New Planet Data to Fuel Search for Life Beyond Earth

(Wall Street Journal) - Astronomers seeking new worlds capable of supporting life will next week unveil data on hundreds of possible planets circling other stars, quickening the pace of the high-stakes quest for the first truly habitable world outside our own solar system, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The flurry of new information on so-called exoplanets -- those that orbit stars other than the Sun -- includes 400 planets that NASA researchers have kept secret since their discovery last spring.

A carbon copy of Earth, warm and wet enough for the chemistry of life, is unlikely to be revealed among them -- at least not yet. The new data, though, may offer important evidence of planets that are at least Earth-sized and more likely to harbor life as we know it.

The new data about exoplanets is the product of a survey of 156,000 stars conducted by the space agency's $600 million planet-hunting Kepler space probe, which was launched in 2009.

Since June last year, when NASA released some preliminary probe data, the Kepler mission scientists have been cross-checking data on 706 stars that may have planets orbiting them, ranging from as small as Earth to larger than Jupiter, and weeding out false alarms with the help of ground-based observatories.

More possible planets have subsequently turned up, as the probe continues to send more data back to Earth.

"We have found more interesting planet candidates," said Natalie Batalha, deputy science team leader for the Kepler Mission at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

The probe can detect a planet by measuring its shadow as the orb crosses in front of a star and by recording the tiny variations in starlight as it dims and brightens. Astronomers working at independent observatories then double-check those candidates by looking for subtle gravitational wobbles caused by the planet tugging on the star it circles.

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