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NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Its First Rocky Planet

By gregladen on January 11, 2011.

It is very hard to see cold, small, rocky planets like Earth when they are running around stars that are light years away, but Kepler found one. S, it turns out, we are not alone, at least in relation to geology.

NASA's Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.

The discovery of this planet, called an exoplanet, is based on more than eight months of data collected by the spacecraft from May 2009 to early January 2010.

"All of Kepler's best capabilities have converged to yield the first solid evidence of a rocky planet orbiting a star other than our sun," said Natalie Batalha, Kepler's deputy science team lead at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and primary author of a paper on the discovery accepted by the Astrophysical Journal. "The Kepler team made a commitment in 2010 about finding the telltale signatures of small planets in the data, and it's beginning to pay off."


The rest of the press release and a pretty picture are here.

Now, get those radio-telescopes pointed in that direction and see if we can pick up some Milton Berle!

They know the planet is there because they detected high-frequency variations in the birghtness of Kepler-10, the planet's sun.

There is a clear signal in the data arising from light waves that travel within the interior of the star. Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium scientists use the information to better understand the star, just as earthquakes are used to learn about Earth's interior structure. As a result of this analysis, Kepler-10 is one of the most well-characterized planet-hosting stars in the universe.

That's good news for the team studying Kepler-10b. Accurate stellar properties yield accurate planet properties. In the case of Kepler-10b, the picture that emerges is of a rocky planet with a mass 4.6 times that of Earth and with an average density of 8.8 grams per cubic centimeter -- similar to that of an iron dumbbell.

So, if there are hunanoid aliens on that planet they are probably not using geothermal to heat their homes!

Nice job, NASA, if confirmed.

Tags
Cosmos

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