is covetously protective of their video because the link I put up is to streaming audio only.  They have a couple other links there about subscribing to the channel through satellite TV, but not cable.  (Hmmm.  Satellite?  That seems a little self-serving, don't it?)

Thanks again, Tracy!

[PPI Tracy]

Anything for you!  What can I say?....I loves me Karl.   

[PPI Brian]

NASA discovery made: Two planets orbitting their own sun

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Kepler spacecraft discovered the first ever confirmed planetery system with more than on planet orbiting the same star. That means a place where life possibly could exist because it works the same as our planet, earth.

The two planets are named Kepler 9b and Kepler 9c. The discovery came after seven months of looking into space and at more than 156000 stars in search for earth like planets.

The super camera of Kepler measures tiny decreases in the stars brightness when other planets move past them, the discovery was made because of the planets that moved past their own "sun" similar in the way the earth moves around the sun.

There were more than 700 planet candidates in the first 43 days of Kepler data.

"Kepler's high quality data and round-the-clock coverage of transiting objects enable a whole host of unique measurements to be made of the parent stars and their planetary systems," said Doug Hudgins, the Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The larger of the two planets is Kepler-9b, both have similar masses than each other but less than Saturn.

"Kepler-9b lies closest to the star with an orbit of about 19 days, while Kepler-9c has an orbit of about 38 days. By observing several transits by each planet over the seven months of data, the time between successive transits could be analyzed. "

"This discovery is the first clear detection of significant changes in the intervals from one planetary transit to the next, what we call transit timing variations," said Matthew Holman, a Kepler mission scientist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "This is evidence of the gravitational interaction between the two planets as seen by the Kepler spacecraft."

Scientists also identified a third planet that is similar to the size of earth, or actually 1 and a half times bigger than the earth and has a 1.6 day orbit around it's sun or otherwise known as Kepler.

"Additional observations are required to determine whether this signal is indeed a planet or an astronomical phenomenon that mimics the appearance of a transit."

[PPI Tracy]

This is amazing.  Thank you for posting this, Brian.  I listened in to the call but there was so much noise in my office that I missed a good portion of it. 

This totally boggles the mind.  These new findings are so exciting.  Did they have any hint that this might be a possibility?

[PPI Brian]

I'm not sure. The really exciting news is the possibility of an earth-size planet orbiting this star. Astronomers long believed that planetary systems around stars were the rule rather than the exception, but there was no evidence to support their theory. In the last 15 years we have documented hundreds of stars with planetary systems.  It's mind boggling, isn't it? 

[Gary]

I have started to allow my mind to just accept the amazing sights and capabilities that our universe holds, but when I read how far these new planets were from us, I attempted to do a quick math equation then stopped immediately when I remember that I suck at math!!  But dang, they are freaking far far away!  Where is the Millennium Falcon when you need it???   

[PPI Brian]

I know what you mean, Gary. Trying to comprehend the vast distances between stars is an exercise in futility. Look how long it has taken Voyager I and Voyager II to travel to the edge of our solar system. They were launched in the late 1970's and nearly 40 years later they still have not crossed the heliopause, the area where the solar wind stops and interstellar space begins.

As Carl Sagan so eloquently said, "The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From this shore we have learned most of what we know. Recently we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls."

[Damian]

Thinking about distances in space, I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I had heard that the planet Neptune has not yet completed one complete orbit around the sun since the time humans identified the planet.  If that's accurate, that is absolutely astounding!

[PPI Jason]

This is amazing news. It's just mind boggling to think that we are on the threshold of possibly discovering another earth-like planet in our lifetimes at a time when (even when I was young) in our recent past you would have gotten laughed at if you talked seriously about other planets outside our solar system.

[PPI Brian]

Thinking about distances in space, I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I had heard that the planet Neptune has not yet completed one complete orbit around the sun since the time humans identified the planet.  If that's accurate, that is absolutely astounding!

Yepper, it's true. Next year will mark the completion of the first orbital period since Neptune's discovery. It takes 164 earth years for Neptune to make one orbit around the sun. If you think that's amazing, think about tiny Pluto -- its orbital period is 248 years. Or Eris (which is larger than Pluto but farther away from the sun) -- its orbital period is an amazing 557 years.

http://news.discovery.com/space/home-run-neptune-completes-first-orbit-since-discovery.html

[PPI Karl]

News release from NASA
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2011/M11-06.html


Jan. 27, 2011

Michael Mewhinney / Rachel Hoover Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. 650.604.3937/650-604-0643 michael.s.mewhinney@nasa.gov, rachel.hoover@nasa.gov MEDIA ADVISORY: M11-06

NASA TO ANNOUNCE NEW PLANETARY DISCOVERIES

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. -- NASA will host a news briefing at 10 a.m. PST, Wednesday, Feb. 2, to announce the Kepler mission's latest findings about planets outside our solar system. The briefing will be held in the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St S.W. in Washington and carried live on NASA Television and the agency's website at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.

Reporters may view the televised press conference at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., in the main auditorium, Bldg. N-201 or ask questions by phone. To obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to Steve Cole by e-mail at stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov by 9 a.m. PST on Feb. 1.

Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the surface of the orbiting planet. Although additional observations will be needed over time to achieve that milestone, Kepler is detecting planets and planet candidates with a wide range of sizes and orbital distances to help us better understand our place in the galaxy.

The news conference will follow the scheduled release of Kepler mission science data on Feb. 1. The data release will update the number of planet candidates and is based on observations conducted between May 2 and Sept. 17, 2009.

Participants are:
Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist, NASA Headquarters, Washington
William Borucki, Kepler Science principal investigator, Ames
Jack Lissauer, Kepler co-investigator and planetary scientist, Ames
Debra Fischer, professor of Astronomy, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

For more information about the Kepler mission and to view the Feb. 1 data release, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

[PPI Tracy]

Thank you so much for posting this Karl.

[PPI Karl]

My pleasure   Here's the scuttlebutt:

Astronomers Find 6-Pack of Planets in Alien Solar System
by Denise Chow, SPACE.com Staff Writer Date: 02 February 2011 Time: 01:01 PM ET

Astronomers have discovered an alien solar system in which six planets are orbiting a sunlike star, with five of the newfound worlds in close-knit configuration.

Few stars have been observed with planetary arrangements like our solar system, making this a compelling find. The newfound exoplanet system was sighted by astronomers using NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space observatory.

The smallest of the new alien planets is about 2.3 times the mass of Earth. None of the extrasolar planets are inside the so-called "habitable zone"?? orbits where liquid water could exist on their surfaces, scientists said.

Astronomers made the serendipitous find after poring over Kepler's observations of the changing brightness of the system's parent star ? called Kepler-11 ? as the orbiting planets passed in front of the star.

The discovery of five small planets with close orbits around the single star, with another planet farther out with a longer orbit, was unexpected, to say the least, the researchers said. The star Kepler-11 is about 2,000 light- years from Earth.

"We think this is the biggest thing in exoplanets since the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet, back in 1995," said one of the study's lead authors, Jack Lissauer, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., in a news briefing Monday (Jan. 31).

Lissauer and his colleagues used the Kepler data to analyze the orbital dynamics of the Kepler-11 system and determine the sizes, masses and likely compositions of the planets. The system is compelling because of the number of planets around the host star, their relatively small sizes, and their tightly packed orbits. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

"Not only is this an amazing planetary system, it also validates a powerful new method to measure the masses of planets," said Daniel Fabrycky, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the co-authors of the new study.

The results of the Kepler-11 study are detailed in the Feb. 3 issue of the journal Nature. They are among the latest discoveries from the Kepler mission, which unveiled a massive amount of data early today that includes hundreds more candidates for potential alien planets. NASA will discuss the latest Kepler discoveries during a 1 p.m. EST (1800 GMT) press conference today.

Meet the Kepler-11 solar system
The five inner planets in the Kepler-11 system range in size from 2.3 to 13.5 times the mass of Earth.

Their orbital periods are all less than 50 days (between 10 and 47 days), which means all five planets and their orbits would fit inside the orbit of Mercury in our solar system.

The sixth planet has an undetermined mass, but it is larger than the other five and follows an orbit that takes it farther from the parent star. It completes one orbit every 118 Earth days.

"Of the six planets, the most massive are potentially like Neptune and Uranus, but the three lowest mass planets are unlike anything we have in our solar system," said Jonathan Fortney, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC, who led the work on understanding the structure and composition of the Kepler-11 planets.

More than 100 transiting planets have been observed by Kepler and other telescopes, but the vast majority of them are Jupiter-like gas giants, and almost all of them are single-planet systems. To date, astronomers have confirmed the existence of more than 500 alien planets using ground- based and space-based telescopes.

Before the detection of the Kepler-11 system, astronomers had size and mass calculations for only three exoplanets smaller than Neptune.

Now, measurements from a single planetary system have added five more, and they are among the smallest, Lissauer said.

What are they made of?
Like most of the planets in our solar system, all of the Kepler-11 planets orbit their parent star in roughly the same plane.

These observations reinforce the idea that planets form in flattened disks of gas and dust spinning around a star, and the disk pattern is preserved even after planetary formation, Fabrycky said.

"The coplanar orbits in our solar system inspired this theory in the first place, and now we have another good example," Fabrycky said. "But that and the sunlike star are the only parts of Kepler-11 that are like the solar system."

The densities of the planets, which were calculated from their mass and size, shed some light on their compositions. All six planets were found to have densities lower than Earth's.

"The Kepler-11 system of low mass planets that have low densities implies most of their volumes are made of light elements," Fortney said. "It looks like the inner two could be mostly water, with possibly a thin skin of hydrogen-helium gas on top, like mini-Neptunes. The ones farther out have densities less than water, which seems to indicate significant hydrogen-helium atmospheres."

With scorching hot atmospheres of hydrogen and helium, these planets are not considered habitable, but these results were surprising, since small, hot planets typically have a difficult time holding onto a lightweight atmosphere.

"These planets are pretty hot because of their close orbits, and the hotter it is the more gravity you need to keep the atmosphere," Fortney said. "My students and I are still working on this, but our thoughts are that all these planets probably started with more massive hydrogen-helium atmospheres, and we see the remnants of those atmospheres on the ones farther out. The ones closer in have probably lost most of it."

Part of the equation
The researchers are excited about finding six planets around Kepler-11 because the ability to make valuable comparisons among planets within the same system will help them understand the system's formation and evolution as a whole.

"Kepler-11 is actually telling us a great deal about planets as individual bodies and planetary systems," Fortney said. "Comparative planetary science is how we've come to understand our solar system, so this is much better than just finding more solitary hot Jupiters around other stars."

For instance, the close proximity of the inner planets is an indication that they probably did not form where they are now, Fortney added.

?At least some must have formed farther out and migrated inward. If a planet is embedded in a disk of gas, the drag on it leads to the planet spiraling inward over time," he said. "So formation and migration had to happen early on.?

In search of alien planets
The planet-hunting Kepler space telescope detects planets that transit in front of their host star, causing periodic wobbles in the brightness of the star. The dips in brightness help scientists determine how big a potential planet is in terms of its radius. The time in between transits tells them the orbital period of the planetary candidate.

To determine the mass of the Kepler-11 planets, Fabrycky and his colleagues analyzed slight variations in the orbital periods caused by the gravitational interactions among the planets themselves.

"The timing of the transits is not perfectly periodic, and that is the signature of the planets gravitationally interacting," Fabrycky said. "By developing a model of the orbital dynamics, we worked out the masses of the planets and verified that the system can be stable on longtime scales of millions of years."

The sixth planet in the Kepler-11 system is too far apart from the others that this orbital perturbation method cannot be used to determine its mass, Fabrycky said.[/size]

[PPI Tracy]

This is just mind blowing

[PPI Jason]

I was just thinking.

We often talk about whether or not planets far away from us are more technologically advanced than we are. But it's even more mind-boggling to think of the different variables that might allow a people living in another solar system to advance more quickly, and further, than us.

Think, for example, of a solar system with two or three planets that each have life on them, humanoid life. This would be as if Venus and Mars had people on them too. Imagine if we were close to planets with evolving life on them. That would drastically increase the possibility of having an economic reason to develop a space program that would allow transportation of people and ideas between those planets.

This is my idea. It seems to me that most of our major technological developments (the ones that last at least) are spurred on by economics. Columbus would not have gotten someone to pay for his trip to America if there wasn't some possible return for the investment. And why don't we go back to the moon now? Why are we killing our space program? Probably because there isn't any real economic return for the investment.

But having planets with civilizations on them, NEARBY, might mean that other solar systems would have a better reason to keep their space programs going. Correspondingly, they are able to continue to advance.

So what is the end result? Another solar system will develop technology sufficient to come to our planet, take over our world, and wipe us out. In the mean time, we will continue to develop really really super neat iPhones, with bullshit apps, at a breakneck pace. Maybe we can console ourselves by playing a game on them that will allow us to pretend we are actually able to defend our planet from an alien invasion