Never one to miss a chance to suggest everything is all about me … last week a writer and editor playing partner of mine and I hit a court near campus and came across old pal Geoff Marcy, whose Cal-professor hobby is astronomy and planet-finding, pursuing his heart's true calling. A tall guy named Robert, from the law school, was running him from baseline to alley and back while blasting serves like bolides screaming in from the Oort cloud. Whenever I play Geoff he kills me. This was good theatre. Hey Geoff, I said, I hear you and the Kepler gang got baskets of other Earths almost ready to deliver. You just waiting on that third orbit to confirm full Goldilocks zone? Not enough sigmas yet? Or are they all huddled around little red dwarfs?
My wise guy exo-jargon exhausted I shut up. He said we already have them. Just wait.
Boy howdy. That didn't take long. A passel of papers this week at the American Astronomical Ass'n meeting in Long Beach got rivers of digital and dead-tree media ink. Kepler's data trawlers revealed extrapolations from their latest numbers on small planets that are not all so close to their stars they broil, nor so far away they freeze, betrayed by the tiny dimmings in their star's light as their orbits carry them between them (the stars) and us. The specifics came just a week after the Kepler team revealed preliminary news results with hints of lots more planets of all kinds including earths. Isn't Kepler about the most sublime gnome-cat of a telescope ever, quietly staring at one spot in the sky, whiskers hardly budging, unblinking, its exquisite photometers missing nothing? Its designer and main honcho Bill Borucki, perhaps you heard, just got (another) big prize, this from the National Academy, for proving all the doubters wrong. Too bad Nobels don't split more than three ways. I'd give one to Mayor, Queloz, Marcy, Butler, and Borucki, not that observational astronomers are typical picks for those things. They've all worked their asses off and profoundly changed professional and popular regard of the starry firmament. There be doppelgangers out there. Not just hot Jupiters that got boring after awhile. Billions, they conclude, fit in the habitable rocky terrestrial class.
For more detail read a few STORIES:
- LA Times – Eryn Brown: Kepler data point to more planets in habitable zone ; Plenty of for-instances from the reports but somehow neglects to use the extrapolation to confident in billions just in the Milky Way. Also, nice to see the traditional plural verb with data!
- AP – Alicia Chang: Billions of Earth-sized planets in Milky Way ; Story makes a good distinction – extrapolating to an inevitability of habitable earthlike planets is not the same as finding specific examples of the size of Earth in orbits like ours around stable sunlike stars. Those remain scarce.
- BBC – Jason Palmer: Kepler telescope: Earth-sized planets 'number 17bn' ; Not just press conference quotes here, but a close interivew with an astronomer who explains the fine points of picking signal from noise, eliminating false positives, and other workaday difficulties of the scientific life.
- Atlantic – Rebecca J. Rosen: Astronomers Reckon There Are 17 Billion Earth-Size Planets in Our Galaxy Alone ; A notable feature style piece, discursive, that takes its time getting to the point after reviewing some history. It also asks, rather promptly, Fermi's troubling question. Where are they? Not the planets but the smart aliens that we all think might live on some of them and that send the imagination into overdrive. Shouldn't ONE of their civilization's by now have been spotted, chatting up the ether with instructions or poetry or a simple string of hello out there messages?
- Nature News – Ron Cowen: Small stars host droves of life-friendly worlds / The galaxy's most common type of star system often includes potentially habitable Earth-sized planets ; Cowen, a relentless hunter for details nobody else got, waited another day, for another set of papers beyond the ones on the big picture and that got a press conference. He propels the news forward. His main angle is the potential of M-class (or red) dwarf stars to be particularly fecund places for living worlds.
- Boston Globe – Carolyn Johnson: Earth-sized planets relatively common in the Milky Way ;
- Wired – Adam Mann: Nearly Half of Sun-Like Stars May Have Earth-Like Planets ;
- Planetary Society – Emily Lakdawalla: Report from AAS: Exoplanets (and exo-asteroids, and exo-comets) everywhere ; A blog post from a specialty insider sits, but has amazing stat: 30 percent of papers at a AAS meeting were on exoplanets.
- CNN- Elizabeth Landua: Planets, planets, planets! Good hed on a fairly brief story on the news's surface.
- Mail Online (UK) Damian Ghigliotty: NASA space telescope shows there may be 17 billion Earth-like planets in Milky Way ; The expected Mail plethory of gaudy illus, some of it pertinent. Somewhat should have caught the typo in the lede – the "hundred million stars in the galaxy" is low by a factor of 1000. That's 100 billion of them, conservatively. Perhaps Ghigliotty spoke to an astronomer himself. It is difficult to tell. Mostly it looks off press releases.
- Sky and Telescope – Monica Young: Kepler Zeroes in on Alien Earths ; Good job for the astro-fan readership. Nice touch too to close on Bill Borucki's recent NAS prize.
- Space.com – Karl Tate: Most Earth-like Exoplanet Discovery Explained (Infographic) ;
- Register (UK) Rik Myslewski – New research cuts Kepler'sexoplanet count by one third / Loook out for those 'astrophysical false positive' imposters ; Really inside-the-asteroid-beltway stuff here, off an analysis in Nature. But one seldom sees that journal referred to as a "prestigious science rag." Oh those cheeky Brits.
- SF Chronicle – David Perlman (Dec 27) Milky Way may be home to billions of planets ; Who better than Doctor Dave to provide an example of the wave of coverage, days before the AAS meeting, for another batch of Kepler news on extrasolar planets in general (with earth-like worlds and easy subset to spot)?
Grist for the Mill: UC Berkeley Press Release ; NASA Ames Press Release ; Univ. of Hawaii Inst. for Astronomy Press Release; Harvard-Smithsonian Ctr. for Astrophysics Press Release ;
Leave a Reply