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Post by swamprat on Dec 5, 2011 21:05:45 GMT -6
5 December 2011 Kepler 22-b: Earth-like planet confirmedThe planet lies about 15% closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in the "habitable zone" around a star not unlike our own. The planet, Kepler 22-b, lies about 600 light-years away and is about 2.4 times the size of Earth, and has a temperature of about 22C. It is the closest confirmed planet yet to one like ours - an "Earth 2.0". However, the team does not yet know if Kepler 22-b is made mostly of rock, gas or liquid. During the conference at which the result was announced, the Kepler team said that it had spotted some 1,094 new candidate planets. The Kepler space telescope was designed to look at a fixed swathe of the night sky, staring intently at about 150,000 stars. The telescope is sensitive enough to see when a planet passes in front of its host star, dimming the star's light by a minuscule amount.Kepler identifies these slight changes in starlight as candidate planets, which are then confirmed by further observations by Kepler and other telescopes in orbit and on Earth. Kepler 22-b was one of 54 candidates reported by the Kepler team in February, and is just the first to be formally confirmed using other telescopes. More of these "Earth 2.0" candidates are likely to be confirmed in the near future, though a redefinition of the habitable zone's boundaries has brought that number down to 48. Kepler 22-b lies at a distance from its sun about 15% less than the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and its year takes about 290 days. However, its sun puts out about 25% less light, keeping the planet at its balmy temperature that would support the existence of liquid water. The Kepler team had to wait for three passes of the planet before upping its status from "candidate" to "confirmed". "Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet," said William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at Nasa's Ames Research Center. "The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season." The results were announced at the Kepler telescope's first science conference, alongside the staggering number of new candidate planets. The total number of candidates spotted by the telescope is now 2,326 - of which 207 are approximately Earth-sized. In total, the results suggest that planets ranging from Earth-sized to about four times Earth's size - so-called "super-Earths" - may be more common than previously thought. Of the 54 habitable zone planet candidates reported in February 2011, Kepler-22b is the first to be confirmed. This milestone will be published in The Astrophysical Journal. www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepscicon-briefing.html
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Post by Steve on Dec 5, 2011 23:16:47 GMT -6
One of the super - Earths - 2.4 times the radius of our planet. Article tells much except for it's distance from us. I did a search which the results say is 600 Light years away. Not that far as things go.
If inhabited with sentient beings, and are far more advanced, it is likely they know of us too. If they have knowledge and the ability to bypass the old linear time and distance argument with a form of quantum mechanics, if spacefarers, they may already be here.
Steve
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Post by lois on Dec 6, 2011 0:49:07 GMT -6
Swamprat, this is fascinating.. I copied it with my printer.. I show many things here to my hubby. Some he jokes at but this would be very interesting to him also..
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Post by swamprat on Dec 6, 2011 8:36:12 GMT -6
SETI to Hunt for Aliens on Kepler's WorldsAnalysis by Ian O'Neill Mon Dec 5, 2011 01:52 PM ET When searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, it's a really tricky job to know where to look. Space is big, and the odds of detecting a transmission from an alien are vanishingly small. But with the help of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, some of the guesswork is about to be cut out of the SETI equation. On Monday, the Kepler science team announced the confirmation of a "super-Earth" orbiting right in the middle of the habitable zone of its sun-like star. The world, called Kepler-22b, therefore has some of the qualities of a world where life as we know it may exist. "This is a superb opportunity for SETI observations," said Jill Tarter, the Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. "For the first time, we can point our telescopes at stars, and know that those stars actually host planetary systems -- including at least one that begins to approximate an Earth analog in the habitable zone around its host star (Kepler-22b). That's the type of world that might be home to a civilization capable of building radio transmitters." Although the highest priority will be for SETI's Allen Telescope Array (ATA) to focus on worlds Kepler discovers inside stars' habitable zones, with enough time and funding, Tarter wants to widen the ATA's scope. "In SETI, as with all research, preconceived notions such as habitable zones could be barriers to discovery," adds Tarter. "So, with sufficient future funding from our donors, it's our intention to examine all of the planetary systems found by Kepler." Image credit: SETI InstituteUsing the immense collective power of the ATA's 42 radio antennae, many frequencies can be monitored simultaneously. If intelligent extraterrestrials have evolved to use similar technologies as us, then perhaps we'll be able to listen into their transmissions. It may still be a long-shot, but with the help of Kepler, at least SETI will find a good place to start. We have no clue whether Kepler-22b is a rocky world (like Earth) or a gaseous world (like Neptune). However, we do know its location would make it a rather cozy place for Earth Brand™ Life to live -- if there's water, that is. Though there are plenty of unknowns, Kepler-22b would make a nice place to begin searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. If there's water, and if it's a rocky world, then perhaps some intelligent lifeforms had the chance to evolve. news.discovery.com/space/seti-to-hunt-for-aliens-on-keplers-worlds.html
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Post by auntym on Dec 7, 2011 15:30:32 GMT -6
www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-160681717 December 2011 Viewpoint: The obsession with a 'twin Earth'Hello. Is it me you're looking for?Discovery of an "Earth-like" planet has generated a wave of excitement, but our fascination with finding other habitable worlds goes back a long way, argues science fiction writer Robert J Sawyer. The most famous words in all of science fiction are Captain Kirk's opening narration from Star Trek, in which he explains that the Enterprise's mission is "to explore strange new worlds". But what we really want is familiar new worlds - worlds like good old mother Earth, worlds where we might find "new life and new civilisations." The notion that "Earth-like" worlds might be abodes of life goes right back to the dawn of science fiction. In HG Wells's 1898 masterpiece The War of the Worlds, Mars is an older world than Earth that has been dying over time. That our planet reminded the Martians of how wet and verdant their own world had been, led, in Wells's chilling words, "to intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarding this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drawing their plans against us". Wells's novel begins with an epigram from Johannes Kepler, the great German astronomer who died 381 years ago. The orbiting telescope that bears his name recently discovered what scientists were quick to label a twin of Earth orbiting a star some 600 light years distant. "Twin" is an exaggeration. The newfound world, dubbed Kepler-22b, is much bigger than our planet - but, even so, it's also the smallest world yet discovered outside our Solar System, and finding it does bode well for the eventual detection of a true twin, a planet that really is a second Earth. Small planets, like the inner four in our own solar system, are rocky - larger ones, like the outer four, aren't much more than balls of gas. Kepler-22b is quite a bit larger than the biggest rocky planet in this Solar System (which happens to be Earth), but much smaller than the smallest of our local gaseous worlds (Neptune). We really don't know what sort of composition a planet the size of Kepler-22b would have. But if it is a rocky world, its gravity would be about 2.4 times that of Earth - there may be life there, but I wouldn't expect to see anything as gracile as our giraffes or whooping cranes. It's not just size that matters, though. To be Earthlike, you also need a sun like ours and Kepler-22b has that. You also need an appropriate orbit - one that puts you not too close to or far from the heat of the star, one that allows liquid water, which most scientists believe is necessary for life, to exist. Kepler-22b satisfies on that score, too. If it has an atmosphere like Earth's, with a corresponding greenhouse effect, its average surface temperature would be a balmy 22C. CONTINUE READING: www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16068171
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Post by auntym on Jan 27, 2012 14:13:40 GMT -6
www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/27/kepler_n_1236211.html?icid=maing-grid7 Kepler Mission Finds 26 Planets In 11 Solar Systems, NASA Says The Huffington Post David Freeman First Posted: 01/27/2012 Updated: 01/27/2012 Call it payday for planet hunters. The Kepler space telescope mission has detected 26 previously unknown planets orbiting their suns in 11 new planetary systems, NASA's Ames Research Center announced on Thursday. The discoveries nearly double the number of known alien worlds - or "exoplanets," as astronomers call them. "Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky," Doug Hudgins, a Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in a written statement. "Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates." The findings show that our Milky Way galaxy is "positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits," Hudgins said. And the list is likely to keep growing. The number of exoplanets confirmed by the Kepler mission now stands at 61, with an additional 2,326 planets not yet confirmed, MSBC reported. All told, more than 700 planets have been found outside our solar system. The newly discovered planets vary in size, with some only about 1.5 times the size of Earth and others bigger than Jupiter, Discovery.com reported. It's unclear whether the planets have rocky surfaces like those in Earth or Mars or if they are gaseous planets, like Neptune. TO WATCH VIDEO & CONTINUE READING: www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/27/kepler_n_1236211.html?icid=maing-grid7
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Post by Deleted on Jan 27, 2012 20:33:23 GMT -6
Kepler measures the changes of magnitude of a star when a planet transits (blocks out light of the star) in between us and the star when a planet in its solar system moves in front of it thus dimming the brightness(magnitude) of the star observed. In our solar system we have many objects such as the oort comet cloud, the asteroid belt,and moons around other planets (jupiter has over 60 alone) .
What Im curious about is suppose these other systems have these objects also which is probably safe to presume in most instances. Wouldn't that affect the change in magnitude of these stars during transit ? It seems if there were planets that had sufficient amounts of moons , especially larger ones, it could cause their calculations to be off by a wide margin when determining the size of these planets around other star systems, I would think.
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