Artist's rendering of the Kelper Space Telescope. Credit: NASA
Launched in March of this year, NASA’s latest planet-hunting telescope, Kepler, has just turned in it’s first report. The result was gas giant HAT-P-7b, a planet with an orbit of 2.2 days and a surface temperature of over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, known as a “Hot Jupiter”.
Sure ol’ HATtie has been spotted before but what’s important is that Kepler found it within 10 days of it’s mission start and reported back with a great amount of detail about the find.
Kepler uses the transit method to find new planets which detects the dip in light from a star when a planet passes in front of it. For HAT-P-7b this was easy because it’s so big and orbits so frequently, however, Kepler also detected HAT’s occultation (a method that my spellchecker doesn’t even know about) which measures the light dip as the planet passes behind the star.
This is significant because that amount is roughly equal to whats needed for Kepler to detect Earth-like planets using the transit method, so it proves Kepler has the power. Now all it needs is 3 years or so to confirm the data of an Earth-like planet, you know, 365 day orbits and all. Good thing Kepler is focusing in on about 100,000 stars at the same time huh?
Read the full story at Space.com.
