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Post by moabiter on Jul 27, 2010 22:56:30 GMT -8
Millions of Earths? Talk causes a stir July 26 2010 Alan Boyle writes: A leader of the Kepler planet-hunting team has created a slow-moving scientific stir by telling an audience at a high-tech conference that our galaxy could harbor 100 million Earths, based on the space mission's raw data. The resulting buzz focuses not only on the findings, but also on the means by which they came to light. The conclusions drawn by Harvard astronomer Dimitar Sasselov totally make sense, based on the composition of our own solar system. If we look at the eight dominant planets, four of them are Earth-scale, two are Neptune-scale, and the other two are big gas giants. (And then there are hundreds or thousands of smaller worlds like Pluto.) During his July 16 talk at the TEDGlobal conference at Oxford, Sasselov observed that the preliminary results from Kepler were following that pattern. So far, planetary candidates "like Earth" - those that are no more than twice as wide as our own planet - make up the largest category in Kepler's database, according to a chart Sasselov used to illustrate his talk. The proportion is significantly more than that for Neptune-sized, Saturn-sized or Jupiter-sized candidates. (These observations came just after the eight-minute mark in the video embedded above.) cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/07/26/4756559-millions-of-earths-talk-causes-a-stir
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Post by moabiter on Nov 14, 2010 23:17:02 GMT -8
Pluto Might be Bigger, But Eris is More Massive Fri Nov 12, 2010 03:35 AM ET Although the event was predicted by astronomers, there was some uncertainty about who would get the best view -- this is, after all, the first time an occultation has been used to measure an object so distant (Eris is twice as far away from the sun as Pluto). All they knew was that the occultation would be visible from somewhere in South America. Right on time, the dwarf planet Eris blocked the star from view and three telescopes in Chile witnessed the star's disappearance. The starlight blinked out for 27 seconds at the La Silla Observatory, located at the southernmost edge of the Atacama Desert. 740 kilmeters (460 miles) north, two telescopes at the San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Explorations (SPACE) Observatory saw the dwarf planet block out starlight for 78 seconds. Now, as astronomers know the orbital velocity of Eris, by using the background star as a marker, they could deduce the dwarf planet's diameter. (The reason why the three telescope sites measured different occultation times is that Eris is spherical and therefore saw the starlight being blocked at different locations across Eris' disk.) It turns out that Eris could be a lot smaller than previously thought. So small in fact that it is roughly the same size as Pluto! It could even be smaller. news.discovery.com/space/pluto-might-be-bigger-but-eris-is-more-massive.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+C2C-InTheNews+%28Feed+-+Coast+to+Coast+-+In+the+News%29&utm_content=TwitterDwarf planets www.astronoo.com/en/dwarfPlanets.html
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Post by clone on Feb 3, 2011 2:21:36 GMT -8
February 02, 2011 The New Kepler exoplanet data - NASA videos and pictures NASA press release on the 1202 new Kepler telescope exoplanets. Exoplanets classified by size which are: - 68 Earth-size exoplanets with a radius (Rp) of less than 1.25 Earth radius (Re) - 288 super-Earth size exoplanets with 1.25 x Re < Rp ≤ 2.0 x Re - 662 Neptune-size exoplanets with 2.0 x Re < Rp ≤ 6.0 x Re - 165 Jupiter-size exoplanets with 6.0 x Re < Rp ≤ 15 x Re - 19 very-large-size with 15.0 x Re < Rp ≤ 2 The Feb 2, 2011 pictures and videos from NASA are at this link NASA's Kepler mission news page nextbigfuture.com/2011/02/new-kepler-exoplanet-data.html
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Post by CFBDSIR2149 on Nov 24, 2012 5:18:36 GMT -8
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope have identified a body that is very probably a planet wandering through space without a parent star. This is the most exciting free-floating planet candidate so far and the closest such object to the Solar System at a distance of about 100 light-years. Its comparative proximity, and the absence of a bright star very close to it, has allowed the team to study its atmosphere in great detail. This object also gives astronomers a preview of the exoplanets that future instruments aim to image around stars other than the Sun. www.eso.org/public/news/eso1245/Possible examples of such objects have been found before [1], but without knowing their ages, it was not possible for astronomers to know whether they were really planets or brown dwarfs — “failed” stars that lack the bulk to trigger the reactions that make stars shine. But astronomers have now discovered an object, labelled CFBDSIR2149 [2], that seems to be part of a nearby stream of young stars known as the AB Doradus Moving Group. AB Doradus is a pre-main sequence trinary star system in the constellation Dorado. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorado
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