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New Exoplanets

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Good start for a fine telescope. At the moment, there are about 100 other candidate planets they are investigating. These first five are extremely hot, most are larger than Jupiter and orbit their star in less than 5 days :eek:

2010 is going to be one heck of a year for exoplanet discovery. Some weird solar system configurations are about to be revealed and we're on the verge of discovering earth-like planets.

None of the five planets Kepler discovered would be habitable. All have temperatures at least as hot as molten lava, and two of the bodies, Kepler-5b and Kepler-8b, reside so close to their parent star that their average temperature is hot enough to melt iron, Borucki says.



The four hot, Jupiter-like planets have densities lower than that predicted for such giant, gaseous planets. One of these bodies, Kepler-7b, has one of the lowest densities—0.17 grams per cubic centimeter—of any known extrasolar planet. That's the same density as that of Styrofoam, Borucki noted during his talk. (By comparison, Jupiter’s average density is 1.33 grams per cubic centimeter, slightly higher than that of water, but Jupiter lies much farther from the sun than does Kepler-7b from its star.)
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Ezechiel said:
2010 is going to be one heck of a year for exoplanet discovery. Some weird solar system configurations are about to be revealed and we're on the verge of discovering earth-like planets.
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Well, as far as I understand it will take Kepler at least a couple of years to gather enough data to find what it is looking for :Earth-like planets in the habitability zone. It is slated for a three-year stare into about 100,000+ stars to accomplish this. At this time it can find the super Jupiters because it doesn't take as long to collect and analyze data for these large bodies, but it will take years longer to find the smaller ones.

Is there something else that you know of that will reveal all these exoplanets other than what the astronomers have already been doing?? I'd love to hear and have been quite excited about this topic for some time now. I really think it's only a matter of time before we identify what we think is a life harboring planet. What we do next is anyones guess.
 
TClaeys said:
but it will take years longer to find the smaller ones.
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The smaller the star, the closer the orbit zone that enables liquid water (safe zone) and the less time it takes to observe light dips. The larger the star the further away the earth-like planet needs to be... and the longer it takes to observe transits (hopefully the orbit falls in our line of sight).

Pretty crude when you think about it.. but still amazing when you think the light travelled for up to 400 years to reach us.

Mission ends in december 2012... just before our solar system crosses the galactic plane and life on earth gets irradiated... (lol just kidding)
 
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