NASA will reportedly announce the discovery of a number of newly discovered planets on Monday, the latest batch of mysterious worlds to be added to the space agency’s growing list of celestial bodies.
NASA will reveal the latest batch of discoveries made by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope on Monday, according to a statement released by the space agency. NASA says it will hold a press conference at its Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The press conference is the first of the inaugural Kepler Science Conference, which will focus on findings made by the Kepler telescope. The conference will run from December 5 to December 9 and will feature more than 110 scientific presentations, officials said.
“The briefing will provide an update on the statistical findings since Kepler’s Feb. 1, 2011, science data release and introduce a new confirmed planetary discovery,” NASA officials said in a statement released Friday The space agency says the this year’s annual announcement will continue a long tradition that it anticipated to accelerate in the coming years as the Kepler Telescope continues to search for earth-like planets. NASA officials say they expect a number of significant discoveries by Kepler this year.
“Sooner or later, Kepler will find a lukewarm planet with a size making it probably Earthlike,” said Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley. “We’re no more than a year away” from such a discovery, he said The announcement comes as NASA announced Friday the discovery of an earth-sized planet that is reportedly hot enough to melt iron.
Source:www.thestatecolumn.com
