How many planets are out there?

You guys have to see this.

I didn’t know there was such a thing as the Kepler Mission happening. The Kepler satellite is part of NASA Discovery Mission #10, which aims to collect systematic data on the prevalence and size of planets orbiting other stars in the Milky Way. Kepler is equipped with a powerful telescope that has a very wide range of vision, which is pointed constantly at a particular range of space for four years. In that time, Kepler can monitor the spectral signatures of 100,000 and measure the deviation in brightness to detect the transit of a planet around the star. With such a large sample, the handlers expect to find something on the order of 50 planets, if most are the size of earth and perhaps 640 if planets tend to be much larger. Put simply, Kepler doesn’t just look for planets; it’s looking for data on the prevalence of planets.

But even if planets are common, who such a big sample size? There are all sorts of really delicious details on the link above, but this one knocked my socks off—

For a planet to transit, as seen from our solar system, the orbit must be lined up edgewise to us. The probability for an orbit to be properly aligned is equal to the diameter of the star divided by the diameter of the orbit. This is 0.5% for a planet in an Earth-like orbit about a solar-like star. (For the giant planets discovered in four-day orbits, the alignment probability is more like 10%.) In order to detect many planets one can not just look at a few stars for transits or even a few hundred. One must look at thousands of stars, even if Earth-like planets are common. If they are rare, then one needs to look at many thousands to find even a few. Kepler looks at 100,000 stars so that if Earths are rare, a null or near null result would still be significant. If Earth-size planets are common then Kepler should detect hundreds of them.

The picture below, from here, shows how sensitive Kepler’s output is relative to ground-based detection systems. The dip is the drop in light intensity as a planet transits a distant star.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Science, Space , kepler

What Hydrogen atoms can do with 13.7 billion years.

I want to say two things that I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, because neither can be said enough. Instead of watching the next installment of a sitcom tonight, or clicking through to the next webpage, take fifteen minutes and have your mind blown by rockstar physicist Brian Cox explaining the value of the Large Hadron Collider at TED.

Here is the second thing: basic science is fundamental, and the United States should be leading the way. We talked a couple of days ago about how progressive hegemony can order the world, by inspiring other peoples to recognize the contribution we make to the march of civilization. Basic science should be at the forefront of that effort, and the United States has not lived up to its promise in that regard. What is astounding is how cheap these enormously valuable contraptions can be. The Large Hadron Collider is expected to cost about $3.8 billion, shared between twenty countries. That’s about four-fifths of the cost of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. The post immediately below this has an even more dramatic example.

So which does more for this country, and more for the world—which does more to demonstrate what Hydrogen atoms can do with 13.7 billion years? A really big boat, or the machine that awed someone as brilliant and eloquent as Brian Cox? (To be fair, it is a really big boat.)

a.j.m.

Filed under: Science , progressive hegemony, TED

Christmas distraction.

This is less about international politics than it’s about nothing, but a lesser theme of this page is the utterly and uselessly fascinating.

Winds have names, and none more comprehensively than those of the Mediterranean. The Levanter, the Mistral, the Scirocco will be the most familiar to the layperson, but there are others. The Leveche, for instance ‘is a dry, scorching, sand- and dust-laden wind from between south-east and south-west, peculiar to the south-east coast of Spain between Almeria and Valencia.’ Wikipedia, bless its electronic soul, has a list of named winds. The Gilavar is a south wind in the Absheron Penninsula of Azerbaijan. The Abroholos is a ’squall frequent wind that occurs…on the coast of Brazil.’ The Chinook comes warm and dry westerly off the Rockies.

If you haven’t noticed—winds have great names.

Also of interest: 

• Boomkat’s year end lists of best music. (the best since Pitchfork imploded)

• Wikipedia’s List of largest gatherings in history (in preparation for the inauguration, which may rank in the top five.)

• Enigmo 2, a remarkable puzzle game in robust 3d, for the mac and pc. 

Merry Christmas from TII!

—a.j. mount

Filed under: Science

A stunning lack of vision.

The Wall St. Journal reports this week that the Bush administration is actively opposing what sounds like a very reasonable FCC plan to auction off spectrum bandwidth to a private company who would be required to provide free nationwide, moderate-speed, ad-supported wireless internet. With the other portion of the auctioned bandwidth, the company could provide a higher-quality subscription service. The reasons are predictable.

“The administration believes that the (airwaves) should be auctioned without price or product mandate,” [Commerce Sec'y] Gutierrez wrote.

Given the dismal state of high-speed internet competition in this country—many major metropolitan areas only have two carriers—it’s difficult to see how free market principles are threatened by an auction of a publicly-held good to provide not one but two more price points for a lethargic market. If we’re going to oppose a consensus deal that can simultaneously stimulate the market and provide a public service, let’s at least pretend we’re operating on principle.

Both the penetration and the quality of high-bandwidth connectivity in this country is a disgrace. National wireless internet isn’t a solution, but it’s a start. To refuse to rectify this represents a truly stunning lack of vision.

—a.j. mount

Filed under: Domestic, Science , FCC, internet, markets, NGL, NWI

What news from the real world.

The arXiv is an aggregator of papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, biology, and statistics, run by Cornell University that provides open access to cutting-edge science. Naturally, it’s all worse than greek to me, so the arXiv physics blog provides both a fascinating read and a valuable resource to keep up with scientific progress that doesn’t consist of the perpetual motion machines and news about HAARP that floats to the top of reddit once a month. 

Among the top five posts recently—

• Nuclear decay rates depend on our distance from the sun? (IAEA a seasonal job?)

• Overwhelming evidence for the black hole at the center of our galaxy. (an existential threat to freedom?)

• Quantum communication really doesn’t make sense. (good luck, Alex)

Warning: do not attempt to do social science with this. You know who you are. 

—a.j. mount

Filed under: Science

The silver bullet.

I’ve never posted about this here, but those who know me know that I can’t recommend the talks from the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference enough. These quick talks, by some of the coolest and cleverest and most accomplished minds on the planet, were formerly only available to attendees of the invitation-only conference each year but are now freely available online in their entirety.

Dean Ornish’s frenetic and revelatory discussion of the chronic health effects of exporting an American diet is linked in the sidebar, as is Clay Sharkey’s discussion at a related forum of his notion of the cognitive surplus. For the price of fifteen minutes (or three in Ornish’s case), you can gain many orders of magnitude more information and entertainment from these talks than you would form any sitcom, and they leave you feeling energized, wondrous, anxious for the future. 

Case in point, today I watched Robert Ballard talk for eighteen minutes about the tremendous quantity of knowledge yet to be uncovered by oceanic exploration, which is almost, forgive me, unfathomable. We have better maps of Mars than we do of America’s oceanic holdings in the pacific; the largest feature on Earth, the mid-Oceanic ridge (which covers almost a quarter of the planet) was only explored, by Ballard and others, in the seventies; there are huge flat spots on oceanographic relief maps in the Southern hemisphere where the mountain ranges just stop and you wonder what sort of geographic process produces these planes—but it’s really no more complicated than the fact that we simply haven’t explored it yet. In the twenty-first century, our map of the modern world still looks like those ancient ones that trail off into nothingness.

Anyway, at the end of the talk, he concludes by discussing the school outreach programs he works on. ‘The battle to win or lose a scientist or an engineer is won or lost by the eighth grade,’ he says, and now we aren’t even fighting that battle. ‘We need to be not only proud of our universities, but proud of our middle schools.’ And he shows this sweet girl at the top of the post and says, ‘because when you get a jaw to drop, you can inform; you can put so much information into this mind.’ (Pair the Ballard talk with David Gallo’s very funny five minute discussion of acquatic astonishments and see if you don’t look like the girl above.)

It’s important for children, but it’s also important to claim some of this for ourselves, to remember how much there is to wonder at in the world around us. This is important, in watching the TED talks, but it’s also important to see people who adore what they do—because we see some of these people, day to day, if we’re very lucky, but most of them are out on the frontiers of something, in a lab, or a forest, or under an ocean. 

Just to remind ourselves: in a world that we keep growing every day, why would we sit in our apartments and watch television of other people sitting in their apartments? The globalized media is justifiable because it can put an entire universe of natural knowledge and human thought at our fingertips; if it doesn’t, what good is it?

Filed under: Science , competitiveness, education, TED