systemic

For many years, and irregardless of the audience, one could profitably start one’s talk on extrasolar planets with an impressive plot. On the y-axis was the log of the planetary mass (or if one was feeling particularly rigorous, log[Msin(i)]), and the x-axis charted the year of discovery. The lower envelope of the points on the graph traced out a perfect Moore’s Law trajectory that intersected one Earth mass sometime around 2011 or 2012. (And rather exhiliratingly, Gordon Moore himself was actually sitting in the audience at one such talk, back in 2008.)

But now, that graph just makes me feel old, like uncovering a sheaf of transparencies for overhead projectors detailing the search for as-yet undiscovered brown dwarfs.

By contrast, a document that is fully-up-to-date is the new Kepler Catalog Paper, which was posted to arXiv last week. This article describes the latest, uniformly processed catalog of the full Q1-Q17 Kepler data release, and records 8,826 objects of interest and 4,696 planet candidates. This plot, in particular, is impressive:

For over a decade, transits were reliably the next big thing. At the risk of veering dangerously close to nostalgia trip territory, I recall all the hard-won heat and noise surrounding objects like Ogle TR-86b, Tres-1 and XO-3b. They serve to really set the plot above into a certain context.

Transits are now effectively running the exoplanet detection show. Much of the time on cutting-edge spectrographs — HARPS-N, HARPS-S, APF, Keck — is spent following up photometric candidates, and this is time-consuming work with less glamour than the front-line front-page searches of years past. Using a simple, admittedly naive solar-system derived mass-radius estimate that puts the best K-feet forward, the distribution of Doppler radial velocity amplitudes induced by all the Kepler candidates looks something like this:

Given that one knows the period, the phase, and a guess at the expected amplitude, RV detections of transiting planet candidates are substantially easier to obtain than blue-sky mining detections of low-amplitude worlds orbiting nearby stars. Alpha Centauri is closed for business for the next block of years.

Question is: During 2016, will there be a peer-reviewed detection of a Doppler-velocity-only planet with K<1 m/sec? Head over to Metaculus and make your prediction count.

Spontaneous generation, the notion that life springs spontaneously and readily from inanimate matter, provides a certain impetus to the search for extrasolar planets. In the current paradigm, spontaneous generation occurs when a “rocky planet” with liquid water is placed in the “habitable zone” of an appropriate star.

The general idea has a venerable history. In his History of Animals in Ten Books, Aristotle writes (near the beginning of Book V):

Aristotle provides little in the way of concrete detail, but later workers in the field were more specific. Louis Pasteur, in an address given in 1864 at the Sorbonne Scientific Soiree, transcribes recipes for producing scorpions and mice elucidated in 1671 by Jean-Baptiste van Helmont:

Carve an indentation in a brick, fill it with crushed basil, and cover the brick with another, so that the indentation is completely sealed. Expose the two bricks to sunlight, and you will find that within a few days, fumes from the basil, acting as a leavening agent, will have transformed the vegetable matter into veritable scorpions.

If a soiled shirt is placed in the opening of a vessel containing grains of wheat, the reaction of the leaven in the shirt with fumes from the wheat will, after approximately twenty-one days, transform the wheat into mice.

There is a certain similarity to the habitable planet formula for the spontaneous generation of extraterrestrials — wet and dry elements combined for sufficient time give rise to life.

In his address, Pasteur goes on to describe his own forerunners of the Miller-Urey experiment, in which he sought to determine whether microbial life is spontaneously generated. He placed sterilized broth in swan-necked beakers that allowed the free circulation of air, but which made it difficult for spore-sized particles to reach the broth. His negative results were instrumental in dispatching the idea of Earth-based spontaneous generation of microbes from scientific favor.

A model for Enceladus? Before devising his swan neck flask experiments, Pasteur sealed flasks containing yeast water from air. The one above remains sterile more than 150 years on.

Everyone’s heard the cliché about lemons and lemonade. NASA’s K2 Mission exemplifies it.

For brighter stars, the photometric light curves from K2 have precision on par with the original mission, and the data is completely free for everyone to look at. No secret repositories, no loose lips sink embargoed publications. Individual planets are so numerous that they are beginning to resemble the pages of names in a phone book. Six years ago, the light curve for EPIC 210508766 with its uninhabitable 2.747d and 9.997d super-Earths would have been cause for non-disclosure agreements and urgent Keck follow up. Now, given the ho-hum V=14.33, these planets will wind up as anonymous lines in a catalog paper — weights for gray scale dots in big data plots. Mere dimidia:

(EPIC 210508766 b and c, discovered earlier this week by Songhu Wang and Sarah Millholland)

A few years ago, I wrote a number of posts about a “valuation” equation for getting a quantitative assessment of the newsworthiness of potentially habitable planets. The equation folds qualities such as planetary size, temperature and proximity into a single number, which is in turn normalized by the dollar cost of the Kepler Mission.

The equation, when thoughtlessly applied to Earth, nearly got me into serious hot water when the now-defunct News of the World ran a story with it (which stayed, fortunately, behind a pay wall).

Now that Kepler’s prime mission has been complete for a substantial period, it’s interesting to calculate the values implied by the equation for the up-to-date table of Kepler’s KOI candidates. The cumulative sum runs into the tens of millions of dollars, with single objects such as KOI 4878.01 exceeding $10M. Such worlds are truly the candidates that the Kepler Mission was designed to find.

With K2, which has many bright M-dwarfs within its sites, it’s quite plausible that some very high-profile planets will soon turn up. I’ve set up a K2 prediction market at metaculus.com that canvases the likelihood that such a discovery is imminent…

Sign up and make your prediction count!

If nothing else, the extrasolar planets comprise a thoroughly alien cohort, albeit one that is hitched awkwardly to a naming scheme of utilitarian expedience: Tres-4b, Gliese 876e, HD 149026b, and so forth.

When it comes to exoplanets, I’m somewhat chagrined to realize that I fall into the old timer category, and so predictably, back in the old days, I stuck up for the conservative, default naming convention. In this post on exoplanet names back in 2008, I wrote:

A sequence of letters and numbers carries no preconception, underscoring the fact that these worlds are distant, alien, and almost wholly unknown — K2 is colder and more inaccessible than Mt. McKinley, Vinson Massif or Everest.

The International Astronomical Union, however, just issued official crowdsourced names for 31 exoplanets.

Some of them might take a some getting used to. Fortitudo, Orbitrar, Intercrus. “Son, that’s not 51 Peg b, that’s Dimidium.”

So will the names come into general use? I’ve set up a prediction market at our new website Metaculus to determine whether or not it’s likely:

www.metaculus.com/questions/38/

What do you think? Sign up and make your prediction count…