Milky Way May Contain 60 Billion Life Supporting Planets?!

Scientists using the Kepler spacecraft have redoubled their estimates on planets in the Milky Way that could support life.

Estimates now put the number at an astounding 60 billion planets that could support life.   This mind numbing figure comes on the heels of  Kepler's findings.

Scientists base their estimates on the most common star in the Milky Way, red dwarfs.  Their rational being that each red dwarf's habitable zone contains a life supporting planet. 

The problem though is red dwarf stars are exceedingly miserly with it's energy.   Dorian Abbot, an assistant professor in geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago suggests that planets in the "Goldilocks" zone may well have thick cloud cover to trap infrared energy.  

There is an excellent film concerning discovering extra-solar planets at THIS link

Milky Way May Have 2 Billion Earthlike Planets

Based on what Kepler's found so far, our Milky Way galaxy may be home to at least two billion Earthlike planets. Based on data from the Kepler space telescope, Dimitar Sasselov -- Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics concludes in a study that up to 2.7 percent of all suns, that resemble our own Sol, in the Milky Way may have "earthlike" planets. Kepler has confirmed 45 new planets and found an additional 1,235 planet candidates.

From the Daily Galaxy Article:

• "There are about a hundred billion sunlike stars within the Milky Way," said Joe Catanzarite, a scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "Two percent of those might have Earth analogs, so you have two billion Earth analog planets in the galaxy," he added.

Read complete Daily Galaxy article here

Kepler Discovers Tatooine?

From the Boing Boing blog I see where the Kepler Space Telescope has discovered Tatooine! Yep, well almost. One planet orbiting two stars!!! Now there is something I bet you never thought you would read in print...well as news at least!

Studies of Kepler 16b continue to turn up strange and unusual items. Recent articles noted that 16b had very strange orbital dynamics which expressed itself as orbits of varying speeds. It was thought that the anomalies might be an unseen "ghost" planet. However the truth might be even weirder. The unseen companion may be a very dim star with 16b in orbit with it and the main star in the system. 16b of course would be no Tatooine. Even orbiting as close to the primary as it does, (orbiting as close to it's sun as Venus orbits our sun) because both stars are so dim that instead of being a hot desert world like Tatooine, it would instead be in permanent arctic like conditions. If 16b had a solid surface, temperatures there would be a bone chilling -100 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Ghost" Planet Discovered

Now here is something VERY weird. NASA using the Kepler Space Telescope have located an planet that defies the laws of physics. Kepler 19-b circles its' sun in an orbit that should for all intents and purposes be impossible. Kepler 19-b speeds up and slows down its orbit for no apparent reason!

From the article:

• (Kepler 19-b) completes one orbit every nine days and seven hours. (But here is where the problem appears) sometimes it will complete the orbit five minutes faster than it should, and other times it will be five minutes slow.
• The explanation for this ... anomaly is the presence of a ... companion planet. (However no one has yet found) any direct sign of this planet, designated Kepler-19c. That makes this invisible exoplanet the first ever that is only known from its gravitational effect on another planet.
  

Centers for Astrophysics article

NASA Mission Finds Earth Candidates in Habitable Zone

NASA Kepler Mission continues to pay dividends. NASA reports that Kepler has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, the region around a star where water could exist on a planet's surface in liquid form. Five of the potential planets are near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of smaller, cooler stars than our sun. More investigation will be needed to determine if the bodies are indeed planets as well as more data on size and orbit.

Read the complete NASA article HERE

NASA's Kepler Telescope Discovers New Planetary System

Scientists using NASA's Kepler space telescope, have discovered a six planet system, designated Kepler 11, who's planets are made up of a mix of rock and gases. Kepler 11 is a yellow dwarf star, much like our own sun, located about 2,000 light years from Earth. According to the team at NASA's Ames Research Center, Kepler 11 is amazingly compact, amazingly flat and there's an amazingly large number of big planets orbiting close to their star. In other words, Kepler-11 has the fullest, most compact planetary system yet discovered beyond our own!

As much as the Kepler 11 system resembles our own, there are many startling differences. First all the planets are at least twice as large as Earth and stranger still ALL the planets orbit their primary at least twice as close to their primary with the inner most orbiting ten times closer to its star than Earth. Five of the planets of Kepler 11 orbit closer than any planet in our system. Think about that for a second....between Mercury and Sol, squeeze in 5 more planets! Now THAT is compact!

Oh and lets take a look at the science that is going on to detect these planets. First off, unless you have been in a cave for a few years, you understand that Kepler is not resolving the planets directly. Kepler measures the luminosity of a star. When the star's brightness fades, Kepler infers that a planet has passed between it and the star. The more a star fades, the larger the star. So, we are looking at a dwarf yellow star like our own. So it's a fairly dim star and small, plus it 2000 freakin light-years away! You do the math.... So 2000 ly distance away, a speck travels in front of the star, dimming it ever so infinitesimally! Imagine the calibration it takes to do that level of science!

Check out the complete story at Science daily

Kepler mission confirms the discovery of first rocky planet

NASA Ames researchers have released some really interesting news. The team has confirmed the existence of a rocky planet. The FIRST rocky planet outside our solar system. The planet is designated Kepler-10b. At about 1 1/2 times bigger than Earth it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.

Kepler-10b's sun resides in the Cygnus constellation about 560 light-years distant. The planet is truly an unusual discovery. Up to this point the planets being discovered had for the most part been gas giants many time the size of Earth. Even so, it could not support life. It orbits several times closer to its parent star than our planet Mercury. That makes the surface temperature hotter than a lava flow on Earth. Kepler-10b is so close in its orbit that its parent sun's magnetic field has stripped it of any atmosphere.

Below is some NASA animation of Kepler-10b and go here for the complete NASA article.





Thanks to Dan for the original post

Do astronomers have the right to keep their findings secret?

From Smart Planet

Honest! As weird as this sounds, it is going on right now. From the article:

• The Kepler mission is a NASA program designed to find other possible Earth-like planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. The team involved have painstakingly scoured a patch of space for the tiniest signs of small planets ... and were due to release their findings June 15th–but, ... have not.

The reasoning? The Kepler people and NASA agreed:

• to delay the complete release of their findings by six months, due to launch delays and other various problems that left the team with less time to analyze their findings

Their reasoning is that there is a high risk of false positives and they want time to refine their findings. But this is when it gets a bit weird:

• The team is releasing a list of 350 possible planets, but keeping their best 400 secret for a few months for further analysis.

You just have to think that the conspiracy nuts will have a field day with this decision! Does NASA really think that their decision will limit the controversy?

You be the judge. Click the article title for the complete work.