Now You Can Find Planets Around Other Stars at Home

I've always been a fan of ways that the general public (you and me) can help make discoveries and advance the state of science and technology. In the past, I've given updates on the PlanetQuest project, which seeks to give the general public the tools to help find extrasolar planets. That project is still in the works, but now the fine folks at Zooniverse (creators of the GalaxyZoo project, among others) have beaten them to the punch.

Zooniverse's latest citizen-science project is Planet Hunters, which displays the light-curve of a star on the screen and allows you to use one of the great strengths of the human brain&emdash;pattern recognition&emdash;to determine whether there are gaps or transit events in the light curve.

The site is pretty cool, but it has some problems... the biggest of which is no support for Internet Explorer. Your feelings on the various web browsers aside, a citizen science project should support the browsers most commonly used by the citizenry. Also, after you classify a star, it offers you the opportunity to discuss the star. But after you answer that question, the site has a tendency to hang. I spent some time classifying stars, and suffered a number of hangs.

Still, it is an interesting way to spend a little bit of time, and could result in discoveries of planets in the Kepler data.

2009: International Year of Astronomy

2009 has been designated the International Year of Astronomy by the United Nations General Assembly. And I'm not sure they could have picked a better year for the designation.

During 2009, a space shuttle mission will be launched to make repairs and upgrades to the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the greatest scientific and technical feats we've achieved. Not only will these upgrades replace some failed systems, but newer and better instruments will be added to the orbiting observatory, meaning that over the next several years (until it is de-orbited in a fiery mass) Hubble will be more powerful than it has ever been before. And we've all seen what it could do before!

Not only that, but the Kepler mission will finally launch this year and, while it is unlikely to find many planets its first year, its discoveries will excite the imaginations of a great many people.

And the year has started off with some great night skies showing the moon and Venus, Jupiter, and the vastness of stars in the Milky Way. CNN also has a collection of great astronomy photos in their Space Spotlight.

Go out when you get a chance, preferably with a telescope, and take a good look at the sky. Consider the vastness of it all, and wonder why it's there, if not so we can go see it, explore it, touch it.

Prospects of a Habitable Planet Around Proxima Centauri

Hot on the heels of his earlier post about discouraging prospects for habitable planets around α Centauri, Paul Gilster of Centauri Dreams has (as promised) posted a follow-up about the prospects of finding habitable planets around Proxima Centauri. Proxima, it seems, has no chance of planets larger than 2-3 Earth masses in circular orbits out to about 1 AU (which is way farther out than the habitable region around such a wimpy little star as Proxima Centauri), but could have Earth mass or smaller planets in close.

The habitable zone around Proxima is so tight that any planets in it would orbit the star in as little as 3.6 days or as much as 13.8 days. That's a pretty short year. But planets with low-enough mass to be habitable are really, really hard for us to detect, especially if they're in multiple-planet systems. We need more precise results in order to study the radial velocity of stars with sufficient precision to find small planets.

That's where new probes like Kepler (due to launch early next year) come in. And also where software like that being developed for the PlanetQuest not-for-profit group, which is making software to combine the results of multiple observations, come in. So over the next several years our ability to identify smaller and smaller planets will improve dramatically.

And who knows? We may then discover that Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us, has a planet friendly to life.

PlanetQuest Update

Laurence Doyle posted a new update early this morning on PlanetQuest, saying:

I applied for the NASA Kepler Science Team and included PlanetQuest as the educational component of the proposal. I proposed to find planets in the multiple star systems that Kepler observes and won the proposal.

So, there will be NASA Kepler spacecraft data in the PlanetQuest Collaboratory (we'll divvy it up evenly) to look for planets in. What is amazing about these data is that the precision will be 100 times anything achieved on Earth -- that is, the detection of Earth-sized planets around Sunlike stars will be possible.

So this seems like good news for both Dr. Doyle's PlanetQuest efforts and the Kepler Mission, both of which are projects that I've been interested in for a very long time.

Now, if PlanetQuest can just get their software out the door and into my grubby little hands....