The Kepler space telescope found the science and art in exoplanets

It ‘a very good thing spacecraft can not be bored, because if the spaceship could be drilled, the Kepler space telescope before his spirit out would be long gone. E ‘was started in March 2009, when NASA’s Kepler around the Sun in orbit, showed a small area of ​​deep space contains about 150,000 stars, and gave him a command, “do not blink, you – the” Kepler, who recently October 29 was retired at maneuvering fuel runs out, obeyed, and it paid off. What was the patient’s space research had planets around these stars – or, more specifically, the dimming of light when a planet orbiting the sun rises from his mother, a little ‘dim starlight. Such attenuation is infinite, the equivalent in a display of 10,000 bulbs, a bulb to remove, after astrophysicist Natalie Batalha, head of mission. But that’s all it took. In Kepler’s time I used this method had to be found out in 2327 confirmed exoplanets and other 2,426 candidates in the race, which are yet to be confirmed. Extrapolating to the whole shell to find the sky, astronomers believe that virtually every star in our galaxy – each star, and by extension, in each galaxy – at least one planet. And some, like our Sun, there are many more. “All of a sudden we have learned that planets are everywhere,” says astrophysicist Jessie Dotson, one project scientist of the Kepler team. “I think the biological potential of the galaxy is huge.” This is key, of course, at least for the people: the possibility that we live in our own little world, are not the only organisms in general in the cosmos. Not all the planets Kepler brings in shape would life, or at least life as we understand it. Some are too hot, some are too cold, a little ‘sizzle with radiation from its sun too close, some are gas giants (the so-called “hot Jupiters”) to stand without surface or swimming or crawling on all. What we want is a rocky world like ours, one that orbits its sun in what the astronomers, the “Goldilocks zone”, called colloquially, where things are not too hot and not too cold, so that the water it can exist in liquid form. The next generation of telescopes will continue hunting, some of them returning their attention to Kepler worlds first discovered, others look elsewhere. Alive or not, the planet Kepler has discovered a beauty and humor all their own: worlds with only red, with only two worlds, worlds with hemispheres on which day never dawns. NASA artists who have recorded some of a series of travel posters, running on the artistic style of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. While Kepler found the vast majority of known extrasolar planets, not all planets are discovered showing the posters – only those who “Kepler” actually wear on their behalf. Most of the others were discovered by astronomers on Earth telescopes to measure a star’s radial velocity, or caused by the gravity of a planet in orbit around it swinging. Whatever the origin of the world, art is playful, the science behind it is solid, and helped the mere knowledge that the worlds exist to transform our view of the cosmos. Here’s a look at just a small handful of exoplanets from under the cosmos: Pegasi 51b: Kepler can not say this. Pegasi 51b 50 years light from Earth in the constellation of Pegasus, was the first extrasolar planet ever discovered, October 6, 1995 by astronomers of the radial velocity method. Do not look for life on 51b is about twice the size of Jupiter, has a surface temperature of 1,800º F and is so close to its sun that it takes to complete an orbit just four days. HD 40307 g: Another world discovered with the swing method, HD 40307 g 42 years light from Earth and orbits a small orange star is only 75% of the sun’s radiant energy. It is part of a litter of six planets orbiting the same star, but unlike his brothers, 40307g cars in the Goldilocks zone. Its mass is about seven times that of Earth, with twice the force of gravity. More importantly, it has a solid surface – so you get to pick a place to live and walk. Kepler-16b: It is not Tatooine, home planet of Luke Skywalker, but is not that also not different. Like Tatooine, Kepler-16b – 200 years light from the Earth and discovered in 2011 – two stars orbiting each other orbits. This means that a double sunset, and as the manifesto promises a double shade when the planet’s surface. Not that it would necessarily be there, but. The planet is thought to be cold and gaseous, low mass, wide world in diameter as Saturn. Nice, but certainly not life. Kepler-186F: This could be the jackpot. Discovered in 2014, Kepler-186F, located 582 years distance light, about the same mass of the Earth and about 10% larger in diameter – even within the rocky area. It is three times closer to its star than the Earth around the Sun (32,500,000 miles, compared to 93 million miles), but this star is a red dwarf, which means it is much cooler than our sun. This in turn puts the planet in the habitable zone directly. If the water and the atmosphere are there, and if the planet survives the high radiation exposure may emit red dwarf that life could take hold. PSO J318.5-22, this is just the saddest in the world famous sky. Discovered in 2013, the planet is big enough and bright enough to have been seen in the infrared spectrum directly through a telescope in Hawaii. The reason that it can be shown in this way is that it really had aspirations to be a star, but it was not big enough to make it known to modest star groundwater as a brown dwarf. Instead, with a mass six times that of Jupiter, is officially a planet – to swim an orphan planets bound to any star and yet the room alone, 80 light years away. The next time you see in the direction of the constellation of Capricorn, where Roams PSO J318.5-22, is to spare a thought. First Trappist: What PSO J318.5-22 missing, the first Trappist has in abundance: the family. Discovered the same transit technique used by the Spitzer space telescope Kepler, the first Trappist is part seven of a litter of about the size of Earth orbiting a star 40 light years away. All seven planets could theoretically harbor water. But Trappist – first, the number four position, which in this solar system, the sweetest of the sweet spot where liquid water is likely. All the planets and huddle near the stove in their relatively cool, red dwarf sun -. So close that Trappist first six days needs only one orbit to complete
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