NASA Finds Earth-size Planet Candidates in the Habitable Zone

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. Five of the potential planets are near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of smaller, cooler stars than our sun.

Kepler mission discovers more than 1,000 new planet candidates

Is our Milky Way galaxy home to other planets the size of Earth? Are Earth-sized planets common or rare? NASA scientists seeking answers to those questions recently revealed their discovery.

"We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone - a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. Some candidates could even have moons with liquid water," said William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and the Kepler Mission's science principal investigator. "Five of the planetary candidates are both near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their parent stars."

Planet candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets.

"We have found over twelve hundred candidate planets - that's more than all the people have found so far in history," said Borucki. "Now, these are candidates, but most of them, I'm convinced, will be confirmed as planets in the coming months and years."

The findings increase the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler to-date to 1,235. Of these, 68 are approximately Earth-size; 288 are super-Earth-size; 662 are Neptune-size; 165 are the size of Jupiter and 19 are larger than Jupiter. Of the 54 new planet candidates found in the habitable zone, five are near Earth-sized. The remaining 49 habitable zone candidates range from super-Earth size -- up to twice the size of Earth -- to larger than Jupiter. The findings are based on the results of observations conducted May 12 to Sept. 17, 2009 of more than 156,000 stars in Kepler's field of view, which covers approximately 1/400 of the sky.

"The fact that we've found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting stars like our sun in our galaxy," said Borucki. "Kepler can find only a small fraction of the planets around the stars it looks at because the orbits aren't aligned properly. If you account for those two factors, our results indicate there must be millions of planets orbiting the stars that surround our sun."

"We're about half-way through Kepler's scheduled mission," said Roger Hunter, the Kepler project manager. "Today's announcement is very exciting and portends many discoveries to come. It's looking like the galaxy may be littered with many planets."

Among the stars with planetary candidates, 170 show evidence of multiple planetary candidates, including one, Kepler-11, that scientists have been able to confirm that has no fewer than six planets.

"Another exciting discovery has been the tremendous variations in the structure of the confirmed planets -- some have the density of Styrofoam and others are denser than iron. The Earth's density is in between."

"The historic milestones Kepler makes with each new discovery will determine the course of every exoplanet mission to follow," said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Kepler, a space telescope, looks for planet signatures by measuring tiny decreases in the brightness of stars caused by planets crossing in front of them - this is known as a transit.

Since transits of planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars occur about once a year and require three transits for verification, it is expected to take three years to locate and verify Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars.

The Kepler science team uses ground-based telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope to perform follow-up observations on planetary candidates and other objects of interest found with the spacecraft. The star field that Kepler observes in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra can only be seen from ground-based observatories in spring through early fall. The data from these other observations helps determine which of the candidates can be validated as planets.

"The first four months of data have given us an enormous amount of interesting information for the science community to explore and to find the planets among the candidates that we have found," said Borucki. "Keep in mind, in the future, we'll have even more data for small planets in and near the habitable zone for everyone to look at." ...

Read more: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepler_data_release.html
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110203.html

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Kepler-11
• Planet
• Hunting
• Kepler
• Spacecraft
• Earth-size_Planet
• Habitable
• Zone
• Constellation
• Cygnus

[MrHanzai100]

What if we find new planet rich with oil guess what WAR and muslim terrorist already there we need to go for new war everyboby prepair for new tax rais

[PokemonCrazyCards100]

There is way more then a billion habitable planet, they don't know that because they did't found at.

[s0012823]

In the universe perspective, I wouldn't be surprised that we are at the level of bacteria for other life forms.

[stratocaster1986able]

1100 planets? Geez.

[sbergman27]

@AngeloNiklis I can make a pretty good case that it's not even likely that they/it/whatever would be biological, but artificial descendants of an ancient biological species which evolved naturally. We've had technology for only the blink of an eye, and our machines are already improving far faster than we are. Over arbitrary time, a vastly more capable replacement to Homo Sapiens will likely emerge. Something that does not share our cognitive evolutionary baggage because it missed the savannah.

[sbergman27]

@AngeloNiklis Look. The title of this story is "NASA Finds Earth-size Planet Candidates in the Habitable Zone". Discussing possible attributes of hypothetical ET civilizations is within the realm of relevance. But your agenda, whatever it is, clearly belongs in a different thread under a different story. If you have something at least remotely related to the topic, say it. Otherwise I'm not playing. It's both a waste of my time, and rude to the rest of the forum. You're just so far off the ball.

[sbergman27]

@AngeloNiklis You're saying that religion isn't the only primitive institution that has caused us strife. Fine. That's not a get out of jail free card for religion. Sometimes religion is the first cause of the strife. Sometimes just a convenient tool. (Why don't you just say "Guns don't kill people...")

I don't think you understand science. Or the extreme danger superstition poses in the hands of a newly powerful civilization. Think "natural selection". The irrational "advanced" civs are gone.

[sbergman27]

@AngeloNiklis Make up your mind. Is it religion, profit, or political influence? You're all over the place. At any rate, the church has been the 1-stop shopping spot for all 3. At any rate, even though you've careened in all directions... you still managed to miss addressing my points:

1. Science has been very gradually eroding religious metaphysics for centuries.

2. Advanced civilizations are likely to have left religious superstition behind long ago, if they ever had it at all.

[shardsofsteel]

Why do we talk about what could or could not happen. Whether there may or may not be life or religion there. Why don't we just go for it, set the conversations aside that have no real relevance, set the scientific speculation aside as well... and GO for it! we bemoan a lagging economy world wide when we have a universe of possibility yet we turn away because of "something somebody stated". Can we not start thinking for ourselves?!

[sbergman27]

@milo88100 "what if they on other planets too believe in God...?"

Highly unlikely. Statistically, they would almost certainly be far older than our civilization. Religion is & has been the #1 cause of war & disharmony in our history. If their civilization is enduring, they'll have dropped religion long ago. Also, it's clear that religion has been gradually losing out to science since about Newton's time, the rate picking up notably after Galileo's. They won't believe in silly superstitions.