NASA scientists have discovered more than 20 planets beyond the solar system with Kepler telescope data, which might harbor life.
Nasa scientists have found 20 new planets that could support life – raising hopes that there could be far more habitable worlds out there than previously thought. The discoveries were made by Nasa’s Kepler mission to discover worlds with a similar makeup to Earth in the hope that they already hold life or may be able to host humans in the future.
Many have years that are notably similar to ours and so avoid the problems of the “short” years that often cause problems for other planets, and seem to have temperatures very similar to our very life-encouraging climate.
Planet KOI-7923.0 The most encouraging of the new finds is a planet outside our solar system that has been dubbed KOI-7923.0. It’s year is slightly longer than Earth’s, at 395 days, while it is slightly smaller, at 97 per cent of our world. It is also slightly colder because it is further from its sun, which, in turn, is slightly less warm than our sun.
As such, it is likely to resemble the colder areas of Earth but is still large and warm enough to hold liquid water essential to life as we know it, scientists said. “If you had to choose one to send a spacecraft to, it’s not a bad option,” Jeff Coughlin, one of the scientists involved in the project told the New Scientist magazine. The Kepler mission has found thousands of planets outside the solar system in recent years – but this latest batch is the most promising yet, scientists say.
“If you had to choose one to send a spacecraft to, it’s not a bad option,” Jeff Coughlin, a team leader on the Kepler project and one of the scientists who found the new planets, told the New Scientist, in an interview about the news.
The scientists relay their new findings in an online paper that gives more detail than ever before on the likelihood of the planets being like our own.
The planets found as part of that study have a 70-80% of being solid candidates for habitable worlds, according to the scientists. But they need to do further work to confirm that – work that has become difficult because the Kepler spacecraft, used to collect data on these exoplanets, suffered technical problems that have made it less easy to see through.
Scientist working on Kepler have also discovered the “Rosetta Stone” which appear to show that our own solar cycles are not unique in the galaxy.
Observers of the star HD 173701 say it is almost identical to our Sun in terms of size, mass and age, but has a metallicity twice as high as our own star.
Travis Metcalfe, one of the author’s of a paper in The Astrophysical Journal, told Forbes magazine: “This star is a Rosetta Stone for stellar dynamos - despite having the same mass and age as the sun, its cycle period is 7.4 years instead of 11.”
Christoffer Karoff, the paper’s lead author and an astronomer at Denmark’s Aarhus University, said: “We show that the chemical composition of a sun-like star can influence the dynamo generated in the star.”
Earlier this year the Kepler spacecraft discovered 219 new exoplanet candidates, 10 of which could be habitable. There are around 4,034 observed potential planets in our galaxy, according to Nasa's Ames Research Centre.
NASA’s space observatory was launched on March 7, 2009 with the aim of looking for Earth-like planets that were orbiting other stars.
Kepler uses a photometer that continually monitors the brightness of more than 145,000 stars within a fixed field of vision.
That information is then transmitted to Earth where it is analysed to look for periodic dimming, possibly caused by exoplanets across its view.
Source: New Scientist