Worlds like our own

It’s incredible that in our lifetime we will know how many earth-like planets there are in the galaxy. The NASA Kepler mission has been staring at one patch of sky for more than a year now, looking for winking stars. These are the kind that dim ever-so-slightly when a planet passes between them and us. Finding Jupiters is relatively easy; finding Earths … not so much. But Kepler has shown that it is up to the task.

A few weeks ago, the first results were published, and it turns out that out of about 150,000 stars, 54 of them have planets in the habitable zone – the distance from the star that might support liquid water on the surface. Is that incredible, or what? — 54! — It may not sound like much, but for all the centuries of people looking up into the sky and wondering if there were anybody else out there, this is the first time we can start to answer the question.
Amazing.

The math and science that go into analyzing the data is filled with a myriad of twists and turns, just like all science, so astronomers are quick to point out that these 54, and most of the others like them (Kepler found a total of 1,235), are planetary candidates at this point. Follow-up observations need to be completed to push them into the confirmed status (or debunked, I guess, as the case may be), but you can bet many of them will turn out to be bona-fide planets. Maybe with water on them. And life? You think?

   How cool is that?

The graph below shows all the data, with the x-axis representing how many days it takes for the planet to go around the star (the planetary year) and the y-axis representing the diameter of the planet in Earth radii (Earth=1). A lot of the habitable zone candidates are big planets (Neptune, Jupiter, bigger), but their moons might be just right. Color-coding shows the predicted temperature of the planet in Celsius. Because of the aforementioned circuitous science, liquid water can exist down to sub-freezing temperatures (Earth comes in at -17°C on this scale).

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“Characteristics of planetary candidates observed by Kepler, II: Analysis of the first four months of data”; Borucki et al; eprint arXiv:1102.0541