What a Menagerie

Category: What a Menagerie (page 1 of 4)

Our Ever-Growing Menagerie of Exoplanets

While we have never seen an exoplanet with anything near this kind of detail, scientists and artists now do know enough to represent them with characteristics that are plausible, given what is known about them.. (NASA)

With so many exoplanets already detected, with the pace of discovery continuing to be so fast, and with efforts to find more distant worlds so constant and global, it’s easy to become somewhat blase´ about new discoveries. After so many “firsts,” and so many different kinds of planets found in very different ways, it certainly seems that some of the thrill may be gone.

Surely the detection of a clearly “Earth-like planet” would cause new excitement — one that is not only orbiting in the habitable zone of its host star but also has signs of a potentially nurturing atmosphere in a generally supportive cosmic neighborhood.

But while many an exoplanet has been described as somewhat “Earth-like” and potentially habitable, further observation has consistently reduced the possibility of the planets actually hosting some form of biology. The technology and knowledge base needed to find distant life is surely advancing, but it may well still have a long way to go.

In just the last few days, however, a slew of discoveries have been reported that highlight the allure and science of our new Exoplanet Era. They may not be blockbusters by themselves, but they are together part of an immense scientific exploration under way, one that is re-shaping our understanding of the cosmos and preparing us for bigger discoveries and insights to come.

Already 3,940 exoplanets have been identified (as of April 17) with an additional 3,504 candidates waiting to be confirmed or discarded. this is but the start since it is widely held now that virtually every star out there has a planet, or planets, orbiting it. That’s billions of billions of planets. This image is a collection of NASA exoplanet renderings.

What I have in mind are these discoveries:

The first Earth-sized planet detected by NASA’s year-old orbiting telescope TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.) TESS is designed to find planets orbiting massive stars in our near neighborhood, and it has already made 10 confirmed discoveries. But finding a small exoplanet — 85 percent the size of Earth — is a promising result for a mission designed to not only locate as many as 20,000 new exoplanets, but to find 500 to 1,000 the rough size of Earth or SuperEarth.

Weird Planets

January 2, 2019 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

Artist rendering of an “eyeball world,” where one side of a tidally locked planet is always hot on the sun-facing side and the back side is frozen cold. Definitely a tough environment, but might some of the the planets be habitable at the edges? Or might winds carry sufficient heat from the front to the back? (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The very first planet detected outside our solar system powerfully made clear that our prior understanding of what planets and solar systems could be like was sorely mistaken.

51 Pegasi was a Jupiter-like massive gas planet, but it was burning hot rather than freezing cold because it orbited close to its host star — circling in 4.23 days. Given the understandings of the time, its existence was essentially impossible.

Yet there it was, introducing us to what would become a large and growing menagerie of weird planets.

Hot Jupiters, water worlds, Tatooine planets orbiting binary stars, diamond worlds (later downgraded to carbon worlds), seven-planet solar systems with planets that all orbit closer than Mercury orbits our sun. And this is really only a brief peak at what’s out there — almost 4,000 exoplanets confirmed but billions upon billions more to find and hopefully characterize.

I thought it might be useful — and fun — to take a look at some of the unusual planets found to learn what they tell us about planet formation, solar systems and the cosmos.

Artist’s conception of a hot Jupiter, CoRoT-2a. The first planet discovered beyond our solar system was a hot Jupiter similar to this, and this surprised astronomers and led to the view that many hot Jupiters may exist. That hypothesis has been revised as the Kepler Space Telescope found very few distant hot Jupiters and now astronomers estimate that only about 1 percent of planets are hot Jupiters. (NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech)

Let’s start with the seven Trappist-1 planets. The first three were detected two decades ago, circling a”ultra-cool” red dwarf star a close-by 40 light years away. Observations via the Hubble Space Telescope led astronomers conclude that two of the planets did not have hydrogen-helium envelopes around them, which means the probability increased that the planets are rocky (rather than gaseous) and could potentially hold water on their surfaces.

Then in 2016 a Belgian team, using the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile, found three more planets, and the solar system got named Trappist-1. … Read more

Probing The Insides of Mars to Learn How Rocky Planets Are Formed

November 8, 2018 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

An artist illustration of the InSight lander on Mars. InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is designed to look for tectonic activity and meteorite impacts, study how much heat is still flowing through the planet, and track Mars’ wobble as it orbits the sun. While InSight is a Mars mission, it will help answer key questions about the formation of the other rocky planets of the solar system and exoplanets beyond. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

In the known history of our 4.5-billion-year-old solar system, the insides of but one planet have been explored and studied. While there’s a lot left to know about the crust, the mantle and the core of the Earth, there is a large and vibrant field dedicated to that learning.

Sometime next month, an extensive survey of the insides of a second solar system planet will begin. That planet is Mars and, assuming safe arrival, the work will start after the InSight lander touches down on November 26.

This is not a mission that will produce dazzling images and headlines about the search for life on Mars. But in terms of the hard science it is designed to perform, InSight has the potential to tell us an enormous amount about the makeup of Mars, how it formed, and possibly why is it but one-third the size of its terrestrial cousins, Earth and Venus.

“We know a lot about the surface of Mars, we know a lot about its atmosphere and even about its ionosphere,” says Bruce Banerdt, the mission’s principal investigator, in a NASA video. “But we don’t know very much about what goes on a mile below the surface, much less 2,000 miles below the surface.”

The goal of InSight is to fill that knowledge gap, helping NASA map out the deep structure of Mars. And along the way, learn about the inferred formation and interiors of exoplanets, too.

Equitorial Mars and the InSight landing site, with noting of other sites. (NASA)

The lander will touch down at Elysium Planitia, a flat expanse due north of the Curiosity landing site. The destination was selected because it is about as safe as a Mars landing site could be, and InSight did not need to be a more complex site with a compelling surface to explore.

“While I’m looking forward to those first images from the surface, I am even more eager to see the first data sets revealing what is happening deep below our landing pads.” Barerdt said.… Read more

Water Worlds, Aquaplanets and Habitability

September 20, 2018 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

This artist rendering may show a water world — without any land — or an aquaplanet with lots of more shallow water around a rocky planet. (NASA)

The more exoplanet scientists learn about the billions and billions of celestial bodies out there, the more the question of unusual planets — those with characteristics quite different from those in our solar system — has come into play.

Hot Jupiters, super-Earths, planets orbiting much smaller red dwarf stars — they are all grist for the exoplanet mill, for scientists trying to understand the planetary world that has exploded with possibilities and puzzles over the past two decades.

Another important category of planets unlike those we know are the loosely called “water worlds” (with very deep oceans) and their “aquaplanet” cousins (with a covering of water and continents) but orbiting stars very much unlike our sun.

Two recent papers address the central question of habitability in terms of these kind of planets — one with oceans and ice hundreds of miles deep, and one particular and compelling planet (Proxima Centauri b, the exoplanet closest to us) hypothesized to have water on its surface as it orbits a red dwarf star.

The question the papers address is whether these watery worlds might be habitable. The conclusions are based on modelling rather than observations, and they are both compelling and surprising.

In both cases — a planet with liquid H₂0 and ice many miles down, and another that probably faces its red dwarf sun all or most of the time — the answers from modelers is that yes, the planets could be habitable. That is very different from saying they are or even might be inhabited. Rather, the conclusions are based on computer models that take into account myriad conditions and come out with simulations about what kind of planets they might be.

This finding of potential watery-world habitability is no small matter because predictions of how planets form point to an abundance of water and ice in the planetesimals that grow into planets.

As described by Eric Ford, co-author of one of the papers and a professor of astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University, “Many scientists anticipate that planets with oceans much deeper than Earths could be a common outcome of planet formation. Indeed, one of the puzzling properties of Earth is that it has oceans that are just skin deep” compared to the radius of the planet.… 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

The Architecture of Solar Systems

July 9, 2018 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

The architecture of planetary systems is an increasingly important factor to exoplanet scientists. This illustration shows the Kepler-11 system where the planets are all roughly the same size and their orbits spaced at roughly the same distances from each other. The the planets are, in the view of scientists involved with the study, “peas in a pod.” (NASA)

Before the discovery of the first exoplanet that orbits a star like ours, 51 Pegasi b, the assumption of solar system scientists was that others planetary systems that might exist were likely to be like ours. Small rocky planets in the inner solar system, big gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune beyond and, back then, Pluto bringing up the rear

But 51 Peg b broke every solar system rule imaginable. It was a giant and hot Jupiter-size planet, and it was so close to its star that it orbited in a little over four days. Our Jupiter takes twelve years to complete an orbit.

This was the “everything we knew about solar systems is wrong” period, and twenty years later thinking about the nature and logic of solar system architecture remains very much in flux.

But progress is being made, even if the results are sometimes quite confounding. The umbrella idea is no longer that solar, or planetary, systems are pretty much like ours, but rather that the galaxy is filled with a wild diversity of both planets and planetary systems.

Detecting and trying to understand planetary systems is today an important focus 0f exoplanet study, especially now that the Kepler Space Telescope mission has made clear that multi-planet systems are common.

As of early July, 632 multi planet systems have been detected and 2,841 stars are known to have at least one exoplanets. Many of those stars with a singular planet may well have others yet to be found.

An intriguing newcomer to the diversity story came recently from University of Montreal astronomer Lauren Weiss, who with colleagues expanded on and studied some collected Kepler data.

What she found has been deemed the “peas in a pod” addition to the solar system menagerie.

Weiss was working with the California-Kepler Survey, which included a team of scientists pouring over, elaborating on and looking for patterns in, among other things, solar system architectures.

Weiss is part of the California-Kepler Survey team, which used the Keck Observatory to obtain high-resolution spectra of 1305 stars hosting 2025 transiting planets originally discovered by Kepler.… Read more

Exoplanet Science Flying High

July 3, 2018 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

An artist’s concept shows what the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system may look like, based on available data about the planets’ diameters, masses and distances from the host star, as of February 2018. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Early this spring, the organizers of an exoplanet science gathering at Cambridge University put out the word that they would host a major meeting this summer. Within a week, the 300 allotted slots had been filled by scientists aspiring and veteran, and within a short time the waiting list was up to 150 more.

Not the kind of reaction you might expect for a hardcore, topic-specific meeting, but exoplanet science is now in a phase of enormous growth and excitement. With so many discoveries already made and waiting to be made, so many new (and long-standing) questions to be worked on, so much data coming in to be analyzed and turned into findings, the field has something of a golden shine.

What’s more, it has more than a little of the feel of the Wild West.

Planet hunters Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla site. (L. Weinstein/Ciel et Espace Photos)

Didier Queloz, a professor now at Cambridge but in the mid 1990s half of the team that identified the first exoplanet, is the organizer of the conference.

“It sometimes seems like there’s not much exploration to be done on Earth, and the opposite is the case with exoplanets,” he told me outside the Cambridge gathering.

“I think a lot of young scientists are attracted to the excitement of exoplanets, to a field where there’s so much that isn’t known or understood.”

Michel Mayor of the Observatory of Geneva — and the senior half of the team that detected the first exoplanet orbiting a star like our sun, 51 Pegasi b– had opened the gathering with a history of the search for extra-solar planets.

That search had some conceptual success prior to the actual 1995 announcement of an exoplanet discovery, but several claims of having actually found an exoplanet had been made and shown to be wanting. Except for the relative handful of scientists personally involved, the field was something of a sideshow.

“At the time we made our first discovery, I basically knew everyone in the field. We were on our own.”

Now there are thousands of people, many of them young people, studying exoplanets. And the young people, they have to be smarter, more clever, because the questions are harder.”

And enormous progress is being made.… Read more

Know Thy Star, Know Thy Planet: How Gaia is Helping Nail Down Planet Sizes

May 18, 2018 / Elizabeth Tasker / 0 Comments

Gaia’s all-sky view of our Milky Way and neighboring galaxies. (ESA/Gaia/DPAC)

Last month, the European Space Agency’s Gaia missio n released the most accurate catalogue to date of positions and motions for a staggering 1.3 billion stars.

Let’s do a few comparisons so we can be suitably amazed. The total number of stars you can see without a telescope is less than 10,000. This includes visible stars in both the northern and southern hemispheres, so looking up on a very dark night will allow you to count only about half this number.

The data just released from Gaia is accurate to 0.04 milli-arcseconds. This is a measurement of the angle on the sky, and corresponds to the width of a human hair at a distance of over 300 miles (500 km.) These results are from 22 months of observations and Gaia will ultimately whittle down the stellar positions to within 0.025 milli-arcseconds, the width of a human hair at nearly 680 miles (1000 km.)

OK, so we are now impressed. But why is knowing the precise location of stars exciting to planet hunters?

The reason is that when we claim to measure the radius or mass of a planet, we are almost always measuring the relative size compared to the star. This is true for all planets discovered via the radial velocity and transit techniques — the most common exoplanet detection methods that account for over 95% of planet discoveries.

It means that if we underestimate the star size, our true planet size may balloon from being a close match to the Earth to a giant the size of Jupiter. If this is true for many observed planets, then all our formation and evolution theories will be a mess.

The size of a star is estimated from its brightness. Brightness depends on distance, as a small, close star can appear as bright as a distant giant. Errors in the precise location of stars therefore make a big mess of exoplanet data.

An artist’s impression of the Gaia spacecraft — which is on a mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Milky Way. In the process it will expand our understanding of the composition, formation and evolution of the galaxy. (ESA/D. Ducros)

This issue has been playing on the minds of exoplanet hunters.

In 2014, a journal paper authored by Fabienne Bastien from Vanderbilt University suggested that nearly half of the brightest stars observed by the Kepler Space Telescope are not regular stars like our sun, but actually are distant and much larger sub-giant stars.… Read more

First Mapping of Interstellar Clouds in Three Dimensions; a Key Breakthrough for Better Understanding Star Formation

May 11, 2018 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

This snakelike gas cloud (center dark area) in the constellation Musca resembles a skinny filament. But it’s actually a flat sheet that extends about 20 light-years into space away from Earth, an analysis finds.
(Dylan O’Donnell, deography.com/WikiCommons)

When thinking and talking about “astrobiology,” many people are inclined to think of alien creatures that often look rather like us, but with some kind of switcheroo. Life, in this view, means something rather like us that just happens to live on another planet and perhaps uses different techniques to stay alive.

But as defined by NASA, and what “astrobiology” is in real scientific terms, is the search for life beyond Earth and the exploration of how life began here. They may seem like very different subjects but are actually joined at the hip; having a deeper understanding of how life originated on Earth is surely one of the most important set of clues to how to find it elsewhere.

Those con-joined scientific disciplines — the search for extraterrestrial life and the extraordinarily difficult task of analyzing how it started here — together raise another most complex challenge.

Precisely how far back do we look when trying to understand the origins of life? Do we look to Darwin’s “warm little pond?” To the Miller-Urey experiment’s conclusion that organic building blocks of life can be formed by sparking some common gases and water with electricity? To an understanding the nature and evolution of our atmosphere?

The answer is “yes” to all, as well as to scores of additional essential dynamics of our galaxies. Because to begin to answer those three questions, we also have to know how planets form, the chemical make-up of the cosmos, how different suns effect different exoplanets and so much more.

This is why I was so interested in reading about a breakthrough approach to understanding the shape and nature of interstellar clouds. Because it is when those clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravitational attraction that stars are formed — and, of course, none of the above questions have meaning without preexisting stars.

In theory, the scope of astrobiology could go back further than star-formation, but I take my lead from Mary Voytek, chief scientist for astrobiology at NASA. The logic of star formation is part of astrobiology, she says, but the innumerable cosmological developments going back to the Big Bang are not.

So by understanding something new about interstellar clouds — in this case determining the 3D structure of such a “cloud” — we are learning about some of the very earliest questions of astrobiology, the process that led over the eons to us and most likely life of some sort on the billions of exoplanets we now know are out there.… Read more

To Understand Habitability, We Need to Return to Venus

February 8, 2018 / Elizabeth Tasker / 0 Comments

This image shows the night side of Venus in thermal infrared. It is a false-color image using data from the Japanese spacecraft Akatsuki’s IR2 camera in two wavelengths, 1.74 and 2.26 microns. Darker regions denote thicker clouds, but changes in color can also denote differences in cloud particle size or composition from place to place. JAXA / ISAS / DARTS / Damia Bouic

“You can feel what it’s like on Venus here on Earth,” said Kevin McGouldrick from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Heat a hot plate until it glows red, place your palm on its surface and then run over that hand with a truck.”

The surface of Venus is a hellish place. Suffocated by a thick atmosphere, pressure on the Venusian surface is 92 times greater than on the surface of Earth. Temperatures sit at a staggering 863°F (462°C), which is sufficient to melt lead.

The longest a spacecraft has survived in these conditions is a mere 127 minutes; a record set by the Russian Venera 13 mission over 35 years ago.

As the brightest planet in the night sky, Venus allured ancient astronomers into naming the world after the Roman mythological goddess of love and beauty. This now seems an ironic choice, but the contrast between distant observation and surface conditions produces an apt juxtaposition for exoplanets.

The comparison has led to an article in Nature Geoscience by McGouldrick and a nine author white paper advising on astrobiology strategy for the National Science Foundation. The conclusion of both publications echoes the irony of Venus’s name: we need to return to the inferno of Venus to understand habitable worlds.

A portion of western Eistla Regio is displayed in this three-dimensional perspective view of the surface of Venus. Synthetic aperture radar data from the spacecraft Magellan is combined with radar altimetry to develop a three-dimensional map of the surface. Rays cast in a computer intersect the surface to create a three-dimensional perspective view. The simulated hues are based on color images recorded by the Soviet Venera 13 and 14 spacecraft. The image, a frame from a video released in 1991, was produced at NASA’s JPL Multimission Image Processing Laboratory.

In the last 25 years, scientists have discovered over 3,500 extrasolar planets. The vast majority of these worlds have not been imaged directly, but are detected by tiny influences on their host star.… Read more

Many Worlds