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.