Word: planetsized
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If you're looking for Earthlike planets around other stars - places about the size and temperature of our own planet, where life could in theory be found - it might seem like a letdown to stumble instead on a world bigger than Jupiter, hotter than molten iron and, with a density...
Borucki heads the Kepler Mission, a space-based planet-hunting telescope that went into solar orbit last spring to search for distant worlds like our own. While the first five worlds detected are nothing like Earth, nobody expected them to be. What's important, Borucki declared, was that "these five...
Still, even these planetary finds are unlikely to be exact copies of Earth, and for a very simple reason. Kepler spots faraway planets by watching them transit, or pass in front of, their stars, blocking out a little bit of light and making the star slightly dimmer. The five planets...
The dimming caused by an Earth-size planet would be easy enough for Kepler to notice too, and such smaller planets most likely exist. But to be in an orbit where the temperature is balmy enough to support life, the planet has to be about as far from its star...
For many scientists, just watching the data come in is a pleasure all by itself. "Kepler is working so amazingly well," says Berkeley's Geoff Marcy, a champion planet hunter in his own right and a member of the Kepler science team, "that the light curves [that is, the dips...