kevinkhu.bsky.social
Staff Scientist at Caltech/IPAC-NExScI researching exoplanets. Discoverer of K2-138 g. Outreach aficionado. Peer-mentoring advocate. http://kevinkhu.com
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Image credit for Hoag's Object: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgment: Ray A. Lucas (STScI/AURA)
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Levitating Enterprise and Serenity topper on a space-themed cake.
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I feel like this would be better aimed as a policy discussion or even an IAU-level policy. I'm afraid, however, there's likely no easy way to regulate how/what people report, and those who need to be part of these discussions won't be.
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I don't know enough about techno or other signatures to offer an informed opinion on the matter. Presumably, similarly high burdens of proof must be met in any case.
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The burden of proof of life beyond the solar system requires either ruling out abiotic means of production (which requires searching for several biosignatures) and/or observing biosignatures on many planets to statistically show that life is likely. We are very far from either of these scenarios.
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Congrats to the incredible team led by Rachel Fernandes! @gbergsten.bsky.social, @gijsmulders.bsky.social, @pascucci.bsky.social, @aussiastronomer.bsky.social, @kierstenboley.bsky.social, @ericmamajek.bsky.social, @sabinastro.bsky.social, @sakhee-space.bsky.social, @astrokarpoor.bsky.social 8/8
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To summarize our results, Abagail Minnich has made this incredible video! A hypothetical planetary system is depicted evolving through time, showing tidal migration, atmospheric mass loss, and compositional evolution. 7/8
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What does this mean? Well, between young and intermediate ages, tidal migration could be bringing planets in from further out. When the planets get closer to the host star, they lose their atmospheres, leaving few larger planets and a bunch of big rocks. 6/8
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We ran our planet occurrence rate machinery and what did we find? At the youngest ages, planets between 1.8 and 10 Earth radii are not very common. Then they become much more common at intermediate ages. For old stars, these planets become uncommon again, but smaller planets are about as common. 5/8
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All known transiting young planets are represented in this period vs radius plot, including planets our pipeline recovered (circles), did not recover (plus signs), and planets TESS did not observe (diamonds). This is compared to the older planet population contours. Colors indicate planet age. 4/8
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Planets were statistically validated using the triceratops code. We recovered and validated 16 planets. There are more planet candidates in the target sample we looked at, but we were unable to recover them at high confidence. 3/8
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We first used the pterodactyls pipeline to search for planets around 1,374 Sun-like stars that are younger than 1 billion years old in data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Young stars tend to be more active than older stars, making planet searches a bit challenging. 2/8
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Also, I'm happy to chat about my recent work on simulating oxygen detection surveys with the Extremely Large Telescopes. Many thanks for the shout out to Bioverse from Harshitha Parashivamurthy who is using our homogeneous 100 pc stellar catalog for TESS occurrence rates!
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A couple of days ago, I got a TP-Link Tapo ColorPro (security camera with plug-in power and Wi-Fi connected with a monitoring app) to look for skunks at night, and it works well so far!