NASA Announced The Most Recent Kepler Discoveries
People have waited for a long time to hear the announcement made by NASA regarding the discoveries made with the aid of the Kepler telescope.
NASA has finally made the announcement, and it has stated that the discoveries were very impressive. They have discovered more planets than they initially hoped that they would find. The astronomers have stated that Kepler has discovered 1,235 possible planets outside of our solar system. That is way more than they initially suspected. They believe that the number of the known planets might be tripled thanks to this discovery. 68 of these planets are slightly larger or smaller than our planet. This was the first time when the astronomers have managed to discover exoplanets which have a smaller size than our planet. They were very satisfied with the discovery, and they are very optimistic that they will be able to find life on at least one of those planets. All these planets are located outside of our solar system, and because of that, it will be very difficult to reach them. They have stated that reaching them will be impossible under the current circumstances, as we do not posses the required technology in order to do so. The interesting thing is that 54 of the planets which the researchers managed to discover, are located in Goldilocks areas, those being the areas which have the proper conditions for hosting life. In these regions, it is very likely that liquid water could exist, and thus, life as we know it could exist as well.
The astronomers have also stated that we should not get our hopes high just yet because many of these discoveries might not even be planets after all. They have stated that it will take NASA years until they will able to discover which of those objects discovered in the space are planets or not. They will use their land based telescopes in order to make the discovery, by calculating their massing, and through other methods as well. However, they have stated that based on the early calculations, 95 percent of those objects could be real, and the majority of them could be planets. William Borucki, of the Ames Research Center in Northern California, said that the situation is much tensed, because they made the discovery but they do not know which of the objects that they discovered are real or not. He stated that none of the planets seem to be the new Earth, the paradise which everybody is waiting for. However, even under these circumstances the majority of the people are optimistic that the new Earth will be discovered. Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was involved in the research, stated that for the very first time humanity has seen that there might be other Earths in the Universe. She said that now all we need to do is waiting until the astronomers will be able to investigate these planets in order to see if they contain life, or if they are able to sustain it.
Mr. Borucki said that the discovery was impressive, and he also added that it is very likely that there are way more such planets in the Universe than Kepler managed to discover. He said that Kepler scanned only one four-hundredth of the sky. As you can imagine, if it would scan the entire sky, then the number of planets found would be close to 500,000. This is not the only discovery made by NASA. Another group of astronomers have stated that they have found a planetary system which is made out of six planets that orbit a planet similar to the Sun. They have stated that the new planetary system is very similar to ours, in the sense that it is made out of various planets which circle a Sun-like planet. There have been numerous planets discovered outside our solar system, but none of them have been like this one. The majority of them have been single planet systems, similar in size to Jupiter. These discoveries are incredible, especially the one related to the Goldilocks planets. Prior to these point only two planets have been discovered in the Goldilocks area.
The researchers said that this was the first time when they managed to discover such a large system which contained 6 stars. The astronomers were surprised by the discovery, as they stated that their conception regarding the way in which the planets form was different. They said that the rules which they knew regarding the formation and the evolution of the planetary systems were wrong, and that they need to start reconsider the way in which the planets are formed. There were many experts in the domain who said that the discoveries made very impressive, and that the numbers of the discoveries were very high. Because of that, they might find it is very difficult to know with what to start. The amount of information which they have received all of a sudden is very large, and they might feel overwhelmed by it. However he stated that the discovery made by Kepler is one of the most important from the last period of time. There are many who have the same opinion, as they believe that the discovery made by the astronomers will be very hard to match. They hope that the same astronomers will be able to make similar discoveries in the following years, and to find out more about the exoplanets.
The satellite was launched into orbit on March 2009. It has the task of inspecting the Milky Way, inspecting more than 160,000 stars every 30 minutes. Basically the telescope looks for planets which rotate around another planet. Think about the movement which the Earth makes around the sun. If a telescope would inspect the sun for example, it would have seen our planet rotate around the sun once every year, because that is how long our planet needs in order to make the full rotation. In order for an object detected in space to be considered a planet, it needs to be detected by Kepler on three different occasions. Because of this, the astronomers believe that the truth will come out in 2012 that being the time when Kepler would have managed to analyze the objects on three different occasions. The scientists have stated in June that they have made a discovery which could prove to be very important, and since then the entire world has been waiting for it. However, in June they have said that there could be about 400 Goldilocks planets in the Universe. The most important discovery was the KOI 157, the system which had 5 planets rotating around a Sun-like planet.
The planets from that system are between 2.3 and 13.5 times the mass of our planet, and they require about 50 days in order to orbit around the Sun-like planet. The interesting thing is that the five planets are very close to the star around which they orbit. There is a six planet in the system, but it is located at a farther distance from the star than the other planets, and it takes about 118 days in order to orbit around the main star. The astronomers were surprised by the fact that they were so close together. They said that if that system would be placed in ours, they would fit between the Sun and Mercury or Venus, which are the closest planets in this system. None of these six planets discovered in that system were similar to our planet, but the astronomers believe that they might be able to find Earth-like planets in other places. The planets discovered were considered to be super-Earths because of their size and mass. However, the astronomers have stated that many of them contained lots of gas, water, and rock, instead of containing only rock, as our planet. The astronomers have stated that these planets are more similar to Neptune than to our planet, but they will need to analyze them more thoroughly in the months to come. Regardless of their composition, the astronomers are very satisfied by the fact that these planets are smaller than the ones which they usually discover.
They said that the future of the researches will be in the hand of the next generations. They will be the ones who will need to decide if they will send a probe in that direction, or if they will ignore them. There are more than 800 new candidates planets, and from all of them only 6 have been confirmed to be too hot in order to be planets.
