Main Page

University of British Columbia astronomy student Michelle Kunimoto has discovered 17 new planets, including a potentially habitable, Earth-sized world, by combing through data gathered by NASA's Kepler mission.

Over its original four-year mission, the Kepler satellite looked for planets, especially those that lie in the "Habitable Zones" of their stars, where liquid water could exist on a rocky planet's surface.

The new findings, published in The Astronomical Journal, include one such particularly rare planet. Officially named KIC-7340288 b, the planet discovered by Kunimoto is just 1 ½ times the size of Earth—small enough to be considered rocky, instead of gaseous like the giant planets of the Solar System—and in the habitable zone of its star.

"This planet is about a thousand light years away, so we're not getting there anytime soon!" said Kunimoto, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of physics and astronomy. "But this is a really exciting find, since there have only been 15 small, confirmed planets in the Habitable Zone found in Kepler data so far."

The planet has a year that is 142 ½ days long, orbiting its star at 0.444 Astronomical Units (AU, the distance between Earth and our Sun) - just bigger than Mercury's orbit in our Solar System, and gets about a third of the light Earth gets from the Sun.

Of the other 16 new planets discovered, the smallest is only two-thirds the size of Earth—one of the smallest planets to be found with Kepler so far. The rest range in size up to eight times the size of Earth.

Title		Astronomy Student Discovers 17 New Planets, Including Earth-Sized World
Date		Friday February 28 2020, @03:55PM
Author		janrinok
Topic
from the dept.

SoylentNews SoylentNews is people https://soylentnews.org/

SoylentNews
SoylentNews is people
https://soylentnews.org/