Review of HIDDEN IN THE HEAVENS
The story of the Kepler mission to find new planets
Tl;dr – A fascinating science history read on the most important planet finding mission of our time. A bit more on the technical side as it’s published by an academic press, but accessible to those who enjoy reading about science.
I don’t recall a time since I began college that we didn’t know about planets outside of our solar system. As long as I’ve been paying attention, we’ve always been searching for extraterrestrial life on other planets. Odds seem good that there is something out there, in my opinion.
But my assumption that there are other planets out there is probably in large part a result of the Kepler mission that went from 2009 – 2018 and discovered over 2,600 exoplanets during that time. In Hidden in the Heavens: How the Kepler Mission’s Quest for New Planets Changed How We View Our Own by Jason Steffen shares how the Kepler mission got off the ground – and what we learned.
Steffen, now a physicist at UNLV, began on the Kepler mission right after finishing his PhD and when the mission was finally set to begin. In the nearly 10 years of operation, the Kepler telescope changed what we knew about planetary dynamics, and threw open the door to planet confirmations. That’s because Kepler was specifically designed to find planets and nothing else.
The telescope was in space, rather than here on earth which didn’t limit its ability to look for planets during the day as earth bound telescopes are. It also has a huge field of vision, able to observe a swath of sky 50,000 times bigger than the famous Hubble telescope. Thus, it was designed to continuously monitor an enormous chunk of sky for years to observe the small changes in a star’s brightness that occurs when a planet passes between the telescope and its host star.
Kepler didn’t just find thousands of planets (which it did), it revolutionized and challenged the status quo about planetary science. I won’t pretend to really understand all the new physics generated by this mission, but Kepler changed what we knew about planetary dynamics and solar system formation. It may be that our solar system is quite strange in its set up with our rocky planets spread out. Apparently, many planets found by Kepler orbit much closer than earth to their host star.
Aside from the new knowledge of physics gained by this mission, I found the process of getting the Kepler mission approved quite interesting. It took nearly two decades of persistent proposals, revisions, proof of concepts for tech and analysis, and relationship building to get the mission to become a reality. I’m sure it was all for good reason, and Kepler outlived its original four-year mission functioning for nearly a decade, but it also shows how difficult innovation has become in modern physics. Much of the original push-back to Kepler was because so much of what it was trying to do and how was new. And because it was new, the gatekeepers to approval felt uncomfortable.
Overall, this was a great book. Steffen is a wonderful science communicator, running a twitch stream that he teaches physics on and chats with guests (including me a few years back). If you’re into physics or science history, add this book to your TBR.
Published: October 2024
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Format: Hardcover
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science's Highest Honor (2018) by Brian Keating | Read my review
Most Wanted Particle: The Inside Story of the Hunt for the Higgs, the Heart of the Future of Physics (2016) by Jon Butterworth
