Kepler released its data

[pokerfan]

Remember last June everyone was excited about the release of Kepler results, but miffed that so much of the most interesting material was held back for later release. Well, it was released today.

More than 1200 potential planets have been found by the orbiting observatory!

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/feb/HQ_11-030_Kepler_Update.html

The discoveries are part of several hundred new planet candidates identified in new Kepler mission science data, released on Tuesday, Feb. 1. The findings increase the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler to-date to 1,235. Of these, 68 are approximately Earth-size; 288 are super-Earth-size; 662 are Neptune-size; 165 are the size of Jupiter and 19 are larger than Jupiter.

[LongTomH]

1. Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy reports on this

Including some fantastic artwork (below). Phil has two posts: Motherlode of potential planets found and Kepler finds a mini solar system. Phil quotes an estimate of a million Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.



The image above is from an image gallery by Phil's friend Dan Durda, a planetary scientist who works with a 3d art package called Vue. And yes, that's a Jovian gas giant in the sky. I turns out that, if a gas giant were to orbit within the habitable zone of its star, its moons could have life, just like Pandora (Avatar).

By the way, the Astronomy Picture of the Day is titled Six Worlds for Kepler and features an artist's conception of the mini-solar system mentioned by Phil Plait. The star is called Kepler-11, a star somewhat like the sun, with a solar system of six (known) planets. The whole system could fit inside the orbit of Venus in our solar system. If you follow the link after Thursday, Jan 3, you'll need to go to the archive.

[bananas]

2. "Where there are birds, there is life"

paraphrasing somebody famous...

[qazplm]

4. dont all of the gas giants in our system give up intense radiation?

I mean I would guess that's a pretty small sample size to suggest it's a feature of all gas giants, but at the same time, don't all of them give some amount of radiation to some extent? Certainly I know Jupiter does.

That would seem to be a problem for a planet orbiting a gas giant having life. The other issue, tectonic stress from the gravity of the gas giant, wouldn't that push and pull basically mean constant volcanic activity with the accompanying gas and whatnot, plus earthquakes? It would seem to be in various ways a planetary setup that has a lot of dangers to sustained life above the microbial level.

[Posteritatis]

6. Jupiter's is especially powerful, the others less so

Standing on one of Jupiter's moons would fry you, but Saturn's would be safe, for instance. (Well, aside from the whole "what atmosphere?" thing.)

[jakeXT]

3. They wrote in 2005

Before a candidate detection can be considered
validated and the information released to the public,
a rigorous process must be executed to ensure
that it is not due to some other phenomenon (Jenkins
et al., 2002). Public release of false-positives
would reduce the credibility of mission results.
Therefore to be considered a reliable detection
the candidate planet detection must meet several
requirements.
http://widefield.lbl.gov/proceedings.pdf#page=153



http://kepler.nasa.gov/files/mws/FebDataRelease_revised_020211.pdf

[jakeXT]

5. press conference

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZHSptpDoLQ