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NASA's Kepler mission is searching for Earth-like planets by looking for them to cross the face of alien stars.
CREDIT: NASA
Astronomers have discovered 41 new alien planets in one sweep by analyzing how each world gravitationally yanks on its neighbors.
The newly confirmed exoplanets were spotted by NASA's prolific Kepler space telescope, which has detected more than 2,300 potential alien worlds since its March 2009 launch. The new finds, announced in two separate papers, bring the number of verified Kepler worlds to 115 and the total exoplanet tally to nearly 800.
"Typically planets are announced one or two at a time — it's quite exceptional to have 27 announced in a single paper, or 41 in two," said Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist at the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics in Batavia, Ill. Steffen is lead author of one of the studies.
"It goes to show how rich the Kepler data are and how useful these new methods can be," Steffen told SPACE.com. [Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]
Kepler flags exoplanet candidates via the transit method, which looks for dips in a star's brightness caused by a planet crossing in front of it. Confirming these candidates can be a tricky and laborious process, however, requiring follow-up observations by ground-based instruments or further analysis of Kepler's data.
Two independent teams of researchers took the latter tack to confirm the 41 new alien planets. They delved deep into the telescope's observations, studying how each world's gravity tugs on its sibling planets. These slight pulls cause regular variations in the planets' orbits, affecting when they cross in front of their stars
Read more at: Kepler finds first multi-planet system around a binary starThis is an artist's rendition of the Kepler-47 system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle NASA's Kepler mission has found the first multi-planet solar system orbiting a binary star, characterized in large part by University of Texas at Austin astronomers using two telescopes at the university's McDonald Observatory in West Texas. The finding, which proves that whole planetary systems can form in a disk around a binary star, is published in the August 28 issue of the journal Science.
http://kepler.nasa.gov/news/nasakeplernews/index.cfm?fuseaction=ShowNews&NewsID=228 "It's Tatooine, right?" said McDonald Observatory astronomer Michael Endl. "But this was not shown in Star Wars," he said, referring to the periodic changes in the amount of daylight falling on a planet with two suns. Measurements of the star's orbits showed that daylight on the planets would vary by a large margin over the 7.4-Earth-day period as the two stars completed their mutual orbits, each moving closer to, then farther from, the planets (which are themselves moving). The binary star in question is called Kepler-47. The primary star is about the same mass as the Sun, and its companion is an M-dwarf star one-third its size. The inner planet is three times the size of Earth and orbits the binary star every 49.5 days, while the outer planet is 4.6 times the size of Earth with an orbit of 303.2 days. The outer planet is the first planet found to orbit a binary star within the "habitable zone," where liquid water could exist and thus create a home for life. However, the planet's size (about the same as Uranus) means that it is an icy giant, and not an abode for life. It's a tantalizing taste of discoveries waiting to be made. The combination of observations from the NASA mission and McDonald Observatory allowed astronomers to understand the characteristics of Kepler-47's two stars and two planets.
Australia yesterday unveiled a colossal radio telescope that will allow astronomers to detect distant galaxies and explore the depths of the universe with unprecedented precision. The Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, at the remote Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in the Western Australian desert, is made up of 36 antennae, each 12m in diameter. The A$140 million (US$143.4 million) facility can survey the sky much faster than existing telescopes, with the antennae sensitive to faint radiation from the Milky Way, giving it the ability to detect distant galaxies.
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisations ASKAP director Brian Boyle said studying the radio waves would tell astronomers unique details about the cosmos. They can tell about the gas from which stars were formed and about exotic objects pulsars and quasars that really push the boundaries of our knowledge of the physical laws in the universe, he said. Radio-astronomy also gives us an insight into the very beginnings of the universe.
Australian Science Minister Chris Evans said the telescope was a major step forward for innovation in Australia. This will be 50 years worth of scientific research performed in Australia, providing world-leading scientific knowledge about our galaxies, he said. It will be the worlds most powerful radio astronomy telescope and has huge capabilities way beyond anything that currently exists, Evans told ABC radio. The telescope is part of Australias contribution to the broader US$2.5 billion SKA project, jointly hosted with South Africa and New Zealand, which is to have far greater capabilities.
That project will use a forest of antennae, spread across remote terrain, to pick up radio signals from cosmic phenomena that cannot be detected by optical telescopes. It will be 50 times more powerful than current radio telescopes and will explore exploding stars, black holes, dark energy and traces of the universes origins. Boyle said the ASKAP telescope will see more than 350 researchers from over 130 institutions undertaking 10 survey science projects. The search for extraterrestrial life was a secondary objective. Its almost a parallel activity to all the survey work thats being done, Boyle said.
Australia unveils colossal radio telescope - Taipei Times
Launched in 2009, Keplers mission was to find Earth-sized planets in or near the habitable zone, the region around a sun-like star where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet. The missions principal investigator said Kepler has been spectacularly successful. At the beginning of the mission, no one knew whether Earth-sized planets were abundant or rare in our galaxy. Now at the completion of the Kepler observations, we know that our galaxy is filled to the brim with planets," William Borucki said. "Its likely when you look up at the sky at night and see the sky covered with stars, most of the stars have planets."
Kepler discovered 135 planets and over 3,500 planet candidates with a wide range of sizes and orbital distances. Most of these planets are small, like the Earth. The four-year mission was extended in 2012, but ended last week after engineers failed to repair two broken reaction wheels necessary to precisely point the spacecraft. Deputy project manager Charles Sobeck says the decision was obvious. The wheels are sufficiently damaged that they cannot sustain spacecraft pointing control for any extended period of time, said Sobeck.
Artist's rendering of the Kepler Space Telescope in orbit.
With its observational capability compromised, the Kepler team is looking into whether the space telescope can conduct a different type of mission, potentially including an exoplanet search, using the two operational reaction wheels and thrusters. NASA has called on the science community for ideas. They are not proposals. They are not asking for funds," Borucki said. "They are suggesting ideas and we look at them [and ask], 'Which of these would be practical? Which of these could we do at a reasonable cost?'
Keplers scientific mission is not over. The scientific team is now focusing on data collected by the spacecraft over the past four years, which Borucki expects will yield hundreds if not thousands of new discoveries. And so basically in the next few years when we complete this analysis we will be able to answer the questions that inspired the Kepler mission: Are Earths common or rare in our galaxy? he said. Borucki sees Keplers journey is a critical first step in the exploration of our galaxy. NASA is scheduled to launch a follow-up mission to Kepler in 2017. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will look for larger, brighter planets closer to our solar system than Kepler did.
Kepler Telescope's Planet-hunting Days End
Researchers at the University of Maryland who made the claim realize its a controversial view, but they say their model indicates the spacecraft left the solar system over a year ago on July 27, 2012, to be exact. Voyager is truly beginning its travels through the Milky Way," said University of Maryland research scientist Marc Swisdak, lead author of a new paper published online this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The U.S. space agency, NASA, which operates Voyager, has recently published papers saying Voyager 1 is still in a zone influenced by the Sun called the heliopause, something the Maryland researchers call a fuzzily defined transition zone that is both of unknown structure and location. The controversy lies over the importance in the shift of the magnetic field as the probe passes out of the Suns influence compared to the level of solar particles and galactic particles measured by the spacecraft.
Swisdak says looking at the magnetic field difference as NASA is doing may be the wrong indicator. He says that while you might expect a shift in the magnetic field once outside the solar system, theres no reason to think the magnetic fields should have anything to do with one another. What were arguing is that a lack of shift is consistent with going outside [the solar system, he said. Swisdak says that while magnetic data should not be ignored, the particle data is more compelling. According to Swisdaks research, there were successive dips in the solar particles with a corresponding increase in galactic electrons and protons. Researchers say that last summer, the solar particle counts disappeared and only galactic particles remained. The magnetic data is consistent with [leaving the solar system], he said.
Voyager 1 is more than 11 billion miles away from Earth. Some researchers say it has left the Solar System, but that remains a topic of debate.
Swisdak argues that the NASAs heliopause is not a surface neatly separating "outside" and "inside." His research concludes rather that its both porous to certain particles and layered with complex magnetic structure. At the edges of the heliopause, Swisdaks research showed that there is a complex set of nested magnetic islands that he says, spontaneously arise in a magnetic field due to a fundamental instability. Within these magnetic islands, drops in solar particle counts and surges in galactic particle counts can occur even without changes in the magnetic fields. Swisdak calls the longevity of Voyager impressive considering that is computers are less powerful than the average smart phone or pocket calculator. Talking about the controversy over whether or not the space probe has left the solar system, Swisdak says that on one level, its important because Voyager 1 is providing humanitys first measurements outside the cocoon of the sun.
On a scientific level, he says a lot of astronomy is done on an indirect basis. This gives us our first [direct] measurements of what its like out there, he said. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1s primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. The probe discovered active volcanoes on Jupiters moon Io and showed the intricacies of Saturns rings. Voyager is also well-known for carrying greetings from Earth on a gold plated phonograph record containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. Voyager 1 continues to send back data and has enough power to keep operating until 2020. But given its vast distance, that data takes almost 18 hours to get back to Earth.
Paper: Voyager 1 Leaves Solar System
