Kepler finds first extrasolar planet in habitable zone

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http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-telescope-co ... 05358.html

The Kepler telescope has discovered a planet that can support liquid water, and therefore life. Scientists are saying that it might be the first of many discoveries.

Kepler 22-b,Earth-like planet confirmed

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.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16040655

" . . . Twice before, astronomers have announced planets found in that zone, but neither was as promising. One was disputed; the other is on the hot edge of the zone. . . "
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/ ... nasa-earth

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I understand there is also something called (?) . . . the Continuously Habitable Zone.

we seriously need to start giving these planets better names.
for instance, on this site fifteen out of sixteen worlds begin with the prefix 'KOI".

there are too many planets only known by a 'Kepler' designation too.

of course, there is a regular process for assigning the "official" IAU names, but unofficial names would give us a way to just talk about them.

there are thousands of gods. we won't be running out of names for several years yet (okay, i know the best ones are already taken!).

a job for the poets...

PS http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57337 ... discovery/

Call it Pandora!

Nobody get exited, this planet is in the goldilocks zone yes, we do not know if it even has water on or in it, we do not even know if water is the only component essential to the creation of life(which is still largely a mystery) and finally there is next to no chance of us ever being able to go there. At least not within our lifetime.

We know the planet's orbital period and mass. From there we can extrapolate the distance from the star (it's within the goldilocks zone) and the approximate size (we know it is rocky/metallic and NOT a gas giant).

That's all we know. Liquid water is a possibility. But:
the planet may have no atmosphere
or it may have a runaway greenhouse atmosphere like Venus
or it may have volcanic/tectonic events regularly resurfacing the planet and making life impossible
or it may be tidal locked with the star leaving one side to burn and the other to freeze
or it may not have a moon and is frequently hit by giant asteroids
Etc etc...

It will be decades before we can directly capture light from extra solar planets and run spectral analysis to figure out what it's composed of. That will be exciting! I hope I get to see it.

on my science blog (scroll down):

http://springtail.blogspot.com/2011_12_ ... 2349354913

i find the derived temperature about 29 Celsius average, & the gravity about 2x Earth's.

So when are we going to send an interstellar probe to these planets ?

Why bother? They are too far away with current propulsion technology. We may look, but we have not the technology to touch. With out current technology it would take 10,000 years to send a probe to the star closest to us and 4 years or so to receive a signal in return Do you think our civilization will still exist that far up the line?

ruveyn

I guess you have not been reading about Sandia laboratories Miniature Magnetic Orion Project. A star wars terawatt powered super laser is built to deliver miniature hydrogen bombs to the interstellar spacecraft so that the ship does not have to carry its own fuel and is constantly restoked. Thus speeds of ten percent of the speed of light are easily achieved with only 3 billion dollars worth of fuel. Explosions of miniature hydrogen bombs do not violate any test ban treaty and are not considered weapons because the fuel has to be imploded by the x-ray Z pinch machine in order to achieve criticality.

Such a craft has never been tested so it is not known for sure that it will work.

And lasers are photon emitters. They do not deliver anything but photon coherently in phase.

ruveyn

Previous starships achieving 10 percent of light speed required 300,000 hydrogen bombs costing 5 million dollars a piece for a total of 1.5 trillion dollars. At least this proposal starts at a more affordable 3 billion dollars for the cost of fuel.

We should have tons more in the next year. Apparently they need approx three years to confirm a planet in the sweetspot. So far two down, billions to go!

On a side note, the only downside with the two Keppler series planets they've mentioned there's been a 'likeness to earth' score done and as far as I remember both Mars, Europa, and Titam came ahead of them in life-sustainability. Not the most encouraging start but I'm sure we'll be able to pass that eventually.

Too bad we cannot get to any of them.

ruveyn

In our lifetime.