The First Five Worlds of Kepler
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The first five worlds of Kepler.
Written and narrated by Tony Darnell.
Animations NASA/Kpler science team.
Dedicated to the search for life in the Universe.
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On January 4th 2009
the Kepler science team announced the discovery of its first 5 exoplanets.
These are planets that orbit other starts
outside of our solar system.
So far, as of January 5th, 2010,
there have been a total of 417 extra exoplanets discovered.
Almost all of them found by ground based observatories.
The Kepler space craft is designed to look for small earth like planets
that lie within what is known as the habitable zone.
This is the distance from a star
that will allow for the presence of liquid water.
Kepler is looking over one hundred thousand stars
in one region of sky all at once,
but with the goal of finding planets
with the potential of harboring life.
Throughout its mission
it will be looking at the area of sky
in the constellation Cygnus
that allows measuring many stars at one time.
By staring at the same spot in the sky for a long time
detailed measurements can be collected of all stars in the region
and a record kept in their brightness
in any variations that exist over time.
While these first 5 planets
discovered by Kepler are larger Jupiter size worlds
this discovery affirms that the systems on Kepler are working well
and the science team will meet its goals.
The first 5 worlds discovered by Kepler
were unceremoniously named
Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b.
Since we are very interested in finding life elsewhere in our Universe
it makes sense to look for planets more like our own.
Kepler instruments are among the most sensitive ever created
and
Kepler detects these planets
by accurately measuring tiny dips
in the brightness of a star
as a planet moves in front of it.
Since a planet the size of the earth
is so much smaller
than the size of the star
and require sensitive instruments to record.
The glare of the star can easily hide these worlds from us
and great care must be made when trying to find them.
Detecting earth size planets
is a lot like observing a fly
as it crawls a cross the street late at night
from many miles away.
With Kepler we hope to find many earth size planets
from which we can begin a systematic search
for life elsewhere in our galaxy
and finally begin to answer the question
Is there anyone else?