Kepler discovers 6 planets orbiting a sun-like star

[Sen]

In a press conference earlier today, NASA announced that, among other candidates, Kepler had discovered 6 planets orbiting the star Kepler-11. These planets all orbit very close to the star, the outermost planet lying at a distance that would place it just in-between Mercury and Venus in our own solar system.

Link to the NASA the article is here:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/new_planetary_system.html

I would have thought that a system like this consisting of relatively large planets orbiting close to each-other would be somewhat unstable, but apparently these planets are not as dense as their sizes suggest.

In addition, NASA has also stated that Kepler has found over 1200 potential exoplanet candidates in this article (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepler_data_release.html) as well as their press conference today on NASA TV (So glad I have that channel! ). Simply amazing!

With this new data, just imagine how many planets must exist in our galaxy alone!

A very exciting discovery! I can't wait to see what Kepler will find next!

[MKruer]

Well +/- some tens of a percent we are only seeing 0.45% of all planets with in the green zone or close so for each planet spotted there is likely 215 more that were not observed because the aliment of the orbital plain.

[ajtribick]

Maybe the term "super-Earth" should be replaced by "mini-Neptune", particularly in light of Kepler-11f. Definitely interesting to note that the two planets most likely to be rocky in nature (CoRoT-7b and Kepler-10b) are so close to their stars that they could easily be remnant cores of Uranus-type planets. Guess we need to redo the estimations of habitable zones to take into account planets with hydrogen-rich atmospheres.

[starguy84]

Well +/- some tens of a percent, we are only seeing 0.45% of all planets within the green zone or close, so for each planet spotted there is likely 215 more that were not observed because the alignment of the orbital plane.

And if we assume all the Kepler stars are the same mass as the Sun, after 4 months only objects within 0.44 AU (mP^2=A^3) will have completed one orbit... so there are probably TONS more planets out there.

The fact that Kepler has only announced 1200 planets from the first 4 months NOW suggests to me that it's going to be at least a decade before we actually get all of the Kepler data analyzed... and radial velocity followup is going to be a massive undertaking too.