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By National Institute for Computational Sciences,
Aug 21, 2012 - 4:00:00 AM
In 1605, Johannes Kepler announced his first law of planetary motion, essentially stating that planets move around the sun with an elliptical, rather than circular, orbit.
Around the same time, the Age of Discovery was witness to countless European ocean voyages documenting the enormous, and sometimes falsely frightening, wider world. These forays into global exploration produced all sorts of skewed maps and mythical monsters, such as the Kraken, a giant sea creature somewhere between a squid and a dragon, depending on the account. It was greatly feared among sailors of the day to say the least.
More than 400 years later, two magnificent machines bearing the namesakes of Kepler and Kraken are making new waves into the next great frontier: deep space.
NASA's Kepler spacecraft is currently on the hunt for Earth-like planets throughout the Milky Way, and by extension, is surveying a multitude of stars to determine how many might support orbiting, Earth-like planets. It's a tall order, even for a mission named after one of history's most beloved astronomers.
Two things are required for a planetary body to be labeled Earth-like: its orbit must reside within the habitable, or Goldilocks (not too hot, not too cold) zone of the host star, a distance suitable for water, and by extension possibly life, to exist; and it also must be roughly Earth-sized, meaning no more than 25 percent larger than the radius of the Earth.
Kepler recently grabbed headlines with the discovery of Kepler 22b, the first planet discovered by the spacecraft that resides in the Goldilocks zone. However, it failed the size test with a radius roughly 2.4 times that of Earth's.
Judging a planet's size can be tricky. The only method for doing so is by comparing it to the star it's orbiting. To know the planet you have to first know the star, a task currently being taken up by a team led by Travis Metcalfe of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Metcalfe was on the team that catalogued both Kepler 22b and its host star.
Much like the real Kepler worked with the legendary astronomer Tyco Brahe, the spacecraft, and Metcalfe, could use some help processing the mountains of data being produced by its far flung observations. Enter Kraken, a Cray XT5 supercomputer capable of more than a petaflop (a thousand trillion calculations per second) and managed by the University of Tennessee's National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) for the National Science Foundation (NSF). It's a monster alright, but instead of devouring sailors, it favors numbers.
Metcalfe's team is using Kraken to measure the properties of the stars being orbited by potential Earth-like planets, properties such as radius, mass, age, and bulk composition, or the proportions of individual gases throughout the star. But the ramifications of Metcalfe's project go far beyond that, far beyond the sea once thought to be wrought with all manner of monsters, and far beyond anything Johannes Kepler ever imagined.
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