NASA & Industrial Light & Magic Rep & SETI Rep to Announce Kepler Discovery at Media Briefing ?

reply to post by Smugallo


you are using this one ?
www.nasa.gov...

its starting in less then 2 minutes. so people tune in if you wanne know whats it about.

ahhh if you goto ustream, much higher defination than on nasa site

Starting now...excited, but also prepared for dissapointment haha

This is what it is? Real-life 'Star Wars' planet seen

Again...disappointing. No wonder they had Lucasfilm involved. They wanted to use the 'Star Wars' name. Is this what my tax dollars pay for? GTFO.

Its on now!!!!

I know I will be disappointed, but still watching!

doyle (SETI) is the lead author of the paper in question!

16 B - dammit where are my aliens?

A BINARY planet.. really ts a flop announcement
2nd Line Hahahaha

Meh.

Meh again.

oh dear...talk about clutching at straws!! no incredibly exciting

A planet with two suns. Woohoo!

A planet with no life. Again I am disappointed that my tax money pays for hypes like this. I am sick of getting excited for press conferences that just turn out to be something they spent a lot of money on for an announcement that is not really important.

Freakin' YAWWWWWWNNNNNNNN.

reply to post by Yukitup


On second thought - why is SETI there?

And what is the paper that was published today?

What more could we expect from a government ran department.

Can somebody post a summary?, not enough bandwidth to follow the video myself.

Curious but not too exited.

EDIT: ok, i get the gist. zzzzz

So this big announcement is to say they've found a planet like Tatooine as seen in Star Wars. Oh well back to the football.

Kepler-16: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet

Science 16 September 2011:
Vol. 333 no. 6049 pp. 1602-1606
DOI: 10.1126/science.1210923

www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6049/1602.abstract

Abstract

We report the detection of a planet whose orbit surrounds a pair of low-mass stars. Data from the Kepler spacecraft reveal transits of the planet across both stars, in addition to the mutual eclipses of the stars, giving precise constraints on the absolute dimensions of all three bodies. The planet is comparable to Saturn in mass and size and is on a nearly circular 229-day orbit around its two parent stars. The eclipsing stars are 20 and 69% as massive as the Sun and have an eccentric 41-day orbit. The motions of all three bodies are confined to within 0.5° of a single plane, suggesting that the planet formed within a circumbinary disk.