{"id":20858,"date":"2013-11-06T16:07:43","date_gmt":"2013-11-07T02:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=20858"},"modified":"2020-07-10T14:58:30","modified_gmt":"2020-07-11T00:58:30","slug":"astronomers-conclude-habitable-planets-are-common","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2013\/11\/06\/astronomers-conclude-habitable-planets-are-common\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers conclude habitable planets are common"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading time: <\/span> 3<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>
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The habitable zone corresponds to the range of orbital distances where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface. (Credit: Petigura\/UC<\/abbr> Berkeley, Howard\/UH<\/abbr>-M\u0101noa, Marcy\/UC<\/abbr> Berkeley)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Astronomers from the University of Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> at Mānoa<\/a> and the University of California, Berkeley<\/a> now estimate that one in five stars like the sun have planets about the size of Earth and a surface temperature conducive to life. This conclusion is based on a statistical analysis of all observations from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.<\/p>\n

Although Kepler is now crippled, it nevertheless provided enough data to complete its mission objective—to determine how many of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy have potentially habitable planets. A habitable planet is defined as one that is approximately the size of Earth and that is the right temperature for liquid water.<\/p>\n

“What this means is, when you look up at the thousands of stars in the night sky, the nearest sun-like star with an Earth-size planet in its habitable zone is probably only 12 light years away and can be seen with the naked eye. That is amazing,” said Erik Petigura<\/strong>, who led the analysis of the Kepler data. Petigura is a UC<\/abbr> Berkeley graduate student working at UH<\/abbr> Mānoa for a year.<\/p>\n

“It’s been nearly 20 years since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet around a normal star. Since then we have learned that most stars have planets of some size and that Earth-size planets are relatively common in close-in orbits that are too hot for life,” said Andrew Howard<\/strong>, an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy<\/a>. “With this result we’ve come home, in a sense, by showing that planets like our Earth are relatively common throughout the Milky Way galaxy.”<\/p>\n

Petigura, Howard and Geoffrey Marcy, a UC<\/abbr> Berkeley professor of astronomy, will publish their findings, “Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars”<\/a>, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em><\/a>. In addition to the public data from Kepler, their analysis depended on spectra of the planet-hosting stars from the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea.<\/p>\n

“For NASA, this number—that every fifth star has a planet somewhat like Earth—is really important, because successor missions to Kepler will try to take an actual picture of a planet, and the size of the telescope they have to build depends on how close the nearest Earth-size planets are,” Howard said. “An abundance of planets orbiting nearby stars simplifies such follow-up missions.”<\/p>\n

The team cautioned that Earth-size planets in Earth-size orbits are not necessarily hospitable to life, even if they orbit in the habitable zone of a star where the temperature is not too hot and not too cold.<\/p>\n

Last week, however, Howard, Marcy and their colleagues provided hope that many such planets actually are rocky like the Earth. They reported<\/a> that one Earth-size planet discovered by Kepler—albeit, an uninhabitable planet with a temperature of more than 2,000 Kelvin—is the same density as Earth and likely composed of rock and iron, like Earth.<\/p>\n

“This gives us some confidence that when we look out into the habitable zone, the planets Erik is describing may be Earth-size, rocky planets,” Howard said.<\/p>\n

What distinguishes the team’s analysis from previous analyses of Kepler data is that they subjected Petigura’s planet-finding algorithms to a battery of tests to measure how many habitable zone, Earth-size planets they missed. Petigura actually introduced fake planets into the Kepler data to determine which ones his software could detect and which it couldn’t. Their study is also the first census of Earth-size planets from Kepler to accurately estimate the host star’s habitable zones using data from the Keck Observatory.<\/p>\n

Read the Institute for Astronomy news release<\/a> for more on this discovery.<\/p>\n

Habitable planets animation<\/h2>\n