SETI INSTITUTE

Starspots are cooler, darker areas on the surface of a star that form when regions of the star’s magnetic field block the flow of heat and energy to the stellar surface. Understanding the surface features of stars could provide insights about stellar magnetism and its impact on exoplanet habitability. This FDL team will be using applied AI and machine learning tools and processes to Kepler and TESS data to identify and define the properties of starspots, stellar rotation, and stellar magnetism in tens of thousands of stars, and increase our understanding of our own Sun as a star. Join us for a conversation with team members Daniel Giles (Illinois Institute of Technology and Adler Planetarium), J. Emmanuel Johnson (University of Valencia, Spain), Lisseth Gavilan-Main (NASA Ames Research Center), Stela Ishitani Silva (Catholic University of American and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), and Tansu Daylan (MIT) for a discussion about the starspots challenge they are tackling and what they are learning.

Institute scientist Lori Fenton issues the July 2020 art challenge to our Art Imaginarium members: Jezero Crater, Mars Perseverance's landing zone, as it was in the past. The Art Imaginarium is a Facebook group dedicated to the space where art meets science. Why art? Science and art are more closely connected than people might expect, with each offering new perspectives and insights. We’re building a global artistic community where everyone feels safe in expressing themselves and exploring the limits of their imaginations. We hope that this will be a space where people respect both the art and the science. What is art? We do not want to constrain creativity. Want to write a song? Draw in pencil? Create digital art? Bake a cake? Use pasta and beans? Go for it. Each month, we provide members with a challenge theme. How they interpret that theme is entirely up to them. Join the challenge here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheArtImaginariumbySETI/

the SETI Institute and the Whale Sanctuary Project. What can animal intelligence tell us about the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? And how can the ways we recognize intelligence on our own planet inform how we might interact with extraterrestrial intelligence? Related papers Landscape of Intelligence: https://whalesanctuaryproject.org/content/uploads/Landscape-of-Intelligence.pdf Cetacean Brain Evolution: http://whalesanctuaryproject.org/content/uploads/The-Cetacean-Brain-Evolution-Structure-and-Function.pdf Alien Mindscapes: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2016.1536 Quantum of Life: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-quantum-of-life/

Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak talks about the importance of exploration.

Join us on June 30 2020 for a special #SETILive about Asteroids with American physicist and former NASA astronaut, Ed Lu. Ed is the co-founder of the B612 Foundation and its scientific program the Asteroid Institute, both dedicated to protecting the Earth from asteroid strikes. He will discuss with SETI Institute Senior Director of Education and STEM Programs, Simon Steel, on the role of the B612 Foundation in Planetary Defense at large, including protecting the planet but also informing and forwarding world-wide decision-making on this issue. Ed will share with us his first-hand experience, while using the Unistellar eVscope, a digital telescope developed in partnership with the SETI Institute which could have the potential to involve us in protecting our planet by bringing timely and accurate observations of potentially hazardous asteroids.

Join us for a conversation with the new Director of the SETI Artists-in-Residence program (SETI AIR), Bettina Forget, and Dorka Keehn, SF Arts Commissioner and a member of the SETI AIR Advisory Committee. Now in its 10th year, SETI AIR strives to foster an exchange of ideas between artists and scientists. What do Bettina and Dorka have in mind for the next 10 years? Join us to learn more.

Starting the last week of June, we're giving our Art Imaginarium members a mini-challenge. We want you to rethink the dot in the question mark of our logo. We've used a painter's palette for our group. We've done other versions for special events. Now we want to see your takes. (There's not really a time limit. We don't do deadlines in this group.) The Art Imaginarium is a Facebook group dedicated to the space where art meets science. Why art? Science and art are more closely connected than people might expect, with each offering new perspectives and insights. We’re building a global artistic community where everyone feels safe in expressing themselves and exploring the limits of their imaginations. We hope that this will be a space where people respect both the art and the science. What is art? We do not want to constrain creativity. Want to write a song? Draw in pencil? Create digital art? Bake a cake? Use pasta and beans? Go for it. Each month, we provide members with a challenge theme. How they interpret that theme is entirely up to them. Join the challenge here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheArtImaginariumbySETI/

Senior Researcher Franck Marchis tells us about Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and the recent discovery of a FRB in our Galaxy which seems to be linked to a magnetar, an exotic Neutron star. This could be a major discovery in radio astronomy and could help us to open the gates of a new physics to better understand our universe.

Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak addresses the findings of a new paper that suggests there are only 36 alien societies in our galaxy.

Could an asteroid strike our planet in the future? Astronomers think so since thousands of near-earth asteroids (NEAs) cross our planet’s path. However, the good news is that an asteroid impact is a preventable large-scale disaster. NASA has recently opened a Planetary Defense Coordination Office to manage its ongoing mission of so-called “Planetary Defense.” One of the programs is to find, track, and characterize at least 90 percent of the predicted number of NEAs that are at least 140 meters -- bigger than a small football stadium -- and characterize a subset of them, so we develop projects to deflect them if needed. How are NEAs found and tracked? What are the expected NEA close approaches?

Join us for a SETI Live with Laetitia Delrez (@LaetitiaDelrez) from the University of Liege and Kate Isaak, Project Scientist at ESA on CHEOPS. The CHEOPS mission (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite) is the first of the newly created “S-class missions” of ESA (small class missions with an ESA budget of less than 50 million), and is dedicated to characterizing the transits of exoplanets. The mission has recently reached a new milestone, since it has been declared ready for science. Researchers will tell us the goals of the mission and what to expect in the follow years from this highly accurate transiting light curves provided by the space telescope. Overview of CHEOPS at ESA: https://www.esa.int/cheops and https://www.sci.esa.int/cheops which includes details about the building phase of the project https://cosmos.esa.int/web/cheops aimed at scientists interested in CHEOPS and https://cosmos.esa.int/web/cheops-guest-observers-programme for people interested in applying for observing time on CHEOPS Also, mission webpages from the CHEOPS Mission Consortium: https://cheops.unibe.ch/ The CHEOPS data, once public, will be available through the CHEOPS mission archive at: https://cheops-archive.astro.unige.ch/archive_browser/ And for fun: a paper model to keep people busy building their own CHEOPS: https://sci.esa.int/web/cheops/-/59851-cheops-paper-model

What are rubble pile asteroids with SETI Institute scientist, Michael Busch.

While citizens take to the streets to protest racist violence, the pandemic has its own brutal inequities. Black, Latino, and Native American people are bearing the brunt of COVID illness and death. We look at the multitude of factors that contribute to this disparity, most of which existed long before the pandemic. Also, how the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe maintained their coronavirus safeguards in defiance of the South Dakota governor. And, the biological reasons why we categorize one another by skin color. Listen now at https://bigpicturescience.org

It’s a new era in popular astronomy and citizen science pioneers are making discoveries that are improving our understanding of exoplanets and asteroids. Join us find out what we’ve learned about the main-belt asteroid 200 UD52 and the exoplanet Qatar-1b.

Scientists from the SETI Institute and Purdue University have found that the only way to produce Deimos’s unusually tilted orbit is for Mars to have had a ring billions of years ago. While some of the more massive planets in our solar system have giant rings and numerous big moons, Mars only has two small, misshapen moons, Phobos and Deimos. Although these moons are small, their peculiar orbits hide important secrets about their past. A discussion with the SETI Institute's Matija Cuk.

This week on Big Picture Science Some safeguards against COVID-19 don’t require a medical breakthrough. Catching sufficient Z’s makes for a healthy immune system. And, while you wash your hands for the umpteenth time, we'll explain how soap sends viruses down the drain. Plus, your body’s largest organ – skin – is your first line of defense against the pandemic and is also neglected because of it. Find out why we're suffering from "skin hunger" during this crisis. Listen to the episode at https://bigpicturescience.org

Institute senior astronomer Franck Marchis speaks with Dr. Jason Wang of Caltech about the recent announcement that astronomers using the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRC2) on the Keck II telescope at W. M. Keck Observatory have directly imaged two infant gas giants: PDS 70b and PDS 70c. Recorded live on Facebook for #SETILive, 21 May, 2020.

SETI Institute Research Scientist Wael Farah introduces the Art Imaginarium's June 2020 challenge: Fast Radio Bursts! The Art Imaginarium is a Facebook group dedicated to the space where art meets science. Why art? Science and art are more closely connected than people might expect, with each offering new perspectives and insights. We’re building a global artistic community where everyone feels safe in expressing themselves and exploring the limits of their imaginations. We hope that this will be a space where people respect both the art and the science. What is art? We do not want to constrain creativity. Want to write a song? Draw in pencil? Create digital art? Bake a cake? Use pasta and beans? Go for it. Each month, we provide members with a challenge theme. How they interpret that theme is entirely up to them. Join the challenge here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheArtImaginariumbySETI/

In discussion with Astronomer Anthony Bocaletti from the Observatoire de Paris who will tell us about the incredible of the young star AB Aurigae revealed by the European Southern Observatory last week. These new observations collected with a cutting-edge adaptive optics system reveal complex features around the young star including a twist that marks the site where a planet may be forming. Together with SETI Institute senior astronomer Franck Marchis, Bocaletti will explain how astronomers get crucial clues on the formation of exoplanets from this kind of image.

In this episode of Planetary Landscapes (PL) countdown to Mars 2020, we look at why the presence of an ocean on Mars, and possibly several generations of oceans matters for the search for biosignatures, and also why the older the first ocean the better. Credit video: Planetary Landscapes, Nathalie A. Cabrol.