On the scale of Jon Lomberg’s Galaxy Garden, discussed here on Friday, the star GJ 504 is less than an inch away, representing some 60 light years. In fact, as Jon reminds visitors to the Garden in Hawaii, almost all the stars visible to the naked eye are contained in the volume equivalent of a single leaf. When I speak about interstellar matters I always try to find comparisons that get across the scale of the galaxy, but I can’t think of a better way to experience that scale than to walk through these gorgeous grounds near Kailua-Kona. As I think about GJ 504 and the Galaxy Garden, I’m also reminded that Kona is the source of one of my favorite coffees, yet another reason for making the trip. But yesterday afternoon I roasted some excellent El Salvador beans and I’m settling in with a brightly flavored mug as I write, just the thing to kick off the week. I begin it with GJ 504 because a team from the SEEDS project (Strategic Explorations of Exoplanets and Disks with Subaru) led by...

Red dwarf stars of the sort we discussed yesterday are all over the galaxy, comprising perhaps as much as 80 percent of the stellar population. Brown dwarfs are different. Data from the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer mission (WISE) indicate that these ‘failed’ stars -- brown dwarfs are too small to sustain hydrogen fusion -- exist in smaller than expected numbers, at least in our stellar neighborhood. WISE could find but one brown dwarf for every six stars (see Brown Dwarfs Sparser than Expected for more on the WISE findings). Image: Brown dwarfs in relation to the Sun and planets. Credit: NASA/WISE mission. As we learn more about the brown dwarf population, we can keep in mind the tantalizing fact that several of these objects have been found with disks of material around them, leading to the speculation that they can form planets in the same way that normal stars can. It’s true that several objects have already been found associated with brown dwarfs, but they tend to be large...

Although it's hard for me to believe it, there was a time nine years ago, not long after I began writing these posts, when a daily scramble for topics was fairly common. How the world has changed. These days, between the huge increase in online discussion of interstellar flight and the burgeoning exoplanet scene, the problem becomes to keep from falling too far behind. I'm already a couple of weeks out on interesting work from the University of Washington on one of my favorite topics, red dwarfs and the possibilities for life there. It's time to catch up. What Aomawa Shields has been examining in her recent work is climate in the extreme, the kind of 'snowball Earth' event that, in several periods 600 million years ago and earlier, may have covered the planet in ice from pole to pole. Shields' new paper in Astrobiology goes at the question of climate extremes on planets around M-dwarfs, where conditions are markedly different than around stars like the Sun. It turns out that M-dwarf...

Rayleigh scattering is what happens when light is scattered by particles considerably smaller than the light’s wavelength. Although it can happen in solids and liquids, it’s most obvious when it occurs in our sky, causing its blue color. We’re seeing the short blue wavelengths of sunlight scattered by oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere, while red wavelengths are absorbed more strongly, hence less scattering. When you leave the atmosphere and go into space, the Earth appears blue because the oceans absorb red and green wavelengths more than blue ones, and thus we can see the reflected blue color of our sky. But colors from within the atmosphere or beyond it depend on local conditions. The reddish sky shown by the Viking landers in 1977 was the result of iron-rich dust thrown up by the dust storms that are endemic to the planet. We can assume that the color of other planets as seen from space -- think Jupiter or Venus -- is the result of particles within their atmospheres....

How close can a planet be to its star and still be habitable? If by ‘habitability’ we mean liquid water on the surface, with whatever consequences that may bring on a particular world, then it’s clear that the answer is partially dependent on clouds. We’ve developed one-dimensional models that can study the effect of clouds in various exoplanet environments, but they’re unable to predict cloud coverage, location or altitude. A new paper now describes a three-dimensional model that can make such calculations about atmospheric circulation, with interesting results. Focusing on planets around M-class dwarf stars, Jun Yang and Dorian Abbot (both of the University of Chicago) and Nicholas Cowan (Northwestern University) are quick to note that red dwarfs like these constitute perhaps 75 percent of all main sequence stars. Current data (based on the work of Courtney Dressing and David Charbonneau) suggest that there is an abundance of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone -- one per star...

Gliese 667C keeps getting more interesting. In the past we’ve looked at studies of this star in a triple system just 22 light years away, work that had identified three planets around the star. As one of these was in the habitable zone, this small red dwarf (about a third of the Sun’s mass) quickly engaged the interest of those thinking in terms of astrobiology. Now we get news that GJ 667C may actually host up to seven planets, with three evidently in the habitable zone. I would say Mikko Tuomi (University of Hertfordshire, UK) is guilty of a bit of understatement. He’s quoted in this ESO news release thusly: “We knew that the star had three planets from previous studies, so we wanted to see whether there were any more. By adding some new observations and revisiting existing data we were able to confirm these three and confidently reveal several more. Finding three low-mass planets in the star’s habitable zone is very exciting!” Exciting indeed -- we’ve never found three...

I'm a coffee fanatic. Not only do I drink a lot of the stuff, but I roast my own beans and love fiddling with roasting times and fan speeds, trying to hit exactly the right note. And with a just-brewed carafe of Burundi by my side this morning, it's natural enough that I would be drawn to an exoplanet tool called ESPRESSO. Echelle SPectrograph or Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations is the next generation spectrograph for the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, which has already played such a huge role in finding distant worlds. Using the HARPS spectrograph, the VLT already holds the record for most exoplanet discoveries from equipment on the ground. Upgraded with ESPRESSO, the VLT should be primed for even more fine-tuned radial velocity measurements. HARPS was designed to get us down to about the 1 m/s level, although its effective precision is considerably tighter. But we're still not in range of Earth-like planets in the habitable zone. The...

When a distant planet moves in front of its star as seen from Earth, the slight drop in starlight is often enough to allow sensitive instruments to make a detection. We call the degree to which the star's light is diminished the 'transit depth,' and even with transiting gas giants, the figure is usually on the order of one percent. What we're getting at is the ratio of the area of the planet to the area of the star behind it. The transit depth of the 'hot Jupiter' HD 189733b is unusually large at three percent. Obviously both a planet's size and the the size of the star come into play. In the case of the super-Earth GJ3470b, the primary star is relatively nearby and is also an M-dwarf, allowing greater transit depth and propelling a series of investigations from the ground. GJ3470b orbits its star at 0.036 AU, completing its orbit in a mere 3.3 days. The new work, led by Akihiko Fukui and Norio Narita (NAOJ), along with Kenji Kuroda (University of Tokyo), looks at the atmosphere of a...

Thinking as we have been about exoplanet detection, and in particular about taking the next steps beyond the James Webb Space Telescope, I'm intrigued to see what has happened with the WFIRST mission. After all, despite the successes of Kepler and ESA's CoRoT, we live in an era when mission cancellation is not uncommon. The Space Interferometry Mission was canceled outright, while Terrestrial Planet Finder, long touted as the way we would home in on nearby planets like our own, has been put into indefinite suspension. The JWST is on the horizon, but interesting new possibilities are now bubbling up around WFIRST, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. A mission with a dark energy pedigree could now have serious exoplanet implications. In Exoplanet Capabilities of WFIRST-2.4, Philip Horzempa looks at the latest design to emerge for this mission, one that takes us much deeper into exoplanet country than I had thought the mission could. After all, WFIRST was conceived as a way of...

The golden age of exoplanets? I've often described our time as such, referring to the fact that we're finding planets at such a fast clip and learning so quickly about the wide range of planetary systems out there, including those with 'hot Jupiters' and 'super-Earths.' But the next step in the discovery process is a bit murkier. If we're learning how exoplanets are distributed -- and even with a hobbled Kepler, we still have a great deal of data still to be analyzed -- we're not yet ready to take the spectra of exoplanet atmospheres on conceivably habitable worlds. This is important, because light scattering off an atmosphere bears the signature of things like water vapor, oxygen, methane and carbon dioxide, the right combination of which could signal life. And just as Kepler is useful at developing a statistical read on the distribution of smaller planets, so we'll want to have a way to measure the frequency of worlds that actually do bear life. It's a problem Lee Billings notes in...

I normally think about gravitational lensing as a way of finding planets that are a long way from home. That's just the nature of the beast: Lensing as an exoplanet detection tool depends upon a star with planets moving in front of a background object, its mass 'bending' space enough to cause slight changes to the image of the farther star. Monitor those changes closely enough and you may see the signature of a second disruption, flagging the presence of a planet around the closer star. Occultations like these are rare enough and more likely to be found in a crowded starfield, such as looking toward galactic center. It's a remarkable fact that instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope can make measurements down to 0.2 milliarcseconds, a milliarcsecond being (as this Space Telescope Science Institute news release notes) the angular width of a nickel in Honolulu when viewed from New York City. Comparable measurements, within range of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large...

Because we only have direct images of a tiny number of planets orbiting other stars, we're used to extrapolating as much as we can from our data and plugging in possible scenarios. But as the recent announcement of two 'super-Earths' around Kepler 62 demonstrates, we're coming up hard against the limits of our knowledge. The comments on my recent story on the Kepler find bring up Greg Laughlin's always interesting systemic site and a post he made in early April. Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz) is worth reading not only for his shrewd analysis but for the sheer brio he brings to the exoplanet hunt. And here he sounds a note of caution: I think we currently have substantially less understanding of the extrasolar planets than is generally assumed. Thousands of planets are known, but there is no strong evidence that any of them bear a particular resemblance to the planets within our own solar system. There's always a tendency, perfectly encapsulated by the discipline of astrobiology, with its...

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings." Thus Cassius speaking to Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, trying to convince him that what happens to us comes not from some malign fate but from our own actions. I'm sure he's right, too, but I admit there are days when I wonder. For the stars seem aligned in such a way that whenever there is a significant news conference about exoplanets, I have a schedule conflict. This is true yet again today, so that I'm writing before the NASA-hosted news briefing and will have to set this up to post automatically after the embargo expires. Here, though, are the main points. We have found Kepler 62f, an interesting world about 1.4 times the size of Earth and most likely rocky. When you add up the other known facts about the planet, the attention builds. Discovered through Kepler data in the constellation Lyra, this world receives about half the heat and radiation that the Earth does, while orbiting...

We've looked at a couple of exoplanet issues this week that bear further comment. The first is that different detection methods can be usefully combined to cover different scenarios. If radial velocity works best with larger planets closer to their star, direct imaging takes us deep into the outer planetary system. We saw yesterday how both imaging and radial velocity could be used to probe subgiant stars. We routinely use RV as a check on transiting planet candidates. And gravitational microlensing can find planets at a wide range of separation from their primary. I think microlensing has plenty to teach us, though I'm sensitive to the criticism voiced in comments here that we're dealing with non-repeating events when we have a microlensing detection. Centauri Dreams reader coolstar has also noted that distance may be a factor, questioning whether some of the resources by way of telescope hardware that we're putting into microlensing studies wouldn't be better employed looking at...

Our exoplanet detection methods have their limits. Radial velocity studies work great in the inner regions of planetary systems, but become more challenging as we move away from the star. Direct imaging is the reverse -- we’re most likely to see a distant planet if it’s both large and well separated from the primary. Clearly we need to take the best data from each available method to characterize a planetary system. But direct images are rare and some stars -- A-class in particular -- are tricky for RV studies because of jitter and other problems. If you want to get in close to an intermediate mass star to look for planets or a debris disk, the way to do it seems to be to study ‘retired’ stars sitting on the subgiant branch of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. These are stars that have slowed or stopped fusing hydrogen in their cores. Core contraction raises the star’s temperature enough to fuse hydrogen in a shell surrounding the core and the star begins to swell up toward giant...

The news that NASA has approved the TESS mission kept my mood elevated all weekend. TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) has been the logical NASA follow-up to Kepler ever since the Space Interferometry Mission was canceled in 2010. The point is that Kepler looks at a field of stars with the goal of developing a statistical analysis, helping us (ultimately) to home in on the value for ?Earth (Eta_Earth), the fraction of stars orbited by planets like the Earth. To do this, Kepler is looking out along the Orion Arm of the galaxy, with almost all the stars in its field of view between 600 and 3000 light years away. In fact, fewer than one percent of Kepler’s 156,000 stars are closer than 600 light years. There are plenty of stars beyond 3000 light years, but as we push beyond this distance, the stars become too faint for Kepler’s transit methods to be effective. The carefully chosen field in Cygnus and Lyra is ideal for Kepler’s statistical data but the next question to ask is...

While transit and radial velocity methods get most of the press when it comes to finding exoplanets, gravitational microlensing offers an independent alternative. Here a star passes in front of a far more distant object, causing the light from the source to be gravitationally ‘bent’ by the intervening star. The useful thing for exoplanet work is that if the ‘lensing’ star is orbited by one or more planets, they can leave their own signature in the microlensing event. And indeed, microlensing collaborations like MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) and OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) have made the method pay off in exoplanet discoveries. Image: Gravitational microlensing relies on chance line-ups between an intervening star with planetary system and a more distant light source. Credit: California Institute of Technology. Now researchers at the University of Auckland are proposing to measure low-mass planets, planets as small as the Earth, using these...

Whether we're planning to go to the stars on a worldship or with faster transportation, the choice of targets is still evolving, and will be for some time. Indeed, events are moving almost faster than I can keep up with them. It was in early February that Courtney Dressing and David Charbonneau (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) presented results of their study of 3897 dwarf stars with temperatures cooler than 4000 K, revising their temperatures downward and reducing their size by 31 percent. The scientists culled the stars from the Kepler catalog, and their revisions had the effect of lowering the size of the 95 detected planets in their data. They went on to deduce that about 15 percent of all red dwarf stars have an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone. [PG note: The 15% figure is a revised estimate that I've just learned about from Ravi kumar Kopparapu. Dressing and Charbonneau call attention to this change at the end of their paper. See citation below]. That would...

Just what does it take to make a habitable world? Keith Cooper is editor of Astronomy Now, the British monthly whose first editor was the fabled Patrick Moore. An accomplished writer on astronautics and astronomy as well as a Centauri Dreams regular, Keith has recently become editor of Principium, the newsletter of the Institute for Interstellar Studies, whose third issue has just appeared. In this essay, Keith looks at our changing views of habitable zones in light of recent work, and takes us to two famous science fictional worlds where extreme climates challenge life but do not preclude it. How such worlds emerge and how life might cope on them are questions as timely as the latest exoplanet findings. by Keith Cooper Literally overnight, two habitable planets - tau Ceti f and HD 85512b - were rendered barren and lifeless. What was the cause of this cataclysm? A nearby supernova? Asteroid impacts? On the contrary, it was something far more mundane. A dozen light years away,...

Where is the best place to look for life? At first glance, a red dwarf would seem to be the ideal choice because a transiting terrestrial-class world in the habitable zone of a red dwarf is going to block a larger part of the star’s light than a similarly sized world orbiting a larger star. Red dwarfs pose their own problems for life, including the possibility of tidal lock and severe flares, but in terms of detectability, they seem made to order for planet hunters with transit methods in mind. But white dwarfs turn out to be interesting targets in their own right, and in at least one significant way may offer even more advantages. So says a new paper by Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Don Maoz (Tel Aviv University), who point out that a habitable planet orbiting a white dwarf would have to be close to its star indeed, perhaps as close as 1.5 million kilometers. As with a red dwarf, a transit here will block a large fraction of the star’s light --...