Last week's astronomy discoveries...

Two major discoveries were announced this week, both very relevant to zooniverse projects.

Discovery 1: Firstly, a new record has been set for the most distant object every observed in the universe: a galaxy 13.2 billion light years away (about 4.1 billion parsecs). The age of the universe is around 13.7 billion light years away, so this is providing a glimpse back into the universe's early childhood (to make an analogy, if the universe was a 40 year old human, we're seeing that human at an age of about 1.5 years). The image was a Hubble deep-field exposure of exactly the type you see on Galaxy Zoo.

You can read more here:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/farthest-galaxy.html

Discovery 2: The Kepler team (Kepler is the satellite whose data is used in the Planet-Hunters project on Zooniverse) announced the detection of over 1,200 candidates for planets around other stars. 54 lie in the so-called habitable zone around their star (also known as Goldilock's zone - not too hot, not too cold), and 68 of them are roughly Earth-sized. Here is a useful plot of the mass of the planet versus its orbital period (its year):

See: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepler_data_release.html

Among these candidates are several multiple-planet systems, most notably the system named Kepler-11 which consists of 6 candidate planets: the most of any system outside our own solar system (see the Scientific American article posted below by Chandler and http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/new_planetary_system.html).

This is a remarkable announcement: the number of new candidates announced is more than all the previously discovered extra-solar planets put together by a long way. One final comment: note the use of the word 'candidates': these will have to be confirmed as planets by follow-up observations, and until then there is always a possibilty that some will turn out to be false identifications (in fact, among such a large haul, it is probable that a few will be); this is a point not often made when such discoveries are reported in the mainstream media. Having said that, the vast majority should turn out to be real planet detections, and the Kepler-11 system I think is fairly certain: they would make doubly sure before making such a high-profile announcement to the world's media!