Friday, January 9, 2015
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Kepler's Exoplanets—And Don't Worry About the Natives (At Least for Now)
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Artist impression of Kepler hunting for earth-like exoplanets
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NASA has made a set of travel posters themed to
exoplanets while a nonprofit searches for life among them.
Recently, after four years of training the Kepler Space
Telescope on 150,000 distant stars, NASA scientists added eight new
candidates—including their thousanth overall—to the list of planets that
are just far enough away from their star to
be potentially habitable, according to the agency.
“We’re closer than we’ve ever been to finding Earth twins around other sun-like
stars,” said Fergal Mullally, a NASA scientist who led the search, in a
statement.
To celebrate, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory created travel posters for three
of the habitable planets that Kepler has found. Don't get too
excited: some have quirks that would still keep us out. One
planet, HIP 116454b, spins at the same rate as its star, which means that half of it is always
cold and dark, while the other half remains hot and sunny throughout its
nine-day orbit.
You can cross one danger of interstellar travel off the list,
though—aliens. A nonprofit called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence recently focused a different telescope on
HIP 116454b to look for radio signals that might indicate life, as Ian O'Neill
of Discovery reports. They found none (but will continue their
planet-by-planet search).
So which planets does NASA imagine we might visit? Kepler-186f is the
first to be featured in the travel poster series and for good reason—it was
also the first planet detected by the Kepler telescope that was roughly the
size of Earth.
Kepler-186f orbits a star that is “cooler and redder” than the sun, says NASA. That’s why the grass and trees appear red in
this poster: the agency says the plants' photosynthesis could be
affected by the red-wavelength photons of that star.
Photo:NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Next is a poster for HD 40307g, the agency’s
name for a planet that is double the size of Earth and has eight times as much
mass — making the gravitational pull way stronger.
Photo:NASA/JPL-Caltech
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The last planet to be featured in the series is
Kepler-16b, which actually orbits two stars — leading NASA to conceive of
an ultra-romantic double sunset.
 Photo:NASA/JPL-Caltech |
Unfortunately, a visit to Kepler-16b is probably
not in the cards since the surface temperature of the planet is roughly that of dry ice. That’s only if there is a surface, of course,
since it may also be nothing but gas.
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