CAJ 3: Still searching for our new home/ planet categories / Kepler 16-b

Now that I have introduced briefly the Kepler Mission, I want to talk a little bit more about the planet candidates and discoveries that the mission has brought to light.

To categorize the planets, scientist have created a "Periodic Table of Exoplanets". This system  helps the scientists to classify the newly discovered planets into six main categories. They differentiate planets
by mass/size and three temperature subgroups. This makes 18 categories in total. The three temperature groups are cold zone, warm zone (habitable zone) and hot zone. According to mass and size there are 6 groups, which are mercurian, subterran, terran, superterran( these four constitute the terrestrial planets), neptunians and jovians (these are called the gas giants). Mercurian planets are approximately the size of our Moon or Mercury and they are atmosphere-less low mass planets. Subterran planets are comparable to Mars, terrans are planets like the Earth, superterran is the only group for which our solar-system has no example. Neptunian, as the name already tells, is the category in which the planets are as big as Neptune, and jovian planets are in our solar-system Jupiter or Saturn or even bigger.
























On this picture you can see the confirmed exoplanets that are known by the NASA. The number in the
middle of each picture shows how many of these planets have been discovered so far. In the upper right corner you can also see the multiple number of stellar systems.



These are only the confirmed planets. The Kepler Mission has discovered many more planets, which aren't yet confirmed to be one. In order to confirm that a planet candidate is a planet it must regularly orbit a star with the same transit time. For earth like planets in the habitable zone this means that it has to transit a star for three years to make sure it is one.

 This picture shows how many planet candidates the Kepler Mission helped to discover. As you may see, there are many warm superterran planets outside of our solar system, which are particularly interesting for the scientists. They haven't had the chance to take probes or analyze them closer and as there are no superterran planets in our solar system, the scientists are very curious about their features.

In September 2011 the Kepler Mission announced a discovery which was for many science-fiction fans a day to remember. The Kepler Telescope discovered a planet that orbits two suns. This planet is 200 light-years away from Earth. The solar system is called the Kepler 16 and the name of the planet is Kepler 16-b. The planet is outside of the habitable zone and is said to be a cold world without liquid water. It orbits both stars every 226 days. The discovery was made when the Kepler Scientists discovered a second object transiting the main star that turned out to be a second star. It has a smaller orbit and that means that it orbits the main star faster than Kepler 16-b.The stars are both smaller than our sun. The fact that a phenomenon like this exists shows how mysterious and diverse our Universe is. The reason why most science-fiction fans are interested in this is because Star Wars worked with a similar concept, without knowing about the existence of the phenomenon.