Post by Laura Hentschel on Nov 12, 2010 20:09:42 GMT -5
Both planetary science and cosmology are ripe for big news in 2011, the former in its effort to find planets beyond the Earth and the solar system that could harbor water and thus life as we know it, and the latter in the unending effort to figure out what the universe is made of.
Finding out how common habitable planets are around Sun-like stars is the mission of NASA’s Kepler satellite, which has been trailing the Earth’s orbit of the Sun ever since its launching in March 2009, staring at 156,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra looking for telltale blips in starlight caused by planets passing in front of them. Last June, the Kepler team released a list of 350 stars thought to be harboring planets, but at the same time, and over the protests of some astronomers, they held back the data on 400 more stars that they wanted to check out over the summer.
In February, the Kepler 400 are expected to be released. The smallest planet on the previous list was about one and a half times the diameter of the Earth. The Kepler scientists will not say anything about the stars on the withheld list or their candidate planets, but in an e-mail message Natalie Batalha, a co-investigator on Kepler, said it would not be unreasonable to suspect that there is a smattering of planet candidates smaller than that on the new list. More small planets could also show up as more data is analyzed, she said.
The discovery of an Earth-size planet would be another step on a path that planet hunters have been following for the past 15 years, since the first exoplanet was discovered. About 500 exoplanets are now known, but most of these have been giant ones circling too close to their stars, because they are easiest to find. As techniques have been refined, smaller planets have come into view, and a recent survey by University of California astronomers, Andrew Howard and Geoffrey Marcy, concluded that about a quarter of all Sun-like stars should have Earth-size planets.
If indeed there are Earth-size planets in the Kepler 400, however, Dr. Batalha and others hasten to point out, these would not quite be the planets of our dreams. An Earth-like planet — that is to say, one that is the right temperature for water and thus life as we know it — would take about a year to complete a circuit around a star like the Sun.
Kepler would be lucky to have seen even one blip from a planet in such an orbit in the data analyzed so far and would need an additional year or two to record enough blips to determine that it was indeed in a habitable, water-friendly orbit around a star like our Sun.
The so-called habitable zone around a smaller dimmer star would be smaller, however, and a planet in that zone would complete its orbits more quickly, fast enough to have produced several blips noticeable by Kepler. In September, there was a flurry of excitement when a team of planet hunters led by Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, announced it had detected a small planet, Gliese 581g, in the habitable zone of a dim red star in the constellation Libra. But enthusiasm cooled when a rival team of veteran planet hunters from the University of Geneva said it couldn’t find the planet.
Dr. Batalha said that if the Gliese planet were in Kepler’s patch of sky and did transit its star, the Kepler spacecraft would have seen it.
On Earth, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider will enjoy the accelerator’s first full year of banging protons together in search of new secrets of nature. On top of Haleakala in Hawaii, the biggest digital camera ever built, with 1,400 megapixels, on a telescope known as Pan-Starrs 1, will continue scanning the sky for killer asteroids — in that case no news is good news — and anything else that goes bump in the cosmic night. Another large camera, known as the Dark Energy Survey, will swing into action at a mountaintop observatory in Chile, looking to discern the effects of dark energy on the history and evolution of the universe.
Any day now, the mystery particle that is presumed to make up the dark matter that amounts to a quarter of creation, and which provides the gravitational scaffolding for galaxies, could pop out of the collider and leave its tracks in one of a number of underground detectors. Or it could signal its presence in space by high-energy emanations recorded by experiments like NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope or the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a sophisticated cosmic ray detector that will be installed on the International Space Station next year.
A European satellite called Planck will continue its mission, begun in 2009, of surveying a cosmic radio haze left over from the Big Bang for clues to the origin and structure of the universe.
Meanwhile, the Hubble Space Telescope, rejuvenated by on-orbit surgery a year and a half ago, will keep scrutinizing the heavens with its matchless clarity, sifting eternity pixel by pixel.
The quest goes on, although the role and surely the leadership of American science in it is uncertain. Incoming Republicans have already signaled their desire to whack discretionary spending, which includes nonmilitary research, back to 2008 levels.
That would pretty much undo the America Competes Act, which aimed at doubling research funds for a number of government agencies over five years; it was first passed in 2007 and reauthorized by the House of Representatives last summer but is still awaiting a vote in the Senate.
It might be a long wait.
Finding out how common habitable planets are around Sun-like stars is the mission of NASA’s Kepler satellite, which has been trailing the Earth’s orbit of the Sun ever since its launching in March 2009, staring at 156,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra looking for telltale blips in starlight caused by planets passing in front of them. Last June, the Kepler team released a list of 350 stars thought to be harboring planets, but at the same time, and over the protests of some astronomers, they held back the data on 400 more stars that they wanted to check out over the summer.
In February, the Kepler 400 are expected to be released. The smallest planet on the previous list was about one and a half times the diameter of the Earth. The Kepler scientists will not say anything about the stars on the withheld list or their candidate planets, but in an e-mail message Natalie Batalha, a co-investigator on Kepler, said it would not be unreasonable to suspect that there is a smattering of planet candidates smaller than that on the new list. More small planets could also show up as more data is analyzed, she said.
The discovery of an Earth-size planet would be another step on a path that planet hunters have been following for the past 15 years, since the first exoplanet was discovered. About 500 exoplanets are now known, but most of these have been giant ones circling too close to their stars, because they are easiest to find. As techniques have been refined, smaller planets have come into view, and a recent survey by University of California astronomers, Andrew Howard and Geoffrey Marcy, concluded that about a quarter of all Sun-like stars should have Earth-size planets.
If indeed there are Earth-size planets in the Kepler 400, however, Dr. Batalha and others hasten to point out, these would not quite be the planets of our dreams. An Earth-like planet — that is to say, one that is the right temperature for water and thus life as we know it — would take about a year to complete a circuit around a star like the Sun.
Kepler would be lucky to have seen even one blip from a planet in such an orbit in the data analyzed so far and would need an additional year or two to record enough blips to determine that it was indeed in a habitable, water-friendly orbit around a star like our Sun.
The so-called habitable zone around a smaller dimmer star would be smaller, however, and a planet in that zone would complete its orbits more quickly, fast enough to have produced several blips noticeable by Kepler. In September, there was a flurry of excitement when a team of planet hunters led by Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, announced it had detected a small planet, Gliese 581g, in the habitable zone of a dim red star in the constellation Libra. But enthusiasm cooled when a rival team of veteran planet hunters from the University of Geneva said it couldn’t find the planet.
Dr. Batalha said that if the Gliese planet were in Kepler’s patch of sky and did transit its star, the Kepler spacecraft would have seen it.
On Earth, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider will enjoy the accelerator’s first full year of banging protons together in search of new secrets of nature. On top of Haleakala in Hawaii, the biggest digital camera ever built, with 1,400 megapixels, on a telescope known as Pan-Starrs 1, will continue scanning the sky for killer asteroids — in that case no news is good news — and anything else that goes bump in the cosmic night. Another large camera, known as the Dark Energy Survey, will swing into action at a mountaintop observatory in Chile, looking to discern the effects of dark energy on the history and evolution of the universe.
Any day now, the mystery particle that is presumed to make up the dark matter that amounts to a quarter of creation, and which provides the gravitational scaffolding for galaxies, could pop out of the collider and leave its tracks in one of a number of underground detectors. Or it could signal its presence in space by high-energy emanations recorded by experiments like NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope or the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a sophisticated cosmic ray detector that will be installed on the International Space Station next year.
A European satellite called Planck will continue its mission, begun in 2009, of surveying a cosmic radio haze left over from the Big Bang for clues to the origin and structure of the universe.
Meanwhile, the Hubble Space Telescope, rejuvenated by on-orbit surgery a year and a half ago, will keep scrutinizing the heavens with its matchless clarity, sifting eternity pixel by pixel.
The quest goes on, although the role and surely the leadership of American science in it is uncertain. Incoming Republicans have already signaled their desire to whack discretionary spending, which includes nonmilitary research, back to 2008 levels.
That would pretty much undo the America Competes Act, which aimed at doubling research funds for a number of government agencies over five years; it was first passed in 2007 and reauthorized by the House of Representatives last summer but is still awaiting a vote in the Senate.
It might be a long wait.