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Exoplanet hunter Kepler finds 5 new planets
by Jamie Anderson - January 5, 2010 - comments
The Kepler Space Telescope, a designated planet-hunting satellite, has found its first five planets
Los Angeles, CA, January 5 -- NASA's planet-seeking Kepler spacecraft, filled in some of the blanks and unveiled five hitherto unknown planets in the Milky Way Galaxy.
The announcement of the discovery of these very ‘hot planets’ was made at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.
The mission
Launched last year, the $591 million Kepler Mission is specially designed to survey the region of the Milky Way galaxy to learn more about scores of Earth-size and smaller planets in and around the habitable zone.
The aim of Kepler, which eyeballs about 156,000 stars within 3,000 light-years of Earth, is to determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets. The first find comes within the first 43 days of Kepler’s observations.
"These planets orbit quite close to their stars, so they're quite hot," Kepler science team leader William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field said of the new finds.
The findings
Given their extreme proximity to the stars, these planets orbit their stars once within every four days' time. To put things in perspective; Mercury, the innermost planet in the solar system, takes as many as 88 days to orbit the sun.
Referring to the fact that these planets scorch at temperatures above 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit, Borucki said, "Certainly they are no places to look for life. That will be coming later."
Apart from being extremely hot, the latest five planets are all enormous, with masses ranging from about 25 to 670 Earths. Four of the newly detected planets are 1.3 to 1.5 times wider than Jupiter in our solar system.
The last one, dubbed Kepler-4b, is the least massive, only about 0.6 times as wide as Jupiter and roughly 1.4 times the mass of Neptune.
Long way to go
"That is good news for exobiology (alien life) and good news for planet detection. Kepler is going to find a lot of planets," maintained astronomer Caty Pilachowski of Indiana University-Bloomington.
Habitable Earth-size planets might show up around smaller, cooler stars in Kepler's field of view, however the journey is likely to be tricky and time-consuming.
"The smaller the planet is, the harder it is to confirm. It takes more telescope time. We'll be very careful with those," says Kepler co-investigator Natalie Batalha, a professor of physics and astronomy at San Jose State University.