Kepler Detects the Atmosphere of a Distant World
Media Misses the Story
As my bud Phil Plait would say, “Holy Exoplanet!” The Kepler mission team today announced that their orbiting planet hunter has detected the atmosphere of a known gas giant planet that lies about a thousand light-years from us in the direction of the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.
This is a pretty big story and it should have been mentioned on the evening news, or at least as a headline on places like CNN. But, it wasn’t. What’s it take to get the press excited these days? A scan of CNN headlines shows me that they care about Obama’s grades six months into his presidency (which, by the way, has been a “top” story for two days now), lawmakers whinging about military uniforms, a story about whether anybody is flipping out over Twitter being down for a while earlier today, and a “lifestyle” story about the booming sales at dollar stores. Apparently news of an atmosphere on another planet — a very tough, rare and important discovery, just doesn’t make the cut. Actually, very little science has been making the news, despite the fact that there have been some hot stories and gorgeous images released lately. It’s as if the media don’t give a damn about science if it doesn’t bleed, lead, or bleat about political figures. No wonder so many citizens of the United States are verging science illiteracy — our media don’t bother to report science discoveries very much or very well. Which is sad.
Real science showing evidence for a real atmosphere of a planet a thousand light-years away from us. Courtesy NASA/Kepler mission. Click to embiggen.
Well, I’ll tell you about this story. It’s all about light curves — which may have scared off the media. It’s not a pretty picture of the kind they like to put up on the front page. It’s data and it takes a little explaining — which isn’t hard — but try telling a hardened editor that this is more exciting than yet another story about Michael Jackson’s kids…
So, what’s a light curve? Sometimes stars (or other objects) vary in their brightness. If you chart that variation, you get a curve. It swoops up when the object is bright and then down when the object is dim. Variable stars get brighter and dimmer all the time. So do asteroids — as they tumble through space, they reflect different amounts of sunlight, producing a light curve.
Well, some stars show a changing light curve that has nothing to do with being a variable star. Something is causing those stars to dim just a tiny bit on a regular periodic schedule. What could that be? How about a planet? Planets circle their stars on regular schedules, and as they pass between us and their stars, the amount of light we (or actually our instruments) see from each of those stars gets a little dimmer. If you chart the dimming and brightening over time, you can get a good idea of how long a planet takes to go around its star.
Well, this is exactly what Kepler is doing — measuring light curves of thousands of stars in a field in the constellation Cygnus. Today, astronomers released the news that one of those light curves of a star about a thousand light-years away showed evidence of a planetary atmosphere. That is spectacular news because 1) it hasn’t been done like this before and 2) it’s based on ten days of test data, where the instruments onboard the spacecraft looked at the amount of light coming from stars in its field of view.
The data were collected after Kepler was launched but before the actual science ops began. Make no mistake about it — finding a planetary atmosphere a thousand light-years away in data taken to test an instrument tells me that this spacecraft is going to be uncovering a bunch of new worlds and telling us MUCH more about the state of newly discovered planets in our galaxy. It’s like pointing your telescope to the sky for the first time and spotting a comet right out of the blue.
The observations are of the planet HAT-P-7, a world astronomers already knew existed from a prior discovery. The planet follows a whoppingly fast 2.2-day orbit around its star and lies about 26 times closer to its star than Earth lies from the Sun. Kepler detected this world as it transited (passed in front of) the star. The repeated transits cause tiny dips in the amount of light that the spacecraft sees coming from the star.
HAT-P-7 is a “hot Jupiter.” It’s so close to its parent star that the heat of its glow is about the same as the red heating element on a stove. The new measurements are so precise they also show a smooth rise and fall of the light between transits caused by the changing phases of the planet, similar to those of our moon. This is a combination of both the light emitted from the planet and the light reflected off the planet. That is, the light curve of the star was changed not just by the transit of the planet, but by the changing phases of the planet.
The rise and fall of light is also punctuated by a small drop in light, called an occultation, exactly halfway between each transit. An occultation happens when a planet passes behind a star. The depth of the occultation and the shape and amplitude of the light curve show that the planet has an atmosphere with a day-side temperature of about 4,310 degrees Fahrenheit. Little of this heat is carried to the cool night side. The occultation time compared to the main transit time shows the planet has a circular orbit. The discovery of light from this planet confirms the predictions by researchers and theoretical models that the emission would be detectable by Kepler.
This new discovery at HAT-P-7 also shows us that Kepler has the precision to find Earth-size planets — which I can guarantee you is going to be pretty exciting when it happens. Of course, it will show up in a light curve and not a pretty picture — but that data will be beautiful in its own right!
What I find interesting to speculate about is that if Kepler were 1,000 light-years away from US and looked back at Earth, it would see similar dips and changes in the light curve of the Sun as Earth orbits it. That distant Kepler, operated by aliens who want to know if the Sun has any planets with life, would be excited to know that our planet has an atmosphere. And, they’d wonder whether any life was being supported by that atmosphere. (And, hopefully, their media would be more on the ball about reporting such a discovery.)
If I were you, I’d keep an eye on the Kepler mission via their web site – there’s bound to be more big news coming from this wonderful spacecraft. Heck, it might show us an Earth-like planet soon. But, don’t bet on the media covering that unless there’s something sexy, bloody, or politically banal discovered on the surface of the planet. If it doesn’t bleed, it apparently doesn’t lead.
Update, Monday August 10: I had to laugh last night when I clicked on CNN.com and saw that they were finally headlining this story — late on a Sunday night in the last part of the weekend news cycle. There’s an interesting twist this time: they posted the story about the NASA mission with an image from the ESA COROT mission about an entirely different planetary atmosphere discovery made by the COROT satellite. The image CNN used to illustrate their Kepler story is credited to NASA and apparently came from NASA, even though it was first used on the ESA site to illustrate the COROT findings (in first appeared last year on the it’s clearly stated on the ESA web page that the credit is ESA-C. Carreau. CNN just put up there what they were given — albeit a few days after the actual news was released.
Nifty. Kepler should look back at Earth and the U.S.-if the political climate could be measured surely it would think life has ceased.
Comment by ahrcanum — August 6, 2009 #
What they didn’t mention in the press conference but do acknowledge in the 1-page paper in Science today is that the CoRoT spacecraft had already obtained transit lightcurves with much of the same ‘special effects’ for two other exoplanets.
It would have been great to compare the photometric quality of both exo-Earth hunters directly – perhaps the race is more open than NASA wants (us) to believe …? Now that would be something for CNN’s investigative science reporters to find out – oops, all were fired recently, d’oh.
Comment by Daniel Fischer — August 7, 2009 #
An excellent point, Daniel. I suspect they only had so much time in their conference to give out the pertinent details and it is only natural to expect them to focus on what their mission has accomplished. I find that most mission statements during press conferences from any mission (not just NASA, but also in press materials from ESA, ESO, etc.) tend to focus on what that particular mission accomplished; the details such as other observations are outlined in the papers. That’s probably the sensible way to handle things, given the scientific and political constraints on mission scientists from their respective agencies. It’s not fair to single out NASA for something that all agencies do — that is, focus primarily on their own mission discoveries.
Anyway, I also found yesterday that Spitzer has charted some atmospheric changes at an exoplanet, but not to the level and precision of this measurement.
Nonetheless, this was big news and most media didn’t seem to care. Yet, they bathed themselves in an orgy of glory when reporting on the 40th anniversary of the moon landings… that’s something they could sink their teeth into for some reason; but real live science being done today? Not so much. I wonder why so many of us trained to communicate science, only to see the media not give a damn about it.
Comment by ccp — August 7, 2009 #
I was interested in the Kepler story but for newspapers, how much was really news? The planet had already been discovered. As Daniel says, CoRot had detected similar lightcurves. Plus we have had “first detection of planets’ atmospheres” stories before from Hubble and Spitzer. I seem to recall that one even said we could tell the weather!
I am not surprised that NASA failed to mention the CoRot results. If it is not American, it is not important. The release about methane on Mars in January failed, as far as I can recall, to mention that it had already been detected by Europe’s Mars Express orbiter!!
And while, as a journalist, I understand the need to put spin on stories to get them on the news agenda, even I thought it was a hype too far to suggest that Kepler had spied the planet’s phases. A phase is a shape – not a change in brightness.
Comment by Paul Sutherland — August 7, 2009 #
Paul, yes, I mentioned that Spitzer detection in my response to Daniel. I wondered about that and CoRot, too, but I see a difference in the type of discovery that this is. And, for it to come from essentially engineering and test data is quite impressive.
I am not surprised that NASA didn’t mention other results either, but not because it’s uniquely an American thing. As I mentioned to Daniel, I’ve seen releases and conferences from other non-USA institutions that also failed to mention other, related discoveries during their conferences; of course they (as the NASA people did) mention them in the related papers– which is as it should be. The press conference atmosphere is always one of having less time to talk about all the details than one wants. I construe that as the issue, not that it’s us ugly Americans slighting those poor other scientists.
You mentioned the Mars Express orbiter methane info not being mentioned, but I do recall seeing it mentioned in resulting news stories, so obviously SOMEBODY picked up on it. What bugged me about THAT story was the wild hype that the press did put on it when it finally came out. Farting Martian cows, indeed! And, while I did read about it on the institution web site, I saw very little in the mainstream NON-US press about it, and I specifically looked for it right after the news was released. I think it finally did trickle out after a while.
Perhaps this story was a bit hyped, but it is an interesting story and I think that the scientists might be forgiven for being excited by what they found. And for the six or seven hours after the conference that I was able to watch the news online, I saw nothing about it — much less mentioning CoRot or Spitzer or any other planet-detecting methods. Maybe it’s just me, but I think that stories about extrasolar planets are fascinating — and they strike such a chord of interest among the public that the press never seems to pick up on. It’s a shame when stuff doesn’t get picked up by the media, no matter who does the work. There’s a ton of really interesting science out there that should be getting press and it just doesn’t.
About that term “hype” — it seems to get applied more often than it should. Think about it.
Comment by ccp — August 7, 2009 #
I think we also run up against a phenomenon which I will term “planet fatigue”. Now that there are more than 300 extrasolar worlds detected, the reaction from news editors of the day seems to be “not another one, yawn.” It reminds me of how people (or maybe the media?) lost interest so quickly in Apollo or shuttle launches and sadly it took high drama (Apollo 13) or disaster (Challenger and Columbia) to put them back on front pages.
Where I think you are wrong is that when the first truly Earth-like planet is found by Kepler or CoRot or whatever, it WILL be a huge story and it will be prominently reported. People are fascinated by the possibility that there might be life elsewhere in the universe.
Like you, I personally find stories about extrasolar planets fascinating. It would please me if the papers were full of them and other aspects of astronomy on a regular basis. Some night editors are more keen on space science than others and so who is on duty can make a difference to what appears. I certainly keep plugging away to put space stories on the agenda in the UK.
The endless rolling out of the Michael Jackson saga leaves me cold. I have no interest in hearing any more about him. But I know a judgment is being made on a daily basis as to what readers and viewers want to see. It is on such judgments that circulations rise and fall. Remember that, with the possible exception of the BBC(?), news outlets are not government departments of education with a duty to report what is “worthy”. They are commercial operations that exist to make money in a highly competitive market by offering what they judge to be the right mix of information and entertainment.
If that sounds depressing, I’m just trying to give my honest appraisal. Perhaps it says more about the audience than the media itself. Right, I’m just off to slit my wrists.
Comment by Paul Sutherland — August 8, 2009 #
Don’t slit your wrists yet. I’ve been a science writer more years than I want to admit to, and know very well the role that it’s supposed to play (those classes in media law and politics didn’t go wasted, you know
). It pleases me that journalism is NOT a government-funded entity — although FOx News does its best to be a propaganda arm of the right wing interests who don’t care to have people read all the news unless it’s been vetted by those same interests. Anytime I hear someone whine about how the media should be licensed, I have only to point to FauxNews as an example of why that would be a very bad idea.
Fortunately, we have other outlets. When I bitch about the “if it bleeds it leads” mantra, it’s due to many years of writing science and seeing it relegated to back pages behind the astrology column and/or only on the front page if astronauts die or a scientist lies or something dramatic, as you point out. The good thing about this so-called “new media” is that there are more outlets that can specialize in science, etc. The bad news is that they get dissed by the same mainstream media that falls down on the job in terms of reporting science. All we can do is keep trying to get the word out.
Back when I did work at a newspaper, the science stories that got through were mostly about local scientists, in addition to stuff that made nationwide headlines. Occasionally I’d get an editor who would not have a clue about science and would assign the most asinine things (like “does an egg stand on its end on the equinox”) in the interests of science.
I never said they’d ignore it if an Earth-like planet is found… and do agree that it’ll be news. There was a story float by this morning about Epsilon Eridani that I need to go chase down. If true, it might make the front pages, but I can guarantee you, some editor will put a headline over it that makes no sense.
Comment by ccp — August 8, 2009 #