Keeping the PR Machine Happy

By Aaron on February 22, 2007 at 1:57 am | In Blog Posts | No Comments

(Mea culpa: Sorry we’ve been so quiet lately. Travis and Rebekah were put in charge of the process of moving the AAVSO HQ – where they work, over the last month. A tough and thankless task. And over Christmas break, I was telling ppl that I loved my first semester at grad school, but that the work load was a tad lighter than I expected going in. This was foolhardy, for it angered the graduate school gods and they smote me. I am now officially in grad school hell – hence why I’m squeezing out this post at 1am instead of sleeping.)

The discovery that launched a million press releases…

This morning a cool press release came into my inbox. It was about using Spitzer to detect water in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. This was sufficiently cool enough for me to make note of it for a potential blog entry.

Then an hour or so later, another one came in on the same topic. Okay, save and go back to work.

Then an hour or so later yet another. What’s going on?

Then a few minutes, and anudder! What, do publicists get paid by the pound?

This is the perfect storm of discoveries. Often one can find two press releases on a single discovery when the discovery involved a large team from large institutions. Each institution needs to justify their grant work, so they do their own press releases. But this story has two discoveries of the same type, but of two different planets and by three different teams all using the same instrument.

Who’s on first? What’s on second? Why’s in left field?

So the story goes like this. Spitzer was used by 3 different teams to take a highly accurate spectrum of an exoplanet in front of and then behind its respective parent star. It then subtracted the light of the second spectrum from the first one. Voila’! What’s left over is the spectrum of the planet itself – or a rough approximation of it.
Ingenious! And hard as heck. Definitely worth the press releases, journal papers and the Nature coverage it is getting. But why so many?

Each team has their own reasons. The four press releases came from (in order of distribution) the Center for Astrophysics, MIT, JPL and Cal Tech. The CfA is a PR machine and has one of the premier planet hunters on staff (David Charbonneau). MIT’s press release involves the team that got the article in Nature, so they have some serious clout to promote. JPL’s press release must go through NASA so, not surprisingly, it talks pretty much only about NASA’s contributions to the project (while the other press releases were quite generous with praise for the each other). But good on NASA for putting a podcast out too.

But Cal Tech’s press release is the best. It basically dares the Spitzer scheduling committee to not give them more time to get more data. You see, Spitzer is a critically ill patient. It was designed with a finite amount of coolant. When it goes, the instruments get too warm and can’t see into the cold darkness of space anymore. Game over. It has about 1-2 more years left. The Cal Tech press release describes why they need more of this precious limited time. It’s quite a fun read. You can practically see them begging and genuflecting. Besides that aspect, I thought they also did the best job of describing the process in action and the science gleaned from it.

So what WAS gleaned? Well, specifically, water wasn’t found in the atmospheres of the planets (which were “hot Jupiters”, orbiting their Suns completely in about 2 days!). These hot, fast planets are supposed to have water molecules based on our models. Water wasn’t found, but dust WAS found around one of them. So it could be that the planets are in a cocoon of dust, beneath which the water vapor exists. But who really knows? These types of observations are at the very cutting edge of our ability and they involve (in the case of the dust discovery) a sample size of one. Never put your money on a sample of one. As they say in science, always interpolate, never extrapolate. And if our observations are that iffy, imagine the models. Aye carumba!

Now for the astro porn:

NASA’s take…

More from NASA, I’d like to know what Ryan thinks..

This from the CFA, click for a super big version.

Discuss!! (or not..)