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

I received an e-mail today from Dr. Laurence Doyle of PlanetQuest, the BOINC-based search for extra-solar planets. I had e-mailed Dr. Doyle asking for a status update, and this is what he replied:

We have been stalled with fund raising -- but I have written a business plan and that is being circulated through possible donors. As far as the (more predictable) science is concerned, we have half of the detection algorithms running on BOINC and we have a star catalogue of about 2 million observations reduced to light curves. We are also including some re-processed HST images (7-day search for extrasolar planets) and some other public domain data to include -- i.e., to be searched for eclipsing binary planets. Finally, I have been added (via a successful proposal) to the NASA Kepler mission and hope to share some of that data with PlanetQuesters, so that we can all participate in this mission to detect the first "Earths."

It sounds like PlanetQuest is going to have a lot of data for us to crunch in the search for extra-solar planets once they get some funding. So if any of you have any pull with anyone who can help fund, or if you want to put forth some money yourself—as I have done—they are a qualified 501(c)(3) non-profit and they accept donations.

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....

PlanetQuest Update

Another update from Dr. Laurance Doyle on the status of the PlanetQuest group:

...Our lack of progress at the moment is a funding issue which we feel could be solved if we can get initial funding to a point where we can finish the alpha test version of the software and thereafter sign folks up to be supporting-founding members of PlanetQuest.

We do have sufficient astronomical data (stellar light curves) at present for a thorough test of the system and could accommodate perhaps up to 100,000 users for a year. This was previously my main concern. We have also carried the problem through from data acquisition to light curve model fitting (the transit detection algorithm) and therefore see no technical issues in the way of proceeding.

Most of our personnel, however, are also extremely busy people working in other businesses and on other projects, and so PlanetQuest has not received the attention lately that it needs to move forward as quickly as it could, because it is largely (although not entirely) a volunteer project at this point.

I would like to see it take off this year-that is, that we are able to release an alpha version of the Collaboratory and start to post key parts of our educational web site on a daily basis. I am involved in fund raising for PlanetQuest at present, and also writing a comprehensive business plan.

The overall project in execution is quite complex, but the basic overview ideas are readily understandable. After about seven years now since the initial idea, we are still unique in offering a project like PlanetQuest (which surprises me a little). Computational speed (i.e., Moore's Law) has gone up over a factor of 25 in that time, so we have had to collect a lot more stellar data. Our team is ready to proceed, then, as soon as we can get support for the final phase of the programming...

PlanetQuest is a worthy project to allow desktop users (like me and you) to contribute to the search for extra-solar planets that may harbor life. But in order to get the software working and continue their science, they need money. I gave them some a while back, but they obviously still need more.

PlanetQuest Update

I received an email today from Dr. Laurance Doyle, who (among other things) serves as the President of PlanetQuest. PlanetQuest is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to inspire global participation in the discovery of planets.

Their goal is to launch a distributed computing project using the BOINC platform that I've blogged about here before. Their software--dubbed Collaboratory--will analyze data from telescopes focused on extremely dense star regions, such as the center of the galaxy in Sagittarius in the hopes of finding planets around other stars.

From their website:

Discovering a new delta Scuti star, for example, will help astronomers better understand the stability of stars; a new Cepheid variable star would help astronomers determine how far away stars are. Most exciting of all, you could discover a new planet—a never-before-seen world beyond our solar system! You will be credited for your discovery, and your find will be entered into the PlanetQuest catalog.

Dr. Doyle's email (which came in response to my donating money toward their work on the software) contained some information on the status of their work on the software. The information was long overdue, as they haven't done a very good job of keeping the public up-to-date on their progress (although they have responded to email requests for information). Dr. Doyle writes:

We have the eclipsing binary system classifier running very well, and are now interfacing the circum-binary planet discriminator with the the binary classifier. We'll soon be going straight onto the BOINC platform with this and at that time can release an alpha version of the Collaboratory. The beta should not be far behind with a ready number of testers interested in helping us, and we are shooting for this summer to release the beta test.