Gadgetory

this morning NASA announced 219 new planet candidates ten of which are earth-like in both size and distance from their home star occupying what is known as the habitable zone where water could pool on the rocky surface the announcement was made at a coupler media briefing which took place at the NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley the planet-hunting Kepler satellite was launched in spring of 2009 with the sole purpose of detecting earth-sized planets using the transit method by measuring the tiny amount of dimming starlight as a planet passes in front of its host star to date Kepler has detected 4034 planet candidates in 2335 have been verified as exoplanets it has also discovered 50 near-earth sized habitable zone candidates of which more than 30 have also been verified by NASA scientists the Kepler catalog of candidate planets is supposed to serve as a foundation for more discovery to determine the prevalence and demographics of planets in the galaxy this new result presented today have implications for understanding the frequency of different types of planets in our galaxy and helped us to advance our knowledge how planets are form read more details about the Kepler findings in Amanda Custer's article on CNET com you