KEPLER LOCATES FIRST EXOPLANET WITHIN HABITABLE ZONE
Designated Kepler-22b, this exoplanet becomes the first to ever be located within the habitable zone. According to the general definition of habitable zone, it is the zone around certain stars where a planet seized as Earth can maintain and sustain liquid water - hence, habitable for life. The Kepler exoplanet mission has over one-thousand exoplanetary candidates, and amazingly ten have been found near this zone; Kepler-22b has fit perfectly within this hypothetical orbit.
Located six-thousand light years away, this planet orbits its sun (a sun like our own) in just 290 days. The resemblance to our own planet is rather interesting. This exoplanet is one of the smallest found by Kepler, being 2.4 times the radius of earth; its composition is unknown so far, but astronomers should solve this question rather quickly.If you know NASA, you will realize how important this discovery is. One of NASA's major "missions" is discovering life on other planets, or trying to, in a sense. Kepler 22b has brought them just another step closer. "Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet," said William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who led the team that discovered Kepler-22b. "The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season."
"This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth's twin," said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Kepler's results continue to demonstrate the importance of NASA's science missions, which aim to answer some of the biggest questions about our place in the universe." The Kepler team is hosting its inaugural science conference at Ames Dec. 5-9, announcing 1,094 new planet candidate discoveries. Since the last catalog was released in February, the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler has increased by 89 percent and now totals 2,326. Of these, 207 are approximately Earth-size, 680 are super Earth-size, 1,181 are Neptune-size, 203 are Jupiter-size and 55 are larger than Jupiter. ~NASA
"The tremendous growth in the number of Earth-size candidates tells us that we're honing in on the planets Kepler was designed to detect: those that are not only Earth-size, but also are potentially habitable," said Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead at San Jose State University in San Jose, Calif. "The more data we collect, the keener our eye for finding the smallest planets out at longer orbital periods."
VOYAGER ON THE EDGE OF INTERSTELLAR SPACE
The news from NASA has finally come in:
Voyager is about to leave the solar system for good and merge into the vast wonders of the universe. Of course it will take
Voyager millions of years to finally reach the closest star(!), this is a gigantic event for those who keep track of
Voyager and everything about it. "Voyager tells us now that we're in a stagnation region in the outermost layer of the bubble around our solar system," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Voyager is showing that what is outside is pushing back. We shouldn't have long to wait to find out what the space between stars is really like."
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| Voyager 1 |
Rather peculiarly said, NASA describes this region between the solar system and interstellar space as something like a "cosmic purgatory," as
Voyager is eighteen billion kilometers from the sun. The last data collected shows that
Voyager still remains in the heliosphere (the solar system's boundaries), but the data suggests that
Voyager will be out of this solar system for good within the next few months (or year). It truly is amazing to say that both
Voyager 1 (Voyager of note in this article) and
Voyager 2 are in good condition. Nothing seems to stop them from venturing even further out into the far reaches of our galaxy.
"We've been using the flow of energetic charged particles at Voyager 1 as a kind of wind sock to estimate the solar wind velocity," said Rob Decker, a Voyager Low-Energy Charged Particle Instrument co-investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. "We've found that the wind speeds are low in this region and gust erratically. For the first time, the wind even blows back at us. We are evidently traveling in completely new territory. Scientists had suggested previously that there might be a stagnation layer, but we weren't sure it existed until now."
Read More about Voyager.
