Natalie Batalha a UCSC professor of astronomy and astrophysics, says planets the size of Earth are relatively common. That, she says, means “there could potentially be environments like Earth that could serve as cradles of life.” (Photo by Carolyn Lagattuta)
The 18 hexagonal mirrors of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope float nearly one million miles from Earth like golden eyes peering into the universe, searching for signs of life on alien planets.
One of the leaders of the pursuit is celebrated UC Santa Cruz astronomer Natalie Batalha. Her team is one of two at the university tasked with organizing and analyzing the enormous amounts of data collected by the new telescope — a process made faster and easier by gathering a powerful international group of astronomers using a new approach called “open science.”
Batalha’s focus is on exoplanets: the worlds orbiting stars outside of our solar system. Astronomers estimate there are over a billion trillion of them — at least one for every star in the universe. That’s more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
“There’s a lot to do, so we need all hands on deck,” Batalha said in an interview.
Rallying more than 100 collaborators with grassroots-style organizing, the team originally planned to publish six scientific papers. But since the $10 billion telescope began streaming data back to Earth in July, Batalha’s group has begun working on six times that number. Late last month, the team released a detailed chemical portrait of a gaseous planet 700 light-years away.
The astronomers are looking for biosignatures, or signs of life. They could be molecules such as oxygen or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or other evidence that we can’t yet see.
“I’m interested in exoplanets because we essentially live on an exoplanet. That seems to be where life gets a toehold,” Batalha said. “Ultimately, I want to understand the conditions that make a rock into a living world.”
Detecting an exoplanet, astronomers say, is like seeing a firefly in front of a lighthouse from miles away. That’s because exoplanets are so tiny and faint compared to the stars they orbit. Our sun could fit 1.3 million Earths inside of it.
Astronomers have discovered 5,000 exoplanets so far. The first was identified in 1992, but in just the last six years astronomers have discovered nearly 3,000 of them.
“The cosmos is chockablock with planets,” said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Mountain View-based SETI Institute, a pioneering nonprofit organization that has been searching for alien life for decades. “While most of these worlds are undoubtedly disappointing, like Uranus or Neptune, some of them should bear a bit of resemblance to our own planet. This has become a big impetus for those who hope to find life in space.”
Open science has been a major factor in the success of Batalha’s team.
Typically, astronomers conduct research privately, competing with their colleagues to publish first. But Batalha and her collaborators have released all of their data to the world from day one.
The same goes for Andy Skemer, a fellow UCSC astronomer who is leading another team studying exoplanets with the new telescope, launched last Christmas by the European Space Agency in French Guiana.
Worldwide access to the data has led to some amusing bloopers. On Aug. 1, a Reddit user posted an initial image after quickly analyzing some data moments after it was streamed to Earth from the telescope. Another Reddit user commented, “Looks out of focus.” To astronomers, however, an exoplanet was in plain sight, smack dab in the middle of the picture.
Batalha said she modeled the open science approach after strategies used in other fields — notably how vaccine research dramatically advanced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I saw many examples of how open-science collaborations in other fields were fruitful, leading to more science, broader science and quicker science with more productivity and creativity,” she added.
Aarynn Carter, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSC, is capturing direct images of exoplanets with Skemer’s team, a challenging feat that has only been accomplished for two dozen exoplanets of the 5,000 discovered.
“When you download the image, it’s a mess. It’s full of light, and there’s pixel effects you need to correct. You’re going step by step trying to slowly clean the image and subtract away the star’s light,” Carter said. “At the end, out pops an image of the planet. … It’s a really fulfilling moment.”
Carter agrees that open science is the path forward for astronomy research but says there can be significant downsides.
In the hyper-competitive world of scientific research, it’s worrisome when the entire astronomical community sees your data at the same time — and potentially publishes a paper before you do, Carter said.
And in the race to be first, early career scientists, parents of small children and other researchers with major commitments outside of their research may be at a disadvantage, unable to work overtime to publish before everyone else, Carter said.
Despite the potential risks, Batalha said, open science can foster a sense of belonging for more scientists, allowing them to make more meaningful contributions.
By using a spreadsheet of ideas and papers in progress, Batalha’s team keeps track of who does what. It helped the team appoint multiple grad students to be first authors on major papers, almost unheard of for a flagship mission like the current one.
“Open science is about breaking down barriers,” said Carter, who was just starting grad school when he joined Skemer’s team. “With fewer barriers, more people can get involved with exoplanet science and enjoy it as much as myself and other researchers do.”
Originally published at Isabel Swafford, Correspondent