The Kepler spacecraft has found over 750 candidates for extrasolar planets, and that is just from data collected in the first 43 days of the spacecraft's observations. "This is the biggest release of candidate planets that has ever happened," said William Borucki, Kepler's lead scientist. "The number of candidate planets is actually greater than all the planets that have been discovered in the last 15 years."
This is an astounding amount of potential exoplanets from data taken during such a short period of time, however Borucki added that they expect only about 50% of these candidates to actually turn out to be planets, as some may be eclipsing binary stars or other artifacts in the data. But still, even half would be the biggest group discovery of exoplanets ever.
And the exciting part is that 706 targets from this first data set have viable exoplanet candidates with sizes from as small as Earth to around the size of Jupiter. The team says the majority have radii less than half that of Jupiter.
The Kepler team has found so many candidates, that they are sharing. They will keep the top 400 candidates to verify and confirm with observations from other telescopes – with observations done by Kepler team members. And today they have released the other 350 candidates, including five potential multiple planet systems.
However, some astronomers are upset about this and think the Kepler team should release all of their findings from the first year, as is typically done with NASA data.
That is just awesome. 750 candidates. As noted...more than what has been discovered altogether previously.
2 comments:
Put me in the open sourced data sharing camp. Astronomy is replete with current examples of discoveries enabled by the wide distribution and analysis of data. Sure the principal investigators should have a modest 1st shot at the data but anything over 6 months reeks of elitist selfish career aggrandisment. The public funded the many years the investigators spent on the project so the public should have timely, though not instant access.
Actually, I am not in the purely open data group. I think that the investigators that have gone through all the serious PITA that is to get a mission approved and running ought to be given a chance to go through the data and make discoveries on a priority basis.
However, I think after a couple years or at most three, given modern info processing techniques, that ought to be enough.
Then the data ought to be released. I don't like the 14 years or whatever that the project lead suggested though.
Post a Comment