The telescope, known as Plato, will monitor thousands of bright stars over a large area of the sky, in the hopes of discovering Earth-sized planets that could harbour aliens.
NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler mission recently released what it calls the most comprehensive and detailed catalog of candidate exoplanets. Ten of these new worlds are close in size to the Earth and reside within their star’s habitable zone, a location that would permit liquid water on the surface of an Earth-like world.
The first detection of gravitational waves by the US ground-based detector Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory (LIGO) in 2015 gave LISA a boost followed by the success past year of ESA’s LISA Pathfinder mission, a demonstrator of the technology that would be needed for the full-scale detector.
That is how scientists arrived at the 4,034 planet candidates from Kepler’s four-year observing campaign in the constellation Cygnus.
Of those, 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets.
The spacecraft is going to have 26 telescopes and will join NASA’s Kepler observatory as a spacecraft dedicated to finding exoplanets, planets revolving around stars other than our Sun. The catalog’s release also marks the beginning of the end for the mission she’s worked on for almost a decade, she told KPCC. New results released from Kepler data June 19, 2017, have implications for understanding the frequency of different types of planets in our galaxy and the way planets are formed.
And the main ingredient which is key to the existence of life and without which the life can not exist is water and this liquid is seen on these “rocky” Earth-like planets. “We could see details that we couldn’t before”. The most recent batch of data found 219 exoplanets. Its advanced technology will allow the device to look at the full diversity of stars and planetary systems throughout our galactic neighborhood. The team used the observations of light from the stars and how the planets affected that light to determine the planets’ sizes. They will observe regions of the sky for as long as two years using the transit method of detection, which involves searching for periodic dimming of a star’s light caused by a planet passing or transiting in front of the star. Originally planned as a joint ESA-NASA mission, the US agency pulled out in 2011 because of budget problems. “The catalog will open up the possibility of studying the evolution of planetary systems”, Pagano says. Exoplanet science is now one of the most rapidly growing fields in astronomy.
A new and fantastic information is revealed by NASA.
PLATO’s data will come from a satellite loaded up with 26 telescopes. But it may not be alone.
They are either rocky, like Earth, with sizes almost 2 times that of our planet or are gas-covered worlds, like the four outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, that are between 2 to 3.5 times the size of Earth but are smaller than Neptune.
NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler mission recently released what it calls the most comprehensive and detailed catalog of candidate exoplanets. Ten of these new worlds are close in size to the Earth and reside within their star’s habitable zone, a location that would permit liquid water on the surface of an Earth-like world.
The first detection of gravitational waves by the US ground-based detector Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory (LIGO) in 2015 gave LISA a boost followed by the success past year of ESA’s LISA Pathfinder mission, a demonstrator of the technology that would be needed for the full-scale detector.
That is how scientists arrived at the 4,034 planet candidates from Kepler’s four-year observing campaign in the constellation Cygnus.
Of those, 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets.
The spacecraft is going to have 26 telescopes and will join NASA’s Kepler observatory as a spacecraft dedicated to finding exoplanets, planets revolving around stars other than our Sun. The catalog’s release also marks the beginning of the end for the mission she’s worked on for almost a decade, she told KPCC. New results released from Kepler data June 19, 2017, have implications for understanding the frequency of different types of planets in our galaxy and the way planets are formed.
And the main ingredient which is key to the existence of life and without which the life can not exist is water and this liquid is seen on these “rocky” Earth-like planets. “We could see details that we couldn’t before”. The most recent batch of data found 219 exoplanets. Its advanced technology will allow the device to look at the full diversity of stars and planetary systems throughout our galactic neighborhood. The team used the observations of light from the stars and how the planets affected that light to determine the planets’ sizes. They will observe regions of the sky for as long as two years using the transit method of detection, which involves searching for periodic dimming of a star’s light caused by a planet passing or transiting in front of the star. Originally planned as a joint ESA-NASA mission, the US agency pulled out in 2011 because of budget problems. “The catalog will open up the possibility of studying the evolution of planetary systems”, Pagano says. Exoplanet science is now one of the most rapidly growing fields in astronomy.
A new and fantastic information is revealed by NASA.
PLATO’s data will come from a satellite loaded up with 26 telescopes. But it may not be alone.
They are either rocky, like Earth, with sizes almost 2 times that of our planet or are gas-covered worlds, like the four outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, that are between 2 to 3.5 times the size of Earth but are smaller than Neptune.