Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says our galaxy
Speaker 1: itself contains a hundred billion stars. I'm Jonathan Strickland and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. So today we wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: something that was in the news fairly recently, that being
Speaker 1: the Kepler telescope. Uh, there was a big announcement that
Speaker 1: NASA had not too long ago. Was it aliens? No,
Speaker 1: but that was what everyone thought it was gonna be, right,
Speaker 1: We actually had well, we had a morning meeting the
Speaker 1: week that the announcement came out. We had a morning
Speaker 1: meeting where we specifically said we need to keep an
Speaker 1: eye on what the NASA announcement is going to be
Speaker 1: because we probably wanted to cover it. And I said,
Speaker 1: someone asked, like, what do you think it's going to be?
Speaker 1: And apparently the scuttle but at the time was aliens.
Speaker 1: It's all alien. Definitely alien aliens. So it was not aliens.
Speaker 1: It was not aliens. And not only was it not aliens,
Speaker 1: but when I heard which part of NASA was making
Speaker 1: the announcement, when I heard it was going to be
Speaker 1: the Kepler team. I thought, there's no way it could
Speaker 1: be aliens because the Kepler telescope couldn't tell us that. Well,
Speaker 1: it could be that some aliens landed on the Kepler telescope.
Speaker 1: Then yes, the Kepler teams like so bad news telescopes
Speaker 1: broken good news or taken hostage. Right right, the telescope
Speaker 1: is just showing us the backside of the Moon that
Speaker 1: has a big message on it saying ha ha ha
Speaker 1: written there. Um, that was not what happened. That was
Speaker 1: not what happened. But but the silver lining of all
Speaker 1: of these things not being the announcement is that the
Speaker 1: actual announcement was really cool, absolutely super cool. So we've
Speaker 1: talked about exo planets on this show before, the planets
Speaker 1: that are not inside our own Solar system but are
Speaker 1: part of some other system, or potentially a rogue planet
Speaker 1: just going out there and being all han solo like
Speaker 1: in the galaxy the worst rogue go ahead. He's such
Speaker 1: a scruffy looking nerve herder. So we we wanted to
Speaker 1: mention that this this particular press event was to announce
Speaker 1: that the number of identified exo planets had more than
Speaker 1: doubled due to a new approach to looking at the
Speaker 1: data coming from the Kepler Telescope. That's amazing. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: the announcement itself was in brief that on May ten,
Speaker 1: uh NASA held this press conference and the announced the
Speaker 1: Kepler mission had verified the existence of one thousand, two
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty four known exoplanets in our galaxy. And
Speaker 1: that's verified. So that's that's in addition to the nine
Speaker 1: hundred something that we already knew existed, right, nine eighty
Speaker 1: four that had been previously verified through other means. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So they arrived at this number by analyzing four thousand,
Speaker 1: three written two potential planets or candidate planets that have
Speaker 1: been discovered and cataloged as of July by the Kepler Telescope. Now,
Speaker 1: because the method we currently have for detecting potential exo planets,
Speaker 1: which we're going to talk about in a minute, not
Speaker 1: all candidates will turn out to be real exo planets.
Speaker 1: That might be anomalies or other phenomena that can simulate
Speaker 1: the presence of a planet. So after not on purpose
Speaker 1: probably right, probably not disguised as a planet with a
Speaker 1: clever planet disguise kit from party city, right right. Uh So,
Speaker 1: after applying some verification criteria to all of the discoveries,
Speaker 1: the Kepler team published findings indicating that one thousand, two
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty four them had a greater than nine
Speaker 1: percent chance of being a real exo planet. And those
Speaker 1: are pretty good odds. So these are now considered verified.
Speaker 1: They're for real. Maybe one and a hundred of them
Speaker 1: will turn out to be wrong, but anyway, a further
Speaker 1: one thousand, three hundred and twenty seven planets had a
Speaker 1: better than fifty percent a chance of actually being planets. Uh,
Speaker 1: and they will require more research before we can say
Speaker 1: with confidence whether they're real planets or not. That's pretty
Speaker 1: amazing because I would have a much lower threshold, like six. Sure,
Speaker 1: I'm going to call that a planet. It's a planet. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They're a little more strict with their numbers than I think.
Speaker 1: It's okay that NASA is more exacting than you, or
Speaker 1: that you are less exacting than that, whichever way you
Speaker 1: want to put in. They are. They are the ones
Speaker 1: who have actually put stuff into space, whereas I have
Speaker 1: only filled up space, so you've probably excreted some gases
Speaker 1: that ended up in space. I have been known to
Speaker 1: do so mean catering, that is true. Sorry about carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide that he exhaled. Come on whatever anyway, but there
Speaker 1: is a simple takeaway. So the galaxy is looking more
Speaker 1: and more populous all the time, populous in terms of planets,
Speaker 1: not necessarily aliens, though this might come with the territory because,
Speaker 1: in the words of NASA Astrophysics Asian Director Paul Hurts quote,
Speaker 1: before the Kepler Space Telescope launched, we did not know
Speaker 1: whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy. Thanks
Speaker 1: to Kepler in the research community, we now know there
Speaker 1: could be more planets than stars. And as I said
Speaker 1: at the beginning of this podcast, our galaxy is thought
Speaker 1: to have around a hundred billion or more stars in it.
Speaker 1: So when you think there could be more planets than stars,
Speaker 1: that's a bunch of planets just in our galaxy alone. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: a lot of those planets are going to be burnt
Speaker 1: up little crispies or gas giants, places where there's almost
Speaker 1: definitely not going to be any life in the way
Speaker 1: we understand life. But we've also added to our account
Speaker 1: of planets that are believed to be in the habitable zone. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: nine of these planets that they're looking at are being
Speaker 1: considered potentially habitable, which we will go into a little
Speaker 1: bit later. But but first, let's talk about this incredible
Speaker 1: telescope and how it works. Sure, so the tree of
Speaker 1: the Kepler telescope is one that I think it's fascinating,
Speaker 1: and also it tells you a lot about how NASA
Speaker 1: operates and how they have to be so careful before
Speaker 1: they go all in on a mission. And there's no
Speaker 1: really have seas on these kind of missions. They cost
Speaker 1: millions upon millions of dollars billions. Sure, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: love these kind of stories because it's so it's so
Speaker 1: harrowing until you get to I mean, you know, happy,
Speaker 1: happy ending in this one. Right, we we know how
Speaker 1: it turned out, So there's not gonna be a whole
Speaker 1: attention as I unraveled this tale. But just imagine that
Speaker 1: you don't know that the Kepler is out there and
Speaker 1: actually doing science. So the whole thing started out with
Speaker 1: a simple question, which is just how frequent our other
Speaker 1: earth sized planets in our galaxy? Is our planet and anomaly?
Speaker 1: Is it something that happens one in a hundred million
Speaker 1: star systems, in which case finding life would be incredibly difficult,
Speaker 1: or is it something more common where finding life maybe
Speaker 1: is within the realm of possibility in the foreseeable future.
Speaker 1: May not be within our lifetimes, but perhaps in the
Speaker 1: foreseeable future. So to answer this question, there was a
Speaker 1: series of different proposed projects that came up. UH. First
Speaker 1: of all, back in a guy named Frank Rosenblatt suggested
Speaker 1: an outlined a method for detecting satellites orbiting other stars,
Speaker 1: satellites like planets, and it's called the transit method. Now,
Speaker 1: this method looks at the light coming from a star
Speaker 1: and it measures that amount of light. Now, should that
Speaker 1: light dim, it suggests something has passed between that star
Speaker 1: and our perspective whatever we're using to look at that star.
Speaker 1: And if this dimming happens at a regular interval, it's
Speaker 1: just that something is actually orbiting that star, like a planet. Now,
Speaker 1: the reason we call it the transit method is that's
Speaker 1: how we described the movement of the planet across its
Speaker 1: host star. From our perspective, the planet is transiting its
Speaker 1: host star, and we call it the the actual path
Speaker 1: the transit UH. And a side note, Frank Rosenblatt was
Speaker 1: a bit of a renaissance man. He didn't just he
Speaker 1: actually wasn't known for astronomy. He built kind of a
Speaker 1: modest observatory behind his his house, I believe, but he
Speaker 1: was not an astronomer. He was actually working in AI.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, I mean thanks thanks Rosenblatt for being
Speaker 1: awesome at multiple things. So he worked largely in areas
Speaker 1: of AI that involved pattern recognition and speech recognition. Tricky,
Speaker 1: tricky things. So NASA began to talk about how could
Speaker 1: they use the transit method practically, Like, how could they
Speaker 1: actually do this, because when you're talking about things as
Speaker 1: distant as stars and things as relatively small as planets
Speaker 1: in comparison to those stars, A, you're going to need
Speaker 1: a really advanced system to be able to detect that
Speaker 1: dimming of the light. Right, it's not gonna be it's
Speaker 1: not gonna be obvious. It's not like there's a big
Speaker 1: shade going in. Yeah, it's not like it's like like
Speaker 1: Morse code or something. It's pretty subtle exactly. So they
Speaker 1: were essentially laying out the requirements back in Night four
Speaker 1: UH that they felt were necessary in order to detect
Speaker 1: plants with a reasonable amount of confidence. They said, in
Speaker 1: order for us to do this. Here are the things
Speaker 1: that we need to be available to us. Otherwise anything
Speaker 1: we send up there is not likely to work. It
Speaker 1: kills me that they started thinking about this in and
Speaker 1: it took until anyway, Yeah, it took some took some time.
Speaker 1: So they had a conference on high precision photometry, and
Speaker 1: that acted, as I wrote, launching ground and about NASA.
Speaker 1: I didn't even mean to make a pun, but it
Speaker 1: acted as a launching ground for discussions about a space
Speaker 1: based telescope designed to detect a transitting planet. Now, when
Speaker 1: I talked about that tiny amount of light dimming, to
Speaker 1: give you an idea of how much you know, how
Speaker 1: how small that amount is. Uh, stars, of course tend
Speaker 1: to be much much bigger than they're the planets that
Speaker 1: orbit them. For example, our Sun's diameter is a hundred
Speaker 1: and nine times greater than the Earth's diameter, so it's
Speaker 1: much larger. Earth sized planets are very tiny compared to
Speaker 1: host stars, particularly stars that we think are more likely
Speaker 1: to be supportive of life, stars that are similar to
Speaker 1: our own. Um. The change in brightness amounts to about
Speaker 1: one or one parts per million of the total Sun's brightness,
Speaker 1: and that dimming lasts between two and sixteen hours as
Speaker 1: the planet moves across its star from our perspective. Because
Speaker 1: that's such a tiny difference, we need that really sophisticated
Speaker 1: equipment to pick it up. So in NASA proposed some
Speaker 1: new missions to look into the possibility of life in
Speaker 1: our galaxy, and the first concept they talked about was
Speaker 1: called free SIP, or the Frequency of Earth size inner Planets.
Speaker 1: That proposal was rejected largely because there was serious doubt
Speaker 1: that we were actually at the level of sophistication necessary
Speaker 1: to detect any transitting planets of Earth like size. So
Speaker 1: essentially I said, like, well, we can't really spend money
Speaker 1: on this because as far as we can tell, our
Speaker 1: technology isn't advanced enough for us to even see something.
Speaker 1: If it's there, there could be tons of transitting planets,
Speaker 1: but we would never even be able to tell. Uh.
Speaker 1: So it would be proposed again just two years later
Speaker 1: with a space based telescope in lagrange orbit. But then
Speaker 1: the committee determined that the price would be similar to
Speaker 1: that of the Hubble, and the Hubble was pretty darn expensive,
Speaker 1: and they weren't sure that they were going to be
Speaker 1: able to be get that. UM approved especially since the
Speaker 1: Hubble had a couple of minor issues with it which
Speaker 1: cost about it cost a lot cost. It cost a
Speaker 1: lot of money to repair because we had to send
Speaker 1: people back up to it, which already is going to
Speaker 1: cost you drama money. Um, So that was so I
Speaker 1: was rejected again. It did not make that approach. And
Speaker 1: part of the reason it was so expensive, I'm sure,
Speaker 1: is that if you remember, lagrange orbit is a point
Speaker 1: between Earth and the Sun where a spacecraft will keep
Speaker 1: up with Earth's orbit with with very little effort due
Speaker 1: to the opposing gravitational forces of the Earth in the Sun.
Speaker 1: And so it's it's, uh, about what is it like
Speaker 1: four times out from Earth as far as the Moon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it depends. There's actually three different there are three lagrange
Speaker 1: points that are around the Earth. But so yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's it's sending its spacecraft out there, right, And not
Speaker 1: only are you spending a spacecraft out there, but even
Speaker 1: though it can more easily stay within that orbit, you
Speaker 1: still have to do a lot of course corrections to
Speaker 1: keep it there, which means you need more fuel, more
Speaker 1: equipment for thrusters. It increases the expense of the spacecraft
Speaker 1: in order to to do that. So engineers began to
Speaker 1: experiment with charge coupled of vice sensors or c c
Speaker 1: D s. These are the sort of things you find
Speaker 1: in digital cameras. UH. They wanted to see if this
Speaker 1: was possible to make a CCD style sensor as opposed
Speaker 1: to the traditional silicon sensors and see if those would
Speaker 1: make UH they would be more effective UH, and they
Speaker 1: started to have some real success in lab experiments, so
Speaker 1: they began to to consider that as a potential tool
Speaker 1: for the future Kepler telescope or what would become the
Speaker 1: Kepler telescope. They hadn't even thought of that yet, so
Speaker 1: in the idea was revisited again. So you know, two
Speaker 1: more years later and they had made some changes to
Speaker 1: the proposal. One was moving the spacecraft into a solar
Speaker 1: orbit rather than a lagrange orbit, so this would be
Speaker 1: its own orbit around the Sun um and the big
Speaker 1: selling point of that was they wouldn't have to have
Speaker 1: all that extra fuel to keep it within the lagrange
Speaker 1: point orbit. They could just put it into a solar
Speaker 1: orbit and then occasionally have to maneuver it, but not
Speaker 1: as frequently as the other style. UH. The project was
Speaker 1: renamed Kepler after the German astronomer who proposed the laws
Speaker 1: of planetary motion, So Freesip was dropped, Kepler was brought
Speaker 1: on and the proposal was rejected once more. Now this
Speaker 1: time it was because no one at that point had
Speaker 1: proven the telescope could simultaneously observe thousands of stars. So
Speaker 1: researchers went to work on a prototype photometer to see
Speaker 1: if they could actually prove it could be done. So
Speaker 1: in those researchers finished building a photometer and in they
Speaker 1: demonstrated it could observe six thousand stars in a single
Speaker 1: field of view and generate data that could then be analyzed.
Speaker 1: So they said, we've proven it can be done, the
Speaker 1: data can be checked, we can look for transiting planets.
Speaker 1: There we go. The results of the project were published
Speaker 1: in a paper in nineteen So this is not a
Speaker 1: super fast process. It took three years from building it
Speaker 1: to testing it to writing about it getting it published.
Speaker 1: So later they proposed Kepler yet again, and get what happened.
Speaker 1: It got rejected. Yeah, this is the point where you're like,
Speaker 1: the thing is in space, how did it ever get there? Right?
Speaker 1: So we're we're with you, we feel your pain. But
Speaker 1: this time it was rejected on the grounds that there
Speaker 1: was no evidence that the photometer would be precise enough
Speaker 1: to find Earth sized planets that could also operate in
Speaker 1: orbit in the presence of the noise that you would
Speaker 1: get while the telescope itself is in orbit. So it
Speaker 1: had to, you know, it had to account for stuff
Speaker 1: that could be in our solar system passing in front
Speaker 1: of the telescope and give us false positives that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. They had to prove that this thing would
Speaker 1: work out there in orbit and we wouldn't have false
Speaker 1: positives giving us wrong information. So two thousand rolls around
Speaker 1: and kept where it gets proposed one more time because
Speaker 1: an engineers had already built a test bed and they
Speaker 1: proved that it could in fact operate satisfactory fact factorily
Speaker 1: in our solar system even with the noise. So two
Speaker 1: thousand rolls around. It comes time to suggest missions again.
Speaker 1: And the way NASA works is that you propose missions,
Speaker 1: and you have all these different departments proposing missions, and
Speaker 1: NASA will only select a few, and even the few
Speaker 1: they select, typically they compete with one another to actually
Speaker 1: get funding. So just because you get selected doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that it's gonna happen. It just means that they'll listen
Speaker 1: to you, right, they don't dismiss you out of hand.
Speaker 1: So two thousand rolls around, Keptli gets proposed one more time.
Speaker 1: This time it's selected as one of three proposals out
Speaker 1: of a total of twenty six to compete for NASA approval,
Speaker 1: and in two thousand and one it one that approval.
Speaker 1: It became Discovery Mission number ten. So it is a
Speaker 1: Discovery class spacecraft. I learned that today. I didn't know
Speaker 1: it was a discovery class because we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: a successor to Kepler. That's an explorer class, which makes
Speaker 1: me totally makes me think Star Trek. That's what I'm
Speaker 1: always like on the start of the classes Trek. You've
Speaker 1: got like the Constitution class, that's what the Enterprise is.
Speaker 1: You've got the h what is the I can't remember
Speaker 1: what the USS roll Aliance classes now, Oh, it's gonna
Speaker 1: kill me. Declaration class. No. No, But there's a there's
Speaker 1: a whole series like the Constitution class, the you know,
Speaker 1: the Constellation class, which was the excelsior Um that was
Speaker 1: supposed to be the replacement for the Constitution class in
Speaker 1: the original series. But yeah, they have different classes of StarCraft. Um,
Speaker 1: just like in real life, we actually do have different
Speaker 1: classes of StarCraft. Well, the actual work on the mission
Speaker 1: began in two thousand two, and that started with them
Speaker 1: placing orders for the detectors, the light sensors. The telescope
Speaker 1: was launched on March sixth, two thousand nine. So this
Speaker 1: is a journey that started back in nineteen seventy one
Speaker 1: with this proposal of how to detect a planet transiting
Speaker 1: its SOH star and culminating with the launch in two
Speaker 1: thousand nine. So, the diameter of this telescope, it's just
Speaker 1: shy of a meter. It's point nine five meters, which
Speaker 1: is a little more than three feet. And then the
Speaker 1: camera has a ninety five megapixel a A. So if
Speaker 1: you're thinking like, oh, I've got a camera that's twelve megapixels,
Speaker 1: this one's it can continuously monitor the brightness of more
Speaker 1: than one hundred thousand stars. Yeah, and it's still just
Speaker 1: looking at a tiny portion of our galaxy, right, A
Speaker 1: hundred thousand in the grand scheme of things is nothing.
Speaker 1: It's a big number to us, but in the galaxy terms,
Speaker 1: it's it's a drop in the bucket. So it's now
Speaker 1: part of the Exo Planet Exploration Program office. It was
Speaker 1: transferred over to that office. That office is part of
Speaker 1: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Now, we talked earlier about how
Speaker 1: before this announcement was made, the number of verified exo
Speaker 1: planets was around four. The way that that had worked
Speaker 1: was that Kepler would detect a transit signal something that
Speaker 1: looked like it was potentially a planet, and then you
Speaker 1: would have to do lots of follow up observations to
Speaker 1: make sure that what was detected was in fact a
Speaker 1: planet passing in front of a star. Well, and in
Speaker 1: the past, a lot of the ways of detecting exo
Speaker 1: planets weren't necessarily the transit method, right. You might look
Speaker 1: at the start to see if it is wobbling, for example,
Speaker 1: to the gravitational influence of an orbiting body, right, yeah, there,
Speaker 1: And that would also be used to back up any
Speaker 1: any UH observations that the Kepler telescope made. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just that they were using the Kepler telescope over and
Speaker 1: over again to make sure that this thing was actually
Speaker 1: repeating itself. They were using other methods to verify that,
Speaker 1: which means meant to take a took a lot of
Speaker 1: time and effort. UH, and it meant that the whole
Speaker 1: process was relatively slow, and that's why we had four.
Speaker 1: Four is awesome, but it's relatively tiny, right, it's a
Speaker 1: tiny number. So when they came out in in May
Speaker 1: of TWI sixteen and said, hey, we've got a thousand,
Speaker 1: two d eighty four new exo planets confirmed and probably
Speaker 1: a few hundred more UH that that I haven't been
Speaker 1: firmed yet but are very potentially planets, that was a
Speaker 1: huge deal. It was more than twice the number, right,
Speaker 1: so or more than doubled, rather the number of exoplants.
Speaker 1: It wasn't more than twice the previous number, and more
Speaker 1: than doubled the total number. And in this this jump
Speaker 1: in in this number is due to a new approach
Speaker 1: that they've been using to look, yeah, this is interesting
Speaker 1: rather right. Yeah. So so before they were just making
Speaker 1: lots of repeated observations to UH to make sure that
Speaker 1: the initial UH observation was relevant. Right now, what they're
Speaker 1: doing is using statistical probability UH. And it was spearheaded
Speaker 1: by an associate research scholar at Princeton University named Timothy Morton.
Speaker 1: And this is where we get that greater than confidence
Speaker 1: level that Joe was talking about at the top of
Speaker 1: the show. So essentially you can break it down into
Speaker 1: a pretty simple concept. You take the level of confidence
Speaker 1: you feel that the transit signal in fact represents a
Speaker 1: planet because it looks like a planet signal. And then
Speaker 1: you take the amount of confidence you feel that it
Speaker 1: is not an impostor what they call an impostor, which
Speaker 1: is be a false positive. And then you assign a
Speaker 1: number between zero and one, which ends up being that percentage,
Speaker 1: and anything that is greater than a point nine nine
Speaker 1: you feel, I'm pretty confident that's a planet. Because we've
Speaker 1: taken the other factors into account and we're still ninety
Speaker 1: more than sure that this signal represents a planet, we
Speaker 1: feel confident enough to say it is now a verified planet.
Speaker 1: The big advantage of this approach is you can apply
Speaker 1: it across all the signals that you're looking at. You're
Speaker 1: not going one by one to verify. And that's why
Speaker 1: we got a sudden like burst of verified planets all
Speaker 1: at once. And that is a pretty phenomenal moment in
Speaker 1: science and and a love that we can use statistical analysis.
Speaker 1: Two feel as confident as we possibly can be without
Speaker 1: having that multiple backup approach of of uh lots of
Speaker 1: different observations to uh end up, you know, confirming what
Speaker 1: we have thought we found. It's cool to me that
Speaker 1: we can do that just through this probabilistic approach. Now,
Speaker 1: the other interesting part here is that we mentioned they
Speaker 1: found more candidates for potentially rocky planets in the habitable
Speaker 1: or goldilocks zone around their host stars. Yeah, almost five
Speaker 1: and fifty of the newly discovered or newly verified group
Speaker 1: could be considered rocky planets like Earth. End of those,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned earlier, nine are considered to occupy the
Speaker 1: habitable zone, which is the distance from the host star
Speaker 1: that would allow temperatures at which liquid water could collect
Speaker 1: on the surface. And you might think, oh, well, why
Speaker 1: don't you just go ahead and give us distances. Well,
Speaker 1: that's because it depends also upon the nature of the
Speaker 1: host star, right, because some stars are giving off more
Speaker 1: energy than our son does, and therefore you have to
Speaker 1: take that into account how far away the planet should be.
Speaker 1: If water wasn't going to evaporate immediately, then it would
Speaker 1: need to the planet would need to be a little
Speaker 1: bit further out right or it maybe giving a less
Speaker 1: energy than our sunets, which means that it might need
Speaker 1: to be a little closer in So uh, we we
Speaker 1: do call that the Goldilock zone. Uh. It is a
Speaker 1: variable thing, dependent upon the nature of the star itself,
Speaker 1: as well as some other things like does the orbit
Speaker 1: of the planet remain within that zone or if it's
Speaker 1: a if it's an elliptical orbit where it's going outside
Speaker 1: the zone a little bit, that could be bad news
Speaker 1: for anything that needs to have water to to live.
Speaker 1: And that's another thing we have to point out is
Speaker 1: that we're we're assuming here that life is going to
Speaker 1: be dependent upon water, because life here on Earth is
Speaker 1: so dependent upon water. But as I think all of
Speaker 1: us would point out that we can't necessarily depend upon
Speaker 1: that assumption. We're basing that on a sample size of
Speaker 1: one planet, all right, and we've talked about that on
Speaker 1: the show before. Absolutely, But but yes, life as we
Speaker 1: know it needs the water that which I just knocked
Speaker 1: my hand into my water glass. In facts, this is
Speaker 1: all very illustrative. Yes, it's uh, it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's a valuable life lesson. Uh, that water is both
Speaker 1: necessary for life and yet can betray you at a
Speaker 1: critical moment um. So it's really cool to see that
Speaker 1: the number of potential planets that could have life on
Speaker 1: them has increased from twelve, which is what it was
Speaker 1: before this announcement, to one. And uh and that that
Speaker 1: doesn't include a bunch of other potential candidates that just
Speaker 1: yet have not been verified to actually be planets yet.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean that's considering planets. Another thing that
Speaker 1: would be important to consider would be things like moons
Speaker 1: of gas giants. I mean, here in our own Solar system,
Speaker 1: Jupiter is outside the habitable zone, yet moons of Jupiter
Speaker 1: are hypothesized to possibly contain conditions suitable for life. Right,
Speaker 1: And we need to also remember that while while twenty
Speaker 1: one you might think, well that sounds like nothing, you
Speaker 1: were talking about a hundred thousand stars, and then you
Speaker 1: were talking about it more than a thousand planets. And
Speaker 1: now out of all those, only twenty one of those
Speaker 1: are potential candidates for having life on them, and it
Speaker 1: may turn out that none of them do. Why are
Speaker 1: you so excited? Well, the kepler is awesome, but it's
Speaker 1: not a device that's going to pick up every single
Speaker 1: exo planet out there. If the planet's orbit isn't at
Speaker 1: the correct angle from the kepler's perspective, the kepler doesn't
Speaker 1: detect any dimming. Yeah, what if it's what if it's
Speaker 1: orbiting perpendicular to us? Yeah, then then you don't you
Speaker 1: don't see Yeah, you don't see the dimming because the
Speaker 1: planet doesn't pass in front of its star from our perspective. Right, So,
Speaker 1: how many plants are actually passing at the angle that
Speaker 1: will not perpendicular story oblique? Right right, right, yeah, as
Speaker 1: opposed at nine a ninety degree angle. It's like an
Speaker 1: overhead view. If you're looking at an overhead view of
Speaker 1: the Solar system, like you have a Solar system model
Speaker 1: and you're looking at an overhead view of it, then
Speaker 1: none of the planets or moons or anything are going
Speaker 1: to cross in front of the Sun. They're all going
Speaker 1: to go around it looking top down. Well, if that's
Speaker 1: far enough away, you don't see any planets or moons
Speaker 1: or anything, at least not with a transit method that
Speaker 1: would not help you. So, but how many of those
Speaker 1: stars have planets that are actually passing at the correct
Speaker 1: angle for kepler to detect them. So, according to the NASA,
Speaker 1: the probability of such a thing is determined by the
Speaker 1: diameter of the star divided by the diameter of the orbit,
Speaker 1: which for a planet the size of Earth orbiting a
Speaker 1: star that's like the Sun, ends up being a point
Speaker 1: five percent chance point five us that Kepler will actually
Speaker 1: be able to see it, meaning that the number that
Speaker 1: we have is representative of what is more likely than
Speaker 1: not a much bigger number less than one percent of
Speaker 1: the total number of rocky planets and or planets in
Speaker 1: the GOLDI list zone as long as they exist, right,
Speaker 1: because they have to exist for it. But but either way, like,
Speaker 1: it still means that there could be hundreds of planets
Speaker 1: that Kepler was pointed the right way but could not
Speaker 1: see because of the orientation of the orbit compared to Kepler. Well,
Speaker 1: let's see, let's do the math. If we've got twenty
Speaker 1: one now, and that's uh, and that's should be point
Speaker 1: half of one percent, shouldn't that mean that there are
Speaker 1: about forty two hundred that there should be. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's quite possible. It's the other question is that it's
Speaker 1: again saying that it's a point five percent probability that
Speaker 1: will detect a planet of Earth like size around a
Speaker 1: star that is similar to the sun. It's a little
Speaker 1: different from extrapolating it out to say how many plants
Speaker 1: there should be. And you you also can't say that
Speaker 1: the with with certainty at any rate, that the number
Speaker 1: of rock like potentially habitable planets is constant throughout different
Speaker 1: sections of the galaxy, right, right, So there are a
Speaker 1: lot of other factors that come into variables. But that's
Speaker 1: a really nice rough number. That rough number. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's appreciate that you just like did that in your head.
Speaker 1: It's probably wrong. I mean, well, it's it's fair to say.
Speaker 1: It's fair to say that that the number of plants
Speaker 1: detected represents a fraction of the number of planets that
Speaker 1: are actually out there. Um. And of course, if you're
Speaker 1: talking about bigger plants, like the gas giants, then you
Speaker 1: have a better chance of detecting those because of the
Speaker 1: the you know, they have a greater uh, they cover
Speaker 1: more area of the star, the dimming is easier to detect.
Speaker 1: It's more of a ten percent probability to detect one
Speaker 1: of those as opposed to point five. UM. So it's
Speaker 1: you'll keep in mind there are a hundred thousand stars
Speaker 1: that Kepler was looking at there a hundred billion in
Speaker 1: our galaxy. So when you start building out numbers like that,
Speaker 1: you realize the potential planets just based on statistical probabilities.
Speaker 1: It's mind boggling right now. Granted, there probably isn't one
Speaker 1: closer than twelve light years away, which is a bit
Speaker 1: of an issue if you want to do something like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, go check it out. That might might
Speaker 1: take a while before we ever get any technology capable
Speaker 1: of bringing us there and or back. But it's still
Speaker 1: really cool. Uh So. I love that that this announcement
Speaker 1: came out. I love that it has something to do
Speaker 1: with the search for alien life, and I love that
Speaker 1: it wasn't aliens because it made me feel smart when
Speaker 1: I found that out, because I thought, how could the
Speaker 1: Kepler telescope discover aliens if it's looking for the dimming
Speaker 1: of a star's light again, unless they're aliens just posing
Speaker 1: in front of the telescope and and and you know,
Speaker 1: doing bunny ears behind each other or whatever the equivalent is,
Speaker 1: and their alien civilization. Um, I don't see how it
Speaker 1: would have picked up alien life. Maybe they've got like
Speaker 1: really bright like neon lights flashing on the surface of
Speaker 1: the planet, right, we see like an extra little blip
Speaker 1: of of light on top of the transitting right. Or
Speaker 1: maybe they just landed right outside the Kepler offices and
Speaker 1: that's why the Kepler team gets to report on it, like,
Speaker 1: this has nothing to do with our telescope, but we
Speaker 1: totally just found aliens. They brought us coffee space coffee.
Speaker 1: So one question we should ask ourselves is what comes next?
Speaker 1: Because the Kepler mission, you know it, it ended its
Speaker 1: primary mission back in but it was put on an
Speaker 1: extended mission past its primary one, and they said, well
Speaker 1: that could go as long as four years, and if
Speaker 1: my math is right, that means sixteen is the end.
Speaker 1: And if I'm like calendar is right, that's this year.
Speaker 1: So you'd say, well, what what comes next? Well, there's
Speaker 1: stuff from NASA. There's also stuff from the European Space Agency.
Speaker 1: For example, the European Space Agency is planning on launching
Speaker 1: the Characterizing Exoplanets satellite or cheops and not chops because
Speaker 1: that would have been fun, but not cheaps. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it'll mainly be looking at planets that have already
Speaker 1: been detected, so they're they're going to be getting a
Speaker 1: closer look at stuff where we've already received a hit
Speaker 1: through spectroscopic surveys. Now, spectroscopic surveys can estimate the massive planets,
Speaker 1: but they don't get a look at planets to see
Speaker 1: what their relative size is. Size and mass are two
Speaker 1: different things, So chee ops will give us an idea
Speaker 1: of the size of those planets, and knowing both the
Speaker 1: size and the mass will give us a better idea
Speaker 1: of what those planets are composed of, whether they are
Speaker 1: gaseous or rocky, and potentially even maybe even like what
Speaker 1: kind of elements are involved in there? You can you
Speaker 1: can tell roughly like that has a lot of iron
Speaker 1: versus that has a lot of nitrogen. Spectroscopy is awesome.
Speaker 1: Other rock stats, it's got gravel, It's it's like aggregate planet. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's also the Transiting Exoplanets Survey satellite. This is a
Speaker 1: NASSA on or Tests and Tests is an explorer class
Speaker 1: planet finder. It will do an all sky transit survey,
Speaker 1: which means it will map out the entire sky. Is
Speaker 1: going to map out the southern hemisphere in its first
Speaker 1: year of operation, and then it will map out the
Speaker 1: northern hemisphere the following year. That's its primary mission that
Speaker 1: two year mission tests will monitor the brightness of more
Speaker 1: than two hundred thousand stars in this two year mission,
Speaker 1: and the conservative estimate they're making right now is that
Speaker 1: they think they will discover another fifteen hundred transiting exoplanets,
Speaker 1: including around five hundred Earth sized plants and super Earth planets.
Speaker 1: Super Earth planets would be of twice the size of
Speaker 1: Earth and also wears a cape and glass, heat rays
Speaker 1: and changes in in gigantic space. Telephone Boss can rebuild
Speaker 1: broken down monuments with his eyeballs, right, but it can
Speaker 1: be defeated by the bat planet under the right circumstances anyway. Um,
Speaker 1: So the all jokes aside that one is going to
Speaker 1: uh potentially give us a lot more exo plants to
Speaker 1: look at, And like I said, I think that number
Speaker 1: might be conservative. In light of this new approach to
Speaker 1: verifying planets, we may see quite a bit more since
Speaker 1: they're looking at even more stars than the Kepler ones.
Speaker 1: Then you've got the James Webb Space Telescope that's scheduled
Speaker 1: to launch in October two thou eighteen. It will be
Speaker 1: an infrared telescope with a six and a half meter
Speaker 1: primary mirror which is about twenty one feet in size.
Speaker 1: The this telescope will be looking into slightly more cosmic
Speaker 1: matters than rocky planets. Like it's essentially the upgrade to
Speaker 1: the Hubble. It's like the next generation of the Hubble approach.
Speaker 1: So it's gonna be looking at dust clouds where stars
Speaker 1: and planets form in the first place, and it will
Speaker 1: be able to look further back into time than the
Speaker 1: Hubble could further further distance away a ka back into
Speaker 1: time exactly. Remember that when we're looking up at the stars,
Speaker 1: were really looking back in time because of the amount
Speaker 1: of time it takes light to travel to us. We're
Speaker 1: looking at stars as they used to be, sometimes billions
Speaker 1: of years ago. So pretty exciting. I really want to
Speaker 1: do the maths someday on on how many stars that
Speaker 1: we're actually looking at are dead? Yeah, yeah, it's true.
Speaker 1: Some of the stars that you're looking at have they
Speaker 1: don't really they're not really there anymore. We're yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also about the James Webb telescope, I wanted to put
Speaker 1: in that. Holly and Ben got to go visit the
Speaker 1: JPL lab where they are constructing the James web Telescope
Speaker 1: and d C and uh and got to interview some
Speaker 1: of the team members. So if you guys, it's a
Speaker 1: bunch of really fascinating stuff. And if you guys want
Speaker 1: to check those out, you can either just google like
Speaker 1: James Webb Telescope, how stuff works, it'll probably pop up,
Speaker 1: or you can find them on the House to Works
Speaker 1: YouTube channel. I would be really envious of that, except
Speaker 1: they send me to go and check out ww E.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and I mean, and you got to you
Speaker 1: got to stand like like in like next to the
Speaker 1: you touched the ring. I mean they didn't get to
Speaker 1: touch to help build the ring. Yeah, they didn't get
Speaker 1: to help build They didn't get to touch anything. Also,
Speaker 1: while they were talking about an astronomical tool, I got
Speaker 1: to actually talk to super stars, because that's what the
Speaker 1: w w E calls their wrestlers. I thought you were
Speaker 1: going to say I got to talk to some real tools. No, Joe,
Speaker 1: those people were nice. Shame on you. So the last
Speaker 1: telescope I want to talk about is the Wide Field
Speaker 1: Infrared Survey Telescope or w FIRST. This is a planned
Speaker 1: telescope that would explore both exoplanets and questions related to
Speaker 1: dark energy, so kind of a catch all it'll be
Speaker 1: a wide field of you near infrared telescope, and we'll
Speaker 1: observe hundreds of thousands of supernova and millions of galaxies.
Speaker 1: So really a big picture kind of thing, not just
Speaker 1: looking at our little humble milky way. But uh, I
Speaker 1: loved hearing the the press conference. I actually dialed in
Speaker 1: when it happened, so I listened to the whole thing,
Speaker 1: and it was really entertaining, and it was just great
Speaker 1: to hear people who were really passionate about science, and
Speaker 1: they were great communicators. They weren't just you know, really
Speaker 1: excited to to talk about this, they were really good
Speaker 1: at explaining why it was cool, and uh, of course,
Speaker 1: you know, that's kind of like what our jobs are too,
Speaker 1: So it was I really appreciate it when I hear
Speaker 1: someone else who's really really good at that, and everyone
Speaker 1: on that group was was quite capable of communicating that
Speaker 1: excitement and the significance of the find. So we're really
Speaker 1: excited to see what else we can learn. Uh, it
Speaker 1: may be a while before we get a better look
Speaker 1: at some of these exoplanets, just because we lack the
Speaker 1: capability to get a real, real definitive look at most
Speaker 1: of them. And it may require the construction of all
Speaker 1: new telescopes to get, you know, more of a look
Speaker 1: to see what sort of materials might be prevalent on
Speaker 1: those worlds. Can we get a spectroscopic look where we
Speaker 1: might be able to detect biosignature gases, Whether or not
Speaker 1: they're present on these worlds, that remains to be seen,
Speaker 1: but it is the first step to getting to that
Speaker 1: point where we can look around and say, hey, is
Speaker 1: there anyone else out there? Uh? And they might you know,
Speaker 1: they might not be intelligent life forms, and maybe that
Speaker 1: there's life out there but it's not reached the point
Speaker 1: of intelligence. Or we might end up finding some delicious
Speaker 1: sentient slime molds that could be a thing that we find.
Speaker 1: Who knows. I like to put delicious right in front
Speaker 1: of the words sentient. Well, I think it's always important
Speaker 1: to remember the potential for us to eat whatever alien
Speaker 1: life we come across, you know, I mean, I I'm
Speaker 1: just it's just a practical question. I'm not saying that
Speaker 1: we do eat them. I'm just asking if we can
Speaker 1: eat them important important research. Yet, if they taste like caso,
Speaker 1: they have no chance. I mean, we really have the
Speaker 1: ability to eat almost anything. Yeah, yeah, well I think
Speaker 1: that's what makes us great that in opposable thumbs. I
Speaker 1: don't know, I get indigested from a lot of things
Speaker 1: on our planet. You just they're just consequences afterwards, right, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it just shows that you have
Speaker 1: greater self control than some of us. At any rate,
Speaker 1: this was a really fun thing to talk about. If
Speaker 1: you guys have suggestions for topics that we can tackle
Speaker 1: in future episodes of forward Thinking, Maybe there's some scientific
Speaker 1: discovery you want to hear more about, or you're just
Speaker 1: wondering what is you know, what will a toaster oven
Speaker 1: be like in the future. Well, we've got our ovens one,
Speaker 1: but we didn't really focus on toaster ovens, so we
Speaker 1: can always go back and talk about that again. Let
Speaker 1: us know what you think. Send us an email our
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