Finds New Super-Earth 180 Light-Years Away
WASHINGTON, DC: A year and a half after an equipment failure threatened
to derail its epochal search for worlds beyond our solar system, NASA's Kepler
spacecraft has bagged another planet, astronomers announced on Thursday.
The new planet is
20,000 miles in diameter, about 2 1/2 times the size of Earth, and 12 times as
massive, putting it into a category of planets called super-Earths that do not
exist in our solar system. It is unlivable, circling a star slightly smaller than
the Sun about 180 light-years from here in the constellation Pisces, at the
roasting distance of only 8.4 million miles, less than a tenth of the distance
between us and our star.
Kepler was
originally designed to stare at a patch of stars for four years and watch for
blinks caused by planets passing in front of them. Early in 2013, however, one
of the reaction wheels that keep the telescope pointed broke down. Engineers
figured out a way to compensate using the pressure of sunlight on Kepler's
solar panels to stabilize the spacecraft for smaller periods of time.
During a nine-day
test run in February with the telescope, a team led by Andrew Vanderburg of the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected a planet passing in front
of a star known as HIP 116454. Follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes
and the Canadian MOST satellite confirmed the presence of a planet, which
astronomers said was probably a water world or a "mini-Neptune," with
a small core and a billowing gaseous atmosphere.
Pasted
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