“Planet Hunters Sift Through Information”

Months of information from more than 150,000 stars are due to be dumped upon the scientific community nowadays, and planet hunters are set to sift through those reading in search of the signature of alien worlds.
NASA Kepler spacecraft all those stars for the telltale dip of light that happen when a planet passes over the disk of a faraway star. The 600 million dollars task has already identified 9 confirmed planets, based on earlier releases of data. Still more findings are due to be announced at a news broadcast to be televised by NASA channel.

The Kepler mission is all about being capable to find Earth size planets in Earth type orbits around sun like stars. But it will take a few times to make confirmed detections of such planets.

And that's not the end of the progression; Kepler can tell scientists how wide a planet (or something else, such as an eclipsing binary star) appears to be. But in order to confirm an object's planetary status, the scientists would like to know how massive that object is- either by analyzing the gravitational wobbles it creates in its parent star, or by even more subtle methods. Such methods are how the scientists make sure that the candidates are really planets rather than variable stars or data glitches.
This is why the Kepler team has established only 9 planets so far, even though the probe was launched almost 2 years ago. When the mission's first set of readings was released, last June, the Kepler scientists said they had found 706 potential planets. The scientists held back the detailed data about the 400 most promising candidates, however, to give themselves the first chance to confirm their planetary status. That created a stir among astronomers who weren't part of the Kepler team.
The Kepler 400 are to be made public as part of this week data release, along with the mission raw data from June to September 2009. Once again, some of the most promising candidates from the fresh dump will be held back for further scrutiny by the Kepler team.

                                                  WORLD TECHNOLOGY {WT}