NASA announces 'mother lode' of new planets: 715

[Buster's Uncle]

NASA announces 'mother lode' of new planets: 715
Associated Press
By SETH BORENSTEIN  21 minutes ago



This handout artist conception provided by NASA depicts multiple-transiting planet systems, which are stars with more than one planet. The planets eclipse or transit their host star from the vantage point of the observer. This angle is called edge-on. Our galaxy is looking far more crowded as NASA Wednesday confirmed a bonanza of 715 newly discovered planets circling stars other than our sun. Four of those new planets are in the habitable zones where it is not too hot or not cold. NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting telescope nearly doubled the number of planets scientists have discovered in the galaxy, pushing the figure to about 1,700. Twenty years ago, astronomers had not found any planets outside our solar system. (AP Photo/NASA)



WASHINGTON (AP) — Our galaxy is looking far more crowded and hospitable. NASA on Wednesday confirmed a bonanza of 715 newly discovered planets outside our solar system.

Scientists using the planet-hunting Kepler telescope pushed the number of planets discovered in the galaxy to about 1,700. Twenty years ago, astronomers had not found any planets circling stars other than the ones revolving around our sun.

"We almost doubled just today the number of planets known to humanity," NASA planetary scientist Jack Lissauer said in a Wednesday teleconference, calling it "the big mother lode."

Astronomers used a new confirmation technique to come up with the largest single announcement of a batch of exoplanets — what planets outside our solar system are called.

While Wednesday's announcements were about big numbers, they also were about implications for life behind those big numbers.

All the new planets are in systems like ours where multiple planets circle a star. The 715 planets came from looking at just 305 stars. They were nearly all in size closer to Earth than gigantic Jupiter.

And four of those new exoplanets orbit their stars in "habitable zones" where it is not too hot or not too cold for liquid water which is crucial for life to exist.

Douglas Hudgins, NASA's exoplanet exploration program scientist, called Wednesday's announcement a major step toward Kepler's ultimate goal: "finding Earth 2.0."

It's a big step in not just finding other Earths, but "the possibility of life elsewhere," said Lisa Kaltenegger, a Harvard and Max Planck Institute astronomer who wasn't part of the discovery team.

The four new habitable zone planets are all at least twice as big as Earth so that makes them more likely to be gas planets instead of rocky ones like Earth — and less likely to harbor life.

So far Kepler has found nine exoplanets in the habitable zone, NASA said. Astronomers expect to find more when they look at all four years of data collected by the now-crippled Kepler; so far they have looked at two years.

Planets in the habitable zone are likely to be farther out from their stars because it is hot close in. And planets farther out take more time orbiting, so Kepler has to wait longer to see it again.

Another of Kepler's latest discoveries indicates that "small planets are extremely common in our galaxy," said MIT astronomer Sara Seagar, who wasn't part of the discovery team. "Nature wants to make small planets."

And, in general, smaller planets are more likely to be able to harbor life than big ones, Kaltenegger said.


http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-announces-mother-lode-planets-715-192716739.html

[Ford_Prefect]

Ohhhh.  That's nice.   I'm really sad that Kepler is no longer working as a planet detector.  (It can no longer point in exactly one direction, it drifts now)

[Buster's Uncle]

They've been kicking around a way to get back limited use of the Kepler.  Haven't heard anything new on that for about a month, I think, but you ought to be able to find a story about it a few pages back.

[Buster's Uncle]

Ah.  Here's the most recent one: http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=6479.msg41667#msg41667

[gwillybj]

Time to build the starship Enterprise and get out there where we've not gone before.

[Buster's Uncle]

Population of Known Alien Planets Nearly Doubles as NASA Discovers 715 New Worlds
SPACE.com
by Mike Wall, Senior Writer  February 26, 2014 2:12 PM



This NASA artist concept depicts multiple-transiting planet systems, which are stars with more than one planet. The planets eclipse or transit their host star from the vantage point of the observer. This angle is called edge-on. (NASA)



NASA's Kepler space telescope has discovered more than 700 new exoplanets, nearly doubling the current number of confirmed alien worlds.

The 715 newfound planets, which scientists announced today (Feb. 26), boost the total alien-world tally to between 1,500 and 1,800, depending on which of the five main extrasolar planet discovery catalogs is used. The Kepler space telescope is responsible for more than half of these finds, hauling in 961 exoplanets to date, with thousands more candidates awaiting confirmation by follow-up investigations.

"This is the largest windfall of planets — not exoplanet candidates, mind you, but actually validated exoplanets — that's ever been announced at one time," Douglas Hudgins, exoplanet exploration program scientist at NASA's Astrophysics Division in Washington, told reporters today.[Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]

About 94 percent of the new alien worlds are smaller than Neptune, researchers said, further bolstering earlier Kepler observations that suggested the Milky Way galaxy abounds with rocky planets like Earth.

Most of the 715 exoplanets orbit closely to their parent stars, making them too hot to support life as we know it. But four of the worlds are less than 2.5 times the size of Earth and reside in the "habitable zone," that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist on their surfaces.

The $600 million Kepler spacecraft launched in March 2009 to determine how frequently Earth-like planets occur around our galaxy. The spacecraft detects alien worlds by noticing the telltale brightness dips caused when they pass in front of, or transit, their parent stars from Kepler's perspective.



The histogram shows the number of planet discoveries by year for roughly the past two decades of the exoplanet search. The blue bar shows previous planet discoveries, the red bar shows previous Kepler planet discoveries, the gold bar displays t


Kepler's original planet-hunting mission ended last May when the second of its four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed, robbing the spacecraft of its ultraprecise pointing ability. Still, scientists have expressed confidence that they will be able to achieve the mission's chief goals with the data Kepler gathered during its first four years in space.

Those were very productive years. Kepler has flagged more than 3,600 planet candidates to date, and mission team members expect that about 90 percent of them will end up being the real deal.

Indeed, the 715 new planets were pulled from just the first two years of Kepler observations, so more big planet-confirmation hauls could be coming as researchers work their way through the rest of the mission's huge database.

All of the 715 newfound alien planets reside in multiplanet systems, just like Earth. Taken together, the new planets orbit a total of 305 stars, researchers said. And these systems are generally reminiscent of the inner regions of our own solar system, where planets travel around the sun in circular orbits that are more or less in the same plane, they added.

"These results establish that planetary systems with mulitple planets around one star, like our own solar system, are in fact common," Hudgins said.



The histogram shows the number of planets by size for all known exoplanets. The blue bars on the histogram represents all the exoplanets known, by size, before the Kepler Planet Bonanza announcement on Feb. 26, 2014. The gold bars on the histog


Scientists validated the newly discovered worlds using a powerful and sophisticated new method called "verification by multiplicity," which works partly on the logic of probability.

During its original mission, Kepler stared continuously at more than 150,000 stars, finding planet candidates around several thousand of them. If these candidates were distributed randomly, just a few would reside in multiplanet systems. But Kepler has found hundreds of such systems, a fact that helped scientists identify the 715 bona fide new planets.

"Multiplicity is a powerful technique for wholesale validation that will be used again in the future," said Jason Rowe of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

The five main exoplanet-discovery databases, and their current tallies (with the new Kepler finds included), are: the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia (1,790); the Exoplanets Catalog, run by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo (1,790); the NASA Exoplanet Archive (1,749); the Exoplanet Orbit Database (1,490); and the Open Exoplanet Catalog (1,714).

The different numbers reported by the databases reflect the uncertainties inherent in exoplanet detection and confirmation.

While Kepler's original mission operations have ended, the spacecraft may not be done hunting for alien planets. Team members have proposed a new mission for Kepler called K2, which would allow the observatory to search for a variety of celestial objects and phenomena, including exoplanets, supernova explosions and comets and asteroids in our own solar system.

NASA is expected to make a final decision about the K2 mission proposal by this summer, officials have said.


http://news.yahoo.com/population-known-alien-planets-nearly-doubles-nasa-discovers-191250870.html

[Buster's Uncle]

NASA cries planetary 'bonanza' with 715 new worlds
AFP
By Kerry Sheridan  February 26, 2014 3:07 PM



This NASA artist's conception illustrates Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star (AFP Photo/)



Washington (AFP) - NASA on Wednesday announced a torrent of new planet discoveries, hailing a "bonanza" of 715 worlds now known outside the solar system thanks to the Kepler space telescope's planet-hunting mission.

A new method for verifying potential planets led to the volume of new discoveries from Kepler, which aims to help humans search for other worlds that may be like Earth.

"What we have been able to do with this is strike the mother lode, get a veritable exoplanet bonanza," Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA, told reporters.

"We have almost doubled just today the number of planets known to humanity," he said.

The 715 newly verified planets are orbiting 305 different stars.

The latest announcement brings the number of known planets to nearly 1,700.

Not much is known about the composition of these distant planets and whether they would truly have the conditions that would support life, such as a rocky surface, water and a distance from their stars that leaves them neither too hot nor too cold.

Four of them are potentially in the habitable zone of their stars and are about the size of Earth, NASA said.

Most of the new discoveries are in "multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system," and 95 percent are between the size of Earth and Neptune, which is four times larger than our planet, said the US space agency.

Most are also very close to their stars.

"The Kepler team continues to amaze and excite us with their planet hunting results," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

The new method for verifying planets relies on a statistical technique that can be applied to multiple planets at once.

Before, scientists confirmed each planet individually based on recording the number of times it passed in front of its star. Three of these transits were enough to confirm a planet.

The discoveries announced Wednesday were all initially detected in the first two years of Kepler's observations, from 2009 to 2011, and confirmed with the new statistical method.

The Kepler space telescope observes some 150,000 stars, more than 3,600 of which are presumed to be planetary candidates.

Until now, 961 of Kepler's planet candidates had been confirmed.

Kepler was launched in March 2009, and last year lost the use of two of its reaction wheels that helped keep it precisely oriented. Scaled down plans for the telescope, called K2, have been drawn up and submitted to reviewers at NASA.

The latest findings are to be published March 10 in The Astrophysical Journal.


http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-cries-planetary-bonanza-715-worlds-200707552.html

[Buster's Uncle]

U.S. space telescope spots 715 more planets
Reuters
By Irene Klotz  23 hours ago



CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Scientists added a record 715 more planets to the list of known worlds beyond the solar system, boosting the overall tally to nearly 1,700, astronomers said on Wednesday.

The additions include four planets about 2-1/2 times as big as Earth that are the right distance from their parent stars for liquid surface water, which is believed to be key for life.

The discoveries were made with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope before it was sidelined by a pointing system problem last year. The telescope, launched in 2009, spent four productive years staring at 160,000 target stars for signs of planets passing by, relative to the telescope's line of sight.

The tally of planets announced at a NASA press conference on Wednesday boosted Kepler's confirmed planet count from 246 to 961.

Combined with other telescopes' results, the headcount of planets beyond the solar system, or exoplanets, now numbers nearly 1,700.

"We almost doubled, just today, the number of planets known to humanity," astronomer Douglas Hudgins, head of exoplanet exploration at NASA Headquarters in Washington, told reporters on a conference call.

The population boom is due to a new verification technique that analyzes potential planets in batches rather than one at a time. The method was developed after scientists realized that most planets, like those in the solar system, have sibling worlds orbiting a common parent star.

The newly found planets reinforce evidence that small planets, two to three times the size of Earth, are common throughout the galaxy.

"Literally, wherever (Kepler) can see them, it finds them," said astronomer Sara Seager, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "That's why we have confidence that there will be planets like Earth in other places."

Like the solar system, which has eight planets plus Pluto and other so-called "dwarf planets," the newly found exoplanets belong in families.

But unlike the solar system's planets, which span from inner Mercury to outer Neptune some 150 times farther from the sun than Earth, the Kepler clans are bunched in close.

Most of the planets fly nearer to their parent stars than Venus orbits the sun, a distance of about 67 million miles (108 million km.)

NASA and other space agencies are designing follow-on telescopes to home in on planets in so-called "habitable zones" around their parent stars where temperatures would be suitable for liquid surface water.

Two papers on the new Kepler research will appear in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.


http://news.yahoo.com/u-space-telescope-spots-715-more-planets-223227397--sector.html