Today I received an update on my phone from CNN explaining
that "3 new planets could host life". Immediately this caught my
attention so, I decided to read the article and share it through my blog.
Today, April 18th 2013, scientists believe to have discovered three
planets outside of our own solar system that may be habitable to life. The author of the article, Elizabeth Landau,
discusses how researchers believe that water can exist on these planets.
The Kepler satellite as named through NASA, scans
space in hopes of finding earth-like planets. Kepler 62 happens to be the host
star which would be equivalent to our host star, the sun. The Kepler satellite
has discovered Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f which are two of the three planets
found. The third planet is Kepler-69c but the
focus appears to mostly be on Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f. Although these planets appear to be "super earth" size, if life were to be on them, it would be like nothing we have experienced before.
Caption: This diagram lines up planets
recently discovered by Kepler in terms of their sizes, compared to Earth.
Kepler-22b was announced in December 2011; the three Super-Earths were
announced April 18, 2013. All of them could potentially host life, but we do
not yet know anything definitive about their compositions or atmosphere. Photo taken from CNN.com, "3 new planets could host life" article.
Author of
article: Elizabeth Landau
- To read the whole article you can visit: http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/18/us/planet-discovery/index.html?iref=allsearch
The article to the Kepler experiment can
be found on sciencemag.org in the science journal.
- Title: KEPLER-62: A FIVE-PLANET SYSTEM WITH PLANETS OF 1.4 AND 1.6 EARTH
RADII IN THE HABITABLE ZONE
- DOI: 10:1126. I believe you must be a member or
purchase the article for further reading other than the abstract reported by
William J. Borucki etc.
To learn more about the Kepler project you can also visit: http://kepler.nasa.gov/
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