715 new planets discovered

Nasa's Kepler space craft finished up with a big chunk of data and found evidence supporting a total of 715 exoplanets.

While I understand the use of concise language means some people might come out screaming.

"You haven't been there so you cannot say there is a discovery!"

And yes that might be correct... but when you look at what the satellite does and the detection method and the way analysis is done, you should be prepared to offer up a better solution to what is observed than the scientists involved already did. Which is... "Probably a planet with an orbital period of x, a distance of y and a mass bound of z"

Pretty awesome stuff, something that we maybe already got a taste for, that the galaxy we see is teeming with planets, but getting a good handle of how many we can currently detect and figuring out finer details is a really awesome start.

Does that mean the "elite" will be leaving soon? YEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAW!!!!

dEfinite repost

reply to post by ErosA433


Link wouldn't load for me, but it was prob due to an overabundance of people on the NASA site.

anyway this story was unexpected. because last year Keplar broke...

On August 15, 2013, NASA announced that Kepler would not continue searching for planets using the transit method after attempts to resolve issues with two of the four reaction wheels failed.[20][21][22] An engineering report has been ordered to assess the spacecraft's capabilities, its two good reaction wheels and its thrusters.[20] Concurrently, a scientific study is being conducted to determine whether enough knowledge can be obtained from Kepler's limited scope to justify its $18 million per year cost. Both reports are expected during the fall of 2013, at which time NASA will determine the future of Kepler.

they did have a fix in mind called k2--- kind of a workaround to keep it going, so I guess they got it fixed?

REPOST

www.abovetopsecret.com...

ATS member stumason discovered 2.6 milion new stars here ..

apologies for the re-post... kind of interesting still that a single repost gets like 3 people complaining its a re-post... though typically a few members here repost like crazy, on the same forum... and no one cares.

Oooooh well

Yup ..

closing