Summer is upon us, and next week begins our first Virtual STEM Experience (VSE). We wanted to provide more in-depth classes for the OLC, and the VSE was created to give you deeper understanding of a STEM related field. Thus includes content from experts in the field, similar to what we try to do every Thursday night. In order to spend more time during the VSE withinstruction, we decided to move the subject matter expert (SME) to our regular Thursday night chat and open it for everyone in the community. This is what we did last night, when Dr. Shawn Donnegal-Goldman from Goddard Space Flight Center talked about his job of searching for evidence of life on other planets.
Dr Shawn talked first about finding other planets (around other stars), a task that the space probe Kepler does very well. (You can build a model of the Kepler spacecraft by clicking here.) With Kepler we have found hundreds of planet candidates, but even then our ability to directly observe them is very slight. A planet like the earth would be orbiting too close and be too dim to distinguish from the central star's light. Future projects like the star-shade could help us in observing these faint objects.
The following animation illustrate every star to date that Kepler has detected as having planets and the relative size and orbits of those planets.
To learn more about Dr. Shawn's work, you can follow his blog at http://paleblueblog.org.
Next week, more on the search for extraterrestrial life, but this time on Icy Worlds!
P.S. If you are in the Life on Other Planets VSE and were not able to attend the LiveChat, make sure to view it in the archives!
Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12
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