Astronomers Find a Planet Like Mars in a Distant Star System

A team of astronomers has found the equivalent to planet Mars in a star system with three planets 200 light years away.  This is the planet with the lowest mass found so far around any normal star.  That’s because the methods that allow us to find the masses of planets (how much they weigh) generally work best for planets that are heavier.  Here a wonderful combination of circumstances allowed the team (including Jason Rowe of the SETI Institute) to make their record-breaking measurement.

The nameless star system is given the catalog designation Kepler 138, because the three planets, orbiting a cooler star, were first discovered by the Kepler spacecraft.  Kepler allows astronomers to find planets when they move across the face of their stars, causing a tiny eclipse (or “transit.”)  Tremendously accurate instruments aboard Kepler measured the decrease of light when each planet got in front of the star.

The three planets are each closer to their star than Mercury is to our Sun.  The planet that resembles Mars, closest of the three, takes only 10.3 days to go around.  In other words, a year on that planet is 10 Earth days.  Think how often you’d have to celebrate annual events, like your birthday!

The present team of astronomers (which also includes members from NASA’s Ames Research Center and Penn State) followed the three planets’ transits over time and noticed that they did not occur at the same time each orbit, because the gravity of the other two close planets was tugging on each one.  By measuring the size of the tugs, the astronomers could derive the gravity (mass) of each planet, something that is otherwise very hard to do.

Now here is the clever part.  When we watch a planet go in front of its star, that allows to measure how big the planet is (its diameter).  Bigger planets block more light.   So for these three planets, we now had the mass (from the tugs) and the size (from the transits).  Most of the time, when they find planets around other stars, astronomers only have one OR the other. 

Since we have both in this case, that allows us to calculate the density of each world. If a planet is dense, it is likely to made mostly of rock, like Earth is.  If a planet is not so dense, it combines rock with ice or even perhaps melted ice, such as the liquids we find inside Jupiter and the other partly liquid planets in our solar system.

This is what allowed the team to say with some certainty that the inner planet in the Kepler 138 system is about the size of Mars and about the same composition as Mars.  The planet is roughly 10% the mass of Earth and half the size of Earth, just like Mars is.   This is the smallest world for which we have both size and mass.

Almost 2000 planets are now known around other stars, a remarkable number, given that the first one was discovered just 20 years ago.  What amazes us is the variety of planets out there.   There are huge planets, bigger than Jupiter, but orbiting very close to their stars.  There are planets we are calling super-Earths, that are intermediate in size between Earth and Neptune.  And now we know that there are smaller, solid worlds like Mars.  Some smaller worlds are really close to their stars, like the one around Kepler 138, but others are much further out, like Mars is in our solar system.   Nature likes diversity in astronomical settings, much as she likes it for people.

(For a nice "infographic" about the Kepler 138 system compared with our solar system, see:

http://www.space.com/29690-small-alien-planet-kepler-138b-facts-infographic.html  )

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!