NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Two Planets Transiting the Same Star

August 26, 2010

NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Two Planets Transiting the Same Star

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/two_planet_orbit.html

This article is about a two planets orbiting the same star, in a similar manner as our own solar system. The transit of these two planets was observed through the data of the sun-like star, designated Kepler-9. The two planets were named, Kepler-9b and Kepler-9c. The discovery of the two planets includes a seven month research, of about 156,000 stars, which was a part of the on-going search for earth-size planets outside our solar system. Kepler, the telescope, has an ultra precise camera, which captures the brightness of the stars, and how the brightness decreases in the star when a planet transits around it. The size of the planet can be estimated thanks to this dips. The distance of the planet is also estimated by measuring the time of the successive dips of the planet orbiting the star. The variations and the regularity of this dips, help scientist determine the mass of the planet.

Observations on the mass of the planets, state that Kepler-9b is bigger than Kepler-9c, but both have similar masses to but less than Saturn. Kepler-9b lies closest to the star with an orbit of about 19 days, while Kepler-9c has an orbit of about 38 days. By observing several transits by each planet over the seven months of data, the time between successive transits could be analyzed.

"This discovery is the first clear detection of significant changes in the intervals from one planetary transit to the next, what we call transit timing variations," said Matthew Holman, a Kepler mission scientist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "This is evidence of the gravitational interaction between the two planets as seen by the Kepler spacecraft."

In addition to the two giant planets, there is also a possibility that a third planet is around, much smaller, but still orbits the star. Additional observations are required to determine whether this signal is indeed a planet or an astronomical phenomenon that mimics the appearance of a transit.
This article really interested me at first, when I was reading the newspaper one day, because I thought that this was a great discovery for mankind. I think that its really interesting because we always think that our solar system is the only one that exists, when actually there are thousands discovered by powerful telescopes yearly. When I read the article in the newspaper I immediately looked for it in the NASA web page, and it was one of the main news. Before reading the whole article, I thought that it had been discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope, which is one of the most powerful telescopes invented, and it has proved many theories of the scientists. But then I saw that it was from the Kepler telescope, which I knew little about. So I found this article very interesting, and it makes me think that there could really be more life outside of our planet.

I can connect this article to our lives, because we, as human beings are, sometimes, really closed minded. Since all the planets of our solar system were discovered, we have thought that we are the only living thing in the universe. Personally I think that this happens because we really didn’t know what else was out there before all the telescopes were launched. I don’t think we might be the only living thing in the vast universe, but as far as we are concerned we are one of the only known planetary systems, which have planets orbiting a star, in our case the Sun. By thinking this, I think that this article really interested me, because it made me think that maybe, we are not the only living things in the whole universe, and that there are other planetary systems like ours.