Life on Mars
Life on 715 Planets
By Omnia Noser
NASA announced Wednesday, February 26, the amazing Discovery of
715 new planets, revealing several are determined to be suitable for
Alien life. To put the discovery into perspective, only roughly 1,000
planets had been verified in our galaxy beforehand, making this the
largest planetary discovery in NASA’s history. The discovery has opened
our eyes to complex realities of how cosmic life might operate in the
galaxy.
The Kepler Space Observatory, active since its launch in March 2009,
was the premiere NASA mission to discover planets that were in the
“goldilox” zone. These habitable zones are believed to be capable of
sustaining liquid water, being in an moderate Earth-like temperature
range from their sun or suns; not too hot, and not too cold. The new
planets, calculated to orbit 305 unique stars, were discovered by the
Kepler space telescope and affirmed by NASA’s new veryfication
technique, opening the bottleneck to deliver more frequent and more
detailed planetary discoveries. NASA scientists agree, from
astrophysicists to astronomers Kepler has really become a viable tool for
their understanding and discovery of the incredible diverse possibilities
of planets and planetary systems in the Milky Way galaxy.
NASA’s new Kepler technique is dubbed “verification by multiplicity,”
relying heavily in part on logical laws of probability. Focusing their
efforts, NASA uses the telescopes on stars that suggest they are likely to
have multiple planets in their orbit. The technique conveys that looking
at a star with a cluster of planets gives NASA a higher probability rate
than searching for stars that have single or few orbiting planets. This
probability technique is what led to the NASA discovery of 715 new
planets, with even several believed to be suitable for alien life. NASA
scientists agree the multiplicity verification technique is biased in so far
Kepler discovers the planets closest to their star first, and that when
extended data is received, scientists expect to find a higher percentage of
the unique “goldilox” planets that potentially have an Earth-like climate
capable of supporting Alien life.
NASA astronomers report 95 percent of the new planets discovered by
Kepler are no larger than Neptune, which has a massive size four times
greater than Earth. One of the planets in the habitable zone believed
capable of hosting alien life, orbits a star in a 30-day revolution that is
only half the size of Earth’s sun, while itself being roughly twice th