{"id":3886,"date":"2014-02-27T12:53:14","date_gmt":"2014-02-27T17:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.waubonsee.edu\/wordpress\/?p=3886"},"modified":"2021-11-27T22:10:06","modified_gmt":"2021-11-28T03:10:06","slug":"nasa-announces-an-exoplanet-bonanza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.waubonsee.edu\/wordpress\/2014\/02\/27\/nasa-announces-an-exoplanet-bonanza\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA Announces an Exoplanet Bonanza"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.com\/sites\/msnbc\/files\/styles\/ratio--83-34--1067x437\/public\/articles\/planet_bonanza.jpeg-08749.jpg?itok=G4redQte\" width=\"1067\" height=\"437\" \/>715 confirmed new plants.\u00c2\u00a0 Whew<strong>,\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong>that&#8217;s impressive.\u00c2\u00a0 Especially considering that Kepler, a space ship, stopped working in May 2013.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Astronomers working on NASA&#8217;s Kepler mission\u00c2\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/ames\/kepler\/nasas-kepler-mission-announces-a-planet-bonanza\">announced 715 new confirmed planets<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0today &#8211; an increase of almost 70% in the number of planets outside our Solar System known to date.<\/p>\n<p>Some quick background on Kepler: the spacecraft launched in March of 2009, and observed almost 150,000 stars continuously for just over three years looking for\u00c2\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/mission_pages\/kepler\/multimedia\/images\/transit-light-curve.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">the telltale sign of a transiting planet<\/a>. The results were slow at first and then steadily, more and more planets were discovered.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>But the longer astronomers looked, the more they started to see signs of smaller and smaller planets: Neptune-sized and even Earth-sized.<\/p>\n<p>As a caution, Earth-sized should not be confused with Earth-like, as we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t yet have the technology to fully probe the composition of these planets yet, let alone their habitability.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Another exciting thing about this announcement is that these 715 new planets were detected in data astronomers already had on hand. Kepler actually\u00c2\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/the-wheels-come-off-kepler-1.13032\" rel=\"nofollow\">stopped working<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0in May of last year and hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been able to make any new observations since. However, astronomers used a new approach to pour back over the data they already had in hopes of extracting additional information. <strong>Just goes to show you that your data might always have more to tell you.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.com\/rachel-maddow-show\/exoplanet-bonanza\">Exoplanet Bonanza | MSNBC<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Astronomers working on NASA&#8217;s Kepler mission announced 715 new confirmed planets today &#8211; an increase of almost 70% in the number of planets outside our Solar System known to date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":7951,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[916,914,912,913,915],"class_list":["post-3886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-did-you-know","tag-discovery","tag-exoplanets","tag-kepler","tag-nasa","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.waubonsee.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.waubonsee.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.waubonsee.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.waubonsee.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.waubonsee.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3886"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/library.waubonsee.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3888,"href":"https:\/\/library.waubonsee.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3886\/revisions\/3888"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.waubonsee.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.waubonsee.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.waubonsee.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.waubonsee.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}