I Want It All, And I Want It Now!

Humans have always wanted to know everything about anything, especially when it comes to things they knew were much greater than themselves. Take the stars for instance. Try to imagine being a Greek back around 400 BC or so. Besides having great abs, all you needed to do was look up during the night at all the stars and you could immediately recognize the "known" universe, constellations, and nearby planets.

How am I supposed to see the constellations with all this rain?

The problem is, human nature made us want to know more, so a millennium later, a man by the name of Galileo Galilei decided to improve the telescope and use it to look out at the night sky. What did he find? Well he discovered a lot of stuff that made a lot of people mad, like agreeing with Copernicus on the heliocentric model. He also found that Jupiter was indeed a planet with its own moons and that Saturn had rings. So what happened next? It took some years and development in telescope technology, but the discovery of new stars, planets and even whole galaxies, skyrocketed.

Lets fast forward to 1988. Gas is $0.91 per gallon, new houses cost $91,600, Michael Jackson came out with "Dirty Diana," and Crack Cocaine and Prozac appear (that sounds like one crazy year). But something else happened in '88, something that actually turned heads when talking about aliens, Canadian astronomers Bruce Campbell, G. A. H. Walker, and Stephenson Yang discover a planet orbiting the star Gamma Cephei using radial-velocity observations, the first confirmed extrasolar planet.

Artist's concept of the extrasolar planet, Gamma Cephei AB, with the Gamma Cephei star in the background.

So lets review the ways new planets were discovered that we've talked about. There was simply looking up at the sky, using a telescope, and observing something called radial-velocity. There's many more ways to do it, like using IR to find "invisible" planets as talked about in our post Predator Vision. This brings us to the real topic of today's post, technique 3720 on finding new planets in our vast universe: pinpointing the source of Gamma Rays.

A group of over 170 scientists (mainly physicists) from USA, Italy, Sweden, Japan, and France discovered a way to find new planets in the depths of our universe by tracking this insanely high energy radiation. They used the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) to detect pulses of gamma radiation at various energy levels. This "super group" of scientists chose to search at random energy levels and random areas of space, basically a "blind" test, to find previously unknown sources of these radiation pulses.

Think of the brown dog as a gamma ray pulse and the yellow dog the LAT randomly searching an area of space, hoping to find the gamma radiation.

The end result of these blind searches was the discovery of 16 gamma ray pulsars (as of 2009, reportedly 70 were found as of 2010). A pulsar is the source of the gamma radiation, typically neutron stars or supernova remnants. Now why is finding a neutron star that emits gamma rays important? The frequency that these gamma rays pulse are so precise and rigid, that any small disturbance may indicate an orbiting planet!

Using this technique, and of course the many other techniques out there, humans just may be able to fully map out our galaxy's planets and stars.

Whats next? The mapping the entire universe of course.

Human intentions sound similar to Brain's if you think about it...

~Nolan