3 Weird Alien Planets Found Around Sun-Like Star

A NASA spacecraft has found an unusual three-planet system that consists of one super-Earth and two Neptune-size worlds orbiting a star similar to our sun, a new study reveals.

The planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope discovered the three planets around the star Kepler-18, which is only 10 percent larger than the sun and contains 97 percent of the sun's mass, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin said. The alien system could also host more planets than have been found so far, they added.

All three planets, which are designated Kepler-18b, c, and d, orbit much closer to their parent star than Mercury does to the sun. The planet Kepler-18b orbits closest to the star, taking 3.5 days to complete its journey. The planet is about 6.9 times the mass of Earth and is twice the size of our home planet, making planet b a so-called super-Earth, the researchers said.
news.yahoo.com...

NASA is just another scheme to justify losing all focus of our planetary concerns and instead focus on some hypothetically existing inhabited planet in the universe

Pics.. or it didn't happen.

reply to post by Manhater


io9.com/kepler-18

wow! I think the most mind boggling thing for me is trying to imagine a large planet orbiting a sun in 3.5 days, instead of a year!! That baby must be really whipping through space. Makes me dizzy.

reply to post by chrissiel123


Its kind of common for the exoplanet we've been able to detect so far, there are Jupiter sized planets hurling around their star in less than a day out there, hotter than bjesus!

So far we have discovered hundreds of planets and these are the easy big ones that happen to pass between ourselves and its sun. There will be considerably more whose orbital path is not between us and its sun as well as the smaller ones further out too difficult to detect. However, even these will be spotted in the very near future and they are even talking about detecting the planets atmospheres. Exciting stuff.

If Kepler-18b orbits closer to its parent start than Mercury, wouldn't that make it pretty inhabitable due to extreme temperatures..?

reply to post by jeenyus2008


Who said it was habitable?
Earth-like is a broad term used for a simple terrestrial planet, nothing more, meaning it's solid and not gas. I wish more scrutiny would be used with a term like that. In fact, the debate is whether Kepler 18 b is a planet at all! Really the link below is a little more informative, and all three Kepler 18 planets are not just closer to their star than Mercury is to the sun, more like a magnitude of over twice as close, diagramed in the link below.

kepler-18

reply to post by Illustronic


Oh, the other site didn't have any images.. Cool. Thanks.

Thank you for the second link Illustronic. This Transiting method they use doesn't seem too reliable, but am glad that they even share this info with the general public. Space is largely unknown and has so many variables we still couldn't even begin to comprehend. I did have one question for the more knowledgeable people here. How can they tell if planets are rocky or gaseous using this Transiting method? Is it because rocky planets that have more mass block out more light as they pass the star, and gaseous planets have less volume and don't dim the star as much....?

reply to post by jeenyus2008


its just becuase of the planets size (bigger= thicker atmosphere). Although sometimes they can extract atmosphere data from the transit method. I don't think they did that yet for these.

the reliability of the transit method increases the longer you look at the star. (more transits)