

First Potentially Habitable Earth-Sized Planet Confirmed by Observatories - jeromeparadis
http://www.keckobservatory.org/recent/entry/first_potentially_habitable_earth_sized_planet_confirmed_by_keck_and_gemini

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scrumper
My personal future shock is bound up in the fact that we are now discovering
planets outside of our solar system. Somehow, I just never expected that to
happen in my lifetime.

The milestones keep getting knocked down: planets, multiple planets in the
same system, super earths, now earth-size planets in the habitable zone.
Wonderful stuff, and very exciting to think what we'll find next. It's not
impossible to imagine that we'll develop the technology to conduct
spectrographic analysis of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets, maybe one
day even discovering methane.

My assumption is that all solar systems orbit in more or less the same plane
as their host galaxy. Is this why we're able to detect so many planets by this
occultation technique? Presumably this is because the Milky Way and all it
contains started out as one large accretion disk. Am I way off base?

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jswhitten
The orbital plane of planets in a given system is random as far as we know,
and not related to the plane of the galaxy. Our own solar system, for example,
is tilted more than 60 degrees from the plane of the galaxy's disk.

So as you might expect, more than 99% of all planets in a sample are
undetectable by this technique. Kepler has been so successful because it is
watching about 150,000 stars at once, all in an area of sky that would be
covered by your fist at arm's length.

