It’s the 1840s. Rival astronomers in Britain and France separately toil away in their notebooks, fiercely guarding their calculations of just where a planet beyond Uranus might be hiding, hoping that they and their country will get the glory for finding it. When telescopes finally spot Neptune, the discovery leads to decades of debate over primacy, and scouring each man’s private data to determine who deserved the most credit.

Fast forward to the 21st century: Rivalries may have changed, but in the hunt for new planets—especially becoming the first to detect a new world like our own in a distant star system—defending one’s data to lay claim to discovery has not gone away.

This week the team behind NASA’s planet-hunting space telescope, Kepler, announced that it has found more than 700 new candidates for exoplanets. Given that the current tally of known planets beyond our solar system stands near 460, that’s a huge announcement. But what’s drawn some attention is that more than half of the candidates won’t be released publicly at this time. These include smallest planet candidates—those closest to our own world in size—which won’t be officially announced until February 2011.

It’s no secret why:

“The first astronomer who can prove they found an Earthlike planet around an Earthlike star will win many kudos and prizes,” said John Huchra of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led a NASA advisory committee that approved the deal. “It’s glory for NASA,” he added.“NASA would like to have one of its missions find an Earthlike planet” [The New York Times].

Given all the time and effort that went into developing Kepler, most astronomers seem to be all right with the team taking its time to analyze its data and get the credit they deserve. The best viewing time to confirm many of them as true exoplanets will take place over this summer. But given the tantalizing contents of Kepler’s catalog and the potential for finding an Earth-like planet it shouldn’t be surprising if people get impatient to have their own look.

The typical planet identified by transit observations (the method used by Kepler) was about 13 Re [Earth radii]. The data that has been released includes about 100 planets that are somewhere between two and four Earth radii—and that’s excluding up to 400 smaller objects [Ars Technica].

In the meantime, those planets Kepler scientists have now publicized should provide fodder for curious stargazers. One new paper says that five stars the telescope studied have multiple exoplanets in orbit. Also, Europe’s CoRoT Space Telescope has added six new giant exoplanets to its own tally, and even spotted a brown dwarf.

Perhaps more eyes would speed up the search for a second Earth. However, it’s hard to blame the Kepler scientists for trying to avoid the claim-to-fame wars of the past.

Related Content:
80beats: Kepler Telescope Spies Its First 5 Exoplanets, Including “Styrofoam World”
80beats: Kepler Sends Postcards Home: It’s Beautiful Out Here
DISCOVER: How Long Until We Find a Second Earth?
Bad Astronomy: Kepler Works!

Image: NASA

This is a guest post from a member of Science in the News (SITN), an organization of PhD students at Harvard University whose mission is to bring the newest and most relevant science to a general audience. For over a decade, SITN has been presenting a fall lecture series at Harvard Medical School, with talks on a diversity of current and newsworthy topics, such as stem cell biology and climate change. SITN also publishes the Flash, an online newsletter written by graduate students at Harvard, which presents current scientific discoveries and emerging fields in an accessible and entertaining manner. SITN engages in additional outreach activities such as "Science by the Pint", and hopes students at other institutions will also make the commitment to strengthen science communication. The following post is from Harvard graduate student Atreyee Bhattacharya. As devastating drought threatens sub-Saharan Africa, and millions are faced with starvation and socio-political conflict, a question might loom large on the minds of policy makers: “How do we prepare for a potentially several decade-spanning drought, in a region where survival of our population depends mainly on rain-fed agriculture?” Research has shown that dry spells spanning several decades, also known as megadroughts, have been regular ...

Terry Nazon is a professional astrologer. That really tells you right away most of what you need to know: she’s wrong, because her whole profession is based on misinterpretation, bad science, and human fallacy. Astrology doesn’t work.

Oddly, astrologers tend to flip out when you mention that to them (and they really freak when you go into details, as I did in that link above). They claim you don’t understand astrology, you’re in denial, and that besides, their flavor of astrology is The One True Flavor. Of course, when you ask for actual specifics, they lapse into goobledygook, spin, and anecdotes.

So I was not surprised at all to get an email from my friend, astronomer and nonsense-debunker Stuart Robbins, claiming he was getting threats from Ms. Nazon. He had the audacity to apply a little logic and reason to her claims (and it really only takes a little) and prove them to be totally wrong. You can read his reports here, here, and here.

What happened next, according to Stuart, is that she went on the attack. You can read all about it on Stuart’s site as well as a followup he posted. I’d say they were amusing, but I’ve been on the receiving end of such nonsense in the past, and it’s at best tiresome, and at worst very unsettling. While I’m sure her attacks are full of sound and fury — signifying nothing — things like that are a nuisance. It’s like having a cloud of non-biting insects around you; ultimately they won’t hurt you, but they’re darn irritating.

And if you plan on reading the comments below on this post, I suggest you gird your loins (or, for you Leos, gird your lions), because no doubt there will be a flood of astrologers coming in to leave their little tidbits of silliness. That’s fine; I appreciate it when they do, because it invariably demonstrates that they haven’t actually read my debunking of astrology linked in the first paragraph above, or, if they did read it, they didn’t actually absorb it.

Because if, they did, they’d understand the one single most fundamental thing about their field:

I've long been a big fan of Threadless shirts. The creative images and phrases always spark interesting conversations, especially when meeting strangers while traveling. Now they have a new "Gulf Coast relief tee" called "peliCAN" and are:
donating all proceeds from the sale of this tee to the Gulf Restoration Network, a 15 year old environmental non-profit organization committed to uniting and empowering people to protect and restore the natural resources of the Gulf Region for future generations. They're the only environmental organization working Gulf-wide, and since the first days of BP's oil drilling disaster, they've provided independent monitoring and advocacy focused on holding BP accountable and ensuring an effective and transparent response to the crisis. Take action, stay informed, and donate to these efforts here. It's great to see a company get involved in local efforts to restore the Gulf. I'm not sure how I feel about the graphic, but it definitely succeeds in capturing the symbol of the oil spill. What do you think? You can read more about peliCAN here and visit the Gulf Restoration Network for other ways to help.

OK Go strikes again.

Their last video memorably featured a Rube Goldberg machine that filled a two-floor warehouse and took four minutes to complete its sequence of wonder and mayhem. This time, the tech-happy band recruited Jeff Lieberman and Eric Gunther–artists, musicians, and all-around interesting guys–to direct the video.

Together, the team warped time. Check out the video, and read below for some details about the project from Lieberman.

From Lieberman:

“The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh and don’t forget, it’s one continuous camera shot.”

“We also made a special friend in the process. Her name is Orange Bill and she’s a goose. You will agree that she clearly has a future in music videos.”

Related Content:
Discoblog: The Mother of all Rube Goldberg Machines!
Discoblog: Pixellated Video Game Beasties Attack Manhattan’s Streets
Discoblog: Video: Google Chrome Is Faster Than a Speeding Potato
DISCOVER: The Real Rules for Time Travelers