Oh
thank you very much for having me
Kepler exoplanets NASA is on a quest to
find evidence of life beyond Earth do
not doubt it is one of the grand
questions is there anybody out there one
of the grand questions that drives
strategic planning for NASA astrophysics
right there are three paths that we can
take to get us there to find evidence of
life beyond Earth one is solar system
exploration this beautiful image of the
plumes of Enceladus the landscapes of
Mars that curiosity shows us compels us
to explore the solar system and see if
there is life lurking in any of these
nooks and crannies in the subterranean
cave on Mars in the subsurface ocean on
Europa or Enceladus whether or not we
find life maybe we’ll find death in
fossils in extinction regardless the
implications are profound
the second path is the SETI search ears
to the universe listening searching for
signals that are not astronomical as we
understand them signals that are big
surprises that might be due to
technology might be due to intelligent
life depicted by the Allen telescope
array up in Northern California but
there’s a third path and that’s looking
for the cradles of life as we know it
looking for planets like Earth that
could Harbor surface liquid water and
could give rise to life as we understand
it here on earth carbon-based life
well this path was made possible twenty
years ago with the first discovery of an
exoplanet orbiting a normal main
sequence kind of star like our Sun and I
just happened to be at that conference I
was a young graduate student at the time
and
is a conference on stars not planets
that field of study didn’t exist at all
it was cool stars stellar systems in the
Sun no exoplanet in the title right in
fact that talk wasn’t even on the agenda
but next thing we knew Michelle my your
Estrella Swiss astronomer went up to the
stage cameras were there and announced
the discovery of 51 peg B and it blew
our mind it was unlike anything we
understood right we understood the solar
system close to the star you’ve got the
small rocky planets further out you’ve
got the ice and gas giants right that’s
how solar systems are supposed to form
that’s how they’re supposed to lay out
our own solar system says it is so and
yet here we had a planet discovery a
planet almost as large as Jupiter with a
four-day orbital period around its star
blasted by stellar radiation theorists
did not know how to make a planet like
that and that’s basically how the field
of exoplanets has been ever since we
have uncovered an unparalleled diversity
of worlds but what we want to look for
what NASA wants to look for our worlds
not like this gas giant blasted by
stellar irradiation where surface liquid
water cannot exist we’re looking for the
cradles of life and so we fast forward
to march of 2009 3 2 engine start 1 0
went left
the Delta 2 rocket with a search for
planets suddenly like our Kepler NASA’s
first mission capable of detecting
potentially habitable earth-sized
planets a Space Telescope launched into
orbit about the Sun pointed toward one
field of view about the size of my hand
near the plane of the Milky Way galaxy
focusing on about a hundred and fifty
thousand stars they’re measuring their
brightnesses with very high precision
because for some of those systems
planets that are in orbit about the star
will pass directly between the disk of
the star and the telescope and the
telescope will perceive the presence of
that planet as a momentary dimming of
light a dimming of light that repeats
once every orbital cycle this is
Kepler’s first light image every tiny
speck you see every tiny pinpoint on
that image as a star in this one
handprint on the sky in the
constellation of Cygnus and Lyra there
are four and a half million stars in
this one footprint Kepler observed 150
thousand of them the precision that’s
required to see an earth-sized planet
transit across the disk of a sun-like
star can be described with the following
thought experiment
imagine the tallest skyscraper in New
York City maybe something like 80
storeys high I don’t even know how tall
the tile highest of skyscrapers in New
York City anymore but let’s pretend it’s
about 80 stories high and it’s it’s
occupied every single room is occupied
in it’s night time all the windows are
open every light is on and one person in
that building goes to the window and
lowers the blinds by about a centimeter
that’s the precision that’s required to
see this tiny diminution of light caused
by an earth so what I’d like to do is
give you kind of a big picture of what
exoplanets have been discovered since
that historic meeting in 1995 in
Florence Italy where the first exoplanet
was announced and I’m going to do that
with a scatter
Kepler doesn’t take beautiful pictures
of planets right we don’t find planets
by pointing our telescope up into the
sky and saying aha
there’s one we must infer their
existence by measuring some property of
the star itself okay so in this scatter
plot it’s going to be radius or diameter
of the planet versus orbital period okay
and we’re going to animate this plot
adding discoveries as they’re made and
I’m going to first show you the
discoveries that have been made by every
other team around the world except
Kepler there will be some horizontal
there will be some horizontal lines to
give you some reference earth-sized has
a horizontal line neptune-sized and
jupiter-sized they’re color-coded by the
technique that was used to find them but
I want you to just get a general feel
for the patterns that are emerging
2005/2006
earth is there for reference at the
orbital period and size 2011-12 we start
to see some patterns there is a swarm of
blue points up there in the left another
larger swarm of pink points in the upper
right for reference Jupiter would have
an orbital period of just over 4,000
days so 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 up to
the line that is Jupiter and you see we
have found some Jupiter analogues out
there in the distant environs of a solar
system so this is what the scene looked
looks like barring kepler right over 85%
of those discoveries are planned its
larger than Neptune okay
now I’m going to show you what Kepler
has added after analyzing four years of
its data through this technique of
transit photometry measuring brightness
Kepler has found over 4200 transiting
objects 90% of which or more are going
to be bona fide exoplanets planets
orbiting other stars in our galaxy
see our blinders have been lifted to
small planets the landscape has changed
dramatically right now more than 85% of
the known planets or the planets known
to humanity are smaller than Neptune
instead of larger which just goes to
show that it our technology we were
hampered by our technology every time
you build a new piece of technology you
learn a tremendous amount moreover you
can see that there are some yellow
points kissing that Earth locust at one
earth diameter and 365 day orbital
periods so Kepler has begun to find
earth true earth analogs the big
question that Kepler set out to answer
is what fraction of stars in our galaxy
harbours potentially habitable
earth-sized planets we want to get a
feeling for the for the ubiquity of
planets like Earth these cradles of life
these potential cradles of life are
Earth’s common are they are they
prevalent in our galaxy or is our own
earth somehow special right so what have
we learned from Kepler from Kepler we
can now with this large sample of
planets we can ask the question okay
what is the population of planets out
there what is the dire their diversity
what is the population how far do I have
to go out into the galaxy before I
happen upon a potentially habitable
earth-sized planet you can ask this
question because of Kepler and so the
answer is if we were to take our own
galaxy and we were to shrink it down to
the size of the continental United
States and you stand on one coast maybe
here in Washington DC you look out over
the continent and you ask yourself how
far is the nearest potentially habitable
earth-sized planet the answer is about a
stroll across the National Mall between
about the Capitol building and the
Lincoln Memorial or about 15 light years
which
which is very close given the fact that
the galaxies a hundred thousand
light-years across
okay so what’s next so we’re kind of
learning that earth-like planets are
pretty common that’s good that means
that exploration finding evidence of
life following this path has great
potential so what’s next well here on
the left I’m showing you an image
actually taken of Venus transiting our
own Sun this is an actual image of a
planet in our own solar system
transiting across the surface of our Sun
the Hinode spacecraft took this image
and I’m showing it to you because I want
you to see the very thin layer of orange
hugging that planet do you see that
that’s the Venusian atmosphere it’s very
thin it’s only five kilometers thick I
think that’s about the scale height we
call it very thin in terms of area if
you collected that whole area it’s only
one two hundred three hundred the area
of the disk itself all right so it’s
very very thin but here’s the thing
the sunlight shining on the planet from
behind is filtering through that
atmosphere that’s hugging it right and
when it does that the atmosphere itself
is leaving a fingerprint on that light
if I’m on the other side I can collect
that light I can spread it out into a
spectrum I inspect it and I can I can
disentangle the fingerprint that that
atmosphere left on the light which means
I may have the ability with enough
sensitivity to disentangle what that
atmosphere was made of on the right hand
side of this image is cyanobacteria
it’s like algae and this microscopic
picture of cyanobacteria was caught in
the act of metabolizing and producing a
tiny burp of oxygen the very process
which created the oxygen on our own
planet and gave rise to more complex
life-forms okay so that’s the kind of
signature that we would want to see by
catching the light filtering through the
atmosphere that’s called transmission
now that’s very tough but the James Webb
Space Telescope is going to do that very
thing for maybe larger planets more like
mini Neptune’s another technique that
I’m looking forward to is imaging what
we really want talking about big dreams
what we really want is to catch the
light reflecting off of the surface of a
planet here you’ve got the blue marble
on the left an iconic image taken by the
Apollo astronauts leaving Earth on the
way to the moon that’s an image that was
taken from 22,000 miles away the first
full disk image of our planet and you
can see the reflected light the light
from the Sun that’s reflecting off the
planet and into the camera of the Apollo
astronaut right on the right hand side
it’s the pale blue dot of Earth taken by
this Cassini spacecraft from 900 million
miles away it’s unresolved you don’t see
the surface features right but the
information is there if you look at the
Apollo image the way light reflects off
of every element of that disc is
different right the way it reflects off
ocean is different than the way it
reflects off land which is different
than the way it reflects off forests and
those features those peculiarities will
be present in the light even if it’s
unresolved it will be present in the
light if we can take it with enough
sensitivity we can spread it out into a
rainbow and we can see the indications
of those surface features it’s tough
these planets are faint 10 billion times
fainter than the star they orbit we are
overwhelmed by the glare of the parent
star how are we going to see this faint
little smudge that is an earth-like
planet potentially habitable earth-like
planet well the way that we think about
doing it
it’s kind of like the way I would see
you out here in the audience I’d have to
put my thumb over these lights oh wow
that works right we block out the light
of the parent star the problem is you
know that the little planet is like a
little Matt orbiting a big search light
or a spotlight right a lighthouse so I
take my thumb and I cover it and then
maybe I can see the net flying next to
it but light bends it bends around
obstacles it still kind of introduces
this diffraction this interference so I
have to be careful about the way that I
design my thumb you know I need to be
kind of fancy about it but that kind of
technology is being developed today as
we speak and here’s a little clip
showing some of that technology
happening at JPL this is an animation of
what the thumb would look like you
launch a system a Space Telescope that
has connected to it a sunflower the
petals that you see unfurling are a star
shade that’s the thumb that you hold up
you fly it out some thousands of
kilometres away and you use it to
perfectly block the glare from the star
thereby revealing the faint Nets
orbiting the lighthouse all right so
I’ll end with this image 500 light-years
away there is a star called kepler-186
in the constellation of Cygnus that
cygnus lyra region it’s a red star a
star that’s cooler than our own Sun and
Kepler has found five planets so far
orbiting that star the fifth planet out
at an orbital period of about 192 days
is within the uncertainty the same size
as the earth to within 10% so what
you’re seeing here is not an image of
that planet remember Kepler does not
take pictures of planets it infers its
existence and so we have to put a little
bit of our imagination into this we tell
everything that we know to the artist
and let him bring this
old to life but I ask myself the
question you know if you have water
you’re likely to have at least simple
life form simple microbes maybe
single-celled things how does life begin
does it begin with a with a spark a
sputter a smolder does it evolve slowly
or is it that when you have simple
celled organisms microorganisms when
they take hold does life begin by
igniting transforming the global
landscape we don’t know which it is or
if it’s someplace in between but what I
know is we creatures we are these
creatures these portals to the universe
we are the universe becomes self-aware
right our bodies are these portals to
the universe observing itself and as
such by our self-awareness by DeVille by
definition that means that by necessity
we reach out so when we do find a planet
that harbours life that is a habitable
environment that has bio signatures and
this is possible within the next one or
two generations maybe two or three by
necessity we are going to want to reach
out and I wonder what potential will be
unlocked when we go what potential will
be unlocked when we connect thank you
very much
you
Oh
thank you very much for having me
Kepler exoplanets NASA is on a quest to
find evidence of life beyond Earth do
not doubt it is one of the grand
questions is there anybody out there one
of the grand questions that drives
strategic planning for NASA astrophysics
right there are three paths that we can
take to get us there to find evidence of
life beyond Earth one is solar system
exploration this beautiful image of the
plumes of Enceladus the landscapes of
Mars that curiosity shows us compels us
to explore the solar system and see if
there is life lurking in any of these
nooks and crannies in the subterranean
cave on Mars in the subsurface ocean on
Europa or Enceladus whether or not we
find life maybe we’ll find death in
fossils in extinction regardless the
implications are profound
the second path is the SETI search ears
to the universe listening searching for
signals that are not astronomical as we
understand them signals that are big
surprises that might be due to
technology might be due to intelligent
life depicted by the Allen telescope
array up in Northern California but
there’s a third path and that’s looking
for the cradles of life as we know it
looking for planets like Earth that
could Harbor surface liquid water and
could give rise to life as we understand
it here on earth carbon-based life
well this path was made possible twenty
years ago with the first discovery of an
exoplanet orbiting a normal main
sequence kind of star like our Sun and I
just happened to be at that conference I
was a young graduate student at the time
and
is a conference on stars not planets
that field of study didn’t exist at all
it was cool stars stellar systems in the
Sun no exoplanet in the title right in
fact that talk wasn’t even on the agenda
but next thing we knew Michelle my your
Estrella Swiss astronomer went up to the
stage cameras were there and announced
the discovery of 51 peg B and it blew
our mind it was unlike anything we
understood right we understood the solar
system close to the star you’ve got the
small rocky planets further out you’ve
got the ice and gas giants right that’s
how solar systems are supposed to form
that’s how they’re supposed to lay out
our own solar system says it is so and
yet here we had a planet discovery a
planet almost as large as Jupiter with a
four-day orbital period around its star
blasted by stellar radiation theorists
did not know how to make a planet like
that and that’s basically how the field
of exoplanets has been ever since we
have uncovered an unparalleled diversity
of worlds but what we want to look for
what NASA wants to look for our worlds
not like this gas giant blasted by
stellar irradiation where surface liquid
water cannot exist we’re looking for the
cradles of life and so we fast forward
to march of 2009 3 2 engine start 1 0
went left
the Delta 2 rocket with a search for
planets suddenly like our Kepler NASA’s
first mission capable of detecting
potentially habitable earth-sized
planets a Space Telescope launched into
orbit about the Sun pointed toward one
field of view about the size of my hand
near the plane of the Milky Way galaxy
focusing on about a hundred and fifty
thousand stars they’re measuring their
brightnesses with very high precision
because for some of those systems
planets that are in orbit about the star
will pass directly between the disk of
the star and the telescope and the
telescope will perceive the presence of
that planet as a momentary dimming of
light a dimming of light that repeats
once every orbital cycle this is
Kepler’s first light image every tiny
speck you see every tiny pinpoint on
that image as a star in this one
handprint on the sky in the
constellation of Cygnus and Lyra there
are four and a half million stars in
this one footprint Kepler observed 150
thousand of them the precision that’s
required to see an earth-sized planet
transit across the disk of a sun-like
star can be described with the following
thought experiment
imagine the tallest skyscraper in New
York City maybe something like 80
storeys high I don’t even know how tall
the tile highest of skyscrapers in New
York City anymore but let’s pretend it’s
about 80 stories high and it’s it’s
occupied every single room is occupied
in it’s night time all the windows are
open every light is on and one person in
that building goes to the window and
lowers the blinds by about a centimeter
that’s the precision that’s required to
see this tiny diminution of light caused
by an earth so what I’d like to do is
give you kind of a big picture of what
exoplanets have been discovered since
that historic meeting in 1995 in
Florence Italy where the first exoplanet
was announced and I’m going to do that
with a scatter
Kepler doesn’t take beautiful pictures
of planets right we don’t find planets
by pointing our telescope up into the
sky and saying aha
there’s one we must infer their
existence by measuring some property of
the star itself okay so in this scatter
plot it’s going to be radius or diameter
of the planet versus orbital period okay
and we’re going to animate this plot
adding discoveries as they’re made and
I’m going to first show you the
discoveries that have been made by every
other team around the world except
Kepler there will be some horizontal
there will be some horizontal lines to
give you some reference earth-sized has
a horizontal line neptune-sized and
jupiter-sized they’re color-coded by the
technique that was used to find them but
I want you to just get a general feel
for the patterns that are emerging
2005/2006
earth is there for reference at the
orbital period and size 2011-12 we start
to see some patterns there is a swarm of
blue points up there in the left another
larger swarm of pink points in the upper
right for reference Jupiter would have
an orbital period of just over 4,000
days so 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 up to
the line that is Jupiter and you see we
have found some Jupiter analogues out
there in the distant environs of a solar
system so this is what the scene looked
looks like barring kepler right over 85%
of those discoveries are planned its
larger than Neptune okay
now I’m going to show you what Kepler
has added after analyzing four years of
its data through this technique of
transit photometry measuring brightness
Kepler has found over 4200 transiting
objects 90% of which or more are going
to be bona fide exoplanets planets
orbiting other stars in our galaxy
see our blinders have been lifted to
small planets the landscape has changed
dramatically right now more than 85% of
the known planets or the planets known
to humanity are smaller than Neptune
instead of larger which just goes to
show that it our technology we were
hampered by our technology every time
you build a new piece of technology you
learn a tremendous amount moreover you
can see that there are some yellow
points kissing that Earth locust at one
earth diameter and 365 day orbital
periods so Kepler has begun to find
earth true earth analogs the big
question that Kepler set out to answer
is what fraction of stars in our galaxy
harbours potentially habitable
earth-sized planets we want to get a
feeling for the for the ubiquity of
planets like Earth these cradles of life
these potential cradles of life are
Earth’s common are they are they
prevalent in our galaxy or is our own
earth somehow special right so what have
we learned from Kepler from Kepler we
can now with this large sample of
planets we can ask the question okay
what is the population of planets out
there what is the dire their diversity
what is the population how far do I have
to go out into the galaxy before I
happen upon a potentially habitable
earth-sized planet you can ask this
question because of Kepler and so the
answer is if we were to take our own
galaxy and we were to shrink it down to
the size of the continental United
States and you stand on one coast maybe
here in Washington DC you look out over
the continent and you ask yourself how
far is the nearest potentially habitable
earth-sized planet the answer is about a
stroll across the National Mall between
about the Capitol building and the
Lincoln Memorial or about 15 light years
which
which is very close given the fact that
the galaxies a hundred thousand
light-years across
okay so what’s next so we’re kind of
learning that earth-like planets are
pretty common that’s good that means
that exploration finding evidence of
life following this path has great
potential so what’s next well here on
the left I’m showing you an image
actually taken of Venus transiting our
own Sun this is an actual image of a
planet in our own solar system
transiting across the surface of our Sun
the Hinode spacecraft took this image
and I’m showing it to you because I want
you to see the very thin layer of orange
hugging that planet do you see that
that’s the Venusian atmosphere it’s very
thin it’s only five kilometers thick I
think that’s about the scale height we
call it very thin in terms of area if
you collected that whole area it’s only
one two hundred three hundred the area
of the disk itself all right so it’s
very very thin but here’s the thing
the sunlight shining on the planet from
behind is filtering through that
atmosphere that’s hugging it right and
when it does that the atmosphere itself
is leaving a fingerprint on that light
if I’m on the other side I can collect
that light I can spread it out into a
spectrum I inspect it and I can I can
disentangle the fingerprint that that
atmosphere left on the light which means
I may have the ability with enough
sensitivity to disentangle what that
atmosphere was made of on the right hand
side of this image is cyanobacteria
it’s like algae and this microscopic
picture of cyanobacteria was caught in
the act of metabolizing and producing a
tiny burp of oxygen the very process
which created the oxygen on our own
planet and gave rise to more complex
life-forms okay so that’s the kind of
signature that we would want to see by
catching the light filtering through the
atmosphere that’s called transmission
now that’s very tough but the James Webb
Space Telescope is going to do that very
thing for maybe larger planets more like
mini Neptune’s another technique that
I’m looking forward to is imaging what
we really want talking about big dreams
what we really want is to catch the
light reflecting off of the surface of a
planet here you’ve got the blue marble
on the left an iconic image taken by the
Apollo astronauts leaving Earth on the
way to the moon that’s an image that was
taken from 22,000 miles away the first
full disk image of our planet and you
can see the reflected light the light
from the Sun that’s reflecting off the
planet and into the camera of the Apollo
astronaut right on the right hand side
it’s the pale blue dot of Earth taken by
this Cassini spacecraft from 900 million
miles away it’s unresolved you don’t see
the surface features right but the
information is there if you look at the
Apollo image the way light reflects off
of every element of that disc is
different right the way it reflects off
ocean is different than the way it
reflects off land which is different
than the way it reflects off forests and
those features those peculiarities will
be present in the light even if it’s
unresolved it will be present in the
light if we can take it with enough
sensitivity we can spread it out into a
rainbow and we can see the indications
of those surface features it’s tough
these planets are faint 10 billion times
fainter than the star they orbit we are
overwhelmed by the glare of the parent
star how are we going to see this faint
little smudge that is an earth-like
planet potentially habitable earth-like
planet well the way that we think about
doing it
it’s kind of like the way I would see
you out here in the audience I’d have to
put my thumb over these lights oh wow
that works right we block out the light
of the parent star the problem is you
know that the little planet is like a
little Matt orbiting a big search light
or a spotlight right a lighthouse so I
take my thumb and I cover it and then
maybe I can see the net flying next to
it but light bends it bends around
obstacles it still kind of introduces
this diffraction this interference so I
have to be careful about the way that I
design my thumb you know I need to be
kind of fancy about it but that kind of
technology is being developed today as
we speak and here’s a little clip
showing some of that technology
happening at JPL this is an animation of
what the thumb would look like you
launch a system a Space Telescope that
has connected to it a sunflower the
petals that you see unfurling are a star
shade that’s the thumb that you hold up
you fly it out some thousands of
kilometres away and you use it to
perfectly block the glare from the star
thereby revealing the faint Nets
orbiting the lighthouse all right so
I’ll end with this image 500 light-years
away there is a star called kepler-186
in the constellation of Cygnus that
cygnus lyra region it’s a red star a
star that’s cooler than our own Sun and
Kepler has found five planets so far
orbiting that star the fifth planet out
at an orbital period of about 192 days
is within the uncertainty the same size
as the earth to within 10% so what
you’re seeing here is not an image of
that planet remember Kepler does not
take pictures of planets it infers its
existence and so we have to put a little
bit of our imagination into this we tell
everything that we know to the artist
and let him bring this
old to life but I ask myself the
question you know if you have water
you’re likely to have at least simple
life form simple microbes maybe
single-celled things how does life begin
does it begin with a with a spark a
sputter a smolder does it evolve slowly
or is it that when you have simple
celled organisms microorganisms when
they take hold does life begin by
igniting transforming the global
landscape we don’t know which it is or
if it’s someplace in between but what I
know is we creatures we are these
creatures these portals to the universe
we are the universe becomes self-aware
right our bodies are these portals to
the universe observing itself and as
such by our self-awareness by DeVille by
definition that means that by necessity
we reach out so when we do find a planet
that harbours life that is a habitable
environment that has bio signatures and
this is possible within the next one or
two generations maybe two or three by
necessity we are going to want to reach
out and I wonder what potential will be
unlocked when we go what potential will
be unlocked when we connect thank you
very much
you
Oh
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