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One in Six stars have earth sized planets and billions more roam interstellar space
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The findings come thanks to NASA's Kepler space telescope, which has been notching up an increasing tally of exoplanets—worlds orbiting stars other than our own sun—ever since it was launched in 2009. “The total number of exoplanet candidates is now 2740,” says Christopher Burke of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, including 461 new ones unveiled at the meeting. The number of Earth-sized candidates has increased by 43% since Kepler's previous catalog was published about a year ago.
Kepler keeps an eye on the brightness of some 150,000 stars. If an orbiting planet passes in front of the star, the telescope sees a small, periodic dip in the star's brightness. Follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes have so far confirmed that 105 Kepler candidates are true planets. Many of them reside in multiplanet systems, although most orbit much closer to their parent stars than the planets in our own solar system do.
See more and subscribe to NextBigFuture at 2013-01-07 17:45:43 Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/01/one-in-six-stars-have-earth-sized.html
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