Saturday, April 20, 2013

The Kepler telescope spots two potential exoplanets ... - The Point

The Kepler space telescope NASA has detected two extrasolar planets located in a “habitable zone” in relation to their star, and therefore likely to harbor some form of life, reported on Thursday U.S. scientists. In total, about 700 planets have been discovered outside our solar system since 1995. Among the news are being detected two planets orbiting a star called Kepler-62 at 1,200 light-years from us in the constellation Lyra. The two planets Kepler-62, which are 1.5 times the size of Earth, is located at the right distance from their star to have liquid on its surface water, an essential element for the emergence and development of life .

“These two planets far are the best candidates to be habitable (…),” said one of the scientists following the Kepler telescope, William Borucki of Ames Research Center NASA, at a press conference. According to the modeling, these two planets, designated under the names of Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f, are likely telluric composed of rock, ice and a mixture of rock and ice. The solar system Kepler-62 has three other planets, but located too close to their star to host life forms. The Kepler telescope measuring the tiny oscillations of light from the stars. These oscillations may be caused by the passage of a planet in front of the star, which briefly reduced the radiation emitted by the sun.

Scientists have also recently discovered two planets orbiting another star, Kepler-69, located 2700 light years from us in the constellation Cygnus. One of the two is on the edge of the “habitable zone”. It will in the future most powerful Kepler telescope to gather data to say whether exoplanets located in “habitable zone” actually contain water. “We are moving towards the discovery of the first worlds similar to the Earth,” said astronomer Thomas Barclay, of the Institute for Research on Environment Bay in Sonoma, California.

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