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An artist's conception shows the rocky planet Kepler-10b
NASA's Kepler spacecraft has detected a rocky planet that's one of the closest analogs to Earth — except for the fact that it's way too close to its sun.
Rocky worlds have been detected around alien stars before, but Kepler-10b is the first of what's expected to be hundreds of Earth-scale planets found by the Kepler mission. It's too hot to sustain life as we know it, but it buoys hopes for finding other Earths and "super-Earths" that may be more habitable.
Natalie Batalha, an astronomer from San Jose State University who is part of the discovery team, said Kepler-10b is a "scorched world." The temperatures on the planet's sun-facing side would be 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,370 degrees Celsius), almost hot enough to melt iron. Temperatures on the dark side would be too chilly for life, and Batalha said there was no chance that the planet could hold onto an atmosphere.
Kepler-10b's diameter is 1.4 times that of Earth, and its mass is 4.6 times Earth's, Batalha said. That makes it one of the smallest worlds ever found in a distant planetary system like our own. But if Kepler-10b were in our own solar system, it would orbit more than 20 times closer to the sun than Mercury — so close that it makes a complete orbit in just a little more than 20 hours.
Geoffrey Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley who is one of the pioneers in the effort to detect planets beyond our solar system, said the discovery "will be marked as among the most profound scientific discoveries in human history." Marcy explained that Kepler-10b served as a "planetary missing link" between the giant planets that dominate the list of more than 500 distant worlds found to date, and the Earth-size worlds that scientists hope to find in the future.
The find was reported today at the American Astronomical Socyty's winter meeting in Seattle, and a research paper on the discovery has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
How the world was found
The $600 million Kepler mission, launched in March 2009, looks for distant planets by staring at a patch of sky between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. What it's looking for is the faint dimming of starlight that's produced regularly when a planet passes over the bright disk of the star it orbits. Kepler is monitoring 150,000 stars for those telltale signals, and in principle, it should be able to find Earthlike planets in Earthlike orbits around sunlike stars.
Kepler-10b, circling a star 560 light-years from Earth, was one of the mission's first good candidates for an Earth-scale planet. Its signature showed up in data collected while the spacecraft was being commissioned for science operations, just a couple of months after launch. Scientists collected eight months' worth of readings pointing to Kepler-10b's existence, but they needed to confirm that the planet was really there and get a better estimate of its mass and size.
For the planet's mass, they turned to the W.M. Keck Observatory's 10-meter telescope in Hawaii. The Keck telescope detected the right pattern of tiny wobbles in the movement of the parent star — which is similar to the mass and size of the sun but is more than 8 billion years old (as opposed to the 4.6 billion-year age of the sun).
To confirm the planet's size, astronomers had to figure out the width of the parent star. They resorted to analyzing high-frequency oscillations in the star's brightness that are caused by "starquakes." The oscillations can serve as an indication of how big the star is, just as the pitch of a pipe organ's musical note could be used to estimate the size of the pipe making that tone.
Batalha said the size of the star could be determined to an accuracy of 4 to 6 percent. The researchers combined that measurement with the others to confirm the planet's mass and size as well as its density.
"All of our very best capabilities have converged on this one result," she said.
Where Kepler-10b fits
The Kepler team reported that the exoplanet's density is 8.8 grams per cubic centimeter, which is far denser than Earth's 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter. Batalha said the best explanation for that density is that Kepler-10b is a rocky planet like Earth, only bigger. However, Kepler-10b's proximity to its star means that it would look nothing like Earth. The heat might well be blasting away rock, sending flurries of debris into space. She said mountains wouldn't have much chance to rise up, but canyons could be carved into the planet's surface by flowing lava.
Batalha recalled that a century ago, astronomers were looking for a planet that might orbit our own sun within Mercury's orbit, known as Vulcan. "The thing that came to me is, wow, this is our planet Vulcan," she said.
A couple of years ago, a European planet-hunting probe called CoRoT detected a similar "lava planet," which has been designated CoRoT-7b. That planet is thought to be a little larger than Kepler-10b (1.8 times as wide as Earth, vs. 1.4 for Kepler-10b), and Batalha said there were still some uncertainties surrounding CoRoT-7b's size estimate. Uncertainties also surround the reported discovery of an Earth-scale planet known as Gliese 581g.
Berkeley's Marcy said the Kepler find would likely "go into textbooks" around the world, due in part to the innovations that were used to nail down the planet's vital statistics. But there's more to come: Batalha said that there might be yet another planet in the Kepler-10 system with an orbital period of 45 days. Those observations still had to be confirmed, she emphasized.
She also noted that the Kepler mission has turned up more than 300 other yet-to-be-confirmed planet candidate, with most of them thought to be smaller than Neptune. More revelations are likely to come to light in February, when the next big batch of Kepler data is due to be released. Although Kepler-10b may be a milestone, it's by no means the end of the road for planet-hunters.
"The discovery of Kepler 10-b is a significant milestone in the search for planets similar to our own," Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said today in a news release. "Although this planet is not in the habitable zone, the exciting find showcases the kinds of discoveries made possible by the mission and the promise of many more to come."
More about the planet quest:
- Interactive: The search for other worlds
- Looking for alien Earths? Here they come
- Rare exoplanet has twin 'Star Wars' sunset
Correction: Ugh, did I really say two hours per orbit? I meant 20 hours, or 0.84 Earth days. These conversions always get me in trouble. Sorry about that.
Update for 3:35 p.m. ET Jan. 11: Kepler researcher Natalie Batalha told me that the research paper on this discovery lists the Kepler-10 star's age as 11.9 billion years, plus or minus 4 billion years. Some reports have gone with the 11.9 billion-year figure, but Batalha prefers to say that the star is "more than 8 billion years old," and so that's what I'm going with.
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Leave a Comment:
Who Cares! We can never travel the speed of light, and therefore anything outside our solar system is to far to travel to. Stop wasting money on all of this nonsense and stop wasting money at Nasa. We have problems here on earth and we are throwing away money hoping to find a planet hundreds of light years from earth. Get your priorities in order. If you want to visit a different planet read Star Wars.
This is not a rant and rave. I am very serious. Millions of lives could be helped in this country if we learned to use our governments money more wisely. In the future when things start to go really bad in the economy, and I don't mean our little recession. I'm talking about catastrophic problems. People will ask why we spent our budget the way we did.
Just something to think about
prime,
Here are just a few items that are a direct spin-off from NASA:
And my personal favorite - the computer you wrote that message on.
This is only a very small sample of the direct benefits we enjoy every day - thanks to NASA. Your world would be substantially different without the advancements made possible by that research.
You say that millions could be helped by spending money more wisely. I ask - how many people are alive today because of the medical, material, meteorological, and communications advances made possible by NASA?
David,
The King James version, like all versions, of the bible says just what other members of the human race wanted it to say, it was written by man. It also says that the earth has four corners, show me corners on a globe.
With billions of galaxies and billions of stars in each of those galaxies the chance that this is the only planet in the universe that has life is extremely small, though I will concede there is no irrefutable proof that the earth has ever been visited by any life from another planet. But then there is also no irrefutable proof in the existence of God either, many of the things once attributed to 'God' are now easily explained by the laws of physics.
I know that I'm not going to change your mind anymore than you will change mine but you go ahead and preach your gospel to every creature like you mentioned. That's every mouse, shrew, fly and head lice you come across since you maintain that there can be no life elsewhere and you are supposed to preach to every creature here on earth. Let me know if you find any converts in the head lice community.
Meanwhile people who are not rooted in old legends will continue to expand the knowledge base of mankind and continue to better our standard of living through science instead of trusting in the good grace of some omniscient being who, as I said, there is no proof even exists.
@prime00beef,
We also can never fly, never travel faster than the speed of sound, hell we can't even travel farther from shore than the eye can see or we will fall off the earth!
Just because the laws of physics as we know them NOW prohibit travel faster than the speed of light does not mean we won't learn something else in the future that will allow travel at a faster pace. Who knows when that knowledge will come or even if it will, only the future will tell.
Errr…Ummm… Can I ask a stupid question?
Why in nearly every science/space posting, does the comments turn into a religious vs. science fist fight? Although briefly amusing, it gets really old after a while.
Tell you what, I will stay away from right wing, Christian religious based sites, and the unscientific can go preach somewhere that cares; deal???
So, let me get this straight. According to the argument that many athiests seem to use to support their nonexistence of God theory, he can't exist if there is more than one "Earth" and/or intelligent life forms exist. And he can't exist if the Big Bang theory is true.
Why Not?
Could God not have made Mankind and the Earth and the Big Bang, while still being the sustainer of it all? It seems like they can only argue against 6th Century Christian theology. If you ask me, creation must have a creator. And to me, matter, light, quantom particles, space itself, gravity, etc. all falls under the category of creation. Since we can extrapolate that that they all have a beginning and ending. (If we found something that has neither, then I would say we found something significant. Since, by definition if God exist they would not be among his properties.)
And how could the discovery of ET undermine the existence of God? What exactly does it condradict? Maybe some ancient christian dogma that the Earth is the center of life or that Mankind are the children of God, but again, that is Chistian theology. Perhaps an argument against the existence of God as the Christologists believe, but not at all contrary the his existence.
The more and more I try to comprehend quantom physics, the more and more I realize that we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg as far understanding the cosmos and the intricate fabric of creation.
If creation( the universe which is defined as everything that exists or is thought to exist) has to have a creator where did the creator come from? Did the creator have to have a creator? And that creator have to have a creator? And on and on?
I do agree with your last statement that the more we learn the more we realize that we haven't seen the tip of the iceberg as far as understanding the cosmos.
I'm no scientist or religious person, but i seems to me that if you look at the numbers, to think that we are the only viable planet in the universe for life is just a wholly ridiculous, arrogant, and species-centric thought. Seriously, we are looking at a tiny patch of sky in our galaxy and finding hundreds of planets. Will we go there someday, I think eventually we will venture out of our solar system, to say it will never happen is just as foolish as saying we are the only life. In an infinite universe there are infinite possibilities. What do you think a person in 1911 would think if you showed up with your iPod, laptop or even TV. Just a hundred years ago, our current everyday life would appear as a fantasy written by Jules Verne. Nobody could have even conceived of the technology we posses today. So it seems to me to be a short cut to thinking to say we are the only life and we will never reach another star. No one today can even begin to say what we will have in 2111, let alone 3011. Having a belief in something is part of being human, but when that belief closes your eyes to facts right in front of you then as an intelligent being shouldn't you begin to question that belief? So if God is the father, our parent, Isn't it the hope of every parent that their children will learn to think for themselves and eventually move out of the house and start their own lives? We will move off our world eventually, after we grow up as a species.
But I digress, Kepler 10-b, amazing! Cant wait to see what else they find when the data is studied.
GO TEAM EARTH!!
In years to come our telescopes and techniques will get better and better and we'll start finding our super earths.
The Christians, always a few centuries behind the curve, will claim its all faked while their famous greed destroys our planet even more until their wished-for Armageddon turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy...
We need a map like Sarah Palin's with the crosshairs on every Christian household. NO violence, just conversation. Tell them their magical god's gonna have a hard time sorting them out from the Muslims and Jews they love to hate.
No violence. Just conversation about their future payback.
Christian Voodoo worshippers believe in ghosts, demons, magic, fortune tellers. If Christians are allowed to vote then the mentally retarded should be given the same right to vote.
christian is such a general broad term. real christians should be involved in voodoo, ghosts, demons etc, they should even be voting but i guess most "christian denominations" today are part of all this mostly because they don't fully adhere to what the bible teaches. there's alot the bible says christians should do but alot of the churches choose to ignore.
blase - That's the 'True Christian' argument I get whenever I ask Christians to justify why their religion's caused more human suffering than all the other cults combined.
"Those people weren't TRUE Christians."
If it looks, smells, and sounds like a duck then...its a duck - Christianity is evil, period.
The morons feel GOOD when walking out of church. I got that same feeling back in the 70's when I almost got snared into a Hindu cult. That 'feel-good' feeling is from DOPAMINE and its released by the brain while sitting like mindless zombies in church and being told how to vote by a tax-free preacher.
@ Marcus
As i said "True Christians" i.e those who live sorely by what the bible says and are not hypocrites such the so called christians you are talking about don't engage in or should i say shouldn't engage in political, economic etc affairs. What i mean by that is they shouldn't/don't vote, don't register for military service/go to war, are not allied to or have influence with governments etc. These are a few of the things the bible says christians shouldn't engage in. John 18:36 is important in understanding this.
My problem is that people who follow what the bible says to the letter as much as they can label themselves christian but because others who "pretend to be" call themselves christian as well, people generalise the term and put them all in one basket. you should remember the bible itself speaks of true and false christians. Both have "christian" but a certain group is false. that's the point i'm trying to make
I would assume that the planet hunters are looking for a planet that would allow life. Have the hunters ever found a planet that we could live on in our own area, meaning around our sun?
Um, there is that one...
LOL@tazz! They're so cute at this age, aren't they?
Hiya Tazz!
Beyond the Earth, and within our Solar System, we can envision living on Mars and on Earth's Moon, as well as the interesting idea of hollowing out an asteroid or two. Life on all those destinations would be a severe challenge, making life in Antarctica look positively luxurious by comparison.
Future tech may allow for other destinations that may be called "home".
We have not yet found anything beyond our Solar System that is potentially habitable (not that we could get there given our current tech and the limits of known physics). The Kepler mission hopes to find such worlds.
"The Kepler mission hopes to find such worlds."
Correction..."will find" :)
Once more let it be stated that the amount spent of space research is less than one percent of the federal budget.
Man doesn't need religion to be inhumane. he's got that iced on his own. In some ways I hope when we find life it will be so far away we can never visit.
There is a Dr. Who episode (Tom Baker) where he tells his companion "I do like Earthling. Its just when they get toegther in large numbers other species tend to suffer."
@blase re:5.9
"2. Human leader(s) can't successfully unite mankind just religion has failed to do."
How could anyone possibly refute a sentence which doesn't even make sense?
But going on from that point in your post name me one 'God' or religion which has managed to unite mankind, even one country without any wars, corruption, class distinction, etc.
well nice to see you're one of those who instead of focusing on the discussion at hand want to nit-pick at little things like spelling and grammar. FYI most of my comments are typed really fast so i'm not suprised they read the way they do. excuse me for not proof reading before click post comment, see i care to an extent about my argument but not enough to treat it like an exam where my life depended. when you're ready to stop being a snob maybe we'll talk. it made sense enough for you to leave a comment about how it doesn't make sense. interesting. well if that's all you have to say...
I really don't give a rat's patootie how fast or how slow you type though it would be nice if you made sure your brain was engaged BEFORE you started typing, that is if you wanted people to understand what you were saying and weren't just typing to impress yourself.
"Human leader(s) can't successfully unite mankind just religion has failed to do."
That could be interpreted a couple different ways. 1) Human leaders can't successfully unite mankind, just religion can. ('has failed to do' being just a brain fart mistakenly added to the end of the statement) 2)Human leaders can't successfully unite mankind just (AS) religion has failed to do. As you can hopefully see these two interpretations have totally different meanings. From the continuation of your post you seemed to be saying the first of the two but don't let me put words into your mouth. So which is it or did you mean something entirely different that doesn't fit either of my interpretations?
I was not being a snob, I was trying to focus on the discussion until you threw a monkey wrench of gibberish into it.
I really like when people say they weren't trying to do something they have actually done. "i'm not being a snob"...but i'll write a snobbish comment or "don't let me put words in your mouth", this coming after making a way off "interpretation 1". even the dumbest egg in the basket would know you're first guess doesn't come close to what i wrote; going to question my frame of mind when typing i suggest you question yours when reading other people's comments. you're the only one whose commented on this so clearly most people understood what i meant except you. You're probably one of those people who when a non-english speaking person says something in english but in the wrong order, you can't wait to tell them "without being snobbish" of course even though you understood what they said
I guess it's one of those moments in class when a teacher says something and everyone knows what he's talking about and you put up your hand to ask a question about it and look stupid. Seriously, you're going to berate me for missing 2 letters, which you clearly managed to deduce were supposed to be there but you're making yourself deliberately dumb not to know what i was writing, that's truly inspiring. and you don't get to tell me what frame of mind i should have when i'm typing, my space, my keyboard, my brain.
now like i said, if you want to get back to the original discussion i'll be glad to carry on but if you're going to play intellectually possum then this is adios!
Hello dears, there is a clear statement in QURAN (the Great Book of Islam) saying that; God created seven skyes and seven earthes. Beleivers asked the prophet Mohamed about that (what does that mean). Prophet Mohamed said: Yes there is seven earthes all occupied by humanbeings like you 'there is Adam like Adam, Ibraham like Ibraham, Jesus like Jesus and Mohamed like Mohamed' but we do not know where are they in this huge universe he explained.
Fore more details about this matter please email me. God bless you all and NASA!!!!!!!!
Regards
Interesting, sounds similar to the, "Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" a rival to the Copenhagen interpretation of QM.
so are you saying that out there, somewhere, there's 6 other mes. i'm pretty sure that might be a symbolic thing people have chosen to take literally. sure there's loads of planets out there and some similar NOT quite like earth but similar, sure i'll believe that but not exactly like earth and no one exactly like me.
blase - With trillions of yellow dwarfs out there just like our sun I'd put odds on the bet that there ARE many types of humanoids just like us - you probably have MANY twins out there.
see all i'm seeing the term "just like" not "exactly like". Our planet sustains life because of it's location in the solar system, have you noticed there's always something missing with each planet they find that's "just like" earth. i.e; if we any closer or any further from the sun even by small fraction, we'd be in trouble. The location allows for conditions/temperatures, growth as well as cycles such as condensation, evaporation or as i call it the recycling system, if one of these wasn't working properly... so my conclusion is that unless there's another milky way out there and i don't mean "like the milky way" i mean a second exact milky way then you're probably right. But seeing as i believe in a creator and that he made variety hence all the beauty in the sky and beyond. the doppleganger theory(for lack of a better word) doesn't carry much weight for me. if there was better planet for us to be on i believe we'd be on it which leads me to the conclusion also that there's is no better planet and any planet that is found "to sustain life" even though not the extent that earth can, well let's just say i won't be the first on the spaceship.
That's very nice and all but most of us realize there are earth like size planets out there because of how big the Galaxy is but how about stop waisting our time about these types of planets. Really, who cares about a planet that is burning up? Maybe I would be interested if you said the temps were about 150 degrees because that would mean a chance of water atleast. When you find something that is in the so called goldilocks zone then I definitely would be interested in hearing about it.