Kepler Co-Investigator Spills The Beans: Lots of Earth-like Planets

It is an old story that some news outfits are notorious for distorting their news to make them more palatable and attractive to their audiences...

But, this is also a bi-product of the way the Kepler team is sitting on the data.

If you leave a void like this, don't complain about what's coming in to fill it... unless of course this is all part of the plan, sort of like an iPhone release PR scheme... withhold, leak, deny, get angry, repeat... until it's finally time for the long-anticipated "unveiling" or "unleashing"...

The more they publish, the less other scientists can "steal their thunder", which seems to be their primary concern.

Yawn. In some 6 months this will all be immaterial anyway - I personally have my calendar marked.

Hi, Keith ... These articles were sparked by a talk that was given by Harvard's Dimitar Sasselov at TEDGlobal at Oxford this month. It was posted to the TED site last week and picked up by various sites:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dimitar_sasselov_how_we_found_hundreds_of_earth_like_planets.html

The smoking gun is the slide in the background at about 8:15 in the talk.

What exactly is the control for this data? I would be much more comfortable with the headline "Kepler data suggests hundreds of earth-size planets; confirmation underway"

Let's hope the instrument isn't being fooled by some other phenomena.

OK, so smaller "Earth size" planets are more common then Gas Giants. Makes sense. And it appears the Solar System, with 4 small planets to one Jupiter size, one Saturn size and two Neptune size shows the Solar System distribution of planet sizes is average for the area surveyed. OK, fits the pattern since Copernicus that there is nothing special about us.

Now the big question. How many have stable orbits in the Habitable Zone of their star?

And then the bigger question, if The Solar System is so average in terms of the distribution of planet sizes and stable orbits - Where is ET?

Yes, it will be interesting to see the full report when it comes out. And it should stimulate some interesting discussion about our place in the Universe, always good.

Curious that this comes out into the open right in the middle of all of the "compromising" about launch vehicles, etc.

If this Kepler data is for real, I hope that whatever budget and game plan wins out will provide the funds necessary to take this particular science endeavor through its next phases. In terms of the "big questions," this may well end up being more exciting than any other science mission, or even HSF. After all, the "other Earths" question has been around a lot longer than any other question in space science.

Steve

"Where is ET?"

Out of millions of species on earth, and hundreds of millions of years. Exactly one species developed intelligence and only actually pretty recently given the age of the earth. And isn't there some studys that show we nearly didn't make it at some point?

So lots of earth like worlds helps, but it still could be very difficult for intelligence to arise.
Were talking lotto ticket odds per earth like world perhaps.

But hey, I'm all in for going to dinosaur planet. ;)

Kevin, your disdain for Fox News is palpable.

Editor's note: "Kevin"? Who is that? As for my distain for Fox News - where do I start with those biased twits?

However, I think you are being unfair to them in this particular instance. The link to Fox News you provided in your earlier Kepler report simply had them stating the facts...i.e, Earth-like planets had been discovered by the Kepler team.

so they sniffed the fumes of another story from another source and cited zero sources .... typical Faux News.

It was the Daily News that embellished the story out of all proportion, and erroneously reported that the Earth-like planets had land and oceans...which obviously is something that Kepler cannot determine.

It is sickening to see a publicly funded scientist use these data as if it were his own private reserve. Shameful and arrogant. Should the IG investigate?

Well, of the many possibilities of "where is ET", and answer to the Fermi Paradox, author Greg Bear posited one chilling scenario. I highly recommend his "Forge of God", and "Anvil of Stars" duology.

It seems even Stephen Hawking has recently advocated against deliberately announcing our presence to the Universe. It is a big forest out there, and it may be full of wolves.

I've been on vacation over the past week so am just catching up with this story, but Space.com had something last week that discusses the reports and has something of a knockdown from Sasselov and others on the Kepler team. Sasselov says he's simply repeating what was reported earlier, but the numbers for the distribution of candidate sizes are nevertheless interesting. More later, I reckon:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/kepler-earth-like-exoplanets-100722.html

Thanks for taking my earlier message into account, Keith ... All the best, Alan Boyle

I am not an astronomer, but I can add this:

- Stability of orbits is less of an issue, since this is a large random sample. If the orbits are unstable, than we should be seeing less planets, since they'd have been ejected/devoured by now.

- Habitability too. IIRC, rocky planets tend to be in the inner areas of solar systems. So if there's a large number of them, we'll get habitable ones as well.

- Where's ET. That's an interesting question that IMO speaks to two things: The impossibility of FTL travel, and the probable limited longevity of advanced civilizations. "The Mote in God's Eye" discusses this very nicely.

one more thing - I call BS on the eclipsing binary star argument.

Given that they can analyze the light curve to even figure out how large the planet is (by looking at the exact intensity drop-off profile) I can't imagine that they cannot distinguish between a planet and a binary pair.

Unfreakingbelievable. This is just the first 6 weeks of data? It boggles the mind. I believe the scientist that said when Kepler comes by Earth again in 50 years we'll go out and pick it up. This instrument is a game changer, more than we can even imagine - AND ALL IT DOES IS FLOAT AND TAKE PICTURES LOL!

Let's post a link to a peer-reviewed article:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1006.2799

I wonder then - where is the press release on the website of NASA?!?

Word. Sink your teeth into this matter.

GRRRRRRRRRRR!

Now we just need to get the people in this country that are afraid of their own shadow to start fearing the boogeymen from outer space. That'll get NASA more funding.

Imagine what NASA could do if it had even just half of the DoD's annual budget.

We'd have more than an outpost on the Moon and Mars, we'd have a city on each.

Even the numbers here are incomplete, because they must represent only short-period planet candidates (i.e. very hot), and because at least a few of them will turn out to be non-planet phenomena after scrutiny. In 3 years, when the final dataset has been analyzed, we'll have good estimates of how many of each kind of planet occur in the habitable zones of stars. This preview/teaser showing lots of earth-size planets is extremely encouraging, because that means there will be good statistical answers to all those questions. (It's hard to do statistics on 2-3 planets, but we won't have to worry about that. We'll have dozens :-)

Bob Mahoney: Let's hope the instrument isn't being fooled by some other phenomena.

From the scientists' perspective, this is exactly the reason for taking care and taking time with the data. From the customers' perspective (US taxpayers), this care is what we've paid all that money for -- not just their salaries, but the time and money that's gone into the whole mission. There is a previous discussion with arguments in favor of PI proprietary data periods. If you didn't get it then, remember this: it's always done this way, and it's sufficiently fair.

Steve Whitfield: If this Kepler data is for real, I hope that whatever budget and game plan wins out will provide the funds necessary to take this particular science endeavor through its next phases. In terms of the "big questions," this may well end up being more exciting than any other science mission, or even HSF. After all, the "other Earths" question has been around a lot longer than any other question in space science.

Now you're talkin'. Currently the astronomy community is holding its breath for the Decadal Survey of the National Academies, in which science priorities and corresponding spending priorities are laid out for NASA and NSF from now until 2020. The report is due for release in the next 3 weeks or so. Here's hoping they advocate exoplanet science.

col bleep: It is sickening to see a publicly funded scientist use these data as if it were his own private reserve. Shameful and arrogant. Should the IG investigate?

Although Sasselov's little tidbit is a bit premature, this kind of presentation (but *full* of results) is exactly what we eagerly expect next spring. For a year and a half, the PI and science team DOES own the data, and we want them to. This is the deal that NASA made with them when the Kepler mission was first selected. This is the normal modus operandi for science with space missions. No IG investigation is required. The fact that you don't understand it doesn't mean it's another foul conspiracy. Calm down, take some Pepto Bismol, and breathe deeply.

NASA PR is a very lame thing. It doesn't surprise me at all that we wait so long to hear about such results. I've complained to several NASA managers about the performance of the PIOs, and they are uniformly defensive. What we appear to have is a cutting-edge agency who's PR arm yields Post-Office performance levels.
That being the case, you have to wonder what remarkable technology stories are buried within the space agency that we have yet to hear about. Having covered NASA for a few years during my career, I can tell you that a lot more goes on within NASA than most people know about -- sometimes including the administrator.
If voters and Congress knew about half of this material, NASA would have no problem engaging the public, youth, and the OMB. If the PIO did a professional job of getting the story out, we would be throwing dollars under their chariot wheels.

Talks are always tailored for their intended audience. In this case, it's an astronomer giving a public talk to an educated but not in-field audience, and one that probably has deep pockets. So he "sexed up" his slides. There's nothing at all surprising about that. One presumes he probably had to clear the talk with the PI before hand. If he were giving a talk at an astronomical conference the data would have been presented differently.

He probably didn't realize the talk would get disseminated this way outside his control. This has become an issue at meetings. Most people don't want their talks kept as part of the public record, because talks and posters are assumed to be ephemeral and hence it's ok to put things on them that might later turn out to be wrong. The bar for evidence is a lot lower. If the bar were the same as it is for published papers this would have a significant chilling effect.

With the advent of cheap high resolution cameras people started a few years ago to photograph everything. As a result most meetings (certainly the AAS and SPIE) now ban still or video recording. People still do it, but you're not supposed to.