Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Looking for Another Earth like Home

Looking for another Earth-like home, what are the possibilities?  Well in all honesty as far as the distance away from where we are right now is pretty slim to none.  We are light years away from other inhabitable planets that possess that Goldilocks zone.  One tool we use in this exploration of Exoplanets is Kepler, a space observatory sampling the galaxy of inhabitable planets like Earth.  First seen in Stellarium a bizarre honeycomb pattern where some thought it was a sun simulator and\or a constellation of satellites.  Going deeper into Kepler's field of view we discovered stars like our Sun's system numbering in the thousands.

In this video Kepler - 1368 is used for reference, we find the exoplanet system is 5007.74 ly (light years) away from our sun.  The temperature on Kepler - 1368 is 5906 K (Kelvin) or 10171.13 F. The field of view from Kepler has mapped a part of the galaxy in this sampling we see is between two double stars, Vega and Deneb in the constellations of Lyra and Cygnus.  This field of view from Kepler will always be stationed here for observation. Also, a galactic grid is available in Stellarium for coordinates with many variables of degree, hour, minutes and seconds are used to pinpoint a location.  One example of this mapping is Right Ascension - 19 hour 39' minute 04.01" second combined with Declination - +41deg 38' minute 40.8" second.  In the grid seen here in the video the location used is a Galactic Grid location - +75deg 04' min 33.2" sec / +9deg 32' min 33.9" sec. Entering this number +750433.2, +9 3233.9 into the search at SkyView Query Form we find the bright double star Vega, middle low of the pic by the head of a large hydrogen gas plume as seen below.



SkyView

Stellarium (download)


The pic above is an artist rendering of a star which in this case would be Kepler 1368, the planet orbiting Kepler 1368 is exoplanet 1368 b.  These exoplanets are found as they transverse the star causing a dimming affect in light when observed.   

Time now to feel small, really small.

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