Kepler Team Announces New Rocky Planet
Artist's impression of Kepler-10c (foreground planet)
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Today at the American Astronomical Society conference in Boston, the Kepler team announced the confirmation of a new rocky planet in orbit around Kepler-10. Dubbed Kepler-10c, this planet is described as a “scorched, molten Earth.”
2.2 times the radius of Earth, Kepler-10c orbits its star every 45 days. Both it and its smaller, previously-discovered sibling 10b are located too close to their star for liquid water to exist.
Kepler-10c was validated using a new computer simulation technique called “Blender” as well as additional infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. This method can be used to locate Earth-sized planets within Kepler’s field of view and could also potentially help find Earth-sized planets within other stars’ habitable zones.
This is the first time the team feels sure that it has exhaustively ruled out alternative explanations for dips in the brightness of a star… basically, they are 99.998% sure that Kepler-10c exists.
The Kepler-10 star system is located about 560 light-years away near the Cygnus and Lyra constellations.
Read the release on the Nature.com blog.
Image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
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