Kepler Mission Finds 752 Extrasolar Planet Candidates

An anonymous reader lets us know about the initial release of data from the Kepler spacecraft, launched in the spring of 2009, which has been hunting extrasolar planets. The instrument has found 752 candidates to examine in its first 43 days of operation. This is exciting news, because even if only half of the possibilities pan out as exoplanets (as the Kepler team expects) the results would still almost double the count of known planets. And some of the new ones could be Earth-sized, or not too much larger. Controversy has erupted however because NASA has decided to allow the Kepler team to withhold 400 of the best candidates for its own examination, releasing about 350 others to the worldwide community. The reasons for this are complicated and the New York Times does a good job of digging into the issue of proprietary vs. public data. Nature.com first reported two months ago on the decision to hold back some of the data.

Comments

NASA is just acting on orders:

[tverbeek]

"All these worlds are yours, except for this list of 400. Attempt no landings there."

Approximately 50% of your base...

[moondawg14]

... are belong to us.

Planet Pantent Trolls

[Goffee71]

Pretty sure you can't patent a celestial body. Also pretty sure that some idiot will try.

Obligatory XKCD

[Hurricane78]

Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/384/

Re:Candidates?

[Narishma]

if it orbits a planet it is a moon

Not necessarily. It could be a giant space station.