Posted on 01/10/2011 4:32:01 PM PST by KevinDavis
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 so-called exoplanet is based on more than eight months of data collected by the spacecraft from May 2009 to early January 2010.
(Excerpt) Read more at nasa.gov ...
Are we not alone? and SC is this worthy of your ping list?
Even more astounding is the fact that NASA found a writer who resisted the urge to call it “earthlike”.
Why does the writer think that this is not really an exoplanet? Perhaps the writer's just an idiot, and doesn't understand the meaning of these words.
The first Rocky planet is named Kepler-10b? Why not Stallone?
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Data!
For God´s sake, Data!
Here’s data:
http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/discoveries/kepler10b/
In brief:
Orbital Period-just under 306 days,
4.56 x Earth Mass,
1.42 x Earth Radius.
Parent star: Kepler-10 is a relatively old (11.9±4.5 Gyr) but otherwise Sun-like Main Sequence star with
Teff = 5627±44K,
Mass = 0.895±0.060 Solar Masses,
R = 1.056 ± 0.021 Solar Radii.
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