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The Virtual Planetary Lab and Its Search for What Makes an Exoplanet Habitable, or Even Inhabited

As presented by the Virtual Planetary Laboratory, exoplanet habitability is a function of the interplay of processes between the planet, the planetary system, and host star. These interactions govern the planet’s evolutionary trajectory, and have a larger and more diverse impact on a planet’s habitability than its position in a habitable zone. (Meadows and Barnes)

For more than two decades now, the Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL) at the University of Washington in Seattle has been at the forefront of the crucial and ever-challenging effort to model how scientists can determine whether a particular exoplanet is capable of supporting life or perhaps even had life on it already.

To do this, VPL scientists have developed or combined models from many disciplines that characterize and predict a wide range of planetary, solar system and stellar attributes that could identify habitability, or could pretty conclusively say that a planet is not habitable.

These include the well known questions of whether water might be present and if so whether temperatures would allow it to be sometimes in a liquid state, but on to questions involving whether an atmosphere is present, what elements and compounds might be in the atmospheres, the possible orbital evolution of the planet, the composition of the host star and how it interacts with a particular orbiting planet and much, much more, as shown in the graphic above.

This is work that has played a significant role in advancing astrobiology — the search for life beyond Earth.

More specifically, the VPL approach played a considerable part in building a body of science that ultimately led the Astro2020 Decadal Study of the National Academy of Sciences to recommend last year that the NASA develop its first Flagship astrobiology project — a mission that will feature a huge space telescope able to study exoplanets for signs of biology in entirely new detail. That mission, approved but not really defined yet, is not expected to launch until the 2040s.

With that plan actually beginning to move forward, the 132 VPL affiliated researchers at 28 institutions find themselves at another more current-day inflection point: The long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope has begun to collect and send back what will be a massive and unprecedented set of spectra of chemicals from the atmospheres of distant planets.

The Virtual Planetary Laboratory has modeled the workings of exoplanets since 2001, looking for ways to predict planetary conditions based on a broad range of measurable factors.

The James Webb Space Telescope And Its Exoplanet Mission (Part 1)

March 15, 2022 / Marc Kaufman / 2 Comments

This artist’s conception of the James Webb Space Telescope in space shows all its major elements fully deployed. The telescope was folded to fit into its launch vehicle, and then was slowly unfolded over the course of two weeks after launch. (NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez)

The last time Many Worlds wrote about the James Webb Space Telescope, it was in the process of going through a high-stakes, super-complicated unfurling. About 50 autonomous deployments needed to occur after launch to set up the huge system, with 344 potential single point failures to overcome–individual steps that had to work for the mission to be a success.

That process finished a while back and now the pioneering observatory is going through a series of alignment and calibration tests, working with the images coming in from the 18 telescope segments to produce one singular image.

According to the Space Telescope Science Institute, working images from JWST will start to appear in late June, though there may be some integrated “first light” images slightly earlier.

Exciting times for sure as the observatory begins its study of the earliest times in the universe, how the first stars and galaxies formed, and providing a whole new level of precision exploration of exoplanets.

Adding to the very good news that the JWST successfully performed all the 344 necessary steps to unfurl and that the mirror calibration is now going well is this: The launch itself went off almost exactly according to plan. This means that the observatory now has much more fuel on hand than it would have had if the launch was problematic. That extra fuel means a longer life for the observatory.

NASA announced late last month that it completed another major step in its alignment process of the new James Webb Space Telescope, bringing its test images more into focus. The space agency said it completed the second and third of a seven-phase process, and had accomplished “Image Stacking.” Having brought the telescope’s mirror and its 18 segmented parts into proper alignment, it will now begin making smaller adjustments to the mirrors to further improve focus in the images. (NASA/STScI)

Before launch, the telescope was expected to last for five years. Now NASA has said fuel is available for a ten year mission and perhaps longer. Quite a start.

(A NASA update on alignment and calibration will be given on Wednesday. … Read more

A Call To Action on Ensuring That Extraordinary Claims About ET Life Come With Extraordinary Evidence

October 27, 2021 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

An artist’s rendering of the sweep of cosmic events important to astrobiology. They include the formation of molecular clouds of gas and dust where stars are born, the subsequent evolving of a protoplanetary disk surrounding the new star, and then the organizing of a cleaned-up solar systems with planets and moons. (National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Dina Clark/University of California, Santa Cruz)

The global scientific search for signs of life beyond Earth has produced cutting-edge and paradigm-shifting science for several decades now, and it has clearly found eager audiences around the world. This search is a high-priority goal of NASA and other space agencies, as well as institutions, universities and companies.

While the successes in this broadly defined field of astrobiology are legion, the field has also struggled with a problem that flows precisely from its high-impact subject.

That problem is how to best keep its scientific claims evidence based and how to take into account all the myriad factors that can undermine the strength of a “finding.” And then comes the question of how to best communicate with the public the nature of the findings and all the caveats involved.

There appears to be a widely-held view that some scientific claims and media reports about potential life beyond Earth have become not only a distraction in the field, but have served to undermine some public confidence in the endeavor.

NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green is the lead author of a Nature paper calling for heightened standards for all extraterrestrial life detection science. With discoveries coming in so fast, he said, some formal new standards are needed to increase scientific and public confidence. (NASA /Carla Cioffi)

And some of the leading figures in the field have written a paper, released today by the journal Nature, that calls for the creation of some as yet undefined guardrails or confidence scales to make exciting scientific findings and news about astrobiology more consistently dependable.

The goal is to find ways to make sure that papers meet the widely-embraced Carl Sagan standard that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.

This is how the authors introduce the paper:

“Ours could realistically be the generation to discover evidence of life beyond Earth. With this privileged potential comes responsibility.”

“The magnitude of the question, “are we alone?”, and the public interest therein, opens the possibility that results may be taken to imply more than the observations support, or than the observers intend.… Read more

New Insights Into How Earth Got Its Nitrogen

February 12, 2021 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

An artist’s conception shows a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas around a young star. New research by Rice University shows that Earth’s nitrogen came from both inner and outer regions of the disk that formed our solar system, contrary to earlier theory. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Scientists have long held that many of the important compounds and elements that make life possible on Earth arrived here after the planet was formed and was orbiting the sun. These molecules came via meteorites and comets, it was thought, from the colder regions beyond Jupiter.

But in a challenge to that long-accepted view, a team from Rice University has found isotopic signatures of nitrogen from both the inner and the outer disk in iron meteorites that fell to Earth. What this strongly suggests is that the seeds of rocky, inner solar system planets such as Earth were bathed in dust that contained nitrogen and other volatiles, and the growing planet kept some of that “local” material.

“Our work completely changes the current narrative,” said Rice University graduate student and lead author Damanveer Grewal. “We show that the volatile elements were present in the inner disk dust, probably in the form of refractory (non-gaseous) organics, from the very beginning. This means that contrary to current understanding, the seeds of the present-day rocky planets — including Earth — were not volatile-free.”

The solar protoplanetary disk was separated into two reservoirs, with the inner solar system material having a lower concentration of nitrogen-15 and the outer solar system material being nitrogen-15 rich. The nitrogen isotope composition of present-day Earth lies in between, according to a new Rice University study that shows it came from both reservoirs. (Credit: Illustration by Amrita P. Vyas)

This work helped settle a prolonged debate over the origin of life-essential volatile elements — such as hydrogen, water, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen, ammonia — on Earth and other rocky bodies in the solar system.

“Researchers have always thought that the inner part of the solar system, within Jupiter’s orbit, was too hot for nitrogen and other volatile elements to condense as solids, meaning that volatile elements in the inner disk were only in the gas phase,” Grewal said.

Because the seeds of present-day rocky planets, also known as protoplanets, grew in the inner disk by accreting locally sourced dust, he said it appeared they did not contain nitrogen or other volatiles because of the high temperatures, necessitating their delivery from the outer solar system.… Read more

Exploring Our Sun Will Help Us Understand Habitability

February 20, 2020 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

The surface of the sun, with each “kernel” or “cell” roughly the size of Texas. The movie is made up of images produced by the Daniel Inouye SolarTelescope in Hawaii. Novel and even revolutionary data and images are also expected from the Parker Solar Probe (which will travel into the sun’s atmosphere, or corona) and the just launched Solar Orbiter, which will study (among many other things) the sun’s polar regions. (NSO/NSF/AURA)

Scientists have been studying our sun for centuries, and at this point know an awful lot about it — the millions of degrees Fahrenheit heat that it radiates out from the corona, the tangled and essential magnetic fields that it creates, the million-miles-per-hour solar wind and the charged high-energy solar particles that can be so damaging to anything alive.

But we have now entered a time when solar science is taking a major leap forward with the deployment of three pioneering instruments that will explore the sun and its surroundings as never before. One is a space telescopes that will get closer to the sun (by far) than any probe before, another is a probe that will make the first observations of the sun’s poles, and the third is a ground-based solar telescope that can resolve the sun in radically new ways — as seen in the image above, released last month.

Together, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, the joint European Space Agency-NASA Solar Orbiter mission and the National Science Foundation’s Inouye Solar Telescope on Hawai’i will provide pathways to understand some of the mysteries of the sun. They include resolving practical issues involving the dynamics of “space weather” that can harm astronauts and telecommunications systems, and larger theoretical unknowns related to all the material that stars scatter into space and onto planets.

Some of those unresolved questions include determining how and why heat and energy flow from the sun’s inner core to the outer corona and make it so much hotter, determining the structure and dynamics of the plasma and magnetic fields at the sources of the solar wind, the make-up and effects of solar flares and coronal mass ejections, and how and why the sun is able to create and control the heliosphere — the vast bubble of charged particles blown by the solar wind into interstellar space.

An illustration of Kepler2-33b, , one of the youngest exoplanets detected to date using NASA Kepler Space Telescope.

“Agnostic Biosignatures,” And The Path To Life As We Don’t Know It

August 12, 2019 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

Most research into signs of life in our solar system or on distant planets uses life on Earth as a starting point. But now scientists has begun a major project to explore the potential signs of life very different from what we have on Earth. For example, groups of molecules, like those above, can be analyzed for complexity — an attribute associated with life — regardless of their specific chemical constituents. (Brittany Klein/Goddard Space Flight Center)

Biosignatures — evidence that says or suggests that life has once been present — are often very hard to find and interpret.

Scientists examining fossilized life on Earth can generally reach some sort of agreement about what is before them, but what about the soft-bodied or even single-celled organisms that were the sum total of life on Earth for much of the planet’s history as a living domain? Scientific disagreements abound.

Now think of trying to determine whether a particular outline on an ancient Martian rock, or a geochemical or surface anomaly on that rock, is a sign of life. Or perhaps an unexpected abundance of a particular compound in one of the water vapor plumes coming out of the moons Europa or Enceladus. Or a peculiar chemical imbalance in the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet as measured in the spectral signature collected via telescope.

These are long-standing issues and challenges, but they have taken on a greater urgency of late as NASA missions (and those of other space agencies around the world) are being designed to actively look for signs of extraterrestrial life — most likely very simple life — past or present.

And that combination of increased urgency and great difficulty has given rise to at least one new way of thinking about those potential signs of life. Scientists call them “agnostic biosignatures” and they do not presuppose any particular biochemistry.

“The more we explore the solar system and distant exoplanets, the more we find worlds that are really foreign,” said Sarah Stewart Johnson, at an assistant professor at Georgetown University and principal investigator of the newly-formed Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures (LAB). The LAB team won a five-year, $7 million grant last year from NASA’s Astrobiology Program.

“So our goal is to go beyond our current understandings and find ways to explore the world of life as we don’t know it,” she told me. “That might mean thinking about a spectrum of how ‘alive’ something might be… And we’re embracing uncertainty, looking as much for biohints as biosignatures.”… Read more

NExSS 2.0

May 13, 2019 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

Finding new worlds can be an individual effort, a team effort, an institutional effort. The same can be said for characterizing exoplanets and understanding how they are affected by their suns and other planets in their solar systems. When it comes to the search for possible life on exoplanets, the questions and challenges are too great for anything but a community. NASA’s NExSS initiative has been an effort to help organize, cross-fertilize and promote that community. This artist’s concept Kepler-47, the first two-star systems with multiple planets orbiting the two suns, suggests just how difficult the road ahead will be. ( NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or “NExSS,” began four years ago as a NASA initiative to bring together a wide range of scientists involved generally in the search for life on planets outside our solar system.

With teams from seventeen academic and NASA centers, NExSS was founded on the conviction that this search needed scientists from a range of disciplines working in collaboration to address the basic questions of the fast-growing field.

Among the key goals: to investigate just how different, or how similar, different exoplanets are from each other; to determine what components are present on particular exoplanets and especially in their atmospheres (if they have one); to learn how the stars and neighboring exoplanets interact to support (or not support) the potential of life; to better understand how the initial formation of planets affects habitability, and what role climate plays as well.

Then there’s the question that all the others feed in to: what might scientists look for in terms of signatures of life on distant planets?

Not questions that can be answered alone by the often “stove-piped” science disciplines — where a scientist knows his or her astrophysics or geology or geochemistry very well, but is uncomfortable and unschooled in how other disciplines might be essential to understanding the big questions of exoplanets.

The original NExSS team was selected from groups that had won NASA grants and might want to collaborate with other scientists with overlapping interests and goals but often from different disciplines. (NASA)

The original idea for this kind of interdisciplinary group came out of NASA’s Astrobiology Program, and especially from NASA astrobiology director Mary Voytek and colleague Shawn Domogal-Goldman of the Goddard Space Flight Center, as well as Doug Hudgins of NASA Astrophysics. It was something of a gamble, since scientists who joined would essentially volunteer their time and work and would be asked to collaborate with other scientists in often new ways.… Read more

The Moon-Forming Impact And Its Gifts

January 28, 2019 / Marc Kaufman / 2 Comments

Rice University petrologists have found Earth most likely received the bulk of its carbon, nitrogen and other life-essential volatile elements from the planetary collision that created the moon more than 4.4 billion years ago. (Rice University)

The question of how life-essential elements such as carbon, nitrogen and sulfur came to our planet has been long debated and is a clearly important and slippery scientific subject.

Did these volatile elements accrete onto the proto-Earth from the sun’s planetary disk as the planet was being formed? Did they arrive substantially later via meteorite or comet? Or was it the cataclysmic moon-forming impact of the proto-Earth and another Mars-sized planet that brought in those essential elements?

Piecing this story together is definitely challenging, but now there is vigorous support for one hypothesis — that the giant impact brought us the elements would later be used to enable life.

Based on high pressure-temperature experiments, modeling and simulations, a team at Rice University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences makes that case in Science Advances for the central role of the proto-planet called Theia.

“From the study of primitive meteorites, scientists have long known that Earth and other rocky planets in the inner solar system are volatile-depleted,” said study co-author Rajdeep Dasgupta. “But the timing and mechanism of volatile delivery has been hotly debated. Ours is the first scenario that can explain the timing and delivery in a way that is consistent with all of the geochemical evidence.”

“What we are saying is that the impactor definitely brought the majority supply of life-essential elements that we see at the mantle and surface today,” Dasgupta wrote in an email.

A schematic depicting the formation of a Mars-sized planet (left) and its differentiation into a body with a metallic core and an overlying silicate reservoir. The sulfur-rich core expels carbon, producing silicate with a high carbon to nitrogen ratio. The moon-forming collision of such a planet with the growing Earth (right) can explain Earth’s abundance of both water and major life-essential elements like carbon, nitrogen and sulfur, as well as the geochemical similarity between Earth and the moon. (Rajdeep Dasgupta; background photo of the Milky Way galaxy is by Deepayan Mukhopadhyay)

Some of their conclusions are based on the finding of a similarity between the isotopic compositions of nitrogen and hydrogen in lunar glasses and in the bulk silicate portions of the Earth. … Read more

The Kepler Space Telescope Mission Is Ending But Its Legacy Will Keep Growing.

November 1, 2018 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

An illustration of the Kepler Space Telescope, which is on its very last legs. As of October 2018, the planet-hunting spacecraft has been in space for nearly a decade. (NASA via AP)

The Kepler Space Telescope is dead. Long live the Kepler.

NASA officials announced on Tuesday that the pioneering exoplanet survey telescope — which had led to the identification of almost 2,700 exoplanets — had finally reached its end, having essentially run out of fuel. This is after nine years of observing, after a malfunctioning steering system required a complex fix and change of plants, and after the hydrazine fuel levels reached empty.

While the sheer number of exoplanets discovered is impressive the telescope did substantially more: it proved once and for all that the galaxy is filled with planets orbiting distant stars. Before Kepler this was speculated, but now it is firmly established thanks to the Kepler run.

It also provided data for thousands of papers exploring the logic and characteristics of exoplanets. And that’s why the Kepler will indeed live long in the world of space science.

“As NASA’s first planet-hunting mission, Kepler has wildly exceeded all our expectations and paved the way for our exploration and search for life in the solar system and beyond,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

“Not only did it show us how many planets could be out there, it sparked an entirely new and robust field of research that has taken the science community by storm. Its discoveries have shed a new light on our place in the universe, and illuminated the tantalizing mysteries and possibilities among the stars.”

The Kepler Space Telescope was focused on hunting for planets in this patch of the Milky Way. After two of its four spinning reaction wheels failed, it could no longer remain steady enough to stare that those distant stars but was reconfigured to look elsewhere and at a different angle for the K2 mission. (Carter Roberts/NASA)

Kepler was initially the unlikely brainchild of William Borucki, its founding principal investigator who is now retired from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

When he began thinking of designing and proposing a space telescope that could potentially tell us how common distant exoplanets were — and especially smaller terrestrial exoplanets like Earth – the science of extra solar planets was at a very different stage.… Read more

A New Frontier for Exoplanet Hunting

July 18, 2018 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

The spectrum from the newly-assembled EXtreme PREcision Spectrometer (EXPRES) shines on Yale astronomy professor Debra Fischer, who is principal investigator of the project. The stated goal of EXPRES is to find many Earth-size planets via the radial velocity method — something that has never been done. (Ryan Blackman/Yale)

The first exoplanets were all found using the radial velocity method of measuring the “wobble” of a star — movement caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet.

Radial velocity has been great for detecting large exoplanets relatively close to our solar system, for assessing their mass and for finding out how long it takes for the planet to orbit its host star.

But so far the technique has not been able to identify and confirm many Earth-sized planets, a primary goal of much planet hunting. The wobble caused by the presence of a planet that size has been too faint to be detected by current radial velocity instruments and techniques.

However, a new generation of instruments is coming on line with the goal of bringing the radial velocity technique into the small planet search. To do that, the new instruments, together with their telescopes. must be able to detect a sun wobble of 10 to 20 centimeters per second. That’s quite an improvement on the current detection limit of about one meter per second.

At least three of these ultra high precision spectrographs (or sometimes called spectrometers) are now being developed or deployed. The European Southern Observatory’s ESPRESSO instrument has begun work in Chile; Pennsylvania State University’s NEID spectrograph (with NASA funding) is in development for installation at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona; and the just-deployed EXPRES spectrograph put together by a team led by Yale University astronomers (with National Science Foundation support) is in place at the Lowell Observatory outside of Flagstaff, Arizona.

The principal investigator of EXPRES, Debra Fischer, attended the recent University of Cambridge Exoplanets2 conference with some of her team, and there I had the opportunity to talk with them. We discussed the decade-long history of the instrument, how and why Fischer thinks it can break that 1-meter-per-second barrier, and what it took to get it attached and working.

This animation shows how astronomers use very precise spectrographs to find exoplanets. As the planet orbits its gravitational pull causes the parent star to move back and forth. This tiny radial motion shifts the observed spectrum of the star by a correspondingly small amount because of the Doppler shift.… Read more

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