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Mars Base

Kepler Spies Smallest Alien Worlds Yet - ScienceNOW - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...spies-smallest-alien-worl.html

scibyte29 Kepler exoplanet small

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • 11 January 2012
  • very rough statistical analysis, the new discovery suggests that up to one-third of all red dwarf stars in the Milky Way galaxy are accompanied by small, rocky planets, many of which might be in wider orbits
Mars Base

NASA - NASA Discovers New Double-Star Planet Systems - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...kepler-34-35.html

scibyte29 NASA circumbinary exoplanet multimedia

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • An artist's rendition of the Kepler-35 planetary system
Mars Base

Tatooine the Sequel: Kepler Finds Two More Exoplanets Orbiting Binary Stars - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...oplanets-orbiting-binary-stars

scibyte29 circumbinary exoplanet multimedia

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • January 12, 2012
  • Artist's conception of the Kepler-35 system. Credit: Lynette Cook / extrasolar.spaceart.org / Nature
Mars Base

Transiting circumbinary planets Kepler-34 b and Kepler-35 b : Nature : Nature Publishin... - 0 views

www.nature.com/...nature10768.html

scibyte29 Kepler twin star

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Received 15 November 2011 Accepted 05 December 2011 Published online 11 January 2012
  • Questions remained, however, about the prevalence of circumbinary planets and their range of orbital and physical properties
Mars Base

3 Alien Planets Smaller Than Earth Found | Alien Planets & Solar Systems | NASA & Keple... - 0 views

www.space.com/s-kepler-telescope-aas219.html

scibyte29 exoplanet small Kepler

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • : 11 January 2012
  • orbit very close to their star, just 0.6 to 1.5 percent the distance from Earth to the sun
  • surface temperatures of these planets range from 720 Kelvin (836 degrees F) to 450 Kelvin (350 degrees),"
Mars Base

NASA - NASA's Kepler Mission Finds Three Smallest Exoplanets - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...smallest-exoplanets.html

scibyte29 Kepler small NASA multimedia

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • 01.11.12 
  • Mini Planetary System: This artist's conception illustrates KOI-961. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
  • Sizing Up Exoplanets: This chart compares artists' concepts of the smallest known exoplanets, or planets orbiting outside the solar system, to our own planets Mars and Earth. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 'Honey I Shrunk the Planetary System': This artist's concept compares the KOI-961 planetary system to Jupiter and the largest four of its many moons. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Mars Base

Some Newfound Planets Are Something Else - Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...und_planets_are_something_else

scibyte50 Kepler exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 08 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • When the Kepler spacecraft finds a giant planet closely orbiting a star, there’s a one in three chance that it’s not really a planet at all.
  • according to a new study
  • results, posted June 5 on arXiv.org, suggest that 35 percent of candidate giants snuggled close to bright stars are impostors, known in the planet-hunting business as false-positives
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Out of more than 2,300 possible planets, only 46 fell into that category
  • Eleven of these were already known planets. Santerne’s team confirmed nine more
  • The remaining 26 candidates included 13 unknowns, two failed brown dwarf stars, and 11 members of binary star systems
  • not everything that darkens a star is a planet
  • After distributing the unknowns according to the observed ratios of objects, the team arrived at the 35 percent false-positive rate.
  • scientists don’t consider it a serious flaw for Kepler
  • percentage is very low compared to all other transit programs
  • Short period transiting planets are exotic objects, we don’t expect them to be everywhere
  • The potential billion planets are more expected to be small, long-period planets. We didn’t kill those ones, fortunately
Mars Base

Faraway moon or faint star? Possible exomoon found - 0 views

phys.org/...y-moon-faint-star-exomoon.html

scibyte126 exoplanets

shared by Mars Base on 11 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • NASA-funded researchers have spotted the first signs of an "exomoon," and though they say it's impossible to confirm its presence
  • The discovery was made by watching a chance encounter of objects in our galaxy, which can be witnessed only once
  • won't have a chance to observe the exomoon candidate again
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • can expect more unexpected finds like this.
  • international study
  • using telescopes
  • technique, called gravitational microlensing, takes advantage of chance alignments between stars
  • When a foreground star passes between us and a more distant star, the closer star can act like a magnifying glass to focus and brighten the light of the more distant one
  • These brightening events usually last about a month
  • If the foreground star—or what astronomers refer to as the lens—has a planet circling around it, the planet will act as a second lens to brighten or dim the light even more
  • carefully scrutinizing these brightening events, astronomers can figure out the mass of the foreground star relative to its planet.
  • the foreground object could be a free-floating planet, not a star
  • astronomers are actively looking for exomoons—for example, using data from NASA's Kepler mission - so far, they have not found any.
  • In the new study, the nature of the foreground, lensing object is not clear. The ratio of the larger body to its smaller companion is 2,000 to 1.
  • That means the pair could be either a small, faint star circled by a planet about 18 times the mass of Earth—or a planet more massive than Jupiter coupled with a moon weighing less than Earth.
  • astronomers have no way of telling which of these two scenarios is correct
  • One possibility is for the lensing system to be a planet and its moon
  • The answer to the mystery lies in learning the distance to the circling duo
  • A lower-mass pair closer to Earth will produce the same kind of brightening event as a more massive pair located farther away
  • once a brightening event is over, it's very difficult to take additional measurements of the lensing system and determine the distance
  • The true identity of the exomoon candidate and its companion, a system dubbed MOA-2011-BLG-262, will remain unknown
  • In the future, however, it may be possible to obtain these distance measurements during lensing events
  • NASA's Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes, both of which revolve around the sun in Earth-trailing orbits, are far enough away from Earth to be great tools for the parallax-distance technique.
  • The basic principle of parallax can be explained by holding your finger out, closing one eye after the other, and watching your finger jump back and forth
  • A distant star, when viewed from two telescopes spaced really far apart, will also appear to move
  • When combined with a lensing event, the parallax effect alters how a telescope will view the resulting magnification of starlight
  • Though the technique works best using one telescope on Earth and one in space, such as Spitzer or Kepler, two ground-based telescopes on different sides of our planet can also be used
  • Meanwhile, surveys
  • are turning up more and more planets
  • These microlensing surveys have discovered dozens of exoplanets so far, in orbit around stars and free-floating
  • A previous NASA-funded study, also led by the MOA team, was the first to find strong evidence for planets the size of Jupiter roaming alone in space, presumably after they were kicked out of forming planetary systems
  • The new exomoon candidate, if real, would orbit one such free-floating planet.
Mars Base

May 15 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on May 15th, died, and events - 0 views

todayinsci.com/5_15.htm

scibye130 LookingBackMay

shared by Mars Base on 11 May 14 - No Cached
  • Kepler's Law
  • In 1618, Johannes Kepler discovered his harmonics law published in his five-volume work Harmonices Mundi (Harmony of the Worlds, 1619). He attempted to explain proportions and geometry in planetary motions by relating them to musical scales and intervals (an extension of what Pythagoras had described as the “harmony of the spheres”.) Kepler said each planet produces musical tones during its revolution about the sun, and the pitch of the tones varies with the angular velocities of those planets as measured from the sun. The Earth sings Mi, Fa, Mi. At very rare intervals all planets would sing in perfect concord. Kepler proposed that this may have happened only once in history, perhaps at the time of creation.«
Mars Base

Kepler Discovers Earth-Sized Mystery Planet - Popular Mechanics - 0 views

www.popularmechanics.com/...-sized-mystery-planet-16101131

scibyte108 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • it is difficult to measure the mass of planets that Kepler finds
  • it hard for ground-based telescopes to spot the subtle wobble of the star
  • since
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • orbits
  • close to its star, the planet exerts a greater gravitational pull on the star that it would if it were as far as Earth is from our sun
Mars Base

Astronomers answer key question: How common are habitable planets? - 0 views

phys.org/...-common-habitable-planets.html

scibyte109

shared by Mars Base on 07 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • astronomers analyzed all four years of Kepler data in search of Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of sun-like stars
  • Based on this analysis, they estimate that 22 percent of stars like the sun have potentially habitable Earth-size planets, though not all may be rocky or have liquid water
  • NASA's Kepler spacecraft
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • provided enough data to complete its mission objective: to determine how many of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy have potentially habitable planets
  • Based on a statistical analysis
  • astronomers now estimate that one in five stars like the sun have planets about the size of Earth and a surface temperature conducive to life.
  • nearly 20 years since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet around a normal star
  • Since then we have learned that most stars have planets of some size and that Earth-size planets are relatively common in close-in orbits that are too hot for life
  • Earth-size planets in Earth-size orbits are not necessarily hospitable to life, even if they orbit in the habitable zone of a star where the temperature is not too hot and not too cold
  • thick atmospheres, making it so hot at the surface that DNA-like molecules would not survive
  • rocky surfaces that could harbor liquid water suitable for living organisms
  • Last week,
  • provided hope that many such planets actually are rocky
  • NASA launched the Kepler space telescope in 2009 to look for planets that cross in front of, or transit, their stars, which causes a slight diminution – about one hundredth of one percent – in the star's brightness
  • 150,000 stars photographed every 30 minutes for four years
  • reported more than 3,000 planet candidates
  • the Keck Telescopes in Hawaii
  • help them determine each star's true brightness and calculate the diameter of each transiting planet, with an emphasis on Earth-diameter planets.
  • The team's definition of habitable is that a planet receives between four times and one-quarter the amount of light that Earth receives from the sun
  • Independently
  • focused on the 42,000 stars that are like the sun or slightly cooler and smaller, and found 603 candidate planets orbiting them
  • Only 10 of these were Earth-size, that is, one to two times the diameter of Earth and orbiting their star at a distance where they are heated to lukewarm temperatures suitable for life
  • Accounting for missed planets, as well as the fact that only a small fraction of planets are oriented so that they cross in front of their host star as seen from Earth, allowed them to estimate that 22 percent of all sun-like stars in the galaxy have Earth-size planets in their habitable zones.
  • All of the potentially habitable planets found in their survey are around K stars, which are cooler and slightly smaller than the sun
  • analysis shows that the result for K stars can be extrapolated to G stars like the sun
Mars Base

NASA's Kepler Mission Finds Three Smallest Exoplanets - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory - 0 views

www.jpl.nasa.gov/...news.cfm

scibyte29 exoplanet small

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • January 11, 2012
  • Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Finding one as small as Mars is amazing, and hints that there may be a bounty of rocky planets all around us."
  • Red dwarfs are the most common kind of star in our Milky Way galaxy. The discovery of three rocky planets around one red dwarf suggests that the galaxy could be teeming with similar rocky planets.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In December 2011, scientists announced
  • : a planet 2.4 times the size of Earth
  • Later in the month
  • team announced the discovery of the first Earth-size planets
Mars Base

Mars-sized planet orbits red dwarf star - 0 views

www.astronomynow.com/...11mars

scibyte29 Kepler small

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • 11 January 2012
  • The new three planet system hosts planets that are all smaller than Earth. Image: NASA/JPL Caltech.
  • eight out of ten stars in the Galaxy are red dwarfs
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • suggests that this breed of star could be the place to search for Earth-like rocky planets
  • 85 out of 900 potential planetary systems identified by Kepler have been found in red dwarf systems.
  • A comparison of KOI-961 and its tiny planets with our own planet Jupiter and its four large moons. Image: NASA/JPL Caltech
  • KOI-961 also bears striking resemblance to the well-studied nearby red dwarf, Barnard's Star, which is only six light years away
Mars Base

Ceres (dwarf planet) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Ceres_(dwarf_planet)

scibyte118 LookingBack LookingBackFed LookingBackJan

shared by Mars Base on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • in 1772, first suggested that an undiscovered planet could exist between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter
  • Kepler had already noticed the gap between Mars and Jupiter in 1596.
  • Giuseppe Piazzi at the Academy of Palermo
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • discovered Ceres on 1 January 1801
  • Instead of a star, Piazzi had found a moving star-like object, which he first thought was a comet
  • Piazzi observed Ceres a total of 24 times, the final time on 11 February 1801, when illness interrupted his observations
  • The information was published in the September 1801
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