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    Default 10 new planets that could have life

    Traci Watson, Special for USA TODAY Published 12:52 p.m. ET June 19, 2017 |
    Updated 4:48 p.m. ET June 19, 2017

    NASA's Kepler spacecraft discovered more than 4,000 potential new planets
    outside our solar system, some of which are in the "habitable" zone of their
    star.

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...d-have-life-di
    scovered/103009286/


    In a grand finale of planet-spotting prowess, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has
    tracked down 219 new planets outside our solar system — including 10 that could
    have the right qualifications for hosting life, scientists announced Monday.

    The 219 planets announced Monday are technically planet “candidates,” meaning
    they await rigorous confirmation, and some may turn out to be false leads. Even
    so, Kepler is unlikely to lose its crown as the top planet-spotting machine ever
    devised. All told, the spacecraft has notched 2,335 confirmed planets orbiting a
    star other than the Sun – more than 80 percent of the total found by all the
    world’s observatories combined.

    Kepler's latest finds are in a region of the galaxy hundreds of thousands of
    light years away, in between the bright stars Deneb and Vega.

    But Kepler’s star is setting fast. The high-precision craft suffered a
    mechanical failure in 2013 that forced an end to its systematic planet-finding
    campaign. Though it continues to churn out data, Monday’s announcement was the
    last time scientists expect to step onto a podium and announce a new cache of
    Kepler planet candidates.
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    “Yeah, it feels a bit like the end of an era, but actually, I see it as a new
    beginning,” Susan Thompson of the SETI Institute said at a NASA briefing Monday.
    “It’s amazing the things Kepler has found … I’m really excited to see what
    people are going to do with this catalog.”

    Kepler, which began orbiting the Sun in 2009, sought out planets by looking for
    stars in the Cygnus constellation that dimmed every so often and ever so
    slightly. Such dimming can occur when a planet passes over the face of a star.
    Inevitably, though, some planet candidates identified by the spacecraft have
    turned out to be stars or other phenomena. So scientists must carefully scrub
    the candidate list for errors.

    With the addition of the 10 candidates announced on Monday, Kepler can boast
    having located nearly 50 worlds roughly Earth’s size in the “habitable zone,”
    the area around a star where a planet is graced with the right amount of light
    that it could harbor liquid water on its rocky surface. Liquid water is a
    necessity for the kind of life we know best.

    Among the newly revealed planet candidates, one is only slightly larger than
    Earth and is bathed in the same amount of light from its star as the Earth
    receives from the Sun, making it a possible haven for living organisms. But it’s
    too soon to say whether it is an “Earth twin,” because scientists don’t yet know
    whether it has an atmosphere or liquid water.

    Closer scrutiny of the planets found by Kepler has revealed a surprising new
    rule about small planets: they fall into two very distinct categories. By
    pinpointing the planet’s sizes, a team headed by Benjamin Fulton of the
    University of Hawaii in Manoa found that small planets are either-or kind of
    objects. Either they’re rocky – like Earth – or mostly gaseous and closer to the
    size of Neptune. There’s almost nothing in between.

    That finding has “significant implications for the search for life,” Fulton
    says. It means that half the planets of a size common in the galaxy “have no
    solid surface, or a surface deep beneath the weight of a crushing atmosphere.
    These would not be nice places to live.”

    Kepler was not designed to find life, and it is no longer raking in large
    numbers of planets that look like possible incubators of life. All the same,
    Kepler has revealed that Earth-sized planets likely to have solid surfaces are
    common in the galaxy.

    “Are we alone?” NASA’s Mario Perez said at Monday’s briefing. “Maybe Kepler
    today has told us indirectly, though we (need) confirmation, that we are not
    alone.”

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    Default Re: 10 new planets that could have life

    I'm glad NASA is trying to get on board with the reality of exo-planets too

    Then it would only make sense that what John Lear says in this very interesting synopsis of outtakes from May 2017 interview by Kerri Cassidy / Project Camelot, he said that there are 40 planets in our solar system alone, instead of 7, and that each one is inhabited by at least one civilization !! o.O
    (What really doesn't matter is whether it's 7 or 40 planets but considering John Lear's background and pedigree, I wouldn't dismiss it right off the bat because nothing we were told at school was true anyways)


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    Default Re: 10 new planets that could have life

    How many light years away?

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