What I learned about our galaxy

Every star has planets!!!
If you don't read this blog any further but get this point I'll still be super happy. This new understanding of our Milky Way is thanks to the Kepler space telescope. Between the years 2009-2013 the telescope's mission was to look at a tiny fraction of our galaxy and try to detect planets orbiting stars. The area surveyed by the telescope has about 160,000 stars in it (a relatively small cone that spreads from our solar system to a distance of 1000 light years) and the estimation that Prof. Jaymie Matthews from the University of British Columbia (and one of Kepler's astronomers) has is that by the time all of Kepler's data is processed the number of systems to have been found with planets would be about 5,000. Given the geometry of the way Kepler looks for planets, when you extrapolate this number you understand that almost every star in our galaxy has planets. Jaymie calls it a census of the galaxy, by looking at this tiny neighbourhood we can now understand how the whole country looks like. And it look alive with planets!

The really cool thing about this understanding is that it changes the calculation previously made with the Drake equation, it increases the number of potential habitable, and even inhabited, planets by a nice factor. It basically says that E.T is closer then ever...

Sadly, after fulfilling its mission, one of Kepler's systems started malfunctioning. The telescope is still operational but the satellite can now longer be controlled in the way necessary to have it survey that small neighbourhood. NASA was about to shut down the mission when the satellite's contractor at Ball Aerospace devised a new mission for the satellite. It will still look for planets orbiting stars, but look much closer and all around us, trying to find planets around the most common star type in the galaxy, the M class star (smaller than our G class sun but 10 times for frequent). The new mission, named K2 or 'Seconed Light', has started earlier this year and I'm very curious about its results.

The Kepler chronicles were given during our Exoplanet TP (team project) experts panel (together with Prof. Matthews were Dr. Hanno Rein from University of Toronto and John Troeltzsch, Kepler's lead engineer from Ball Aerospace). The panel also included a presentation by John Troeltzsch on the B612 Foundation, a foundation looking to privately fund (most by philanthropy) the SENTINEL mission, which purpose is to map medium size asteroids that might hit the Earth. Another important contributor to the search for Exoplanets is the Canadian MOST mission, a small and old work horse that has been providing data about star and planet activity since 2003.

The recent giant leap in planets known to mankind 

Except for really cool Exostuff, we also discussed other subjects and done other things since my last blog. We had a Hawaiian space party, we had our first quiz, we were filmed for the local evening news and in the orbital mechanics lecture we concluded that spacecrafts don't fly, they fall with style.

Christina with R2D2

Montreal Biosphere, haven't been in yet, next weekend