Kepler's largest finding of new exoplanets

[Smithysteve]

NASA's Kepler mission has verified 1,284 new planets – the single largest finding of planets to date.

“This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler,” said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth.” 

 

Taken from the following Nasa link;

 

http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasas-kepler-mission-announces-largest-collection-of-planets-ever-discovered

 

[Tweedledee]

Very interesting stuff Steve. 

 

The odds on finding a habitable planet are improving dramatically with this survey. It seems to have established that there are likely to be more planets than stars. In an almost infinitesimal sample of the total stars in our galaxy, 21 are likely to have rocky planets in the goldilocks zone! I wonder how this would feed into the old Drake equation. 

Edited May 10, 2016 by Tweedledee

[Smithysteve]

It's all very interesting!

Nasa also announced finding traces of oxygen in Mars atmosphere today!

http://www.sciencealert.com/a-flying-observatory-just-detected-oxygen-in-the-martian-atmosphere

 

The JWT telescope may end up looking at some of these planets... and here is a great link to nasa's James Webb telescope compared to Hubble:

 

http://jwst.nasa.gov/comparison.html

[Tweedledee]

We are living in very exciting times, with so much ground breaking research being done, and so many amazing new discoveries in all aspects of astronomy and astrophysics.

 

Those two links are fascinating. Good find Steve

Edited May 10, 2016 by Tweedledee