Blue Collar Scientist

One of the things I emphasize to my students is that a lot of the better research going on today is interdisciplinary, in which scientists from completely different fields collaborate to study a phenomenon and the scientific results are improved from the participation of folks that have different knowledge and different backgrounds.

Yesterday I spent a little time in my own cross-disciplinary scientific world. I wasn’t really contributing anything, I was soaking up the awesome coolness that is Tom Kaye.

Tom’s a sort of modern gentleman-scientist, of the sort that nearly went extinct shortly after Darwin’s time when the cost of doing scientific research began to require funding that was not available even to the very rich. I’ve known Tom by reputation for years; back in 2000, he had a telescope set up at a friend’s observatory where he made the first amateur astronomer detection of an exoplanet using the radial velocity method. He’s also the guy that got hold of Norm Oberle’s 1-meter mirror blank; I knew Norm back when I lived in Ohio, have seen the blank, and knew that someone had bought it, but never knew who until I went to dinner with Tom a few nights ago.

Tom’s neck-deep in astronomy, but he’s also a paleontologist, and he’s specifically looking at a possible connection between gamma-ray bursters, the K-T boundary extinction, and the Chicxulub impactor. To support this research, Tom has a bunch of fossils, K-T boundary samples, microscopes, and atomic composition analysis equipment.

And when I say microscopes, I mean microscopes. He’s got everything from a simple stereo microscope, to a couple of the nicest compound binocular microscopes ever made, and even two electron microscopes. We slapped a spider leg into one of the electron microscopes and took a look at it in all its hairy, spikey glory. Really cool stuff - I’ve never had a chance to play with a microscope before.

Tom was kind enough to donate a bunch of hadrosaur teeth to me for use in my educational programs, along with a sauropod stomach stone and some 35 million year old fossilized poop. And we’re going to work at the beginning of next school year on putting together some brief educational videos for use in the classroom, and maybe even set him up so that he can visit my classes through webcam to talk about his research.

It’s amazing the people you meet in my line of work.

This is a little disheartening. Universe Today has repeated erroneous reports that the smallest exoplanet so far has recently been found. Citing a Reuters story - not the best place to learn astronomy facts - the same UT contributor who posted the bizarre story about the Sumerian Aten asteroid “impact” reports:

The planet has a mass five times the size of Earth, which makes it the smallest extrasolar planet among the roughly 300 identified so far….

As far as I can determine, from a quick look through the Interactive Extra-solar Planets Catalog, the smallest exoplanets found to date orbit PSR B1257+12, a pulsar 980 light years away in the spring constellation Virgo, and they were discovered eighteen years ago. The planets orbiting that star have masses of 0.02, 3.9, and 4.3 Earth masses. The Reuters story talks about how Spanish astronomers found an exoplanet of 5 Earth masses. Which is two hundred fifty times bigger than the smallest pulsar planet!

It must be time for the funding cycle at CSIC Research Institute, where the PI announcing the discovery is based.

I don’t mean to pick on Universe Today. I read them religiously, and they rarely do this kind of stuff. This is an aberration, a statistical anomaly, an edge case. They usually get it right. Don’t hate them.

Is there something about the University of California PR system that causes it to occasionally kick out weird press releases? It happened before with a really bad one from UC Davis, and now there’s a merely odd one at UC Santa Barbara.

An international team of astronomers has found 10 new “extra solar” planets….

Cue the sound of a record player being bumped hard and the music ending in an abrupt scratch. Really, we’ve called these things simply extrasolar planets (or exoplanets) for about fifteen years. No quotes necessary. And all one word, please, because extra solar would mean we’ve got some spare planets hanging around in our own solar system (can you imagine passing stars asking, ‘hey, buddy, can you spare a planet?’), and we really do mean extrasolar, as in outside the solar neighborhood. Just like extra ordinary means something that is as utterly ordinary as possible, while extraordinary means definitely outside the ordinary. Here, this may clear it up:

Extra ordinary car: You are going to the trouble of special-ordering the model without power windows even though the cost savings is less than fifty bucks.

Extraordinary car: Zero to sixty in three seconds, 500 miles to the gallon.

This technique of locating the planets gives more information about the formation and evolution of the planets than the gravitational technique. Astronomers look for “transits,” moments when the planets pass in front of the star, like an eclipse, as viewed from the Earth.

Ok, that’s pretty good. It is “like an eclipse,” and that’s not a bad comparison to make, especially since the accompanying pictures show that it isn’t really an eclipse.

Don’t need the quotes around transit, though. The word is in the dictionary, it isn’t something novel or made-up. Everyone has heard of mass transit and rapid transit, we just need to be sure the special meaning here of “passing in front of” is conveyed. And that isn’t done with the quotation marks.

With the gravitational technique….

Ok, really this is talking about the radial velocity technique, more commonly called the doppler technique in the press. We’re not detecting extrasolar planets gravitationally. We’re not detecting anything gravitationally. Yet.

With the gravitational technique, scientists have discovered around 270 extra solar planets since the early 1990s. They measured the gravitational pull on the star that is exerted by the orbiting planet.

No, they can calculate that, but they can’t measure it. They are measuring doppler shift.

As the planet moves, it pulls on the star, tugging it back and forth.

Yes!

However, making these discoveries depends on looking at each star over a period of weeks or months, so the pace of discovery is slow.

Actually, the pace of discovery would be quite high if you were looking for multi-Jupiter mass planets orbiting close to the star, even if you were using the radial velocity method. If the planetary orbit is three days, you just need three days to get a full orbit’s radial velocity data. This is why the discovery of so many “hot Jupiters” were made when these programs began. The fact that they hadn’t been operating long meant that the only kind of planet they could possibly detect were ones with really short periods.

The SuperWASP technique involves two sets of cameras to watch for events known as transits, where a planet passes directly in front of a star and blocks out some of the star’s light.

Credit where it is due: This description is perfect.

It is, however, the second time the concept is explained in the release. Move it up to where the first attempt was made, and you’d improve things.

A total of 46 planets have been found to transit their stars.

Ewww. This usage might not be strictly wrong, but it sure seems wrenching to me. I think this is because of two attributes of transits: All planets transit their stars from some perspective in the universe. And a transit isn’t a sign of anything interesting; it is just an accident, a chance alignment. Think of it this way: a planet orbits for a reason provided by physics - gravity. But a planet transits because you just happen to be lined up with it.

I’d have said something like: “A total of 46 planets have been found using the transit method.”

The planets discovered by SuperWASP have masses between a middle weight of half the size of Jupiter to more than eight times the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.

Er - what? Of the planets discovered by SuperWASP, is the middle weighted one, i.e., the median, half the mass of Jupiter? I think not - that would be a really low median size for these detections. It must mean that a planet half the mass of Jupiter, which is the smallest SuperWASP has discovered, is a middleweight (note the lack of a space, as a space changes the meaning of a compound word), as in the weight class from boxing.

Unfortunately, that’s completely wrong. I think. Let’s say that if there is a fact here, it’s wrong. And if there isn’t, then it’s strange.

Jupiter has a mass of 318 Earths. The next most massive planet in the solar system is Saturn, which has a mass of 95 Earths.

Bear with me here: Half a Jupiter is still 159 Earths, way bigger than Saturn, which is the second biggest of eight planets in the solar system - a very big planet.

The middleweight planet, - if you line up eight planets in order of mass and you pick the one in the middle - is harder to determine, since there are an even number of planets. So you have to pick either the heaviest of the light four, or the lightest of the heavier four. If you do this, your choices for a middleweight are Uranus - at 14 Earths - or - get this - Earth!

So, let’s just not use confusing terms like middle weighted to described planets more than half again as large as Saturn, which is a really massive planet.

Ok, enough fun. Overall, this is not a terrible press release like the one from UC Davis. This is ok, I guess. Where I’m having problems with it is that it is at several point misleading, and at a couple points maybe outright false. Press releases that are misleading or convey falsehoods as facts are harmful to science communication. It is too bad the astronomers involved in this release either couldn’t control the content of the release, or couldn’t improve upon it, because this release definitely falls into the category of harmful to the profession - just less so than some others.

Yesterday I gave the debut of my talk on exoplanets at the Campbell Creek Science Center, to a packed house, despite a lot of items competing for attention on the Anchorage social calendar that evening. Luise certainly knows how to do the publicity for these events. The CCSC is a consistently great venue; everything always works, the publicity is always done professionally and they almost always pack the house, and as a result of my eight appearances there I have a complete set of CCSC commemorative coffee cups to show off to my friends. (And I do use them!)

Anyway, while talking about exoplanets, I presented some evidence that showed that space is “filthy” with amino acids, sugars, and the elements necessary for life as we know it - i.e., carbon-based life, not necessarily life that looks like what we see on Earth. Unbeknownst to me, two pertinent studies on these topics were published the day of my talk - I didn’t hear about them until afterwards, because I hadn’t had a chance to go online anytime on Thursday.

Anyway, the two results bear directly on what I was speaking about. The first reports that the Spitzer Space Telescope has found more life-forming stuff in a protoplanetary disk:

Researchers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered large amounts of simple organic gases and water vapor in a possible planet-forming region around an infant star, along with evidence that these molecules were created there. They’ve also found water in the same zone around two other young stars.

This isn’t exactly Earth-shattering news. We’ve found all these chemicals in protoplanetary disks and in star-forming regions before. The big advance here is twofold - first, they’ve pushed Spitzer to new levels of performance, squeezing the maximum amount of information from its observations. And second - they’ve found more of these pre-biotic chemicals¹ in protoplanetary disks than in the nebula they came from. In other words, the chemistry of life is formed in protoplanetary disks.

That’s pretty important, and very cool, and I’m really upset that I didn’t know about this in time to work it into last night’s talk. But I’ll be giving the talk again in a week at the Eagle River Nature Center, so I’ll be able to work this in there.

The second result bears on amino acids in meteorites. In my talk, I discussed the fact that amino acids had been found in meteorites, and that this was another indication that the universe was “filthy” with the building blocks of life.

The organic soup that spawned life on Earth may have gotten generous helpings from outer space, according to a new study. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have discovered concentrations of amino acids in two meteorites that are more than ten times higher than levels previously measured in other similar meteorites.

In other words, there’s a lot more pre-biotic chemistry in our solar system than scientists had at first thought. Again, that’s pretty important, because part of my talk is all about how all this chemistry must be happening on billions, nay, even zillions, of roughly Earth-sized, terrestrial planets, all over the universe.

I speculate in the talk that the probability that life exists outside our solar system is 1. This is just more data to pile onto the evidence so far that the Earth is not unique.

1. Technically, what they’ve found is a greater proportion. [↩]

Just a friendly reminder that you can hear my talk about exoplanets - planets in orbit around other stars - tonight (Thursday, March 13) at the Campbell Creek Science Center in Anchorage. Check here for details.

I’m going to talk about the history of exoplanets - including ancient speculation and the sad fate of Giordano Bruno - the state of knowledge about exoplanets today, information about how exoplanets form, and at the end a whirlwind explanation of why I think life must exist elsewhere in the universe. I promise it won’t be boring. Come on out and see the show!