Kepler's First Planet Will Soon Be Eaten

Soon being a relative term, of course, this is still astronomy. 

The Kepler Space Telescope did a lot of great work in the hunt for exoplanets over its 10-year lifespan; no other telescope has been so prolific in that field. Kepler alone is responsible for discovering over 2,500 exoplanets. One of those planets had to come first though, and that planet is Kepler 1658b, a so-called Hot Jupiter that orbits its star in just 3 days. (If you're wondering why it's not called Kepler 1b, the planet was initially dismissed as a false alarm until its existence was confirmed in 2019, 10 years after the initial discovery.)

Unfortunately, it's also dying. Kepler 1658b is spiraling in toward its star, with its orbit shortening by 130 milliseconds every year; in just 2.5 million years, give or take a few hundred thousand, it will be swallowed up. Obviously, a couple million years is a long time. If you scale the planet's life down to a more human life span, however, it's only got a month or so to live. That's not so long. So, if we ever want to visit an utterly inhospitable, searing-hot gas giant, we'd better get a move-on with the whole interstellar travel thing.

Slow Pulsars and Kepler is Dead

Yes, we've got a double whammy with the space news today.

Slowest-spinning pulsar discovered

Most pulsars spin really quickly. Like, they can complete one rotation in dozens or maybe even hundreds of times per second. The slowest rotation period previously discovered is 8.5 seconds. That makes this new pulsar positively lazy, to be honest. It takes a lethargic 23.5 seconds to complete one rotation.

What makes the discovery more impressive is the emission only lasts 200 milliseconds. That means the outgoing radio beam isn't directly facing us and could have very easily missed us entirely.

Will this discovery mean anything earth-shattering? Well, probably not, though it was not known pulsars could spin so slowly and still produce radio emissions. So that's kind of cool.

RIP Kepler

I posted something about this a few months ago, and I just thought I'd update with the official time of death. On October 30th, NASA officials announced that Kepler had run out of fuel and its mission was finally at an end. It was a good and productive life for the telescope, and it's given us incredible insight into exoplanets and how common they really are.

Have We Found Our First Exomoon?

I didn't think this would be happening for a while. Finding exoplanets is hard enough, but finding a small little moon orbiting an exoplanet? That's even harder. But the potential moon orbiting Kepler-1625b has one very important thing going for it that made it much easier to spot: It's gigantic. According to the observations, it's as big as Neptune and has about 1.5% of the mass of its host planet. Kepler-1625b is about three times as massive as Jupiter, so that puts its moon at 10-15 Earth masses, which is about the mass of Uranus.

Now, were this moon in any other location, it would be a planet in its own right, and there's a strong argument to be made that this represents a double planet rather than a planet and a moon. But the mass relationship of Kepler-1625b and its moon are almost identical to the Earth-Moon system, and I don't think anyone considers this to be a double planet. It's just a bit strange to think about. Imagine if Jupiter had Neptune orbiting around it.

It's probably safe to say though that this is an outlier and that most exomoons won't be literal gas giants. Remember, in exoplanet hunting, it's a lot easier to spot the weird things than the normal ones. Hot Jupiters are uncommon, but they make up a lot of our exoplanet catalog because they're easy to spot. We found this moon because, once again, it was really (relatively speaking) easy to spot. But now that we've done it once, we can do it again, and hopefully the next exomoon we find will be a bit smaller.

The End Is Coming For Kepler

As of right now, we have discovered close to 4,000 extrasolar planets. That's an impressive haul for a science that's only 25 years old. We owe the vast majority of those discoveries to one space probe, the Kepler Space Telescope. For 9 years it's been patiently watching a narrow cone of the sky, watching for dips of light in the thousands of stars within its line of sight, a surefire sign of the present of an orbiting planet. It's been spectacularly successful, discovering thousands of worlds, some of which are potentially Earth-like.

Kepler is also nearly out of fuel. On August 2, Kepler will turn its antenna towards Earth to send back its latest batch of data, and it is likely that this will burn all the remaining fuel. There may be enough for one more 80-day period of data collection, but almost certainly no more after that. Kepler's been running on fumes for months. Unlike something like Hubble, which is in low Earth orbit and can be regularly serviced, Kepler is millions of miles away in a solar orbit and far beyond our ability to refuel it. When it's done, it's done forever. There are other space probes out there currently hunting for exoplanets, but for sheer output, I don't imagine anything will be matching Kepler any time soon. 

Here's Your Chance to Find Your Own Exoplanets!

Well, sort of.

Basically, what you can do is use a code a couple of researchers cooked up to search through archival data from Kepler. They've already found one exoplanet using this code, and now they've released it to the public. So if you want to do your part in the search for exoplanets, here's your opportunity. The link to the code and the instructions are here. Have fun!

Want to visit Kepler-13Ab? Hope For Snow!

I may be being slightly facetious. Kepler-13Ab is an exoplanet 6 times more massive than Jupiter, orbiting so close to its star it completes one orbit in 1.8 days. It's one of those hot Jupiters that are very easy to find because they're big and close to their star, thus making the most dramatic impacts for our telescopes to find. Either they make the star wobble a bunch due to their gravity, or in this case since it's a Kepler planet, as Kepler-13Ab passes in front of its star, the light from the system dips significantly.

These hot Jupiters are not nice places. You're looking at daytime temperatures in the thousands of degrees, and the clouds rain metal. Kepler-13Ab is among the hottest of the exoplanets, with temperatures of 5,000 degrees, but don't worry too much if you find yourself suddenly transported there, you'll be okay, because instead of metal rain, it snows sunscreen.

Okay, technically, it's titanium dioxide, but that's the active ingredient in sunscreen! So you may be instantly roasted and incinerated, but at least you get won't get sunburnt. What a relief, right?

Kepler Finds Many New Exoplanets, But No Earth Analog

The Kepler Space Telescope has been through some hard times in its life. It's discovered hundreds of exoplanets, even as not one, but two of its stabilizers has failed, forcing the team behind Kepler to modify its mission. Then, in recent weeks, it went into emergency mode, raising concerns that even the extended mission would be brought to an end before its time. Luckily, Kepler made a full recovery, and now, it's in the news again. It's even good news this time. Astronomers announced that Kepler has discovered 1,284 new exoplanets. This is a huge number, for reference, before this announcement, we had discovered around 2,000 exoplanets. Thanks to these new planetary confirmations, that number has increased by about 60 percent. Even more remarkable is that of the roughly 3,200 confirmed exoplanets, Kepler has found 2,235 of them. It's done some good work.

Of course, we all know what the crown jewel of exoplanet hunting is, and the fact remains that we haven't found a true Earth analog yet. There are a couple of planets that stand out among this latest crop, but there's something about them all that plays spoiler. One orbits a star like ours, but is much bigger than Earth, another is the right size, but orbits a red dwarf and is almost certainly tidally locked. There is another Earth out there, there are probably millions, if not billions of them. We just haven't found it yet.