16-04-09 Kepler takes first images in hunt for Earth-like planet

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope,launched March 6 from Cape Canaveral,FL,has shipped home its first images of the star zone where it will hunt for Earth-like planets.Think there are a lot of options for a succesful find in the vibrant photo shown above?That's only 0.2 per cent of Kepler's full field of view.This patch of stars in the constellation Lycra covers 100 square degrees in our Milky Way.The image above has been color-coded.Bright stars appear white,and the fainter ones are red.Kepler snapped this 60-second exposure shortly after it cover was ejected last eek.An eight-billion-year-old cluster of stars 13,000 light-years from Earth,called NGC 6791,can be seen in the image.Clusters are families of stars that form together out of the same gas cloud.This particular cluster is called an open cluster,because the stars are loosely bound and have started to spread out from each other.Using the largest camera ever flown in space,Kepler will spend three-and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars in our Milky Way galaxy for signs of Earth-size planets.Some of the planets are expected to orbit in a star's "habitable zone," a warm region where water could pool on the surface.Called a photometer,the camera contains special devices that will detect when incoming starlight decreases.In effect,the photometer works by looking for the absence of light when planets pass in front of stars,casting,in simple terms, their shadow.The Kepler team has high hopes for the future.William Borucki,science principal investigator for Kepler at NASA's Ames Research Center said:It's thrilling to see this treasure trove of stars.We expect to find hundreds of planets circling those stars,and for the first time,we can look for Earth-size planets in the habitable zones around other stars like the sun.They'll spend the next few weeks testing Kepler.they've even got a test case:a star with a known "hot Jupiter" planet located roughly in the center of the field shown above.The planet,officially known as TrES-2,orbits its star a every 2.5 days.Kepler will focus on observations of TrES-2 and other known planets as a demonstration test.So far,344 exoplanets have been discovered by astronomers,with 291 orbiting their own suns.None have yet shown any signs of being like Earth

Image Kepler