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NASA's Kepler Mission Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star
Posted on Dec 06, 2011 01:12:02 PM | John Entwistle | 1 Comments    |
NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the "habitable zone," the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Kepler also has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, nearly doubling its previously known count. Ten of these candidates are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their host star. Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets.

To read more about this discovery go to http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepscicon-briefing.html

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Tags : Education Point of Interest, NASA Mission Update, NASA Science Update  

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1 Comments so far ( Post your own )
1 On Dec 16, 2011 01:40:46 PM  guest  added a comment on your blog post. 

I have a question about Kepler's capability to detect habitable exoplanets around stars with high stellar mass. If I am correct, the period of an exoplanet in an orbit comparable to Earth's around a higher mass star scales approximately as P=k M^5/2. So for a star of two solars masses, the period of an habitable exoplanet would be about 5.7 years. Kepler's mission life would not permit the observation of three transits. Is Kepler unable to detect habitable exoplanets around high mass stars?

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