The Kepler Space Telescope continues to paint a fantastic picture of planets in our galaxy outside the Solar System – exoplanets as they’re known. It has now found upward of 4,000 of them, 2,356 of which have been confirmed. It has done this by very accurately measuring the light intensity from about 150,000 stars.
Tag: Kepler
The space telescope.
Kepler-22b
With the new Kepler telescope findings having hit the news-feeds this month, I thought I would post an update to my original data. The tally of Kepler planetary candidates now stands at 2,326, with one particularly noteworthy find: Kepler-22b. Also known as Kepler Object of Interest (KOI) 87.01, or Kepler Input Catalog ID 10593626, this planet deserves special attention, as it is one of the first confirmed planets that resides within the habitable zone of its star. At only 2.4 times Earth’s diameter, and with an orbital period of around 290 days, it seems to be a pretty close match to the Earth. The Kepler web-site has a nice article describing the planet, with the image below showing how it stacks up against the inner planets in our own solar system. NASA Mission Page – Kepler (image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech) After reading about the new planet, and trying to find the raw…
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…