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UH Astronomers Identify 20 Planets with the Highest Likelihood of Harboring Life

Chester Harman / NASA
Chester Harman / NASA

A team of astronomers known as the Kepler Habitable Zone Working Group has identified a handful of planets that are most likely to be similar to our home.  

The team sifted through more than 4,000 exoplanets recorded from NASA’s Kepler mission… and found only 20 planets met the criteria for life as we know it.

Researchers used the planets’ radius and distance from their star to estimate what its surface and composition would be like.  A world too close to its sun would not be able to sustain water needed for life… nor would water be able to exist on a planet made of gas.  Nader Haghighipour is an astronomer with UH’s Institute for Astronomy. 

In the future, Haghighipour and his team will be taking a closer look at the twenty planets with telescopes on Mauna Kea.

For a better explanation listen to the complete interview: 

nader_haghighipour_full.mp3

Nick Yee’s passion for music developed at an early age, as he collected jazz and rock records pulled from dusty locations while growing up in both Southern California and Honolulu. In college he started DJing around Honolulu, playing Jazz and Bossa Nova sets at various lounges and clubs under the name dj mr.nick. He started to incorporate Downtempo, House and Breaks into his sets as his popularity grew, eventually getting DJ residences at different Chinatown locations. To this day, he is a fixture in the Honolulu underground club scene, where his live sets are famous for being able to link musical and cultural boundaries, starting mellow and building the audience into a frenzy while steering free of mainstream clichés.
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