Five new planets found

Hotter than molten lava :

Victoria Jaggard in Washington, DC

Five new planets have been found orbiting distant stars—the first confirmed new worlds from NASA’s recently launched Kepler space telescope mission, astronomers announced today.

Like many of the more than 400 exoplanets, planets outside our solar system—found to date, the new planets are so-called hot Jupiters. They’re about the same mass as Jupiter and orbit very close to their host stars, which makes the planets relatively easy to spot from Earth.

The smallest of the new planets is about the same size as Neptune, though much more massive.

All of the planets are hotter than molten lava and could turn gold to goo, according to NASA temperature estimates.

Dubbed Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b, and 8b, the five new planets range in temperature from 2,000 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,090 to 1,650 degrees Celsius), William Borucki, Kepler’s principal investigator, said today during a press briefing at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting in Washington, DC.

Kepler ‘working so well’

One of the worlds, Kepler 7b, is among the lowest-density planets yet found, with about the same density as Styrofoam, he said.

These planets are ‘certainly no place to look for life—that will be coming later’, with discoveries of Earth-like planets, Borucki said. Kepler’s main goal is to find rocky, Earthlike planets orbiting in stars’ habitable zones—the regions in which planets receive enough heat from their stars for liquid water to exist.

While the new finds don’t meet those criteria, they do show that the instrument is working as expected—offering ‘a tantalizing hint at what we can expect in a few years’ time’, noted Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“It’s wonderful to see Kepler working so well”.

How to find new planets

Kepler looks for extrasolar planets by spying the decrease in starlight as a planet transits, or crosses in front of, its host star, as seen from Earth.

The orbiting telescope, which launched last March, spotted the five new worlds in its first six weeks of operation.

National Geographic News