Nasa’s Kepler spacecraft is built to review regions in the Milky way to look for the “fraction in the numerous immeasureable stars” in our universe which might be competent in accommodating human life. The mission has confirmed the discovery of the first planet that exist in a habitable zone. Kepler‘s mission also has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, nearly doubling its known count. Ten of these candidates are near-Earth-size and orbit in the “habitable zone” of their host star. But this candidates require follow-up observations to verify if they are actually a planet.
The newly confirmed planet was called Kepler-22b, is the smallest yet found to orbit in the middle of the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun. The planet is about 2.4 times the radius of our planet. Scientists have not comfirmed yet if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth’s twin planets.
Kepler-22b is located 600 light-years away from us. While the planet is larger than Earth, that its orbit 290 days around a sun-like star smaller than our sun.
“This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin,” said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
“Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet,” said William Borucki, Kepler’s principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.
The Kepler science team employs ground-based telescopes as well as the Spitzer Space Telescope to evaluate findings on planet candidates that the spacecraft finds. The star field that Kepler observes within the constellations Cygnus and Lyra can only be noticed from ground-based observatories in early spring through early fall. The data from these kinds of findings helped them figure out which candidates can be confirmed as planets.
The Kepler team is organizing its inaugural science conference at Ames Dec. 5-9, announcing 1,094 new planet candidate discoveries. Since the last catalog was introduced in February, the number of planet candidates determined by Kepler has increased by 89% and now with a total of 2,326. Worth mentioning, 207 are just about Earth-size, 680 are super Earth-size, 1,181 are Neptune-size, 203 are Jupiter-size and 55 are larger than Jupiter.
So… What do you think is the meaning of this??