SETI Pioneer Frank Drake Celebrates His 90th Birthday

This week, Dr. Frank Drake, the pioneer in the scientific search for intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos and one of my favorite astronomers, turns 90. He has been a really important mentor in my life, with good advice at several crucial career points, and I want to wish him all the best on this occasion.
He is perhaps best known for the ”Drake Equation,” a formula for making estimates of the number of technological civilizations in the Galaxy that are capable of communicating with us. To read an article in which he wrote up “The Origin of the Drake Equation” (for a column I was editing at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific), go to: http://bit.ly/drakearticle
For my 2012 interview with Drake, where he reflects on his work over the years, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPQz-kdaxNo&t=536s The accompanying picture shows us on that occasion, at the SETICon convention organized by the SETI Institute, where he and I have been on the Board of Trustees.
With all the reasons to despair of intelligent life here on Earth, I hope we can soon realize Drake's dream of finding it among the stars. A number of projects are carrying on the search he began, and a success would be a great present for his next birthday.

Our Astronomy Lecture Series Has a Million Views on YouTube

As regular readers may know, I have the pleasure of organizing and moderating a series of public talks at my college called the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures. Thanks to a generous anonymous donor, we are able to record, edit, and publish each talk on YouTube (now in High Definition). Yesterday, the counter at our YouTube channel passed one million views of the lectures from around the world!

Recent speakers have included Carolyn Porco, imaging team leader for the Cassini mission to Saturn; Robert Kirshner of Harvard and Alex Filippenko of Berkeley, both members of the teams that discovered, to everyone’s surprise, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating; Caleb Scharf of Columbia, explaining his book, "The Copernicus Complex," about humanity’s place in the cosmos; astronaut Ed Lu about discovering asteroids that threaten the Earth; and NASA’s Jeff Moore, from the New Horizons science team, explaining what we have discovered about Pluto this year.

Older lectures include Frank Drake explaining his current thinking about the Drake equation, Michael Brown (who discovered many of the Pluto-like dwarf planets out there) discussing "How I Killed Pluto...," Leonard Susskind on his battle with Stephen Hawking over black holes, and Helen Quinn on the mysteries of antimatter.

You can enjoy all the videos, free of charge or advertising, at:http://www.youtube.com/svastronomylectures

Even an astronomer like me, used to big numbers, is kind of impressed by a million views! I'm glad there are so many fans of astronomy out there. Or maybe, when people think about what's happening in the country and in the world right now, their thought have to escape into the larger universe to stay sane!

The Movie Interstellar: The Science Behind the Story

Lots of my students are asking questions about the new film Interstellar.  I have been hearing about the movie for some time; the studio even sent me a “teachers’ guide” that was not especially useful, but piqued my interest.  Most exciting for me was the news that the scientific advisor (and one of the producers of the film) was Prof. Kip Thorne of Caltech, who is arguably the world’s expert on black holes and wormholes -- and designed the science behind the “galactic subway system” in Carl Sagan’s novel and film Contact.

I wrote to Dr. Thorne and he told me that he had indeed been involved with Interstellar, and had, in fact written a book, entitled The Science of Interstellar, to explain the complicated science that was the basis for some of the more intriguing scenes and events in the film.   The book also tells the story of the film, which was always supposed to be strong on science, and, at one time, was set to be directed by Stephen Spielberg.  But that original deal fell apart and it took a while to bring Christopher Nolan, the film’s current director, into the project.

Dr. Thorne wasn’t the only scientist involved in the long period before the movie went from an idea to a completed production.  Yesterday, I was talking with Dr. Frank Drake, the father of the scientific search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, and he told me that he was on one of the early panels of scientists brought together (with Stephen Spielberg) to make sure the plot stayed close to real science and possible science.

With Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan (a writer of screenplays) involved, the film evolved from the script Dr.Thorne and producer Lynda Obst had first envisioned, to include much more about a future Earth facing ecological disaster.  Still, the original thought, to portray black holes and worm holes as accurately as modern science can make it, was high on everyone’s list of priorities.

A black hole is a place where the death and collapse of a huge star has produced such strong gravity, that space itself is “warped” -- and nothing, not even light can escape.  Near a black hole, time proceeds more slowly than in the rest of the universe, and this change in the flow of time becomes a major plot element in the movie.  Both the existence of black holes and their strange effect on time have been demonstrated by many experiments and are well established.

A wormhole is more speculative, but something Einstein himself thought a bit about.   It’s a place where a black hole or some other unusual feature of space and time becomes a tunnel (or short cut) from one place in space to another place very far away, or even to another time.  In a wormhole, the dangerous effects you would feel falling into a black hole are somehow kept at bay, so that a spaceship can go through it to elsewhere or elsewhen.

Both wormholes and black holes get major roles in Interstellar.  The astronauts in the movie first use a wormhole to get from our Milky Way Galaxy to another galaxy far far away.   Then, they wind up in the new galaxy in a location where there is a massive, spinning black hole, with planets around it.  I won’t give anything else away, except to say that the special effects showing the wormhole and the gargantuan black hole were composed from calculations made by Dr. Thorne and his team at Caltech, fed directly to the computers of the special effects team for the movie – and they are truly SPECTACULAR.

For more, I recommend reading Dr. Thorne’s book (pictured in this post) and going to see the movie – especially if you are a black hole fan.  Dr. Thorne also has a web page with some animations at: https://interstellar.withgoogle.com/transmissions

An Interview with the Father of the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence

In 2012, during a weekend astronomy event (called SETICon II), I had the pleasure and privilege of doing a 45-minute on-stage interview with Frank Drake, the distinguished astronomer who did the first scientific experiment searching for evidence of intelligent life among the stars. The interview was videotaped at the time, but not released.

Now, to celebrate the beginning of the 30th year of the SETI Institute (the organization engaged in continuing that search), they have released the interview on YouTube and you can see it at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPQz-kdaxNo

Dr. Drake was the first President of the SETI Institute, and I have been a board member there since the beginning. We discuss both his career and his current thinking about the search, including his current view of the Drake Equation (a way of estimating the chances of intelligent life out there). He also reflects on a number of modern developments, including the discovery of numerous planets orbiting other stars and novel ways of searching for extra-terrestrial civilizations.

For more about the non-profit Institute, you can explore their web site at: www.seti.org

Astronomy Talks Have a YouTube Channel

The Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures, which I have the pleasure of moderating, feature noted scientists giving nontechnical illustrated talks on recent developments in astronomy. I am happy to announce that they are now available on their own YouTube Channel, at:
http://www.youtube.com/SVAstronomyLectures/

The talks include:

* Frank Drake (the father of the search for radio signals from civilizations in space) discussing his modern view of the Drake Equation,

* Michael Brown explaining how his discovery of the dwarf planet Eris led to Pluto being kicked out of the planet club,

* Alex Filippenko (selected as the U.S. Professor of the Year, a few years ago) talking about the latest ideas and observations of black holes,

* Natalie Batalha (mission scientist for the Kepler Project) sharing the latest planet discoveries from outside the solar system, and

* Chris McKay updating the Cassini discoveries about Saturn's moon Titan (the only moon known to have an atmosphere thicker than Earths).

The lectures are taped at Foothill College near San Francisco (where I teach), and co-sponsored by NASA's Ames Research Center, the SETI Institute, and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

Note that the top page of the YouTube channel shows the lectures in the order they happened to be uploaded to YouTube. If you want to see them in chronological order, select the Playlist option.

Both new and older talks in the series will be added to the channel as time goes by. Many well-known astronomers have given talks in this series since its founding in 1999; recent lectures are being recorded so that people around the world can "tune in."

(About the picture: This is a false color image of the Helix Nebula, the last gasp of a dying star located about 650 lightyears away.  A relatively low-mass star is collapsing and losing its outer layer in a final internal adjustment before it dies as a white dwarf.  The material the star loses is excited by the energy of the shrinking star and set to glow.  In this image, infrared radiation (as measured from the Spitzer telescope in space) is shown in green and red, ultraviolet radiation (as measured by the GALEX telescope in space) is shown in blue.)

Reading Recommendations: Pluto's Discovery; the Astronomy of Harry Potter

From time to time, I like to use this page to recommend some outside reading on interesting aspects of astronomy that you might enjoy. I have two recommendations this time, both from a column (called "Astronomy Beat") that I had the pleasure of editing for a number of years for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

This week was the anniversary of the discovery of Pluto, in February 1930, by Clyde Tombaugh, a young observer fresh off the farm and doing his first project for the Lowell Observatory. Before Tombaugh passed away, I was fortunate to be able to persuade him to write up the circumstances of his discovery. (This week's picture shows me -- with a lot more hair -- in 1985 with Tombaugh.) If you want to read his story, you can see it at:http://www.astrosociety.org/pluto/ab2009-23.pdf 

Another fun column covered the astronomy of Harry Potter and how teachers have used the popularity of those books and movies to encourage more interest in astronomy. Sirius Black (named after the brightest star visible in our sky) is only one of many astronomical references in the world of Hogwarts. Check out that column at:
http://astrosociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ab2011-66.pdf

Links to all the columns in the series that have been made available to the public can be found at: http://astrosociety.org/publications/astronomy-beat/

I recommended the column by Frank Drake in an earlier post, but for readers new to the AstroProf pages, it has the story of how Frank Drake came up with the way of estimating the number of intelligent civilizations we might contact in our galaxy.  See: 
http://astrosociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ab2010-46.pdf

(His way of estimating became known as the Drake Equation and is now part of popular culture.  You can see it discussed on the TV comedy, the Big Bang Theory for example, here: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj_Bz_Cqu0g )

POSSIBLE Planet Around a Famous Nearby Star

Today came a news story that illustrates how hard progress is at the very frontiers of science. For both science and science fiction fans, the nearby star Tau Ceti (a sun-like star just 12 lightyears away) is legendary. In science, it was one of the two stars that Frank Drake searched for intelligent signals in his first SETI project back in 1960.  In science fiction, many authors and screenwriters have used Tau Ceti as the home base of alien species.

Naturally, astronomers have searched for planets orbiting this star and no "obvious" planets (such as a big Jupiter-like planet) have been found. A key way astronomers find planets too dim to see with a telescope is to watch the effect of the planet's gravity on the much brighter star. As planets orbit a star, the star will appear to wiggle back and forth slightly, which sophisticated instruments can detect.  (For the technically minded, we can take a spectrum -- spread out the light like a rainbow of colors -- and measure the motion of the star from the Doppler Effect.)

So an international team of astronomers has been analyzing 6000 previous observations of any possible "wiggle" of Tau Ceti from the pull of smaller planets to see if they can tease out any information when they combine the information gathered by three of the largest telescopes in the world, including the giant Keck Telescope in Hawaii. The complex analysis allows scientists to get down to smaller wiggles than have ever been observed before -- down to changes in the speed of the star of 2 miles per hour!

At this level, scientists are down to speeds that are "in the noise" -- smaller than the statistical variations in the observations and the movements of the star's own surface. As the experimenters themselves quickly say, this is new territory. Yet, when they do their best to model and explain the changes in the star's speed, their work is compatible with the possibility that there are five small planets orbiting Tau Ceti. One of these appears to be in the "habitable zone" where life like us may be comfortable.

The discoverers freely admit that it may take a decade to confirm that their tiny wiggles are real. But the possibility of planets around Tau Ceti -- coming so soon after the discovery of a planet around one of the stars in our nearest neighbor star system, Alpha Centauri -- brings new excitement to the idea that planets are going to be found around the majority of stars, even the ones nearby. More than 800 planets are now confirmed out there, and we have thousands of candidates in our catalogs. It's a wonderful universe!

Searching for Intelligence Among the Stars & the Drake Equation

At the quarterly meeting of the Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute (to which I have the privilege to belong), I spent some time this week with Dr. Frank Drake, the astronomer who is the father of the science of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). Now over 80, Frank is still going strong and very much involved with the ongoing quest to find evidence that there are other intelligent species among the stars.  Today, 52 years after Frank made the first search for possible intelligent radio signals from other star systems, our technology for searching has become much more sophisticated, although funding for the searches is still sporadic.

The discovery of so many planets orbiting other stars is very encouraging to those who hope to find our counterparts out there.  The Kepler mission is showing that planets the size of Earth and planets in the habitable zones of their own stars are more common than most astronomers had dared to hope.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of encouraging Frank (and his coauthor Dava Sobel) to update a historical summary of how he came up with the "Drake Equation." Not so much an equation as a way of making estimates, this formula (which you can see behind him in the photo) is now taught in many introductory astronomy classes. It helps us summarize our best knowledge of astronomy, biology and sociology to figure out how common our type of technological civilization might be in the Galaxy.

Thanks to the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (which published the column,) you can read the story of how he came up with the equation by going to:
http://www.astrosociety.org/drake/index.html