NASA to announce new planetary discoveries -- Kepler Mission results.

[ngcles]

Hi All,

Just a heads-up that in a few days time on 2 February 2011, NASA will hold a press conference to discuss newly discovered extra-solar planets with the Kepler Mission.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2011/M11-06.html

Personal Comment (and no, I'm not in the know): My prediction (ie punt) is that they will announce about 300-odd new extra-solar planet discoveries of which 10-odd will approximately be Earth mass, of which 1 appears to be in or near a habitable zone.


Best,

Les D

[renormalised]

Here's my punt....most of them will be super earth's or smaller and a good number of them will be in habitable zones around their stars :):)

There'll be a few Neptune sized planets amongst the group.

(Knowing just how good my predictions are....they'll probably be mostly gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn and there'll only be a small number (10-20) of super earth's amongst them :):P )

[CraigS]

I'll take a punt and say that the existence of about 50% of them, will be in dispute, within a month or so.

:P:)

Cheers

[renormalised]

That wouldn't surprise me in the least :)

Some will be disputing their existence just because they're ticked off at not finding the planets themselves, others will be just being anal about the results and there'll be a few who don't think we've found any confirmed planets (like Han, who kept calling all the Jupiters we've found either brown dwarfs or small M class stars).

[supernova1965]

Someone on one of these planets will have been pointing a LASER POINTER at us and they will have captured it on film:P

[CraigS]

Now that planet was already in dispute before the announcement ... both it and the laser apparently both disappeared in a puff of statistical analysis during the data reduction phase, I believe ...

:P:)

Cheer

[supernova1965]

I hope it didn't hurt the person holding the LASER too much:sadeyes::P

[OneOfOne]

That'd be right! I just updated the figures on my power point presentation on planets and exoplanets this morning! I did the figures, statistics, graphs etc. Now I'm gonna have to do it again.:sadeyes:

[renormalised]

Trevor, you'll never be able to finish those PPT's, simply because the numbers are changing all the time :)

[casstony]

Todays astronomical frontier is very exciting and the discoveries very satisfying - hopefully we can keep things together here on Earth, keep the funds flowing and the discoveries coming.

[mswhin63]

It seems planethunters.org have been of great help to discovering new things. Just received an email from them and they are pushing for more data to be checked before submitting new data.