The first planet to be discovered orbiting a binary system by Kepler was discovered four years ago and since then nine more have been discovered.
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We will also talk about New Horizons, the mission to Pluto that created a sensation last month when I began to beam back unbelievable images of our solar system’s smallest and most distant planet.
John Grunsfeld, the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said, “On the 20th anniversary year of the discovery that proved other suns host planets, the Kepler exoplanet explorer has discovered a planet and star which most closely resemble the Earth and our Sun”.
While the planet itself isn’t habitable, that doesn’t mean we should give up the search for like in this system. This means the planet’s transits in front of other stars that allow scientists to spot it are only visible about 9 percent of the time.
The discovery is detailed in an article accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and will be announced by San Diego State University Professor William Welsh on Friday at the global Astronomical Union meeting in Honolulu. This method is known as the “transit method”.
In fact, had researches not detected the planet now, their next chance to do so would not have come until 2066. “Kepler just happened to be viewing the system at the right time for us to make the detection”. “It’s a good reminder that there’s always a value in checking again”. Kepler-452b is 60 percent bigger than our Earth, when it comes to diameter and the planet is believed to be a super Earth size planet.
“Our hypothesis suggests that among the rocky exoplanets, there’s another dial that’s important to turn when considering whether a planet is habitable or not: its bulk composition”, Jackson said. If you put Jupiter’s moon Europa around this planet, it would become a water world very favourable to life.
A binary system is one where two stars are in orbit around a common centre of mass. On Tatooine, two stars can be seen in the sky; this is what the view might look like from Kepler-453b. It takes almost about 240 days for Kepler-453b to orbit its host stars. The astonishingly high rate of occurrence in the habitable zone is caused by the types of stars observed by Kepler (generally Sun-like) and the need for the planet to be sufficiently far from the stars for its orbit to be stable.
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“Yes, there was a certain amount of luck involved for this discovery”, Kane told redOrbit via email. “We live in an awesome time in which we have the technology to measure objects hundreds of light-years away and answer some of the questions about the universe that humans have asked for ages”. “It’s incredible to be part of that”.
