NASA's Inspiring, Enlightening, and Successful Search for New Earths

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Source:  Tim Folger, Discover Magazine
Excerpt:  The Kepler space telescope, NASA’s first mission dedicated to the search for planets beyond our solar system, has produced a gusher of strange new worlds. If astronomers are right, many of them will prove to be habitable. …Kepler-10 b …announced … this past January, was the smallest world yet found beyond our solar system. …Kepler-10 b was merely a preview. A month after the January announcement, NASA released its first full data set from the Kepler mission, and the results left astronomers straining for superlatives. ...“We’re learning about a diversity of worlds in our universe that we had no clue about beforehand,” Marcy says. “Rocky planets, yeah, we thought there might be some of those. By the way, we’re finding some rocky planets that are even denser than Earth. But we’re also finding these mini-Neptunes, a class of planet for which we have no examples in our solar system. They’re like small Neptunes but with huge amounts of liquid water around a rocky core.”...

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