THIS 25-YEAR-OLD MOROCCAN HELPED IN NASA'S CRAZIEST EVER PLANET DISCOVERY

[mfcorey1]

http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/this-25-year-old-moroccan-helped-in-nasas-craziest-ever-planet-discovery/76636


The dingy classroom at Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech reminds me that there was a time when astronomers charted the skies with little more than math and passion. Sophisticated computer models have been developed to catalog pulsars and probe dark matter, but here in Morocco, in a dark room devoid of high-tech gadgetry, Khalid Barkaoui, a 25-year-old doctoral student, distilled data captured by the TRAPPIST-North telescope at the Oukaimeden Observatory that helped paint a picture of three of seven previously unidentified exoplanets. With this discovery of planets that may very well be habitable, Barkaoui is inching closer to answering one of our most persistent questions: Are we alone in the universe?

An exoplanet, or extrasolar planet, is any planet that orbits a star other than the sun. Scientists like Michaël Gillon from the University of Liège in Belgium are obsessed with determining whether or not these planets support life. In Gillon’s opinion, Barkaoui’s work marks a new era of exploration that could eventually result in humans becoming an interstellar species. “I’m certain of it,” Gillon says.

When NASA announced in February the discovery of seven rocky planets orbiting a single dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1, the first known grouping of its kind outside our solar system, the report was picked up by virtually every mainstream publication in the world. But few mentioned Morocco’s role in the project. Thirty scientists, including Barkaoui and his mentor, Zouhair Benkhaldoun, contributed to an article in Nature chronicling the science behind the discovery. According to Benkhaldoun, who heads the astrophysics department at Cadi Ayyad and is president of the Arab Astronomical Society in Marrakech, without the Oukaimeden telescope and Barkaoui’s data reduction, crucial details about three of the seven planets would’ve been missed. We would not know, for example, their radius, temperature, orbiting period, mass or density — all essential to supporting the conclusion that they are the most likely to harbor life. Gillon, who led the discovery, says the Moroccan team made an important contribution to characterizing the TRAPPIST-1 system, and he is optimistic about Barkoui’s future as an astrophysicist.

[Expecting Rain]

1. But is he a Muslim?

[ProudLib72]

2. Of course there is extraterristrial life

The aliens were about to reach out to us, but then tRump happened.

There's a star man
Way up in the sky
He'd like so much the meet us
But he's afraid tRump would blow him up.