Category: Space

The last time I wrote here, it was about the October 2012 discovery of an exoplanet around our Sun’s closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. Now, today, February 26, 2014, NASA has announced 715 confirmed new exoplanets from Kepler mission data. 715! That’s between a third and a half of the confirmed total of exoplanets ever discovered… ever!
http://www.space.com/24824-alien-planets-population-doubles-nasa-kepler.html

While Kepler may be temporarily out of commission due to dual reaction wheel failures, the data she amassed keeps on giving.

At this rate, I am even more confident of my prediction that we will find a true Earth twin out there within the next two decades, probably much less. And with Europe’s PLATO mission now approved, that Earth twin may turn out to be very nearby, in astronomical terms.

Anyone who knows me should know I’d be excited about this. Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own, has been found to actually have at least one planet orbiting one of the twin sun-like stars, Alpha Centauri B. While this new world is almost certainly not habitable, it’stoo close to its sun, the likelihood that there are more near-Earth sized planets in the vicinity is pretty high. If we’ve learned anything from the Kepler discoveries it’s that where there’s one rocky planet, there’s more. http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1241/