In the news… as I mentioned last week, this week is the annual American Astronomical Society meetings, and among the very many topics of presentations are exoplanet studies, and the top of that list are the latest Kepler findings.

Today the Kepler team released the results of the next series of their analyses:

NASA’s Kepler telescope finds 461 potential new planets

NASA’s Kepler space telescope has uncovered another 461 potential new planets, most of which are the size of Earth or a few times larger, scientists said on Monday.

The announcement brings Kepler’s head count to 2,740 candidate new worlds, 105 of which have been confirmed.

“Two years ago we had around 1,200 candidate planet objects. A year later, we added a significant number of new objects and saw the trend of huge numbers of very small planets … twice the size of Earth and smaller,” Kepler astronomer Christopher Burke told a news conference webcast from the American Astronomical Society conference in Long Beach, California.

With the addition of 461 new candidate planets, collected over 22 months of Kepler telescope observations, the proliferation of smaller planets continues.

The new targets include what appears to be a planet about 1.5 times bigger than Earth circling its sun-like parent star in a 242-day orbit - a distance where liquid water, believed to be necessary for life, could exist on its surface.

In related research, astronomers have determined that about one in six sun-like stars have Earth-sized planets circling their parent stars closer than Mercury’s 88-day day orbit around the sun.

[…]

Announcing 461 New Kepler Planet Candidates

[…]

For more about Fressin’s presentation, see Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Press Release 2013-01. Excerpt: …50 percent of stars have a planet of Earth-size or larger in a close orbit. By adding larger planets, which have been detected in wider orbits up to the orbital distance of the Earth, this number reaches 70 percent. …it looks like practically all Sun-like stars have planets. …17 percent of stars have a planet 0.8 - 1.25 times the size of Earth in an orbit of 85 days or less. About one-fourth of stars have a super-Earth (1.25 - 2 times the size of Earth) in an orbit of 150 days or less. …The same fraction of stars has a mini-Neptune (2 - 4 times Earth) in orbits up to 250 days long. Larger planets are much less common. Only about 3 percent of stars have a large Neptune (4 - 6 times Earth), and only 5 percent of stars have a gas giant (6 - 22 times Earth) in an orbit of 400 days or less.

[…]

I hope you are short on “planets” on the inter-galactic board of exchange.