Big science news of the day is the revelation from the Kepler mission that they have (so far) discovered more than 1000 candidate exoplanets. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy has the low-down on the significance of the news:
In 15 years we’ve found about 500 planets orbiting other stars, but in the almost two years since Kepler launched it may have easily tripled that number! Now, to be careful: these are candidate planets, which means they have not been confirmed. But in most cases these look pretty good, and if these numbers hold up it indicates that our galaxy is lousy with planets. They’re everywhere.
And it gets better: of those planets found, 54 are in their stars’ habitable zones. Now, many of these are massive planets unlikely to be Earth-like, but the huge news is that five are near-Earth sized, and one is actually very close to Earth’s size!
If this pans out, then it implies there could be a million Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.
You can read more on the Kepler news at Cosmic Log, The Planetary Society, NASA, Nature, and Boing Boing. In fact, it’s worth taking a look at all of Lee Billings’ guest blogs on Boing Boing for a good rundown on these exoplanet discoveries and the techniques used to make them.
