NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

[Dr. Jai Maharaj]

NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

NASA
nasa.gov
Thursday, July 23, 2015

NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-
size planet in the "habitable zone" around a sun-like
star. This discovery and the introduction of 11 other new
small habitable zone candidate planets mark another
milestone in the journey to finding another "Earth."

The newly discovered Kepler-452b is the smallest planet
to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone -- the
area around a star where liquid water could pool on the
surface of an orbiting planet -- of a G2-type star, like
our sun. The confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total
number of confirmed planets to 1,030.

"On the 20th anniversary year of the discovery that
proved other suns host planets, the Kepler exoplanet
explorer has discovered a planet and star which most
closely resemble the Earth and our Sun," said John
Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science
Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in
Washington. "This exciting result brings us one step
closer to finding an Earth 2.0."

Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth
and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. While its
mass and composition are not yet determined, previous
research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b
have a good chance of being rocky.

While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit
is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther
from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the
Sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years
older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20
percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.

"We can think of Kepler-452b as an older, bigger cousin
to Earth, providing an opportunity to understand and
reflect upon Earth's evolving environment," said Jon
Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA's Ames
Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who led the
team that discovered Kepler-452b. "It's awe-inspiring to
consider that this planet has spent 6 billion years in
the habitable zone of its star; longer than Earth. That's
substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the
necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on
this planet."

To help confirm the finding and better determine the
properties of the Kepler-452 system, the team conducted
ground-based observations at the University of Texas at
Austin's McDonald Observatory, the Fred Lawrence Whipple
Observatory on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona, and the W. M. Keck
Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. These measurements
were key for the researchers to confirm the planetary
nature of Kepler-452b, to refine the size and brightness
of its host star and to better pin down the size of the
planet and its orbit.

The Kepler-452 system is located 1,400 light-years away
in the constellation Cygnus. The research paper reporting
this finding has been accepted for publication in The
Astronomical Journal.

In addition to confirming Kepler-452b, the Kepler team
has increased the number of new exoplanet candidates by
521 from their analysis of observations conducted from
May 2009 to May 2013, raising the number of planet
candidates detected by the Kepler mission to 4,696.
Candidates require follow-up observations and analysis to
verify they are actual planets.

Twelve of the new planet candidates have diameters
between one to two times that of Earth, and orbit in
their star's habitable zone. Of these, nine orbit stars
that are similar to our sun in size and temperature.

"We've been able to fully automate our process of
identifying planet candidates, which means we can finally
assess every transit signal in the entire Kepler dataset
quickly and uniformly," said Jeff Coughlin, Kepler
scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View,
California, who led the analysis of a new candidate
catalog. "This gives astronomers a statistically sound
population of planet candidates to accurately determine
the number of small, possibly rocky planets like Earth in
our Milky Way galaxy."

These findings, presented in the seventh Kepler Candidate
Catalog, will be submitted for publication in the
Astrophysical Journal. These findings are derived from
data publicly available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive.

Scientists now are producing the last catalog based on
the original Kepler mission's four-year data set. The
final analysis will be conducted using sophisticated
software that is increasingly sensitive to the tiny
telltale signatures of Earth-size planets.

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 in Boulder.

For more information about the Kepler mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

A related feature story about other potentially habitable
planets is online at:

http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/finding-another-earth

http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-kepler-mission-discovers-bigger-older-cousin-to-earth

More at:

NASA
http://www.nasa.gov

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.jai-maharaj

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