NASA's Planet Hunter Spots Record 1,284 New Planets, 9 In A Habitable Zone (networkworld.com)

coondoggie quotes a report from Network World: NASA's planet hunting space telescope Kepler added a record 1,284 confirmed planets to its already impressive discoveries of extraterrestrial worlds. [This batch of planets is the largest single account of new planets since Kepler launched in 2009 and more than doubles the number of confirmed planets realized by the space telescope so far to more than 2,300.] The discoveries were a result of an automated technique implemented in a publicly available custom software package called Vespa, which lets scientists analyze thousands of signals Kepler has identified to determine which are most likely to be caused by planets and which are caused by non-planetary objects such as stars. "Vespa computed the reliability values for over 7,000 signals identified in the latest Kepler catalog which identified 4,302 potential planets and verified the 1,284 planets with 99% certainty," said the Princeton researchers that developed Vespa. NASA said, based on their size, nearly 550 of the validated planets could be rocky like Earth. Nine of which orbit in their sun's habitable zone.

Comments

Re:This is useless research

[butzwonker]

Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you? Twenty years ago we didn't even know that exoplanets exist and now we find more and more of them. Since when has record breaking research in astronomy been a waste of taxpayer dollars? What kind of ignorant wouldn't want to know in what kind of universe we live?

Re:Lets build a few generational ships already...

[Maritz]

Our love of and emphasis on militarism and warfare is essentially what will prevent our species from progressing to the medium term future in a stable manner. So it's worth noting. It's also highly likely to be what ends civilization (roughly 1% or so risk of nuclear war per year).

Having said that, I'm not keen to start building 'generation ships' just yet. You've gotta walk before you can run. And we ain't even crawling.

But without wanting to be too doom and gloom - we aren't going to the stars. This isn't the species you're looking for. lol

Managed expectations

[MBGMorden]

One thing to keep in mind - according to many charts Mars and Venus are in our own star's habitable zone. Neither seem to have life. Even Earth seems like it would have a much hard time at it if not for some specific factors (ie, a large moon to stabilize the rotational axis - a rare feature for a rocky planet).

If we're batting only 1 out of 3 planets in the habitable zone of our own star actually having life, I wouldn't hold out too much hope of there being life on any of these planets just because its in the habitable zone. My guess (and really that's all we can do until we get a larger sample size of planets having life vs not) is that a very tiny percentage of these planets even in the habitable zones actually harbor life.

That said - even if there was only life in the universe at a rate of one inhabited planet per galaxy, the universe as a whole would still have billions of inhabited planets - it's just that there'd be virtually zero chance that life from one would ever be aware of or affected by life on another.