Spaceships and Exoplanets

I was admiring all the spaceships in io9's compilation of awesome space artworks when i noticed a pattern: almost all of them have planets!
"But of course! Spaceships are built so that one can go from planet to planet, so that's why planets are present in the background of many pictures of spaceships!" One can say that, but has anyone ever really noticed that fact? And so what? What does it mean? Well, it made me realize that Spaceships and Exoplanets go together!
And maybe there is some kind of golden rule in creating artworks of spaceships--perhaps there must be a planet's crescent somewhere in the canvas to be a masterpiece.
Or maybe i'm just exaggerating. And yes, maybe i'm just excited. After all, it will be on spaceships that our descendants will hop on to go to colonize other worlds.

Humanity’s First Interstellar Flight

The idea of mankind going to the stars might be jumpstarted by the discovery of the first earth-like planet. It's a bold new era.

Brainwave: Music of Exoplanets

It's not often that Art and Science converges on something that integrates exoplanets with music. Thus, blogging about the Art and Science of New Worlds renders me captive to an event where I will get a chance to be inspired by Greg Laughlin who created a software that generates music from planetary orbits. And to boot, I will learn more about Philip Glass, the renowned composer of Kepler and Galileo Galilei who will interpret the sound of the musica universalis.

Laughlin said he and Glass will explore commonalities between music and orbital dynamics. The pairing of the two was sparked in part by Laughlin’s articles on his blog oklo.org that delve into ways to "sonify" planetary movements. He developed software to map planetary systems as audible waveforms. He said he became intrigued by the realization that planetary systems can be used as a type of nonlinear digital synthesizer and can provide an enormous palette of sound -- sounds never before heard.

Thus, the Laughlin/Glass Brainwave session appealed to me especially that ive been exploring a genre of music tagged as exogazing music--similar in the kind of mood that shoegazing elicits, but instead of looking down, one looks up at the stars.
Exogaze music is ideally the kind of music to accompany a stargazer while pondering exoplanetary thoughts.

With the synthesis of exoplanets and music, hearing about the Brainwave event is truly music to my ears, so I almost instantly secured a ticket at the Rubin Museum to witness this awesome synthesis of Art and Science. I would soon expect astronomy inclined musicians to insert clips and samples generated from exoplanet orbits into their songs to literally create exogazing music!


How Do We Listen to the Music of the Spheres?
Composer Philip Glass + astronomer Greg Laughlin
Rubin Museum of Art · 150 West 17th Street, New York, NY
Sunday February 21, 6:00 p.m.

Worlds In The Sky: A Live Exoplanet Transit Event

To my knowledge, this has never been done before: An actual exoplanet transit, or it's real-time lightcurve will be broadcast live over the internet on Feb. 13, 2010.

The project is called "Worlds of the Sky" which is an International Project for the public observation of an Extrasolar Planet Transit, specifically of XO-3 b. The name of this event, "Worlds of the Sky" was taken from a famous book by Camille Flammarion, the man behind the "Flammarion Woodcut", a recognizable picture that you see often in Astronomy books and magazines.

The event will be broadcast live on the website http://www.crabnebula.it, or at http://www.livestream.com/eantv on February 13, from 7pm onwards. The webcast will allow users around the world to watch the evolution of the light curve of the star XO-3 as the planet passes in front of it, monitored by the 1.34-metre Ruths Telescope of the Brera Observatory in Merate, Italy. The real-time data will be accompanied by comments of astronomers in English, Italian and Chinese.

Please take note that the observatory that is observing XO-3b's transit is located in Italy, so please match your particular timezones. New Yorkers must tune in to the event at around 1pm Eastern Time (EST). Let's hope that the clouds don't get in the way of the telescope for this event because i really would like to see an actual exoplanet transit as it happens, and to see it along with other people simultaneously. And let's hope the servers in Europe allow visits from other parts of the world.

Make sure you plan to view this event with your beloved, because this occurs on the eve of Valentine's Day, which makes the transit of XO-3b even more appropriate! XOXO!

Neill Blomkamp's Thoughts and Ideas

For Neill Blomkamp to give this kind of TEDx talk is simply amazing. This clip is highly-recommended for anyone who is interested in the same stuff that this blog is enthusiastic about. A fascinating talk has been elicited from a simple answer of "no" to a question of whether the "prawns" from his District 9 movie is an accurate representation of aliens. And with this kind of ideas from a director, I'll make it a point to watch all his movies. We need more of this kind of filmmaker!

Do Androids Dream of Exoplanets?

"The ship turned back a sixth of the way to Proxima. Otherwise Rachael would never have seen earth.." Thus that line inspired me to write a post about "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", the futuristic novel by the legendary author Philip K. Dick (PKD).

Probably known as the story which inspired the cult scifi movie Bladerunner, I also enjoyed it's rendition as a graphic novel. Although the art behind the comics version did not fully capture the kind of world that PKD painted, I honestly did not expect "Do Androids Dream" to be as rich as it is, touching upon a lot of topics that might become apparent in the near future.

First, is the opening introduction to the issue of animal extinction, and how Deckard--the pet-loving bounty-hunter (specializing in retiring "Andys") is yearning to own a real sheep, a real horse or any genuine animal, for that matter. As I write this, thousands of species are actually disappearing from our planet. Perhaps our children may someday own pets that are genetically-modified or fully synthetic versions of extinct species.

Second is the apparent evolution of robots into Androids that are so sophisticated that they are difficult to discern from real human beings. A special kind of modern psychological Turing Test is needed, which is requires a Voight-Kampff machine to detect whether a subject is an android or a human.

And the third one, which is of particular interest to this blog is the mention of Colony Worlds. In the future, we will employ hordes of androids, called "replicants"--to do all the drudgery for us, in building off-world colonies on inhospitable worlds like Mars. Already in the beginning stages of planetary exploration as we use rudimentary robots like the Spirit rover whom we already ascribe with anthropomorphic qualities, and who already moves our emotions in ways we could never explain.

Google perhaps even named their "Android" phones after one of the earlier versions of the replicants called the Nexus-6 (which gives us a hint of what this "evil" company may be up to in the near future). Corporations may utilize the charm of anthropomorphized machines to create profitable products that appeal to the masses and thus secure funding from "gadget-loving" consumers. Now that Human Space Flight is wide open for commercial entrepreneurship, it signals a glimpse of what lies ahead. Planetary exploration and colonization may in fact be undertaken by private firms.

And since humans are so fragile and expensive to transport and land on other planets, could there be good reasons to believe that the future exoplanetary exploration will be done in whole or in part, by artificially intelligent robots and androids operating under the funding or technology of commercial firms? One can never tell, unless of course when they're already staring us right in the face.

But if i was an Andy i will never go back to Earth, especially with that kind of treatment depicted in the novel. I'd rather run away far unto outer planets than be extinguished by narrow-minded humans on this forsaken world.

Links:
"Spirit" from XKCD
"Do Androids Dream" Official Page
Commercial Spaceflight

On Resolving Exoplanet Nicknames

While i was building the "Exoplanet Seeker", i discovered a wonderful capability of Freebase and i think i've found an extended use for it's auto-suggest feature.

If you start typing the nicknames of some exoplanets such as "Bellerophon" or "Osiris" or "Methuselah", you would notice that it suggests the correct exoplanet and shows it's official name. For example, if you started typing "Bellerophon" in the empty field it would start showing 51 Pegasi b, the historic exoplanet co-discovered by Michel Mayor. Or typing in "Methuselah" would bring up PSR B1620-26 b--the oldest known exoplanet believed to be 12.7 billion years old.

Immediately i appreciated this capability to bring up the official name by just typing the nickname, and we owe it to Freebase. It actually would prove to be a nice platform upon which to implement the proposal of Wladimir Lyra to give each exoplanet a nickname--in which case the "Exoplanet Seeker" would function as a nickname-resolver. A practical use would be this: If you can't remember what the cryptic official name of that odd exoplanet was, but you remember it's nickname (which often is the case), just go to The Exoplanet Seeker to help you find out the official name!

All this would only work if we saved the nickname in the 'alias' of the exoplanet data within Freebase. Somehow, behind the scenes the system looks up the aliases of objects within freebase and gets resolved by the auto-suggestion capability.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg--many more useful apps can be developed if enough exoplanet data is entered into Freebase. I hope some folks join me in filling up more data about exoplanets on freebase so many other developers can create more mash-ups utilizing this impressive platform.

A Data Pipe Dream

I have a dream, a data pipe dream. I'd like to share a vision on how to maximize the usefulness of data in the field of Exoplanet Science.

Even before I built the so-called Exoplanet Seeker, I had something else in mind. I wanted to build a "mash-up" from the treasure trove of data available about exoplanets. Much data on exoplanets are freely available but there is no standard as to how they are shared, and have no structure as to be usable by other web applications. And there is no way to channel them to other applications. In other words there are no "pipes" to send them through in order to make them more useful.

I am thankful that exoplanet researchers are sharing their data online. But now we must move to the next logical step. Most of the data providers do not expose their data in a structured way like XML or JSON. So far, the only one I saw that is friendly to programmers is LookUP, as they share data in XML, JSON, and AVM format.

Currently, there's no way for web developers to create compelling Web Apps or "mashups" from the data available at The Exoplanet Encyclopedia, NStED, or Exoplanets.org. The best I could do was to come up with a very simple exoplanet seeker, in the hopes that it signals a vision of what is to come in the next few years as more exoplanet discoveries pour in.

Think of the hundreds of thousands of exoplanets that will fill scattered databases across the earth. Think of how many Petabytes of data all these discoveries will mount to. And finally, think of how wonderful it would be if all the exoplanet researchers and planet-hunters in the world shared their data in the form that is usable by other Scientists, and open to Citizens as well.

I believe that when an interoperability standard is developed (perhaps something like an "Exoplanet Markup Language", ExoML), or when exoplanet data sources started sharing their data semantically, then a new form of Science will emerge from this abundance of structured Exoplanetary Science data. Awesome things can emerge from this information pipe infrastructure. Perhaps even some new and novel discoveries can come out of it.

If programmers can readily create visualizations from open data, or run simulations using structured data, or create cross references from different planetary characteristics along with their host stars' qualities then perhaps patterns can be discovered, like how they discovered the relationship between the lithium content of stars and the presence of planets around them. I'm sure there are other clues that are hidden in all these data, just waiting to be mined. Even old data can still contain yet undiscovered treasures, like how an exoplanet was found hidden within Hubble's old data archives.

This data pipe dream must have been apparent in two of my previous posts, "The Extremophile Zone" that hints some aspect of this data infrastructure (injecting how social media can play a role in science), and another is "Life is a Pattern", a flash fiction that gives a glimpse of this vision in a metaphorical narrative.

I hope that some organization picks up on this thread to enable a collaborative data pipeline among exoplanet researchers around the world.

Basic Guide To Star Adoption

If you've been following the saga of humanity's search for Earth-like worlds but you've always felt like an outsider in that effort, then here's your chance to become part of that endeavor. Yes, Science need the support of Citizens. In fact, Citizen involvement is the Holy Grail of Exoplanet Science.

So here's how you can contribute to science financially. There is a project called "Pale Blue Dot" that encourages donors to pick one of 100,000 stars in Kepler's field of view that show promise for hosting planets.

For $10 you can adopt one of these stars and plant your personal flag in that star on Google Sky. As Kepler makes new discoveries, you will get email updates about your star and its potential planets. Now, the fun part is that if you've chosen the right star, you'll be named in history as the adopter of the star with the FIRST known Earth-sized or Earth-like planet! Then imagine if that planet is introspected later on by the James Webb Telescope and actually hosts extra-terrestrial life! Isn't it great to be the proud parent of aliens?!

Now with that kind of title, money should not be an issue. But if you are curious about where the money goes, here is the gist. The money raised will go to the Kepler Astroseismic Science Consortium, an international group of researchers who study the seismology of stars. The group cannot get NASA funding to support its research because the agency can't fund foreign organisations.

You may think that Astroseismology may have nothing to do with planet-hunting, but knowing more about stars leads to more knowledge about the planets they hold. Kepler is in fact officially contributing to the field of Asteroseismology. Scientists can use pulsations to measure the radius of the star, giving NASA a way to determine the size of the planet. Pulsations can also help determine the stars' ages, which can help give an idea of how planetary systems form over time. The researchers may even be able to detect non-transiting planets that the main Kepler team would miss, if the planet is massive enough to make the star wobble towards and away from Earth.

So whether you hit the bullseye or not, it's all worth it. You can rest assured that you have been a generous contributor to Scientific Research and the advancement of human knowledge.

Personally, the Pale Blue Dot project appealed to me because it allows me to contribute to Science in a fun way. And the method of fund-raising is noble and is very unlike the possessive stance where you "buy" stars and delude yourself that you own them. But being able to brag to your friends that you adopted a whole world of aliens and civilizations is kinda crazy fun!

So now that I've brought the sparkle in your eyes and convinced you to be part of Science (and soon to be part of history)--lets do it! You need to go to the Pale Blue Dot project and adopt star(s). But which among these tens of thousands of stars are most likely to be the first one to be discovered that hosts the first Earth-like planet known in history?

Here's where i can help you choose your best bet. I've gathered several facts that would give you the best chance of adopting that lucky star. But don't tell your friends about this yet. They will beat you to that star! First here are some of the relevant facts:

1) Prior to launch high-resolution spectroscopy is performed to identify and eliminate the giant stars in the FOV.
2) There are gaps in the middle. This is like the blind spot(s) of Kepler.
3) Objects near the edges of the CCDs may be of marginal quality and may be off the edge of the CCD.
4) Differential velocity abberation causes the FOV (Field of View) to expand and contract by about 6 arcsec on an annual basis as the spacecraft orbits the Sun. This means that an object near the edge of the FOV will move by about 3/4 of a pixel.
5) The CCD data channel changes with the season and the exact pixel location will move slightly.
6) M dwarfs (Cool stars of spectral type M or red dwarf stars) have great chances of having Earth-like worlds. In fact, Gliese 581 and Gliese 876 is a red dwarf.

So given those facts, I can tell you that you should:

1) Choose the ones that are somewhere in the middle of a CCD. Do not choose the stars outside or at the edges of the CCDs. The rectangles in the photo denote the borders of the CCDs.
2) Choose small or medium stars and not the giant ones
3) Choose the reddish or orange stars. They are probably M stars, most likely to be discovered first that hosts planets in the habitable zone. There are still plenty of available stars that are small and has a reddish tint, as seen in the snapshot above.
4) Choose isolated stars, those which has no close neighbors. We don't know yet whether two stars very close together are true binary systems. (There's a lesser chance of planets forming in binary systems compared to isolated stars of the same type)

The list above is just a basic guide to improve your chances of guessing which star would be discovered first that hosts the first known earth-sized world. For the detail-oriented, there are more complex methods to improve your chances. But for the capable ones, I simply recommend the simplest way to snag that star accurately--by employing statistics. Simply adopt ALL those stars and you're guaranteed! But there's no challenge in that, so it's just better to make playful bets with your friends as to which star would win the honors. Of course a disclaimer is that if CoRoT, HARPS, Mearth and other planet-hunting teams beat Kepler to the punch, you would lose the *first* "Alien-Parent" title. But then again, that's another game (perhaps seriously played by the planet-hunters themselves). We could limit our game to the stars in Kepler's view for now.

Many earth-like planets may in fact orbit stars other than Red Dwarfs, but we want to target the *first* ones to be announced. The Habitable Zone around smaller and dimmer stars are closer to their suns. Their earth-mass planets will have tighter orbits and shorter orbital periods. Thus, observed transits of potential habitable worlds in these stars would occur more often than the 365 days it takes for our earth to go around the sun, relatively speaking.

A couple or more of transits is enough for Kepler to detect the presence of that planet, hence a little over a year and a half from now, the Kepler team might announce the discovery of that Earth-sized planet that orbits around the star you've chosen! So you better hurry. Adopt that star now to be the proud parent of Extra-Terrestrials!

The Exoplanet Seeker

Today, I just unveiled a convenient way for exoplanet researchers and enthusiasts to "seek" data about specific exoplanets from highly-targeted sources. I call it "The Exoplanet Seeker". It's a simple interface to enable anyone to easily query numerous exoplanet databases on the web to find data on an exoplanet of choice. Currently, it can be found at the homepage at http://www.exoplanetology.com for easy access.

Current exoplanet data sources include the Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia, NASA's PlanetQuest New Worlds Atlas, The Planetary Society's Catalog, Exoplanets.org's table, ArXiv, and so on.

As you can see, each database has it's own unique focus and presentation. For example, The Planetary Society's Catalogue has orbital diagrams, while exoplanets.org has the lightcurves, and Planet Quest's New Worlds Atlas has the nice graphical charts.

So the Exoplanet Seeker acts as a junction point to all these great sources of exoplanet data. More sources will be added as they come along. And of course, more exoplanets will appear in the auto-suggest list as they get entered into Freebase which powers the auto-suggest feature.

And the great thing about all this is that anyone can contribute by adding data into Freebase--which is easy: just copy the data from the reputable sources! [eyebrows rising sharply? tee-hee] Perhaps this is just the beginning of "Open Source Exoplanetology" via Citizen Science.

The interface that I provided is just a tip of the possibilities if enough exoplanet data is entered on Freebase. Many exoplanet apps can be made from the wealth of free structured data on the Freebase platform.

To use the Exoplanet Seeker, simply start typing into the empty field and a list of exoplanet suggestions will pop up so you can choose accordingly. Then select an exoplanet data repository to search from. Finally, click the "SEEKER" button to search data about that exoplanet from the source database that you've chosen. A new browser window will be opened showing the search results from the external website providing the exoplanet data.

Please enjoy The Exoplanet Seeker and I welcome your comments, and will dodge violent reactions. Do let me know any of your suggestions.

Happy Exoplanet Seeking!

The Loopback Address of Habitable Worlds

In the world of servers and the interwebs, there is such a thing as a loopback address. It's often http://127.0.0.1 on most computers or simply http://localhost that is used to find out if the internet infrastructure is functional. It's also used to test if a webserver (such as Tomcat) is active on a local machine.

In the search for Habitable Worlds, there is a kind of "loopback address" as well. Our loopback address is Earth--the local host of life.

Recently, we have used some of our space probes to look back at our planet from millions of miles away. As if from a mirror, we've learned new things by watching Earth--giving us initial insights on what to look for on exoplanets for prospects of habitability.

One of these crafts, EPOXI has helped scientists to come up w/ a potential technique in detecting features on the surface of exoplanets. They based their findings on how the oceans and continents of the Earth appears from 30 million miles away. The same team also found out that "sun glints" are reflected from the oceans of the Earth.

And from a little farther away, the Voyager spacecraft has shown us that our planet is a tiny speck of pale blue dot, which has evoked lucid reflections from the late Carl Sagan.

With all these beginner insights of what to look for on other planets, we've alternately began to think of how other alien civilizations would see us. By some recursive loop of "Exoplanetary thinking", we now think about how they would think of us thinking about them thinking about us.

And in turn, any extraterrestrial in the same curious endeavor of finding life elsewhere would naturally begin their quest by also looking back at their homeworld--their loopback address.

Perhaps there is a cosmic rule, that for Civilizations which starts to think about other habitable worlds, they will find that the loopback address begins at home.

"... and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." --T.S. Elliot

Links:
The New Exoplanetology
Seeing Earth from an Alien Perspective
Sun Glints
Pale Blue Dot

The First Five Exoplanets for 2010 from Kepler

Amidst the bone-chilling weather, on the first Monday of 2010 the Kepler Mission Team announced 5 new exoplanet discoveries to kick-start the new year, and to coincide with the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Washington.

The new exoplanets were named Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b. They range in size between Neptune to larger than Jupiter, and have orbits ranging from 3.3 to 4.9 days. Estimated temperatures of these "Hot Jupiters" range from 2,200 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than molten lava and much too hot for life as we know it. All five of the exoplanets orbit stars hotter and larger than Earth's sun.

I consider the discovery of these seething hot giants as a warm-up for Kepler (no pun intended). Planets with short periods of orbits will be announced first as they transit their star much quicker relative to the Earth's 365-day orbit. Soon, the planet-hunting telescope will discover smaller, and possibly more "earth-like" worlds as Kepler stares longer at stars with planets orbiting a bit farther away from their suns, and thus probably lie within a Habitable Zone. As Jon Morse, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington says, "We expected Jupiter-size planets in short orbits to be the first planets Kepler could detect. It's only a matter of time before more Kepler observations lead to smaller planets with longer period orbits, coming closer and closer to the discovery of the first Earth analog."

Congratulations and High fives to the Kepler Team!

Links:

Kepler Mission Page

NASA Kepler Page

Sky and Telescope

Wired Magazine

Universe Today

The Planetary Society

Washington Post