1235 Planets Discovered By NASA Kepler By Article Chase Technology 5th April, 2011 Life beyond our planet is not such a fantasy or part science fiction novel when you consider the findings of a prolific planet finding mission hosted by the NASA Kepler Space Observatory – a spacecraft detecting planets orbiting stars. Some 1235 planets and more have been discovered subject to confirmation to date.
Photographic evidence of planets crossing their neighboring sun’s have been recorded by the Kepler mission, which is discovering planets faster than at any other point in human history. One of these planets could hold the key to answers that is on the lips of many scientists and theorists around the world, “are we alone in the Universe?”
Science tells us that there are probably as many planets in our part of the Universe as there are grains of sand on our planet, which in many scientific minds translate as ‘life on Planet Earth is definitely not just a fluke.’
So what of the planets currently discovered by the Kepler team? The question is answered with a shrewd “we just do not know,” but theoretically the probability of one planet holding the answers to potential life is quite high.
Whether life on another world is primitive bacteria or intelligent beings the fact remains that some of these planets have the potential to have life just from the position in relation to neighboring stars (if the chemistry is right.) The amount of planets being discovered just from the data fielded has yet to be properly assessed, but the possibilities are seemingly limitless.
Small worlds orbiting giant stars thousands of times the size of our sun, to giant planets revolving around small suns the imagination can go wild.
In an interview with Space.com David Rowe who produced the inset graphic of some of the planets discovered to show science and the world a little more detail about the discoveries, he stated "The graphic itself has been great to show to people. There is lots of interesting astrophysics that one can present," Rowe, a member of the Kepler team at NASA's Ames Research Center and the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute.
“My favorite one so far is that planets can be just as big as some of the smallest stars."
The graphic actually shows our own sun in relation to sizing and how it looks in relation to the other planetary discoveries. Our own Earth and Jupiter can be seen sweeping across the sun, which helps show just how large or how small some of the stars and planets are.
Apparently 54 of the 1235 planets that have been discovered by the Kepler team are within what is termed the ‘Goldilocks-Zone’, which theoretically suggests a planet that distance from a star could hold liquid H2O (water), and an abundance of other atmosphere building chemicals. So in principle it is not just blowing smoke when suggesting that alien-life could be just on our own doorstep in the Universe. The Kepler spacecraft is tuned so that it looks at one point in space, looking for slight changes in light around stars, this has produced the results that the Kepler team has been theorizing about for many years. After Kepler’s data has been recorded about a possible planet (exo-planet) the information is then confirmed by astronomers using different telescopes.
NASA sent the Kepler craft into orbit in 2009 and expects the telescope to keep transmitting data and staring into space until November 2012.