The search and observation of planets outside the solar system is today one of the fronts of cosmology that raise enthusiasm among astronomers. It is expected therefore to find planets with similar characteristics to the Earth – and therefore theoretically could harbor life forms. The most spectacular tool ever developed for the exploration of exoplanets, as they are called the planets revolving around other suns, is the Kepler telescope, launched into space in March this year by the United States and came into operation three months ago. Their detection equipment light are 100 times more accurate than those of the largest telescopes on earth. Over the next tr ~ es and a half years, the Kepler mission will be to inspect 100,000 stars to detect bodies in their orbits, a task which scientists have dubbed it, with a little humor, the first planetary census.
Astronomers have assumed the existence of extrasolar planets since the nineteenth century, but only fifteen years obtained the technology necessary to detect them. Today it is known the existence of 350 of them, almost all huge balls of poisonous gases subjected to huge gravitational forces. The best surprise in this search for cosmic brothers of the Earth took place two years ago with the discovery in the constellation Libra, the planet GL 581c. The star has surface temperatures ranging between zero and 40 degrees, gravity is compatible with the body of humans and it is quite probable that harbor liquid water. For now, however, is useless to imagine a trip to the GL 581c. The spacecraft built faster, the New Horizons spacecraft would take 400,000 years to reach the planet. In the case of HAT-P-7b, recently studied by Kepler, the journey would measure in the tens of millions of years.
To the uninitiated in cosmology, the impossibility of man to reach exoplanets may sound frustrating. For astronomers, it’s just a detail. The analysis of these stars, msmo over long distances, can give huge contributions to the study of the universe and its origins. So we celebrate both the power of Kepler to analyze the HAT-P-7b. The observation of exoplanets made the earth uses a method called radial velocity, which is based on the oscillation of the stars according to the gravitational pull of planets in orbit. In the technique used by Kepler, known as transit heavenly instruments detect variations in brightness of a star that may indicate the existence of a planet in its orbit. The telescope can not see the planet, only the decrease in light of the star when it passes in front of something like a tiny eclipse. A planet Earth-sized blocks 0,01% of light from a star the size of the sun It is not just something to measure the temperature of a planet at a distance of 23 billion times greater than that separating Earth from the Moon existence of life on other planets is one of the mysteries that instigate the human mind ever since. The discovery of planets capable of supporting life as we know it is the first step in answering this question ancestor.