MSNBC Report on Planet KOI 326.01

[Christopherdel Profile]

It's just one data point among the 1,235 potential worlds identified by NASA's Kepler planet-hunting probe, but you can't help noticing it on a graph. The planetary candidate known as KOI 326.01 sticks out as the one object that's estimated to be the size of Earth or smaller, with an average temperature that's lower than water's boiling point.

If scientists confirm that what they're seeing actually exists, KOI 326.01 could go down as the closest analog to our own planet in the current crop of Kepler data. But that's a big if.

"It's a small object, a small candidate," William Borucki, a planetary scientist from NASA's Ames Research Center who heads Kepler's science team, said today during a news briefing at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Washington. Astronomers don't even know the size of its parent star with sufficient precision, Borucki said.

These factors make the planet's existence and its characteristics "extremely difficult to confirm." He said further observations over the next few months might produce the data for that confirmation. Or maybe not.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The case of KOI 326.01 illustrates how tricky the planet-hunting business can get. MIT's Sara Seager, a member of the Kepler team, said the $600 million mission represents just one step toward figuring out the answers to the three big questions about worlds beyond our solar system: Do Earth-size planets exist out there? How common are they? Do they show signs of life? "The reality is that one telescope cannot answer all three questions," she said.

Kepler detects extrasolar planets by staring at 150,000 stars in a single patch of sky, centered on the constellation Cygnus, and detecting the faint dips in light as planets pass over the stars' disks. Based on a statistical analysis of the data available so far, 44 percent of the stars should have planets going around them, Borucki said. Ten percent should have Earth-size planets. So as more readings come in, astronomers should find more candidates like KOI 326.01.

The latest list of candidates has 54 potential planets that lie in their stars' habitable zones, including five that are around Earth's size. (KOI 326.01 is listed as the smallest of the five. "KOI," by the way, stands for Kepler Object of Interest. SolStation.com has the full rundown on Kepler's potentially habitable planet candidates.)

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20 ... -prospects