Kepler Makes Discoveries Inside the Habitable Zone

welcome to NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field California we're here today to announce new discoveries from NASA's Kepler mission which is managed right here at NASA Ames getting us started with a few opening remarks is Center Director dr. Pete worden dr. worden Thank You Michelle just as a open introduction this is really cool the I'd like to welcome all of you to NASA Ames Research Center here in Silicon Valley and just like the companies that surround us in the universities this region has always been known for innovative different in groundbreaking approaches nothing represents that better than Kepler now I'm an astronomer or used to be and before I became a bureaucrat but sometime in the last century I was in graduate school and the thing that inspired me was the idea that we might someday find planets around other stars and at that time we know of none and I was hoping that sometime maybe before I went on to my final reward that we would find planets but it was kind of a iffy proposition decade or two later I I heard one of the guys you're going to hear today William baroque II talked about a concept and I and some of my colleagues said out of that'll never work NASA said the same thing but they thought it just might work so bill was given a little bit of money and it actually got turned down I think four times until it finally got selected and Kepler is we know today has been an unbelievably phenomenal scientific instrument it has confirmed more than 115 planets and it has over 2,700 planet candidates it's the success reach [Music] resulted in it being extended in additional four years through 2016 and this has also brought us here to discuss some of the key results we have today now I'd like to say that you know just probably in closing this brief introduction that Kepler represents the spirit and ingenuity of this Center Silicon Valley California NASA and most importantly the United States I know of no better way to kind of say that we all of us still have the right stuff so I want to congratulate the team looking forward to hearing what they have to say and I want to turn it back to Michelle so Godspeed Kepler Godspeed NASA all right thank you dr. Gordon it's now my distinct pleasure to introduce our panel today so joining us live via via video teleconference from NASA headquarters is Paul Hertz astrophysics director at NASA headquarters and joining us live here at NASA Ames we have Roger hunter Kepler project manager here at NASA Ames we have William burrow key kept Kepler's principal science investigator also at NASA Ames and we have Thomas Barkley Kepler scientists at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Sonoma California and we also have Lisa Kelton Egger research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of astronomy and research associate at harvard-smithsonian Center for Astrophysics at Cambridge Massachusetts we're going to start with opening remarks and then take questions here at Ames and then we're going to join have questions from our panelists from our participants on the teleconference and then we're also going to take questions from those on social media so if you are interested in asking a question please tweet or post your question with hashtag ask NASA and those joining on the phone bridge if you'd like to ask a question push star pound so with that let's turn it over to Paul thanks very much Michelle so I'm Paul Hertz I'm the director of astrophysics and one NASA headquarters in Washington DC excuse me so NASA astrophysics mission is to unravel the mysteries of the universe to help understand how the universe began involved and to search and discord study planets around other stars and like dr. worden I remember when none had been discovered I used to be an astronomer before I became a bureaucrat and now it's one of our prime missions the Kepler space telescope is one of 12 satellites that we have operating right now and is the only one that's capable of discovering and studying earth sized planets around other stars it's not going to be the last such satellite nASA has recently announced the selection of a follow-on mission called the transiting exoplanet survey satellite or tests which will launch around 2017 and we'll discover planets around the Stars nearest to our own Sun but today's announcement is about a Kepler discovery one which takes us on the path towards understanding how many star how many planets there are around other stars and whether they are small enough to be rocky and whether any of them might be habitable and have liquid water on them this is a gradual path that Kepler has been taking us down and today's exciting announcement takes us even closer to that goal of finding habitable planets around other stars so with that I'm going to pass it back over to Roger hunter the Kepler project manager there at Ames Research Center thank you Paul we're counting on you bureaucrat it does astronomers more money and so we have some really juicy information to talk about today and it's my job to set the stage with a preamble and if you go to my first chart I want to talk just a little bit about the scientific objectives of Kepler we've always wanted to know how rare or how common are planets like the earth and the galaxies we want to know what percentage of stars in the galaxy harbours potential habitable planets if you go to my next chart I want to talk about the results that we've experienced so far three months ago the Kepler mission showed this chart to the public and as you can see we have already identified within just the first 22 months of this mission 2007 and 40 planet candidates one thing to take away from this chart also is this there are a lot of plentiful small planets out there and that is key we have 16 quarters of observations in the bank and this is just from the first 22 months let's go to my next chart let's do a quick refresher on how the system works Kepler detects planets by transit photometry if you're standing on the edge of our solar system and looking in you'd see the earth do this once a year and we're using the same concept as we're looking at stars thousands of light years from us and when that planet crosses the face of that star we can measure the change in brightness so precisely that we can give you three vital pieces of information about that planet how big is it what is its orbital period and what is the distance from its star those are key in determining whether a planet is in a habitable zone or not now until today until today Kepler had announced only two other planets in a habitable zone Kepler 22b and Kepler 47c and both of them were relatively large 22b was 2.4 times the size of Earth and 49c was even bigger almost 5 times the size of Earth but we're going to talk to you about today are two planetary systems one harbours two habitable zone planets in that are harbours another one that is right on the cusp of the habitable zone and these are smaller planets I'm going to turn this over to Bill Bergey to announce the first discoveries Thank You Roger Kepler is certainly making excellent progress towards the goals that Roger enunciated so clearly so today I could I have next finger please today I'd like to announce these two planets somewhat larger than the earth in the habitable zone of a single star the planet in the center there is a little bit bigger than the earth one point four times the size of the earth the other ones one point six times the size of the earth we think there's a good chance that the center one there might be in fact a rocky planet and in fact these two planets are there our best candidates for planets that might be habitable not just in the habitable zone they're part of a planetary system of five planets that we've discovered so far but these are the two of most important that are most important and the ones that we'll discuss at length could add next figure we talked about the habitable zone we really need to understand what we're trying to portray here and that is we could imagine taking a planet and putting it close to a star if it's so close in their red region for example that the is too hot the oceans boil find the other hand we move the plant too far away if that blue region is too cold the oceans would be frozen solid in either case do we think that's conducive to the evolution of life in the middle between the fire and the ice is this green zone the habitable zone where a planet at that distance around its star could have liquid water on its surface that habitable zone shown in green is a function of pump of the star how big is the star how hot is the star you can see for the hottest stars is quite far out it gets smaller towards sun-like stars and even smaller toward cooler stars the star for Kepler 62 is actually a little bit cooler and smaller than the Sun next figure please Roger talked about two large planets and they're shown here the vertical axis is the size of the planet relative to the size of the earth the horizontal axis is this orbital period earth is the lower right hand corner and that's there for reference Roger mention the two upper ones we're interested in the two lower ones that's Kepler 62e orbital period about hundred twenty two days kepler-62f orbital period of about two hundred and sixty seven days getting close to the orbital period of the earth next picture please this is an animation we can see us are flying through past the two outer planets and then we come to the inner planets there are three inner planets one of which is the size of Mars we look at the star itself that star is two-thirds the size of the Sun it's about one-fifth as luminous as the Sun but it's older than the Sun it's about seven billion years old so it is planets are older than our Sun older than our planets it's about twelve hundred light years away so it's not all that close here we can see the planets the habitable zone and we're moving towards this planet that we believe is warm it may be a water planet and so we hot warm and have lots of water and in fact if you look at the back side it might very well have lightning the next plane that's showing up is 62 F the one that we think may very well be a rocky planet it's much cooler it's got polar caps now we're surmising this polar caps we think that it may have significant land masses and certainly a possibility of water as well the three inner planets and the two outer planets are part of this five planet system but we don't know that we found all the planets it may very well be as we continue to look we'll find planets that are much further out I don't know whether it be Jupiter's or whatever but we're continuing to look for these other planets as well next figure please here's our comparison of the Kepler 62 planetary system and our solar system there are some similarities there are some differences certainly the habit of habitable zone is quite a bit smaller than that of the solar system so that's a difference but there's similarities if we look at the three inner planets for Kepler 62 they're all so close to their star they're very very hot you could the some of them have lick might have liquid zinc on the surface hot enough to have liquid caddy among others so they're very hot and it's very much like Mercury and Venus if we look there's two planets in the habitable zone of the solar system Earth and Mars and two in the system 62 e and F 62 E is someone bigger we think might be a water world but we don't really know we have not been able to measure the masses of these objects that something we would hope to do someday in the future but right now we are telling you what we know and what we think is a reasonable understanding of what these planets are like good I have next figure please when I talk about the fact that we think the these two planets might be rocky or rockin a water world what what evidence do we have for that what can we surmise and so again we have a graph here the size relative to the earth on a vertical axis the horizontal axis is the orbital period and again the Earth's there for reference but these are planets just in the habitable zone if you look to the left there are three planets Corot 7b Kepler 36 B and Kepler 10b these are planets that are that are small in fact the same size as kepler-62f but they're very close to their star they move very rapidly and that means with radial velocity we can have people I our colleagues like Geoff Marcy go to the Keck telescope and measure their masses and we get densities we know these are rocky we have measured their densities and they are the same size as kepler-62f so we surmise 62f is also rocky that would be consistent with theory and we note that we have never found a gas planet anywhere near that small so we think 62f has got a good chance up being a rocky planet 62e is a little bit bigger it might be rocky it might be a Waterworld we don't know and in fact my rep if it represents a water world it's a planet like we've never we don't have in our own solar system so sort of a mystery planet but the summary of this is we have found two planets that in a habitable zone of another star and they are the best candidates found to date for habitable planets now at this point I'd like to introduce Tom Barkley who will tell you about another planetary system that Kepler has discovered thanks Bill so I think we're seeing very nicely as Kepler goes along we're finding these small planets on longer and longer orbital periods pushing towards finding these small planets in the habitable zone move on to the next slide so Bill's the star is about one-fifth as luminous of the Sun we probably wouldn't consider it a sun-like star the private purpose of the Kepler mission is to find small planets orbiting sun-like stars that's very different to Bill's system today I'm announcing a super-sized planet that's a planet about 1.7 times the size of Earth orbiting within or close by to the habitable zone of a star very much like our Sun next slide please I want to take you back now to January of this year we announced the new kepler planet catalog these are our new planet candidates they're not confirmed but they look like planets from what we understood at the time this plot here shows the size of the planet and the vertical axis and our best guess at a temperature on the horizontal the green region is the habitable zone what we defined as a project as a habitable zone the four yellow dots show four new potentially rocky super earth sized candidates and we were really excited by one of these candidates we catalogued it as KY 170 2.02 we're excited because it was orbiting a sun-like star nip to the habitable zone today we can announce what we've confirmed that this is a bona fide planet this is a real planet orbiting this star kepler 69 here we show a schematic of the habitable zone if you compare it to what bill showed earlier the habitable zones much further out that's the green region and these showing the solar system compared to our system to scale it's very similar size to the habitable zone of our own star we see our planets here there are two planets in the capital 69 system 69 B orbits very close to its star it goes around every 13 days and is about 2.4 times as big as Earth it's very unlikely to have a rocky surface it's going to be a hot world what we're very excited by is Kepler 69 C here we see it orbiting close to the inner edge of the habitable zone so as bill sock eloquently said the habitable zone is a region between fire and ice well this is orbiting closer to the fire than the ice we consider this perhaps to be more of a super Venus than a super earth perhaps we're not entirely clear of where the habitable zone is it's an ongoing research area I'm on to the next so I want to show you here the progression we're making as a project 16 months ago we announced the discovery of Kepler 22b that was 2.4 times as big as Earth we now consider this a sub Neptune size a mini Neptune sized planet because it's unlikely to be like the terrestrial planets our own solar system Venus Earth and Mars today we're announcing the discovery of 3 super earth sized planets these are planets that may be rocky may have liquid water at the surfaces below about 1.5 earth radius but probably we're more likely to have a rocky surface this is kepler-62f as we move larger in size we're getting more mass in the planet we're able to hold more lighter elements lighter molecules and so you likely to possibly have liquid water at the surface perhaps we're not too clear and the reason we're not clear about what makes up these planets is we don't have anything like this in our own solar system we don't look the mass so we have to go to models and theory to try and stand what's going on so we see here our progression towards this earth-sized planet however we're not quite there yet you see none of these are quite earth sized but we're pushing towards it with our announcement today of three super earth sized planets in the habitable zone thank you I'll pass on to Lisa cult mega now so as Bill and Tom told you is like we having for the first time planets that are below two Earth radii what we usually use is a cutoff for a solid plan and then 1.5 we use as a cutoff from the models for a rocky planet so someone between 1.5 and 2 what you're getting is more and more water in these models so as I agree with Phil the fascinating idea is that maybe we've actually found the first ocean planets the first water rolls out there and what it just shows you is the diversity that we were discovering out there and let me say that we only have the radius so what we in fear from the models is very exciting but always has to be taking a little bit with a grain of salt could I have the next slide please so this is what we already showed you and here what I want to also point out you see on the Left 69 seen then you have the smaller one 62 e and then 62 F and it's also the same progression so the earth is here as a reference it's the same progression for the flux that they're getting for the heat that they're getting from their own star compared to our own Sun next slide please and so what we usually do is we actually show you this in term of a habitable zone and you see the shaded blue region and you see the systems that we just announced so the lower system so the Sun is a bit cooler 62s bit cooler than our own Sun 69 is roughly well warmer not like our Sun but a bit cooler than our Sun but you see that 462 both of the planets lie in what we call the habitable zone and one life slack in the middle of where all our atmospheric models actually say if this is a rock if it's like Earth's geological actives that can actually bump co2 in the atmosphere take it back out then it has or it can have a temperature on the surface that we do again we don't know that but it is a possibility and also 62f as 62e sorry the closer in one that we'll talked about so this one is also in the habitable zone so we have two shaded regions here that you see one is the narrow habitable zone based on our atmospheric models where we put everything in that we know from the earth and we know that we have a couple of things missing this is why we call it the narrow habitable zone the bright blue region because for example cloud feedback it's something that we don't have in there we don't know how to do that yet for extrasolar planet atmospheres because it's very complicated problem but if you actually heat up a planet you have no water in its atmosphere so you should have more clouds and that basically puts 62e also in the temperature range of liquid water on the surface and it's built that it might be that we're actually looking at one of the first water worlds out there and so what you see in this graphic is our own solar system on the top then you see for reference kepler 22b as we say it's actually a mini Neptune because it's too big and then for reference you see 69 where both of the planets are not within the habitable zone but the arrow bars for 60 to 69 C are actually big enough that if we get really really lucky and the star is actually cooler than we think then it could be on this border to the habitable zone so right now it looks like a super Venus but if all the arrow bars pan out in the right direction it might just be at the Venus border and maybe a little bit inside but the other two planet that you see in the lower part in the 62 system is what I've got us so excited and me very excited to work with the project so next slide please what we of course want to show you here is what is special or why are we so excited about these planets here used these three grey circles and those show you there confirmed radio velocity planets so you probably heard a lot about the first habitable planets and so on and so forth and so we show them for reference and you see that they all fall in the habitable zone and for those we know the maths and it's also very exciting because they could be rocks or they could be mini Neptune's but they have a potential that they could be rocks but for this new system 62 E and F the radius tells us that they actually solid what makes it for me very fascinating candidates and the best candidates in the habitable zone could have the next slide please so here we just shade everything out that you know for reference and we just show you the beautiful new discoveries and what you really want if you really want to collect the light from these planets to figure out to take the data not just in fear whether or not there's water and even signs of life on these planets and as Paul said we just got a mission approved called tests that will look for such planets around the closest stars to us because as bill said this is the thousand two hundred light years away so we'd have to build a huge telescope much bigger than a touristy to actually read the data in the fingerprint of that planet to figure out there really water worlds or not and if I can have a next slide what sorry next slide here what I just want to give you a flavor off is all the candidates we have already with the Kepler mission so you see the confirmed ones at this really pretty images but you see all the other ones that we very excited of that we're still confirming the blue the green one sorry I actually smaller than so you see the small dots here these are the ones that we're really excited off in the habitable zone it just shows you what variety and what is coming up they're only candidates not confirmed yet but this is coming up so we are on the verge of the discovery of so many of very exciting planets that in turn will tell us so much more about how rocky planets work how they can be diverse and we will then learn something as well for our own earth that's why we're also doing that with Warner if we can have a look in the future of our own earth and learn from all these planets out there how rocky worlds work in the first place and so if I can go to the last slide here I would like to just speculate and that's what we're doing we have the radius of these two planets in the 62 system and what I find beautiful and Bill mentioned it already we have two planets in our solar system that are in this habitable zone but Mars is too small it doesn't have enough gravity to keep holding on to an atmosphere they could heat it that has enough greenhouse gas but F then would also have to build up a lot of greenhouse gas to keep warm because it's further out than we are from the and it's not further out but in terms of flux how much radiation it gets from its star it's further out than we are so we'd have to build up a lot of co2 to be habitable and E basically gets a little bit more flux than we do so you want it to be cloudy just to reflect a bit more flex out into space and keep nice and warm but this is an artist impression of potentially you know just one interpretation of these planets and think about it these planets get as close to each other as Venus does and it's closest approximation to us and they're bigger so that would be amazing beautiful jewel up there in the sky if you could be on a planet looking up and so I just want to leave you with this artist impression again saying that we have not had a look at the atmosphere we can't right now we need closer by planets to do that but from the radius we know we infer that it's actually solid planets we don't have a better explanation very hard to make these gas when they're small and so for the first time we found a system where potentially you could have even one more habitable planet and that's of course potentially then in our own world thank you very much fantastic thank you all well now move to questions here at NASA Ames followed by those participating on the phone bridge those on the phone please press star 1 to get if you'd like to ask a question and get into the queue and then again we'll also take questions via social media so you can tweet or post your question with hashtag ask NASA so for those in the auditorium please raise your hand and a mic runner will come to you if you could please stand state your name and your affiliation hi my name is Adam Becker I'm a reporter with New Scientist uh I have a few questions so first of all I don't think I caught how far away is Kepler 69 it's about two thousand light-years two thousand light-years okay and is there is there any reason to think that there's something special about sun-like stars is there I mean I guess this is this is really for all of you I mean is there a world in the habitable zone of a dimmer star like Kepler 62 could still have liquid water on it so is there if there's something special about earth-like planets around sun-like stars as opposed to earth-like planets around dimmer stars take that so what we basing our information or our models on is the earth and then if you change the sunlight well it might get a little bit redder but our atoms for a glance account for that so if the star gets smaller there is no reason to believe that you couldn't have water that you couldn't have signatures for life or like conditions for life on the other hand what you do have to say if you super conservative is that the one case for life that we have is the earth so a lot of people or some people would like to have the exact Earth's analogue around the exact Sun analog but I would personally say chances that it has the same amount of water or continents so everybody some people want to have exactly the same mix we don't think that's necessary because think of the Earth's just generally it is true its lifetime who's habitable at the time and just because your star is colder as long as you close in like with a bonfire smaller fire want to stand closer to be warm hotter fire you want to refer the way to be warm I see no reason why there would be anything special about a Sun analog star all the stars that sound like but again if you want to be the person that says I don't believe life could have gone any other way and it's exactly the Sun exactly the earth you have so far some argument because we haven't found signatures of life on other planets we don't think you're right but we cannot prove you wrong you have anything to add to that well very simply oh I was going to say is the one planet we know of with life orbits a sun-like star and that seemed natural to be the first place to study in detail would be these sun-like stars the other thing I could mention is that when you think about being on 62f and looking out at that star it was look about the same as our star except it'd be bigger but their luminosity the light that you were experiencing the illumination level would be like if you were walking around on earth on a cloudy day it drops by a factor of five like in a cloudy day so it's it's not too obvious that you could tell the difference if you were on that planet Adam you had another question I have several other questions and they can okay so uh is there is there a simple way to explain why we think that these worlds that are you know slightly larger than Earth could be water worlds as opposed to you worlds with a mix of water and land on them like earth I don't know can i sorry it falls into my jurisdiction sorry and the idea is just if you take planetary if you take a planet like yours keep the water mass fraction the same just make the mass bigger the volume you know mass and volume so basically what you get is you get enough water then you can cover the whole surface just be cost you make it four times as massive as the earth right to the radius but the radius doesn't go to four times so the surface doesn't go to four times so you actually end up with more water on on the on the top and generally we don't really know how much water planets should have and Earth's even so to see a lot of ocean is extremely dry so you know there's just the chance that the bigger the planet gets the easier it is it holds on to lighter elements like water and sail the more water you could have justice earth is extremely dry compared to what I do in terms of mass percent if you just check how much percentage in mass of the earth do you have it's a very small number water compared to anything else okay thank you um yeah along the same lines is there is there any reason to think is there any reason to think that these planets on the interior of the habitable zone like Kepler 69c would have an atmosphere like Venus as opposed to Earth is there is there any reason to be that pessimistic or should we be optimistic Phil or Tom well certainly if you have a planet that hot that's big and as massive as you might expect you would certainly expect a lot of co2 to become from from the rocks into into the atmosphere and so you might have an atmosphere that thick that big and making the planet even hotter than it would be if it didn't have that atmosphere atmospheres usually make the planet hotter certainly never make it colder wait I thought uh sorry follow-up question I thought that sometimes an atmosphere can make you colder if there's enough clouds wasn't that what yeah what do you have is colder compared to us right we have a certain amount of clouds and if you don't make more for II then it would become pretty hot and muggy but if you make a little more clouds because you have much more water vapor in the atmosphere you should be fine and generally what as bill was saying we have Venus and we have models that say if Venus is like the earth in the beginning but you move it well if you move the earth in terrace Venus is position then because it's so hot it's still sad you will start to evaporate all of your water and then you can get rid of the co2 anymore will build up so it gets hotter and hotter and hotter and you end up with Venus and as Phil just stated if the gravity or the mass of this thing is even bigger right they might hold on to more that I get more of the co2 stick have been even worse this is based on modeling what we usually do for this outer line of the habitable zone that I showed you we just have a look at our solar system and we say okay Venus is inhabitable so if you get so much radiation from your stars Venus it's probably too much and then on the outside we take Mars and say okay if mas were bigger it would be better because you could hold on to greenhouse gases but that's roughly from the data where we take the real limits of the habitable zone guesses yeah that that answers the question if I have time to ask one of them I will give you one more happy yeah so there are these two definitions of the habitable zone can one of you speak a little bit more about what the difference is between them I I'll give that one a try basically we have two ways of estimating the habitable zone is one is to look at our own solar system as at least as pointed out if you got out as far as Venus we believe it would be just too hot to hold that water to get me out beyond Mars again too cold so the oceans might be frozen and we call it the empirical habitable zone but people like Lisa and several other groups are trying to build models of how the atmosphere affected how thick the atmosphere is what the composition would be and what cloud cover would do and so they calculate an inner zone that's a little bit tighter than the other one that they say this is the best place where you expect to have water on a surface so we have two ways of estimating it and she's described both of those for you so basically just this a small comment and building this exactly perfect we don't know how in this models to include what clouds going to do and so therefore it's too narrow because when it gets hot you should get more clouds on the inside they actually have water clouds so they cool you on the outside there co2 clouds so they warm you different kind of things but it's very hard to model these things so we know that the narrow habitable zone as bill said misses this crucial factor so it's too small but we know that within this one even our own existing models we can make it work great all right let's take our attention to the phones and and ask a question out there and then we'll come back to the room here I'll turn it over to the operator to turn it over to the media to ask questions on the phone bridge thank you we have a question from Seth Borenstein Associated Press your line is open yes thank you for doing this um I guess this would be for Lisa or Bill in terms of the difference between E and F the sort of the rockiness versus the Waterworld miss one is in general the thought that more watery is more more conducive to the beginning and evolution of life or what or is it more rocky I mean and just a sense I know we have no idea whether any kind of life could develop on here but a sense of what kind of life we you know since this is you know potentially very high you know habitable what kind of life could how are we talking about when we're talking about the potential for life and and what differences would the two planets make between each other mr. Berluti okay I'll try to answer that if we look at our own ocean it is just aptly full of life we think in fact life might have begun there in the ocean vents and places like that where chemicals like hydrogen sulfide come out things that are poisonous to us so in the variety of life is actually unbelievable if you look at our emotions so speculating as to what those oceans would be like is is a puzzle but one of the things that's important is to get rocky material minerals elements into that water and one of the some of the work that Lisa our group is have done and we'll be talking about I believe in another press release is that there is a way of getting the rock you mature from the core into the ocean so there is the chemicals that are required to Oh life clearly life where that builds radio telescopes and communicates with us or as tell optical telescopes it's probably much less likely on a water world unless there is some land where is when the rocky world it might very well be quite similar to the earth in almost every way other than gravity would be higher it would be more you know we might not have gotten got off of four legs to have two legs and some arms simply because that gravity is higher but we could walk on that it would just be a little bit more difficult so it seems to me those both of those planets have a real chance of habitability but we really don't know what life requires to get started so we don't know whether they have any life Raphel one of the other things that would also be interesting in terms of somebody asked me what about if you fly there as you said the outer one has in the cup and the models of the habit of stone will have to build up a lot of co2 greenhouse gases to stay warm so if you land on the other one don't take off a spacesuit because it's not very good for us to breathe more than one bar or like a lot of co2 we'll have to get some masks to do that well the other one potentially is going to be very hot and muggy but doesn't need that kind of co2 again we don't know how these worlds could at all develop but if you want to write a science fiction story and you land on both at least we share that on a few don't want to take your mask singing off the other that Lisa's mentioned along this line I think was rather interesting if you've got a planet with a massive atmosphere an ocean planet we know that at least in our ocean we have flying fish they fly to get away from predators so we might find in fact they have evolved Birds on this ocean planet all right let's move to the next question on the phone our next question comes from David Perlman San Francisco Chronicle your line is open I thank you I my question really is for dr. Barkley and 67 and 69 see first of all the public has that been published anywhere yet and second of all would you go a little more repeat a little bit more about why 69 see might be a good candidate for habitability yes so the paper was published in the Astrophysical Journal today I believe at 11 a.m. this morning Pacific time cap plus 69 C is certainly on the inner edge of what we've considered to be the habitable zone by the product project the studies of what the habitable zone is are ongoing and I think one of the most exciting things is this is no longer an academic theoretical exercise because we are finding planets that really fit into these models can really test new are new understandings of what's going on I think it's very exciting there is probably this planet is closer to a Venus than an earth but we're not sure it has an orbital period between Venus and Earth it's longer than Venus and it's around a cooler star slightly but still very similar to the Sun so the answer is we're not sure yet one of the most exciting things from these discoveries I think is the fact that we are finding these small planets on these longer orbital periods so we're pushing towards the habitable zone suggesting that there are many small bodies within the habitable zones of their host stars I follow up with my food can it kind of just not long common to that is that's Tom pointed out and I think that's a very good point like what we know we know from our solar system and from our atmospheric modeling if you could also say maybe Venus is a fluke maybe other planets could somehow have survived more radiation than and that's what tom is pointing out so maybe and especially with future telescopes when we find such planets close around close stars so test is going to give us targets and then shado is T hopefully can I have a look at that we can test that we can see if there is an option that if you get more fluxed in venus you can still be a habitable world right now we don't know fun but you know we can't hundred-percent excluded either Devi had a follow-up yes I did just a quick one which candidate for habitable zones you people agreeing on and is there a big difference in your your attitude towards habitable zones there isn't one standard how do you determine that which kind of habitable zone you're talking about Filaret on in the case yeah so so basically s bill was explaining before we do agree so this is one of the exciting things in science now we're working on the models but we do agree because the basics we actually talk to each other and we figure out how our different models work and we make independent analysis and we agree on the limits of the habitable zone that we use and so bill explained it very eloquently how we do this so in the the narrow habitable zone that we have in our paper and that we also show in the science paper and bill science paper is where we take the earth and as I said we don't have a feedback for cloud but other than that we know how the earth would evolve if you put it closer to the Sun and further away from the Sun getting really hot getting really cold and the other zone because we know that we're missing cloud feedback in this model that we use for the narrow habitable zone is empirically looking at Mars and Venus in our own system and determining it there so there is no conflict at all about where the habitable zone is you know we might say okay now we found something new and so you can stretch it out a little bit but the empirical habitable zone from the data in our solar system basically tells us that Venus not habitable and so that's what we take for data based habitable zone so what tom was saying it's just that there's an error bar in where the planet is or how hot the star really is so there's a narrow barn how much of the flex how much of the radiation energy from its star that planet 69c gets and if you have a look at one of the first of my flights or one of them you see this habitable sound and for capital n 96 C you see this arrow bar 69 sorry 69 C not 96 sorry 69 feet you see this arrow bar and you know part of the arrow bar gets into the habitable zone so with with new measurements we figure out the star is actually cooler gets radiates less then we shift it into the habitable zone right and Tom our bill did you could follow up to that okay Lisa's pointed out that the wider zone is based on our own solar system and that these systems are different and that they might very well have an empirical we may very well find the empirical Hamilton is wider than we have found and so we do need to look at that data and so I think that Tom quite right this is something that we consider in the habitable zone or so close that it's we consider a habitable zone basically we're coming up on the top of the hour already so we have a few more questions or we have a number of questions from social media so let's try to get through a few more and if we get answer questions a little more briefly that way we can get to more questions so let's go back here in the room we had a question in the front yeah hi my name is Mike stager I'm with 21st century science and technology I just want to first just applaud what you've done to keep people inspired regarding space exploration especially under these austere budgetary conditions I'm glad you guys could all make it here today I quote two questions one more a bit more future oriented at we mentioned tests I'd like to know a little bit more about where we can go and especially if we were able to expand the budget what do we see as possible not so much restricted but what's actually available technologically to really look at these questions and then second because we the the we've found over the last few decades you know life is far more formidable than we had maybe previously considered under what concern what considerations do we have in looking at the organization of the star system in terms of you know planetary arrangements how that might affect the characteristics and in that context what we've what was recently announced a few months ago the asteroid belts how these are found to be consistent in some of the projects research so there's just two questions if those could be addressed let me answer the first question basically you're saying what could we do if we had more money yes and it's almost limitless the objective of what we're trying to do is to explore the galaxy looking for life Kepler's this one first step Tess is another step but next big step is likely to be something like what people are talking about years previous the terrestrial planet finder what we're trying to do there is to look at the atmospheres of these planets and find out are the co2 is there water with those two things you can have life those are plant what plants need if you have oxygen maybe they're higher animals as well if there are prions I mean you've got it made that obviously intelligent life is there so we want to look at the composition of these atmospheres and that's going to take a much more expensive extensive mission but we've talked about it we planned it once we got the once we get the funds in the future I think we'll see rapid progress in that direction because we have several din methods of approaching that in fact the National Academy of Sciences have said that when we get the numbers for Kepler we know how frequent Earth and habitable zone are if they're very frequent just look at the nearest stars if there were any freak infrequent then you have to look much further out into the galaxy so you build a much bigger more powerful instrument but a much much more expensive one so we're looking forward to getting these frequencies of planets as a function of size and habitable zone and so on but I think that's what we're going to see in the future is a movement or a better understanding of these planets and whether they might have life but even if you found that if you found an atmosphere like that with water and co2 and oxygen you that's not a proof there's life you'll have to have them because beyond that that will help us understand is there actually life there so we've got ways of using your money through our children and grandchildren so lots of plans I can touch on the other thing you talked about you talked about the asteroids and life being very versatile one of the things that I also want to point out is this habitable sound is defined as where we can have liquid water on the surface of a planet or a moon if you want if you freeze the surface of the planet over not to say that you couldn't have an ocean below where you could have life but if you can't go there this is our whole discussion of going to Europe are basically going drilling through the ice and having a look if you take your rope or something bigger than your rover right with a huge ice layer put it ten light years away it's not easier to detect if there's life right and so this habitable zone in a way we define it for liquid waters so that whatever life produces has an easy chance to get in the atmosphere and so we don't have to fly there we can build bigger telescopes as bill just said to pick up the signatures of life from the atmosphere because I think we're not talking even if you give us loads of money actually flying to a thousand two hundred light years things or planets very far away will require some really really good engineers and so if anybody has a smart idea how we can travel faster than light please let us know all right okay let's go back to the phones operator we have a question from David Templeton miss Berg post-gazette your line is open yes if you are Kepler we're looking at the our solar system would would earth be in that narrow zone and Mars be kind of on the edge or beyond the narrow zone or what what would what would it conclude about our solar system well the first thing of course is because Kepler's has been analyzed data for only the first about two years we would not have seen three transits of any planet that have a and certainly that goes for earth and certainly that goes from ours so we wouldn't have seen anything yet we have to look longer we have to look at the data that we have stored but if we postulate that we've looked longer we would expect to find those planets certainly 62f in the narrow habitable zone I don't know about 62e Lisa so basically what you have and a scoop point event in our own solar system both Earth and Mars fall in this narrow habitable zone but Mars is just too small it doesn't hold on to an atmosphere like the earth stuff so it cannot build up greenhouse gases that could keep it warm at that radiation because it gets less radiation less energy from its star than our own planet so the habitable zone is defined for an earth or something bigger than an earth and you keep moving it closer to the star further out from the star and figure out where it actually stops so gets frozen on the outside and loses all the toilet on the inside that's how we define it and so for E and F bringing it back to the capital of 62 system this really narrow definition of the nearer habitable zone where we don't have any cloud feedback again I said clouds worm or cool depending which ones they are F is in it it needs to build up with lots of co2 to actually stay warm like is if you put the Earth's that the Mars position and is just in this wider habitable zone because it will actually need to have more clouds to be nice and warm thank you our next question comes from Eileen klutz Reuters your line is now open I am thanks so much I just had a quick question about the listing of the list the growing list of exoplanets on exoplanets dot-org I didn't see any of these new candidates on there and that total on that site had 697 is that accurate and is it reasonable just to add these three Oh more these let's see five for the total number including the ones in the habitable zone to that list so we're announcing seven new planets today five-round Kepler 62 and two round cap plus 69 and these are confirmed planets so they will be I presume added to the list as soon as possible these results have only come out at 11 a.m. today so I think they haven't updated just yet thanks Nancy Atkinson universe today your line is open can you talk a bit more about how important these planets atmospheres are to make them habitable and and then you did talk a little bit about the terrestrial planet finder and that kind of mission but what kind of mission or telescope do we need to find out more about the atmospheres of distant exoplanets yeah in measuring these atmospheres is a great step forward and technology it really requires that's the edge at the edge of what we might be able to do you need a big telescope you need to have a telescope that blocks out the light of the star because it's over a billion times brighter than that of a planet that's extremely difficult to do to the point where you've blocked it up so thoroughly that you can actually see the planet but once you can do that then you can actually do spectra and get the composition of the atmosphere when people were developing the concepts and the engineering ideas for the transfer planet finder they felt they might be able to go out something like 30 light years maybe 100 light years not as far as the planets we're taught discovering today I think what will help them and help pay up JWST to look at some planets is test tests we'll go and look through the entire sky and find those stars with planets that are closer and nearby in many ways Kepler was a scout it scouted deep into the end of the galaxy to find out what the frequencies were the show there were a lot of planets to find it's accomplished that and now these new missions will come online and give us more information about these planets but the big step is that step when we first start measuring the composition of the atmospheres and that will be a very technologically difficult task okay I read this to follow up to your question about the number of confirmed planets you can go out to the NASA exoplanet archive and that's exoplanet archive Dipak IPA C Caltech edu and you'll also be able to access all of the Kepler missions data that it has the light curves and everything and you'll have the confirmed plan account there so these planets will be added to that so let's go to social media then now that we've wrapped up our calls on the apart me about we do have one more call a question from the opponent sees our famous global newspaper your line is open yes thank you I would like to know what would it take to - to - to verify this truly planet Singh in 69 69 e-m-f are indeed rocky planets or are they too far away that that our technology our current capabilities can can take against a confirm instead let me answer that one basically we want to know the mass of the planet as well as its size that gives you the density if the density is like the earth 5.7 or it's like 10 B which is over eight eight point eight then we're pretty sure it's rocky and the difficulty is that when a planets in the habitable zone it's so far from it starts moving very slowly these planets are small and they're fairly light compared to the Giants that we've been looking at consequently the radial velocity method the Doppler method we're looking at the wobble of the star doesn't have the precision required it can't make that measurement we have a second way of getting at masses and that is if there's two planets in orbit they tend to affect one another they tend to slow the outer planet down for a while and it speeded speeds up so they habitable the orbital period changes in a rather regular way gets a little bit longer gets a little bit shorter just a little bit longer and by the amount that it gets longer and shorter in the distance from the other planet you can get at the mass of these planets and we have found and determined masses that way but we have not found any planets in 62 or 69 that are close enough to affect the plants we're talking about that may happen you know in the years coming but right now we don't we don't see the variation that's needed to get these masses so right now we have no method of getting measurements of the mass we can only use a theory and to surmise it from what we've learned about other planets which halves are closer to their stars let's take our first question from social media where were you able to detect solar like oscillations in Kepler 62 the star to put it down its parameters the stars most stars have some variability they have storms like the Sun and that produces acoustic waves that pass through them that oscillation that vibration can tell you about the interior of a star it can tell you about the size and start with very high accuracy give you some idea of the chemicals there but to do that you need an enormous amount of light over a fairly long period of time our telescope is big enough to do that for many other stars but not for Kepler 62 for Kepler 62 it's just simply too dim now Kepler 69 let's brighten up isn't it unfortunately this yeah for sun-like stars we can detect these so like oscillations from width and use that to derive very accurate stellar properties unfortunately cap 69 was also too faint to be able to detect these oscillations so we had to measure the stellar properties Estela mass and radius via spectra which is very good but less accurate okay let's take another question from social media how will the habitable zone change throughout a star's life cycle so that's a very good question because that's what we trying to learn for the future but generally if you just think about it initially this star is colder and so the Sun was for example 30% less luminous we got 30% less energy when it was really young when it just started out and now it's just brightening with time and so basically it gets hotter and hotter with time but this habitable sound is actually defined for a planet they can deal with that meaning that if it gets hotter it washes out the greenhouse gases like co2 very efficiently from its atmosphere well if it gets colder it freezes the surface over and so it built up co2 in the atmosphere until it's warm again and that's basically similar to what happened if you want to think about it during the Earth's lifetime in the beginning with colder we had more co2 warm greenhouse gases to keep us warm but if you now go really far in the future let's say a second lifetime of us so we're about 4.5 billion years old then at one point the planet actually stops being able to cope with that because you get so much radiation that you start to evaporate the oceans but that's a really long time from now so the habitable zone concept and the lines that we showed you are good for a couple of billion years and still for a couple of billion years to come say one last question from social media how does the discovery of the earth-like planets like Kepler 69s and Kepler 62s help us understand our own world Tom you want to take that I'd like to make it clear that we wouldn't describe these as earth-like planets these planets are larger than the earth we call them super Earths we're still progressing towards finding the first truly earth-like planets that's that's where we'll probably be in a few years when we find these if they exist and we simply don't know whether other earth-like planets are out there yet we haven't found any lissa them so let me I agree Talmud let me take the little more positive view from a planetary modeler because if a rock and that rock behaves similar like the rock we live on then we think we can learn a lot from once we get the atmosphere and look at the spectral fingerprint because it will just tell us how an earth's a bit bigger a bit smaller actually works and so yes I would like to find the exact earth analogue I keep calling this planet Earth's like because yes they are bigger they are super and somebody once asked me is it like better to live there I don't think so but you know we called them supers and now we stuck with it but the super earth and mini Earth's if you want it's just bit smaller actually should function and again we don't know that but they should function from everything we now similar to the earth down to a size where they're not geologically active anymore they cool out faster and thus cannot recycle greenhouse gases like Mars did but I think these discoveries I actually are informing us and we're learning about our own world with every step with our model that we do great the other thing is the disease discovery show the other planetary systems can be very different from our own and yet might well be habitable so that that's new knowledge for people to try to understand when we thinking about how to our solar system for other solar system have planets and handles own hundred ours for great thank you very much thanks panelists that concludes today's news briefing to learn more about NASA's Kepler mission visit us on the web at www.weather.gov/fortworth slash NASA Kepler and join us in on Facebook as well at WWF facebook-dot-com forward-slash NASA's Kepler mission thank you all for joining and clear skies to you [Applause]

Channel: NASA

Views: 104,277

Rating: 4.8609624 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: GQVlDqOchSA

Length: 66min 30sec (3990 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2013