Author Topic: NASA - Kepler updates  (Read 275165 times)

Offline Star One

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #480 on: 05/12/2016 07:33 pm »

Offline yg1968

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #481 on: 05/13/2016 02:59 am »
Here is the audio of the May 10th 2016 Kepler teleconference:



The slides can be found here:

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/kepler/briefingmaterials160510
« Last Edit: 05/13/2016 03:02 am by yg1968 »

Offline Star One

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #482 on: 06/20/2016 08:28 pm »
NASA's K2 Finds Newborn Exoplanet Around Young Star

Astronomers have discovered the youngest fully formed exoplanet ever detected. The discovery was made using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope and its extended K2 mission, as well as the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Exoplanets are planets that orbit stars beyond our sun.

The newfound planet, K2-33b, is a bit larger than Neptune and whips tightly around its star every five days. It is only 5 to 10 million years old, making it one of a very few newborn planets found to date.

"Our Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old," said Trevor David of Caltech in Pasadena, lead author of a new study published online June 20, 2016, in the journal Nature. "By comparison, the planet K2-33b is very young. You might think of it as an infant." David is a graduate student working with astronomer Lynne Hillenbrand, also of Caltech.

Planet formation is a complex and tumultuous process that remains shrouded in mystery. Astronomers have discovered and confirmed roughly 3,000 exoplanets so far; however, nearly all of them are hosted by middle-aged stars, with ages of a billion years or more. For astronomers, attempting to understand the life cycles of planetary systems using existing examples is like trying to learn how people grow from babies to children to teenagers, by only studying adults.

"The newborn planet will help us better understand how planets form, which is important for understanding the processes that led to the formation of Earth," said co-author Erik Petigura of Caltech.


The first signals of the planet's existence were measured by K2. The telescope's camera detected a periodic dimming of the light emitted by the planet's host star, a sign that an orbiting planet could be regularly passing in front of the star and blocking the light. Data from the Keck Observatory validated that the dimming was indeed caused by a planet, and also helped confirm its youthful age.

Infrared measurements from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope showed that the system's star is surrounded by a thin disk of planetary debris, indicating that its planet-formation phase is wrapping up. Planets form out of thick disks of gas and dust, called protoplanetary disks, that surround young stars.

"Initially, this material may obscure any forming planets, but after a few million years, the dust starts to dissipate," said co-author Anne Marie Cody, a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "It is during this time window that we can begin to detect the signatures of youthful planets with K2."

A surprising feature in the discovery of K2-33b is how close the newborn planet lies to its star. The planet is nearly 10 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun, making it hot. While numerous older exoplanets have been found orbiting very tightly to their stars, astronomers have long struggled to understand how more massive planets like this one wind up in such small orbits. Some theories propose that it takes hundreds of millions of years to bring a planet from a more distant orbit into a close one -- and therefore cannot explain K2-33b, which is quite a bit younger.

The science team says there are two main theories that may explain how K2-33b wound up so close to its star. It could have migrated there in a process called disk migration that takes hundreds of thousands of years. Or, the planet could have formed "in situ" -- right where it is. The discovery of K2-33b therefore gives theorists a new data point to ponder.

"After the first discoveries of massive exoplanets on close orbits about 20 years ago, it was immediately suggested that they could absolutely not have formed there, but in the past several years, some momentum has grown for in situ formation theories, so the idea is not as wild as it once seemed," said David.

"The question we are answering is: Did those planets take a long time to get into those hot orbits, or could they have been there from a very early stage? We are saying, at least in this one case, that they can indeed be there at a very early stage," he said.

Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.


News Media Contact

Elizabeth Landau
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6425
[email protected]

Michele Johnson
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
650-604-6982
[email protected]

Felicia Chou
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0257
[email protected]

Written by Whitney Clavin

2016-156

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2016-156

Offline Star One

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #483 on: 07/01/2016 04:55 pm »
Five Planets Transiting a Ninth Magnitude Star

Quote
The Kepler mission has revealed a great diversity of planetary systems and architectures, but most of the planets discovered by Kepler orbit faint stars. Using new data from the K2 mission, we present the discovery of a five planet system transiting a bright (V = 8.9, K = 7.7) star called HIP 41378. HIP 41378 is a slightly metal-poor late F-type star with moderate rotation (v sin(i) = 7 km/s) and lies at a distance of 116 +/- 18 from Earth. We find that HIP 41378 hosts two sub-Neptune sized planets orbiting 3.5% outside a 2:1 period commensurability in 15.6 and 31.7 day orbits. In addition, we detect three planets which each transit once during the 75 days spanned by K2 observations. One planet is Neptune sized in a likely ~160 day orbit, one is sub-Saturn sized likely in a ~130 day orbit, and one is a Jupiter sized planet in a likely ~1 year orbit. We show that these estimates for the orbital periods can be made more precise by taking into account dynamical stability considerations. We also calculate the distribution of stellar reflex velocities expected for this system, and show that it provides a good target for future radial velocity observations. If a precise orbital period can be determined for the outer Jovian planet through future observations, it will be an excellent candidate for follow-up transit observations to study its atmosphere and measure its oblateness.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.08441

Offline Star One

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #484 on: 07/15/2016 06:54 pm »
WARM JUPITERS ARE LESS LONELY THAN HOT JUPITERS: CLOSE NEIGHBORS

Quote
Exploiting the Kepler transit data, we uncover a dramatic distinction in the prevalence of sub-Jovian companions between systems that contain hot Jupiters (HJs) (periods inward of 10 days) and those that host warm Jupiters (WJs) (periods between 10 and 200 days). HJs, with the singular exception of WASP-47b, do not have any detectable inner or outer planetary companions (with periods inward of 50 days and sizes down to 2 R Earth). Restricting ourselves to inner companions, our limits reach down to 1 R Earth. In stark contrast, half of the WJs are closely flanked by small companions. Statistically, the companion fractions for hot and WJs are mutually exclusive, particularly in regard to inner companions. The high companion fraction of WJs also yields clues to their formation. The WJs that have close-by siblings should have low orbital eccentricities and low mutual inclinations. The orbital configurations of these systems are reminiscent of those of the low-mass close-in planetary systems abundantly discovered by the Kepler mission. This, and other arguments, lead us to propose that these WJs are formed in situ. There are indications that there may be a second population of WJs with different characteristics. In this picture, WASP-47b could be regarded as the extending tail of the in situ WJs into the HJ region and does not represent the generic formation route for HJs.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-637X/825/2/98

Offline Star One

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #485 on: 07/18/2016 08:15 pm »
News | July 18, 2016
NASA's Kepler Confirms 100+ Exoplanets During Its K2 Mission
This artist's concept shows NASA's Kepler Space Telescope on its K2 mission.
This artist's concept shows NASA's Kepler Space Telescope on its K2 mission. In July 2016, an international team of astronomers announced they had discovered more than 100 new planets using this telescope. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Full image and caption

An international team of astronomers has discovered and confirmed a treasure trove of new worlds using NASA's Kepler spacecraft on its K2 mission. Out of 197 initial planet candidates, scientists have confirmed 104 planets outside our solar system. Among the confirmed is a planetary system comprising four promising planets that could be rocky.

These four planets, all between 20 and 50 percent larger than Earth by diameter, are orbiting the M dwarf star K2-72, found 181 light-years away in the direction of the Aquarius constellation. The host star is less than half the size of the sun and less bright. The planets' orbital periods range from five-and-a-half to 24 days, and two of them may experience irradiation levels from their star comparable to those on Earth. Despite their tight orbits -- closer than Mercury's orbit around our sun -- the possibility that life could arise on a planet around such a star cannot be ruled out, according to lead author Ian Crossfield, a Sagan Fellow at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson.

The researchers achieved this extraordinary "roundup" of exoplanets by combining data with follow-up observations by Earth-based telescopes including the North Gemini telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the Automated Planet Finder of the University of California Observatories, and the Large Binocular Telescope operated by the University of Arizona. The discoveries are published online in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

Both Kepler and its K2 mission discover new planets by measuring the subtle dip in a star's brightness caused by a planet passing in front of its star. In its initial mission, Kepler surveyed just one patch of sky in the northern hemisphere, determining the frequency of planets whose size and temperature might be similar to Earth orbiting stars similar to our sun. In the spacecraft's extended mission in 2013, it lost its ability to precisely stare at its original target area, but a brilliant fix. created a second life for the telescope that is proving scientifically fruitful.

After the fix, Kepler started its K2 mission, which has provided an ecliptic field of view with greater opportunities for Earth-based observatories in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Additionally, the K2 mission is entirely community-driven with all targets proposed by the scientific community.

Because it covers more of the sky, the K2 mission is capable of observing a larger fraction of cooler, smaller, red-dwarf type stars, and because such stars are much more common in the Milky Way than sun-like stars, nearby stars will predominantly be red dwarfs.

"An analogy would be to say that Kepler performed a demographic study, while the K2 mission focuses on the bright and nearby stars with different types of planets," said Crossfield. "The K2 mission allows us to increase the number of small, red stars by a factor of 20, significantly increasing the number of astronomical 'movie stars' that make the best systems for further study."

To validate candidate planets identified by K2, the researchers obtained high-resolution images of the planet-hosting stars as well as high-resolution optical spectroscopy. By dispersing the starlight as through a prism, the spectrographs allowed the researchers to infer the physical properties of a star -- such as mass, radius and temperature -- from which the properties of any planets orbiting it can be inferred.

These observations represent a natural stepping stone from the K2 mission to NASA's other upcoming exoplanet missions, such as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and James Webb Space Telescope.

"This bountiful list of validated exoplanets from the K2 mission highlights the fact that the targeted examination of bright stars and nearby stars along the ecliptic is providing many interesting new planets," said Steve Howell, project scientist for the K2 mission at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "These targets allow the astronomical community ease of follow-up and characterization, providing a few gems for first study by the James Webb Space Telescope, which could perhaps tell us about the planets' atmospheres."

This work was performed in part under contract with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory funded by NASA through the Sagan Fellowship Program executed by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute.

NASA Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. JPL in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

For more information on the Kepler and the K2 mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

For more information about exoplanets, visit:

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6572
« Last Edit: 07/18/2016 08:17 pm by Star One »

Offline Star One

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NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #486 on: 07/20/2016 08:20 pm »
Two super-Earth-sized planets discovered orbiting a nearby star

Quote
NASA's Kepler spacecraft continues its fruitful exoplanet hunt with the newest discovery of two super-Earth-sized alien worlds. The newly detected planets are orbiting a nearby sun-sized star known as HD 3167, located some 150 light years away. The results are presented in a paper published July 18 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Although Kepler has lost two of its four reaction wheels and therefore cannot be precisely pointed toward stars, it is still capable of detecting new exoworlds. The spacecraft is now in its extended mission, known as K2, during which it has already found over 100 new planets. The HD 3167 system is just the latest addition to the vast collection of extrasolar worlds detected by K2.

HD 3167 was observed by Kepler between January 3 and March 23, 2016 during Campaign 8 of its K2 mission. This observation campaign allowed a team of astronomers, led by Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), to detect two transit signals that could be planets circling around this nearby star.

"We identified two planet candidates transiting HD 3167 after processing pixel-level data to produce a light curve, removing systematic effects due to Kepler's unstable pointing, and searching for planets using a Box Least Squares periodogram search," the researchers wrote in the paper.

http://m.phys.org/news/2016-07-super-earth-sized-planets-orbiting-nearby-star.html
« Last Edit: 07/20/2016 08:20 pm by Star One »

Offline Lar

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #487 on: 08/01/2016 03:11 pm »
Many of the last few posts should really be in the discussion thread (http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=38687.0)

Thank you AnalogMan for the report AND for giving the link, saving moderator time. I've moved some posts. Might have missed some. Might have moved some that shouldn't have. PM me if you are so inclined.
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Offline hop

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #488 on: 08/05/2016 08:14 pm »
Another glitch
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/kepler/kepler-mission-manager-update-k2-campaign-10
Quote
Kepler Mission Manager Update: K2 Campaign 10
During a scheduled contact with NASA's Kepler space telescope on Thursday, July 28, the team found the photometer—the camera onboard the spacecraft—powered off. The photometer was turned on again and the flight system returned to autonomous science operations on Monday, Aug. 1. We will confirm that science operations have been resumed within a week. The team is currently investigating the cause; the spacecraft is otherwise operating normally.

Offline hop

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #489 on: 08/08/2016 08:45 pm »
It appears issue in the previous update may have been due to another CCD module failing

http://keplerscience.arc.nasa.gov/break-in-science-collection-during-k2-campaign-10.html
Quote
While the cause of this is yet to be confirmed, the observables are in family with those seen in conjunction with the failure of science CCD Modules 3 and 7 in 2010 and 2014. Further, thermal data retrieved from the spacecraft are strongly suggestive of a drop in power dissipated by Module 4 that is again in family with a similar drop when Modules 3 and 7 failed. Thus there is a strong likelihood that Module 4 is no longer functioning. If this is indeed the case, this would leave us with 18 remaining science modules of the initial 21.

Offline Star One

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #490 on: 10/07/2016 07:08 pm »
NASA's Kepler Gets the 'Big Picture' of Comet 67P

On Sept. 30, the European Space Agency concluded its Rosetta mission and the study of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. During the final month of the mission, NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft had a unique opportunity to provide a "big picture" view of the comet as it was unobservable from Earth. Ground-based telescopes could not see comet 67P, because the comet's orbit placed it in the sky during daylight hours.

From Sept. 7 through Sept. 20, the Kepler spacecraft, operating in its K2 mission, fixed its gaze on comet 67P. From the distant vantage point of Kepler, the spacecraft could observe the comet's core and tail. The long-range global view of Kepler complements the close-in view of the Rosetta spacecraft, providing context for the high-resolution investigation Rosetta performed as it descended closer and closer to the comet.

During the two-week period of study, Kepler took a picture of the comet every 30 minutes. The animation shows a period of 29.5 hours of observation from Sept. 17 through Sept. 18. The comet is seen passing through Kepler's field of view from top right to bottom left, as outlined by the diagonal strip. The white dots represent stars and other regions in space studied during K2's tenth observing campaign.

As a comet travels through space, it sheds a tail of gas and dust. A comet's activity level can be obtained by measuring the reflected sunlight. Analyzing the Kepler data, scientists will be able to determine the amount of mass lost each day as comet 67P travels through the solar system.

NASA Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

For more information on Kepler and the K2 missions, go to:

www.nasa.gov/kepler

For more information on Rosetta, go to:

https://www.nasa.gov/rosetta/


News Media Contact

Elizabeth Landau
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6425
[email protected]

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6641

Offline Star One

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NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #491 on: 11/28/2016 07:27 pm »
Potentially habitable super-Earth K2-3d observed transiting parent star

Quote
A group of researchers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), the University of Tokyo, and the Astrobiology Center among others has observed the transit of a potentially Earth-like extrasolar planet known as K2-3d using the MuSCAT instrument on the Okayama Astrophysical Observatory 188-centimetre telescope. A transit is a phenomenon in which a planet passes in front of its parent star, blocking a small amount of light from the star, like a shadow of the planet. While transits have previously been observed for thousands of other extrasolar planets, K2-3d is important because there is a possibility that it might harbour extraterrestrial life.

Quote
K2-3d is an extrasolar planet 147 light-years away that was discovered by NASA’s Kepler K2 mission. K2-3d’s size is 1.5 times that of the Earth. The planet orbits its host star — also known as EPIC 201367065, hosting two other super-Earth exoplanets, K2-3b and c — which is half the size of the Sun, with a period of about 45 days. Compared to the Earth, the planet orbits close to its host star (about ⅕ of the Earth-Sun distance). But, because the temperature of the host star is lower than that of the Sun, calculations show that this is the right distance for the planet to have a relatively warm climate like the Earth’s. There is a possibility that liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet, raising the tantalising possibility of extraterrestrial life.

K2-3d’s orbit is aligned so that as seen from Earth, it transits (passes in front of) its host star. This causes, short, periodic decreases in the star’s brightness, as the planet blocks some of the star’s light. This alignment enables researchers to probe the atmospheric composition of these planets by precise measurement of the amount of blocked starlight at different wavelengths.
About 30 potentially habitable planets that also have transiting orbits were discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission, but most of these planets orbit fainter, more distant stars. Because it is closer to Earth and its host star is brighter, K2-3d is a more interesting candidate for detailed follow-up studies. The brightness decrease of the host star caused by the transit of K2-3d is small, only 0.07 percent. However, it is expected that the next generation of large telescopes will be able to measure how this brightness decrease varies with wavelength, enabling investigations of the composition of the planet’s atmosphere. If extraterrestrial life exists on K2-3d, scientists hope to be able to detect molecules related to it, such as oxygen, in the atmosphere.

MuSCAT observations and transit ephemeris improvements
The orbital period of K2-3d is about 45 days. Since the K2 mission’s survey period is only 80 days for each area of sky, researchers could only measure two transits in the K2 data. This isn’t sufficient to measure the planet’s orbital period precisely, so when researchers attempt to predict the times of future transits, creating something called a “transit ephemeris,” but there are uncertainties in the predicted times. These uncertainties grow larger as they try to predict further into the future. Therefore, early additional transit observations and adjustments to the ephemeris were required before researchers lost track of the transit. Because of the importance of K2-3d, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope observed two transits soon after the planet’s discovery, bringing the total to four transit measurements. However, the addition of even a single transit measurement farther in the future can help to yield a significantly improved ephemeris.

Using the Okayama 188-centimetre Reflector Telescope and the latest observational instrument MuSCAT, the team observed a transit of K2-3d for the first time with a ground-based telescope. Though a 0.07 percent brightness decrease is near the limit of what can be observed with ground-based telescopes, MuSCAT’s ability to observe three wavelength bands simultaneously enhanced its ability to detect the transit. By reanalysing the data from K2 and Spitzer in combination with this new observation, researchers have greatly improved the precision of the ephemeris, determining the orbital period of the planet to within about 18 seconds (1/30 of the original uncertainty). This improved transit ephemeris ensures that when the next generation of large telescopes come online, they will know exactly when to watch for transits. Thus these research results help pave the way for future extraterrestrial life surveys.

https://astronomynow.com/2016/11/28/potentially-habitable-super-earth-k2-3d-observed-transiting-parent-star/

Paper.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/152/6/171
« Last Edit: 11/28/2016 07:28 pm by Star One »

Offline Star One

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NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #492 on: 06/19/2017 04:04 pm »
NASA Releases Kepler Survey Catalog with Hundreds of New Planet Candidates

NASA’s Kepler space telescope team has released a mission catalog of planet candidates that introduces 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and orbiting in their star's habitable zone, which is the range of distance from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet.

This is the most comprehensive and detailed catalog release of candidate exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system, from Kepler’s first four years of data. It’s also the final catalog from the spacecraft’s view of the patch of sky in the Cygnus constellation.

With the release of this catalog, derived from data publicly available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive, there are now 4,034 planet candidates identified by Kepler. Of which, 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets. Of roughly 50 near-Earth size habitable zone candidates detected by Kepler, more than 30 have been verified.

Additionally, results using Kepler data suggest two distinct size groupings of small planets. Both results have significant implications for the search for life. The final Kepler catalog will serve as the foundation for more study to determine the prevalence and demographics of planets in the galaxy, while the discovery of the two distinct planetary populations shows that about half the planets we know of in the galaxy either have no surface, or lie beneath a deep, crushing atmosphere – an environment unlikely to host life.

The findings were presented at a news conference Monday at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley.

“The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near Earth-analogs – planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth,” said Mario Perez, Kepler program scientist in the Astrophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Understanding their frequency in the galaxy will help inform the design of future NASA missions to directly image another Earth.”

The Kepler space telescope hunts for planets by detecting the minuscule drop in a star’s brightness that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it, called a transit.

This is the eighth release of the Kepler candidate catalog, gathered by reprocessing the entire set of data from Kepler’s observations during the first four years of its primary mission. This data will enable scientists to determine what planetary populations – from rocky bodies the size of Earth, to gas giants the size of Jupiter – make up the galaxy’s planetary demographics.

To ensure a lot of planets weren't missed, the team introduced their own simulated planet transit signals into the data set and determined how many were correctly identified as planets. Then, they added data that appear to come from a planet, but were actually false signals, and checked how often the analysis mistook these for planet candidates. This work told them which types of planets were overcounted and which were undercounted by the Kepler team’s data processing methods.

“This carefully-measured catalog is the foundation for directly answering one of astronomy’s most compelling questions – how many planets like our Earth are in the galaxy?” said Susan Thompson, Kepler research scientist for the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and lead author of the catalog study.

One research group took advantage of the Kepler data to make precise measurements of thousands of planets, revealing two distinct groups of small planets. The team found a clean division in the sizes of rocky, Earth-size planets and gaseous planets smaller than Neptune. Few planets were found between those groupings.

Using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the group measured the sizes of 1,300 stars in the Kepler field of view to determine the radii of 2,000 Kepler planets with exquisite precision.

“We like to think of this study as classifying planets in the same way that biologists identify new species of animals,” said Benjamin Fulton, doctoral candidate at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, and lead author of the second study. “Finding two distinct groups of exoplanets is like discovering mammals and lizards make up distinct branches of a family tree.”

It seems that nature commonly makes rocky planets up to about 75 percent bigger than Earth. For reasons scientists don't yet understand, about half of those planets take on a small amount of hydrogen and helium that dramatically swells their size, allowing them to "jump the gap" and join the population closer to Neptune’s size.

The Kepler spacecraft continues to make observations in new patches of sky in its extended mission, searching for planets and studying a variety of interesting astronomical objects, from distant star clusters to objects such as the TRAPPIST-1 system of seven Earth-size planets, closer to home.

Ames manages the Kepler missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

For more information about the Kepler mission, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/kepler

-end-
« Last Edit: 06/19/2017 04:06 pm by Star One »

Offline hop

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #493 on: 06/19/2017 05:18 pm »
Latest Kepler science conference is happening this week: https://keplerscience.arc.nasa.gov/scicon4/

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #494 on: 06/20/2017 03:06 am »
Here is the briefing material of today's press conference:
https://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/briefing-materials-final-kepler-survey-catalog-of-planet-candidates-in-the-cygnus-field

Here's the archived video of the press conference:




Here is cool short video highlighting the announcements of today:

« Last Edit: 06/20/2017 03:12 am by yg1968 »

Offline Star One

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #495 on: 12/09/2017 09:22 pm »
NASA Hosts Media Teleconference to Announce Latest Kepler Discovery

NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST Thursday, Dec. 14, to announce the latest discovery made by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data.

The briefing participants are:

Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington
Christopher Shallue, senior software engineer at Google AI in Mountain View, California
Andrew Vanderburg, astronomer and NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Texas, Austin
Jessie Dotson, Kepler project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley
For dial-in information, media must send their names, affiliations and phone numbers to Felicia Chou at [email protected] no later than noon Dec. 14. Questions can be submitted on Twitter during the teleconference using the hashtag #askNASA.

Teleconference audio and visuals will stream live at:

https://www.nasa.gov/live

Any speculation on what’s this about?

Offline Johnnyhinbos

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #496 on: 12/11/2017 02:28 pm »
John Hanzl. Author, action / adventure www.johnhanzl.com

Offline Star One

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NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #497 on: 12/11/2017 02:56 pm »
I like this sensational piece regarding Thursday's NASA press conference...

https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/890401/aliens-nasa-breakthrough-exoplanets-space-planet-solar-system-ai-ufo

That paper & it’s sister paper the Daily Star have a unique relationship with ‘space’ based news.
« Last Edit: 12/11/2017 02:56 pm by Star One »

Offline RotoSequence

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #498 on: 12/11/2017 02:57 pm »
I like this sensational piece regarding Thursday's NASA press conference...

https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/890401/aliens-nasa-breakthrough-exoplanets-space-planet-solar-system-ai-ufo

 ::)

The day they find something related to aliens is the day it leaks three months before the scheduled press conference.  ;D

Offline Star One

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Re: NASA - Kepler updates
« Reply #499 on: 12/13/2017 05:15 pm »
Judging by this article the big significance about this announcement will be the use of Google’s machine learning to find exoplanets. Especially with a senior software engineer from Google AI on the panel.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2017/12/nasa-news-deep-dive-update-kepler-missions-big-alien-planet-discovery-the-first-by-ai-live-streamed-.html

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