NASA's Kepler mission announced Wednesday the discovery of 715 new planets. These newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system.
Nearly 95 percent of these planets are smaller than Neptune, which is almost four times the size of Earth. This discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small-sized planets more akin to Earth than previously identified exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.
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Mind you, these new results only come from using the first two years of Kepler data; when the technique is applied to all four years of data there’s no doubt a new treasure trove of planets will pop out.
On August 15, 2013, NASA announced that Kepler would not continue searching for planets using the transit method after attempts to resolve issues with two of the four reaction wheels failed.[20][21][22] An engineering report has been ordered to assess the spacecraft's capabilities, its two good reaction wheels and its thrusters.[20] Concurrently, a scientific study is being conducted to determine whether enough knowledge can be obtained from Kepler's limited scope to justify its $18 million per year cost. Both reports are expected during the fall of 2013, at which time NASA will determine the future of Kepler.
They now estimate up to 8.8 billion earth like planets in our galaxy alone. And these estimates are using only sun like stars
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Space is vast, but it may not be so lonely after all: A study finds the Milky Way is teeming with billions of planets that are about the size of Earth, orbit stars just like our sun, and exist in the Goldilocks zone — not too hot and not too cold for life.
Astronomers using NASA data have calculated for the first time that in our galaxy alone, there are at least 8.8 billion stars with Earth-size planets in the habitable temperature zone.
As for what it says about the odds that there is life somewhere out there, it means "just in our Milky Way galaxy alone, that's 8.8 billion throws of the biological dice," said study co-author Geoff Marcy, a longtime planet hunter from the University of California at Berkeley.
In the Milky Way, about 1 in 5 stars that are like our sun in size, color and age have planets that are roughly Earth's size and are in the habitable zone where life-crucial water can be liquid, according to intricate calculations based on four years of observations from NASA's now-crippled Kepler telescope.
And the 8.8 billion Earth-size planets figure is only a start. That's because scientists were looking only at sun-like stars, which are not the most common stars.
An earlier study found that 15 percent of the more common red dwarf stars have Earth-size planets that are close-in enough to be in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold Goldilocks Zone.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yes. This selfie of Bill, Barack, and Me that's been circulating on the internet is real. President Obama made it clear that he doesn't do selfies -- there's a White House photographer with him at all times when he greets the public -- but he noted, "For you two gentlemen, I'll make an exception." -NDTyson
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"Researchers from the BICEP2 collaboration today announced the first direct evidence for this cosmic inflation. Their data also represent the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. These waves have been described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang." Finally, the data confirm a deep connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity."
Huge News in the field of Astrophysics. Proof that the Universe is Expanding.
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Yeah been reading about that, pretty cool. And just a small correction, it's proof of inflation (not just expansion), which is a brief period of extreme expansion before what would be called the Big Bang.
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Originally Posted by photon
Yeah been reading about that, pretty cool. And just a small correction, it's proof of inflation (not just expansion), which is a brief period of extreme expansion after what would be called the Big Bang.
Fixed your post. There was no before the big bang.
Inflation occured almost immediately after the Big Bang.
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The Big Bang, instead of being a singularity, is the set of initial conditions of an extremely hot, dense, expanding Universe that exists immediately after the end of inflation.
Was there a singularity before inflation? Possibly, but at this point, we have no way of knowing. Inflation is the first thing we can say anything definitive about, but it definitely comes before what we traditionally call “The Big Bang”. So maybe I should admit that Starts With A Bang isn’t really the starting point of everything, after all, just the start of where our observable Universe comes from.
Though it's kind of semantics, since lots of people refer to the Big Bang as the absolute beginning.. but since we don't know (and don't have a theory adequate to describe) what happened before inflation, talking of absolute beginnings doesn't seem right.. or even necessary.
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Cosmic inflation is actually a pretty simple idea. Very early on–we’re not sure exactly when, but plausibly 10-35 seconds or less after the Planck time–the universe went through a phase of accelerated expansion for some reason or another. There are many models for what could have caused such a phase; sorting them out is exactly what we’re trying to do here. The basic effect of this inflationary era is to smooth things out: stuff like density perturbations, spatial curvature, and unwanted relics just get diluted away. Then at some point–again, we aren’t sure when or why–this period ends, and the energy that was driving the accelerated expansion converts into ordinary matter and radiation, and the conventional Hot Big Bang story begins.
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Jesus God must have worked like hell during those 6 days.
We all know that the big bang was actually God dropping a scattering spray after the Saturday night all you can eat burrito buffet on the corner of divine and heavenly in heaven.
He created the universe in 20 minutes, then took a nap.
And the universe and mankind ate poop for trillions of years.
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Though it's kind of semantics, since lots of people refer to the Big Bang as the absolute beginning.. but since we don't know (and don't have a theory adequate to describe) what happened before inflation, talking of absolute beginnings doesn't seem right.. or even necessary.
Thanks, I've never seen it stated that way, it is an interesting way of defining things for sure.
I suppose if you're looking at things that way, then it is all semantic.
It really depends on what you consider the big bang.
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Two more articles about that signal from 'the beginning of time'. Besides solidifying the idea of inflation and expansion, this discovery could be an important step in proving or denying the idea of a multiverse!
Photon, go put multiverse in the spell checks list of words.
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