[troutman]

Originally Posted by atb

Nasa Discovers 700 possible planets
http://www.ecanadanow.com/curiosity/...sible-planets/

Interesting article, although with Keppler don't they have to observe multiple transits before confirming it's a planet? Does that mean that all these discoverd so far have super quick orbits?

Cool. I met the head of the Kepler project last year at JPL.

140 of the 700 identified bodies are much like Earth.

“The figures suggest our galaxy, the Milky Way will contain 100 million habitable planets, and soon we will be identifying the first of them,” Dimitar Sasselov, a scientist on the Kepler Mission said. “There is a lot more work we need to do with this, but the statistical result is loud and clear, and it is that planets like our own Earth are out there.”

http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/miss...lerMission.cfm

http://www.planetary.org/news/2010/0...ds_of_New.html

In order to separate true transiting planets from other phenomena that mimic the transit effect, scientists try to follow up on each of Kepler’s discoveries with radial velocity observations of each star. This method measures the slight shifts in a star’s spectrum as it rocks back and forth to the tug of an orbiting planet, and has been responsible for the majority of exoplanets discoveries to date. Significantly, whereas transit detections like Kepler’s provide a good estimate of a planet’s diameter, radial velocity measurements provide an accurate estimate of a planet’s mass. If the RV study shows that a planetary mass object is orbiting a star where Kepler detected a candidate planet, then the candidate is almost certainly a true exoplanet. If, however, the orbiting object turns out to have the mass of a star, then Kepler’s “transiting exoplanet” is, in fact, no planet at all but a binary star whose two components periodically eclipse each other.