Scientists from around the world are gathered this week at NASA's
Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., for the second Kepler
Science Conference, where they will discuss the latest findings
resulting from the analysis of Kepler Space Telescope data.
Included in these findings is the discovery of 833 new candidate
planets, which will be announced today by the Kepler team. Ten of these
candidates are less than twice the size of Earth and orbit in their
sun's habitable zone, which is defined as the range of distance from a
star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet may be suitable
for liquid water.
At this conference two years ago, the Kepler team announced its first
confirmed habitable zone planet, Kepler-22b. Since then, four more
habitable zone candidates have been confirmed, including two in a single
system.
New Kepler data analysis and research also show that most stars in
our galaxy have at least one planet. This suggests that the majority of
stars in the night sky may be home to planetary systems, perhaps some
like our solar system.
"The impact of the Kepler mission results on exoplanet research and
stellar astrophysics is illustrated by the attendance of nearly 400
scientists from 30 different countries at the Kepler Science
Conference," said William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator
at Ames. "We gather to celebrate and expand our collective success at
the opening of a new era of astronomy."
From the first three years of Kepler data, more than 3,500 potential
worlds have emerged. Since the last update in January, the number of
planet candidates identified by Kepler increased by 29 percent and now
totals 3,538. Analysis led by Jason Rowe, research scientist at the SETI
Institute in Mountain View, Calif., determined that the largest
increase of 78 percent was found in the category of Earth-sized planets,
based on observations conducted from May 2009 to March 2012. Rowe's
findings support the observed trend that smaller planets are more
common.
An independent statistical analysis of nearly all four years of
Kepler data suggests that one in five stars like the sun is home to a
planet up to twice the size of Earth, orbiting in a temperate
environment. A research team led by Erik Petigura, doctoral candidate at
University of California, Berkeley, used publicly accessible data from
Kepler to derive this result.
Kepler data also fueled another field of astronomy dubbed
asteroseismology -- the study of the interior of stars. Scientists
examine sound waves generated by the boiling motion beneath the surface
of the star. They probe the interior structure of a star just as
geologists use seismic waves generated by earthquakes to probe the
interior structure of Earth.
"Stars are the building blocks of the galaxy, driving its evolution
and providing safe harbors for planets. To study the stars, one truly
explores the galaxy and our place within it," said William Chaplin,
professor for astrophysics at the University of Birmingham in the United
Kingdom. "Kepler has revolutionized asteroseismology by giving us
observations of unprecedented quality, duration and continuity for
thousands of stars. These are data we could only have dreamt of a few
years ago."
Kepler's mission is to determine what percentage of stars like the
sun harbor small planets the approximate size and temperature of Earth.
For four years, the space telescope simultaneously and continuously
monitored the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, recording a
measurement every 30 minutes. More than a year of the collected data
remains to be fully reviewed and analyzed.
Ames is responsible for the Kepler mission concept, ground system
development, mission operations, and science data analysis. NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed Kepler mission
development.
Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed
the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of
Colorado in Boulder.
The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts
and distributes Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA's 10th Discovery
Mission and was funded by the agency's Science Mission Directorate.
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