NASA's Kepler Mission Rockets to Space in Search of Other Earths

NASA's Kepler mission successfully launched into space from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II at 10:49 p.m. EST, Friday. Kepler is designed to find the first Earth-size planets orbiting stars at distances where water could pool on the planet's surface. Liquid water is believed to be essential for the formation of life.

"It was a stunning launch," says Kepler Project Manager James Fanson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Our team is thrilled to be a part of something so meaningful to the human race -- Kepler will help us understand if our Earth is unique or if others like it are out there."

Engineers acquired a signal from Kepler at 12:11 a.m. Saturday, after it separated from its spent third-stage rocket and entered its final sun-centered orbit, trailing 950 miles behind Earth. The spacecraft is generating its own power from its solar panels.

"Kepler now has the perfect place to watch more than 100,000 stars for signs of planets," says William Borucki, the mission's science principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. Borucki has worked on the mission for 17 years. "Everyone is very excited as our dream becomes a reality. We are on the verge of learning if other Earths are ubiquitous in the galaxy."

Engineers have begun to check Kepler to ensure it is working properly, a process called "commissioning" that will take about 60 days. In about a month or less, NASA will send up commands for Kepler to eject its dust cover and make its first measurements. After another month of calibrating Kepler's single instrument, a wide-field charge-couple device camera, the telescope will begin to search for planets.

The first planets to roll out on the Kepler "assembly line" are expected to be the portly "hot Jupiters" -- gas giants that circle close and fast around their stars. NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes will be able to follow up with these planets and learn more about their atmospheres. Neptune-size planets will most likely be found next, followed by rocky ones as small as Earth. The true Earth analogs -- Earth-sized planets orbiting stars like our sun at distances where surface water, and possibly life, could exist -- would take at least three years to discover and confirm. Ground-based telescopes also will contribute to the mission by verifying some of the finds.

In the end, Kepler will give us our first look at the frequency of Earth-size planets in our Milky Way galaxy, as well as the frequency of Earth-size planets that could theoretically be habitable.

"Even if we find no planets like Earth, that by itself would be profound. It would indicate that we are probably alone in the galaxy," says Borucki.

As the mission progresses, Kepler will drift farther and farther behind Earth in its orbit around the sun. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which was launched into the same orbit more than five years ago, is now more than 62 million miles behind Earth.

For more information about the Kepler mission, click here.

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Worlds In Collision

Two terrestrial planets orbiting a mature sun-like star some 300 light-years from Earth recently suffered a violent collision, astronomers at UCLA, Tennessee State University (TSU) and the California Institute of Technology will report in a December issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

"It's as if Earth and Venus collided with each other," says Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-author on the paper. "Astronomers have never seen anything like this before. Apparently, major catastrophic collisions can take place in a fully mature planetary system."

"If any life was present on either planet, the massive collision would have wiped out everything in a matter of minutes — the ultimate extinction event," says co-author Gregory Henry, an astronomer at TSU. "A massive disk of infrared-emitting dust circling the star provides silent testimony to this sad fate."

Zuckerman, Henry and Michael Muno, an astronomer at Caltech at the time of the research, were studying a star known as BD+20 307, which is surrounded by a shocking 1 million times more dust than is orbiting our sun. The star is located in the constellation Aries. The astronomers gathered X-ray data using the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory and brightness data from one of TSU's automated telescopes in southern Arizona, hoping to measure the age of the star.

"We expected to find that BD+20 307 was relatively young, a few hundred million years old at most, with the massive dust ring signaling the final stages in the formation of the star's planetary system," Muno says.

Those expectations were shown to be premature, however, when Carnegie Institution of Washington astronomer Alycia Weinberger announced in the May 20, issue of the Astrophysical Journal that BD+20 307 is actually a close binary star — two stars orbiting around their common center of mass.

"That discovery radically revised the interpretation of the data and transformed the star into a unique and intriguing system," says TSU astronomer Francis Fekel who, along with TSU's Michael Williamson, was asked to provide additional spectroscopic data from another TSU automated telescope in Arizona to assist in comprehending this exceptional binary system.

The new spectroscopic data confirmed that BD+20 307 is composed of two stars, both very similar in mass, temperature and size to our own sun. They orbit about their common center of mass every 3.42 days.

"The patterns of element abundances in the stars show that they are much older than a few hundred million years, as originally thought," Fekel says. "Instead, the binary system appears to have an age of several billion years, comparable to our solar system."

"The planetary collision in BD+20 307 was not observed directly but rather was inferred from the extraordinary quantity of dust particles that orbit the binary pair at about the same distance as Earth and Venus are from our sun," Henry says. "If this dust does indeed point to the presence of terrestrial planets, then this represents the first known example of planets of any mass in orbit around a close binary star."

Zuckerman and colleagues first reported in the journal Nature in July 2005 that BD+20 307, then still thought to be a single star, was surrounded by more warm orbiting dust than any other sun-like star known to astronomers. The dust is orbiting the binary system very closely, where Earth-like planets are most likely to be and where dust typically cannot survive long. Small dust particles get pushed away by stellar radiation, while larger pieces get reduced to dust in collisions within the disk and are then whisked away. Thus, the dust-forming collision near BD+20 307 must have taken place rather recently, probably within the past few hundred thousand years and perhaps much more recently, the astronomers said.

"This poses two very interesting questions," Fekel says. "How do planetary orbits become destabilized in such an old, mature system, and could such a collision happen in our own solar system?"

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'Plutoid' Chosen Name For Solar System Objects Like Pluto

The International Astronomical Union has decided on the term plutoid as a name for dwarf planets like Pluto at a meeting of its Executive Committee in Oslo.

Almost two years after the International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly introduced the category of dwarf planets, the IAU, as promised, has decided on a name for transneptunian dwarf planets similar to Pluto. The name plutoid was proposed by the members of the IAU Committee on Small Body Nomenclature (CSBN), accepted by the Board of Division III, by the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN) and approved by the IAU Executive Committee at its recent meeting in Oslo, Norway.

Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the Sun at a distance greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighbourhood around their orbit. The two known and named plutoids are Pluto and Eris. It is expected that more plutoids will be named as science progresses and new discoveries are made.

The dwarf planet Ceres is not a plutoid as it is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Current scientific knowledge lends credence to the belief that Ceres is the only object of its kind. Therefore, a separate category of Ceres-like dwarf planets will not be proposed at this time.

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Astronomers Find Grains of Sand Around Distant Stars

In a find that sheds light on how Earth-like planets may form, astronomers this week report finding the first evidence of small, sandy particles orbiting a newborn solar system at about the same distance as the Earth orbits the sun. The report will be published online this week by the journal Nature.

"Precisely how and when planets form is an open question," says study co-author Christopher Johns-Krull, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University. "We believe the disk-shaped clouds of dust around newly formed stars condense, forming microscopic grains of sand that eventually go on to become pebbles, boulders and whole planets."

In previous studies, astronomers have used infrared heat signals to identify microscopic dust particles around distant stars, but the method isn't precise enough to tell astronomers just how big they become, and whether the particles orbit near the star, like the Earth does the sun, or much further away at a distance more akin to Jupiter or Saturn.

In the new study, Johns-Krull and co-authors in the United States, Germany and Uzbekistan used reflected light from the sand itself to confirm the Earth-like orbit of grainy particles around a pair of stars called KH-15D in the constellation Monoceros. The stars are about 2,400 light years from Earth in the Cone Nebula, and they are only about 3 million years old, compared to the sun's 4.5 billion years.

"We were attracted to this system because it appears bright and dim at different times, which is odd," Johns-Krull says.

The researchers found that the Earth has a nearly edge-on view of KH-15D. From this perspective, the disk blocks one of the stars from view, but its twin has an eccentric orbit that causes it to rise above the disk at regular intervals.

"These eclipses let us study the system with the star there and with the star effectively not there," Johns-Krull says. "It's a very fortuitous arrangement because when the star is there all the time, it's so bright that we can't see the sand."

The team conducted both photometric and spectrographic analyses of data collected during the past 12 years from a dozen observatories, including the McDonald Observatory in west Texas, the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the VLT on Mount Paranal in Chile.

"Because of how the light is being reflected there are opportunities to make observations about the chemical composition of these sand-like particles," says co-author William Herbst, an astronomer at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. "That's very exciting because it opens up so many doors for new type of research on this disk."

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NASA Spacecraft Sees Changes in Jupiter System

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft provided a new bird's-eye view of the dynamic Jupiter system as it traveled through the planet's orbit on Feb. 28.

New Horizons used Jupiter's gravity to boost its speed and shave three years off its trip to Pluto. Although the eighth spacecraft to visit Jupiter, New Horizons' combination of trajectory, timing and technology allowed it to explore details never before observed.

The spacecraft revealed lightning near the Jupiter's poles, the life cycle of fresh ammonia clouds, boulder-size clumps speeding through the planet's faint rings, the structure inside volcanic eruptions on its moon Io, and the path of charged particles traversing the previously unexplored length of the planet's long, magnetic tail.

"The Jupiter encounter was successful beyond our wildest dreams," says Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, NASA headquarters, Washington. "Not only did it prove our spacecraft and put it on course to reach Pluto in 2015, it was a chance for us to take
sophisticated instruments to places in the Jovian system where other spacecraft could not go. It returned important data that adds tremendously to our understanding of the solar system's largest planet and its moons, rings and atmosphere."

The New Horizons team presented its latest, most detailed analyses of those data Tuesday at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Orlando, Fla. Results also will appear in a special section of the Oct. 12 issue of the journal Science.

From January through June, New Horizons' seven science instruments made more than 700 separate observations of the Jovian system. Jupiter's weather was high on the list, as New Horizons' visible light, infrared and ultraviolet remote-sensing instruments probed the planet's atmosphere for data on cloud structure and composition.

Instruments saw clouds form from ammonia welling up from the lower atmosphere. Heat-induced lighting strikes in the polar regions also were observed. This was the first polar lighting ever seen beyond Earth, demonstrating that heat moves through water clouds at virtually all
latitudes across Jupiter.

New Horizons made the most-detailed size and speed measurements yet of "waves" that run the width of the planet and indicate violent storm activity below. Additionally, New Horizons snapped the first close-up images of the Little Red Spot, gathering new information on storm dynamics. The spot is a nascent storm about half the size of Jupiter's larger Great Red Spot, or about 70 percent of Earth's diameter.

The spacecraft captured the clearest images to date of the tenuous Jovian ring system, showing clumps of debris that may indicate a recent impact inside the rings or some more exotic phenomenon. Movies made from New Horizons images offer an unprecedented look at ring dynamics, showing the tiny inner moons Metis and Adrastea shepherding the materials around
the rings. A search for smaller moons inside the rings, and possible new sources of the dusty material, found no bodies wider than a mile.

The mission's investigations of Jupiter's four largest moons focused on Io, the closest to Jupiter, which has active volcanoes that blast tons of material into the Jovian magnetosphere and beyond. New Horizons spied 11 different volcanic plumes of varying size, three of which were seen for the first time. One, a spectacular 200-mile-high eruption rising above the
volcano Tvashtar, provided a unique opportunity to trace plume structure and motion. New Horizons' global map of Io's surface confirms the moon's status as the solar system's most active body, showing more than 20 geological changes since the Galileo Jupiter orbiter provided the last close-up look in 2001.

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Physicists Test the Physics of Star Formation

The formation of stars and planets remains one of the big questions in astrophysical science. Currently, scientists do not understand the required conditions and the accretion, or matter collection process, involved in star and planet formation. There are contentious debates about whether hydrodynamic turbulence is responsible. The Magnetorotational Instability (MRI) experiment at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in collaboration with the Astrophysical Sciences Department of Princeton University is shedding light on this mystery.

Results published in Nature show that it is virtually impossible for hydrodynamic turbulence to generate sufficiently effective accretion to form stars and planets. The U.S. Department of Energy, NASA, and National Science Foundation are funding the work jointly.

"The Earth must have sufficient angular momentum so that it does not fall into the Sun under the influence of gravity. We also know that galaxies and solar systems have a preferred direction of rotation. Consequently, matter forming these systems must also have had net angular momentum, which must have been overcome by gravity for the matter to coalesce," says Hantao Ji, the lead author of the Nature paper. "The angular momentum prevents matter from falling into the star directly, so an accretion disk is formed, which consists of matter losing its angular momentum and swirling into the core of the star. For example, when our Sun was formed, the accretion process must have been very efficient in casting off angular momentum because most of the material comprising our solar system ended up in the Sun."

Since angular momentum cannot be created or destroyed, it must flow outward through the disk as the accreting mass flows inward. But how does this happen? Star formation occurs in deep space and therefore, while accretion disks are seen, the details of the accretion process cannot be discerned except in theoretical models and computer simulations. The Princeton project's primary mission is to test the plausibility of a 1991 theory that indicates the magnetorotational instability, a disruptive plasma process, plays a major role in accretion.

The elimination of hydrodynamic turbulence as a mechanism for accretion, makes it much more likely that magnetorotational instability is responsible. Matter in an accretion disk is composed of plasma, dust, and other materials. However, the MRI experiment does not use these materials. Ji and Jeremy Goodman, the primary collaborator from the Princeton University Astrophysics Department and also a co-author of the Nature paper, came up with a way to physically simulate an accretion disk with material "standing in" for the plasma, dust, and other materials. The system consists of two concentric cylinders, each 28 centimeters in length, free to rotate independently about a common axis.

The inner cylinder has a radius of 7.1 centimeters and is made of steel, and the outer cylinder has a radius of 20.3 centimeters and is made of plastic to allow visual inspection. The inner and outer cylinders rotate independently in the same direction, but at significantly different speeds, 1200 rpm and 160 rpm, respectively, as reported in the paper. What made this project a significant engineering challenge is the requirement to have two rotating disks at each end of the cylinders. The disks must be driven at different speeds by separate motors through six concentric pipes in order to achieve the required rotation patterns of the fluid.

For the experiments reported in Nature, the space between the cylinders was filled with water. Water cannot carry a significant electrical current or interact with a magnetic field and therefore cannot display magnetorotational instability, but according to nonmagnetic theories of accretion disks, should have become turbulent anyway with fast enough spinning. Future experiments are planned in which the space between the cylinders will be filled with a liquid metal chosen because it is easy to maintain and interacts with the magnetic field in ways similar to plasma. The researchers have chosen a mixture of 67 percent gallium, 20.5 percent indium and 12.5 percent tin. Future experiments will be conducted with and without a magnetic field parallel to the axis of the cylinders.

Computer simulations of the experiment predict that when a strong magnetic field is applied to the rotating liquid metal, magnetorotational instability will cause angular momentum to be transferred from the inner cylinder toward the outer cylinder, resulting in an increase in measured torque between the cylinders. This result would further support the hypothesis that magnetorotational instability is responsible for the transport of angular momentum in accretion disks, and hence for star formation. Accretion disks also form around massive black holes in the center of many galaxies and in binary star systems.

Results from the PPPL experiments will help astrophysicists better understand these phenomena. Understanding transport phenomena in plasmas is important for basic plasma physics in general, and for fusion plasmas in particular.

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