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21st June 2017 13:32
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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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21st June 2017 21:53
Link to Post #2