NASA to Reveal Big News From Planet-Hunting Spacecraft Thursday

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/nasa-to-announce-latest-kepler-fin...

By Denise Chow
SPACE.com Staff Writer

NASA is expected to make an announcement Thursday on the progress of its Kepler spacecraft, which has been staring at one patch of space for evidence of other worlds.

The space agency has scheduled an afternoon teleconference with reporters to announce the results from Kepler, which include the "discovery of an intriguing planetary system," NASA officials said Monday.

Participating in the teleconference will be senior NASA scientists and Kepler mission researchers, including principal investigator William Borucki, at the space agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

The Kepler space observatory hunts for Earth-like planets around other stars. In June, mission scientists announced it had found over 700 candidates, including five systems that appear to have more than one transiting planet.

The spacecraft monitors stars for subtle changes in their brightness, which could indicate that alien planets are passing in front of them as seen from Earth. To date, astronomers have discovered more than 400 planets lurking around stars beyond our solar system.

NASA launched the $600 million spacecraft in March 2009. It is currently staring at a patch of the Milky Way that contains over 156,000 stars – a star field in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.

Astronomers have been using the data from Kepler to determine whether orbiting planets are responsible for the variation in brightness of several hundred stars.

Follow-up observations are necessary to distinguish between actual planets and false alarms such as binary stars, which are two stars that orbit each other.