As I decompress from the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (and review my notes for next week's report), I have the pleasure of bringing you Andrew LePage's incisive essay into a key exoplanet question. Are some of the planets now considered potentially habitable actually unlikely to support life? Recent work gives us some hard numbers on just how large and massive a planet can be before it is more likely to be closer to Neptune than the Earth in composition. The transition from rocky to non-rocky planets is particularly important now, when our instruments are just becoming able to detect planets small enough to qualify as habitable. LePage, who writes the excellent Drew ex Machina, remains optimistic about habitable planets in the galaxy, but so far the case for many of those identified as such may be weaker than we had thought. A prolific writer, Drew is also a Senior Project Scientist at Visidyne, Inc., where he specializes in the processing and analysis of remote sensing...

Because building an economically sustainable infrastructure in the Solar System is crucial for the development of interstellar flight, I was interested to learn about a game called High Frontier, which looks to combine O'Neill habitats with a steady expansion of our species outward. Have a look at the Kickstarter campaign page if the idea of modeling space colonies as an extension of human civilization appeals to you. High Frontier seems to be a chance to get involved in game creation from the ground up to create models of how a starfaring culture might grow. I've never gotten involved in gaming, but I can see the potential for education in games that accurately model complex economies or cultural interactions. In the case of deep space scenarios, it's possible to model an interstellar mission that does not rely on an established infrastructure. Indeed, we just looked at one in Dana Andrews' recent paper, which asks how a mission without such resources could be mounted. But building...

Imaging planets around other stars is challenging enough because their light is overwhelmed by the proximity of the parent star. But what about comets? We may not be able to see them directly, but minute variations in light can mark their passage across the stellar disk. Nearly 500 comets have been detected around the star Beta Pictoris using these methods. New work led by Flavien Kiefer (IAP/CNRS/UPMC) analyzes this cometary hoard to give us a look at what is happening in a young planetary system. Using the HARPS instrument at the European Southern Observatory’s site at La Silla in Chile, Kiefer and team have compiled what the ESO is calling ‘the most complete census of comets around another star ever created.’ Beta Pictoris is becoming an old friend, a young star some 63 light years from the Sun that is no older than 20 million years. The star is surrounded by a disk of material that has been the subject of intense study as we watch the interaction between gas, dust and the...

A physicist and writer well-versed in the intricacies of the exoplanet hunt, Andrew LePage now turns his attention to the question of planets around Centauri B, and in particular the controversy over whether the highly publicized Centauri Bb does in fact exist. Today is the second anniversary of the discovery announcement, and we still have work to do to resolve whether 'noise' in the data -- explained below -- may account for what seems to be a planet. The good news is that multiple teams continue to work on Alpha Centauri, and we should expect answers within several years, or just possibly, as LePage explains, a bit sooner than that. by Andrew LePage Time certainly seems to fly at times. It has already been two years since the October 16, 2012 announcement by a Geneva-based team of astronomers of the discovery of a planet orbiting our Sun-like neighbor, α Centauri B, using precision radial velocity measurements. While this planet, designated α Centauri Bb, was hardly...

On Friday I mentioned transmission spectroscopy, the technique of analyzing the light of a parent star as it is filtered through a planetary atmosphere. We've used it on various 'hot Jupiters' before now -- think of the much studied planet HD 209458b, where water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane have been detected and fierce upper atmosphere winds revealed. And while we wait to see if the method can be applied to the interesting WASP-94 system, we can look at its uses in another hot Jupiter whose weather has now been mapped. WASP-43b has twice Jupiter's mass and a breathtaking 19-hour year. Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have used transmission spectroscopy to determine the abundance of water in the atmosphere at the terminator between night and day on this tidally locked world. The team also used so-called emission spectroscopy -- in which much of the light of the parent star is subtracted -- to measure water abundance and temperature at different points in its orbit....

The WASP Consortium (Wide Angle Search for Planets) has come up with an interesting find: Two new Jupiter-class worlds, one around each star in a binary star system. Both are 'hot Jupiters,' a class of planets that is susceptible to discovery by transit methods, as in this case, and radial velocity as well. Consisting of two robotic observatories, one on La Palma (Canary Islands) and the other in South Africa, WASP has a proven track record, having found over 100 planets since 2006. WASP-94A and WASP-94B, like all WASP candidates, were confirmed by radial velocity techniques through a collaboration with the Geneva Observatory. The two stars are about 600 light years away in the constellation Microscopium. In this case, it was the WASP-South survey team that noticed dips in the light of WASP-94A, the mark of a likely hot Jupiter, with WASP-94B being found by the Geneva team during the confirmation process for the first planet. "We observed the other star by accident, and then found a...

Centauri Dreams welcomes Ravi Kopparapu, a research associate in the Department of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University. He obtained his Ph.D in Physics from Louisiana State University, working with the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) collaboration. After a brief stint as a LIGO postdoc at Penn State, Ravi switched to the exoplanet field and started working with Prof. James Kasting. His current research work includes estimating habitable zones around different kinds of stars, calculating the occurrence of exoplanets using the data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, and understanding the bio-signatures that can potentially be detected by future space telescope missions. Dr. Kopparapu's website is http://www3.geosc.psu.edu/~ruk15/index.shtml. by Ravi Kopparapu Imagine this scenario: You are planning to buy a new house in a nice neighborhood. The schools in the area are good, the neighborhood is very safe, but you want to know the 'kid friendly'...

Like most people, I'm highly interested in the hunt for habitable worlds, planets that could truly be called Earth 2.0. But sometimes we need to step back from the 'habitable' preoccupation and think about the extraordinary range of worlds we've been finding. I'm reminded of something Caleb Scharf says in his new book The Copernicus Complex (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), in a chapter where he describes the work of Johannes Kepler and other astronomical pioneers. Kepler's laws of planetary motion first told us that planetary orbits are ellipses rather than the perfect circles envisioned by the school of Ptolemy. The implications are striking and lead us to expect just the kind of wild variety we find in the exoplanet hunt, where we're uncovering everything from 'hot Jupiters' to 'super-Earths' and a wide variety of Neptune-like worlds. Says Scharf: If planets follow elliptical paths as a general rule, and those paths need not be all within a single plane around a centrally massive...

While I'm in Houston attending the 100 Year Starship Symposium (about which more next week), Andrew LePage has the floor. A physicist and freelance writer specializing in astronomy and the history of spaceflight, LePage will be joining us on a regular basis to provide the benefits of his considerable insight. Over the last 25 years, he has had over 100 articles published in magazines including Scientific American, Sky & Telescope and Ad Astra as well as numerous online sites. He also has a web site, www.DrewExMachina.com, where he regularly publishes a blog on various space-related topics. When not writing, LePage works as a Senior Project Scientist at Visidyne, Inc. located outside Boston, Massachusetts, where he specializes in the processing and analysis of remote sensing data. by Andrew LePage Like many space exploration enthusiasts and professional scientists, I was inspired as a child by science fiction in films, television and print. Even as a young adult, science fiction...

Bringing some order into the realm of 'hot Jupiters' is all to the good. How do these enormous worlds get so close to their star, having presumably formed much further out beyond the 'snowline' in their systems, and what effects do they have on the central star itself? And how do 'hot Jupiter' orbits evolve so as to create spin-orbit misalignments? A team at Cornell University led by astronomy professor Dong Lai, working with graduate students Natalia Storch and Kassandra Anderson, has produced a paper that tells us much about orbital alignments and 'hot Jupiter' formation. It's no surprise that large planets -- and small ones, for that matter -- can make their stars wobble. This is the basis for the Doppler method that so accurately measures the movement of a star as affected by the planets around it. But something else is going on in 'hot Jupiter' systems. In our own Solar System the rotational axis of the Sun is more or less aligned with the orbital axis of the planets. But some...

In terms of habitability, it's clear that getting a world too close to its star spells trouble. In the case of Gliese 581c, we had a planet that some thought would allow liquid water at the surface, but subsequent work tells us it's simply too hot for life as we know it. With the recent dismissal of Gl 581d and g (see Red Dwarf Planets: Weeding Out the False Positives), that leaves no habitable zone worlds that we know about in this otherwise interesting red dwarf system. I'm glad to see that Stephen Kane (San Francisco State) and his team of researchers are working on the matter of distinguishing an Earth-like world from one that is more like Venus. We've made so much of the quest to find something roughly the same size as the Earth that we haven't always been clear to the general public about what that implies. For Venus is Earth-like in terms of size, but it's clearly a far cry from Earth in terms of conditions. Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to find a more hellish place than...

In Greg Bear's novel Queen of Angels (Gollancz, 1990), a robotic probe called AXIS (Automated eXplorer of Interstellar Space) has used antimatter propulsion to make a fifteen-year crossing to Alpha Centauri. The world's various networks of the future begin to feast on reports of what it finds, like this one: "In the past few weeks, AXIS has returned images of three planets circling Alpha Centauri B. As yet these worlds have not been named, and are called only B-1, B-2, and B-3. B-3 was already known to moonbased astronomers; it is a huge gas giant some ten times larger than Jupiter in our own solar system. Like Saturn, it is surrounded by a thin rugged ring of icy moonlets. B-1 is a barren rock hugging close to Alpha Centauri B, similar to Mercury. But the focus of our attention is now on B-2, a justright world slightly smaller than Earth. B-2 possesses an atmosphere closely approximating Earth's, as well as continents and oceans of liquid water. It is orbited by two moons each about...

For those of you who, like me, are fascinated with red dwarf stars and the prospects for life around them, I want to mention David Stevenson's Under a Crimson Sun (Springer, 2013), with the caveat that although it's on my reading list, I haven't gotten to it yet. More about this title after I've gone through it, but for now, notice that the interesting planet news around stars like Gliese 581 and GJ 667C is catching the eye of publishers and awakening interest in the public. It's easy to see why. Planets in the habitable zone of such stars would be exotic places, far different from Earth, but possibly bearing life. At the same time, we're learning a good deal more about both the above-mentioned stars. A new paper by Paul Robertson and Suvrath Mahadevan (both at Pennsylvania State) looks at GJ 667C with encouraging -- and cautionary -- results. The encouraging news is that GJ 667Cc, a super-Earth in the habitable zone of the star, is confirmed by their work. The cautionary note is...

Here's an interesting notion: Put future radio telescopes like the Long Wavelength Array, now under construction in the American southwest, to work looking for exomoons. The rationale is straightforward and I'll examine it in a minute, but a new paper advocating the idea homes in on two planets of unusual interest from the exomoon angle. Gliese 876b and Epsilon Eridani b are both nearby (15 light years and 10.5 light years respectively), both are gas giants, and both should offer a recognizable electromagnetic signature if indeed either of them has a moon. The study in question comes out of the University of Texas at Arlington, where a research group led by Zdzislaw Musielak is looking at how large moons interact with a gas giant's magnetosphere. The obvious local analogue is Io, Jupiter's closest moon, whose upper atmosphere (presumably created by the active volcanic eruptions on the surface) encounters the charged plasma of the magnetosphere, creating current and radio emissions....

I've made no secret of my interest in red dwarf stars as possible hosts of life-bearing planets, and this is partially because these long-lived stars excite visions of civilizations that could have a stable environment for many billions of years. I admit it, the interest is science fictional, growing out of my imagination working on the possibility of life under the light of a class of stars that out-live all others. What might emerge in such settings, in places where tidal lock could keep the planet's star fixed at one point in the sky and all shadows would be permanent? Some of this interest grows out of an early reading of Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker, in which the author describes life in the form of intelligent plants that live on such a tidally locked world. For that matter, Larry Niven developed an alien race called the Chirpsithra, natives of a red dwarf who have a yen for good drink and socializing with other species (you can sample Niven's lively tales of these...

When I was a boy in ninth grade, I asked our science teacher whether the nearest star was likely to have planets. He loved the question because it gave him the chance to explain to the class that Alpha Centauri was a binary star (we left poor Proxima out of the discussion), and that as a binary, it couldn't possibly have planets because their orbits would be too disrupted by gravitational effects to survive. That sounded reasonable to me, and I began putting my hopes on places like Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, single stars with no disruptive companion. Since then we've begun finding binary stars with planets and are learning about the diversity of exoplanetary systems, putting Alpha Centauri back into the game. A good thing, too, given the fact that binary stars are common, and keeping them in the planet hunt allows that many more chances to find an Earth 2.0, not to mention all the other interesting kinds of planets including 'super-Earths' that we're locating. But the fact that...

Be aware of Open Source, a radio show on Boston's WBUR that last week did a show about exoplanets and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Earth 2.0 is available online, featuring David Latham (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Dimitar Sasselov (Harvard University), Jason Wright (Penn State) and Sarah Rugheimer (a PhD student at Harvard studying exoplanet atmospheres). The discussion ranges through the Kepler mission to the Fermi question and recent studies of exoplanet atmospheres, the latter particularly appropriate to today's post. For I want to talk today about 'Hot Jupiters' and their atmospheres, and what we can learn about planet formation by studying their composition. Hot Jupiters were a surprise when first discovered, but models of planetary migration seemed to explain them. We would expect a gas giant to form at or beyond the 'snow line,' where volatiles like water would form ice grains. As we saw in our discussion of Kepler-421b (see Transiting World at...

Both the Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes had a role to play in recent work on the planet Kepler-93b, whose size is now known to an uncertainty of a mere 120 kilometers on either side of the planet. What we have here is the most precise measurement of an exoplanet radius yet, a helpful result in the continuing study of 'super-Earths,' a kind of world for which we have no analogue in our own Solar System. A third instrument also comes into play, for studies of the planet's density derived from Keck Observatory data on its mass (about 3.8 times Earth's mass) and the known radius indicate this is likely an world made of iron and rock. And that is absolutely the only similarity between Kepler-93b and Earth, for at 0.053 AU, six times closer than Mercury to the Sun, the planet's surface temperature is estimated to be in the range of 760 degrees Celsius. The planet is 1.481 times the width of Earth. The accuracy of the measurement is the story here, a result so precise that, in the...

It’s 9000 times easier to find a ‘hot Neptune’ than a Neptune out around the ‘snow line,’ that region marking the distance at which conditions are cold enough for ice grains to form in a solar system. Thus says David Kipping (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), who is lead author on the paper announcing the discovery of Kepler-421b, an interesting world about which Kipping has been sending out provocative tweets this past week. Kepler-421b draws the eye because its year is 704 days, making it the longest orbital period transiting planet yet found. The intriguing new world is located about 1000 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Lyra. The transit method works by detecting the characteristic drop in brightness as a planet moves across the face of the star as seen from Earth. What’s unusual here is that Kepler-421b moved across its star only twice in the four years that the Kepler space telescope monitored it. As Kipping explains on this CfA web page,...

Although I'm sure I'll refer to various papers presented at the American Astronomical Society this week in future entries, I'll close our current look at the Boston meeting with word of two planets that will be falling into their star in short order (at least as astronomers measure time). Kepler-56b and Kepler-56c have a predicted era of death, some 130 million and 155 million years from now respectively. I can't think of any other exoplanets about which we've been able to make such statements, making this a system worth watching as we ponder our own Sun's future. Just as the Sun will one day enlarge to red giant status, threatening the inner planets, so Kepler-56 is growing, already reaching four times the size of the Sun. The star has a long way to go as it continues its outward expansion, and the two planets in question are in a perilous position, with Kepler-56b orbiting the host star every 10.5 days, and Kepler-56c every 21.4. Gongjie Li (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for...