The Kepler science team today revealed an additional 461 candidate exoplanets, with four being less than twice Earth’s size and in the habitable zone.

Worlds without end: The Kepler science team today revealed an additional 461 candidate exoplanets, with four being less than twice Earth’s size and in the habitable zone.

Since the last Kepler catalog was released in February 2012, the number of candidates discovered in the Kepler data has increased by 20 percent and now totals 2,740 potential planets orbiting 2,036 stars. The most dramatic increases are seen in the number of Earth-size and super Earth-size candidates discovered, which grew by 43 and 21 percent respectively. The new data increases the number of stars discovered to have more than one planet candidate from 365 to 467. Today, 43 percent of Kepler’s planet candidates are observed to have neighbor planets.

Of these candidates, 105 have so far been confirmed to be exoplanets by other methods.

Note that these Kepler planets are in addition to the fifteen new exoplanets noted in my previous post.

On Wednesday Apophis will pass the Earth at a distance of 9 million miles, allowing astronomers to gather more data about this asteroid’s orbit and composition.

On Wednesday Apophis will pass the Earth at a distance of 9 million miles, allowing astronomers to gather more data about this asteroid’s orbit and composition.

Having crossed outside Earth’s orbit, Apophis will appear briefly in the night-time sky. Wednesday 9 January will afford astronomers the rare opportunity to bring a battery of telescopes to bear: from optical telescopes to radio telescopes to the European Space Agency’s Infrared Space Observatory Herschel. Two of the biggest unknowns that remain to be established are the asteroid’s mass and the way it is spinning. Both of these affect the asteroid’s orbit and without them, precise calculations cannot be made.

Astronomers have discovered that a large number of dwarf galaxies are orbiting Andromedea in a flat plane, like our solar system, contrary to all predictions.

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have discovered that a large number of dwarf galaxies are orbiting Andromedea in a flat plane, like our solar system, contrary to all predictions.

The study reveals almost 30 dwarf galaxies orbiting the larger Andromeda galaxy in this regular, solar system-like plane. The astronomers’ expectations were that these smaller galaxies should be buzzing around randomly, like bees around a hive. “This was completely unexpected,” said Geraint Lewis, one of the lead authors on the Nature publication. “The chance of this happening randomly is next to nothing.” The fact that astronomers now see that a majority of these little systems in fact contrive to map out an immensely large – approximately one million light years across – but extremely flattened structure, implies that this understanding is grossly incorrect. Either something about how these galaxies formed, or subsequently evolved, must have led them to trace out this peculiar, coherent, structure.

The GAO is concerned about the future budget and schedule of the James Webb Space Telescope.

O goody: The GAO is concerned about the future budget and schedule of the James Webb Space Telescope.

This is very bad news if true for NASA’s astronomy program. Webb was originally budgeted at $1 billion and scheduled to launch in 2011. Its budget is now $8.8 billion and its launch is now set for October 2018. And until it launches there is little money to build any other space telescope.

The biggest black hole yet found, 17 billion times the mass of our sun.

The biggest black hole yet found, 17 billion times the mass of our sun.

The unusual black hole makes up 14 percent of its galaxy’s mass, rather than the usual 0.1 percent. … NGC 1277 [the galaxy] lies 220 million light-years away in the constellation Perseus. The galaxy is only ten percent the size and mass of our own Milky Way. Despite NGC 1277’s diminutive size, the black hole at its heart is more than 11 times as wide as Neptune’s orbit around the Sun.

Based on these measurements, it appears that this black hole is literally eating this galaxy whole.

Impressive radar images of near-Earth asteroid 2007 PA8 were taken during its recent fly-by of Earth.

Impressive radar images of near-Earth asteroid 2007 PA8 were taken during its recent fly-by of Earth.

The images … reveal possible craters, boulders, an irregular, asymmetric shape, and very slow rotation. The asteroid measures approximately one mile wide (about 1.6 kilometers).

The asteroid poses no threat to Earth. The resolution of the images, however, is astonishing, especially considering it was done by radar.

The discovery of volcanoes on Io

discovery image

On March 8, 1979, as Voyager 1 was speeding away from Jupiter after its historic flyby of the gas giant three days earlier, it looked back at the planet and took some navigational images. Linda Morabito, one of the engineers in charge of using these navigational images to make sure the spacecraft was on its planned course, took one look at the image on the right, an overexposed image of the moon Io, and decided that it had captured something very unusual. On the limb of the moon was this strange shape that at first glance looked like another moon partly hidden behind Io. She and her fellow engineers immediately realized that this was not possible, and that the object was probably a plume coming up from the surface of Io. To their glee, they had taken the first image of an eruption of active volcano on another world!

Today, on the astro-ph preprint website, Morabito has published a minute-by-minute account of that discovery. It makes for fascinating reading, partly because the discovery was so exciting and unique, partly because it illustrated starkly the human nature of science research, and partly because of the amazing circumstances of that discovery. Only one week before, scientists has predicted active volcanism on Io in a paper published in the journal Science. To quote her abstract:
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Astronomers have found a super-earth exoplanet inside its star’s habitable zone.

Worlds without end: Astronomers have found a super-earth exoplanet inside its star’s habitable zone.

The planet is large enough that it might be more like Neptune, but if it should have any earth-sized moons they will definitely be capable of supporting life.

Update: The science paper included a wonderful graphic comparing the solar system of this star with that of our own solar system. I have posted this graphic below the fold. HD40307g is the potentially habitable planet.
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