The record of the smallest planet outside the solar system has been broken again and this time approaching the scale of the Earth
NASA's Kepler space telescope has confirmed the discovery of the first rocky planet known as Kepler-10b that is 40% larger than Earth. The discovery of this planet is based on data collection for over 8 months from May 2009 to early January 2010.
"All of Kepler's capabilities came together to provide the first discovery of a rocky planet orbiting a star other than our Sun," says Natalie Betta, deputy director of Kepler's science team at NASA's Ames Space Center in California, and principal investigator in an article on the discovery published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Vernell. "The Kepler team promised in 2010 that they would be able to find a signature of rocky planets in their data and the decision has been fulfilled."
Kepler's ultra-precise photometer measures the tiny diminution in the star's brightness caused by the planet's passage in front of it. The size of the planet is derived from the periodic dips in brightness. The distance between the planet and the star is estimated by measuring the time between cycles.
Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-sized planets in or near the habitable zone, the region where water can remain in a liquid state on a planet's atmosphere. However, since it orbits its Sun in 0.84 days, Kepler b10 is 10 times closer to the Sun than Mercury is to our Sun and is therefore not in the habitable zone.
Kepler 10 was the first planet that may contain a minor asteroid, which places it at the top of the list for examination by ground-based telescopes - and in particular the 10-meter telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The scientists who expected the confirmation of Kepler b10 as a planet were not disappointed, Keck was able to measure the changes in the spectrum of the star, known as the Doppler shift, which was caused by the transit of the planet.
"The discovery of a rocky planet is a significant stepping stone in the search for planets similar to our own," said Douglas Huddings, a scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Even though this planet is not in the habitable zone, the exciting find shows us the kind of discoveries that can be made with this mission and the promise that there will be many more."
13 תגובות
Max:
I did not read what Joel wrote at all.
As soon as I saw that his first sentence ends with "according to Judaism" I realized that there was nothing to comment on his words.
My father, on the other hand, is worth every reference and when I saw that he confuses the location of the galaxies at the edge of the visible universe at the moment Oran started on his way to us and their location at this moment, I decided to provide a link that would clarify things for Ashuram (at least - as far as our current understanding goes).
Michael, a diameter (radius times 2) of 29 million kilofarsecs, which is 29 billion farsecs, which is 93 billion light years, is still less than half of what Joel stated.
He is a great genius, he consumes the locusts of planets
Avi:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Size_of_the_observable_universe#Size
Yoel, thank you for helping us to wean many ultra-Orthodox people from their addiction to religion. If even a bacterium is found on another planet, Judaism collapses according to your claim.
my father
post Scriptum. Not 2 with 11 zeros but only 13.7 billion cubic light years. It's a thousandth of what you wrote.
There is no extraterrestrial life according to Judaism. The universe is limited, it has a limit, the universe is not infinite, only God is infinite. Scientists claim that the size of the universe is 200,000,000,000 billion light years. This is the size of the universe. Rabbis and elders of Israel explicitly say that there are no geographical worlds, a world like the earth in which humans, animals and plants live.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0607/0607493v1.pdf
http://exoplanets.org/
I have not yet understood whether they have already looked for planets in the stars in our "neighborhood", say within a range of 30 light years or less. And if so, what did they find, if anything? Does the Centauri system have no planets?
Therefore, with today's equipment, there is no obstacle to locating a star like this, which is about a distance from the Sun - all that is needed is luck (to catch it at the right time and at the right angle)
H the first,
With the method described in the article for finding planets (on the basis of a reduction in the light of the star closest to them) it is not easier to find a planet close to the sun (because the reduction in the degree of illumination of the star does not depend on the planet's distance from it) - what is true is that the closer the star is, the shorter its cycle is, therefore "reasonable" more to find it (also, the tilt angle of the plane of rotation with respect to us should be less precise).
I don't know if it's 400 times, but I know that a few years ago not even a single planet was discovered. So as much as the equipment needs to improve we can bet that it won't take more than 10 years, and in my opinion much less.
A small correction - the direct and inverse relationship are not necessarily linear, so actually you have to improve by 400 to the power of something, when I have no idea what the something is.
The closer a planet is to its star (R), the more instruments we have to find it.
The more massive (M) a planet is, the more instruments we have to find it.
The closer a planet is to us (D), the more instruments we have to find it.
Therefore, somewhere directly related to R and inversely related to D and M, is our ability to find stars like DHA.
In fact, in the claim "we found a planet the size of DHA", we arrived at the correct M, but we are far away by a multiple of approximately 400 for the radius of gyration (R) of such a planet, and the article did not say at all how far it is from us (D).
So that in order to see terrestrial planets up to D light years away from Earth (like the planet in the article), the instrumentation needs to be improved 400 times.
Honest and courageous.