Publisher's Note: I received an email this morning from the National UFO Center and one of its top posts was entitled, "We Almost Doubled Just Today the Number of Planets Known to Humanity". According to the article 715 new planets that could sustain life have been discovered outside of our galaxy. Excellent read. Enjoy Dirk
WASHINGTON (AP) — Our galaxy is looking far more crowded and hospitable. NASA on Wednesday confirmed a bonanza of 715 newly discovered planets outside our solar system.
Click here to enlarge top photo.
Scientists using the planet-hunting Kepler telescope pushed the number of planets discovered in the galaxy to about 1,700. Twenty years ago, astronomers had not found any planets circling stars other than the ones revolving around our sun.
“We almost doubled just today the number of planets known to humanity,” NASA planetary scientist Jack Lissauer said in a Wednesday teleconference, calling it “the big mother lode.”
Astronomers used a new confirmation technique to come up with the largest single announcement of a batch of exoplanets – what planets outside our solar system are called.
While Wednesday’s announcements were about big numbers, they also were about implications for life behind those big numbers.
All the new planets are in systems like ours where multiple planets circle a star. The 715 planets came from looking at just 305 stars. They were nearly all in size closer to Earth than gigantic Jupiter.
‘We Almost Doubled Just Today the Number of Planets Known to Humanity’
And four of those new exoplanets orbit their stars in “habitable zones” where it is not too hot or not too cold for liquid water which is crucial for life to exist.
Douglas Hudgins, NASA’s exoplanet exploration program scientist, called Wednesday’s announcement a major step toward Kepler’s ultimate goal: “finding Earth 2.0.”
It’s a big step in not just finding other Earths, but “the possibility of life elsewhere,” said Lisa Kaltenegger, a Harvard and Max Planck Institute astronomer who wasn’t part of the discovery team.
The four new habitable zone planets are all at least twice as big as Earth so that makes them more likely to be gas planets instead of rocky ones like Earth – and less likely to harbor life.
So far Kepler has found nine exoplanets in the habitable zone, NASA said. Astronomers expect to find more when they look at all four years of data collected by the now-crippled Kepler; so far they have looked at two years.
Planets in the habitable zone are likely to be farther out from their stars because it is hot close in. And planets farther out take more time orbiting, so Kepler has to wait longer to see it again.
Another of Kepler’s latest discoveries indicates that “small planets are extremely common in our galaxy,” said MIT astronomer Sara Seagar, who wasn’t part of the discovery team. “Nature wants to make small planets.”
And, in general, smaller planets are more likely to be able to harbor life than big ones, Kaltenegger said.
Source: http://nationalufocenter.com
This image is an artistic rendition of a nomad object wandering the interstellar medium. The object is intentionally blurry to represent uncertainty about whether it has an atmosphere.This image is an artistic rendition of a nomad object wandering the interstellar medium. The object is intentionally blurry to represent uncertainty about whether it has an atmosphere. A nomadic object may be an icy body akin to an object found in the outer solar system, a more rocky material akin to asteroid or even a gas giant similar in composition to the most massive solar system planets and exoplanets.Our galaxy may be awash in homeless planets, wandering through space instead of orbiting a star.In fact, there may be 100,000 times more "nomad planets" in the Milky Way than stars, according to a new study by researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), a joint institute of Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.If observations confirm the estimate, this new class of celestial objects will affect current theories of planet formation and could change our understanding of the origin and abundance of life."If any of these nomad planets are big enough to have a thick atmosphere, they could have trapped enough heat for bacterial life to exist," said Louis Strigari, leader of the team that reported the result in a paper submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Although nomad planets don't bask in the warmth of a star, they may generate heat through internal radioactive decay and tectonic activity.Searches over the past two decades have identified more than 500 planets outside our solar system, almost all of which orbit stars. Last year, researchers detected about a dozen nomad planets, using a technique called gravitational microlensing, which looks for stars whose light is momentarily refocused by the gravity of passing planets.The research produced evidence that roughly two nomads exist for every typical, so-called main-sequence star in our galaxy. The new study estimates that nomads may be up to 50,000 times more common than that.To arrive at what Strigari himself called "an astronomical number," the KIPAC team took into account the known gravitational pull of the Milky Way galaxy, the amount of matter available to make such objects and how that matter might divvy itself up into objects ranging from the size of Pluto to larger than Jupiter. Not an easy task, considering no one is quite sure how these bodies form. According to Strigari, some were probably ejected from solar systems, but research indicates that not all of them could have formed in that fashion."To paraphrase Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, if correct, this extrapolation implies that we are not in Kansas anymore, and in fact we never were in Kansas," said Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science, author of The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets, who was not involved in the research. "The universe is riddled with unseen planetary-mass objects that we are just now able to detect."A good count, especially of the smaller objects, will have to wait for the next generation of big survey telescopes, especially the space-based Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope and the ground-based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, both set to begin operation in the early 2020s.A confirmation of the estimate could lend credence to another possibility mentioned in the paper – that as nomad planets roam their starry pastures, collisions could scatter their microbial flocks to seed life elsewhere."Few areas of science have excited as much popular and professional interest in recent times as the prevalence of life in the universe," said co-author and KIPAC Director Roger Blandford. "What is wonderful is that we can now start to address this question quantitatively by seeking more of these erstwhile planets and asteroids wandering through interstellar space, and then speculate about hitchhiking bugs."Additional authors included KIPAC member Matteo Barnabè and affiliate KIPAC member Philip Marshall of Oxford University. The research was supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Royal Astronomical Society.Source : http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/february/slac-nomad-planets-022312.html