Kepler-16b (extreme geek alert)

[dirkterrell]

I know some of you have an interest in astronomy topics, so I thought I'd share this discovery and gloat a little bit. Back in 2003 I began working on the topic of habitability in binary star systems, that is, the possibility of life arising in systems where there are two suns (like Tatooine in Star Wars). The search for planets around other stars had been going for about a decade but all of the efforts had been on looking at single stars (like our solar system), mainly because it was easier. (For some reason, I am always attracted to science problems that are hard and that others want to ignore. I'll leave for another time the discussion of how our model of funding science research makes it very difficult for people like me to get funding to do such work. :) ) You might think that binary star systems would be very rare, but that is not at all the case. It is likely that most star systems are binaries. They are very common. If you are going to understand habitability in the galaxy, you have to understand how it works in binaries.

In 2003, I proposed to the NASA Exobiology (life outside the solar system) program to model the formation and evolution of planetary systems in which the planets orbited the binary star pair (rather than just orbiting one of the stars, with the second star very distant, a much easier and much more boring theoretical problem). The response by the reviewers was that such systems were "extreme" and unlikely to be interesting. Subsequent resubmissions of the proposal met with the same fate.

Yesterday a paper was published in the journal "Science" about a binary system called Kepler-16, because it was discovered with the Kepler satellite (http://kepler.nasa.gov/). It is an eclipsing binary system where the orbital plane is oriented close to edge-on as seen from the Earth so that the stars pass in front of each other, causing the brightness to drop (sort of like a solar eclipse).In Kepler-16 there is a planet orbiting around the two stars and it also passes in front of the stars causing (smaller) eclipses. The way Kepler works is it measures the brightnesses of stars, extremely accurately, so these eclipses are easily seen when you plot the brightness of the star system over time (called the "light curve"). Here is the light curve from the paper (vertical axis is brightness and the horizontal axis is time):

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/%7Eterrell/images/kepler-16_light_curve.png

Now, I realize that this is seriously geeky stuff, but I can only describe that data set as beautiful. Observing with telescopes from the ground, the scatter in the measurements is much higher and we can see the deep star eclipses (blue and yellow) and the deeper planet eclipse (green), but the scatter would be much, much higher and shallower one (red) would be impossible. And I must admit to feeling a great sense of satisfaction in seeing the discovery of a type of system whose importance I championed almost a decade ago while my colleagues dismissed it.

Interestingly, I did a painting of a similar (but imaginary) system a few weeks back:

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/%7Eterrell/images/cumulonimbus_lake_1024.jpg

The planet in Kepler-16 is more like Saturn than the imaginary one I painted, but the stars are pretty similar. I guess it's time to do another painting, and maybe time to dust off that old proposal and see if my colleagues have finally opened their eyes. :)

[Devaclis]

I was just reading that! Pretty interesting but also lame at the same time (That they thought your proposal was NOT going to be interesting)

[vort3xr6]

Nice work Dirk. It must have felt pretty good to see that hit the news. I saw it last night.

[Wheezy]

Good info thanks man.

[Jmetz]

I have no idea what you're talking about...

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ozTGOi_9CPQ/SPUrBIBHe4I/AAAAAAAAAoo/46PoctihoKs/s400/Sarah%2BPalin%2BPancake%2Bon%2BHead.jpg

[Ghost]

Awesome news, I was actually reading a similar article about this elsewhere.

Anecdote: When I was in gradschool working on my PhD I kept submitting a proposal to my Principle Investigator (Head of the Program) and he kept turning it down saying it wasn't a feasible study.

While I'm no longer in that field a colleague of mine sent me a copy of my some recent work from my former PI--and it was largely the same stuff I'd suggested years ago--so things do, occasionally, come full circle...if I were you, I'd dust off that submission and try again, maybe someone's listening this time...

BTW: What do you use to paint those terrific images? Is that actual paint on canvas and scanned or is that all digital work?

[Jmetz]

I should say that I understand most of what you're talking about and you gotta love it when things come back like that. And that is a cool painting.

[dirkterrell]

I was just reading that! Pretty interesting but also lame at the same time (That they thought your proposal was NOT going to be interesting)

Yeah, if you run with the herd, funding is a lot easier (since the herd decides what gets funded). But I prefer to do research that is on topics that others look past. I guess an apropos analogy might be with adventure riders. Yeah, that trail is tough and hard to ride, but there might be something incredible at the end of it...

[dirkterrell]

Anecdote: When I was in gradschool working on my PhD I kept submitting a proposal to my Principle Investigator (Head of the Program) and he kept turning it down saying it wasn't a feasible study.


I know the feeling. I did something in my dissertation about 20 years ago, almost as an afterthought, that people are just starting to take an interest in (mainly because the observing technology has come along enough to test the theoretical work I did). I even submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation in their "innovative" research program but I was told that it was "too far ahead of its time." Maybe that's another one I should dust off. :)

[dirkterrell]

BTW: What do you use to paint those terrific images? Is that actual paint on canvas and scanned or is that all digital work?

I work almost exclusively digital these days since that is more productive for my stop-start style of doing things. That one was done in Terragen 2. A lot of times I'll use multiple tools (Terragen, Painter, Photoshop, etc) to get the exact effect I want but that one was to see if I could get cumulonimbus clouds to look right without any touch-up by hand. I think it turned out pretty well.

[Ghost]

I even submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation in their "innovative" research program but I was told that it was "too far ahead of its time." Maybe that's another one I should dust off. :)

I would dust it off and send it in. Fwiw, I was actually an NSF Doctoral Research Fellow, and the NSF is super-conservative, not the radical, forward-looking think-tank people assume them to be (or at least as I assumed them to be when I got the gig).

Once something is "accepted" by the majority of mainstream researchers, then they'll put money to it (or would, now that everything's being cut I'm not sure there's much left to go around). I suppose it's because they constantly have to justify why and where they're spending "government money" and they can't have projects that are so on-the-cusp that they may not yield viable results for years or even decades...if at all.

Send in your proposal, can't hurt, right? :D

[dirkterrell]

I would dust it off and send it in. Fwiw, I was actually an NSF Doctoral Research Fellow


Interesting, I was a NASA Graduate Research Fellow. I've served on lots of NSF review panels and find the organization not so much conservative, but the review panel members tend to be to narrow-minded and too "cliquey". It's more of a who-you-know kind of thing than the actual merits of the proposed research. And if you work in a small field like I do, it's hard to break through when there is so little money to go around. Once everybody selects the work of their buddies, there's nothing left. But, let's not stink up the nice topic of Kepler-16 with all of that. :)

[Ghost]

Interesting, I was a NASA Graduate Research Fellow. I've served on lots of NSF review panels and find the organization not so much conservative, but the review panel members tend to be to narrow-minded and too "cliquey". It's more of a who-you-know kind of thing than the actual merits of the proposed research. And if you work in a small field like I do, it's hard to break through when there is so little money to go around. Once everybody selects the work of their buddies, there's nothing left. But, let's not stink up the nice topic of Kepler-16 with all of that. :)

Yeah, I suppose the cliquey nature dovetails with what I called a lack of "going beyond the mainstream"--perhaps it was the "mainstream" of the clique/who-you-know and that was it.

But, yes, you're right. Let's drop this dreary topic before it leaves a stain. :D

[dirkterrell]

Since space art came up, I thought I'd share another painting I did recently of the bright star Albireo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albireo). Through a telescope or even a pair of binoculars, it resolves into a beautiful double star with blue and orange components (when I did public nights at the UF observatory, the locals got a kick out of it when I called it the Gator star).

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/NewAlbireo.jpg

It's actually a triple system (the orange star has a fainter blue companion that you can't resolve when looking at it though the telescope). I thought it would make a nice subject for a painting:

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/%7Eterrell/images/albireo.jpg

[dm_gsxr]

Jeeze, and I only worked at NASA as a system admin :)


Good job though. Cool stuff and great pic.

Carl

[dm_gsxr]

In reading 2031 Odyssey, Jupiter was turned into a White Dwarf I believe. Do you have a pic with that sort of setup?

Carl

[dirkterrell]

In reading 2031 Odyssey, Jupiter was turned into a White Dwarf I believe. Do you have a pic with that sort of setup?

Carl

I have been working on a painting of Mira (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mira) which is a binary that contains a white dwarf but it's not finished yet. Here's where it stands at the moment:

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/%7Eterrell/images/mira_test.jpg

[Ghost]

I have been working on a painting of Mira (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mira) which is a binary that contains a white dwarf but it's not finished yet. Here's where it stands at the moment:

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/%7Eterrell/images/mira_test.jpg

Dirk, what do you use to make/paint these?

[dirkterrell]

Here is a CNN article on Kepler-16:

http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/15/tatooine-gives-first-direct-proof-of-2-sun-planet/?hpt=hp_t2

[CYCLE_MONKEY]

Awesome stuff, as usual, Dr. Dirk! :)

Did anyone catch the moonrise sunday night about 7:45, or the moonset Monday morning about 6:45? AWESOME! I got a shot of it Monday, though not the one I wanted because I had to find a safe place to pull over on the way to work and shoot it.

[dirkterrell]

Dirk, what do you use to make/paint these?

See post #10.

[Ghost]

See post #10.

Thanks, missed that somehow.

Definitely looks cool, and I like the pseudo-realism to it all

[dapper]

Nice art work!

[DavidofColorado]

Hello,
I was wondering something. In a binary star system like the one you are talking about you are not expecting to find a planet that may support life right? I thought if there was a planet that close it would be sling shotted out of the system by the other star. But my imagination is running wild about it too. Not over the numbers you put out because I can't make anything out of it. But the pictures for sure and the idea of a duel star system with a life supporting planet.

[deadline]

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/%7Eterrell/images/cumulonimbus_lake_1024.jpg


I like this picture... how is it done?

[dirkterrell]

Hello,
I was wondering something. In a binary star system like the one you are talking about you are not expecting to find a planet that may support life right?


I have been talking about them since 2003, trying to get funding for research to find out if life can be supported in them. I see no reason a priori why it couldn't be. My colleagues have been a little slow to see the possibilities.



I thought if there was a planet that close it would be sling shotted out of the system by the other star. But my imagination is running wild about it too. Not over the numbers you put out because I can't make anything out of it. But the pictures for sure and the idea of a duel star system with a life supporting planet.

It depends on how far away the planet is from the binary. If it is ~4 times as far from the stars as the stars' separation or more, it can be dynamically stable for long periods of time. But, the stars do change over time and if they are very close together (like this system), they can change pretty dramatically. My proposed research was to model all of this stuff (changes in the stars, the dynamics, and the climate of the planet) and see if life could be sustained. That kind of research is not easy to do, but is is doable.

Since most of you probably have no idea about how research like this gets funded, let me explain, assuming you are interested. As a research scientist, you develop ideas for projects that will extend our understanding in your area. You then write a proposal (text is usually limited to 15 pages) explaining your idea, how you will do it, and what the results will tell us. You then submit the proposal to some agency that funds such work, for me, usually NASA or the National Science Foundation. The agency then convenes a panel of (supposedly) knowledgeable people to review all of the proposals that come in.

Who are these knowledgeable people? They are your colleagues, who also submit proposals. That is, your competition decides whether you get funded. Think about how that approach would work in the business world. I think you can see that that approach is rife with the possibility of problems. If you go with the herd, you stand a much better chance than trying to go in a different direction. The herd currently focuses almost exclusively on searching for planets around single stars because that is the easiest work to do. I like to be challenged, so I am drawn to studying situations where there is more complexity to deal with.

You can therefore see how this leads to funding difficulty. The herd thinks it's too hard and thus too "risky" to fund with the limited money available. But risky things do sometimes lead to great discoveries. Einstein would never have made in it this environment. Maxwell? Never. Without those guys, we wouldn't have lasers, CD/DVD/Bluray players, iPods, or even the Internet for this forum to exist. We'd probably have some badass steam engines though, since that's what the herd thought was important back then. :)

The big problem is that we have too little money to fund the research of the scientists that we train. I have served on many of these review panels, and my experience is that 1/2 to 3/4 of the proposals received are worth funding. We have enough money to typically fund 1/5 to 1/4 of them. That is why I shake my head when I hear political types blabbing on about how we need to have more kids going into science as a career. Why spend upwards of twenty years developing the skills necessary to do that kind of work when only half of the current graduates (or less) are employed in jobs that require those skills? You either pay for more scientists or you have fewer of them. The politicians, as usual, want the positive result without paying for it. And prattling on about needing more scientists isn't going to convince young people to make the very steep personal investment to have a 40%-50% chance of having a job 15 years later.

[dirkterrell]

I like this picture... how is it done?

See post #10.

[Ghost]

While not a binary sun, has there been any more movement on the Tyche front?

Wasn't the WISE program supposed to weigh in on this?

[dirkterrell]

While not a binary sun, has there been any more movement on the Tyche front?

Wasn't the WISE program supposed to weigh in on this?


I haven't heard anything recently about that topic but I don't keep close tabs on the planetary science literature. I was peripherally involved in some research published last year that showed that perhaps 90% of the comets in the Oort cloud were captured from other stars in the star cluster that the Sun formed in.

And I'm going to be chatting with Jack Lissauer in a few minutes, so I'll ask him. I know he's done some work in that area...

[Ghost]

Cool, thanks!

[dirkterrell]

The discoveries continue:

http://www.space.com/14203-alien-planets-2-suns-tatooine-star-wars-aas219.html

They estimate that several million of these systems exist, as opposed to the reviewers of my proposals a few years back who claimed that they would be rare. Now maybe they'll listen. :D

[Ghost]

The discoveries continue:

http://www.space.com/14203-alien-planets-2-suns-tatooine-star-wars-aas219.html

They estimate that several million of these systems exist, as opposed to the reviewers of my proposals a few years back who claimed that they would be rare. Now maybe they'll listen. :D


Did you resubmit?

[longrider]

Dirk, would you consider selling prints of any of your artwork?

[dirkterrell]

Did you resubmit?

We'll be submitting it to NASA Exobiology in March. I put the NOI in last week.

[dirkterrell]

Dirk, would you consider selling prints of any of your artwork?

Absolutely. The easiest way is probably through my Cafe Press store. Let me know what you're interested in.

I've got most of my stuff here:

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~terrell/dtart.htm (http://www.boulder.swri.edu/%7Eterrell/dtart.htm)

Here's a new one I did recently:

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/%7Eterrell/fall_colors_3.jpg

[Ghost]

We'll be submitting it to NASA Exobiology in March. I put the NOI in last week.

Awesome, keep us posted!

[Captain Obvious]

Pretty cool stuff on the binary research Dirk. Good luck with the resubmit.

While looking at the fall colors in a binary, I though, you know what that picture needs? Evergreens! :) I haven't researched to see what type of tree these are, but I saw them all over Peru and once in St Pete Beach. Just thought they were so cool and alien looking. I like the way the needles point upwards.

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f389/funksouljon/Peru%20Items%202011/LaCasaDeAbuela12.jpg

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f389/funksouljon/Peru%20Items%202011/LaCasaDeAbuela13.jpg

[dirkterrell]

While looking at the fall colors in a binary, I though, you know what that picture needs? Evergreens! :) I haven't researched to see what type of tree these are, but I saw them all over Peru and once in St Pete Beach. Just thought they were so cool and alien looking. I like the way the needles point upwards.


Those are cool looking. I may have to give them a try sometime. :)

[Captain Obvious]

Those are cool looking. I may have to give them a try sometime. :)


I know you answered what applications you use, but still not sure HOW you do some of those effects i.e. the mountain ridges, then all the way to the small stacks of rocks or how to put so much texture into the clouds. Clearly looking at your site, there was a growth/skill curve. Definitely an art form.

[dirkterrell]

I know you answered what applications you use, but still not sure HOW you do some of those effects i.e. the mountain ridges, then all the way to the small stacks of rocks or how to put so much texture into the clouds.

Like most things- lots of practice and learning from very talented people. :) And I will usually go in and touch up things by hand in Photoshop to clean it up. That's where a few years of traditional painting helps. It's amazing what a few little dabs of color here and there can do.



Clearly looking at your site, there was a growth/skill curve. Definitely an art form.

Yeah, it's amusing to look back at some of the stuff from when I started. I leave that stuff up so people can see how things progress as you work at it more.

[CYCLE_MONKEY]

Absolutely. The easiest way is probably through my Cafe Press store. Let me know what you're interested in.

I've got most of my stuff here:

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~terrell/dtart.htm (http://www.boulder.swri.edu/%7Eterrell/dtart.htm)

Here's a new one I did recently:

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/%7Eterrell/fall_colors_3.jpg
I just favorited your link. Nice work bro!:headbang:

I think I sent you this link some years ago, if not, here it is. You should submit here! they have some cool Christmas stuff.
http://www.digitalblasphemy.com/