Exoplanets

A talk I gave to a group of Indian school kids about NASA exoplanet experiments. This public talk level.

Transcript

1. Tom Barclay NASA Ames Research Center January 11, 2017 Exoplanet Discovery
5. Detecting Planets
6. The amount of dimming tells us the size of the exoplanet. The time it takes to complete an orbit tells us how far away it is from the star.
7. NASA’s Kepler Mission: What fraction of stars in our galaxy harbor potentially habitable, earth-size planets?
8. Size Energy
9. * *
10. * * March 6, 2009
11. Exoplanet Detections, 1995-2009 Radius Relative to Earth Orbital Period in days Earth Jupiter
12. Coughlin et al. 2015 Exoplanet Detections, 1995-2015 Radius Relative to Earth Orbital Period in days
13. A. Kepler has told us that planets are everywhere. B. Finding small planets on long orbital periods is hard D. We can combine observations, theory and modern statistics.
14. 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.5-0.7 0.7 - 1 1 – 1.4 1.4 - 2 2 – 2.8 2.8 - 4 4 – 5.7 5.7 - 8 8 - 11 11 - 16 16 - 23 Planet Size (Earth=1) Fraction Observed Sizes not seen in our Solar System 55 165 381 520 567 268 94 54 53 39 17
15. 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 Sizes not seen in our Solar System 1 – 1.4 1.4 - 2 2 – 2.8 2.8 - 4 4 – 5.7 5.7 - 8 8 - 11 11 - 16 16 - 23 Planet Size (Earth=1) Average Number of Planets per Star
16. Confirmed Habitable Zone Planets New validations from Morton et al. 2016 ApJ 822 86
18. Spitzer Kepler JWST1 TESS Missions WFIRST-AFTA NASA Missions 1 NASA / ESA Partnership Hubble1 Habitable Exoplanet Imager L-UV-OIR Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer NN-EXPLORE W. M. Keck Observatory New Worlds Telescope
19. Kepler Search Space: 3000 light-years 0.25% of the sky TESS Search Space: 200 light-years All-sky
22. The Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd/Capitol Records Light from Star
23. Voyager’s picture of Earth, the Pale Blue Dot Spectrum of the reflected light reveals a living world.
24. Earth’s Spectral Fingerprints are Unique Credit: Sky & Telescope 10/2015; reproduced from Robinson & Meadows Vegetation
28. Spitzer Kepler JWST1 TESS Missions WFIRST-AFTA NASA Missions 1 NASA / ESA Partnership Hubble1 Habitable Exoplanet Imager L-UV-OIR Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer NN-EXPLORE W. M. Keck Observatory New Worlds Telescope
29. Large Space Telescope Required
30. Coronagraph Technology
31. Star ShadeTechnology
32. “Is there life on other worlds? For the first time in human history, we have finally been able to embark on the systematic, scientific pursuit of an answer.” NASA 30-Year Roadmap for Astrophysics
33. Where will exploration take us in 100 years? 33 Exoplanet Travel Bureau