P.J.
0
Jackpot! NASA's Kepler telescope finds 'mother lode' of 715 planets
Using a brand-new technique, scientists using NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope have found 715 confirmed planets huddling around 305 stars, nearly triple Kepler’s previous total of 246 confirmed planets in the Milky Way galaxy. Nearly 95% of them are smaller than Neptune, and four of them are in their star's habitable zone, the region where liquid water – a necessary ingredient for life as we know it – could exist.
Even though the planet-hunting telescope’s crucial pointing ability was crippled last year, data mined from the spacecraft are still turning up a trove of strange and wonderful worlds, researchers said – bringing them ever closer to finding "Earth 2.0."
“We’ve been able to open the bottleneck to access the mother lode and deliver to you more than 20 times as many planets as have ever been found and announced at once,” said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center who led one of two papers on the discovery set to be published in the Astrophysical Journal
Read more :
Jackpot! NASA's Kepler telescope finds 'mother lode' of 715 planets - latimes.com
Using a brand-new technique, scientists using NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope have found 715 confirmed planets huddling around 305 stars, nearly triple Kepler’s previous total of 246 confirmed planets in the Milky Way galaxy. Nearly 95% of them are smaller than Neptune, and four of them are in their star's habitable zone, the region where liquid water – a necessary ingredient for life as we know it – could exist.
Even though the planet-hunting telescope’s crucial pointing ability was crippled last year, data mined from the spacecraft are still turning up a trove of strange and wonderful worlds, researchers said – bringing them ever closer to finding "Earth 2.0."
“We’ve been able to open the bottleneck to access the mother lode and deliver to you more than 20 times as many planets as have ever been found and announced at once,” said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center who led one of two papers on the discovery set to be published in the Astrophysical Journal
Read more :
Jackpot! NASA's Kepler telescope finds 'mother lode' of 715 planets - latimes.com
