In other words, they are a sort of savior-entity attempting to address the issue of scarcity and resource depletion by rescuing Earth (and Mars, as well as many other planets) from self-destruction by pooling our resources with a potentially unlimited number of other planets throughout the universe.
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Several panel members have favored dividing planets into categories: terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars), giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) and a third class that would include Pluto.
According to Dr Lissauer, about 50 of the 1, 200 or so candidate planets (if planets they be) are orbiting in the habitable zones of their parental stars.
And water would be all the more exciting on Ganymede because it is the largest moon in the solar system (larger even than the planets Mercury and Pluto) and, like earth, it has a permanent magnetic field that protects part of its surface from bombardment by certain sorts of life-destroying radiation.
As if from different planets ( more on this), their two strategies are completely disconnected.
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This will enable it to detect planets as tiny as four earth masses up to 33 light-years away, and earth-sized planets (if they exist) around the sun's closest neighbours.
Trappist (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) will study exoplanets by measuring at high precision the "brightness dips" that can be caused by objects transiting (passing in front of) their parent star.
Just over 50 extrasolar planetary systems have so far been discovered and analysis of them shows just how unusual our local system is with its giant planets (Jupiter and Saturn) positioned well away from the Sun.
Other fiction nominees include Argentine Sergio Chejfec's (SHAY'-fekz) "The Planets, " translated from Spanish by Heather Cleary.
They have used similar observations of more distant stars to find "exoplanets" (planets orbiting stars other than the sun) and in a few rare cases, to measure characteristics of the exoplanet atmospheres.
Astronomers would like to pin down the masses of the planets (information difficult to acquire with Kepler), as well as getting that data on atmospheric composition.
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Two of the planets (Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f) orbit a K2 dwarf estimated to be around 7 billion years old.
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And the hole's outer edge is roughly where rocky planets, like the inner planets of this solar system (including the earth), are expected to be.
In a lot of ways, the weather of the four giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) should be easier to understand than that of the earth, because there are no oceans and continents to complicate matters.
It's taken more than six years of development, but a new imaging system for the Palomar Observatory's 200-inch Hale Telescope finally started capturing images last month, and promises to aid significantly in the search for planets outside our solar system (otherwise known as exoplanets).
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Mr. GEOFF MARCY (University of California at Berkeley): We've announced the discovery of 107 planets, and I think it's fair to say we consider this the most exciting perhaps of all of the 107.
Dubbed the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (or TESS), this new space telescope will one-up Kepler with the ability to perform an all-sky survey (an area 400 times larger than previous missions) to search for transiting exoplanets, with an eye towards planets comparable to Earth in size.
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Two researchers (separated by the Atlantic ocean, rather than the English Channel), have used gravitational perturbations that affect comets, rather than planets, to predict the existence of something that might be a planet, or might be a star depending mainly on how you define a planet or a star.
Fortunately, there are other ways to find planets than by detecting transits (the passage of a planetary body across a sun), as Kepler does.
Without it such a galaxy's outer parts would spin more slowly than the inner ones (just as the outer planets of the solar system move around the sun more slowly than the earth does).
Mr. ALAN STERN (Southwest Research Institute): And, you know, whereas we know of four terrestrial planets and four gas giants, we expect that there are hundreds if not thousands of these ice dwarfs, and so this class of planets which we have not yet reconnoitered is in reality the most populous class of planetary body in our solar system.
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