Kepler Mission Finds Five New Planets

The discovery of several extra-solar planets, including the announcement of a whopping 30 such finds in a single day in October, was among the biggest science stories of 2009.

With the wrapping barely off the new year, and the same can be said for the multiyear Kepler Mission launched back in March, 2010 is already shaping up to suggest that we're likely to keep on adding to our roster of planets known to exist outside our solar system.

In a development reported by Scientific American and National Geographic, the Kepler space telescope team announced the discovery of five new planets. More than 400 such exoplanets are now known to us. The rate at which we're learning of new ones has certainly picked up speed recently with new and more sophisticated tools and methods coming online. Many in the space sciences are looking for good and fascinating things to come from the Kepler Mission in its search for planets similar to ours.

Consider these initial finds a trial run, a test drive, if you will, as these five are, in fact, not in the least bit similar to ours. Much larger and hotter than Earth, and much closer to their respective stars than we are, these newly discovered bodies are not candidates for likely harbors of life forms. But their discovery offers to the Kepler project team confirmation that the space telescope is functioning precisely as it should.

Kepler detects the presence of planets by measuring the extremely subtle decrease in light seen to come from a star as an orbiting planet passes. These minuscule decreases in measurable light are confirmed and cross-referenced against measurements of movement (again, very subtle) by the star itself. The gravitational interaction between planet and star will cause the star to wobble. Light decrease plus wobble equals confirmation of planet, in a nutshell.

These five newly discovered exoplanets are all much larger than Earth. As Scientific American reports, the range of the five is from 25 to more than 600 times the Earth's mass. The bigger planets, close to their stars, made them comparatively easy for the Kepler team to detect the light decrease and the orbit-induced wobble.

But better, more interesting and perhaps more familiar things are in store, according to project team members. Kepler's core mission is to find evidence for planets of about Earth's size and density that orbit their respective stars at a similar distance to the one between us and the sun.

While the heat's on but nobody's home on today's crop of five new finds, Kepler is at the early stages of a mission that will most certainly add to our body of knowledge about the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe.

Image courtesy of NASA, via Wikimedia Commons