Science at Cal - Gibor Basri - How Many Planets are Out There?
Channel: ckleinastro
Date: 21/08/2013

Four years ago a dedicated space telescope ("Kepler") was launched to search for terrestrial planets around other stars, and even possibly discover a planet that might be like the Earth. The main purpose of the mission is to find out how common planets are out to the distance we are from our Sun.  I explain how the mission works, and highlight some of its most amazing discoveries. Nearly 3000 potential planets have been found, including many in multiple planet systems. The most common planet may be something that we don't have in our own Solar System: "super-Earths" which are 1.5-3 times as big as our planet. Some of these may be rocky, some may be "water worlds", and some may be more like warm Neptunes. The Kepler mission is rapidly leading us to the conclusion that most stars have planets going around them, and the number of earth-sized planets in our Galaxy is probably in the billions.

Gibor Basri has been a faculty member of the Astronomy department at UC Berkeley for 30 years. He is best known for his pioneering work on brown dwarfs. He produced a number of first discoveries on these "cosmic missing links" between stars and planets. He helped define their relation to stars and used them to inform the debate on "what is a planet?". Another major area of research has been star and planet formation, including the magnetic interface between newly forming stars and their surrounding protoplanetary disks. Prof. Basri has extensively studied the role of magnetism in the history of solar-type and low-mass stars. He is now a Co-Investigator on NASA's Kepler exoplanet mission, which enables unprecedented detail on starspots and other magnetic activity for large numbers of stars. In addition to astrophysics, Prof. Basri has always worked to increase the participation of minorities in science, and is the founding Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion at UC Berkeley.