All My High School Classmates Are Getting Married And/or Having Kids.....then Here I Am With My Sugar

Largest Collection of Planets EVER Discovered!

Guess what!? Our Kepler mission has verified 1,284 new planets, which is the single largest finding of planets to date. This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can possibly one day discover another Earth-like planet.

But what exactly does that mean? These planets were previously seen by our spacecraft, but have now been verified. Kepler’s candidates require verification to determine if they are actual planets, and not another object, such as a small star, mimicking a planet. This announcement more than doubles the number of verified planets from Kepler.

Since the discovery of the first planets outside our solar system more than two decades ago, researchers have resorted to a laborious, one-by-one process of verifying suspected planets. These follow-up observations are often time and resource intensive. This latest announcement, however, is based on a statistical analysis method that can be applied to many planet candidates simultaneously.

They employed a technique to assign each Kepler candidate a planet-hood probability percentage – the first such automated computation on this scale, as previous statistical techniques focused only on sub-groups within the greater list of planet candidates identified by Kepler. 

What that means in English: Planet candidates can be thought of like bread crumbs. If you drop a few large crumbs on the floor, you can pick them up one by one. But, if you spill a whole bag of tiny crumbs, you’re going to need a broom. This statistical analysis is our broom.

The Basics: Our Kepler space telescope measures the brightness of stars. The data will look like an EKG showing the heart beat. Whenever a planet passes in front of its parent star a viewed from the spacecraft, a tiny pulse or beat is produced. From the repeated beats, we can detect and verify the existence of Earth-size planets and learn about their orbits and sizes. This planet-hunting technique is also known as the Transit Method.

The number of planets by size for all known exoplanets, planets that orbit a sun-like star, can be seen in the above graph. The blue bars represent all previously verified exoplanets by size, while the orange bars represent Kepler’s 1,284 newly validated planets announced on May 10.

While our original Kepler mission has concluded, we have more than 4 years of science collected that produced a remarkable data set that will be used by scientists for decades. The spacecraft itself has been re-purposed for a new mission, called K2 – an extended version of the original Kepler mission to new parts of the sky and new fields of study.

The above visual shows all the missions we’re currently using, and plan to use, in order to continue searching for signs of life beyond Earth.

Following Kepler, we will be launching future missions to continue planet-hunting , such as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and the James Webb Space Telescope. We hope to continue searching for other worlds out there and maybe even signs of life-as-we-know-it beyond Earth.

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Saturn Photographed by Giacomo Venturin

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Life on an Icy Moon

Jupiter’s moon Europa is the size of the Earth’s moon, and yet it holds more than twice as much water as all of Earth’s oceans combined. Europa’s salty ocean covers the entire surface, and the crust is completely frozen over because the moon is 780,000,000 km from the sun and has an average temperature of -160 degrees Celsius. The icy moon’s orbit is eccentric, orbiting in an oval instead of a circle, and so Jupiter’s enormous gravitational pull constantly squeezes and stretches the moon, creating constant motion and likely the surface cracks too. This tidal heating generates warmth, which creates a significant chance that this distant ocean is harboring life. Radiation from Jupiter’s magnetosphere could destroy life at shallow depths, but new research suggests that there’s oxygen available in the subsurface ocean that could support oxygen-based metabolic processes. Scientists must now determine how deep such organisms must hide in order to avoid radiation, and therefore how deep we need to go to find them. The icy crust might be hundreds of metres or even kilometres thick, and so sending a probe through the surface would be difficult, but we have to try, because Europa is one of the best potential sources for extraterrestrial life in the solar system.

Read more—could the oceans be too acidic for life?

Planet Saturn and its moons Tethys and Dione were, photographed by the Voyager 1 space probe in November of 1980.