Habitable Exo-Planet Megathread!

[jimmy olsen]

Awesome! 

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/astronomers-find-715-more-planets-amid-crippled-probes-data-n39326

Astronomers Find 715 More Planets Amid Crippled Probe's Data
By Alan Boyle


NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope may be out of commission, but the mission has yielded 715 new confirmed detections of alien worlds — thanks to a new way of looking at the probe's data.

The bonanza boosts the number of planets found beyond our solar system to nearly 1,700, said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center who serves as the $600 million mission's co-investigator.

"We've almost doubled just today the number of planets known to humanity," he told reporters during a teleconference Wednesday.

Kepler was launched in 2009 to detect planets among 150,000 stars in a patch of sky that straddles the constellations Lyra and Cygnus, using what's known as the transit method. That method involves looking for the faint dips in starlight that occur when a planet passes over its parent sun's disk.

In the past, Kepler's detections have had to be verified using other methods — for example, by analyzing the gravitational effect that a planet has on the wobble of its sun. The verification was necessary because some of Kepler's detections were actually caused by one star in a multiple-star system eclipsing another.

In hundreds of cases, astronomers detected several blips in a star system — and recently, they figured out which cases couldn't possibly have been caused by eclipsing stars because such star systems would be unstable. "The fact that you can't have multiple star systems that look like planetary systems is the basis of verification by multiplicity," Lissauer explained.

That realization led to a "veritable exoplanet bonanza," he said. The 715 planets added to the list on Wednesday are distributed among 305 different star systems.

The new verification system makes it easier to confirm the existence of smaller planets, said Jason Rowe, a member of the Kepler science team who works at NASA Ames and the SETI Institute. Ninety-four percent of the newly confirmed planets are smaller than Neptune, and the number of roughly Earth-sized planets in Kepler's database rose by more than 400 percent, Rowe said.

Rowe said four of the newfound planets lie in the "habitable zone" of their star systems, where water can exist in liquid form. Those four worlds, which are all two to 2.5 times as wide as Earth, have been designated Kepler-174d, Kepler-296f, Kepler-298d and Kepler-309c, he said.

Scientific papers describing the discoveries are to be published March 10 in The Astrophysical Journal. They're already available as part of the Kepler mission's online press kit.

Kepler's planet search had to be suspended last May when the spacecraft's fine-pointing system failed, and it's not yet clear whether it can be returned to service. But MIT astronomer Sara Seager said hundreds more planets, including Earth-scale worlds, could be found in the data already collected for the mission.

"Kepler is the gift that keeps on giving," Seager said.
First published February 27th 2014, 3:51 am

[The Brain]

katmai is a confirmed planet.

[KRonn]

Ok, now that they've found even more planets, it's time to start journeying to some of them! Man, I was born a century or two too early! It's going to be pretty interesting when we develop much better ways of traveling in space to more easily visit distant places, if that's even ever possible given the laws of physics.

[Ed Anger]

katmai is a confirmed planet.

The Chalupa planet

[derspiess]

You don't want to be around when he drops the chalupa.

[Ed Anger]

You don't want to be around when he drops the chalupa.

It turned into a black hole

[grumbler]

You don't want to be around when he drops the chalupa.

It turned into a black hole

I think I saw the movie based on that incident.  Isn't Katmai played by Ernest Borgnine?

[Syt]

[Siege]

So, what's the total count?

[jimmy olsen]

Read the article, that's in literally the 2nd sentence!

[Siege]

Read the article, that's in literally the 2nd sentence!

I can't read.

[jimmy olsen]

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2014/0417/Earth-sized-planet-discovered-Is-our-galaxy-teeming-with-habitable-worlds

Earth-sized planet discovered: Is our galaxy teeming with habitable worlds?
NASA's Kepler spacecraft has detected an Earth-sized planet orbiting an M dwarf star, scientists announced Thursday. We have some 70 billion M dwarf stars in our galaxy, so this suggests a huge number of potential life-friendly planets.

By Liz Fuller-Wright, Staff writer / April 17, 2014


For the first time, astronomers have confirmed the presence of an Earth-sized planet orbiting another star in its "habitable zone" – the not-too-hot, not-too-cold region where a star warms a planet just enough to allow liquid water to form lakes or oceans. The planet, known as Kepler-186f, shares its star with four similar-sized planets that are all much closer to their sun and thus are too hot for liquid water on the surface.


The star at the center of this small solar system, Kepler-186, is very different from our own star.

"Kepler-186 is an M dwarf, that is, smaller and cooler than our sun," says Elisa Quintana, lead scientist on a paper published in this week's Science. 

M dwarfs are good targets in the search for habitable worlds, says Dr. Quintana, a research scientist at NASA's SETI Institute. Their relatively low temperatures mean that their habitable zones are small, so any life-friendly planets would need to be close. In fact, Kepler-186f is as close to its star as Mercury is to our sun.

When it comes to finding exoplanets – planets orbiting stars other than our own  – small orbits are ideal.

"The Kepler mission uses the transit technique to find exoplanets," explains Douglas Hudgins, NASA's exoplanet exploration program scientist. "It's designed to measure the tiny dimming of a star that occurs when a planet's orbit causes it to pass in front of, or 'transit,' that star."

Smaller orbits make for more transits in a shorter window of time, notes Tom Barclay, a co-author on the paper. "Kepler 186f goes around its star every 130 days. Earth goes around its star every 365 days. So in the four-year duration of the Kepler mission, we could see more transits of Kepler-186f."

Watching for transits is a bit like looking for bugs at night by watching your neighbor's porch lights. Every dark streak against the glowing orange light bulb tells you there's an insect flying past. Big bugs are easier to spot than small ones, and insects staying close to the light are easier to see than those further away.

NASA's search for planets multiplies that theoretical porch-light survey on a massive scale. The Kepler Space Telescope has been watching about 160,000 stars near the constellations Cygnus and Lyra for the past five years. Kepler measures the amount of light coming from the stars, and astronomers watch for that light to be dimmed by a passing planet. Every measured decrease in the star's light represents a potential exoplanet, which must be verified by repeating the measurement again and again on subsequent orbits.

"To date, analysis of the data from just the first three years of those observations has revealed more than 3,800 exoplanet candidates," says Dr. Hudgins, "and more than 950 of those have subsequently been validated as actual planets and not false-positive signals."

The quicker the orbit, the easier an exoplanet is to observe and verify. The four inner planets of the Kepler-186 solar system, with orbits of 4, 7, 13, and 22 days respectively, were all spotted and confirmed within Kepler's first two years. This fifth planet, in the habitable zone, was far enough away that it took a third year of measurements to find it and a fourth year to confirm it, says Hudgins. All the measurements were gathered between May 2009, when Kepler was first launched, and May 2013.

Finding an Earth-sized planet near an M dwarf is actually easier than finding one near a star like our own, says Dr. Barclay, a research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute at NASA Ames. "M dwarfs are great targets to search for habitable worlds," he says.

"M dwarfs ... range in size from about 10 percent of the size of the sun to about half the size of the sun. Kepler-186 here is on the larger end of the scale, being about half the size of the Sun. The size difference helps us find planets," he explains. "The larger the star, the shallower the transit, because what we measure is the ratio between the size of the planet and the size of the star. So you shrink the star and you get a deeper transit. Deeper transits are easier to detect, so we find it easier to detect smaller planets around these smaller stars."

Plus, M dwarfs are incredibly common. "They're the most abundant stars in our galaxy," says Barclay. "There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and 7 out of every 10 of them are M dwarfs. This means that most Earth-type planets in their habitable zones will be around M dwarfs, simply because most stars are M dwarfs. They're also our nearest neighbors. Most of the nearest-by stars to us are M dwarfs. Now when you go out to your backyard and look at the sky, you won't see any M dwarfs. They're very faint – you can't see any of them with the naked eye – however they are there."

M dwarfs are also known as red dwarfs, because they emit more light in the red and infrared spectrum than our sun, which emits most of its light in the visible spectrum. Kepler-186 emits only about a third as much light as our sun.

If there is life on Kepler-186f, it will have adapted to this different amount and color of sunlight, notes Victoria Meadows, principal investigator for the Virtual Planetary Laboratory.

"It's fun to note that if the planet is habitable, photosynthesis may be possible," she says. On Earth, "we have shade plants that live under the canopy of rainforests and so forth that routinely manage to photosynthesize even in those sorts of light levels."

Of course, there is no evidence yet that Kepler-186f has life of any kind, let alone photosynthesis. All that is certain so far is that the planet is in the right place to make liquid water possible on its surface: "This is the first validated, Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of another star," says SETI Institute's Quintana. "We can now say that other potentially habitable worlds, similar in size to our Earth, can exist. It's no longer in the realm of science fiction."

[11B4V]

Well we might have to start exploring again...wait, obamacare sucked up that part of the budget. 

[Ed Anger]

Well we might have to start exploring again...wait, obamacare sucked up that part of the budget. 

THANKS OBAMA

[HVC]

Well we might have to start exploring again...wait, obamacare sucked up that part of the budget. 

now our great grandsons won't be able to nail hot green alien chicks