Is there anybody out there? - Edinburgh Scientists join the search

(originally published by The Student)

ASTROPHYSICISTS AT the University of Edinburgh will be joining an international team of scientists in the search for earth-like planets in other solar systems.

     The Kepler project, which since 1994 has searched the sky for planets similar to our own, aims to identify planets where water, and potentially life, could exist.

     Edinburgh's scientists will be part of the team constructing an instrument for Kepler called the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher-North (HARPS-N). Based on a similar device in the southern hemisphere, HARPS-N will be mounted on a telescope in the Canaries and analyse data collected by the Kepler project.

     Dr Ken Rice, a Reader at the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Astronomy, described the project as “the first hope to find planets like Earth”.

     By observing tiny fluctuations in the gravity of stars in the Kepler field, and light we receive from them, scientists have been able to detect whether planets exist in other solar systems millions of lightyears away.

     “But this could be caused by things other than a passing planet” Rice explains, “The star could be moving, or another star not quite aligned could alter the light we detect, and we need to rule out these other possibilities. This is what HARPS-N can do.

     “With HARPS-N we can potentially actually see light from an earth-sized planet” - something which other devices have failed to do before. While Kepler has already discovered planets several times the size of our own, it is only with a more accurate device that any smaller galactic bodies can be found.

     From here intricate calculations based on these observations can tell us the position on the planet, and whether it lies in the 'goldilocks zone' like our own, allowing a stable atmosphere and, critically, water to form on the planet's surface.

     “We can't directly detect water on other planets yet- what we can do is observe a planet of earth's size and at earth's distance from its star and infer the presence of water. This could happen tomorrow or in a year's time and with HARPS-N, but detecting water will be ten years or so down the line.”

     The project is scheduled for completion by April 2012.