Word: kepler
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...Kendall/MIT stop, where an art installation by Paul Matisse allows passengers to play mobile-like instruments hanging between the tracks. The piece, called “The Kendall Band,” is composed of three elements that you might mistake for part of the machinery: “Kepler,” an aluminum ring that hums for five minutes after being struck; “Pythagoras,” a 48-foot row of aluminum chimes interspersed with teak hammers; and “Galileo,” a large steel sheet that clatters when the handle...
...dimming caused by an Earth-size planet would be easy enough for Kepler to notice too, and such smaller planets most likely exist. But to be in an orbit where the temperature is balmy enough to support life, the planet has to be about as far from its star as Earth is from the sun, making its orbit about a year long; and that, by definition, requires at least two years after the initial detection. "Have patience," said Jon Morse, director of NASA's astronomy and physics division, to the assembled crowd. (See pictures of Earth from space...
...many scientists, just watching the data come in is a pleasure all by itself. "Kepler is working so amazingly well," says Berkeley's Geoff Marcy, a champion planet hunter in his own right and a member of the Kepler science team, "that the light curves [that is, the dips in light caused by transiting planets] look like they come from a textbook, not a real instrument...
...that precision, plus the fact that Kepler is staring, unblinking and unceasingly, at 150,000 mostly sunlike stars in the Milky Way, that makes astronomers confident that Earths are in Kepler's future. As for any signs of life on those Earths, their detection will undoubtedly have to wait for future telescopes that can image the planets directly, probing their atmospheres for gases that hint at biological activity. (See the top 50 space moments since Sputnik...
...Still, Kepler has had some tantalizing news on the biology front too. While looking for planets, the probe has been taking note of the behavior of the stars themselves. Our sun is remarkably steady, without dramatic changes in warmth and brightness that might have prevented the emergence and evolution of life - and Kepler now reports that two-thirds of the sunlike stars it's monitoring are no more active than the sun at its most turbulent. Lots of stable suns could mean at least a handful of promising Earths - and those, in turn, could mean living company...