Discovering Exoplanets from Matt D. on Vimeo.
I emailed a professor in California who runs the whole Kepler program and this is what he wrote back.
.... I know that you found planets that are hundreds and thousands of light-years away, so why are you looking at stars so far away even though we have no chance of getting to them?
I'll try to answer the most critical part of question first, even though a "why" question is notoriously tricky. You assert that we have no chance of getting to them. I would modify that assertion slightly: we have no chance of getting to them with our present science and technology. But who knows what the future really holds for us. We have been surprised many times by what becomes possible when human knowledge advances and technology becomes ever more amazing. Being in 7th grade, it could be hard for you to see all the examples of such changes in your lifetime. But at my age, I've seen a pretty fair number of them---the difference between now and 1950s or early 60s is considerable. Internet did not exist, travel to the Moon or even into space was in the realm of science fiction only. We knew the universe was expanding but we had no idea that expansion was actually accelerating. In another class, a very similar question was raised---can we go to any of these stars? When the guest speaker said that was unlikely, one student responded, don't you worry about that Mr. _____, you just find the planets, we'll take care of getting there!
But let's suppose for the moment that we never acquire the knowledge needed to travel to the stars. There's an implication in the question that there's no point in looking at something if you can't "get to it." In a positive sense, we look at things to learn about them. We do it for for the enjoyment and the excitement of quest for knowledge. Human hunger to learn about the universe is insatiable. We do it to satisfy our hunger for knowledge or our need to explore. And in this case, searching for Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of stars, we do it in part to start to answer the question are we humans and critters on Earth the only example a planet with thinking beings on it?
One way we can get to them is by sending signals---electromagnetic radiation---in fact we already are, for the most part unintentionally. If our civilization lives long enough, and there are other civilizations out there, generations could embark on very long term conversations with round trip response time in hundreds or thousands of years. Whether or not we'd extend human longevity to those time periods is a whole other question.
Would you were able to go to another planet.Would you want to go there or would you want to stay on Earth? What would bring? Would you want to go to a planet in our solar system or outside of our solar system. I would leave the solar system, because there would be so much more to see.
First, what is an exoplanet. An exoplanets is a planets outside of our solar system and how do we find them. Well the way NASA does it is they watch the star very, very closely. Then when a planet passes by the star goes a little dimmer and then they still watch it to see how fast it revolves or maybe if was just an asteroid that passes by. Some challenges of finding these planets is that they don’t produce their own light except when young. They are very far away for us and they can be lost in the brightness of the star. A question I had was why do we look at stars so far away. One reason is that there really aren’t any stars that are close. The closest star is 4.2 light-years away, that is the Alpha Centauri, which is actually 2 stars, but you have to use a telescope to see them separated. Even so the newest planet they found is 560 light-years away. Also the professor talked more about it below.
Kepler is a spacecraft that has a large telescope on it. It was named after Johannes Kepler. The telescope is like any other telescope in those big observatories, except it is out in space, following the earth. Also they use earth telescopes to help confirm it is a planet.Once the kepler telescope detected the new planet, every observatory has special things it can do. For this planet they used the Kekak Observatory can see the electromagnetic spectrum. So it can confirm it is a new planet, because the star wobbles because of the pull of the planet. During the time it wobbles it switches between purple (high frequency) or red (low frequency). Also the wobble is when the planet pulls on the star and the star actually moves around in a circle.
The main plan for kepler is to find Habitable planets and according to NASA a habitable place is a place that can sustain water. In our solar system there are 4 places that have water on them. 1. Earth. moon, but it has no atmosphere. 3. Mars, it has ice caps. NASA was thinking that under the ice could be some2. The kind of live form, but now the ice caps are melting because of its own planetary warming. 4. Jupiter’s Moon: Titan, Sending probe in 2012.
The main goal of kepler is to find habitable planets and they did find planets that we may be able to live on, but the problem was that we would never get to them, well not with our current technology. The only way I think we should travel is if we could go at least 6x the speed of light, because even going that fast it would still take 100 years to get to Kepler-10b or we could teleport. That is way, way, way in the future, but still the other way is have a lot of people on a giant ship where people live there, but think how many generations would die on that ship. Even if we went the speed of light 6 or more generations would be born on the ship and die on that ship. To me that is the wrong way to go.
As you Kepler-10b is NOT a habitable planet, because it is extremely hot there, but now they just found new planets that possibly could sustain water. Though we have no chance of getting there, but like the professor said now at least we have the knowledge that it is there.
Looking back at my driving question it was “How does NASA find planets like earth” and I did answer it, but now kind of looking back at that it doesn’t seem like much of an open ended question, because answer it by just saying a few sentences. But otherwise I hope you enjoyed my project.
