Category Archives: Kepler mission

astronomy, astronomy news, exoplanets, Kepler mission, star wars planet

Two Suns

Leave a comment

and the Planet that Orbits Them

This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars -- what's called a circumbinary planet. The planet, which can be seen in the foreground, was discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle.

It’s all over the news today—the Kepler Mission has found a planet called Kepler-16b that has two suns its sky. It is, in essence, orbiting two stars.  And, of course, the Star Wars comparisons to Tatooine are ricocheting around the blog-o-sphere and news media sites faster than you can say “Kessel Run.”

It’s completely appropriate to think back to that place in a galaxy far far away that has captivated so many fans of the Star Wars universe. I remember being completely awed by the view of the two suns setting in that alien sky, and yet it felt organic and real to me.  Maybe that’s a tribute to the artists at LucasFilm and the care they took to make it seem real.  But, as one of those artists—John Knoll, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic—said about the story released today, “Working in film, we often are tasked with creating something never before seen. However, more often than not, scientific discoveries prove to be more spectacular than anything we dare imagine. There is no doubt these discoveries influence and inspire storytellers. Their very existence serves as cause to dream bigger and open our minds to new possibilities beyond what we think we ‘know.'”

That’s what’s so cool about today’s planetary discovery announcement.  It takes us to alien worlds that we now KNOW exist.  This exploration has moved from science fiction to science fact.  That world is there and those stars are there, and NASA-funded scientists and missions help us look at them. In fact, exoplanet discovery is a world-wide science industry. Earlier this week, scientists at the European Southern Observatory announced that they’d found more than 50 new exoplanets, using a specialized instrument attached to the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Among their finding are 16 super-Earths, worlds that are more massive than Earth but much less massive than the gas giant planets.  At least one of those planets exists on the edge of its system’s habitable zone, which is the distance from its star where an Earth-like planet could have liquid water on its surface.

Now, Kepler16-b isn’t the hot, desert world of Tatooine. It’s not a super-Earth. It’s actually about the size of Saturn, made of of half rock and half gas, and is cold. Really cold.  The stars it orbits are smaller than our Sun. One of them is only about 20 percent the size of our warm, yellow star. This means they’re dwarf stars. Kepler-16b takes 229 days to orbit its suns, and it is just far enough away that liquid water would not exist on its surface. So, there’s likely not life there.  (If you want more details on the discovery and the orbital information, check out the Kepler announcement here.)

But, let’s say there were intelligent life forms on that planet.  They would be different from us simply because the evolution of life on any planet is going to depend on the materials and elements available in that particular star-and-planet-system’s birth cloud. And, that raises a lot of very interesting conjectures about what life would evolve to be like on a planet with two suns, where the temps are low and the magnetic field environments would be different from ours.  Imagine two “solar wind” streams.  Imagine trying to tell time!  Early civilizations wouldn’t be able to use simple sundials.  What would they use?  How would they live?  What would they look like? And what would the weather be like on such a world?  These may be questions that science fiction writers can and will answer in stories about this place.  Perhaps they already have.   Time to go read some more SF and learn about the cosmos!

AAS meeting stories, american astronomical society, astronomy, astronomy news, cassini mission, JWST, Kepler mission

More Astronomy than You Can Shake a Stick At

1 Comment

A Sip from the Fire Hose of Astro Information

Every year in early January is “astronomy assimilation” time for me, a time when I can go and soak up all the latest in professional astronomy research. Yes, it’s the annual winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society.  Today’s the first full day of the conference and we hit the ground running.  I’ll be posting sporadic notes from the meeting over the next few days, including some highlighted astronomy discoveries that could make the news in between the coverage of the bad snowstorms and the very sad events in Tucson.

Part of Dr. Porco's talk focused on the dynamic causes of events called "propellers" in the Saturning rings. An unusually large propeller feature is detected just beyond the Encke Gap in this Cassini image of Saturn's outer A ring taken a couple days after the planet's August 2009 equinox.

Today’s meeting began with a short presentation about the future of space observational astronomy particularly as it will be seen through the James Webb Space Telescope. Following that was a wonderful talk sponsored by the Kavli Institute about Saturn’s rings and the observations made by the Cassini spacecraft that are enabling speaker Carolyn Porco and her team members to understand the dynamics of this evolving system.

The first press conference of the meeting featured the discovery of a new rocky world called Kepler-10b. It’s circling a star that lies about 600 light-years away and has been studied steadily by the Kepler planet-finding mission for more than eight months.  This is the first rocky world discovered by Kepler and it’s a fascinating one: it is about 1.4 times the size of Earth and orbits closer to its star than Mercury does to the Sun.

Kepler-10b is a scorched world, orbiting at a distance that’s more than 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our own Sun. The daytime temperature’s expected to be more than 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than lava flows here on Earth. Intense radiation from the star has kept the planet from holding onto an atmosphere. Flecks of silicates and iron may be boiled off a molten surface and swept away by the stellar radiation, much like a comet’s tail when its orbit brings it close to the Sun.

There are several constants about these meetings — especially in these exciting days of spacecraft missions like Cassini, HST, and Kepler — and that is that we’ll always be hearing about new planets around other stars, we’ll keep learning new things about familiar objects like Saturn and its rings, and Hubble Space Telescope (and its sister orbiting observatories) will keep bringing us gorgeous images of the cosmos.
Each day of this meeting is chock full of papers and results to hear about. My own path through the meeting (at least today) is guided by radio astronomy results, and so I spent some time listening to presentations about early science from the Murchison Widefield Array in Australia and the search for the epoch of reionization at low frequencies.  It’s always amazing to me the new and inventive ways that astronomers can explore the universe and find out things we didn’t know before. The more of these meetings attend, the more I realize that even though we know a LOT – there’s so much more that we will be learning in the days and years and centuries ahead.