With my time-out period over (more about this next week), I want to get back into gear with the help of Ramses Ramirez, a specialist on planetary habitability whose work has now taken him to Japan. Born and raised in New York City, Ramses tells me he is much at home in his new position as a research scientist at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) in Tokyo, where opportunities for scientific collaboration abound and the chance to learn a new language beckons. We've looked at Ramses' papers a number of times in these pages, and I was delighted when he offered this description of his work to our readership. A student of James Kasting, he received his Ph.D. from Penn State in 2014 and went on to postdoc work with Lisa Kaltenegger at Cornell's Carl Sagan Institute. A fascination with astrobiology and the issues involved in defining habitable zones continues to be a primary focus. Ramses' new paper ponders whether we are best served by looking for life similar to Earth's because this...

A cluster of stars sharing a common origin, now gravitationally unbound, is referred to as a stellar association. I’ve written before about how useful some of these groupings can be. In the form of so-called moving groups -- a stellar association that is still somewhat coherent -- they help us identify stars of similar age, an aid as we discover new objects. Now we have word of an object called 2MASS 0249 c, found in the Beta Pictoris moving group, that has striking similarities to the most famous member of that group, Beta Pictoris b. 2MASS 0249 c, like Beta Pictoris b, was found by direct imaging, meaning we’re actually looking at the object under discussion in the image below. The two objects are all but identical in mass, brightness and spectrum. Images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) showed an object moving at a large distance from its host, which turned out to be a pair of closely spaced brown dwarfs. Follow-up observations with the Keck instrument allowed that...

Red dwarfs have a lot of things going for them when it comes to finding possibly habitable planets. A planet of Earth size in the HZ will produce a substantial transit signal because of the small size of the star (‘transit depth' refers to the amount of the star's light that is blocked by the planet), and the tight orbit the planet must follow increases the geometric probability of observing a transit. But planets that do not transit are also more readily detected because of the large size of the planet compared to the star, gravitational interactions producing a strong radial velocity signature, which is what we have in the case of Ross 128b. About 11 light years from Earth, the planet was culled out of more than a decade of radial velocity data in 2017 using the European Southern Observatory's HARPS spectrograph (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The location of the planet near the inner edge of its star’s habitable zone excited...

It's always a shock for me when the soft air and fecund smells of spring slam into a parched and baked July, but seasonal change is inevitable. At least it is on Earth. We get such seasonal changes because of Earth's obliquity, the angle of its spin axis relative to the plane of its orbit. For Earth, the angle has stayed pretty close to 23 degrees for a long time, although the tilt's direction wobbles over cycles of thousands of years. And this very constancy of obliquity turns up in exoplanet discussions at times because it affects conditions on a planetary surface. Some have argued that without the gravitational effects of the Moon, the tilt of the Earth would be changed by the gravitational pull of the Sun and planets, producing a potentially high degree of obliquity. Contrast our situation with that of Uranus, where we find a 90-degree tilt that leaves one pole in sunlight for half the Uranian year as the other remains in darkness. Without knowing how long the Moon has been able...

The K2 mission's C16 and C17 observing campaigns -- each containing observations of one patch of the sky for an 80-day period -- have proven fruitful for astronomers at MIT. The institution's Ian Crossfield, working with graduate student Liang Yu, has brought new software tools developed at MIT to work, producing results just weeks after the mission's raw data for these observing runs were made available. Now we have nearly 80 new exoplanet candidates from C16, but we also have a method of fast analysis that should benefit future missions. Let's pause on method. The idea here is to speed up the analysis of light curves, the graphs showing the intensity of light from a star. Between them, C16 and C17 tracked about 50,000 stars, the analysis of whose light would normally take at least several months and perhaps as long as a year. Speed is of the essence because a faster planet identification process makes it possible for quick ground-based radial velocity follow-ups that might...

Looking through a recent Astrophysical Journal paper on gas giants in the habitable zone of their stars, I found myself being diverted by the distinction between a conservative habitable zone (CHZ) and a somewhat more optimistic one (OHZ). Let's pause briefly on this, because these are terms that appear frequently enough in the literature to need some attention. The division works like this (and I'll send you to the paper for references on the background work that has developed both concepts): The OHZ in our Solar System is considered to be roughly 0.71 to 1.8 AU, which sees Venus as the inner cutoff (a world evidently barren for at least a billion years) and Mars as the outer edge, given that it appears to have been habitable in the early days of the system, perhaps some 3.8 billion years ago. 'Habitable' in both HZ categories is defined as the region around a star where water can exist in a liquid state on a planet with sufficient atmospheric pressure (James Kasting has a classic...

Some 4 million years old, the star HD 163296 is about 330 light years out in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. When dealing with stars this young, astronomers have had success with data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), teasing out features in protoplanetary disks filled with gas and dust, the breeding ground of new planets. As seen below, the ALMA imagery can be striking, a closeup look at a stellar system in formation. Image: ALMA image of the protoplanetary disk surrounding the young star HD 163296 as seen in dust. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO); A. Isella; B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF). Tantalizingly, ALMA can show us rings in such disks, and the gaps that imply an emerging planet. But how do we know we're actually looking at planets, rather than other phenomena we're only now learning how to detect in such disks? New work from Richard Teague (University of Michigan) as well as a second effort by Christophe Pinte and team (Monash University,...

One of the benefits of having Alpha Centauri as our closest stellar neighbor is that this system comprises three different kinds of star. We have the familiar Centauri A, a G-class star much like our Sun, along with the smaller Centauri B, a K-class star with about 90 percent of the Sun’s mass. Proxima Centauri gives us an M-dwarf, along with the (so far) only known planet in the system, Proxima b. Questions of habitability here are numerous. Along with possible tidal locking, another major issue is radiation, since M-dwarfs are known for their flare activity. As we learn more about the entire Alpha Centauri system, though, we’re learning that the two primary stars are much more clement. They may have issues of their own -- in particular, although stable orbits can be found around both Centauri A and B, we still don’t know whether planets are likely to have formed there -- but scientists studying data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory have found that levels of X-ray radiation are...

In Stephen Baxter’s novel Ark (Gollancz, 2009), a starship launched by an Earth in crisis reaches a planet in the 82 Eridani system, an ‘Earth II’ that turns out to have major problems. Whereas Earth has an obliquity, or tilt relative to its orbital axis, of about 23.5 degrees, the second ‘Earth’ offers up a whopping 90 degree obliquity. Would a planet like this, given what must be extreme seasonality, be remotely habitable? The crew discusses the problem as they watch a computerized display showing Earth II and its star. The planet’s rotation axis is depicted as a splinter pushed through its bulk, one that points almost directly at the star. But as the planet rotates, the axis keeps pointing at the same direction in space. After half a year, the planet’s north pole is in darkness, its south pole in light. One of Baxter’s characters explains the consequences: “Every part of the planet except an equatorial strip will suffer months of perpetual darkness, months of perpetual light. Away...

The definition of a habitable zone is under constant refinement, an important line of research as we choose which exoplanets to focus on in our search for life. Centauri Dreams regular Alex Tolley today looks at the question as it involves the presence of methane. With planetary warming already known to vary depending on the spectral type of the host star, we now learn that the presence of methane can produce thermal inversions and surface cooling on M-star exoplanets, impacting the outer limits of the habitable zone. The work of Ramses Ramirez (Tokyo Institute of Technology) and Lisa Kaltenegger (Carl Sagan Institute, Cornell University), the paper also suggests a possible biosignature near the outer habitable zone edge of hotter stars, one of several results that Alex explores in today's essay. by Alex Tolley Alien world - still from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) As noted in previous posts on biosignatures, especially in regards to life prior to...

Looking for biological products in planetary atmospheres is how we'll first study exoplanetary life, assuming it exists. The tools for characterizing atmospheres have already developed to the point that we are examining the gases surrounding some 'hot Jupiters,' and even talking about the movement of clouds -- exoplanet meteorology -- on giant worlds. The hope is that TESS will find targets that we can then investigate with new space telescopes. The way forward is exciting, but my guess is that as we start looking into the atmospheres of transiting planets around nearby red dwarfs, the most accessible targets in the near future, we're going to find ourselves awash in controversy. Did we just find oxygen? Maybe we're on the way to a biosignature detection, but then again, ultraviolet radiation can break down atmospheric water to produce oxygen. For that matter, UV can split carbon dioxide molecules. What about methane? Abiotic methane from geothermal activity on the surface could...

Scientists have been saying for some time now that helium should be readily detectable in the atmospheres of gas giant planets -- after all, this is the second-most common element in the universe, and we know it is plentiful at Jupiter and Saturn. The problem has been how to detect it, an issue which this morning's story brings into sharp relief. At the University of Exeter (UK), Jessica Spake has put data from the Hubble telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 to good use, finding an abundance of helium in the upper atmosphere. The planet in question is the puffy WASP-107b, and this marks the first helium detection of the inert gas on an exoplanet. Some 200 light years from Earth in the constellation Virgo, WASP-107b shows little similarity to anything in our own Solar System. It was discovered in 2017 and is one of the lowest density planets yet found, a world that, although roughly the same size as Jupiter, has only 12 percent of its mass. In a tight six-day orbit around its K-class...

Scaling up our space telescopes calls for new thinking. Consider this: The Hubble telescope has a primary mirror of 2.4 meters. The James Webb Space Telescope takes us to 6.5 meters. But as we begin to get results from missions like TESS and JWST (assuming the latter gets off safely), we're going to need much more to see our most interesting targets. Imagine what could be done with a 30-meter space telescope, and ponder the challenge of constructing it. This is what Cornell University's Dmitry Savransky has been doing, developing a NIAC study that looks at modular design and self-assembly in space. Savransky's notions take me back to a much earlier era, when people like Bob Forward talked about massive structures in space that dwarf any engineering project we've yet attempted. Forward saw these projects -- his vast Fresnel lens between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus 1000 kilometers in diameter, for example -- as ultimately achievable, but his primary concern was to be sure the...

Avi Loeb's always interesting work has recently taken us into the realm of target selection for exoplanet surveys. Where should we be putting our time and money in the search for life elsewhere, and what can we do to maximize both the credibility of the investigation and the funding that it demands? These sound like pedestrian matters compared to the excitement of discovery -- finding Proxima b was a lot more exciting than watching any congressional committee debate over NASA's priorities. But Proxima Centauri b, that fascinating world around the nearest star, fits neatly into this narrative, for reasons that contrast nicely with its own nearest neighbors, Centauri A and B. The Centauri stars are an obvious target, and one that Loeb has devoted considerable time to assessing, given his deep involvement with Breakthrough Starshot's study of a mission there. If we find planets around Centauri A or B, are they our priority? Just where does Proxima b fit in? And what of fascinating...

Water delivery to the inner Solar System is crucial for life to develop, for worlds like our own must have formed dry, well within the 'snowline.' We need a mechanism to bring volatiles from the ice-rich regions beyond 3 AU or so, and while much attention has been paid to comets, we've been learning more about asteroids as a second delivery option, for isotopic measurements have shown that Earth's water has similarities to water bound up in carbonaceous asteroids. Focusing on asteroid delivery, Pete Schultz (Brown University) and colleague Terik Daly, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University, have confronted the issues raised by early system impacts in a series of experiments. The results appear in the journal Science Advances. Says Schultz: "Impact models tell us that impactors should completely devolatilize at many of the impact speeds common in the solar system, meaning all the water they contain just boils off in the heat of the impact. But nature has a tendency to...

I usually get up while it’s still dark and take a walk. The idea is to shake the night’s dreams out of my head, listen to the birds waking up and pull in a lot of fresh air, all conducive to thinking about what I want to write that day. Last fall I kept noticing the glow before morning twilight that marked the zodiacal cloud, faint enough to be lost in moonlight and challenging to see when competing with city lights. But catch the right conditions and its diffuse glow is apparent, as in the photograph below, a striking example of zodiacal light’s effect. Image: Sometimes mistaken for light pollution, zodiacal light is sunlight that is reflected by zodiacal dust. It is most visible several hours after sunset on dark, cloudless nights surrounding the spring and fall equinoxes, when the Earth's equator is aligned with the plane of the solar system. Credit: Malcol. What we’re seeing, especially at times when the ecliptic is at its largest angle to the horizon, hence autumn and spring, is...

As we await the launch of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, I want to pause this morning to remind everyone of another significant mission: CHEOPS (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite). The decade ahead is going to be an exciting one for exoplanet discovery, given that we have TESS about ready to go, JWST in the pipeline despite its problems, and CHEOPS expected to launch in 2019. Eleven European nations are involved in CHEOPS, a European Space Agency 'S-class' mission that will study exoplanetary transits. Image: Artist's impression of CHEOPS at work. Credit: ESA. In 2026, we can look forward to ESA's PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission, which will study up to a million stars in search of planetary transits, with the emphasis on rocky planets in the habitable zone. In 2028, we have the ARIEL mission (Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey) to anticipate (see ARIEL: Focus on Exoplanet Atmospheres). What a run of space-based...

Last December I mentioned the ongoing work at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to modify an instrument called VISIR (VLT Imager and Spectrometer for the InfraRed). Breakthrough Initiatives, through its Breakthrough Watch program, is working with the ESO's NEAR program (New Earths in the Alpha cen Region) to improve the instrument's contrast and sensitivity, the goal being the detection of a habitable zone planet at Alpha Centauri. Exciting stuff indeed, especially given the magnitude of the challenge. After all, we are dealing with a tight binary, with the two stars closing to within 11 AU in their 79.9 year orbit about a common center (think of a K-class star at about Saturn's distance). The binary's orbital eccentricity can separate the stars by about 35 AU at their most distant. The latest figure I've seen for the distance between Centauri A/B and Proxima Centauri is about 13,000 AU. In an ESO blog post that Centauri Dreams reader Harry Ray passed along,...

Given Centauri Dreams's interest in exoplanet studies, it's no surprise that when I write about the James Webb Space Telescope, it's usually to fit the observatory into the overall study of other stellar systems. But of course JWST has been conceived to study everything from the earliest stars and galaxies to the ongoing birth of stars out of massive clouds of dust, not to mention objects within our own Solar System. JWST also offers us a real chance to probe exoplanet atmospheres around nearby M-dwarfs, but it is certainly not a dedicated exoplanet mission. So while we hope for a successful launch in 2020, according to the evolving schedule, and look forward to finding plenty of JWST targets with the upcoming Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), let's have a look at a new mission from the European Space Agency with a tight exoplanet focus. The Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL) has just been selected as an ESA science mission scheduled for...

No one said this was going to be easy. Delays involving the James Webb Space Telescope are frustrating, with NASA now talking about a launch in mid-2020 instead of next year, and the uncertain prospect of a great deal of further testing and new expenditures that could run the project over budget, necessitating further congressional approval. It's hard to look back at the original Webb projections without wincing. When first proposed, estimates on the space observatory ran up to $3.5 billion, a hefty price tag indeed, though the science payoff looked to be immense. It was in 2011 that a figure of $8 billion emerged; the project now has a Congressionally-mandated cost cap of $8.8 billion. And now, looking forward, we have Thomas Zurbuchen, speaking for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, explicitly saying "We don't really fully know what the exact cost will be…" Image: Illustration of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: NASA. Projects this big invariably take us into the...