First Potentially Habitable Earth-Sized Planet Confirmed by Observatories

keckobservatory.org

11 points·jeromeparadis··2 comments

My personal future shock is bound up in the fact that we are now discovering planets outside of our solar system. Somehow, I just never expected that to happen in my lifetime.

The milestones keep getting knocked down: planets, multiple planets in the same system, super earths, now earth-size planets in the habitable zone. Wonderful stuff, and very exciting to think what we'll find next. It's not impossible to imagine that we'll develop the technology to conduct spectrographic analysis of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets, maybe one day even discovering methane.

My assumption is that all solar systems orbit in more or less the same plane as their host galaxy. Is this why we're able to detect so many planets by this occultation technique? Presumably this is because the Milky Way and all it contains started out as one large accretion disk. Am I way off base?

The orbital plane of planets in a given system is random as far as we know, and not related to the plane of the galaxy. Our own solar system, for example, is tilted more than 60 degrees from the plane of the galaxy's disk.

So as you might expect, more than 99% of all planets in a sample are undetectable by this technique. Kepler has been so successful because it is watching about 150,000 stars at once, all in an area of sky that would be covered by your fist at arm's length.

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