Mountain View: NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a new planetary system that is home to five small planets around a slightly smaller star than our Sun. Two of them are super-Earth planets, most likely made of rock or ice mixed with rock, which are located in the habitable zone of their host star. This discovery is providing a target for the SETI search, since if life has thrived on these worlds and reached a point where civilization has developed complex technology, it may be detectable.
When the NASA Kepler mission was launched on March 9, 2007, the Delta II rocket was carrying the hope of a large community of scientists who dedicate their work to studying extra-solar planets, planets in orbit around other stars. The Kepler mission's main scientific objective is exploration of the structure and diversity of planetary systems. It accomplishes this goal by staring almost constantly at a large field composed of about 150,000 stars to detect small dips in brightness due to the transits of a planet.
Kepler has already been a successful NASA mission with the discovery of 2,740 planet candidates with estimated sizes from Mercury to larger than Jupiter. A fifth of these planet candidates are also called "super-Earths", a new class of planets, without analog in our solar system, with a radius between 1.25 to 2 times the radius of our planet.
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See Also:
NASA Discovers 3 New Earth-Like Planets | VIDEO
VIDEO | Watch: 2,300 Planets Orbit One Star
New Earth-Like Planet Could Sustain Life, Scientists Claim
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