New Earth Found!...we think

I know I've been posting pretty much every day this week, and I wanted to space it out so I appeared less obviously blogpolar (blog bipolar). But this one is just too exciting to leave for later. I love the annual astronomy meetings, you always get so much cool stuff from it. Today's news (and yesterday's, which I was going to write a post on anyway) comes from the Kepler probe. Its job is to look for all the planets it can possibly find, and it's doing its job remarkably well.

Previously, all we had was some observations of huge Jovian planets (large gas giants like Jupiter, hence Jovian -- Jove was the Roman name of Jupiter) very close to their stars. Some people thought that perhaps our planetary system was rare after all, and that these huge gas planets were more common. However, the actual explanation was that these kind of systems are just easier to see. This is mostly for two reasons:

1. The shorter period of a small orbit; if the planet goes around its star more than once in a month, say, or a year, we're more likely to see it. We don't usually stay watching the same star for months or years at a time, ruling out most planets that have years about our own length.
2. The larger a planet is, the easier it is to see. Both of our main planetary detection methods are biased towards high-mass planets. The radial velocity method measures how much a star wobbles because of its planet's gravitational pull (more wobble = higher mass planet = easier to detect), and the transit method detects planets by measuring variations in starlight brightness (bigger planet = less starlight during planetary transit = easier to detect).

So NASA decided to send Kepler up to watch the sky and record as much as it possibly could about the mass, composition, and period of every planet around every star that it could find. And its data is getting released this week. Already, we have the news (click here) that there is a super-Earth orbiting a Sun-like star's habitable zone. To boil it into totally non-technical terminology, we think we found a planet that is a prime candidate to have life we would actually recognize! Or we found our Plan B to escape to, when our Sun explodes, our planet freezes from climate change, or we blow ourselves up. However you want to think of it.

The news they released yesterday was very nearly as cool, for a real nerd. As you can see here (click here) -- please don't bring up my obsession with data sets, I'm well aware of it and have sought help (read: sought employment) -- Kepler's data has successfully righted our view of the Universe as far as exoplanets are concerned. The proportions of Jovian worlds has dropped significantly. The estimates now stand at 1 in every 6 stars having an Earth-like planet; that's over 16 billion possible places with recognizable life in our galaxy alone. Think about that...

Unfortunately, it still looks as though slightly larger worlds in closer orbits are more prevalent, but there's no reason to think that this isn't still due to our technology's limitations. The fastest-growing segment by far is the Earth-like planets, and the orbital size is growing as well. The longer Kepler looks, the more distant planets it will find.

Physicists are claiming that this is the year we will find our second home. It's January, and we may already have done it.

Now we just have to figure out how to get there. Alcubierre warp drive, anyone?