News and updates on NASA’s Earths in Other Systems Project from PI Daniel Apai. May 10, 2015.
Sunday early morning with a coffee in my hand, sitting next to giant blooming Saguaro cacti and citrus trees in Tucson with the spectacular Catalina mountains in the background. Two tiny hummingbirds angrily hover around each other in the air, in a surreal, high-speed aerial fight over the nectar drops in our bottlebrush flowers. A rare, quiet moment to reflect on the launch of our Earths in Other Systems project and the five years ahead of us in this exciting endeavor.
After almost two years in planning and preparation, our Project EOS has finally began: an exciting meeting at NASA HQ has launched NASA’s new Nexus for Exoplanet System Science program (which is funding EOS), we published the first paper with EOS results and investigators, the first postdoctoral researchers and a program coordinator are joining our project in May, our website is also online, and we began preparations for transforming a group of offices at the Steward Observatory of The University of Arizona into the EOS “Headquarters”.
Project EOS is an ambitious, exceptionally large-scale research project that combines different disciplines and research techniques to understand how Earth-like planets form. While we now know that Earth-sized planets that receive similar amount of energy from their host stars as Earth does are common in the Galaxy, we do not know how similar these worlds are to Earths: do they only have the same size, but very different compositions, or are many of these worlds truly Earth-like, each carrying in it a potential for rich and complex living systems to emerge? Consider Venus, Earth’s “evil twin”: 81% as massive as Earth and orbiting at 72% of the Earth-Sun distance, it is a world that — seen from hundreds of lightyears — could appear misleading similar to Earth. Yet, through differences in its formation and evolution Venus has become a world with a surface and atmosphere astonishingly different from Earth: entirely devoid of water, lacking plate tectonics and its ability to bury CO2 and stabilize its, Venus’s thick CO2 atmosphere traps the incoming solar radiation and heats up to about 740 K (464 C). Or consider the opposite extreme: NASA’s Kepler mission has found a new type of planets, super-Earths, to be very common in the Galaxy. Many of these super-earths may have very low densities, an evidence that they must have lot of water and light, extended atmospheres. And a “lot of water” here means hundreds or thousands of Earth oceans’s worth of water, completely covering the silicate mantle of the planets, most likely in hundreds of km-thick high-pressure water ice layers, below thick liquid oceans or high-pressure steam atmospheres. These “water worlds” may be just inhospitable to life as the hot, acidic, bone-dry desert Venus has evolved into.
How many of the planets in the solar neighborhood are truly Earth-like — moderately rich in volatiles and organics — is an essential question to answer if we want to carry out a meaningful search for extraterrestrial life: for surveying nearby Earths for signatures of life is going to be one of the most complex and challenging endeavors in science yet.
In Project EOS twenty-five of the best experts from five disciplines will work together over the next five years to understand how the composition and volatile and organics budget of newly formed Earth-sized planets is set. In a fascinating set of projects we will look at the smallest scales and back in time, probing the mineralogy and composition of micron-sized grains in ancient meteorites using the most sophisticated microscopic techniques, to explore the history of volatiles and organics in planetary building blocks at the time when the Solar System was young. We will also use optical, radio, and infrared telescopes to study young stars and, around them, planetary systems in formation to piece together the incredible story of a dusty disk rapidly transforming itself into a planetary system that may support life. In search of new knowledge our team will travel to most continents on Earth and will use telescopes in the Sonoran Desert, the Chilean Atacama Desert and on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea; the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes. We will also build powerful computer models for the planet formation process and use these to inspect the details and fill out the gaps; we will compare the predictions of these models to the properties of exoplanetary systems: planetary orbits, masses, densities, atmospheric compositions. If we succeed, what we learn here will guide our and NASA’s search for life beyond Earth.
I am fortunate enough to work with a team of truly outstanding scientists from the diverse fields, all working toward a shared goal. Over the next five years, our team will also be joined by a dynamic group of young students and postdoctoral researchers: the team at its largest will include over forty researchers. But we will reach an and involve much larger groups: Our results will find their way to the courses we teach and we will also build up a team of Other Earths Ambassadors – citizen scientists excited by the search for life on other planets and eager to contribute.
We will share the excitement and news from the EOS project through blog updates, public talks, Twitter and Facebook posts; join us and follow the blog and twitter feeds and you will learn about our science results, discoveries, travels, and about exploring other worlds, directly from the front line.
Twitter: @EOSNExSS, @danielapai