 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things in matter-to-tech and Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Rachel Juergen. In our show this time, we'll visit the most recent Science Café featuring a discussion by Nankie van de Merel of the Institute for Astronomy at UH Manoa. She talked about her primary scientific research at IFA, the mystery of exoplanets, what they are, where they are, and how we can find them. How do we detect distant planets around other stars? How are they formed? How do we study the formation if that formation takes millions of years? Nankie covered these and other interesting questions on exoplanets, that is, on planets and planet formation at the Science Café. Nankie is from the Netherlands. She took her PhD in Leiden University working at the Leiden Observatory there. Since 2015, she has been a Beatrice Watson parent fellow at the Institute for Astronomy at IFA at UH. Nankie has been working on protoplanetary disks where planets are forming. She has been analyzing molecular line and continuum data with interferometric physical chemical modeling observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, ALMA, ALMA, and data from the Keck and Subaru observatories at Manakea to do direct imaging of exoplanets. Astrochemistry is an important part of her work. This lets her analyze the chemical content of the universe, that is, the formation, destruction, and excitation of molecules. It provides her and other astronomers with a unique perspective, that is, that molecules can be used as tracers of physical conditions. Astrochemistry connects many research fields, including the study of molecular lines in star and planet formation, and the interstellar medium, the modeling of chemistry in interstellar environments, and in laboratory studies using high vacuum chambers. The formation of complex organic molecules also allows us to look into the origin of life in our solar system and elsewhere. In the last decade, high-tech telescopes have given us the opportunity to study chemistry in the universe. ALMA, with its advanced sensitivity, gives us an even closer view of the chemical content of molecular clouds, galaxies, and disks. Nanke spoke to the Science Café of the Hawaii Academy of Science last month. Her talk was called Exoplanets, How They Form and Where to Find Them. She addressed the questions of how do we detect distant planets around distant stars, how are they formed, and how do we study their formation if that process takes millions of years. The question of are we alone? Are humans the only intelligent creatures in the universe? Is there other life out there? Is the Earth unique? Is the solar system unique? This is very fundamental. It's trying to give a value to our being. If you look in the history of astronomy, the first people who were thinking about space and stars, and what are these things in the sky, I'm talking about the ancient Greeks, for example, they were already thinking about this, and naturally humans put themselves in the center. We would like to say that we are significant. We would like to say that we are making a difference, and that we are sort of the only thing. But in the end, screen the dust pack. We are just very tiny compared to the rest of the universe. One planet here in a very big solar system, and there are three other rocky planets close to us, close to the sun, as in Mercury, Venus, and Mars, where we could say, Mars and Venus are sort of copies of the Earth. They're not really nice places to live, but in a way, from an astronomical point of view, they look a little bit like us. Then there are the larger planets further out, the Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, which are gas giants, so in that sense, fundamentally different from us. And they are mostly located in the outer part of the solar system. And what's funny is that people thought for a long time that this is like the perfect configuration. Again, humans think we are significant. We have the perfect configuration to create life in the universe. So that's why the solar system looks like it is. And if there are other planets, they all must look the same. Go a step further. Our solar system is not in a very special place in the Milky Way. It's located somewhere out here. Obviously, this is not a picture because, well, we cannot send satellites that far out. But this is how we imagine the Milky Way looks like if we would go this far away. It looks like a spiral galaxy. The exoplanets, as it was already said in the introduction, are planets around other stars than our sun. The first discovery of an exoplanet was actually not that long ago, 1995. I was alive. I don't actually remember this. I was nine years old. I'm sure it was a big deal, but I guess I wasn't reading newspapers at that time. So, but it must have been a very, very big discovery. To see that that planet around other stars really existed. But within those last 22 years, this field of exoplanets has exploded. So many people got interested in it. Both astronomers and non-astronomers, I have to say. And a lot of telescopes have started focusing on just finding more and more exoplanets. So this is a sort of timeline of a number of exoplanets that we know as a function of time. And the current number, and I always say this, I looked that up this morning. So if something has changed in the last 10 hours, I apologize. This number of exoplanets as a function of time, it shows how many more planets have been discovered in just the last couple of years. So we went to 1 here in 1995, to 10, 50, 100, maybe. And then suddenly here it goes up to 2,000, and now even over 3,000. The colors are also showing the techniques that we use to discover planets. I'll come back to that in a second. We see that most planets are actually discovered by the so-called transit method, which is the easiest way to discover a planet. And the second method is radial velocity. Again, I'll explain what that is in a moment. And then there are all these other planets that are, you know, they're important too, but you see they're only very minor part. Let's get back to this question of how do we find them? Because it's not like we can look at a star and see a planet next to it. Let me make that clear. All we can see is a little dot that is a star, and we cannot even resolve that star. We're just, we're seeing something very blurry, if we were zooming in on it, it would always remain blurry, because it's so much smaller than what we can see with a telescope. And then it gets even worse, because we're not just looking at that star, we're actually trying to see something that is basically not bright at all, a firefly that is on or even off. And we're trying to find that right next to that really, really bright star. So it's not a question of just making a picture and then we have that planet. No, we have to use primarily indirect methods in order to find those planets. The most famous method, and as you've seen also the most common method what has given us most of our exoplanet discoveries is the transit method. Where, well, we need a certain amount of luck, because the planet has to transit in front of the star in its orbit. And then when the planet is going in front of the star, remember we are not resolving this, we're not seeing two dots, we just see one big blob and we can measure its brightness. And then if we measure its brightness with time, so not, well, usually not constantly, but we take a measurement here and we take one here, we take one here, here, and we do that randomly for a lot of stars and hope we will find these kind of dips, then in that way we can discover a planet. But you can imagine that this is a very, very time-consuming job and it takes a lot of, well, not only telescope time, but also analysis time to see if a planet is really there. Because you have to be lucky, right? Maybe this certain star has a planet, but it's just not going in front of the star. The orbit is like this, in that case it would never block the light. Or maybe there are multiple planets and you get a very complicated pattern and you have no idea what's going on. Or maybe it's a very tiny planet and the effect is so small that you need a super sensitive telescope to even measure this dip. And I have to add that even for the bigger planets, this dip is a thousandth of a percent of the total brightness of the star. We're looking at very, very sensitive observations here. Despite all these difficulties, we've actually managed to find a lot of planets, so I don't want to discourage future astronomers here. Then another method, which is also quite common, that requires a little bit more detail is the so-called radial velocity map. And this has to do with the fact that I'm going to get it started. So just focus on the left side now. I'll explain the other parts later. Just look at the planets orbiting the star. So we are located here and we're looking in this direction. We're looking at that system. And what you see is that that planet, it is orbiting, it's following laws of Kepler, which is good. Laws of Kepler apply everywhere. But you see that not only is the planet moving, actually the star is moving a little bit. And the reason for that is that the star feels the gravitational pull of the planet. It's only moving a tiny little bit because it's much more massive than the planet. But on the other hand, it's much more bright. So it's easier to measure the star than the planet in this particular case. So what we are measuring is the wobble of the star. And how do we do that? We don't actually see this as a functional position. For that, the motion is too small. But we can do it by looking at spectral lines. Lines in visible or near for that any other spectrum. So how does that work? This approach makes use of the so-called Doppler effect. And Doppler effect is something that we know primarily from sound, which means that if a car is making a sound, the car is going to keep driving, if that car is approaching us, the pitch of that sound, let's say an ambulance, very familiar here in Honolulu, the pitch will become higher, and that means that the wavelength becomes shorter. On the other hand, if the car passes us, so it was approaching us, approaching us, and then it's moving away from us again, the pitch will actually become lower, or the wavelength becomes longer. This is the Doppler effect, the change of wavelength because of the velocity with respect to us. So since light is a wave as well, this is just a way that we can describe this phenomenon, we can see the same effect in light. So we see that something that's moving away from us becomes a little bit more red, gets a longer wavelength, and if it's moving towards us, it becomes a little bit more blue, it gets a shorter wavelength. When we are seeing that the sun is moving towards us, we see that the spectral lines are moving to the blue, these black lines are moving towards the blue, and when it's moving away, the whole thing is moving to the red. So again, if we measure the position of that line, so the velocity of that line as a function of time, so again this requires a lot of measurements, we find this beautiful sine curve, because first the velocity is going up, and then the velocity is going down, and that goes in a repeating pattern, which is again something that you can recognize. We can use this technique called coronography, where we put a mask in our telescope at the location of the star, so we block that light, and then you still see a little bit of remnant light around it, which is why we cannot see any planets that are super close to it, because you have all this scatter and annoying stuff there. But these other things, these other blobs that are further away, we can certainly detect. These observations were made with a Keck telescope on Mauna Kea, and so by now there are four companions, there's even a fifth one, but that one still needs to be confirmed, which we haven't only detected a couple of times with different telescopes, but we have even follow-up observations where we see that they have slightly moved, and they move exactly in their Keplerian orbit. So yeah, hey, physics makes sense, and these are really planets. No, the reason why we need follow-up observations is because maybe this very bright blob has nothing to do with the star here. Because remember, we are looking at the sky, we see something 2D, but in fact we are looking at a 3D image. Something could be much further away, and that's very completely unbound to the star itself. But then of course it wouldn't be following the Keplerian motion of a planet around a certain star. So that is the confirmation that you need if you have a directly imaged. The Kepler Space Telescope was launched around five years ago, and it had the mission to just scan a portion of the sky for many, many days, use all that data, analyze it automatically, and then send us the results of all the possible stars that may have a planet. It was using the transit method, so it was just measuring brightness of many stars in long periods and trying to detect these patterns. Every candidate that was found in that way was then followed up with radial velocity observations from Earth to confirm if the planet was really there. And the reason for that is that the Kepler Space Telescope dish, so the mirror, was actually kind of small, so it didn't have a super high sensitivity. If you want to do radial velocity, you need to have a large mirror to collect a lot of light. By combining radial velocity and transit in this way, you can constrain more about the geometry of the system. So for example the orientation of the planet orbit with respect to the star and with respect to us. So again, this is why Kepler was incredibly important for finding more and more planets. And actually the Kepler mission is still going. It shows typical things we can find all over the world. And based on this map, we're going to try to find what is the best location to put a telescope. So what are the things that we need for our observations to be as perfect as possible? First of all, we have the problem of the atmosphere. This is the whole reason that we like to put things in space because then there's no atmosphere. Because the atmosphere disturbs everything. It blocks part of the light. Even if it doesn't block it, it makes it fuzzy. There are a lot of issues with the atmosphere. So basically we would like to go as high as possible. So if we're going to go to space, at least we have to go up to a mountain. Then another thing we would like to avoid when we want to build a ground-based telescope is light pollution. So this is a map again of the Earth, maybe a little bit more realistic, where we see where we don't want to build a telescope. And maybe Hawaii is over here. Maybe somewhere that we do. And the third point is weather. Because it would be nice if we have a telescope that we can use almost every night, or even every night. And not like the Netherlands, 50 nights per year. Or something like that. So you want to be at a location where you can build a road and where people can easily drive up. And that means that you're excluding locations like Antarctica, North Pole, etc. Because even though they are maybe perfect in terms of weather and light pollution, they are really, really hard to reach. Summary of all of this is that Manakea truly is one of the very, very best sites in the world. There are maybe two or three other sites in the entire world who are maybe competitive with Manakea. And this is the reason why there are so many telescopes up there and why we are still working on, for example, getting the 30-meter telescope up there. Because there is really no alternative that is just as good and is going to give us the same kind of results as Manakea. You studied in Leiden, Leiden University, which is a big observatory, which is world-famous, world-class, and you came here, only towards right into the middle of the TMT dispute. How do you feel about that? Yeah, that was very strange because actually I arrived at the end of November 2015. My first working week, that was the first week of December, was decided that the permit had to be revoked and that basically the whole procedure of obtaining the permit had to be redone. Welcome, Nikki! Yeah, and I had heard about it, of course, like the TMT story was a big issue in astronomy, but suddenly it got a whole lot closer. It's been interesting to follow it in the last two years. I'm really glad that the permit has now been granted again. It actually happened. There's still a couple of steps to take, but I have confidence that TMT will be built. Some people think they're going to fight it forever, but you know, there is the law. We do have the law. People used to say, oh, the Earth is in the center of the universe. Everything else is orbiting us. I think I've rid of that notion a long time ago. We got rid of that, but it was around for a long time. But even after that, when they put the Sun in the center of our solar system and the Earth orbiting it, okay, well, fine. But maybe our Sun was still very special. And then when we realized we were actually part of the Milky Way and we are just somewhere in the outskirts of the Milky Way, not really special. Again, we're making ourselves less important. That's fine. However, then we started to discover exoplanets and so planets around other stars. And what we are looking for are planets just like us. And they are actually pretty hard to find. Because what we find primarily are these hot Jupiters, which are very massive planets, very close to the Sun. So it's a complete different configuration than our own solar system. So that kind of raises the question, maybe we are more unique than we thought. Origin of life elsewhere. Yeah, that is the second part of it. Because you need certain conditions in order to even have life. I mentioned that also in my talk, the habitable zone, which is the region where water is liquid. So temperature and pressure are just right so that water is liquid. So it's possible. And that's possible. And we've discovered planets like that that are in the habitable zone where water is liquid. Check out ifa.hawaii.edu. If you want to know more about the Science Cafe, check out high-si.org. If you want to know more about the Hawaii Academy of Science, check out Hawaiiacademyofscience.org. And now let's check out our Think Tech schedule of events going forward. Think Tech broadcasts its talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long. And some people listen to them all night long. If you missed a show, or if you want to replay or share any of our shows, they're all archived on demand on thinktecawaii.com and YouTube. For our audio stream, go to thinktecawaii.com slash radio. And we post all our programs as podcasts on iTunes. Visit thinktecawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links. Or, better yet, sign up on our email list and get the daily docket of our upcoming shows. Think Tech has a high-tech green screen studio at Pioneer Plaza. If you want to see it or be part of our live audience, or if you want to participate in our programs, contact shows at thinktecawaii.com. If you want to pose a question or make a comment during our shows, call 808-374-2014 and help us raise public awareness on Think Tech. Go ahead, give us a thumbs up on YouTube or send us a tweet at thinktechhi. We'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives in these islands. We want to stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us. Let's think together. And now, here's this week's Think Tech commentary. The stories coming out of Puerto Rico now are absolutely heart-rending. Already suffering from serious economic woes, the island was not prepared for the devastation that followed Hurricane Maria. Rescue and relief efforts have begun, but the challenges of supplies and repair are more substantial when everything needs to be brought in by boat or by plane. Recently, the Trump administration finally granted a Jones Act waiver to aid in the Puerto Rico relief effort. And it goes beyond just fuel to encompass all good ship from U.S. ports to the island. But a temporary waiver isn't going to be enough this time. Puerto Rico has been lobbying to ease the Jones Act restrictions long before Maria reached its shores. Much like in Hawaii, the Jones Act has been throttling that island's economy. Now Puerto Rico faces a substantial rebuilding effort and the Jones Act will be a cruel and unnecessary burden. That is why Congress and the President should move to make this temporary Jones Act waiver permanent. Puerto Rico desperately needs meaningful long-term relief and removing the regulatory barriers created by the Jones Act's cabbage provisions could help its struggling residents rebuild both their infrastructure and their economy. And Puerto Rico is not the only far-flung U.S. island that deserves consideration in this case. There is a lesson here for those of us in Hawaii as well. Situated far from the United States mainland, we are more isolated and therefore more at risk in the case of an emergency. The Jones Act is a dead weight on our businesses and adds to our cost of living. Why should we wait for a disaster to take action when it has become clear that the act is a continual burden on every state and territory in the nation? We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of ThinkTech. But first, we want to thank our underwriters. The Annie Sinclair-Newton Memorial Fund, the Atherton Family Foundation, the Bernice and Conrad Bonham Fund, Castle and Cook Hawaii, the Center for Microbial Oceanography, Research and Education, Collateral Analytics, the Cook Foundation, the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Order, Hawaii Energy, the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, the Hawaii Institute for Geophysics and Planetology, Hawaiian Electric Competence, Gaelin Ho of BAE Systems, Ameha Meha Schools, Integrated Security Technologies, Carol Monli and the Friends of ThinkTech, the Omediar Ohana Fund, the Shidler Family Foundation, the Sydney Stern Memorial Trust, Eureko J. Sugimura. Okay, Rachel, that wraps up this week's edition of ThinkTech. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on Spectrum OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it, just like Rachel does. For additional times, check out OC16.tv. For lots more ThinkTech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on ThinkTech, visit ThinkTechHawaii.com, be a guest or a host, a producer or an intern, and volunteer to help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks for being part of our ThinkTech family and for supporting our open discussion on energy diversification and global awareness in Hawaii, and of course, the solar system around us and beyond. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Jay Fiedel. And I'm Rachel Jurgen. Aloha, everyone.