Astronomers announced on Dec 4, 2011, that they had taken E T off hold and resumed searching for Radio signals from Extra Terrestrial civilizations with a set of Radio Telescopes in Hat Creek, California. The project, part of the search for ET intelligence or SETI, was suspended in April.
Astronomers from the SETI institute had been using an innovative set of Radio Telescopes known as the Allen Telescope array to try to listen in on alien broadcast from the raft of planets newly found by NASA's Kepler Satellite.
Introducing Kepler 22b:
An overflow crowd of more than 500 astronomers signed up, and got their money's worth in the first hour. William Boruck, Keplers principle investigator reported that Kepler had confirmed its first "Goldilocks", planet, one that orbits its star in the so called habitable zone-the right distance from its star, to have liquid water on its surface.
More about Kepler 22b:
Size - 2.4 times the size of earth
Distance from earth - 600 light years from Earth
One Orbit - 290 days
Size of its Star - slightly smaller and dimmer than the Sun
Temperature- 72 degree Fahrenheit
But whether Kepler 22b is actually habitable depends on its composition and its atmosphere, which is unknown. Kepler finds planets by detecting star-blinks when planets pass in front of their own star, which allows astronomers to measure the size of planets, relative to that of their own stars, but not their masses and thus densities and composition.
Kepler 22b is put in a class of planets known as Super Earths and is little known since their is no planet in that range in our Solar System. It could be mostly rock, making it thirteen times the mass of earth or mostly gas, like Neptune.
Kepler has found 2326 planets outside the solar system, of which 207 objects that are about the size of earth and 680 others which are up to ten times the size of earth, i.e, Super Earths.
Astronomers from the SETI institute had been using an innovative set of Radio Telescopes known as the Allen Telescope array to try to listen in on alien broadcast from the raft of planets newly found by NASA's Kepler Satellite.
Introducing Kepler 22b:
An overflow crowd of more than 500 astronomers signed up, and got their money's worth in the first hour. William Boruck, Keplers principle investigator reported that Kepler had confirmed its first "Goldilocks", planet, one that orbits its star in the so called habitable zone-the right distance from its star, to have liquid water on its surface.
More about Kepler 22b:
Size - 2.4 times the size of earth
Distance from earth - 600 light years from Earth
One Orbit - 290 days
Size of its Star - slightly smaller and dimmer than the Sun
Temperature- 72 degree Fahrenheit
But whether Kepler 22b is actually habitable depends on its composition and its atmosphere, which is unknown. Kepler finds planets by detecting star-blinks when planets pass in front of their own star, which allows astronomers to measure the size of planets, relative to that of their own stars, but not their masses and thus densities and composition.
Kepler 22b is put in a class of planets known as Super Earths and is little known since their is no planet in that range in our Solar System. It could be mostly rock, making it thirteen times the mass of earth or mostly gas, like Neptune.
Kepler has found 2326 planets outside the solar system, of which 207 objects that are about the size of earth and 680 others which are up to ten times the size of earth, i.e, Super Earths.
