Kepler observatory locates 700 planets in just six weeks

by Steven Mostyn - Jul 27 2010, 06:41

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler observatory has the hearts of stargazing scientists all aflutter after early deep space images collected by the mission revealed more than 700 new planets, of which around 140 are similar in size to Earth.

With the Kepler spacecraft having already located such an array of worlds in just six weeks of looking beyond our solar system, scientists are now rethinking the idea that most deep space planets are likely to be gas giants much like Jupiter and Saturn.

“The figures suggest our galaxy, the Milky Way [which has around 100 billion stars], will contain 100 million habitable planets, and soon we will be identifying the first of them,” enthused Dimitar Sasselov, astronomy professor at Harvard and a scientist attached to the Kepler Mission.

“With our own little telescope, just in the next two years, we will be able to identify at least 60 of them,” he added. “There is a lot more work we need to do with this, but the statistical result is loud and clear, and it is that planets like our own Earth are out there.”

It’s hard to quantify exactly how many new worlds are orbiting distant stars across the universe, not least when considering that the Kepler observatory has its sights fixed on an incredibly small field of view within just the Milky Way.

NASA’s spacecraft is presently using a 95 mega-pixel camera to monitor the brightness of more than 145,000 stars located across three constellations of the Milky Way. By doing so, its cutting-edge telescope is able to record and analyse the passage of planets orbiting those stars by measuring specific changes in light radiation.

To put Kepler’s scientific worth into perspective, only around 450 planets had been found outside our solar system in the past 15 years before NASA’s observatory turned its eye to the stars.

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