NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft has found a New Super-Earth 180 Light-Years Away
Kepler is a space observer launched by NASA with the mission to find new Earth like planets in the nearby universe. It is names after the great space researcher Johannes Kepler and was launched on 7th March 2009.
Just a year and a half after the equipment failure which proved to be detrimental to the mission, Kepler has found another planet as announce by the astronomers. The new planet is 20,000 miles in diameter which makes it 2.5 times the size of earth and 12 times more massive. Thus such planets are put into the category of Super Earths outside our Solar System. These Super Earths revolve around their sun within the habitable zone and are likely to contain life.
The new Super Earth revolves around a relatively smaller sun than ours and is about 180 light years away in the constellation Pisces.
During a nine-day test run in February with the telescope, a team led by Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected a planet passing in front of a star known as HIP 116454. Follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes and the Canadian MOST satellite confirmed the presence of a planet, which astronomers said was probably a water world or a "mini-Neptune," with a small core and a billowing gaseous atmosphere.
