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: super-Earth
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...
This news broke Thursday afternoon and Friday....
This news broke Thursday afternoon and Friday. Ksjtracker skipped it yesterday as it was getting just a little stale. But new renditions of the news just keep popping up. The news is discovery, by a UC Santa Cruz and Carnegie Institution research team (plus co-authors all over), that a triple star system just 22 light years away has a so-called Super Earth planet with a mass estimated to be at least 4.5 times that of the real Earth. It orbits one of the triplet's members, a red dwarf star, every 28 days (our days, natch) so it better be close to its bitty little sun to whip around that fast. The giveaway was a wobble in the star's position, as measured by doppler shift. Red dwarfs, or M-stars, are pretty dim. Upshot:...
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