Right on time - as many years into the mission as is needed to allow three, statistically persuasive blips apiece by other-Earths in orbits like ours - the Kepler Telescope mission has paid off its prime promissory note: habitable planets that are of Earth's approximate size. In fact, astronomers with...
Category: Kepler Telescope
Right on time - as many years into the mission as is needed to allow three, statistically persuasive blips apiece by other-Earths in orbits like ours - the Kepler Telescope mission has paid off its prime promissory note: habitable planets that are of Earth's approximate size. In fact, astronomers with the NASA Ames Research Center program reported they have bagged, with the requisite three orbits each, a numeralogically apt three large and rocky but probably not crazy massive planets. The two-planet report is in Science magazine, that on the third star and its planet is in the Astrophysical Journal .
Big news, gratifying news. Not huge news - that'll come if Kepler, or eventually some even better planet shadow-spotting instrument, reports a world just about spot-on to Earth's specs. The best two of these three, which means they get the most attention in press and that's probably because they are in Science plus are sister worlds which fires...
Just a short...
Just a short time after a tiny telescope got professional-quality data on two transiting planets, the heavy weight champion among transit detectors landed with its own new edition of the on going, space freak show of exoworlds. Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Ctr for Astrophysics, Univ. of Washington, and scads of other places report in Science this week discovery with the Kepler space telescope of two planets in orbit so close they're almost in each others britches. They are so close to...
It's only natural that in 150 years the...
It's only natural that in 150 years the standards of evidence in many fields of science - what it takes to make a case - have changed. Several outlets late last week and over the weekend reported news, off a paper in Science, that a sunlike star among the 150,000 that the Kepler telescope is monitoring for tiny blips in their brightness as planets cross in front of them, found another. But this planet is in the bag without such shadow blips of its own. And several outlets dutifully report the press release's proper, main angle: that by inferring its presence from the irregularity in the pace at which yet other, genuinely transiting, planets orbit their sun, another one must be there perturbing their orbits....
©2010 Knight Science Journalism at MIT. All Rights Reserved.