DISCLAIMER

The following is the opinion of the writer/s and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, gender, sexual orientation or individual. The views of the writer/s are his own, and do not in any way reflect the views of the site they are posted on, other sites affiliated with this site, the staff involved with the site, or any other members of this site. Furthermore, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the the people who live in the author’s neighbourhood, city, province, country, continent, hemisphere, planet, star system, galaxy, or universe of orign. Please also note that the fact the piece is written in English is in no way meant to malign other languages or linguistic entities, nor to malign those who are illiterate or visually impaired and thus are unable to read the piece. Furthermore, the individual letters, words, and punctuation marks involved had no option but to be placed into the story, and should not be held accountable for the writers’ statement. Any spelling or grammatical errors are not the responsibility of the the schools the author/s attended, the teachers the author/s was taught by, the regional governments who did or did not fund the authors’ educational system, or anyone else involved in the authors’ education. In point of fact, the author/s also do not take any responsibility for his actions and opinions and does not hold his parents, siblings, other relations, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, people in any proximity, or that strange guy he talked to on the bus three weeks ago responsible for anything in the following work, or for anything else the author may or may not have done. The author/s freely admits that his views may not be the same as those of his religious group, gender, species, ethnic group, or other club. The author/s has written the posts based on his/her point of view at a particular point of time and is only a snapshot of his/her mind at the time he / she typed the words through the keyboard or mouse or any other physical and mental gestures possible, and subsequently his/her views may have changed but they did not have sufficient time to make those changes in the posts. The authors do not take any responsibility for any losses incurred, physical and property damage and any other catastrophe caused to the readers as a result of reading the blog posts. The readers have to read the blog posts at their own peril.No animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, viri, spores, seeds or any other living things were harmed during the making of this disclaimer or blog. Further, no environmental damage was caused to any ecosphere, existing or nonexisting. All electrons used in the production were strictly volunteers, and all paper was made of trees that died of natural causes.

This website may inadvertently link to content that is obscene, prurient, useless, hate-filled, poisonous, pornographic, frivolous, empty, rotten, bad, disgusting, hostile, repulsive, virulent, infectious…This website in no way condones, endorses or takes responsibility for such content. The accuracy, completeness, veracity, honesty, exactitude, factuality and politeness of comments are not guaranteed.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

First Earth-sized exoplanet discovered


The discovery of Kepler-10b, the first rocky extrasolar planet, was confirmed yesterday by NASA’s Kepler mission. Only 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest exoplanet ever discovered.
Because its size is comparable to that of Earth, this is a first step to discovering how common such planets are, and if some of them could sustain life. This is not the case of Kepler-10b: the planet orbits too close to its star, about 1/20th as far from it as Mercury, the innermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun. The planet orbits once every 0.84 days (about 20 hours), and its mass is about 4.6 times that of Earth; it is 560 light-years away and about eight billion years old.
Kepler’s 1-meter-diameter telescope, launched in 2009, searches for exoplanets by staring at the same 150,000 stars in the Cygnus constellation. It is looking for periodic dips in brightness caused by the passage of a planet in front of its star, in order to find Earth-sized planets in habitable orbits.
Kepler-10 was the first star identified that could potentially harbor a small transiting planet, early after the satellite’s launching. Precise measurements of the planet’s radius and mass were then made by the W.M. Keck Observatory 10-meter telescope in Hawaii.
Finding similar planets in habitable orbits will take a couple of more years of observations for sunlike stars, but the announcement of another habitable world never seemed so close.

~KIROAN~

No comments:

Post a Comment

Configuration After installing, you might want to change these default settings: