Kepler Mission Options

[Hungry4info]

This paper suggests that cold Neptunes may outweigh cold Jupiters by at least 3 to 1.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.1171v1

[tasp]

Hmph.

There goes Mother Nature messing up another perfectly good joke with actual reality.






Crikey, just how many planets are we going to have to keep track of??



Oh, wait a minute, that's a good thing . . . .

[Habitable Zoner]

Interesting paper accepted for publication in Astrobiology (Segura et al.) with implications for Kepler discoveries... It has been widely assumed that earth-like planets orbiting M dwarfs would have habitable zones lying rather too close for comfort to the star. But this study suggests that life on such a world would probably be able to weather even strong stellar flares, if one makes reasonable assumptions about the atmospheric chemistry.

[Habitable Zoner]

There's a new manager's update (here). I like the last sentence: "Meanwhile, the Kepler science team is busy preparing scientific papers for publication about Kepler discoveries."

[Syrinx]

Just want to remind Bay Area people about this lecture. It is scheduled for tonight, about 5 hours from now. I can't make it unfortunately, but hopefully somebody can and will take notes for the rest of us!


RANDALL MUSEUM ANNOUNCES
SAN FRANCISCO AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS’ LECTURE SERIES
Extrasolar Planets & NASA’s Kepler Mission
A Presentation by Dr. Jack J. Lissauer
NASA’s Ames Research Center


What: San Francisco Amateur Astronomers’ Lecture
Extrasolar Planets & NASA’s Kepler Mission
A Presentation by Dr. Jack J. Lissauer, NASA’s Ames Research Center

When: 7:30pm, Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Where: Randall Museum
199 Museum Way, SF, CA

[Byran]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/art...l#ixzz0ua68fFAU

Astronomer Dimitar Sasselov told a conference that a space telescope has uncovered 140 different planets which are around the same size as Earth.

[Paolo]

I was going to post it too. There are a few things that I don't understand. How many Earth sized planets have been discovere? 140 or 60. are they reporting real discoveries or just projections of Kepler's capabilities?

[Byran]

I was going to post it too. There are a few things that I don't understand. How many Earth sized planets have been discovere? 140 or 60. are they reporting real discoveries or just projections of Kepler's capabilities?

140


60 - is the expected number of analogs of the Earth (the planet the size of Earth in the habitable zone)

[brellis]

60 out of 140 are in the HZ? Time to change Drake's equation again

[Byran]

60 out of 140 are in the HZ?

While Kepler discovery short-periodical planet, far from habited areas.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch5MilCuxK8

[Drkskywxlt]

These are all CANDIDATES. The Kepler team has said they expect that as many as 50% of the CANDIDATES are false alarms (eclipsing binaries, etc.)

[Habitable Zoner]

"Despite overzealous news headlines this week, NASA's Kepler spacecraft has not indentified more than 100 Earth-like planets in the galaxy...[Dimitar] Sasselov was referencing only possible planets among the Kepler data, scientists said...'What Dimitar presented was "candidates,"' said David Koch, the mission's deputy principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. 'These have the apparent signature we are looking for, but then we must perform extensive follow-up observations to eliminate false positives, such as background eclipsing binaries. This requires substantial amounts of ground-based observing which is done primarily in the summer observing season'...However, Sasselov did say that what Kepler has learned so far about extrasolar planets offers tantalizing hints that our planet may not be unusual. Among the hundreds of candidate planets, a large percentage of them appear to be Earth-like – that is, small and rocky, rather than large and gassy, like Jupiter. 'Even before we have confirmed the planets among these hundreds of candidates, we can see statistically that the smaller-sized planets will be more common than the large-sized (Jupiter- and Saturn-like ones) in the sample,' Sasselov explained...

For the complete article on Space.com, go here.

[nprev]

Woof. They need to get rid of the term 'Earth-like' immediately & replace it with 'small & rocky', or at the very least 'Earth-sized'.

This could spin right into an unprecedented PR fiasco all too quickly.

[brellis]

Isn't an earth-sized blink of a transiting planet much smaller than an eclipsing binary? If the dip in light is that small, are the other reasons for it? Oh, "background eclipsing binaries"... how does that create a dip that resembles an earth-sized planet? Another mystery to plague my tiny, earth-sized, amateur brain!

[tacitus]

These are all CANDIDATES. The Kepler team has said they expect that as many as 50% of the CANDIDATES are false alarms (eclipsing binaries, etc.)

That's what happens when people start quoting headlines from The Daily Mail. Never a good idea on any type of science forum.