Exo-Planets

Nasa’s Kepler Spacecraft Narrows The Search For Goldilocks Planet

March 30, 2012
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Light reflected from a planet carries the 'fingerprint' of its atmospheric composition.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is discovering a veritable avalanche of alien worlds.  Recent finds include planets with double suns, massive “super-Earths” and “hot Jupiters,” and a miniature solar system.  The variety of planets circling distant suns is as wonderful as it is surprising. As the numbers mount, it seems to be just a matter of time before Kepler finds what astronomers are really looking for:  an Earth-like planet orbiting its star in the “Goldilocks zone”—that is, at just the right distance for liquid water and life. “I believe Kepler will find a ‘Goldilocks planet’ within the next two years,” says...

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SETI Search Of Kepler Planets Receives First Candidate Signals

January 8, 2012
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The image above shows the radio signal detected by the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia while scanning the exoplanetary candidate KOI 817 discovered by the Kepler mission. This is the kind of signal SETI scientists would expect to find if an alien civilization is transmitting.

In an effort to detect the radio emissions from a hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligence, it helps to know where to look. So, using data from the Kepler space telescope, astronomers are becoming more focused on “listening” for radio signals coming from stars known to have planets orbiting them. And it seems the first “candidate” signals have been detected! “We’ve started searching our Kepler SETI observations and our analyses have generated some of our first candidate signals, which areundoubtedly examples of terrestrial radio frequency interference (RFI),” scientists of the University of California, Berkeley announced on Friday.The detection of these artificial signal...

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NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers A Planet Orbiting Two Stars

September 15, 2011
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NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers A Planet Orbiting Two Stars

The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA’s Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet — a planet orbiting two stars — 200 light-years from Earth. Unlike Star Wars’ Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. Previous research has hinted at the existence of circumbinary planets, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Kepler detected such a planet, known as Kepler-16b, by...

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Scientists Develop Technique That Could Detect Multicellular Extraterrestrial Life

May 20, 2011
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If plants are found on other planets, they could look very different compared to those found on Earth. Some astrobiologists think plants on other planets will have a different dominant color than green. CREDIT: Tim Pyle/Caltech

In the search for life on other planets, scientists are looking beyond single-celled organisms and are developing techniques that would help them detect multicellular life. In a recent study published in the journal Astrobiology, researchers are proposing a particular mathematical technique to detect tree-like multicellular structures on extrasolar planets. “This technique allows us to identify planets that potentially have complex life and distinguish them from planets with simple life,” said lead author Christopher Doughty, a junior research fellow in tropical forest science at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford in England. [Is the Rocky Alien Planet...

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Two Billion Earthlike Planets In The Milky Way

March 30, 2011
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Two Billion Earthlike Planets In The Milky Way

via: dailygalaxy.com Our Milky Way galaxy may be home to at least two billion Earthlike planets, a new study based on initial data from from NASA’s Kepler space telescope says — a number that is actually far lower than many scientists anticipated, which could make it hard to find twin “Earths” in our galaxy.   Based on what Kepler’s found so far, the study authors think that up to 2.7 percent of all sunlike stars in the Milky Way host so-called Earth analogs. As of this February, Kepler has confirmed 15 new planets and found an additional 1,235 planet...

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Did Earth Once Share It’s Orbit With A Planet Named Theia?

February 25, 2011
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Did Earth Once Share It’s Orbit With A Planet Named Theia?

Hidden in the mass of data from the Kepler telescope is a planetary system that has two of its apparent planets share the same orbit around their star. If the discovery is confirmed, it would support the theory that Earth once shared its orbit with a Mars-sized body, labeled Theia, that later collided with it, creating the moon. The two planets are part of a four-planet system dubbed KOI-730. They circle their sun-like parent star every 9.8 days at exactly the same orbital distance, one permanently about 60 degrees ahead of the other. In the night sky of one...

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Tiny Area of Milky Way Yields Six-Planet Solar System and 1200 Exo Planets (58 in Life-Zone Orbits)

February 2, 2011
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Tiny Area of Milky Way Yields Six-Planet Solar System and 1200 Exo Planets (58 in Life-Zone Orbits)

* NASA’s Kepler telescope has found more than 1,200 extrasolar planet candidates. * Smaller worlds, like Earth, appear to be more common than gas giants, like Jupiter. * One six-planet system is unique in that the planets orbit very close to their sun. NASA’s life-search is off to the races! NASA announced today that the Kepler space telescope’s survey of one small swath of the Milky Way registered more than 1,200 exo-planet candidates, including 58 residing in life-friendly orbits around their parent stars. Today’s new discoveries from NASA’s Kepler space mission reveal a large and promising variety of planets...

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Have Earthlike Planets Really Been Found?

January 31, 2011
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Exoplanet habitability depends on a long list of at least 50 other variables: the planet’s atmosphere, geology, evolutionary history, influence of the other planetary systems bodies, etc. And, whether a rocky planet is one, three or five Earth-masses could be largely irrelevant. We simply don’t know yet. Because of the close proximity to its sun-like star, we can deduce that Kepler-10b is a very hot rock. It’s not impossible that the roasting world might have an oxygen atmosphere that is being cooked out of the surface rocks. But that’s where any remote similarity to Earth ends. Kepler-10b is so...

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Kepler-10b – The First Iron-Clad Proof of a Rocky Planet Beyond Our Solar System

January 31, 2011
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Kepler-10b – The First Iron-Clad Proof of a Rocky Planet Beyond Our Solar System

* A newly discovered exoplanet proves that rocky worlds like Earth exist in other solar systems. * The planet, Kepler-10b, is too hot for life as we know it, but it might have had life in the past. * Kepler-10b is located about 560 light-years from Earth, circling a sun-like star about twice as old as our sun. The first iron-clad proof of a rocky planet beyond the solar system has been found using the Kepler Space Telescope. “It’s the planetary missing link,” said University of California-Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy, who likened the find to the development of penicillin...

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Planet Gliese 581g Can Sustain Life

January 31, 2011
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Planet Gliese 581g Can Sustain Life

A new member in a family of planets circling a red dwarf star 20 light-years away has just been found. It’s called Gliese 581g, and the ‘g’ may very well stand for Goldilocks. Gliese 581g is the first world discovered beyond Earth that’s the right size and location for life. “Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it,” Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, told Discovery...

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