New Earth Found!...we think

I know I've been posting pretty much every day this week, and I wanted to space it out so I appeared less obviously blogpolar (blog bipolar). But this one is just too exciting to leave for later. I love the annual astronomy meetings, you always get so much cool stuff from it. Today's news (and yesterday's, which I was going to write a post on anyway) comes from the Kepler probe. Its job is to look for all the planets it can possibly find, and it's doing its job remarkably well.

Previously, all we had was some observations of huge Jovian planets (large gas giants like Jupiter, hence Jovian -- Jove was the Roman name of Jupiter) very close to their stars. Some people thought that perhaps our planetary system was rare after all, and that these huge gas planets were more common. However, the actual explanation was that these kind of systems are just easier to see. This is mostly for two reasons:

1. The shorter period of a small orbit; if the planet goes around its star more than once in a month, say, or a year, we're more likely to see it. We don't usually stay watching the same star for months or years at a time, ruling out most planets that have years about our own length.
2. The larger a planet is, the easier it is to see. Both of our main planetary detection methods are biased towards high-mass planets. The radial velocity method measures how much a star wobbles because of its planet's gravitational pull (more wobble = higher mass planet = easier to detect), and the transit method detects planets by measuring variations in starlight brightness (bigger planet = less starlight during planetary transit = easier to detect).

So NASA decided to send Kepler up to watch the sky and record as much as it possibly could about the mass, composition, and period of every planet around every star that it could find. And its data is getting released this week. Already, we have the news (click here) that there is a super-Earth orbiting a Sun-like star's habitable zone. To boil it into totally non-technical terminology, we think we found a planet that is a prime candidate to have life we would actually recognize! Or we found our Plan B to escape to, when our Sun explodes, our planet freezes from climate change, or we blow ourselves up. However you want to think of it.

The news they released yesterday was very nearly as cool, for a real nerd. As you can see here (click here) -- please don't bring up my obsession with data sets, I'm well aware of it and have sought help (read: sought employment) -- Kepler's data has successfully righted our view of the Universe as far as exoplanets are concerned. The proportions of Jovian worlds has dropped significantly. The estimates now stand at 1 in every 6 stars having an Earth-like planet; that's over 16 billion possible places with recognizable life in our galaxy alone. Think about that...

Unfortunately, it still looks as though slightly larger worlds in closer orbits are more prevalent, but there's no reason to think that this isn't still due to our technology's limitations. The fastest-growing segment by far is the Earth-like planets, and the orbital size is growing as well. The longer Kepler looks, the more distant planets it will find.

Physicists are claiming that this is the year we will find our second home. It's January, and we may already have done it.

Now we just have to figure out how to get there. Alcubierre warp drive, anyone?

Can You See Me Now?

I've mentioned this before, but one of the things that I find the most amazing about space is the vastness. To quote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (I often do), "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is." It's very true. The more you think about the distances and time frames involved in properly studying the Universe, the more immense and incalculable it seems.

This bothers a lot of people, in much the same way as looking down from a height does. I'm going to take advantage of this opportunity to evoke the sensation in you, readers. Thinking that it takes 25,000 miles to go once around our planet's equator seems like a fairly large distance, right? It's a little over twice as far as the average person commutes to work in a year (my own calculations, based on Census data -- see bottom of page for how I got it). Then you think that you'd have to drive 9.5 times the Earth's circumference to get to our nearest neighbor, the Moon. To drive to Mars at the same speed, you would have to cover 3000 times the distance of your annual commute, or 1440 Earth circumferences. All that, and we haven't even left the inner solar system yet, much less looked at other stars.

It just gets more staggering from there; beyond our solar system are widely-spaced stars, beyond our local stars are the far-flung arms of our galaxy, beyond our galaxy are distant other galaxies in the Local Group, beyond the Local Group are other chains of galaxies spreading out into the Universe, at distances where even the light of billions of suns are a faint smudge in our telescopes. Just outside the (suddenly tiny) confines of our atmosphere is a vast, black stretch of...almost nothing...for distances that still take our most modern propulsion systems months to travel to.

And that's just space; don't look at time scales unless you want to feel real cosmic vertigo.

I find this all oddly comforting. There's something intensely personal about the fact that, in all this vastness, there is one tiny rock around one totally average star that is just right for our form of life to develop. Then there's all the other rocks out there that could support the same type of life. And all the ones that could have other kinds of life that we wouldn't even recognize. It doesn't matter how you think this Universe started, scientific or otherwise -- anyone who can think about these things and not get totally awestruck is missing out on one of the biggest beauties we know.

So I want to share some of the things that help make the Universe a warmer, fuzzier place to think about again:

1. SETI (http://www.seti.org/): de-funded by the government after less than a year's actual operation, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence has not been idle. Looking for signals from other planets, the now-private group uses its own radio telescopes (or gets time on other telescopes pointing in likely directions) and gathers data. The head scientist, Seth Shostak, recently claimed that SETI was likely to find an alien signal within the next 25 years . You can even help them sort through it by running a SETI@home program while your computer is idling.
2. The Drake Equation: this equation applies to our galaxy, or any other galaxy with at least one civilization. It basically summarizes all of intelligent-life astrobiology. Made up of about 7 terms (depending upon which version you use), it tells you just how likely it is to find intelligent life advanced enough to be broadcasting signals into space in your galactic vicinity at the present time. The trick is that we don't have exact numbers for most of the terms, but the upshot is that all but the most conservative estimates turn up at least a few alien civilizations in our galaxy. A good introduction to the nitty-gritty of the equation can be found here (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/drake-equation.html).
3. Hubble Image Gallery (http://hubblesite.org/gallery/): This might seem counter-intuitive, but there's just something about seeing these beautiful, colorful pictures that makes the Universe look like a friendlier place.
4. Things Close to Home (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/): if you're feeling a little...a-claustrophobic still, take a gander at some of the neighborhood scenery. NASA's Cassini-Huygens and Curiosity missions are returning routinely gorgeous pictures of planets that are within our reach, our cosmic siblings. Cassini is focusing on Saturn and its moons (some of which are prime local candidates for life), and Curiosity is, of course, on Mars. Check out especially the skyline pictures from Curiosity, and think about how those things that look like low hills are mountains up to 5 miles high!

*Fun Census calculations: I used the 2011 ACS numbers for average commute time for the entire US. (while I have your ear, the American Community Survey recently had its funding axed in Congress; this seriously erodes the information we have about the state of our nation's populace. Go read about about the fight, it was all over major media sources.) This number was 25.3 minutes. I assumed 55 mph as a median driving speed, to factor in both highways and local traffic. This gives 23 miles commute, one-way. Double that for a day's trip, 46 miles. Now, multiply that by the traditional 5 day workweek and 50 weeks of work per year, and you get approximately 11,600 miles per year.