![]() Of the 4,661 exoplanet candidates catalogued by the Kepler mission, 1,028 have been confirmed. The researchers will have to use other techniques, such as looking for shifts in the motion of other suns, to verify the nature of the objects. The Kepler telescope can find possible planets by detecting tiny changes in the brightness of stars as planets pass between them and Earth. “Where are we going as human beings, and of course the really grand question: are we alone in the universe?” “We’re trying to answer really fundamental questions,” Grunsfeld said. The discovery “takes us one step closer to understanding how many habitable planets are out there”, said Joseph Twicken, a Seti scientist also on the Kepler mission.Ĭoughlin said that sifting through the catalog will help astronomers “determine the number of small, cool planets that are the best candidates for hosting life”. “Time will tell if they stand the tests.” Seven candidates appear to orbit solar-type stars, Coughlin said. The scientists also found 11 other possible exoplanets that might be less than twice the Earth’s diameter and orbiting in habitable zones. The water vapor would be lost from the planet forever.” Its ageing sun might be heating the surface and evaporating any oceans. “If Kepler 452b is indeed a rocky planet,” he said, its location “could mean that it is just entering a runaway greenhouse phase of its climate history. “Kepler 452b could be experiencing now what the Earth will undergo more than a billion years from now,” said Doug Caldwell, a Seti Institute scientist on the Kepler mission. The new planet consequently receives 10% more energy than the Earth, meaning it could provide a glimpse into a burning, waterless future on Earth, the scientists said. “When they’re young they’re small and dim,” he said, and millennia later “they grow and they get brighter”. As stars age they grow in size and energy, casting more heat at the objects in their orbit. Jenkins said they suspect the planet is rocky, likely with active volcanoes, and has a thicker atmosphere with greater cloud cover than the Earth.īut although 452b has more in common with Earth than any exoplanet yet discovered, its star is 1.5bn years older, 4% more massive and 20% brighter than our own. The research suggests 452b has five times the mass of Earth, is about 1.5bn years older, and has a gravity about twice as powerful as our own.Ībout 1,400 light years away, Kepler 452b orbits a star similar to our sun, and at about the same distances as Earth orbits the sun, meaning it has a similar length year and exists in the “habitable zone” where liquid water can exist on a planet. The planet is like Earth’s “older, bigger first cousin”, he said. “It is the closest thing that we have to another place that somebody might call home,” said Jon Jenkins, a Nasa scientist. All 11 previously discovered exoplanets of a similar size and orbit travel around stars that are smaller and cooler than the sun. “This is the first possibly rocky, habitable planet around a solar-type star,” said Jeff Coughlin, a Seti scientist. The new planet, named Kepler 452b, is “the closest twin to Earth, or the Earth 2.0 that we’ve found so far in the dataset”, said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for Nasa’s mission directorate.
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