Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Great balls of fire!

Kepler rocks! The new NASA space telescope has only been operational a couple of weeks and it's already found five new exoplanets.



Unfortunately NASA left the naming of these planets up to the office junior whilst everyone was on Christmas break, so we've got Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b, must have taken hours to come up with those! Anyway, unimaginative naming aside this is a fantastic result, it's look ever more likely that planets orbiting stars are a common thing in our universe which, if true, means that statistically the chances of a planet somewhere having the right combination of distance from its star and elemental composition for life is good. Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b look too hot to nurture the kinds of life that we have on Earth but it seems like the more we look the more we find so hopefully it will only be a matter of time before we find some planets in the "goldilocks" zone.



I thought it unlikely that we would find such a thing in my lifetime but I'm not so sure now!

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