Kepler Finds Five More Exoplanets

Arvisp was one of several readers to send news of five new exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope. In addition to the new "hot Jupiters" — the easiest targets to find — Kepler's early data has turned up some oddities, including something that is too hot to be a planet and too small to be a star. And one of the exoplanets is so fluffy that "it has the density of Styrofoam." The real news is that Kepler works as designed, and the scientists running it are fully confident that it will find Earth-like planets in some star's habitable zone, if they are out there to be found. Here is NASA's press release.

Comments

Re:But Why?

[Chris Burke]

Sure, finding habitable planets is cool. But what are they going to do once they've found one? Tick a box? Celebrate humanity?

Perform spectroscopy experiments to see if the planet has more in common with ours than just mass and relative distance from its star?

As part of the long, long process of answering one of the most amazing questions in humanity's existence: Are we alone in the universe? Is life unique to our planet, extremely rare, or as common as the stars themselves?

You might have you own theories one way or the other, but a theory isn't an answer. This is about evidence.

can think of two main reasons

[Trepidity]

Obviously the reason it makes headlines is that the question of how many human-habitable planets there are, and what kinds of properties they have, is tied to the question of whether anything vaguely like earth-like life exists elsewhere in the universe.

However a good deal of astronomers are also just interested in everything about the cosmos: what's out there, how does it work, how does it relate to other things, what kinds of variations are there, etc. From that perspective, this particular kind of thing, "exoplanet", is a class of far-away object we don't have a lot of examples of and can't give particularly confident accounts of (how and how often they form, their distribution, etc.). Even if there was no tie-in to human habitability, there are a number of astronomers interested in collecting more data on and clarifying our understanding of basically any class of "thing we don't yet know everything about".

Re:What about what we don't know yet?

[John Hasler]

> My point is that our definition of habitable is going to change dramatically
> as we get more information.

In the meantime, however, we must work with what we have. How likely are we to find anything interesting if we just look around randomly?