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Kepler Discovers First Earth-Sized Exoplanets
ananyo writes "NASA's Kepler telescope has reached one of its major mission milestones: finding an Earth-sized planet outside the Solar System. What's more, it has done it twice in the same star system. Whizzing around the star Kepler-20, about 290 parsecs (946 light-years) from Earth, is not only an Earth-sized planet, but also something just a touch smaller — a Venus."
Turns out, it was from my own solar system. Too much glare
Congratulation to NASA. I hope there is a plan for Kepler 2.0!
"but also something just a touch smaller — a Venus." If there's a Venus and no known Mars... then does that mean it's all women? Sign me up!
Comme on, another planet, it has been a week since the last one, will my extensions work on this one?
"The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface"
Would such planet-finding missions be more successful if there are more of these telescopes, at the cost of being able to peer less farther into space. I'd be much more interested in finding an earth sized exoplanet 50-100 ly away than this, if only we could be looking at more space and closer rather than less space and farther.
Note the previous /. article on the similar topic was about Kepler-22, so I'm thinking this report about Kepler-20 is actually going backwards in time relative to the previous article.
Once again SIMBAD and exoplanet.eu have nothing.
http://exoplanet.eu/star.php?st=Kepler-20
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Um, what? What exactly do you think Johannes Kepler was, a washing machine?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_kepler
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini
Damn that's fast!
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
Ummm ... as much as Kepler is the name of the device, Johannes Kepler laid out the mathematics of orbits. You know, Kepler's Laws.
Naming stars Kepler-20 (or whatever) is naming them after important scientists ... and since it's looking for things which orbit, it's quite apt.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
All the interesting stars with planets within a few thousand parsecs are all going to be called Kepler nnn, where nnn is a number between 1 and 999. All intelligent species found in that radius will be called Keplarians.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
It could still have habitable temperatures if it was a tidally locked planet. The chances of that occuring increase as a planet approach it's star. Any life on such planets would certainly be interesting.
mod parent idiot.
The telescope is "seeing" the planet as it was 946 years ago ... maybe it's not even there any longer
Kepler already has his laws, this is a machine.
We ran out of important scientists. This is the day and age where you dress a hundred "scientists" in lab coats and parade them like Soviet Russia paraded its military. "I have a hundred scientists on my payroll ready to back any of my agenda based claims. Bring it on if you dare!"
A six day long year on one and a 20 day year on the other? Imagine the New Years party! Barely recover from one and it's time for another!
the apparent size of this planet is the same as an object of 0.5 mm on the moon.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Seriously, not only did he set the bases of modern astronomy, but he still discovers planets 381 years after his death.
There's nothing like $HOME
Whizzing around the star Kepler-20, about 290 parsecs...
Just to give you all a sense of scale, the Millineum Falcon would have to be 24 times faster to reach it!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Pardon my skepticism, but is the margin of error on this really so small that they can really claim to differentiate between a Venus and an Earth sized planet?
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
"So here's (link at bottom) a surveillance telescope that DARPA is proposing to provide CONTINUOUS (that's what's new) real-time coverage of any spot on earth at a resolution of 3m (the example given was to detect Scud launches). Of course in order to do this, it would need to be in geo-sync orbit which necessitates a whopping big lens, in this case 66 FEET ACROSS!
So how come I've never heard about this "membrane optics" technology before? (From the picture it appears to be able to make the "lens" extremely thin and presumably lightweight. No word on how it could be folded or rolled up). I notice that it doesn't seem to have a sun-shade or cowling, doesn't this ruin the contrast? Most importantly, if it was pointed UP (towards deep space) rather than down (towards the ground) could it be used for astronomy? A 66 foot space telescope could be able to directly image earthlike worlds!
What's also interesting is that they claim that, at this resolution it would be able to monitor an area of 100km x 100km. That implies a gigapixel detector (not new but the largest I've ever heard being placed in space). Anyway, at (only!) $500 million, it's gotta be in the same price range as the latest "keyhole" spy satellites. Write your congressman today!"
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/darpas-spy-telescope-stream-real-time-video-any-spot-earth
It's amazing to know, that in our lifetime, we WILL see other planets in the detail of a street map, and we WILL see other intelligent life.
I just hope their TV is better and that we can learn something from them.
As he didn't suck he sure was no vacuum cleaner!
Is not will we discover an earth gravity (size is meaningless, it's the gravity that's an issue) planet at earth temperature from it's sun, but when.
And more importantly, when will we find one with 25 light years from Sol.
NASA's primary focus right now IMHO should be giving out X-prizes for corporate achievement in space flight and endeavoring to devise means for reaching stars:
- how to get a probe up to near light speed.
- how to maintain communication with said probe (most likely via entangled diamonds)
- get us off this rock (within 150 years)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but since planets form from a circumstellar disk, all the planets around a star are going to orbit in the same plane. So if Kepler finds one planet eclipsing its parent star, then all the planets around that star are likely to be in an eclipsing orbit, meaning Kepler will find all of the star's planets that are within its detection threshold.
The glass is half glass.
The Vulcans did on just one Warp signature (and Cochrane's smell of booze spanning the solar system, which does make a second data point). ;-)
when the smallest exo-planet we could see was the size of Uranus.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I'm hoping Kepler discovers some Jupiter sized planets, in radius and area, that are really low density, so their gravity is like Earth's - along with the atmosphere. They'd probably lack metals or any heavier elements, though they'd probably better have silicon if their crust is going to look like Earth's surface. If the planet has a moon or an asteroid belt nearby full of those missing elements, space mining might make for a really huge place for humans to spread out on in a familiar style.
--
make install -not war
Seems a little less than professional there, NASA.
Depends on the eccentricity of the orbits. Pluto, for example, would be almost impossible to detect since its orbit almost never crosses the plane of the orbit of the rest of the planets. (Just ignore the time scale for now.) If another star had passed very close while the planets were forming it could have induced a serious warp to the circumstellar disk and orbits could be all over the place. For that matter, I think Uranus's orbit is sufficient inclined from the ecliptic that it would probably be missed as well.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Um, what? What exactly do you think Johannes Kepler was, a washing machine?
I don't know, I've never keppled!
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I suppose distance matters as well - a slight tilt to even exactly co-planar orbits and the planets orbiting farther out might be missed as well.
The glass is half glass.
Hmmm...+1 for obscure reference but -1 for forcing the fit just because their names start with the letter "k". Finally, +1 for keeping your head about you.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Claudio Maccone's proposal to use the Sun as a giant gravitational lens (FOCAL) is pretty astounding. All you gotta do is send your satellite out to about 550 AU (easy peasy eh?) - I think I recall reading that if you were to train it on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system you'd be able to resolve cars in the street assuming there are cars and streets there (bound to be). Not easy to steer though, you'd need to know well in advance what you were aiming it at. One nice thing is that the focal length goes to infinity, so even if you're shooting further out (say 1000AU +) you're still able to get a great picture.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Perhaps I'm being dense but why does the inclination of the target planet's orbit (relative to the other planets orbiting that star) matter? Can't a planet can be detected using the transit method so long as the orbit is one that causes the target to pass through our line of sight to the star?
Given the example of Pluto, I don't understand why it couldn't be observed by someone whose line of sight passes through both its orbit and the Sun. I must be missing something.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
A star system forms from the collapse of a (slightly) rotating cloud. Conservation of angular momentum means that as the cloud collapses, it rotates faster. The final star rotates on the same axis as did the birthing cloud, and the star's planets have orbits that lie on the stars equatorial plane. The rotational axes of nearby stars are randomly oriented throughout the sky. The only planets that can be detected by Kepler are those whose orbital planes are nearly edge on from our view. Too much apparent inclination, and the planet will not pass in front of the star as it orbits. Only a small fraction of orbits will fit this criterion, but I'm not sure what percentage. I'm certain that finding one planet about a star increases the odds of finding the other planets orbiting that same star, simply because they will all have similar orbital planes. But, as was pointed out earlier, it is no guarantee that all such planets will be found.
The glass is half glass.
Oh, it could, but you'd have to be incredibly lucky to be viewing it during the single hour or so transit in its 90,613 day orbit. The OP mentioned catching all of a system's planets with Kepler, since they all originated in the same circumstellar disk, I was just pointing out that actually some of our own solar system's planets would probably been missed by Kepler.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
On behalf of my sovereign nation, the United States of America: I hereby make a territorial claim upon the entire surface of the larger of these two planets, and 75% of the temperate latitudes of the smaller one, wherever they are.
So the obvious thing to do is not to look at some boring distant planet, but look at some star a few thousand light years away. But don't look directly at it, use it as a second gravitational lens to look at *another* star, and indefinitely extend the range of the telescope. Assuming the focal point isn't directly on the opposite side of the gravity well it would be possible to aim the telescope within a small angle and conceivably bend the light path around until it was focusing back on our own planet Earth's past. Our photons stream ever outward but presumably some of them do return by circuitous routes for us to collect and image our own history.
I see, I think. You're saying that the difficulty in detecting Pluto comes not from its inclination, but from the very long period. That clears it up, thanks.
By the by, assuming a system where all the planets' orbits are on the same plane and given a sufficiently long observation, could one use something akin to Fourier analysis to determine the number, size, orbital period (and hence mass) of all the planets in that system? That's not even getting started on spectroscopy and all the other wonderful things one can learn about distant objects by simply looking at them!
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
what if the building just did burn down overnight? what about the night crew? are they ok? what happened to them? i need to call jimmy. jimmy, whats his fucking number? i had it here, i sweartogod i had it. its in my book, that .. no that other one. the black one. with the pen sticking out of it? what pen? shit... i err... nevermind i used that pen to write the rent check.
look, jimmy's last name was watson. how many jimmy watsons can there be in this city? i'll look him up on facebook.
jimmy... jimmy says hes ok. what about alice? what about tayla? what about aronce?
man. burned up. thats fucked up. i wonder if it was arson? i mean, what kind of nutjob would burn down an office building? why not burn down something meaningful, like i dont know, a drug dealers mansion or a corrupt congressman's ferrari.
whats the point of burning down my cubicle? my little cubicle, with my little santa claus doll, and my little.. well.. what about judy? she had a whole manger scene in there that her kids made.
well i guess you are right, it is only just stuff after all. at least we are all safe.. i mean, except what about the night watchman? steve? you know steve right? huge fan of death metal. he lent me all this swedish goth core stuff on his ipod, it was incredible.
man. burned down. i cant believe it. i dont think ill even go there... i just couldnt stand to see it all in ashes. i just want to remember it like it was.
to gather the gorgon rays from the oceanus spectre of alpha quad seven.
dont tell me youve never heard of gorgon rays. why, its simple as old cat man!
imagine a conical bath.
It was his first time.
That, plus the fact that is incredibly freaking small. So small it's not even a planet.
Gravitational microlensing does the same thing, and we don't even have to travel 500 AU to use it.
That's because of Pluto's inclination, not eccentricity.
The angle between us (specifically, the line of sight vector) and the orbital plane is the inclination (for external solar systems). So,
"Can't a planet can be detected using the transit method so long as the orbit is one that causes the target to pass through our line of sight to the star"
Is just another way of saying "if the inclination is near 90 degrees."
Lots of planets, yeah, but several magnitudes more of magnitudes of space.
Space is largely empty, and is full of mostly, well space.
Which is the major problem of getting anywhere. (or our life spans conversely if you want to look at it that way)
Even traveling at the speed of light, that observation is 1000 years away. Traveling at like 30,000 km/s it is likely in the order of 10's of millions of years away.
So ya, while the discovery is cool (or "neat" or "interesting") I do not see it as significant as you seem to.
Although that is perfectly true and incredibly useful, something like FOCAL would allow us to resolve incredibly interesting objects that aren't on the same scale or distance, like the supermassive black hole in our own galaxy or nearby neutron stars, planetary nebulae, etc. So I'd rather have both personally..!
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The inclination wouldn't affect the difficulty, just the likelyhood of being inside the infinitesimally small angle that would allow you to detect the other planets as well as Pluto. You'd have to be on the direct line between Sol and the point where Pluto's orbit intersects the ecliptic. That's nowhere near the place where Uranus's orbit intersects the ecliptic either, so you're still going to miss one planet.
You have to be lucky to see a planetary system edge-on, that's why Kepler looks at so many stars. You'd have to be ridiculously lucky to view both the planets located in the ecliptic and an extreme outlier like Pluto.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Yeah, I was using the other definition for 'eccentric', as in 'not normal', in the wrong context. Didn't occur to me until after I hit 'Post'.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin