NASA
When William Borucki was a little kid growing up in Delavan, he would look up at the stars and wonder what — or who — might be out there.
“I wanted to build a spaceship, explore our galaxy, and meet new life forms,” Borucki says. “My brother and I would try to launch little rockets, and by the time we were in high school we were pretty good at it.”
He never did make the journey beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. But some people are speculating the UW grad’s remarkable career at NASA may have given humans their first glimpse of alien life.
NASA/Ames
William Borucki, who earned a master’s from UW-Madison in 1962, is known as the “planet hunter.” In his career at NASA he helped identify more than 1,000.
Borucki spearheaded the building of the Kepler Space Telescope, which he also helped design. Orbiting the sun since 2009, it recently captured images that scientists are at a loss to explain. A few suggest the images provide evidence of a sophisticated “alien megastructure” orbiting a distant star.
Borucki is quick to point out that there may be other explanations.
Whatever NASA’s Kepler telescope has found, it’s surely remarkable, and another achievement for Borucki, who is known as “the planet hunter.” Borucki is not the only distinguished scientist who has been scanning the vast universe to see what might be lurking out there.
In fact, his alma mater has been playing an active role in the search for extraterrestrial life since at least 2007, with the establishment of the Wisconsin Astrobiology Research Consortium.
But Borucki may have had the greatest impact. Over his long career, his team at the NASA Ames Research Center in California has discovered 1,030 planets outside our solar system, as well as 4,696 unconfirmed planet candidates. His is a life in space.
NASA’s planet hunter was born in Chicago in 1939. His family moved briefly to Lake Geneva and then to Delavan. “I basically grew up in Delavan,” he says. “We would visit Lake Geneva because it’s such a wonderfully beautiful city — still is. I don’t remember the house we lived in, but I remember we could walk to the pier and go swimming.”
He enrolled at UW-Madison and became the first person in his family to attend college. “I certainly knew that I wanted to be in science: physics, astronomy, things like that.” Space exploration remained a special interest.
“You know, you read the science fiction books,” he says, laughing. “You say, ‘Gee I’d like to go and build a spaceship and go and do all these things.’ And you’re young enough not to recognize that building a spaceship is not a one-man task!”
One of the things he liked best about the UW was that he was able to declare a major so late. “And so you learn about geology, you learn about music, you learn about art — just all these different areas. So when you’re ready as a junior to say ‘I know what I want,’ you do know what you want. You’ve had a chance to sample all these other wondrous areas.”
He had an explorer’s spirit, joining Hoofers, the sailing club at the Wisconsin Union, and becoming an instructor. “I would swim from campus to the end of Picnic Point,” Borucki says. Doing the breaststroke, he considered it perfectly safe.
Others disagreed. One time he was halfway out when the university’s lake patrol noticed him.
“They came roaring out and said they were here to rescue me,” he says. “Well, I didn’t want to be rescued. I just wanted to swim to Picnic Point.”
In the classroom, his attention remained fixed on the stars. One treasured memory is an image of a nebula, glimpsed through a UW telescope. “It was absolutely stunning,” he says. “It’s 50-some years since then, and I haven’t forgotten the image.”
He also met his wife, Josephine Joyce, at the UW. They were married at St. Paul’s. He recalls Madison and the campus as “a special place. It was a wonderful experience, going to the University of Wisconsin. I go back every few years to see it.”
Borucki received his master’s in physics from the UW in 1962 and joined NASA Ames the same year.
For 10 years he worked on research related to heat shields on Apollo missions. He studied hypervelocity shock waves and lightning on Earth and other planets. He developed models of the Earth’s atmosphere and published papers predicting a decrease in ozone at the planet’s poles.
NASA/Tim Jacobs
The Kepler Space Telescope is readied for launch at Titusville, Fla., in February 2009. Since liftoff later that year, the telescope has been orbiting the sun, searching for Earth-size and larger planets.
In the 1980s, he focused on searching for planets by looking for their transits. He submitted five proposals in 10 years. Finally, the Kepler mission was approved. It would search for Earth-like planets.
Borucki was confident of what his space observatory would discover.
“When you go to NASA headquarters and say, ‘I want $600 million to build a mission,’ you damn well better be able to tell them what you’re going to find,” he says. “Of course, the objective of the mission is to find out what you’re going to find, but you have to tell them anyway.”
Long used to such bureaucracy, to convince NASA he set about building a predictive model of the galaxy, and it had to be based on fact. Fortunately, “I knew of a star which we could use to measure the existence of planets,” he says. “It’s called the sun.”
The excitement began Oct. 13 of this year, when media worldwide got wind of a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“The strange star that has serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure,” reported The Washington Post. The United Kingdom’s Guardian suggested, “‘Alien megastructure’ could explain mysterious new Kepler results.” USA Today: “Has Kepler discovered an ‘alien megastructure’? FOX News: “An alien sighting?” Yahoo!: “Signs of alien life?”
“My understanding is that what they’ve identified in this particular star is unique. So whatever is causing it is highly unusual,” says Jim Lattis, director of UW Space Place, an education and outreach center. “We’re going to learn something interesting, one way or the other.”
It’s impossible to count out the possibility of alien life. “With billions of sun-like stars in the ‘habitable zones’ that encircle various galaxies, a very high probability exists that life has evolved on Earth-like planets orbiting some of those stars,” says Harrison Schmitt, astronaut and UW adjunct professor of engineering, the second-to-last man on the moon.
But, he warns, “Whether we will ever have definitive knowledge of such life is another question entirely.”
The Wisconsin Astrobiology Research Consortium, now eight years old, is funded by NASA. It is one of only a dozen National Institute of Aerospace research teams. The consortium’s 57 scientists in eight countries are drawn from the fields of geology, microbiology, chemistry and engineering.
The team “is focused on the detection of biomarkers and biosignatures in both ancient and modern planetary environments,” says Richard Quinn, Wisconsin Astrobiology Research Consortium co-investigator. He’s also a senior research scientist at NASA’s SETI Institute, an acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Life.
The consortium works to develop methods for life detection. How might the simplest organic life forms arise and leave records of their existence? Research subjects include: microbial ecology in deep- and shallow-water environments; organic survival over geologic time; geochemistry in volcanic environments; and the roles of oxygen and methane as related to microbial evolution.
They’re not expecting Klingons, Wookies or even workaday Martians.
Instead, they expect to find biomolecules, microbes and microfossils.
Kepler has found something much, much larger than a microbe.
The space observatory is named for a Renaissance astronomer. The $600 million it cost to build is peanuts, compared to manned missions. It was expected to last three and a half years but it’s still in service six years after its launch, though it’s experiencing severe mechanical problems. Kepler orbits the sun, completing one circuit every 371 days.
“It looks constantly at a certain patch in the sky and makes images with a very big detector, over and over again, and looks for any change in brightness of any of the hundreds of thousands of stars in that field,” says Lattis. “If a planet moves in front of a star, that’s an eclipse or transit or ‘occultation.’ And that’s what it’s looking for. Kepler was designed to be a planet finder.”
The Royal Astronomical Society paper that began the excitement was submitted by Yale University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian. With the help of volunteer citizen-scientists, she analyzed Kepler data from a distant star named KIC 8462852. She noticed what appeared to be unusual transits. The unlikely bombshell she delivered was: “Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 was observed to undergo irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20% level.”
To understand why that’s such a big deal, consider this: Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. If it were to orbit KIC 8462852, it would dim the star by only 1%. Therefore, something awfully big is out there, blocking the distant sun.
Boyajian shared her data with Jason Wright, a Pennsylvania State University researcher, who put forward the theory of a massive, orbiting structure designed to collect the star’s energy. This would potentially explain why the star is regularly shaded from Kepler’s gaze. The idea comes from science fiction and is called a Dyson sphere (Scotty saved Capt. Picard from one in Star Trek: The Next Generation).
Borucki is wary of offering his own theories.
“It’s certainly a very interesting variation of the star’s brightness. That’s very clear,” says Borucki. He thinks there are better explanations than a Dyson sphere or anything like it.
“The diameter of the sun is nearly a million miles,” he notes, pointing out construction difficulties. “So if you say, ‘Well, gee I would like to block out a quarter of that,’ you know you need something that’s a half-million miles by half a million miles.”
He suspects scientists will eventually settle on a no-nonsense explanation for the anomaly.
“It’s interesting to ask yourself what could produce such a signal,” he says. “There’s a lot of explanations that are reasonable. They are not necessarily probable, but they are reasonable.” It could be a disk of matter that has yet to coalesce into planets, blocking our view, or a gas cloud passing in front of KIC 8462852, or perhaps the glowing disc of a comet’s head, its ‘coma.’
“That’s something that can be as big as a star,” says Borucki. “Could a coma explain that particular star? I don’t know.” Fortunately, Borucki judges the signal variation to be so large that ground-based telescopes will be able to follow up. “So I wouldn’t be surprised to find that we get more data in the coming year.”
Still, as Mr. Spock has pointed out many times, “there are always possibilities.”
A lifetime immersed in the scientific method has not eradicated Borucki’s boyhood fantasies about alien beings.
“My experiences have convinced me that the universe is much more wonderfully complex than I ever imagined,” he says.
Although he’s yet to see any proof we share the universe, he doesn’t dismiss the possibility.
“I think that the potential for life on other planets is high because the elements needed for the generation of life are so plentiful,” he says. “However, because we have no evidence for or against life on other planets, the actual existence of such life is pure speculation.”
These days Borucki is taking life a little easier. “I retired on the 4th of July — my day of liberation,” he says.
At his retirement, former astronaut John Grunsfeld, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, celebrated Borucki as a pioneer. “Bill’s unique leadership, vision and research tenacity has and will continue to inspire scientists around the world. He retires on such a high note that he leaves a legacy of inquiry that will not only be celebrated, it will be remembered as opening a new chapter in the history of science and the human imagination.”
Yet Borucki stays involved, going into Ames a few days a week, unpaid. “I said I did not want to be a civil servant anymore,” he says. “I will work for free, but I will not work for money.”
He continues looking at Kepler-related material. One of the problems with the telescope’s mission goes back to the predictive model of the galaxy Borucki built. It turns out that our local star, the sun, is quite a bit younger than most others, and therefore more intense.
That affects the model, and “that’s made it more difficult to find Earths,” he says. “Now, how can you do a better job of finding Earths? Well the answer is look for a longer period of time. We need a mission that operates eight years, 12 years, something like that, doing exactly what Kepler did: looking in exactly the same spot with a telescope that’s identical.”
“Ultimately people will have to build one,” he adds. “I’ve been thinking about it.”
