Alessandra Diaz                                                                                           Earth Science IH

Current Event #1: “Kepler Data”                                                             February 28, 2014

“From Kepler Data, Astronomers Find Galaxy Filled With More but Smaller Worlds”

Overbye, Dennis. "From Kepler Data, Astronomers Find Galaxy Filled With More but Smaller Worlds." The New York Times. The New York Times, 26 Feb. 2014. Web. 28 Feb. 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/27/science/space/diving-into-kepler-data-astronomers-discover-hundreds-of-planets.html?ref=science>.

            As any environmental activist will openly argue, the Earth is ever so nearing its final expiration date for human existence here. As global warming increases at startling rates, scientists have often considered the possibility that our harming Earth will lead to the need to find another habitable planet. Within our solar system, all planets, other than our own, have been deemed inhabitable, due to reasons of extreme temperatures, or the sheer fact that their densities are so low that it is impossible to stand on them. As a response to our search for a new home, NASA launched its Kepler spacecraft, designed especially to search for planets orbiting stars, using the blink method. This method detects the dimming of a star’s light as planets pass by them, thus giving scientists the ability to detect orbiting planets, their sizes, and the orbits themselves. However, this blink method often leads to false positives, due to confusion with surrounding binary stars. Also, this method lacks the ability to calculate such data as composition and mass, and thus density. Although Kepler’s planet hunt failed a year ago, the spacecraft’s astronomers are still analyzing the vast archived data. During this process, they verified that 715 more planets that orbit stars exist, divided among 305 stars. Such an amount of these planets, called exoplanets, has never been discovered in one day, leaving the total of 1,700 exoplanets. Of the 3,601 of Kepler’s planet contenders, these exoplanets were chosen by a statistical method called verification by multiplicity. This technique lessens the necessity for outside telescopic data to verify planets in groups. This method only works with systems of multiple planets, which makes up about forty percent of Kepler’s candidates. Around ninety-five percent of these new exoplanets are two to four times larger than Earth, a size range that is non-existent in our solar system. As planets of such a size had not been under our observation prior to these discoveries, scientists have no data suggesting their composition. Of these newfound exoplanets, four orbit in the “habitable zones” of small stars, approximately close in size to the Sun, suggesting that temperatures may easily resemble those on Earth, thus moderate enough for water. These four planets bring great hope for a habitable home for the life that we are familiar with. As astronomers have only reached the halfway point of Kepler’s data, hopes are high for finding planets that may possibly be our next home.

            If the rate of global warming increases at its current rate, the need for a new habitable planet may come sooner than expected. As such, a need for a home with Earth-like qualities is a necessity. Having only looked through two years of Kepler’s data, the verification of four planets with Earth-like temperatures, suggesting the possibility of water there. As the method by which these planets were found cannot measure composition or mass, only through further data collection will we be able to tell if these planets as gassy, like Neptune, or have extremely low densities, like Saturn. As there is such a difference of composition and density based on size in our solar system, we have no way of finding any suggestion as to what these planets’ qualities may be, as they fall within our solar system’s size gap. However, if further observation shows properties in our favor, our society may be on its way to calling a new planet “home.” With two more years of Kepler’s data to look through, our society looks forward to a successful outcome for our search for a new habitable planet.

            I thought the author did a great job of creating a well-flowing piece that clearly demonstrated the sequence of events that led to the discoveries made. As some of the terms used would be unfamiliar to the majority of the article’s readers, I found that the author’s explanation of methods used in the exoplanets’ discoveries was explained in a simple manner that easily demonstrated how it was used and then how that led to the outcome. Most of all, I was very pleased by the way in which the author explained the bigger picture, which, for me, was the pinnacle of the article. However, I was very fascinated by these planets’ similarities to Earth and wished to read more about how scientists planned to go about discovering these planets’ densities, compositions, gravities, and much more. Also, I would have like to have known if any of the four new planets mentioned had an orbit similar to that of Earth. This article could be improved slightly by explaining the ways in which astronomers plan to further observe these planets. Additionally, as the probability of these planets being the same distance from their corresponding stars as Earth is to the Sun in small, knowing the differences and thus their impacts on the possibility of life there would have made the reader more conscientious about the overall impact of these discoveries to their own lives as they know it.