Kepler space telescope finds five planets
January 11, 2010 | 12:55 pm
Keplar spacecraft and photometer. Courtesy of NASA
NASA’s Kepler Mission announced on January 4 the discovery of five new planets orbiting distant stars outside our solar system.
The Kepler Mission, officially dubbed NASA Discovery mission #10, is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone–where liquid water and possibly life might exist–and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets.
The mission failed to find a habitable exoplanet, but the search will continue through at least November 2012.
Evidence exists for substantial numbers of three types of exoplanets: gas giants, hot-super-Earths in short-period orbits, and ice giants.
The mission draws scientists from across the country, including astrophysicists Jason Steffan, of Fermilab, and Matt Holman, of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The duo have adapted the commonplane particle physics use of algorithms for the Kepler telescope’s exoplanet hunt.
The astrophysicists have joined the Kepler Mission as participating scientists–collaborators drawn from fields outside of normal NASA research to expand the scope of the mission. They are looking for additional transiting planets.
The mission’s telescope can pick out the light from transiting planets 30 to 600 times smaller than Jupiter. Steffan and Holman’s computer programs can pick out even tinier, more distant planets.
Tona Kunz
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1 Comment »
January 13th, 2010 at 12:51 pm
I think that when you say, “mission failed to find a habitable exoplanet,” it should be noted that there was no possibility to find these planets in the first set of data. Since the first data set was somewhere in the area of 50 days worth and 3 transits are required for a confirmed find, no planet with an orbital period of more than 17 days could have possibly been found this early. An earth like planet would have an orbital period close to one year plus or minus factors proportional to the thermal output from the star and the width of the habitable zone. This means that we’ll be waiting a long time for them. Over a hundred additional possible finds are left to be confirmed in the initial data. This is in no way a failure, these early results are excellent and the project is proceeding perfectly.