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NASA Kepler Telescope Discovers 715 New Planets

posted by mattie_p on Thursday February 27 2014, @02:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-bet-that's-all-of-them-now dept.

kef writes:

"NASA's Kepler mission has doubled the number of known planets outside of our solar system. In what can only be described as a "bonanza", 715 new planets have been reported thanks to the Kepler space telescope's planet-hunting mission. Using a new method for verifying potential planets led to the volume of new discoveries from Kepler, which aims to help humans search for other worlds that may be like Earth."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2014, @03:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2014, @03:05PM (#7984)

    This drawing [wikimedia.org] of Kepler's search space remains, for me, one of the most inspiring things to come out of astronomy in the last decade. It emphasizes just how sensitive their instruments are, how far we are able to look, and how stupendously large the Milky Way is. Better than that, like a painting of a moon base from the 1960s, it makes exploring space seem like a real possibility, something that is within our species' grasp, if we just keep working at it.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by mrwizrd on Thursday February 27 2014, @03:16PM

    by mrwizrd (2299) on Thursday February 27 2014, @03:16PM (#7991)

    Oh how I wish I still had mod points. I've never seen that image before - really gives you a sense of just how tiny we are and how much we've managed to achieve in our tiny blip of an existence. Kind of makes all of our petty problems and disagreements pale into insignificance.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Jaruzel on Thursday February 27 2014, @04:00PM

    by Jaruzel (812) on Thursday February 27 2014, @04:00PM (#8025) Homepage Journal

    Amazing image.

    I was expecting it to look like a piece of fairy cake[1] to be honest.

    -Jar

    [1]Total_Perspective_Vortex [wikipedia.org]

    --
    This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.

  • (Score: 2) by combatserver on Friday February 28 2014, @12:09AM

    by combatserver (38) on Friday February 28 2014, @12:09AM (#8169)

    "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ be/LombergA1024.jpg"

    Interesting image.

    I gazed at it for awhile, taking in all the implications and quickly realized that it appears that our Solar system is getting flushed down a toilet-bowl of monumental...er, Galactic proportions. This worried me some until I realized that--judging by the length of the headlight beam--we have thousands of years before this happens. We will all be dead long before that happens.

    But, then, I noticed the cross-hairs aimed at us.

    --
    I hope I can change this later...