Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
NASA Space Earth Open Source Software Sun Microsystems News Science Technology

NASA's Planet Hunter Spots Record 1,284 New Planets, 9 In A Habitable Zone (networkworld.com) 83

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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

NASA's Planet Hunter Spots Record 1,284 New Planets, 9 In A Habitable Zone

Comments Filter:
  • by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @05:36AM (#52089739) Homepage

    Why do the editors (I assume) keep putting stuff in [ ]s?

    You don't need to identify every change you might have made to a submission (if that's what's happening). That kind of editing is supposed to be seamless. Highlighting it just leaves readers wondering if they're missing some significance.

  • What they've spotted is NOT a planet, but the EFFECT ON THE STAR that's probably caused by a planet.

    • by lgw ( 121541 )

      And?

      All modern physics/astronomy/cosmology is about statistical analysis of likely causes of observations. From the Higgs Boson to an Exoplanet, it's all about the confidence interval.

      And, really, when we find something that's the mass of a planet orbiting the star at the distance that planets do, not shining on its own, what else would you call it? Whatever it looks like, it's still a "planet".

  • by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @09:17AM (#52090613)

    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.

    • Heck, if one out of three is representative, then we probably just discovered three more life-bearing worlds! Not that I'd buy that, but it's hardly an argument against. And finding planets in the habitable zone is interesting primarily because it reveals places to look more closely at as we develop the technology to do so. Plus, as many others have pointed out, the "habitable zone" is only tuned to Earth-like life on the primary planet - Gas giant moons potentially expand that range quite a bit, while al

      • Right, regarding gas giant moons within our own solar system, you have the possibility that some contain liquid water deep inside which could sustain some kind life. Outside our solar system, there might be the possibility of something like the situation in Nemesis by Isaac Asimov, where you have a gas giant, with a large moon, in the habitable zone of a star. The gas giant is not habitable but the moon is. I also wonder if some of the larger than Earth size planets detected in habitable zones might act
    • The problem of extrapolating a single data point (this star system) into many should be obvious to anyone that understand math and statistics at all.

      Planets are abundant, we've finally confirmed this even in binary systems. Even Kepler (designed to hunt planets) has a hell of a time spotting earth size planets, though it can spot rocky worlds almost all of them are 2-3 times the size of earth and often on the close edge of the habital zone where they are easier to detect. We've never directly imaged one and

  • The discoveries were a result of an automated technique implemented in a publicly available custom software package called Vespa

    So which of these planets is Druidia?

  • Given that the two methods of detection are planets that orbit in plane that is nearly our parallel to view axis (solar transit), or planets that are massive enough to wobble a star and orbit in a plane that is nearly perpendicular to our view axis, what our we not seeing. I would think these circumstances would be the exceptions rather than the rule. Can we extrapolate how many planets orbit stars, given that we can only detect these special cases?

Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.

Working...