"We are looking for very subtle effects. We needed high quality measurements of stellar brightnesses, accurate to a few parts per million," said team member David Latham of the CfA.

"This was only possible because of the exquisite data NASA is collecting with the Kepler spacecraft," added lead author Simchon Faigler of Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Although Kepler was designed to find transiting planets, this planet was not identified using the transit method. Instead, it was discovered using a technique first proposed by Avi Loeb of the CfA and his colleague Scott Gaudi (now at Ohio State University) in 2003. (Coincidentally, they developed their theory while visiting the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein once worked.)

The new method looks for three small effects that occur simultaneously as a planet orbits the star. Einstein's "beaming" effect causes the star to brighten as it moves toward us, tugged by the planet, and dim as it moves away. The brightening results from photons "piling up" in energy, as well as light getting focused in the direction of the star's motion due to relativistic effects.

"This is the first time that this aspect of Einstein's theory of relativity has been used to discover a planet," said co-author Tsevi Mazeh of Tel Aviv University.

The team also looked for signs that the star was stretched into a football shape by gravitational tides from the orbiting planet. The star would appear brighter when we observe the "football" from the side, due to more visible surface area, and fainter when viewed end-on. The third small effect was due to starlight reflected by the planet itself.

Once the new planet was identified, it was confirmed by Latham using radial velocity observations gathered by the TRES spectrograph at Whipple Observatory in Arizona, and by Lev Tal-Or (Tel Aviv University) using the SOPHIE spectrograph at the Haute-Provence Observatory in France. A closer look at the Kepler data also showed that the planet transits its star, providing additional confirmation.

"Einstein's planet," formally known as Kepler-76b, is a "hot Jupiter" that orbits its star every 1.5 days. Its diameter is about 25 percent larger than Jupiter and it weighs twice as much. It orbits a type F star located about 2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

The planet is tidally locked to its star, always showing the same face to it, just as the Moon is tidally locked to Earth. As a result, Kepler-76b broils at a temperature of about 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit.

Interestingly, the team found strong evidence that the planet has extremely fast jet-stream winds that carry the heat around it. As a result, the hottest point on Kepler-76b isn't the substellar point ("high noon") but a location offset by about 10,000 miles.

This effect has only been observed once before, on HD 189733b, and only in infrared light with the Spitzer Space Telescope. This is the first time optical observations have shown evidence of alien jet stream winds at work.

Although the new method can't find Earth-sized worlds using current technology, it offers astronomers a unique discovery opportunity. Unlike radial velocity searches, it doesn't require high-precision spectra. Unlike transits, it doesn't require a precise alignment of planet and star as seen from Earth.

"Each planet-hunting technique has its strengths and weaknesses. And each novel technique we add to the arsenal allows us to probe planets in new regimes," said CfA's Avi Loeb.

Kepler-76b was identified by the BEER algorithm, whose acronym stands for relativistic BEaming, Ellipsoidal, and Reflection/emission modulations. BEER was developed by Professor Tsevi Mazeh and his student, Simchon Faigler, at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

The paper announcing this discovery has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is available online.

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:29:39 AEST Moffett Field CA (SPX) May 15, 2013 - The Kepler mission team reported Wednesdau that Kepler spacecraft is once again in safe mode. As was the case earlier this month, this was a Thruster-Controlled Safe Mode.

The root cause is not yet known, however the proximate cause appears to be an attitude error. The spacecraft was oriented with the solar panels facing the sun, slowly spinning about the sun-line. The communication link comes and goes as the spacecraft spins.

We attempted to return to reaction wheel control as the spacecraft rotated into communication, and commanded a stop rotation. Initially, it appeared that all three wheels responded and that rotation had been successfully stopped, but reaction wheel 4 remained at full torque while the spin rate dropped to zero.

This is a clear indication that there has been an internal failure within the reaction wheel, likely a structural failure of the wheel bearing. The spacecraft was then transitioned back to Thruster-Controlled Safe Mode.

An Anomaly Review Board concurred that the data appear to unambiguously indicate a wheel 4 failure, and that the team's priority is to complete preparations to enter Point Rest State.

Point Rest State is a loosely-pointed, thruster-controlled state that minimizes fuels usage while providing a continuous X-band communication downlink. The software to execute that state was loaded to the spacecraft last week, and last night the team completed the upload of the parameters the software will use.

The spacecraft is stable and safe, if still burning fuel. Our fuel budget is sufficient that we can take due caution while we finish our planning. In its current mode, our fuel will last for several months. Point Rest State would extend that period to years.

We have requested and received additional NASA Deep Space Network communication coverage, and this morning the Anomaly Review Board approved the transition to Point Rest State later today.

Because this is a new operating mode of the spacecraft, the team will closely monitor the spacecraft, but no other immediate actions are planned. We will take the next several days and weeks to assess our options and develop new command products. These options are likely to include steps to attempt to recover wheel functionality and to investigate the utility of a hybrid mode, using both wheels and thrusters.

With the failure of a second reaction wheel, it's unlikely that the spacecraft will be able to return to the high pointing accuracy that enables its high-precision photometry. However, no decision has been made to end data collection.

Kepler had successfully completed its primary three-and-a-half year mission and entered an extended mission phase in November 2012.

Even if data collection were to end, the mission has substantial quantities of data on the ground yet to be fully analyzed, and the string of scientific discoveries is expected to continue for years to come.

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:29:39 AEST Pasadena CA (JPL) May 14, 2013 - Gone are the days of being able to count the number of known planets on your fingers. Today, there are more than 800 confirmed exoplanets -- planets that orbit stars beyond our Sun -- and more than 2,700 other candidates. What are these exotic planets made of? Unfortunately, you cannot stack them in a jar like marbles and take a closer look. Instead, researchers are coming up with advanced techniques for probing the planets' makeup.

One breakthrough to come in recent years is direct imaging of exoplanets. Ground-based telescopes have begun taking infrared pictures of the planets posing near their stars in family portraits. But to astronomers, a picture is worth even more than a thousand words if its light can be broken apart into a rainbow of different wavelengths.

Those wishes are coming true as researchers are beginning to install infrared cameras on ground-based telescopes equipped with spectrographs. Spectrographs are instruments that spread an object's light apart, revealing signatures of molecules. Project 1640, partly funded by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., recently accomplished this goal using the Palomar Observatory near San Diego.

"In just one hour, we were able to get precise composition information about four planets around one overwhelmingly bright star," said Gautam Vasisht of JPL, co-author of the new study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal [http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/768/1/24]. "The star is a hundred thousand times as bright as the planets, so we've developed ways to remove that starlight and isolate the extremely faint light of the planets."

Along with ground-based infrared imaging, other strategies for combing through the atmospheres of giant planets are being actively pursued as well. For example, NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes monitor planets as they cross in front of their stars, and then disappear behind. NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will use a comparable strategy to study the atmospheres of planets only slightly larger than Earth.

In the new study, the researchers examined HR 8799, a large star orbited by at least four known giant, red planets. Three of the planets were among the first ever directly imaged around a star, thanks to observations from the Gemini and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in 2008. The fourth planet, the closest to the star and the hardest to see, was revealed in images taken by the Keck telescope in 2010.

That alone was a tremendous feat considering that all planet discoveries up until then had been made through indirect means, for example by looking for the wobble of a star induced by the tug of planets.

Those images weren't enough, however, to reveal any information about the planets' chemical composition. That's where spectrographs are needed -- to expose the "fingerprints" of molecules in a planet's atmosphere. Capturing a distant world's spectrum requires gathering even more planet light, and that means further blocking the glare of the star.

Project 1640 accomplished this with a collection of instruments, which the team installs on the ground-based telescopes each time they go on "observing runs."

The instrument suite includes a coronagraph to mask out the starlight; an advanced adaptive optics system, which removes the blur of our moving atmosphere by making millions of tiny adjustments to two deformable telescope mirrors; an imaging spectrograph that records 30 images in a rainbow of infrared colors simultaneously; and a state-of-the-art wave front sensor that further adjusts the mirrors to compensate for scattered starlight.

"It's like taking a single picture of the Empire State Building from an airplane that reveals a bump on the sidewalk next to it that is as high as an ant," said Ben R. Oppenheimer, lead author of the new study and associate curator and chair of the Astrophysics Department at the American Museum of Natural History, N.Y., N.Y.

Their results revealed that all four planets, though nearly the same in temperature, have different compositions. Some, unexpectedly, do not have methane in them, and there may be hints of ammonia or other compounds that would also be surprising. Further theoretical modeling will help to understand the chemistry of these planets.

Meanwhile, the quest to obtain more and better spectra of exoplanets continues. Other researchers have used the Keck telescope and the Large Binocular Telescope near Tucson, Ariz., to study the emission of individual planets in the HR 8799 system.

In addition to the HR 8799 system, only two others have yielded images of exoplanets. The next step is to find more planets ripe for giving up their chemical secrets. Several ground-based telescopes are being prepared for the hunt, including Keck, Gemini, Palomar and Japan's Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Ideally, the researchers want to find young planets that still have enough heat left over from their formation, and thus more infrared light for the spectrographs to see. They also want to find planets located far from their stars, and out of the blinding starlight.

NASA's infrared Spitzer and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) missions, and its ultraviolet Galaxy Evolution Explorer, now led by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, have helped identify candidate young stars that may host planets meeting these criteria.

"We're looking for super-Jupiter planets located faraway from their star," said Vasisht. "As our technique develops, we hope to be able to acquire molecular compositions of smaller, and slightly older, gas planets."

Still lower-mass planets, down to the size of Saturn, will be targets for imaging studies by the James Webb Space Telescope.

"Rocky Earth-like planets are too small and close to their stars for the current technology, or even for James Webb to detect. The feat of cracking the chemical compositions of true Earth analogs will come from a future space mission such as the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder," said Charles Beichman, a co-author of the P1640 result and executive director of NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech.

Though the larger, gas planets are not hospitable to life, the current studies are teaching astronomers how the smaller, rocky ones form.

"The outer giant planets dictate the fate of rocky ones like Earth. Giant planets can migrate in toward a star, and in the process, tug the smaller, rocky planets around or even kick them out of the system. We're looking at hot Jupiters before they migrate in, and hope to understand more about how and when they might influence the destiny of the rocky, inner planets," said Vasisht.

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:29:39 AEST Moffett Field CA (SPX) May 15, 2013 - For centuries, humans have pondered what life on other planets beyond our solar system might be like. With the launch of the Kepler spacecraft in 2009 we now have evidence for the widespread existence of such planets.

Kepler's discovery of hundreds of planet candidates around other stars has inspired a new book that combines both science and science fiction: "A Kepler's Dozen: Thirteen Stories about Distant Worlds that Really Exist."

This anthology is co-edited by David Lee Summers (author of "The Pirates of Sufiro" and editor of "Space Pirates") and Dr. Steve Howell, Kepler Project Scientist.

Each individual story in this book is prefaced by actual scientific data for a particular planet and its host star, based on Kepler discoveries and follow-up.

This gives the reader a feel for the type of sun and planets that exist in these alien solar systems. For example, a story titled "A Mango and Two Peanuts" deals with Kepler 37, a star just slightly cooler and less massive than our own Sun, now identified as having three planets in orbit around it, all smaller than Earth.

The Kepler satellite, in orbit around the Sun, stares at a region of the northern hemisphere sky sandwiched between the bright stars Vega and Deneb. Attached to the telescope is the largest imaging camera ever flown into space - 16 million pixels - the only instrument on the telescope and the one used to monitor all the stars in its search for planets.

Planets are detected if they pass in front of their parent sun, causing a very slight dip in the star's brightness. When this dip repeats periodically, it reveals the presence of a possible planet, the length of the plant's "year", and other information.

The location of the 13 stars featured in this book are marked in the Kepler field, shown over Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) in Figure 2, and numbered using astronomical convention.

The planets themselves are named after their host star followed by a lower case letter. For example, the first planet orbiting the star named Kepler 17 would be called Kepler 17b. The next would normally be Kepler 17c and so on. Kepler 17a is the star itself, and the "a" is simply not used.

To date, the Kepler satellite has identified a remarkable 2,500 candidate planets around other stars: however, confirmation of their existence requires further observations from ground-based telescopes.

All 13 extrasolar planets featured in this book have been observed from KPNO at either the Mayall 4-meter telescope (seen in Fig. 2) or the WIYN 3.5-meter.

Such follow-up observations include gathering spectra of these stars, which tell astronomers far more about the system. (The star field shown in Fig. 2 was taken with a diffraction grating which shows the spectra, or rainbow, of the brighter stars.)

"A Kepler's Dozen: Thirteen Stories about Distant Worlds that Really Exist"

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:29:39 AEST Tel Aviv, Israel (SPX) May 15, 2013 - For the past two years, Professor Tsevi Mazeh and his PhD student, Simchon Faigler, from the School of Physics and Astronomy at TAU, have been searching for planets around other stars using a novel detection method. Their technique is based on identifying three very small effects that occur simultaneously as a planet orbits a star.

The first effect is Einstein's relativistic "beaming" effect that causes a star to brighten and dim as it is tugged back and forth by an orbiting planet. Detection of planets via the beaming effect was predicted in 2003 by Prof. Avi Loeb, Harvard University and Sackler Professor by Special Appointment at Tel Aviv University, and Prof. Scott Gaudi (now at Ohio State University).

The second effect that the Faigler-Mazeh method looks for is the stretching of a star into a football shape by the gravitational tides raised by an orbiting planet. Such distorted star appears brighter when observed from the side, due to the larger visible surface area, and fainter when viewed end-on. The third small effect is due to starlight reflected by the planet itself.

Because the brightness variations are extremely small (on the order of one part in ten-thousand), these effects can be detected only with accurate data obtained by space missions.

The Tel Aviv team, which is supported by a European Research Council Advanced Grant, analyzed data for more than one hundred thousand stars obtained with the NASA space mission Kepler, looking for the beaming and the two other modulations.

After discovering a planet candidate, they collaborate with Dr. David Latham from the CfA and his team, which includes Dr. Lars Buchhave, to observe the candidate from the ground for additional spectroscopic confirmation.

On May 3rd 2012 Faigler and Mazeh noticed the three effects in one of the stars observed by Kepler. Ground-based observations to confirm the planet detection were performed by Latham and his team at the Whipple Observatory in Arizona, and by Lev Tal-Or, another PhD student from Tel Aviv, at the Haute-Provence Observatory in France. Both telescopes confirmed unequivocally the existence of the planet, now called Kepler-76b.

Last week, Faigler, Tal-Or, Mazeh, Latham and Buchhave, announced the discovery in a paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal [http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.6841].

Kepler-76b is in the constellation Cygnus at a distance of about 2,000 light-years. The planet, with a mass of twice the mass of Jupiter, orbits its parent star very closely, with a period of one and a half days. The proximity of the star probably causes the planet to be tidally locked, so that the same side of the planet faces the star at all times. That part of the planet is heated by stellar radiation to a temperature of about 3,500 degrees F.

While examining carefully the stellar brightness, the team found strong evidence that the heat absorbed by the planetary atmosphere is carried around the planet by jet stream winds for about 10,000 miles, a substantial fraction of the planetary circumference.

Such an effect has been observed before only in the infrared with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. This is the first time a wind effect has been observed in the optical band. The study of such a jet is extremely important for understanding how the planetary atmosphere responds to intense stellar heating.

All of the planets found so far by the NASA Kepler mission were discovered because they transit (eclipse) their parent stars. What is special about the TAU new technique is that it can find even non-transiting planets. "The irony is that Kepler-76b is in fact transiting the edge of its parent star," says Faigler. "This is why originally it was misclassified as an eclipsing binary. Only through detection of the three small effects were we able to determine that it is actually a planet."

"This is the first time that this aspect of Einstein's Theory of Relativity has been used to discover a planet", says Professor Mazeh, who is a participating scientist in the NASA Kepler mission.

"We have been searching for this elusive effect for more than two years, and we finally found a planet! It is amazing that already a decade ago Loeb and Gaudi foresaw this happening. Shay Zucker of TAU, a former student of mine, called my attention to this prediction.

"At first, I did not believe it is possible, but I slowly got into it. Luckily, we got the support of the European Research Council to carry this project forward, and we collaborated with Dave Latham who believed in this project and kept following the false candidates that Simchon and I were giving him. In the end we found Kepler-76b! It is a dream come true."

"The discovery proves the feasibility of the method," says Faigler. "We hope to find more planets like Kepler-76b using the same technique. This is possible only because of the exquisite data NASA is collecting with the Kepler spacecraft for more than 150,000 stars."

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:29:39 AEST Baltimore MD (SPX) May 13, 2013 - NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found the building blocks for Earth-sized planets in an unlikely place-- the atmospheres of a pair of burned-out stars called white dwarfs.

These dead stars are located 150 light-years from Earth in a relatively young star cluster, Hyades, in the constellation Taurus. The star cluster is only 625 million years old. The white dwarfs are being polluted by asteroid-like debris falling onto them.

Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph observed silicon and only low levels of carbon in the white dwarfs' atmospheres. Silicon is a major ingredient of the rocky material that constitutes Earth and other solid planets in our solar system. Carbon, which helps determine properties and origin of planetary debris, generally is depleted or absent in rocky, Earth-like material.

"We have identified chemical evidence for the building blocks of rocky planets," said Jay Farihi of the University of Cambridge in England. He is lead author of a new study appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"When these stars were born, they built planets, and there's a good chance they currently retain some of them. The material we are seeing is evidence of this. The debris is at least as rocky as the most primitive terrestrial bodies in our solar system."

This discovery suggests rocky planet assembly is common around stars, and it offers insight into what will happen in our own solar system when our sun burns out 5 billion years from now.

Farihi's research suggests asteroids less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide probably were torn apart by the white dwarfs' strong gravitational forces. Asteroids are thought to consist of the same materials that form terrestrial planets, and seeing evidence of asteroids points to the possibility of Earth-sized planets in the same system.

The pulverized material may have been pulled into a ring around the stars and eventually funneled onto the dead stars. The silicon may have come from asteroids that were shredded by the white dwarfs' gravity when they veered too close to the dead stars.

"It's difficult to imagine another mechanism than gravity that causes material to get close enough to rain down onto the star," Farihi said.

By the same token, when our sun burns out, the balance of gravitational forces between the sun and Jupiter will change, disrupting the main asteroid belt. Asteroids that veer too close to the sun will be broken up, and the debris could be pulled into a ring around the dead sun.

According to Farihi, using Hubble to analyze the atmospheres of white dwarfs is the best method for finding the signatures of solid planet chemistry and determining their composition.

"Normally, white dwarfs are like blank pieces of paper, containing only the light elements hydrogen and helium,"Farihi said. "Heavy elements like silicon and carbon sink to the core. The one thing the white dwarf pollution technique gives us that we just won't get with any other planet-detection technique is the chemistry of solid planets."

The two "polluted" Hyades white dwarfs are part of the team's search of planetary debris around more than 100 white dwarfs, led by Boris Gansicke of the University of Warwick in England.

Team member Detlev Koester of the University of Kiel in Germany is using sophisticated computer models of white dwarf atmospheres to determine the abundances of various elements that can be traced to planets in the Hubble spectrograph data.

Fahiri's team plans to analyze more white dwarfs using the same technique to identify not only the rocks' composition, but also their parent bodies.

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:29:39 AEST Moffett Field CA (SPX) May 07, 2013 - At the 2012 Astrobiology Science Conference, Astrobiology Magazine hosted a plenary session titled: "Expanding the Habitable Zone: The Hunt for Exoplanets Now and Into the Future." Originally formulated as part of our "Great Debate" series, this panel of exoplanet hunters and thinkers held a lively discussion about some of the most important issues facing the search for and understanding of alien worlds orbiting far-distant stars.

David Grinspoon: Let's open let's open this up to the audience.

Audience: What is the relationship now and in the future with exoplanet hunters and the SETI Institute?

Eric Ford: The SETI Institute is a private foundation that does what it wants to do. And NASA and NSF funds various things they want to do and at times they collaborate. There are many people who work at the SETI Institute who are part of the NASA/Kepler science team. And there are also parts that are independent. So its a marriage of convenience when they have common goals.

David Grinspoon: That's the sort of organizational relationship. But I will say SETI Institute obviously is paying a lot of attention to what the exoplanet people are discovering. And in fact there's a new program that SETI Institute has of targeting stars now that have known exoplanets. So they're paying close attention and they're eagerly using the data that comes in to help to find places to target their searches.

Audience: Linda Billings, I am with the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University in Washington and working on communication research for the Astrobiology program. My expertise is communication, not biology or chemistry or physics or astronomy.

And I was just furiously scribbling notes in this part three of your discussion. You all here and elsewhere at the conference and other sessions that I've been attending have been talking about how important it is to understand and explain the context for the data that you're examining.

And this is an issue in speaking with an non-expert audiences. And I still cringe every time I hear somebody say "the public" because there is no such thing as "the public" to a social scientist. There are many many different kinds of publics that we need to be aware of that all the times.

Sara has very politely alluded to the individualist nature of some of the leading exoplanet searchers and how this may add to confusion about communication. Part of the context in explaining any kind of news is the research that you have built on in making your discoveries, in making your advances.

And it's not peculiar to exoplanets searches at all, I think that's a problem. Also, whether we like it or not, we have to accept that there's a process for getting out news. Whether you're a government agency or university or an independent research institution.

Where things get not more and more clear as an announcement works its way up the ladder of approval, but more and more fuzzy. And I have certainly observed this at NASA. And so you're always going to have headlines. You know the goal of a public affairs officer is to get people to report the content of a press release.

And you put a grabby headline on a press release, great. The goal of a reporter is to get his or her story on page one, or published on the home page, or on the 7 o'clock news, or whatever the medium may be.

And the same for an editor's goal, and these days editors are much more closely associated with publishers than they used to be in the old days when I was still a news reporter. So the profit motive, keeping up readership, viewership whatever it is.

So there's not a whole lot that we, the science community, writ broadly, can do about changing deeply embedded journalistic conventions and practices in news values.

I think it would benefit us to understand them a little bit better and figure out how to work with them, rather than feeling we always had to keep our dukes up.

"Oh they're going to do it again". Because you know there's a lot of ways in which this happens. In this community we joke about every time you put out a press release. There could be a thousand words in a release, and there are three hundred words in-between the word life and the word Mars, and the headline would be "Life on Mars."

Same thing for water on Mars. We keep discovering liquid water on Mars, over and over and over again. And what happens certainly in a press release, because of the need to be brief, is that the context is left out. So I just think we need to try harder to put a little context into every announcement we make. Whether we are standing up at at a science conference or not.

David Grinspoon: Any thoughts about how we can do a better job about it? I think Linda expressed it pretty well. Okay, thank you. Yes?

Audience: Meryl Irwin, University of Massachusetts. I wonder what the panel thought about the claims from some of the micro-lensing experiments, that there are lots and lots of free-floating planets in the galaxy? And whether you can imagine a habitable free-floating planet?

Sara Seager: First of all, lets just say that that was perhaps one of the miscommunications. The micro-lensing community didn't claim that they were all free-floating, they just said that they're some distance from the star. There's some distance from the star, but they wouldn't be able to tell if there was a star or not. We don't know if they are free-floating or not, for one thing.

That said, we do expect a lot of free-floating planets. You know there's the analogy where that if you find a coffee cup again and again that's perfectly full, you'd think that you had to overflow it for it to be full. And people believe that in planet formation, planets formed where there were lots of them and some of them had to be ejected. So they're probably out there somewhere.

And the one about habitable worlds, there was a paper a number of years ago by David Stevenson that ties back into what we were talking about here, about hydrogen atmospheres. That if indeed you had a really dense hydrogen atmosphere, you could trap heat enough so it could be habitable. You know we don't think we can detect a rogue habitable world, but nonetheless the concept is out there. Eric Ford: And tidal forces could also provide an energy source long after ejection.

Sara Seager: Tidal forces with what?

Eric Ford: You get it with a moon.

Sara Seager: Okay, cool, yeah, great.

David Grinspoon: So if a planet was ejected with a moon, then it would have its built-in internal heat source. And its hydrogen envelope could keep things nice and toasty. And the organisms would be perfectly happy cruising the galaxy away from any kind of a star. Yeah.

Sara Seager: They probably wouldn't be able to see through their atmosphere to see the rest of the universe, but besides that.

David Grinspoon: So they would be solipsistic happy organisms. Yeah. Another question over here?

Audience: My name is Ryan Fortenberry I just finished my graduate studies at Virginia Tech. My point was to actually follow-up with Linda's point about how we had this difficult time with scientists communicating with individuals. And much of that is the responsibility of the individual themselves. Because, we as scientists have this idea about how things work. We look at evidence, we form a hypothesis, we move things along in this process, and then we analyze data. People don't really analyze data.

And we've actually been guilty of doing that much of the time ourselves in things that are outside of our expertise. There have been studies that have been done recently that have looked at why people do these types of things.

And who the most trustworthy people are. And typically the most trustworthy people are family and friends, and those with whom we have relationships. And that's how information gets put down the line. That's why people sometimes have what we as scientists think are crazy ideas about things that science shows to not be the case.

And so I would like to see what the panelists think of this, as a suggestion to something. The way that people really remember things is from a story. You have something that happens, then the information builds and builds and builds and builds and builds. Then there is this climax and then there's a resolution. And then maybe something else happens along the lines of that type of model.

But one of the things that I think would be fascinating, especially as David mentioned with the discovery of exoplanets, instead of saying, "Hey, here's this great thing that's coming along, we found life over here, we found this place, this planet where there might be life."

But if we are willing to be part of a story where we don't know what the climax is, such that the story can be told continually. And then we'll find it someday and then we will allow that to resolve so that we can move onto the next story. What about that type of model for communicating habitability of exoplanets?

David Grinspoon: So then, so what would the press release say?

Ryan Fortenberry: That is a very good point. Maybe a corollary to that is you tell a small story along the way and you don't try to oversell the big story. So when the big story comes along, when we do find microbes on another planet, we're not releasing something about arsenic and DNA on our own planet. That's still really awesome, but the public's like, "Why do I care about this?", because they are not in that scientific mindset.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch: I really don't think that the problem usually relates to us as a scientist, because most of us really try to be accurate and report exactly what we found. And once this is out as a press release, or you spoke with some kind of reporter, then basically the snowball system starts.

One journalist breaks a story, another copies from it and makes it a little bit more, revving it up or something like that, or leaves certain things out. Then the next one copies it, and the next one copies it. Then five generations down if you see it, you just look at it and say, "Oh, God. What? They put my name with it too."

David Grinspoon: As Linda Billings mentioned, we can still try to make ourselves more media-savvy as scientists. And yeah, we may put out a release that has accurate information and we are not saying anything sensationalist. But still the more we understand the media and what they are likely to do with our stories, the more maybe we can try to hedge and prepare them and manipulate them the best we can to tell the kind of story we want want them to tell.

Vikki Meadows: Can I make a comment? The idea of building a story, I think we've been trying to do that in exoplanet science for quite a while. First of all it was like, we discovered the first Jupiters. Or now we are trying to characterize the first Jupiters.

This is a step on the path to characterizing the first habitable planet. And we always say a step on the path. And even with the Kepler 22b, well this is a step on the path in finding a habitable planet.

And yet the press tends to say, "I don't know anything about your steps. I'm just going to take that out and say this is a habitable planet". So, you know, again to Linda's comment, we have to learn how to stop them from jumping ahead in the story and assuming we have just gotten to the end already.

David Grinspoon: Unfortunately we have a free press. They can say what they want.

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:29:39 AEST Pasadena CA (JPL) May 07, 2013 - Our galaxy is teeming with a wild variety of planets. In addition to our solar system's eight near-and-dear planets, there are more than 800 so-called exoplanets known to circle stars beyond our sun. One of the first "species" of exoplanets to be discovered is the hot Jupiters, also known as roasters. These are gas giants like Jupiters, but they orbit closely to their stars, blistering under the heat.

Thanks to NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, researchers are beginning to dissect this exotic class of planets, revealing raging winds and other aspects of their turbulent nature. A twist to come out of the recent research is the planets' wide range of climates. Some are covered with a haze, while others are clear. Their temperature profiles, chemistries and densities differ as well.

"The hot Jupiters are beasts to handle. They are not fitting neatly into our models and are more diverse than we thought," said Nikole Lewis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, lead author of a new Spitzer paper in the Astrophysical Journal examining one such hot Jupiter called HAT-P-2b.

"We are just starting to put together the puzzle pieces of what's happening with these planets, and we still don't know what the final picture will be."

The very first exoplanet discovered around a sun-like star was, in fact, a hot Jupiter, called 51 Pegasi b. It was detected in 1995 by Swiss astronomers using the radial velocity technique, which measures the wobble of a star caused by the tug of a planet.

Because hot Jupiters are heavy and whip around their stars quickly, they are the easiest to find using this strategy. Dozens of hot Jupiter discoveries soon followed.

At first, researchers thought they might represent a more common configuration for other planetary systems in our galaxy beyond our own solar system. But new research, including that from NASA's Kepler space telescope, has shown that they are relatively rare.

In 2005, scientists were thrilled when Spitzer became the first telescope to detect light emitted by an exoplanet. Spitzer monitored the infrared light coming from a star and its planet - a hot Jupiter - as the planet disappeared behind the star in an event known as a secondary eclipse. Once again, this technique works best for hot Jupiters, because they are the biggest and hottest planets.

In addition to watching hot Jupiters slip behind their stars, researchers also use Spitzer to monitor the planets as they orbit all the way around a star.

This allows them to create global climate maps, revealing how the planets' atmospheres vary from their hot, sun-facing sides to their cooler, night sides, due in part to fierce winds. (Hot Jupiters are frequently tidally locked, with one side always facing the star, just as our moon is locked to Earth.)

Since that first observation, Spitzer has probed the atmospheres of dozens of hot Jupiters, and some even smaller planets, uncovering clues about their composition and climate.

"When Spitzer launched in 2003, we had no idea it would prove to be a giant in the field of exoplanet science," said Michael Werner, the Spitzer project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Now, we're moving farther into the field of comparative planetary science, where we can look at these objects as a class, and not just as individuals."

In the new study, Lewis and colleagues made the longest Spitzer observation yet of a hot Jupiter. The infrared telescope stared at the HAT-P-2 system continuously for six days, watching it cross in front of its star, slip behind, and then reappear on the other side, making a full orbit.

What makes the observation even more exciting to scientists is that the planet has a comet-like eccentric orbit, carrying it as close as 2.8 million miles (4.5 million kilometers) to the star and out to as far as 9.3 million miles (15 million kilometers). For reference, Mercury is about 28.5 million miles from our sun.

"It's as if nature has given us a perfect lab experiment with this system," said Heather Knutson, a co-author of the new paper at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.

"Because the planet's distance to the sun changes, we can watch how fast it takes to heat up and cool down. It's as though we're turning the heat knob up on our planet and watching what happens." Knutson led the first team to create a global "weather" map of a hot Jupiter, called HD 189733 b, in 2007.

The new HAT-P-2b study is also one of the first to use multiple wavelengths of infrared light, instead of just one, while watching a full orbit of a hot Jupiter. This enables the scientists to peer down into different layers of the planet.

The results reveal that HAT-P-2b takes about a day to heat up as it approaches the hottest part of its orbit, and four to five days to cool down as it swings away. It also exhibits a temperature inversion - a hotter, upper layer of gas - when it is closest to its star. What's more, the carbon chemistry of the planet seems to be behaving in unexpected ways, which the astronomers are still trying to understand.

"These planets are much hotter and more dynamic than our own Jupiter, which is sluggish by comparison. Strong winds are churning material up from below, and the chemistry is always changing," said Lewis.

Another challenge in understanding hot Jupiters lies in parsing through the data. Lewis said her team's six-day Spitzer observation left them with 2 million data points to map out while carefully removing instrument noise.

"Theories are being shot down right and left," said Nick Cowan of Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., a co-author of the HAT-P-2b study. "Right now, it's like the wild, wild west."

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:29:39 AEST Lisbon, Portugal (SPX) May 02, 2013 - An international team of astronomers, including Alexandre Santerne of the EXOEarths team at CAUP, has identified and characterized two new exoplanets thanks to combined observations from the Kepler space telescope plus the SOPHIE and HARPS-N spectrographs.

These planets, named KOI-200b and KOI-889b, are among the first detected with the new high-accuracy spectrograph HARPS-N, the northern hemisphere counterpart of the most prolific exoplanet hunter, HARPS (ESO).

CAUP researcher Alexandre Santerne commented: "The SOPHIE spectrograph was already playing an important role in the characterization of Kepler planets by unveiling the true nature of the candidates and measuring the mass of giant planets. With the new HARPS-N spectrograph, with an even better accuracy, we expect to characterize much smaller exoplanets, hopefully down to the size of the Earth."

The new planets have about the size of Jupiter but eccentric orbits with periods of less than 10 days. These new results help to further understand the evolution of orbits of these planets located very close to their star, known as "hot Jupiters."

There are currently more than 850 known exoplanets, but as seen from the Earth, only some of them are oriented in a way that they are passing in front of their star every orbital period. These periodic transits of the planet in front of its star produce a small dip in its brightness. These micro eclipses allow astronomers to know the diameter of the planet and some details about its atmosphere.

The Kepler space mission (NASA) has identified more than 2,000 stars that have a great chance of hosting transiting planets. However, most of them need complementary ground-based observations to establish their nature and to complete their characterization.

The team participated in these ground-based observations since 2010, using the SOPHIE instrument, which has already participated in the detection and characterization of more than fifteen Kepler planets, through the radial velocity method. Their observing program is now completed by new observations with the more accurate HARPS-N spectrograph.

KOI-200b is slightly bigger than Jupiter and slightly less massive. With a low density, this gaseous planet is orbiting around its star in less than one week. The planet KOI-889b is of the size of Jupiter but is ten times more massive.

This very-massive planet is orbiting around its star in slightly less than 9 days. These two planets have eccentric orbits: during their orbit, their distance to their star is varying. This produces large variation in their equilibrium temperature of several hundred of degrees in a few days.

KOI-889b, which is among the most massive planets discovered so far, is also among the most eccentric transiting planets. It could have been formed by a different mechanism than less massive planets. Santerne added: "Even if there are just hot and giant planets as we already know hundreds of them, these two planets are orbiting on a highly eccentric orbit, which is relatively rare for such short-period planets.

"I prefer to see these two new planets as two other bricks in the wall of our knowledge about planetary systems: bigger is the wall, better we understand planetary formation and evolution."

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:29:39 AEST Seattle WA (SPX) Apr 29, 2013 - A University of Washington astronomer is using Earth's interstellar neighbors to learn the nature of certain stars too far away to be directly measured or observed, and the planets they may host.

"Characterization by proxy" is the technique used by Sarah Ballard, a post-doctoral researcher at the UW, to infer the properties of small, relatively cool stars too distant for measurement, by comparing them to closer stars that now can be directly observed.

Ballard is lead author of a study accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal that used this method and observations from the Kepler Space Telescope to learn the nature of the distant star Kepler-61.

Our understanding of the size and temperature of planets depends crucially on the size and temperature of the stars they orbit. Astronomers already have a robust way to discern the physical properties of solar-type stars - those like the sun - by measuring the light they emit at different wavelengths and matching that to synthetically created spectra.

"The challenge is that small stars are incredibly difficult to characterize," Ballard said. Those theoretical methods don't work well for what are called M-dwarf stars, lower-mass stars about half the size of the sun and smaller - which is too bad, because such stars make up about three-quarters of the universe.

Ballard is using the characterization by proxy method to try to fill this knowledge gap. She is building on what she calls "truly remarkable" work by astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, now at Yale University, who uses a near-infrared interferometer - an array of telescopes working in unison studying light wavelengths a bit longer than visible light - to resolve the physical size of relatively nearby stars.

Ballard said her characterization by proxy method takes "full advantage that there now exists this precious sample" of relatively nearby stars that have been directly measured. You could say the method borrows a bit from Greek mathematician Euclid, whose first "common notion" held that things that equal the same thing must necessarily also equal each other.

In the new paper, Ballard and co-authors used this reasoning to learn about Kepler-61b, a planet orbiting near the inner edge of the habitable zone of the distant, low-mass star Kepler-61, about 900 light-years away in the Cygnus Constellation. A star's habitable zone is that swath of space just right for an orbiting planet's surface water to be in liquid form, thus giving life a chance.

She did this by comparing it to temperature size averages from four spectroscopically similar stars between 12 and 25 light-years away in the Ursa Major and Cygnus constellations. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles.

A funny thing also happened along the way: Kepler-61 turned out to be bigger and hotter than expected, which in turn recalibrated planet Kepler-61b's relative size upward as well - meaning it, too, would be hotter than previously thought and no longer a resident of the star's habitable zone.

All of this caused Ballard to informally subtitle the paper, "How Nearby Stars Bumped a Planet out of the Habitable Zone."

Funding for the research came from NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

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