What We Are Looking For and How Do We Find It?

     When it comes to planets outside our own, to put it precisely we are looking for another Earth. For planets nearby, we can see what they are made of and though there is some possibility to colonize them, it would be nearly impossible to make them like Earth.
     The main ingredients that come into building a suitable planet are as follows: there needs to be an atmosphere with a large amount of oxygen and not to many toxins, there needs to be habitable land that can support plant life preferably, some sort of harvestable structural resource to make a settlement, and water that exists in multiple phases, though it is fine if there is no ice. Beyond these there are a few subtle features like a differentiated and molten core to support a magnetosphere and a differentiated atmosphere, but if the planet has all of the features from the first list, it is likely that the other main features are accounted for. What we are looking for for these is a planet within the "Habitable Zone," an area around a star where its not too hot and not too cold.
     So how do we know where a habitable zone is. Mostly it depends upon the star, for example the following picture illustrates the difference in the habitable zones of our own fair system and the heavily populated Gliese 581 system.

     Notice how the zone is much closer to the star since the star is significantly closer to the star than it is in our own system.

     As for finding a planet with actual atmosphere and water, it is currently impossible unless the system is extremely close (and with the discovery of new brown dwarfs, there may be some very "local" systems). It will be up to future technology to determine which worlds have dry land, which have oceans, and which ones we would feel perfectly at home on.

     For now I will also leave this amazing Sagan video to highlight the importance of this wonderful planet we are part of.

May The Stars Shine Brightly In Your Skies!

What Happens On A Busy Day In The World Of Planetary Sciences

     In the world of planetary sciences there are days where nothing happens, researchers sit around refreshing their searches, looking deeper at some old Hubble data, or building new models of systems. On the other hand there are days like today. Earlier today I mentioned how we find planets beyond our own solar system and I pointed my finger at Kepler for being one of the better resources we have.
     All I can say is HOLY COW!!!! Kepler returned data from its recent scan of the skies and has revealed a staggering 1200(ish) new planets in our own galaxy! 1200 in a portion of only one-millionth of the total galaxy!
     Since I am not an expert on this I would suggest following this link: BadAstronomy's coverage of the event

May the stars shine brightly in your skies

Reaching Out With Science

from the greatest webcomic ever xkcd

     Scientists walk a precarious line between appeasing the publics views and causing mental revolts. From the eyes of someone who hopes to one day assist in the upwards progress of humanity the public is scary, one day they are interested in a topic and the next day they are crying for your head on a plater. For instance back late last fall, a NASA researcher claimed to have discovered life on Earth that used arsenic instead of phosphorous.
It was quite the hulabaloo and the scientific journalism world jumped all over it as though it were the find of the century. As it would be, within the next few days certain skeptical scientists started picking holes in the idea, much as always happens and the media sided with those that were fighting the idea that arsenic was really used by these life forms. For someone in the public it looked like science was wrong and couldn't get its act together.
     So where else are there problems. Well when you happen upon a revolutionary idea that the public is unhappy about, you have to do some convincing. While the following video is unrelated to planetary sciences, it touches greatly upon to need for scientists and skeptics to look onto themselves and their behavior to better how they are viewed. Warning it is about half an hour long but is well worth the time.

 

May the stars shine brightly in your skies!

Here Planet Planet Planet...

     Distant planets are incredibly difficult to find, so thus to better understand them it is incredibly important to obtain some knowledge of how we find them. To get an idea of just how difficult it is to find new planets, despite living within our own solar system, it took well into the 1800's to find the 3rd and 4th largest planets and to this date we are still finding planets on the outer rim of our home.
     So if it takes so much effort to find those bodies that are right under our nose on a galactic scale,  how do we find planets that are magnitudes of distance further away. Luckily for us, we know where the stars are, we do not need to find stars like we do with the menagerie of dwarf planets that circle our sun. There are multiple ways in which a planet can affect the star which it circles around, for instance if a planet is large enough and the star is close enough to us, we can observe slight alterations in its spin. Imagine it like a top, if there is a slight flaw on the edge of the top, at some level the top will wobble slightly.
      There are of course better ways, the primary of which involves monitoring the amount of light produced by a star.  Watch this video about the Kepler mission to find planets in the habitable zone from NASA.


 

     So you will have noticed that the problem with the Kepler mission is that we don't get pictures. People inherently want visible data in order to feel an affirmation of their goals so it is the goal of scientists to fill the knowledge deficit with society. The main question with this is can we actually get pictures of these bodies and the simple answer is yes. Back in between 2004 and 2006 Hubble was used successfully used to capture an image of Fomalhaut-b. While it was known that there was the possibility of planets in this system, the picture marks the first time that humanity has been able to see another planet.
   

May the stars shine brightly in your skies!