MIT’s Sara Seager is a member of the team working with the orbiting Kepler telescope. She helped the Boston Museum of Science create the show on exoplanets that premiered at last weekend’s opening of the renovated MOS Planetarium. And this weekend she’ll be in Washington, D.C. speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Also on the bill Matthew J. Holman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
(FYI– #aaasmtg is the Twitter hash tag for the meeting.)
David Chandler put together a Q & A with Seager for the MIT web site:
Q.This release of data represents a huge increase in the number of known exoplanets, all at once. Is this greatly increased discovery rate changing the way astronomers are approaching the study of exoplanets?
A. Kepler has announced 1,235 planet candidates, potentially tripling the number of known planets in our galaxy. With these planet candidates, Kepler is single-handedly changing the way we do exoplanet science — from studying individual objects to studying the statistics of a large number of planet candidates.
Because of limitations on telescope time and people power, and also the faintness of the stars, most of these planet candidates will not be able to be confirmed as planets. Nonetheless, by statistical analysis of these candidates Kepler will be able reach its main goal: to answer the question, “How common are Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits about sun-like stars?”
As a second example of science from large planet candidate numbers, Kepler has announced 662 Neptune-size planet candidates. This is incredible, even if 20 to 40 percent are expected not to be bona fide planets. Planetary scientists barely understand how our solar system’s Uranus and Neptune formed, beyond a contrived scenario. Now we need an explanation of why Neptune-size planets are among the most common planets out there.
The sheer numbers of stars with multiple transiting planets and varying orbits is opening up a whole new field in exoplanetary science.