Finding the Next Earth: The Latest Results from Kepler

good evening everyone my name is andrew frak noi i'm the astronomy instructor here at foothill college in Silicon Valley and it's a great pleasure for me to welcome everyone at Smithwick theater and everyone watching or listening on the web to the new 2012 2013 silicon valley astronomy lecture series six times every school year we feature noted astronomers telling us about the exciting developments in our exploration of the universe and there are few topics as exciting as the one our speaker is treating tonight just yesterday the announcement came of the discovery of a planet orbiting the nearest star one of the two stars in the Alpha Centauri system and we're delighted that there's so much going on that we could have dr. Bhatia who spoken with us before back to catch us up on what's happening with planets elsewhere our speaker dr. Natalie Battaglia is a research astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center here in Mountain View and she is the mission scientist for NASA's Kepler mission which were delighted is now in its extended mission phase dr. Bhatia holds a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of California at Santa Cruz she started her career studying young stars like the Sun but she was so inspired by this field of discovering planets elsewhere that she came to NASA Ames joining the team working on the really amazing technology that is enabling us now to find planets like the earth around stars far far away 12 years after she began dr. Bhatia stands poised with the Kepler team to make discoveries that until recently have only been in the realm of science fiction but now are becoming our scientific reality it's my great pleasure to reintroduce to you our speaker discussing finding the next earth the latest results from cap dr. Nathalie Battaglia good evening thank you for coming out on this beautiful autumn Wednesday evening students that are here for extra credit I'm honored to be able to improve your grades so thanks for coming and thank you to the organizers of course to Andy and the sponsoring organizations for inviting me to come talk about this really fantastic subject that I'm really privileged actually to be able to come speak about finding the next earth NASA is on a quest NASA is on a quest to find a planet like Earth moreover NASA's on a quest to find life in the in the galaxy and people don't realize that most people think ad NASA's about astronauts only but no we send robots out into the solar system and we've probed the galaxy for planets like Earth and ultimately for life and I'm going to tell you about the Kepler mission which is one baby step towards that objective of finding the next earth and ultimately finding life in our galaxy and so let me start with a figure that you're probably all very familiar with just a bunch of balls in fact you're going to see lots of pictures and cartoons of balls throughout this talk so this is a bunch of little balls on on a table to show you the relative sizes between planets and stars this is our own solar system planets are are a cosmic afterthought right planets are nothing they are the debris if the Sun were my mother she would have swept all those planets away to clean up her house planets are this cosmic afterthought and yet they really are the most interesting thing in the universe right that's that's the cradle of life but I show this picture in order to drive home the point that they are very tiny compared to their stars in fact the brightness the reflected light from the planet is about 10 billion times fainter than the brightness of a star and so planets are literally lost in the glare of a star right it's like trying to find a firefly around the brightest man-made spot light down in Los Angeles as viewed from New York right it's very difficult to do so we don't actually take telescopes or very rarely do we take telescopes and tool them around the sky pointing looking up in the sky for planets we detect and discover these planets by indirect means and in fact we discover them by inferring their existence taking observations of the stars themselves there's something about the star about the light that we collect from the star that tells us of the existence of the planets this is a cartoon from a well-known website at least in science circles called xkcd again it's another cartoon of balls these are all the known exoplanets orbiting other stars in our galaxy and that number is is quickly approaching 1,000 right now it's almost at 800 786 as of the time of this cartoon what's interesting about this cartoon is that all of the balls that you see there of these confirmed exoplanets are to scale relative size and in the middle of this diagram there's a tiny little box you can barely see it it's right in the middle it has a grey background kind of underneath the word to scale is a box of our own solar system planets and and the primary planets there are Jupiter and Saturn that you can see right so if you just scan this diagram what you notice right away is that most of these confirmed planets are larger than Jupiter and Saturn that doesn't mean that most of the planets in the in the galaxy are larger than Jupiter and Saturn it means that those are the easiest ones to find and so our ground-based telescopes that are finding most of these and it's so far have this bias towards finding those that are the easiest to discover and those are the largest planets at the shortest orbital periods okay now there are lots of small dots there too so if you don't believe me about the actual statistics that more than 50% of them here are larger than Jupiter then I offer you the periodic table not the periodic table of chemistry of the elements but the periodic table of exoplanets and so the way that this is arranged is by size on the left-hand side we go to we have mercury sized sub Terrans so slightly smaller than Earth earth sized or Terrans super Terrans neptunians and Jovians going over to the right and from top to bottom we have some measure of how much energy is being received by that planet due to its parent star that it orbits that would translate to a temperature of sorts we'll think of it as a temperature so going from the hot zone which would be very close up to its parent star to the warm what we call habitable zone and I'll come back to that point in a second and then the cold zone which would be further out and so what you see in this diagram indeed the numbers of planets in each of these categories is way shifted to the right it's weighted down over there on the right with the Jovian sized planets in the hot zone those are the most of the confirmed planets so that's kind of the general picture now what I'd like to also mention is how these exoplanets the majority of them have been discovered and confirmed this is a little cartoon of a star and a planet in their orbital dance we know that planets orbit their stars due to gravity but what's not so obvious that's--it's stars also orbit their planets in fact the two systems the two objects as they are gravitationally bound and orbiting about each other are orbiting about their common center of mass so if you imagine a bar connecting them and you wanted to put your finger at that balance point you know it would be very close to the star itself because that's the heaviest object that's the point about which these things are orbiting so the planet is accelerating a lot in its orbit we barely perceive the motion of our own central Sun for example but it does indeed wobble as it orbits about that common center of mass and so the Doppler technique which you hear a lot about in the media is this method that detects that wobble it's often called the wobble method what we do is we take a spectrum of a star and this is an example of a spectrum red at the top all the way down to violet at the bottom it's chopped up and stacked so you see this beautiful rainbow and what you notice right away is that there are certain colors missing these little segments that are perfectly black where energy or light is not reaching our telescope those are called absorption lines and if the source of the light which in this case is the star if it is wobbling back and forth the color the exact color of those those missing photons is going to shift back and forth towards the blue and towards the red end of the spectrum and that's called the Doppler effect it's exactly analogous to the change in pitch that you hear when an ambulance approaches you with its siren on and then and then goes away from you you hear that shift in pitch and so this is an is analogous except that that shift is very very tiny let's zoom in here on one of these absorption lines and superimpose it against a grid of pixels that we use to measure light you can see as that absorption line shifts back and forth different pixels will measure difference amount a different amounts of light so that's what we're trying to measure when we do this Doppler technique and the typical speeds of an exoplanet are walking speeds right you're trying to detect a Doppler shift of light for an object that's moving like a walking speed some m/s okay very small so it requires really our most powerful telescopes to do this our most sensitive instruments the kepler team uses the twin telescopes epic Keck Observatory the kept 10 meter telescopes opening their eyes to the universe and taking these very important measurements and the Keck Observatory is responsible for many of the planet discoveries but the Doppler technique with the best technology that we have is yielding a precision of about a meter per second right but these these really interesting planets these earth analog planets that we're trying to detect like earth let's say I planted exactly like the earth out at a 365 day orbit that's going to induce a Doppler shift of of maybe an ant crawling speed some tens of centimeters per second we don't have the technology to do that so how are we going to find these earth sized planets especially those that are potentially habitable and that's where Kepler enters Kepler is a NASA mission it's a space-based telescope whose objective is to answer this one very very simple question what fraction of stars in our galaxy harbours potentially habitable earth-sized planets there's no cartoon here of the spacecraft itself well what do I mean by habitable potentially habitable we're going to take a very simplistic definition of what habitability means and that's that the planet is orbiting at a distance which is neither too hot nor too cold for the existence of liquid water on the surface that area that region around the star is called the habitable zone where the temperatures are just right this Goldilocks zone that I'm sure many of you have heard about in the media so here's a cartoon that shows that the Goldilocks zone which is colored green shaded green in each of these diagrams it's different it depends on what of a campfire you have in the middle namely the star if it's a really hot star the habitable zones going to be further away if it's a really cool star you got a cozy up next to it right so how does Kepler how are we going to know if esto if a planet is in this habitable zone using Kepler's laws of planetary motion hence the name of the of the project we measure the orbital period how long it takes the the planet to go around once and that's directly related to how far away the planet is from the star if we know how far away it is and we know how bright the campfire is we know what the temperatures would be near that surface or how much energy it would be receiving okay so how do we go about doing this that's that's all well in fine but how are we going to detect them is not by the Doppler technique and so I show you this picture I hope that this is familiar to you this is an International Space Station picture of the surface of the earth and that big black dot that you see it's not a hurricane it's actually the shadow of our Moon projected onto the surface of the planet every rocky object orbiting a star is casting a shadow out into space right we've seen it we experience it people that are standing inside that black spot are going to see a total or a solar eclipse right the Sun is going to get blocked out now what about the earth the earth also is casting a shadow out into space right we're not so conscious of it until we have a lunar eclipse where we literally see our own shadow projected onto the surface of the Moon right you stare at the limb of that shadow there's somebody standing right on that limb somebody on earth right you're looking at another part of the earth that's our shadow and so perhaps this point was driven home to you on June 5th how many of you saw an astronomical event on June 5th maybe a quarter of you maybe this will jog your memory this is the hano D a spacecraft video of the transit of the planet Venus across the surface of the Sun so watching this planet Trek its way across the surface of the Sun you can really begin to imagine that that little tiny rock is indeed casting its shadow out into space you also realize how tiny that shadow is going to be right it's such a small amount of dimming of light and yet that's exactly how we're going to infer the existence of planets that's what Kepler is going to do we're going to measure the brightness --is of stars very very precisely we are going to measure those brightnesses as a function of time as shown in the bottom plot the green trace and wait for a momentary dimming of light that will occur if a planet in its orbit about the star happens to be aligned in your line of sight so that that shadow sweeps across the face of the telescope and and is perceived through our instruments as a dimming of light okay so that event is called a transit it transits across the the front and this green trace that I have here we tend to call them light curves they're just simply brightness measurements as a function of time and we call those light curves for a planet like Jupiter that dimming of light is about 1% that's really easy we can do that from the ground we don't need to build a hundred million dollar spacecraft to find a Jupiter transiting a star so 1% change in brightness but an earth-like planet looks like that can barely see it it's a one part per 10,000 change in brightness the analogy I like to give is to imagine the very tallest hotel in downtown San Francisco maybe it's 30 40 stories high and every single room in that hotel is occupied and it's nighttime and every single occupant has the light of their room on and one person in that hotel lowers their blinds by about two centimeters that's the change in brightness that we have to be able to measure we need part per million precision in order to do that and so while the science the idea behind this is very simple very elegant very simple we can all understand this quite easily what makes it a technological feat is achieving that precision this part per million precision and we do that by building a very stable camera and by engineering it inside of a very stable spacecraft we know exactly what that spacecraft is going to do with it when it's in space we know exactly how it's going to jitter we know exactly how temperature is going to affect it and it's all been designed and engineered ingeniously so that those things create a very stable instrument what you're seeing here is a mosaic of CCD detectors these are light measuring devices it's the same exact thing that you have in your cell phone or your digital camera when you take a picture right except the one in your cameras about the size of your thumbnail all right this is one square foot of silicon 42 different detectors mosaicked together and that is what the light is going to fall on from our telescope and that's what's going to count the brightness of all the stars so we need very good sensitivity in order to find these planets but we also need to observe a lot of stars what's the probability that a planet is going to be orbiting exactly on it's on its side so that that shadow does sweep across your telescope it's very small for a for earth-sun analog that probability is 0.5 percent so that means you have to observe 200 of these things to find just one right so you want to observe a lot of stars and where we have a lot of stars is in the plane of the Milky Way galaxy so Kepler is staring up at this patch of the sky there's that pattern of CCD detectors that I show you projected onto the sky it's about an open hand against the sky a hundred square degrees that doesn't seem like a lot but the full moon would fit quite neatly in one of those gaps between the detectors all right so it's a very large field of view on the sky there about four and a half million stars in our galaxy alone in this little patch of sky we've cherry-picked about a hundred and fifty thousand that we've been observing regularly since the mission launched and since this is a space-based mission I have to show you a picture of thief of a rocket the obligatory picture of the launch and the spacecraft launched in March of 2009 so we've been up there taking these observations for about three and a half years now we take a brightness measurement of all 150,000 stars simultaneously every 30 minutes and we've been doing that since we launched the spacecraft so billions and billions of measurements are going into the detection of these planets all right so I'd like to first give you the bird's eye view of what we've discovered so far in these in these three years we've analyzed now about one and a half years worth of data okay so I'm going to show you the results of that analysis and I'm going to do this by showing you a scatter plot on the y-axis we have the size of the planet the radius against the orbital period on the x axis now the size of the planet we get simply by measuring how much of a dimming of light occurs that depends on the size of the occulting object and the orbital period we get by measuring by clocking the interval between Demings of light right and so the white points that you see on this diagram delineated by these horizontal lines marking Jupiter Neptune and earth sizes these were the transiting planets exoplanets that were known before Kepler launched okay and so you see that they cluster there's a swarm of them they're around Jupiter size and orbital periods of about three days if you can read the x-axis three days right mercury in our solar system is 89 so three days is very very close to its parent star and mostly Jupiter size so I'm going to show you now a succession of three plots that adds the planet candidates that Kepler has found in its data three of them because we've published so far three catalogs one in 2010 one in 2011 one in 2012 all right one of these catalogs I've already shown in the lecture here on in this auditorium so those of you who were here have seen this already and this is what that plot looked like the last time I was here right so let's go back and forth between these two already in 2010 we had 312 planet candidates and you can see this that the statistics changed completely no longer were the transiting planets up at Jupiter sizes in orbital days of three orbital periods of three days now something like 90% of these are smaller than Neptune right completely different than what the ground based surveys looked like so that was the scenario in 2010 now let me just fast-forward let's get ourselves up to date here's 2011 and 2012 we now have 2300 over 2300 planet candidates in the data that we've seen thank you thank you all right going from blue to red to yellow you notice that the parameter space is broadening right there's they're spilling out they're spilling out to smaller sizes and longer orbital periods which is exactly what you would expect just by way of collecting more data analyzing more data right the other thing that you notice is that the bottom right hand corner of this plot is relatively empty and that's exactly where Earth resides and that's also to be expected because Earth has an orbital period of one year in order to measure the orbital period of a planet through its dimming Zitz periodic dimming of light we need three years to be able to see it and this analysis is based about on about a year and a half worth of data so we're we're working our way down towards the bottom right hand corner of this plot you'll have to invite me back Andy again in another year to give you the update all right so this is what it looks like I want to say a little bit more about it but I think I'll do it through this very nice animation by the same fellow who did the animation that was playing before and I'll give him credit here in a second it's a pity to have to talk through it because the music is so beautiful but this gives you a feel for the sheer volume of planets that we're talking about at any moment in time there are hundreds of kepler planets that are in the process of transiting their parent stars you can see that quite clearly in this diagram right there are two different size scales that are being shown here the planets themselves are scaled relative to one another and their parent stars so they're all tied to the planets are all orbiting different kinds of stars with different distances but their sizes are set so that they're all relative to this one star in the middle we're going to see an edge-on view and then we'll see a face on view of this collection of course all the planets don't orbit the same star but we just wanted to for display purposes to show them collectively there are colors that you're going to see the colors indicate something about the temperature red being hot and then working its way out towards cooler temperatures but these lines that you see here these three circles delineate orbits in our own solar system namely that of Mercury Venus and Earth and so this animation clearly shows that large majority of the planets in our sample so far are at short orbital periods interior to the 89 days of mercury in our own solar system there are two reasons for that one as I said is because we've only analyzed about a year and a half worth of data but also the second reason is that the probability of having a transit event decreases as you go out in orbital period because the farther away the planet is the smaller the angle is required to sweep it clear out of the line of sight so that it is no longer transiting so we expect to find fewer planets at longer orbital periods those will peter out but the mission has been designed so that we will find significant numbers even in orbital periods of 3 years and now that Kepler has an extended mission for another four years we hope to be able to go out even to 2-year orbital periods in this sample of 2,300 planet candidates 250 are 1.25 times the radius of the earth or smaller 250 what we call earth-sized planet candidates 50 of these candidates are in the purported habitable zone the majority of those however are Jupiter and Neptune sized as you as you saw before the bottom right hand corner of that diagram wasn't yet well populated right so far we've got 50 planet candidates in the in the habitable zone but most of them are super earth Neptune and Jupiter sized the the fellow who did these animations is Alex Parker he's at CFA in Boston done some really beautiful work I encourage you to look at all of the work that he's done on Vimeo okay so let's go back to this exoplanet periodic table I think you already have a good feel for how the statistics have changed right between the exoplanets that were largely discovered from the Doppler surveys that 780 some odd planet candidates compared with this 2300 right but let's just remind ourselves that in the exoplanet periodic table of the seven hundred and some-odd planet candidates they were weighted over towards the right the largest bin was up there at the hot Jupiters in the upper right hand corner let's see how that's changed here's the periodic table of kepler candidates so where is the square that is the most populated now right here super Earths 1216 of the planet candidates are between 1.25 and twice the size of the earth where there abouts actually and I'm sorry they're there metric goes from 1.25 to 2.5 interestingly in our own solar system we go from the earth at one one earth radius the next biggest planet is Neptune at about 4 or 3 D I in our own solar system we have nothing in between and yet that's what they're finding the most of so it's going to be very very interesting to learn about these kinds of planets examples of which we have none right all right we could change we could go back to that scatter plot here's the same thing radius of the planet on the y axis but instead of orbital period on the x axis i've changed it to to temperature that temperature that's related to how far away you're standing from the star of a certain brightness or dim temperature right and this green band here is the purported habitable zone and all of these candidates that fall within that green band are in the in the habitable zone and here is lonely earth not a lot of planet candidates down here but you notice there is one just kind of kissing that little region of the parameter space and I'll show you its data in a second this is a composite of the best planet candidates in the habitable zone so far to date this was constructed by our friends at the virtual planetary habitability laboratory in Puerto Rico and so we've got our solar system planets in the upper right for comparison we've got four of the 786 confirmed planets in the upper left and then down here in the bottom we have the kepler planet candidates drawn from this sample of 2,300 and there are 20 some-odd male I don't remember the exact 27 Kepler candidates and you might be wondering why I keep calling these candidates and in fact in this slide if you can read the tiny print it says for confirmed and 27 unconfirmed Kepler candidates and the reason for that is because there are Astrophysical signals in nature that can mimic a dimming of light due to a planet and it's estimated that the fraction of planets of transit events in our data sample that are these other Astrophysical signals is going to be something like 50 15% probably on average maybe 10 or even 5% up to maybe as high as 20 but even if it's as high as 20 out of 2300 planet candidates you're still looking you know 80% of them are going to be real so the same applies here about 80% of them and that's a conservative estimate 80% of these guys are going to be real alright and just for kicks I wanted to show you some actual data this is the dimming of light due to that one object right around the earth it is a habitable zone earth-sized planet candidate Keo I 21 24 we call it is orbiting a star that's 4000 degrees with an orbital period of 42 days and has a radius of 1.0 to Earth radii it could be some other Astrophysical signal this one is not confirmed yet but it has about an 80% chance of being real the other thing I wanted to mention is illustrated in this slide now what we've done is we've taken horizontal groupings of planet candidates shown scaled relative sizes are correct but every horizontal line is a family of planets orbiting the same stars 900 of the 2300 planet candidates that I showed you are associated with a single star so not only can we learn about single worlds we can also learn about the architectures of systems we can learn about solar systems because we have so many of these multiple planets and planet systems and here I'm showing there they're stacked in order of the orbital period of the innermost planet going up and this collection of what we call multis only represents about a third of the multiple systems that we've seen so far all right I want to shift a little bit now and talk about some of the planets that have had their status upgraded from from candidate to confirmed planets so these are all worlds that we know something about we've characterized them we've done follow-up observations that have allowed us to learn something about them so that they become tangible they become real more like destinations and not just something in our head or something in a catalog and I'm going to start right off the bat well let me show this another collection of round balls this does not represent all of them as of today we have depends on exactly how you count it 70's and 78 officially confirmed planets and there are another 25 or so that are in the literature in the undergoing the review process so about over a hundred confirmed systems and here are some of them and I just wanted to point out that red box there on the right is Jupiter the majority of the systems that are confirmed are smaller than Jupiter in fact the majority are smaller than Neptune so Kepler is really focusing its resources on confirming and characterizing the smallest planets because that's really what we're being paid to do that's that that is our focus and here's Earth we have many down here that are earth sized so I'd like to show you a few of those these are Kepler's first truly earth sized planets this is the Kepler 20 system the star itself is Kepler 20 are given lowercase letters so this is 20 e and F which implies that there is also a B C and D which there is and they don't go in order of the letters I think it goes let's say it goes be e C F D I think is the order Kepler 20 and 20 F are both about Earth's size one is slightly smaller one is slightly larger and these planets were confirmed by doing follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes to eliminate every single one of those false positive scenarios those Astrophysical signals that can mimic a planet transit we've ruled them out systematically by doing follow-up observations so this was a very important milestone for our team the confirmation of the first earth-sized planets they orbit at periods of six days the inner one and about 20 days the outer one so they're still very hot in fact the artist's concept of or 20e this is not a real picture it's it's our imagination rule flight of fancy to imagine what this planet might be like it's Illustrated as a very scorched world because at an orbital period of just six days the temperatures there are going to be too hot to sustain life as we know it but following on its heels was the confirmation of Kepler's first planet in the habitable zone and the name of the star is kepler-22 and here is the artist's concept of the planet itself which is kepler-22b orbiting a star very much like our own Sun a g-type star at an orbital period of about two hundred and ninety days it's two point three eight times the radius of the earth and again we have no examples of planets like this in our own solar system we don't know what it's going to be like we have confirmed the existence of the planet in the same way that we confirm the existence of the Kepler twenty eighth sized planets by eliminating all of these other things that it could potentially be but we don't actually have a mass so we don't know what the density is you can get the density if you've got mass and you've got volume densities mass divided by volume right but for the volume you need to know the radius and Kepler tells us that but but in order to get the density you would also need the mass density is important it's a very interesting quantity because it tells you something about what the planet is made out of right our own earth has a density of about five and a half grams per cubic centimeter but Jupiter has a density of about one so our own solar system planets have very different densities depending on what they're made out of right and so if we can get the mass we can get the density we can say something about the composition for this planet even though it is in the habitable zone we really don't know what its density is going to be this could be I suppose something rocky although our theoreticians are telling us that that's not likely for that reason we do not call this a super earth even though it has a radius of only 2.4 times the Earth's radius we call this a mini Neptune because we suspect that this size have a high content of hydrogen and helium which could imply because this thing is in the habitable zone it could be enshrouded by a liquid ocean we don't know it might also be icy we don't exactly know how planets if you take a planet like Neptune make it a little bit smaller and you plunk it down at one astronomical unit the Earth's orbit what happens to it we don't know theoreticians are working on this problem right now trying to figure it out but it depends it depends on how far the the radiation reaches down into that planet how much it's going to out gas if it's going to create a thick hazy steamy atmosphere all of those things are variables and it's very speculative right now so the artist has drawn this as a Waterworld you can imagine the Loch Ness monster swimming there if you like that's okay but the situation is different for Kepler 10 I've written here that this is Kepler's first rocky planet and by way of saying that you're probably already guessing that we do know something about the mass of Kepler 10 so let me tell you a little bit about Kepler 10 here is the data this is the Kepler data on the left every white point that you see is the brightness measurement and it was taken this data was taken over a period of I think 22 months and every dimming of light from every orbit was chopped up and stacked on top of each other like one of those paper doll chains that you can make so they're if they're folded together and that's why you see lots and lots of white points overlapping each other so this is the dimming of light it's this one part per 10,000 like I spoke of before which speaks to a radius of just 40% larger than the earth 1.4 times the Earth's radius water planets at 1.4 or the radius light we don't know you know could it could be it could be like a comet you know this big giant snowball hurtling through the stellar system maybe can you make a big giant comment one point for earth radius coming from the outer solar system sure you could could you get it to orbit at this orbital period I don't know so what we really want to do is we want to find out its mass and so we started observing this candidate at the Keck 10-meter telescope pretty much immediately when we when we first detected the signal and here on the right is the result of those observations and so I have the velocity as a function of orbital phase and you see the points undulating up and then down red shifted and blue shifted as the plant as the star itself wobbles to and fro due to that tiny little tug from an almost earth-sized planet and so the the amount of wobble that the star undergoes tells you the strength of that tug which tells you the mass of the planet and in this case it's only four and a half times the mass of the earth and you put those two things together and it gives the density of about nine grams per cubic centimeter and as I said our earth is like five and a half right there is no theoretical model consistent with this data within the error bars except for one of a rocky planet and that's how we know that Kepler 10b is indeed a rocky world you cannot make a planet like this if it were mostly hydrogen and helium at that density all right um let's see I think I'm going to skip forward the other planet I'd like to tell you about is actually a multi-planet system that has not one two three four or five transiting planets but six this is the kepler-11 system six transiting planets here is a face on version and five of those planets these five interior planets are all orbiting interior to what would be mercury in our own solar system and one is out kind of between Mercury and Venus so this is very different than something that we have in our own solar system most of these planets are about twice the size of the earth but what's interesting to think about you know we've already talked about how planets can tug on their star but if you pack planets tightly together they can also tug on each other and that's exactly what this system is it's a dynamically packed system five planets orbiting interior to what would be mercury in our own solar system right and so under those conditions planets do start to tug on each other and you get a scenario like this if you watch these orbits carefully you'll notice a couple of things one you notice that the velocities are not perfectly smooth it goes in fits and starts the plan is kind of jerkily speed up slow down you also notice that the loops these white traces don't perfectly close on themselves the orbits each time are slightly different and that's a consequence of the planets exchanging gravitational energy because they are so closely packed not as illustrated in this diagram of course this is very much exaggerated but you get the idea and so this manifest manifests itself in the data as a a perturbation a difference in the arrival time of the dimming zuv light when you think it should occur it's not there it arrived maybe a little bit too early or a little bit too late and that's because of these orbital velocities going in fits and starts and by measuring how much too early how much too late we can get an idea of that that the strength of that tug of one planet due to the other and by doing a complete dynamical solution we can then determine the masses of the planets without needing to go to the Keck 10-meter telescope at all right so this has been tremendously powerful it has exceeded our expectations the majority of kepler planets that have been confirmed so far have been done with this technique it's called transit timing variations so we have great hope that the that this method will yield the mass of a planet the size of the earth near or in the habitable zone we have great hope that that will happen the other interesting thing that Kepler has done is proven that George Lucas was right perhaps you've heard this already he was very psychic in this regard this is not a kepler planet system this is Luke Skywalker on his home planet Tatooine but Kepler did detect the first circumbinary planet which means that planets can form and and exist stabili in orbit about not one but two stars meaning that on the surface of that planet you would enjoy not one sunset every night but two and moreover the stars orbit each other and you would see them switch place and eclipse one another so it'd be quite a spectacular evening sky I think there have been several of these that have come out recently this is Kepler 47 which shows not one but two planets in a circumbinary configuration here are the two store stars orbiting each other and then you have one two neptune-sized planets and then just earlier this week at the DPS meeting in Reno we had the announcement that actually we're very excited about of a Saturn sized planet again orbiting two stars in a system that has two other stars gravitationally bound to it this is a four star system two stars over here orbiting one another two stars over here orbiting one another both of those systems are orbiting one another and a planet orbiting one of those binary systems who knew nature would be so diverse right I mean who knew that you could do this that that could exist in a stable configuration over many years but indeed it can and here's the thing when you look up in the sky at night one half of those points of light that you see are actually binary stars multiple star systems the fact that planets can exist around these stars is telling us that nature is even more prolific than we imagined from our 2300 planet candidates right and the reason that this is so so special is that the signal of this planet in this system was discovered not by a scientist but by a citizen who out of the love of his love of stars and his passion for science was combing through Kepler data on a website called planet hunters org where citizens can actually interact with Kepler data examine it and find their own planets and this is actually becoming quite successful so this was discovered in that way and if you'd like to check it out here's the front front piece of their website and the website is planet hunters org I encourage you to check it out alright so here we are back at this footprint on the sky this mosaic of CCD detectors on the sky and it's filled with these colorful skittles that look like look like skittles looks like candy marking the positions of the Cubs Kepler's candidates and so now we want to ask ourselves the question okay fine so you've found 2,300 planet candidates and you observed 150 thousand stars so I can do the math right two thousand three hundred divided by 150,000 is that about the fraction of stars that has planets well no no not at all why not because the probability of being in a configuration so that that shadow sweeps across your telescope is a half of a percent ten percent at the very best so for every one that we detected in that geometrical configuration there's there's another 50 hundred 200 out there that were not aligned just right all right now imagine this is only one four hundredth of the entire sky and this is probing out to a distance of only three thousand light-years or galaxies 100,000 light-years across and you tell me how can there not be life in the galaxy right it's looking like nature makes small planets efficiently and it's looking from this data alone that there are on average about 0.35 planets per star of course you can't have a fraction of a planet and around a star but if you average it over the whole sample and that number is growing that number is only for planets out to orbital periods of about 50 days as we collect more and more data that numbers going to grow so you'll see that play out in the in the next year or two so now I would like to think a little bit about the future this is a picture also taken by the International Space Station of the limb of the earth and the Sun is just I think setting either setting or rising I don't remember I think it's sunset so that means the Space Shuttle is going away and the reason I like to show it is because of that thin blue haze that blankets our planet that is our fragile atmosphere and the sunlight and this geometrical configuration is filtering through that blue haze and in doing so the atmosphere of that planet that blue haze is leaving a little fingerprint on the light that we would catch in our telescope and if we understand that fingerprint we can learn what that atmosphere is come is composed of right and this is one of the other great advantages about discovering a transiting planet not just that you can get the radius and maybe the density but also that you have this very special geometric configuration where the Starlight is filtering through the atmosphere of that planet on its way to your telescope so in the future what we'd like to see happen is to build instruments that are capable of detecting that fingerprint of that atmosphere let's go back to the transit of Venus here it is again and you can also see the haze enshrouding the planet Venus but look how tiny it is it's one two hundredth the scale out of the atmosphere if you add up all of that area it's only one two hundredth of the total area of that disk and that disk itself is one ten thousandth of the area of the star one two hundredth of one ten thousandth that's the signal that you're trying to get right so it's going to be very very difficult to do this but theoretically possible if we can build sensitive enough instruments we can do this we can collect the light we can see the signature of the atmosphere and check to see what it's made out of let's let's just for dramatic fact zoom-out okay just to give you a feeling for the one two hundredths of the one ten thousandth see how tiny that little black disc is there through the clouds and what we would be looking for is something like this this is a microscopic picture of cyanobacteria pond scum you know pond scum was so exciting but it is early in the Earth's history life was pond scum and that pond scum is responsible for giving earth early Earth its atmosphere of oxygen that you and I breathe in this nice asbestos free auditorium and this microscopic picture of cyanobacteria has been caught in the act of metabolizing and creating that little bubble of oxygen that you and I depend on for life it's evidence of life that populates the atmosphere if we were to do this observation check to see what an atmosphere is made out of an atmosphere that's enshrouding an earth-sized planet in the habitable zone and we see a signature of oxygen that is going to be a telltale signature of a living world not necessarily intelligent life but a living world right okay and so finally I cannot help but mention a little star called Alpha Centauri B how many of you heard the news about this today please raise your hands that's great more than half of you this is one of the brightest stars in the sky unfortunately we can't see it because it's in the southern hemisphere it's at a declination of minus 60 degrees in fact if you were at a latitude below minus 29 degrees or 29 degrees south it would actually be a circumpolar star kind of like the Big Dipper some of the stars in the Big Dipper here is the star here's the constellation Centaurus here is Alpha Centauri the brightest star of the constellation Centaurus in taurus alpha and beta actually point to the Southern Cross nearby which is the southern celestial Pole Alpha Centauri as I said is one of the brightest stars in the sky but it's also the nearest star system at just a little bit over 4.3 light years away it's a stone's throw it's a cosmic stone's throw away it's not just one star it's actually three here is Alpha Centauri a and B a is actually the brightest star in the system B is the next brightest a is a g-type star kind of like our Sun B is a k-type star it's cooler but the way the artist depicted this he has gotten close up to star B and that's why it appears brighter in this image and that's because the observations that have been done we're collecting light from Alpha Centauri B the star itself is smaller therefore if a planet is tugging on it it will move more so the Doppler signal will be slightly larger than would be expected from a g-type star right and so astronomers have been doing this have been observing this and taking spectra and looking for this signature of the Doppler effect around the star for quite some time the European team has been doing this now for four years with one meter per second precision in the four years they've been doing this they have collected 459 velocity groups actually those are they've actually collected even more but they've averaged them together they've taken them very high cadence average some of them together producing 459 points over a 4-year period a tremendous amount of data requiring tremendous persistence now in that data there's basically been nothing no giant planets giant planets would have stuck out like a sore thumb there's been nothing that was actually a good sign because the Kepler data is showing us that if there is a giant planet in a short period orbit chances are there are no earth sized planets they probably get scattered out of the system so that was actually a good sign so they kept observing and then what they found was that the velocity was kind of jumping up it was all over the place and that's because this the velocity of the star itself is being influenced by intrinsic variations of the star that have nothing to do with the planet the variations of the velocity just due to the light output of the star are larger than the signal that we're trying to see and so they spend years trying to tease apart all of these different contributions star spots on the surface creative velocity variation granulation convection on the star surface creates variations activity cycles like our own solar cycle right the 11-year cycle that also creates velocity variations and so meticulously they have filtered out all of these different components and what they have been were left with and announced today actually actually yesterday but that's a longer story is this this is their velocity curve as a function of orbital phase every black point is one of these 459 observations you can see if you just look at the black points they're all over the place you don't see any nice undulation going up and down but if you take tiny sections and you average the velocities together what emerges are these solid black points and their associated error bars when you average a lot of measurements together you beat down the noise and you tease out that signal and this particular signal is only 1/2 of a meter per second 50 centimeters per second is the amplitude of that velocity variation kepler-10b the one-point-four or the radius planet that I showed you was 3 meters per second this is 1/2 kepler-10b I didn't mention orbits its star with an orbital period of 0.89 days it orbits its star once every point eight nine days this particular guy Alpha Centauri capital B little B for the planet orbits its star once every three point two days or there abouts so it's still much much too hot for life as we know it carbon molecules would break down at these temperatures so we don't expect there to be life so why is it important to me it's important when I first saw this result the first thing I thought was wow hello neighbor you know let me go say hello it's a stone's throw away we know of planets like this right you saw Kepler 20 in F same size right even longer orbital period so even closer to being potentially you know towards the habitable zone but this thing is 4.3 light years away it's our neighbor and I think that that is very is something that's very profound everybody is is very excited about this result because all of a sudden you are inspiring young people to to have this destination Within Reach right you're inspiring them giving them this destination you can point to a star that has a planet that is earth size and as we know from Kepler if it has one it's likely to have more which makes this a very very compelling destination we already are funding research to be able to send something like a cellphone with a little digital camera out into the galaxy at about a tenth of the speed of light people think scientists think engineers think that that's not completely unrealistic we can probably accomplish that maybe within the next 50 or 100 years so if you can accelerate a cell phone to about one-tenth the speed of light you can get to Alpha Centauri within what seventy years or so right I mean that's that's a new horizon for my grandchildren right and there's something fundamentally important about having new horizons we are explorers I don't know why but we are and we've always had new horizons some of you sitting in this audience had the moon as your new horizon I myself had Mars as a new horizon I felt that deeply when Pathfinder landed on the surface of Mars for example now then the mer Rovers and now curiosity so current generations have Mars as their new horizons what's the new horizon for the future well looking at this planet I know that in a hundred years we could have another planetary system is that new horizon and our children in this audience who are going to be capable of helping us get there besides the issue of survival the fact that we do have to get off this planet one day for our own survival I think that it's fundamentally important that we get off this planet as a matter of the evolution of our own species I think exploration and having those new horizons is is fundamentally important for us as a species in our our cultural and perhaps intellectual evolution so I would argue that this is exactly what we should be doing that this is going to invigorate NASA science space exploration commercial enterprises and this is it this is a damn exciting time so I hope I hope you're enjoying sorry sorry I'll stop talking now and allow you guys to ask some questions and do feel free to leave if you need to get out I understand okay so in fact let's remind everyone that if you have questions for dr. Bhatia we do have two microphones set up in the middle of the auditorium just in front of that where that railing is we encourage you to please keep your questions short and I'm going to ask you to pick one and then the other in fair order and if people would line up at the microphones we'll have a period of questions so yes please go ahead and start so your data showed a lot of planets very close to the stars with very short periods is that exactly what you expected in terms of when you look at our own solar system because we don't have anything close to that we have all those longer ones but I understand your data is skewed because of the way you're looking and anneli you explained so is our solar system just very weird or is it exactly normal in the distribution we just don't see it in what you're collecting so far it's an excellent question and we should be able to say something about that when the day is done because we do have data that speaks to the architectures of systems it's looking like our solar system might be an on ball as you mentioned we don't have any of those planets we don't have any super-earths between the size of the earth and Neptune however we have this observational bias so we have to take that out of the equation it's it's too early to tell I'm not going to go out on the limb and say that the Sun is that our solar system is unusual because it's too early to tell but I do appreciate the question yes yeah how much more powerful do your sensors need to be to infer some of these planets have their own satellites I'm sorry repeat the question how much more powerful do your sensors need to be to infer that these planets that you're finding have a system of their own satellites come like the Jovian system yeah exactly good great question there is a team of scientists who are examining the data of all of the planets in the habitable zone jupiter-sized planets in the habitable zone why because we've all seen the movie Avatar right there's an adler's of Pandora out there right no honestly a jupiter-sized planet could have a kind of lunar or Mercurian or even earth sized satellite and if it's in the habitable zone that makes that object extremely interesting in theory it's possible around some of our systems to detect such a signal if indeed that object is approaching Mercury Mars earth sizes whether or not that bears fruit I don't know but it isn't very possible for a small number of our stars of our brighter stars yes this is sort of a question of observational symmetry if we do kind of the inverse SETI inquiry and ask given our current state of techniques Doppler transit photometry transit spectroscopy what's the footprint of our of our earth out there and when does that area overlap with what you're finding out there in terms of earth-like so so the Kepler spacecraft was designed to detect and earth-sun analog so in three with three-and-a-half years of data we should be able to begin to see them as I said we've analyzed about a year and a half's worth of data so over the next year or two years as we complete that analysis we will have data in hand to see on earth Sun analog Doppler method again that that Doppler signal do to an earth out at 365 days is going to be some centimeters per second we do not currently have the technology to detect that does that mean that we will never have the technology no no no I'm hoping that especially with this kind of result like alpha cen be that we will invigorate investments in instruments that are capable of achieving sub meter per second precision but we're not there yet did you want to say something much no in terms of the observable observability of our system it's along the ecliptic for instance and and just wondering you know who out there can see us oh that's an excellent question that's the inverse question yes absolutely so as I as I said and you you're pointing out the earth is casting its own shadow out into space so presumably our shadow is sweeping across stars out there in our own galaxy and I there is somebody who's gone to the trouble of calculating at least in the solar neighborhood which stars those are as I don't have them on the off the top of my head but but they exist right so there could be somebody else out there who's doing the same exact thing and finding evidence of us absolutely my question is really of the future what kinds of missions does NASA or the ESA have on the planning boards for future missions to improve the accuracy of the Kepler telescope mission or alternatively enhanced the wobble method to detect planets there is nothing being developed at this moment in time except for the James Webb Space Telescope the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to probe the atmospheres of some of the larger planets Jupiter's maybe even Neptune's they're hoping to be able to do maybe one or two super earth atmospheres through this kind of trend what we call transmission spectroscopy catching the light that has filtered through the atmosphere so JWST will do that for some of the larger but there are two missions that are currently in the proposal stage one is called tests tests is a mission that is very much like Kepler except that it's being designed to find planets near the solar system so it wants to do more of a whole Sky Survey focusing only on stars that are very close to us the you know Kepler is doing a statistical survey of the galaxies probing a slice of the galaxy out to 3,000 light-years for statistics right whereas test would want to look at the whole entire sky to try and find those transiting planets that are closest to us because those would be really good candidates for jws or some kind of a characterization mission that could look at atmospheres right so test something like tests is going to be the next logical step let's find those transiting planets that are closest to the earth those are going to be the best candidates for for doing observations that probe their atmospheres so I'm hopeful that that will pan out that's tes s tes s yes if you were to use the wobble technique on a planetary system we have many planets how would you be able to pick out the different planets from the generalized results such a good question so every planet in the system is tugging on its star and they're doing so at different times so if you have one planet it's really simple it's like the cartoon I showed right it's just going to wobble back and forth but if it's being tugged in lots of different directions it's going to do something much more complicated you have to look at that data look at that complex pattern and you have to be able to fit multiple signals in order to understand what's truly there and that means that it's going to take more time you need to take more observations to really see that long-term pattern to be able to disentangle all the different planets that are there thank you you're welcome oh yes first I'd like to say excellent talk of course thank you very much you had mentioned a few times that there are Astrophysical processes that can simulate what would look like it transit to us yeah and you say anything about those are they just periodic dimming of this absolutely Astrophysical signals in nature that mimic planet transits imagine you're observing a star of course in your telescope on our on our digital camera we don't see it as a round star we just see a smeared out blob of light right we don't have it it's not resolved we don't see the surface of the star if behind the star someplace distant in the galaxy there's another star that happens to be aligned with your star and if that other star itself is an eclipsing binary system so two stars orbiting one another in the configuration that causes them to eclipse one another what you're going to see is the sum total of all of those photons this thing that's really far away and faint that's that's dimming every once in a while contributing a small percentage of light to this total and that's going to end up looking like a tiny dimming of light and so we have to be able to vet those out good thank you yes I'm wondering about the four star system that you were mentioning there that's a that's a fairly complex system and I'm wondering if what you're seeing is something that it has enough of a chaotic component that it's not long-term stable and what we may be seeing is something that's just say a passing pair but we're seeing it sort of in a snapshot form where things are going on temporarily but it's not actually long-term stable hmm that's a great question the circumbinary planets all have that peculiarities and it's very complex actually I didn't get a chance to go into this but I'm going to take the liberty of doing so now that you've asked the question okay if you're looking for planet transits you've got a dimming of light and it occurs at some normal periodicity and it's always the same now if you have a planet that's transiting a binary system all bets are off it looks completely different right because first it transits one star that has one temperature and produces a certain amount of dimming and then it transits a different star and maybe that occults a lot more light because that particular star has more energy per unit area moreover here's the thing let's think about how long the dimming of light lasts okay that's really easy if the star is stationary right every time it's going to be the same it's just the time that it takes that planet to move from one side to the other but what if the stars themselves are walking around if the planet swings around and transits while the star itself is moving in the same direction the transits going to take a long long time but then the star comes over here to the back and now it's going opposite the direction of a planet potentially they're going in opposite directions and that's going to make the transit duration very short so it creates this light curve that's extremely complex it makes the detection of these things completely different we have to employ different techniques in order to be able to detect them but here's the thing because of all these differences you get a tremendous amount of information about the total system you can get the masses of the stars involved you can see gravitational interactions not just between the stars themselves but between the Stars and the planets and between the planets themselves and all of this complex dynamical information allows you to recover unique solutions about the characteristics of that system so it's very difficult to have any kind of Astrophysical false-positive mimic that that complexity the other thing that I was going to say is about the stability yeah once you know the properties of the system then our theoreticians can plug in all the physics all the gravity and physics and just make a simulation and hit the button and say go and see how long the system lasts and they can run that millions of times and and they calculate the time scale for dynamical stability and in all of these cases they're all dynamically stable surprisingly enough even even something like the force even like the fourth star system is to force our system stable because the two pairs are far enough that's right hard it's exactly right it all boils down to the ratio of the separation as long as they're like four times the planet is something like four times further away it sits that was exactly my thought because you get them all you get four of them together you got a mess yeah yeah okay thanks we're just gonna take a few outstanding okay all right so just the people who are now standing I guess will go to this side is Kepler getting enough data that they can start to analyze the size of planetary systems through their evolution over time since you'll have stars of different ages that you're looking at we do have stars of different ages absolutely and so I suppose you could say that they are giving us information about the evolutionary state what we're finding is that it's very complex because the dynamics of these systems the fact that you have jupiter-sized planets at short orbital periods means that systems planets are moving around so things it looks like planets don't just form and then stay put they form they interact they collide there they have friction you know drag with a disk they move around they eject one another it's very chaotic especially in the early stages so it's very it's going to be very difficult to recover the history to be able to see patterns that are evolutionary in nature I think that's going to be very difficult but we do have ages for some of our stars in fact we have a very detailed campaign to study the rotations of stars because rotation is an indicator of age if you can get the rotation you can get the ages of the stars and we can get the rotation because rotation is going to leave an imprint in the brightness measurements as a function of time so yeah yes I'm just curious why it takes so long to reduce the data down I mean a year and a half and we're three plus years into the mission now could you explain the complexities involved in that and why it takes so long there's there are multiple answers to that question multiple components to it every time you add more data the computation time grows not linearly it grows as some log or exponent right so we have computation time however to offset that we have migrated a lot of our software to the supercomputers here at NASA Ames so that's not it an issue but it's not too much of an issue more importantly are the improvements that we have made to the pipeline algorithms that are going to increase the completeness of the sample we have stated in every single one of the papers that we have published that do - I hate to use the word immaturity but due to the status of the pipeline the analysis pipeline the sample of planets that we have presented to the public is not complete in that you would expect I mean we have a we have a detection threshold we say okay if the signal is so big and we measure that in units of standard deviations you know which is the uncertainty if it's seven times bigger than the uncertainty we call that a statistically significant detection is it true that we have detected every single statistically significant event in the data and the answer's no because we are suffering from pipeline incompleteness because the pipeline as scheduled is maturing with time so that's that's another issue the third issue is that we are devising procedures that are creating a more uniform statistically uniform sample from which the public and the astronomical community can derive statistics so we are devoting a lot of time and energy into devising these procedures so so instead of racing the clock trying to get out as many planet candidates as we can early we are taking a more methodical approach to try and produce a comprehensive high completeness highly reliable sample of planet candidates from which you can derive robust statistics so our next big catalog release is going to be using twelve quarters of data so 1200 being about three months so almost a full three years whereas the last catalog that I you utilized six six quarters of data so the amount of data is going to double on top of that you're going to get higher reliability because our vetting metrics have improved and you're going to get higher completeness so that people can go out and do the statistics so that that's that's the short answer yes you just mentioned that you could tell you may be able to tell something about the rotation of stars yes can you tell their axis and can you for multiple planet stars can you tell what plane they're rotating in in some cases yes we can get the obliquity of the star system or the planet right how I mean one question is is it true that planets are always more or less orbiting along a plane that is perpendicular to the rotation axis and Doppler surveys have shown us no that is not always the case however all of these multiple systems that we you that you just saw are very highly coplanar those planets are all orbiting on the same orbital plane and so you do expect those to be coincident or perpendicular to the rotation axis but we know that there are going to be exceptions and there are ways of figuring out what that angle is and then to take that a step further what is the angle of the spin axis on the sky relative to that orbit so those are all different projected angles and you can calculate those for very specific cases all named too if you have a large radial velocity signal and the planet is transiting the planet is going to transit first the side of the star that's rotating towards you and as it moves over it's then going to transit the side of the star that's moving away from you that's a velocity difference first it blocks out light that's moving towards you then it blocks out light that's moving away from you and so that introduces systemic signal in the radial velocity data called the Rossiter McLaughlin effect that gives you that old liquidy okay so that's one but that requires radial velocity data but here is another that requires only Kepler data you can do this with Kepler data alone if the star is spotted has spots like our own Sun has spots and if the planet passes over the spots themselves don't laugh we've done this I'm serious we've done is it's in the literature that gives you the obliquity measurements because it's a little bit different each time so those are the two methods that I know of that are currently being employed in both yielding fruit yeah last question yeah the diagrams you show always show circular at least low eccentricity orbits is that the case or is that only because your technology only sees very circular orbits you're smart it's because we assumed circular orbits when we did our modeling yeah we have no information about eccentricity sometimes we do that's not exactly true in some cases we do have information about the eccentricity but in general for all of our catalogs that has been the case that we assume eccentricity equal to zero and then do the modeling to recover the planet properties now here's the thing imagine you had a multiple star system and sorry multiple planet system multiple planets all orbit at a different distance and you compute you look at the duration of the transit right how long that dimming of light lasts okay so the duration of the transit depends on the velocity of the planet in its orbit and the velocity of the planet just depends via Kepler's laws on the distance and the mass of the central star so the geometry of all of the different planets in that system should yield consistent durations Kepler's laws tell us that the more distant the planet is the slower it moves in its orbit and therefore the longer the duration of the transit is going to be okay so you should see a pattern if however you have eccentricity that means the planet comes in at periastron and then slows down at a pasture on perry app that means it's going to speed up slow down you're going to have slightly different velocities you should be able to see that in the durations of the transits themselves they'll be slightly different it won't follow that same logical pattern of Kepler's laws so you can infer information about eccentricity in some specific cases but generally speaking you need Doppler measurements or transit timing variations or some other information to give you that parameter in general do astronomers believe that most orbits are circular like the our solar system or is it where are we really not necessarily the Doppler data is not proving that to be the case no no eccentricities are quite common all right I'm going to take the last question which is tell us when we can look forward to the next catalog to the next cat X catalog release oh god I'm gonna get myself into trouble in predicting okay I'm always breaking promises so so you have to take it with a grain of salt but we're shooting for something like mid next year now we're going to have an intermediate small catalog release based on a smaller set of data probably somewhere around the beginning of 2013 maybe the end of 2012 significantly smaller may be on the order of some hundreds of new planet cabinet candidates but on a significantly smaller data set so you shouldn't expect any of the most interesting planet candidates that will come with this other big analysis that I spoke of which were shooting for finishing mid next year and I now that I said it all I'll be sure to be wrong well let's take dr. Bhatia for a wonderful talk

Channel: SVAstronomyLectures

Views: 166,819

Rating: 4.7487335 out of 5

Keywords: Astronomy, space, science, planets, extrasolar planets, exoplanets, Kepler mission, hot Jupiters, habitable zone, transits, solar systems, stars, planetary systems, space telescopes, space missions, superearths, terrestrial planets, jovian planets, Kepler telescope, NASA, NASA missions, telescopes, Alpha Centauri, Kepler (spacecraft), Natalie Batalha

Id: ZbijeR_AALo

Length: 88min 39sec (5319 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2013