Kepler mission Archives

June 21, 2012December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

What a View! Exoplanet Odd Couple Orbit in Close Proximity

Imagine if the Neptune was only a million miles from Earth. What a view we’d have! … not to mention some incredible gravitational effects from the close-by, gigantic planet. A similar scenario is taking place for real in star system in the constellation Cygnus. A newly found planet duo orbiting a sun-like star come together in extremely close proximity, and strangely enough, the two planets are about as opposite as can be: one is a rocky planet 1.5 times the size of Earth and weighs 4.5 times as much, and the other is a gaseous planet 3.7 times the size of Earth and weighing 8 times that of Earth.

“They are the closest to each other of any planetary system we’ve found,” said Eric Agol of the University of Washington, co-author of a new paper outlining the discovery of this interesting star system by the Kepler spacecraft. “The bigger planet is pushing the smaller planet around more, so the smaller planet was harder to find.”

Known as Kepler-36, the star is a several billion years older than our Sun, and at this time is known to have just two planets.

The inner rocky world, Kepler-36b orbits about every 14 days at an average distance of less than 11 million miles, while the outer gas “hot Neptune” planet orbits once each 16 days at a distance of 12 million miles.

The two planets experience a conjunction every 97 days on average. At that time, they are separated by less than 5 Earth-Moon distances. Since Kepler-36c is much larger than the Moon, it presents a spectacular view in its neighbor’s sky. And the science team noted that the smaller Kepler-36b would appear about the size of the Moon when viewed from Kepler-36c).

But the timing of their orbits means they’ll never collide, Agol said. However, close encounters of this kind would cause tremendous gravitational tides that squeeze and stretch both planets.

The larger planet was originally spotted in data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which uses a photometer to measure light from distant celestial objects and can detect a planet when it transits, or passes in front of, and briefly reduces the light coming from, its parent star.

The team wanted to try finding a second planet in a system where it was already known that there was one planet. Agol suggested applying an algorithm called quasi-periodic pulse detection to examine data from Kepler.

The data revealed a slight dimming of light coming from Kepler-36a every 16 days, the length of time it takes the larger Kepler-36c to circle its star. Kepler-36b circles the star seven times for each six orbits of 36c, but it was not discovered initially because of its small size and the gravitational jostling by its orbital companion. But when the algorithm was applied to the data, the signal was unmistakable.

“If you look at the transit time pattern for the large planet and the transit time pattern for the smaller planet, they are mirror images of one another,” Agol said.

The fact that the two planets are so close to each other and exhibit specific orbital patterns allowed the scientists to make fairly precise estimates of each planet’s characteristics, based on their gravitational effects on each other and the resulting variations in the orbits. To date, this is the best-characterized system with small planets, the researchers said.

From their calculations, the team estimates the smaller planet is 30 percent iron, less than 1 percent atmospheric hydrogen and helium and probably no more than 15 percent water. The larger planet, on the other hand, likely has a rocky core surrounded by a substantial amount of atmospheric hydrogen and helium.

The planets’ densities differ by a factor of eight but their orbits differ by only 10 percent. The big differences in composition and the close proximity of the two is quite a head-scratcher, as current models of planet formation don’t really predict this. But the team is wondering if there are more systems like this out there.

“We found this one on a first quick look,” said co-author Josh Carter, a Hubble Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). “We’re now combing through the Kepler data to try to locate more.”

Lead image caption: This image, adapted by Eric Agol of the UW, depicts the view one might have of a rising Kepler-36c (represented by a NASA image of Neptune) if Seattle (shown in a skyline photograph by Frank Melchior, frankacaba.com) were placed on the surface of Kepler-36b.

Second image caption: In this artist’s conception, a “hot Neptune” known as Kepler-36c looms in the sky of its neighbor, the rocky world Kepler-36b. The two planets have repeated close encounters, experiencing a conjunction every 97 days on average. At that time, they are separated by less than 5 Earth-Moon distances. Such close approaches stir up tremendous gravitational tides that squeeze and stretch both planets, which may promote active volcanism on Kepler-36b.
Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)

Sources: CfA, University of Washington

June 15, 2012December 23, 2015 by Andy Tomaswick

Terrestrial Planets Could be More Common Than Gas Giants

This artist's conception shows a newly formed star surrounded by a swirling protoplanetary disk of dust and gas. Credit: University of Copenhagen/Lars Buchhave

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Andy Tomaswick, an electrical engineer who follows space science and technology.

As acclaimed astronomer Carl Sagan once famously noted, “We are all made of star-stuff.” So are the multitudes of extra-solar planets that are currently being discovered at a breathtaking pace. What Sagan meant was that all of the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, commonly known as “metals” to astrophysicists, must be created in the interior furnaces of stars. But it takes time for stars to create these heavier elements, and since they are needed to start planets those time spans could have a major impact on solar system formation.

New research led by the University of Copenhagen with help from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics sheds some light on those time spans. In a paper recently presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Lars Buchhave and his team selected more than 150 stars with known planetary systems that were cataloged by NASA’s Kepler mission. They then studied these star’s metal content and the size of the planets in their solar systems. What they found was that gas giant planets were more likely to form around metal rich stars, whereas terrestrial planets were equally likely to form around metal rich or metal poor stars.

As the team explains, the reason for this fits neatly into the “core accretion” model of planetary formation. Each gas giant has a metal core which hydrogen and helium accumulate around. However, if there is no core to collect around, the lighter elements will be blown away by stellar winds while the star is still relatively young. If a star has a high enough metal content, its potential planets might be able to form a large metallic core quickly, before the winds do their work. The core will then gravitationally attract the remaining gas to itself and a new gas giant is born.

On the other hand, the formation of terrestrial planets is not dependent on helium and hydrogen and therefore not subject to the same time constraints. If a star has lower metal content it might take longer to form terrestrial planets, but all the ingredients are still there. Essentially, there is no upper time limit for a terrestrial planet to form whereas a gas giant must develop quickly to keep its hydrogen and helium trapped within the solar system.

Like all good research, these results open up many more questions. How quickly must a gas giant’s core form before its material is lost? Are terrestrial planets much more common given their greater creation timescales and more numerous potential parent stars? Future work on extra-solar planetary systems might help to provide more answers.

Lead image caption: This artist’s conception shows a newly formed star surrounded by a swirling protoplanetary disk of dust and gas. Credit: University of Copenhagen/Lars Buchhave

Source: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

May 18, 2012December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Doomed Mercury-Sized Exoplanet May Be Turning to Dust

Artist concept of the curious events going at the star named KIC 12557548. Credit: MIT

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The old saying of the universe being stranger than we can imagine definitely applies to a newfound exoplanet orbiting a star about 1,500 light years from Earth. Researchers using the Kepler space observatory have detected what appears to be a planet about the size of Mercury literally turning to dust. A long tail of debris — almost like a comet’s tail — is following the planet as it whirls around the star, KIC 12557548. Scientists think the planet could be evaporating under the blistering heat of the star, and that by analyzing the dust, they could decipher the history of the planet. But they better hurry. According to the team’s calculations, the planet will completely disintegrate within 100 million years.

“This might be another way in which planets are eventually doomed,” said Dan Fabrycky, a member of the Kepler Observatory science team.

Besides finding such an unusual planet, this is another leap forward for teams using Kepler data, being able to detect such a small planet orbiting so close to its parent star. The orbital period is 15 hours — one of the shortest planet orbits ever observed. The research team initially saw strange patterns of light from the star, and in examining the star’s light curves, they found the light dropped by different intensities every 15 hours — suggesting that something was blocking the star regularly, but by varying degrees.

The team considered that there might be a planetary duo — two planets orbiting each other — where their orbits would block out different amounts of light during each eclipse, but the data failed to support this hypothesis.

Instead, the researchers came up with a novel hypothesis: that the varying intensities of light were caused by a somewhat amorphous, shape-shifting body.

In looking at the short orbit, they realized the planet must be heated by its orange-hot parent star to a temperature of about 1,982 degrees Celsius (3,600 degrees Fahrenheit.)

Researchers hypothesize that rocky material at the surface of the planet melts and evaporates at such high temperatures, forming a wind that carries both gas and dust into space. Dense clouds of the dust trail the planet as it speeds around its star.

“It had to be something that was fundamentally changing,” said co-author Saul Rappaport, a professor emeritus of physics at MIT. “It was not a solid body, but rather, dust coming off the planet. We think this dust is made up of submicron-sized particles.”

Rappaport says there are two possible explanations for how the planetary dust might form: It might erupt as ash from surface volcanoes, or it could form from metals that are vaporized by high temperatures and then condense into dust. As for how much dust is spewed from the planet, the team showed that the planet could lose enough dust to explain the Kepler data. From their calculations, the researchers concluded that at such a rate, the planet will eventually completely disintegrate.

The researchers created a model of the planet orbiting its star, along with its long, trailing cloud of dust. The dust was densest immediately surrounding the planet, thinning out as it trailed away. The group simulated the star’s brightness as the planet and its dust cloud passed by, and found that the light patterns matched the irregular light curves taken from the Kepler Observatory.

“We’re actually now very happy about the asymmetry in the eclipse profile,” Rappaport says. “At first we didn’t understand this picture. But once we developed this theory, we realized this dust tail has to be here. If it’s not, this picture is wrong.”

“A lot of research has come to the conclusion that planets are not eternal objects,” said Fabrycky. “They can die extraordinary deaths, and this might be a case where the planet might evaporate entirely in the future.”

The group’s findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Source: MIT

April 3, 2012December 23, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

Kepler Mission Extended to 2016

Artist concept of Kepler in space. Credit: NASA/JPL

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With NASA’s tight budget, there were concerns that some of the agency’s most successful astrophysics missions might not be able to continue. Anxieties were rampant about one mission in particular, the very fruitful exoplanet-hunting Kepler mission, as several years of observations are required in order for Kepler to confirm a repeated orbit as a planet transits its star. But today, after a long awaited Senior Review of nine astrophysics missions, surprisingly all have received funding to continue at least through 2014, with several mission extensions, including Kepler.

“Ad Astra… Kepler mission extended through FY16! We are grateful & ecstatic!” the @NASAKepler Twitter account posted today.

Additionally, missions such as Hubble, Fermi and Swift will receive continued funding. The only mission that took a hit was the Spitzer infrared telescope, which – as of now — will be closed out in 2015, which is sooner than requested.

The Senior Review of missions takes place every two years, with the goal assisting NASA to optimize the scientific productivity of its operating missions during their extended phase. In the Review, missions are ranked as which are most successful; previous Senior Reviews led to the removal of funding for the weakest 10-20% of extended missions, some of which had partial instrument failures or significantly reduced capabilities.

But this year’s review found all the astrophysics mission to be successful.

“These nine missions comprise an extremely strong ensemble to enter the Senior Review process and we find that all are making very significant scientific contributions,” the Review committee wrote in their report.

Here’s a rundown of the missions and how their funding was affected by the Senior Review:

• The Hubble Space Telescope will continue at the currently funded levels.

• Chandra will also continue at current levels, but its Guest Observer budget will actually be increased to account for decreases in Fiscal Year 2011.

• Fermi operations are extended through FY16, with a 10 percent per year reduction starting in FY14.

• Swift and Kepler mission operations are extended through FY16, including funding for data analysis.

• Planck will support one year extended operations of the Low Frequency Instrument (LFI).

• Spitzer’s operations are extended through FY14 with closeout in FY15.

• U.S. science support of Suzaku is extended to March 2015.

• Funding for U.S. support of XMM-Newton is extended through March 2015.

NASA says that all FY15-FY16 decisions are for planning purposes and they will be revisited in the 2014 Senior Review.

Excellent Exoplanet Visualization: The Kepler Orrery II

About a year ago, Daniel Fabrycky from the Kepler spacecraft science team put together a terrific orrery-type visualization of all the multiple-planet systems discovered by the Kepler spacecraft as of February of 2011. With a new round of exoplanets just announced, here’s part two. This one is a visualization of the planetary systems discovered by Kepler that have more than one transiting object. There are 885 planet candidates in 361 systems, doubling the number of systems in the original Kepler Orrery. In the description of this video, Fabrycky says the orbits are to scale with respect to each other, and planets are to scale with respect to each other. The colors are in order of semi-major axis, and two-planet systems (242 in all) have a yellow outer planet; 3-planet (85) green, 4-planet (25) light blue, 5-planet (8) dark blue, 6-planet (1, Kepler-11) purple.

Watch and enjoy!

And as a reminder, we’ll be doing a live interview on Friday, March 2 to talk about the latest exoplanet discoveries by Kepler!

January 14, 2012December 24, 2015 by Mike Simonsen

Goldilocks Moons

The Goldilocks Zones around various type stars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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The search for extraterrestrial life outside our Solar System is currently focused on extrasolar planets within the ‘habitable zones’ of exoplanetary systems around stars similar to the Sun. Finding Earth-like planets around other stars is the primary goal of NASA’s Kepler Mission.

The habitable zone (HZ) around a star is defined as the range of distances over which liquid water could exist on the surface of a terrestrial planet, given a dense enough atmosphere. Terrestrial planets are generally defined as rocky and similar to Earth in size and mass. A visualization of the habitable zones around stars of different diameters and brightness and temperature is shown here. The red region is too hot, the blue region is too cold, but the green region is just right for liquid water. Because it can be described this way, the HZ is also referred to as the “Goldilocks Zone”.

Normally, we think of planets around other stars as being similar to our solar system, where a retinue of planets orbits a single star. Although theoretically possible, scientists debated whether or not planets would ever be found around pairs of stars or multiple star systems. Then, in September, 2011, researchers at NASA’s Kepler mission announced the discovery of Kepler-16b, a cold, gaseous, Saturn-sized planet that orbits a pair of stars, like Star Wars’ fictional Tatooine.

This week I had the chance to interview one of the young guns studying exoplanets, Billy Quarles. Monday, Billy and his co-authors, professor Zdzislaw Musielak and associate professor Manfred Cuntz, presented their findings on the possibility of Earth-like planets inside the habitable zones of Kepler 16 and other circumbinary star systems, at the AAS meeting in Austin, Texas.

“To define the habitable zone we calculate the amount of flux that is incident on an object at a given distance,” Billy explained. “We also took into account that different planets with different atmospheres will retain heat differently. A planet with a really weak greenhouse effect can be closer in to the stars. For a planet with a much stronger greenhouse effect, the habitable zone will be further out.”

“In our particular study, we have a planet orbiting two stars. One of the stars is much brighter than the other. So much brighter, that we ignored the flux coming from the smaller fainter companion star altogether. So our definition of the habitable zone in this case is a conservative estimate.”

Quarles and his colleagues performed extensive numerical studies on the long-term stability of planetary orbits within the Kepler 16 HZ. “The stability of the planetary orbit depends on the distance from the binary stars,” said Quarles. “The further out the more stable they tend to be, because there is less perturbation from the secondary star.”

For the Kepler 16 system, planetary orbits around the primary star are only stable out to 0.0675 AU (astronomical units). “That is well inside the inner limit of habitability, where the runaway greenhouse effect takes over,” Billy explained. This all but rules out the possibility of habitable planets in close orbit around the primary star of the pair. What they found was that orbits in the Goldilocks Zone farther out, around the pair of Kepler 16’s low-mass stars, are stable on time scales of a million years or more, providing the possibility that life could evolve on a planet within that HZ.

Kepler 16b’s roughly circular orbit, about 65 million miles from the stars, is on the outer edge of this habitable zone. Being a gas giant, 16b is not a habitable terrestrial planet. However, an Earth-like moon, a Goldilocks Moon, in orbit around this planet could sustain life if it were massive enough to retain an Earth-like atmosphere. “We determined that a habitable exomoon is possible in orbit around Kepler-16b,” Quarles said.

I asked Quarles how stellar evolution impacts these Goldilocks Zones. He told me, “There are a number of things to consider over the lifetime of a system. One of them is how the star evolves over time. In most cases the habitable zone starts out close and then slowly drifts out.”

During a star’s main sequence lifetime, nuclear burning of hydrogen builds up helium in its core, causing an increase in pressure and temperature. This occurs more rapidly in stars that are more massive and lower in metallicity. These changes affect the outer regions of the star, which results in a steady increase in luminosity and effective temperature. The star becomes more luminous, causing the HZ to move outwards. This movement could result in a planet within the HZ at the beginning of a star’s main sequence lifetime, to become too hot, and eventually, uninhabitable. Similarly, an inhospitable planet originally outside the HZ, may thaw out and enable life to commence.

“For our study, we ignored the stellar evolution part,” said lead author, Quarles. “We ran our models for a million years to see where the habitable zone was for that part of the star’s life cycle.”

Being at the right distance from its star is only one of the necessary conditions required for a planet to be habitable. Habitable conditions on a planet require various geophysical and geochemical conditions. Many factors can prevent, or impede, habitability. For example, the planet may lack water, gravity may be too weak to retain a dense atmosphere, the rate of large impacts may be too high, or the minimum ingredients necessary for life (still up for debate) may not be there.

One thing is clear. Even with all the requirements for life as we know it, there appear to be plenty of planets around other stars, and very likely, Goldilocks Moons around planets, orbiting within the habitable zones of stars in our galaxy, that detecting the signature of life in the atmosphere of a planet or moon around another Sun seems like only a matter of time now.

January 6, 2012December 24, 2015 by Jon Voisey

Exomoons? Kepler‘s On The Hunt

An artist impression of an exomoon orbiting an exoplanet, could the exoplanet's wobble help astronomers? (Andy McLatchie)

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Recently, I posted an article on the feasibility of detecting moons around extrasolar planets. It was determined that exceptionally large moons (roughly Earth mass moons or more), may well be detectable with current technology. Taking up that challenge, a team of astronomers led by David Kipping from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has announced they will search publicly available Kepler data to determine if the planet-finding mission may have detected such objects.

The team has titled the project “The Hunt of Exomoons with Kepler” or HEK for short. This project searches for moons through two main methods: the transits such moons may cause and the subtle tugs they may have on previously detected planets.

Of course, the possibility of finding such a large moon requires that one be present in the first place. Within our own solar system, there are no examples of moons of the necessary size for detection with present equipment. The only objects we could detect of that size exist independently as planets. But should such objects exist as moons?

Astronomers best simulations of how solar systems form and develop don’t rule it out. Earth sized objects may migrate within forming solar systems only to be captured by a gas giant. If that happens, some of the new “moons” would not survive; their orbits would be unstable, crashing them into the planet or would be ejected again after a short time. But estimates suggest that around 50% of captured moons would survive, and their orbits circularized due to tidal forces. Thus, the potential for such large moons does exist.

The transit method is the most direct for detecting the exomoons. Just as Kepler detects planets passing in front of the disc of the parent star, causing a temporary drop in brightness, so too could it spot a transit of a sufficiently large moon.

The trickier method is finding the more subtle effect of the moon tugging the planet, changing when the transit begins and ends. This method is often known as Timing Transit Variation (TTV) and has also been used to infer the presence of other planets in the system creating similar tugs. Additionally, the same tugs exerted while the planet is crossing the disk of the star will change the duration of the transit. This effect is known as Timing Duration Variations (TDV). The combination of these two variations has the potential to give a great deal of information about potential moons including the moon’s mass, the distance from the planet, and potentially the direction the moon orbits.

Currently, the team is working on coming up with a list of planet systems that Kepler has discovered that they wish to search first. Their criteria are that the systems have sufficient data taken, that it be of high quality, and that the planets be sufficiently large to capture such large moons.

As the team notes

As the HEK project progresses, we hope to answer the question as to whether large moons, possibly even Earth-like habitable moons, are common in the Galaxy or not. Enabled by the equisite photometry of Kepler, exomoons may soon move from theoretical musings to objects of empirical investigation.

December 20, 2011December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

First Earth-Sized Exoplanets Found by Kepler

The Kepler-20 planetary system contains five planets that alternate in size: large, small, large, small, large, as shown in this artist's rendering. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)

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December 2011 will go down in history as the first time humanity was able to detect an Earth-sized planet around another Sun-like star, said Francois Fressin, an astronomer from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Fressin and his team used the Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft to find two rocky worlds – one just a bit bigger than Earth and the other slightly smaller than Venus.

The two planets, named Kepler-20e and 20f, are the smallest planets found to date. They have diameters of 11,000 km (6,900 miles) and 13,190 km (8,200 miles) – equivalent to 0.87 and 1.03 times Earth. Astronomers expect these worlds to have rocky compositions, so their masses should be less than 1.7 and 3 times Earth’s.

The two worlds are part of a multiple-planet system with five planets around the same star, and is located about 1,000 light years away in the constellation of Lyra. “People can point to that area in the sky and say this is where the era of exo-Earth’s began,” said Fressin, adding that the two rocky worlds are too close to their star — and thus too hot — to be habitable.

Kepler-20e orbits every 6.1 days at a distance of 4.7 million miles. Kepler-20f orbits every 19.6 days at a distance of 10.3 million miles. Due to their tight orbits, they are heated to temperatures of 760 Celcius (1,400 degrees Fahrenheit) and 426 C (800 degrees F.)

The solar system where these planets exists is quite unusual, where rocky and gas planets alternate in their positions instead of being separated into groups like in our own solar system.

The first planet is a Neptune-like world; then the first rocky planet, Kepler 20e; next is another Neptune world; following is the next rocky world 20f, and then another Neptune-like gas planet.

“So, big, little, big, little, big — which is unlike any other system so far,” said David Charbonneau, from Harvard University. “We were surprised to find this system of flip-flopping planets. It’s very different than our solar system.”

Additionally, all the planets are very closely compact, lying within the orbit of Mercury around our Sun.

This unusual system of alternating planets may not be unusual at all, as our sample of solar systems is still relatively small.

“This really is a problem for our community to explain,” said Linda Elkins-Tanton, director of the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, in response to a question posed by Universe Today about the dynamics of such a system. “We are really challenging the community for the reason why this happened, and it may well be that our solar system may be in the minority.”

The astronomers don’t think the planets of Kepler-20 formed in their current locations. Instead, they must have formed farther from their star and then migrated inward, probably through interactions with the disk of material from which they all formed. This allowed the worlds to maintain their regular spacing despite alternating sizes.

“We think they migrated because we can’t imagine all this stuff so close to the star, where it is warm and only portions of the material is in solid form,” Charbonneau told Universe Today. “We think the birth place of a Neptune-like world is farther from the star and then over time the planets migrate in. Wouldn’t be surprised if we see more systems like this as we keep exploring.”

Asked when the Kepler team might find a “best of both worlds” planet — one that is the right size and in the right place to be habitable, Nick Gautier, Kepler project scientist said they may find one in the next year or two, but the Kepler mission may need an extension to ensure finding the Holy Grail of exoplanets — one that is just like Earth.

Kepler identifies “objects of interest” by looking for stars that dim slightly, which can occur when a planet crosses the star’s face. To confirm a transiting planet, astronomers look for the star to wobble as it is gravitationally tugged by its orbiting companion (a method known as radial velocity).

The radial velocity signal for planets weighing one to a few Earth masses is too small to detect with current technology. Therefore, other techniques must be used to validate that an object of interest is truly a planet.

A variety of situations could mimic the dimming from a transiting planet. For example, an eclipsing binary-star system whose light blends with the star Kepler-20 would create a similar signal. To rule out such imposters, the team simulated millions of possible scenarios with Blender – custom software developed by Fressin and Willie Torres of CfA. They concluded that the odds are strongly in favor of Kepler-20e and 20f being planets.

Fressin and Torres also used Blender to confirm the existence of Kepler-22b, a planet in the habitable zone of its star that was announced by NASA earlier this month. However, that world was much larger than Earth.

“These new planets are significantly smaller than any planet found up till now orbiting a Sun-like star,” added Fressin.

For further reading:

Paper in Nature

Harvard CfA press release

NASA

December 6, 2011April 26, 2016 by Ray Sanders

SETI to Resume Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence; Will Target Kepler Data

The Allen Telescope Array. Image Credit: SETI Institute

After being shut down for over six months due to financial problems, The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is once again searching other planetary systems for radio signals, looking for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Some of the first targets in SETI’s renewed search will be a selection of recently discovered exoplanet candidates by NASA’s Kepler mission.

“This is a superb opportunity for SETI observations,” said Dr. Jill Tarter, the Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. “For the first time, we can point our telescopes at stars, and know that those stars actually host planetary systems – including at least one that begins to approximate an Earth analog in the habitable zone around its host star. That’s the type of world that might be home to a civilization capable of building radio transmitters.”

What other studies will SETI be performing with the array, and how were they able to restart the Allen Telescope Array?

This past April, SETI was forced to place the ATA into hibernation mode, due to budget cuts of SETI’s former partner, U.C Berkeley. Since Berkeley operated Hat Creek Observatory where the ATA is located, their withdrawal from the program left SETI without a way to operate the ATA.

SETI has since acquired new funding to operate the ATA and can now resume observations where they left off – examining planetary candidates detected by the Kepler mission. The planetary candidates SETI will examine first will be those that are thought to be in their star’s habitable zone (the range of orbital distance from a planet’s host star which may allow for surface water). Many astrobiologists theorize that liquid water is essential for life to exist on a planet.

“In SETI, as with all research, preconceived notions such as habitable zones could be barriers to discovery.” Tarter added. “So, with sufficient future funding from our donors, it’s our intention to examine all of the planetary systems found by Kepler.”

SETI will spend the next two years observing the planetary systems detected by Kepler in the naturally-quiet 1 to 10 GHz terrestrial microwave window. Part of what makes this comprehensive study possible is that the ATA can provide ready access to tens of millions of channels at any one time.

Resuming ATA operations was made possible due to tremendous public support via SETI’s www.SETIStars.org web site. In addition to the funds raised by the public, the United States Air Force has also provided funding to SETI in order to assess the ATA’s capabilities for space situational awareness.

Tarter notes, “Kepler’s success has created an amazing opportunity to focus SETI research. While discovery of new exoplanets via Kepler is backed with government monies, the search for evidence that some of these worlds might be home to intelligence falls to SETI alone. And our SETI exploration depends entirely on private donations, for which we are deeply grateful to our donors.”

“The year-in and year-out fundraising challenge we tackle in order to conduct SETI research is an absolute human and organizational struggle,” said Tom Pierson, CEO of the SETI Institute, “yet it is well worth the hard work to help Jill’s team address what is one of humanity’s most profound research questions.”

Dr. Tarter will be presenting during the first Kepler Science Conference (at NASA Ames Research Center) from December 5 to 9, 2011. You can view the agenda for the meeting, along with the abstract for her talk on Earth analogs at: http://kepler.nasa.gov/Science/ForScientists/keplerconference/sessions/.

If you’d like to learn more about SETI, or would like to make a donation to help fund their efforts, visit: https://setistars.org/donations/new

Read more about SETI’s partnership with the United States Air Force at: http://www.seti.org/afspc

Source: SETI Institute press release

November 5, 2011December 24, 2015 by Nancy Atkinson

No Alien Visits or UFO Coverups, White House Says

Movie poster from 'Independence Day.' Credit: 20th Century Fox

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The White House has responded to two petitions asking the US government to formally acknowledge that aliens have visited Earth and to disclose to any intentional withholding of government interactions with extraterrestrial beings. “The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race,” said Phil Larson from the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, on the WhiteHouse.gov website. “In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.”

5,387 people had signed the petition for immediately disclosing the government’s knowledge of and communications with extraterrestrial beings, and 12,078 signed the request for a formal acknowledgement from the White House that extraterrestrials have been engaging the human race.

“Hundreds of military and government agency witnesses have come forward with testimony confirming this extraterrestrial presence,” the second petition states. “Opinion polls now indicate more than 50% of the American people believe there is an extraterrestrial presence and more than 80% believe the government is not telling the truth about this phenomenon. The people have a right to know. The people can handle the truth.”

These petitions come from an Obama Administration initiative called ‘We the People’ which has White House staffers respond and consider taking action on any issue that receives at least 25,000 online signatures. Regarding these two petitions, the White House promised to respond if the petitions got 17,000 or more signatures by Oct. 22.

Larson stressed that the facts show that there is no credible evidence of extraterrestrial presence here on Earth. He pointed out that even though many scientists have come to the conclusion that the odds of life somewhere else in the Universe are fairly high, the chance that any of them are making contact with humans are extremely small, given the distances involved.

But that doesn’t mean we aren’t searching, there is just no evidence yet. Larson mentioned SETI (correctly noting that this at first was a NASA effort, but is now funded privately) keeping an “ear” out for signals from any intelligent extraterrestrials, with none found so far. He also added that the Kepler spacecraft is searching for Earth-like planets in the habitable zones around other stars, and that the Curiosity rover will launch to Mars this month to “assess what the Martian environment was like in the past to see if it could have harbored life.”

Regarding any evidence for alien life, all anyone has now is “statistics and speculation,” said Larson. “The fact is we have no credible evidence of extraterrestrial presence here on Earth.”

Whether or not this will appease or satisfy any conspiracy theorists or UFO believers is yet to be seen, but it is gratifying to see the White House respond in such a no-nonsense manner.

UPDATE: The Paradigm Research Group, one of the organizations sponsoring the petitions, has issued a statement saying, “As expected it was written by a low level staffer from the Office of Science and Technology Policy – research assistant Phil Larson. The response was unacceptable.”

See the petitions and the response at the WhiteHouse.gov website.

Hat Tip: NASA Watch