Big Bang Monday: Kepler Found Billions

Pretty awesome of MSNBC to report on the Kepler mission’s discoveries…

Our Milky Way galaxy is home to at least 100 billion alien planets, and possibly many more, a new study suggests.

“It’s a staggering number, if you think about it,” lead author Jonathan Swift, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement. “Basically there’s one of these planets per star.”

Swift and his colleagues arrived at their estimate after studying a five-planet system called Kepler-32, which lies about 915 light-years from Earth. The five worlds were detected by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, which flags the tiny brightness dips caused when exoplanets cross their star’s face from the instrument’s perspective.

It was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal. Good luck finding the abstract.

Hoping some of these images make it to the BigBangPrints.com gallery.


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