It’s a golden age for planet hunters: NASA's Kepler mission has identified more than 3,500 potential planets orbiting stars beyond our Sun. Some of them, like a planet called Kepler-22b, might even be able to harbor life. How did we come upon this distant planet? Combining startling animation with input from expert astrophysicists and astrobiologists, “Alien Planets Revealed” takes viewers on a journey along with the Kepler telescope. How does the telescope look for planets? How many of these planets are like our Earth? Will any of these planets be suitable for life as we know it? Bringing the creative power of veteran animators together with the latest discoveries in planet-hunting, “Alien Planets Revealed” shows the successes of the Kepler mission, taking us to planets beyond our solar system and providing a glimpse of creatures we might one day encounter.
Sadly, the Kepler space telescope is no longer searching the heavens after a mechanical failure in May 2103, but the wealth of information that it provided between 2009 and 2013 will keep scientists busy for many years to come. The NOVA program discusses some of the finding, including Kepler 62F, the first promising earth-like planet to be discovered (see NASA artist concept below). Kepler 62F is about 1,200 lights years away and the program makes it clear that it would take "many million years" for us to get there with our current spacecraft. Given NASA cannot get a budget one year out, it is unlikely this Congress will be contemplating such missions (though I still vote we send a CODEL - or congressional delegation - on the mission anyway).
The NOVA program also discusses how about 75 percent of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarves, which means the nature of life around other suns may be quite different from ours based on the light received on the surface of the exoplanets. Some of the ideas about flora and fauna on these red dwarf exoplanets was pretty interesting.
Another discussion point was how our own planet's life was nothing but microbes for billions of years, and therefore this is what we should probably suspect in terms of "life" on these exoplanets if there is life at all. And the idea that intelligent life would evolve on such exoplanets is not a given. NOVA uses the shark as an example of non-intelligent life staying pretty much the same over 400 million years. Hence, life may be abundant in the universe without much or any of it being intelligent or at a stage of intelligence that can communicate with us.
After all of that, the program still leaves us with the point that one out of every six stars in our galaxy has an Earth-sized planet orbiting it, which puts the number of Earth-sized planets at about 17 billion for the Milky Way. That gives us plenty of exoplanets to explore even with all the caveats above.
Top Image Credit: Exoplanet Eclipse/Bill Lile, quoted from:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blile59/313907609
