Kepler: Milky Way is full of planet Earths

Wisdom Quarterly; TheEconomist.com, Nov. 9, 2013

Astronaut Sandra Bullock does complicated stuff above the planet in Gravity (AP).

 

Latest batch of results from Kepler is illuminating and baffling

When it comes to public appreciation of astronomy, NASA’s exoplanet-hunting space telescope Kepler is the most successful instrument the agency has launched since Hubble. 

 

Astronomers have been spotting exoplanets -- those that orbit stars other than the sun -- since the 1990s. But Kepler has transformed the field from a cottage industry into a production line.

 

On Nov. 4th astronomers gathered at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California to hear the latest news. The headline was the release of the most recent batch of data from the spacecraft. The 833 new planets thus identified bring the total found by Kepler to 3,538.

The akasha deva loka, space, from Hubble telescope's ultra deep slice (onbeing.org)

  

Technically these are only “candidate” planets, whose presence is inferred by the tiny dimming they cause when they pass in front of their host stars. Such candidates must await confirmation by other telescopes before being promoted to full discoveries. But astronomers expect a low rate of false positives.

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This exoplanetary smorgasbord allows researchers to conduct statistical analyses and extrapolate Kepler’s results to the rest of the galaxy. A group led by Erik Petigura of the University of California, Berkeley, having crunched the numbers, told the meeting that around a fifth of sun-like stars in the Milky Way [Galaxy] are likely to host planets roughly the size and temperature of Earth.

By the researchers’ definition, sun-like stars are a fifth of the total, so that means only about one star in 25 would have such a planet. But the galaxy is a big place, so if they are right there are billions of Earthlike planets in it. The closest is expected to be less than 12 light-years from Earth. More

Space is full of life. Cosmonaut reveals what NASA will not. Starts at 2:33