National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has discovered a new planet named Kepler-22b. People wonder if it will support human life or if it already has some kind of life on it?
NASA’s new discovery is going to be a topic of discussion for a very long time to come. For, this is the first time that a planet, complete with a solar system has been discovered that has the promise of life sustaining environment.
This is a major discovery by NASA’s Kepler exploration program and the scientists at the American Space organization have been very excited over the new discovery.According to scientists, the new planet that has been named Kepler-22 is similar to earth in many ways. It has a climate that has everything to sustain life, like our Earth does and has ideal temperature for allowing the human life to prosper. Though the sort of surface, the planet has, is not yet known, nonetheless the excitement is high among space experts across the world.
Kepler Mission has discovered around 1300 planets so far and Kepler-22 is the first planet about whom NASA has said with certainty that it may support vegetation there. Kepler computed planet temperatures are based on an assumption that the planet is in equilibrium with radiation from its star balanced by its own black body radiation, taking into account some reflection of radiation from the planet (albedo). Actual albedo is unknown and unless more definite information is available in the discovery paper, we assume a “generic” albedo of 0.3. The temperatures do not take into account atmospheric properties (greenhouse effect), since these are unknown. In the case of Jupiter, not only does it have an atmosphere to complicate things, but a significant internal heat source as well.
Kepler Mission of NASA launched in March 2009 is finally turning out to be of immense importance to space exploration program by the United States. It is justifying the huge investment incurred on planning and execution of the project. A report says, “Within just the first four months of data, astronomers have found evidence for more than 1,200 planetary candidates. Of those, 408 reside in systems containing two or more planets, and most of those look very different than our solar system…In particular, the Kepler systems with multiple planets are much flatter than our solar system. They have to be for Kepler to spot them. Kepler watches for a planet to cross in front of its star, blocking a tiny fraction of the star’s light. By measuring how much the star dims during such a transit, astronomers can calculate the planet’s size, and by observing the time between successive events they can derive the orbital period – how long it takes the planet to revolve around its star”.
Kepler-22 is at least 600 light years away from our Earth and scientists will be hard pressed to gather more information about it, due to the fact that they will be under tremendous pressure to search more information about it than any other planet discovered in the past.
NASA’s new discovery is going to be a topic of discussion for a very long time to come. For, this is the first time that a planet, complete with a solar system has been discovered that has the promise of life sustaining environment.
This is a major discovery by NASA’s Kepler exploration program and the scientists at the American Space organization have been very excited over the new discovery.According to scientists, the new planet that has been named Kepler-22 is similar to earth in many ways. It has a climate that has everything to sustain life, like our Earth does and has ideal temperature for allowing the human life to prosper. Though the sort of surface, the planet has, is not yet known, nonetheless the excitement is high among space experts across the world.
Kepler Mission has discovered around 1300 planets so far and Kepler-22 is the first planet about whom NASA has said with certainty that it may support vegetation there. Kepler computed planet temperatures are based on an assumption that the planet is in equilibrium with radiation from its star balanced by its own black body radiation, taking into account some reflection of radiation from the planet (albedo). Actual albedo is unknown and unless more definite information is available in the discovery paper, we assume a “generic” albedo of 0.3. The temperatures do not take into account atmospheric properties (greenhouse effect), since these are unknown. In the case of Jupiter, not only does it have an atmosphere to complicate things, but a significant internal heat source as well.
Kepler-22 is at least 600 light years away from our Earth and scientists will be hard pressed to gather more information about it, due to the fact that they will be under tremendous pressure to search more information about it than any other planet discovered in the past.
