Astronomers have announced Wednesday that NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope discovered eight planets around sun-like stars. They are at the perfect distance to allow liquid water to be present on their surfaces. Astrobiologists call the “Goldilocks zone” (habitable area) the Circumstellar Habitable Zone. This is the zone where the planets can sustain liquid water on their surface. Because of the “just right” conditions, “Goldilocks”, an informal name, became very popular. Exoplanets (planets orbiting stars outside of our solar system), need to get as much sun as Earth in order to reach the habitable zone. If there’s not enough sunlight, the water can freeze or turn to steam. Kepler Space Telescope has doubled the number of tiny planets found within their Goldilocks zones. Kepler -438b, and Kepler -442b are the closest to Earth that any other planets have been found. Guillermo Torres (CfA), the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was the lead author. He said that most of these planets are likely to be rocky like Earth. The findings were announced at an American Astronomical Society press conference. Only eight of the over 1 ,000 confirmed planets discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope have been smaller than Earth and are within their sun’s habitable zones. All orbit stars that are smaller and more distant than the sun. Kepler -438b, Kepler -442b. The planets closest to Earth are Kepler -438b (Photo by NASA). Both orbit red dwarfs stars, which are much cooler than the Sun. It is a dwarf star that isn’t a supergiant or giant. It is an ordinary star. The Sun of our Sun is a dwarf star, a yellow dwarf. Kepler -438b circle its star every 30 days while Kepler -442b do it in 112 day. According to scientists, there’s a 70% possibility that Kepler -438b (whose diameter is 12% larger than Earth) is a rocky world. Kepler -442b is about one third larger than Earth’s and has a 60% chance of being rock, rather than being a liquid ball or gas. Torres stated: “For our calculations, we chose to use the broadest possible limitations that can plausibly lead into suitable conditions for living.” NASA’s Kepler space telescope’s mission to find new planets is to search them out. NASA Image. Kepler -438b has a 70% chance of reaching the star’s habitable zone. It gets 40% less sunlight than Earth. For example, Venus receives two-thirds as much sunlight as Earth. Kepler -442b gets about two-thirds of the sunlight that Earth receives. According to astronomers, there’s a 97% possibility that it lies within the Goldilocks area. David Kipping, second author said that “we don’t know whether any of these planets are habitable.” We can only say that these are promising candidates.” Prior to the discovery of eight extraplanets, Kepler -62f was the most Earthlike of the planets. It receives 41% twice as much sunlight as Earth, but is about 1.4 times larger than Earth. Kepler -186f is approximately 1.1 times as large as Earth, and gets 32% just as much light. Artist’s concept of an Earth-like planet that orbits its star, which has created a spectacular ‘planetary Nebula’. Image by David A. Aguilar at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. To validate the planets that they have discovered, they use a program called BLENDER which allows them to see if they are actually planets. Francois Fressin, Torres and the development of BLENDER is their work. The Pleaides supercomputer at NASA Ames runs it. The scientists spent one year collecting and analyzing data, from multiple sources including adaptive optics imaging and high-resolution spectroscopy. This was to fully characterize each system. The scientists concluded that the new validated eight planets were in multi-star systems. The second companion star (or Kepler-442b) is far from the planets and does not have any significant influence. Kepler -438b, and Kepler -442b respectively are light-years from the earth. According to the authors, additional observations are “challenging” due to their distants.
