Kepler-440b (also known by its Kepler Object of Interest designation KOI-4087.01) is a confirmed

super-Earth A super-Earth is an extrasolar planet with a mass higher than Earth's, but substantially below those of the Solar System's ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, which are 14.5 and 17 times Earth's, respectively. The term "super-Earth" refers only to ...

exoplanet orbiting within the

habitable zone In astronomy and astrobiology, the circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ), or simply the habitable zone, is the range of orbits around a star within which a planetary surface can support liquid water given sufficient atmospheric pressure.J. F. Kast ...

Kepler-440 Kepler-44, formerly known as KOI-204, is a star in the northern constellation of Cygnus (constellation), Cygnus. It is located at the celestial coordinates: Right Ascension , Declination . With an apparent visual magnitude of 16, this sta ...

, about from

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surfa ...

. The planet was discovered by

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

Kepler spacecraft The Kepler space telescope is a disused space telescope launched by NASA in 2009 to discover Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. Named after astronomer Johannes Kepler, the spacecraft was launched into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orb ...

using the

transit method Any planet is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent star. For example, a star like the Sun is about a billion times as bright as the reflected light from any of the planets orbiting it. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty o ...

, in which the dimming effect that a planet causes as it crosses in front of its star is measured. NASA announced the confirmation of the exoplanet on 6 January 2015.

Confirmed exoplanet

Kepler-440b is a

with a radius 1.86 times that of

. The planet orbits Kepler-440 once every 101.1 days.

Habitability

The planet was announced as being located within the

of Kepler-440, a region where

liquid water Water (chemical formula ) is an inorganic, transparent, tasteless, odorless, and nearly colorless chemical substance, which is the main constituent of Earth's hydrosphere and the fluids of all known living organisms (in which it acts as a s ...

could exist on the surface of the

planet A planet is a large, rounded astronomical body that is neither a star nor its remnant. The best available theory of planet formation is the nebular hypothesis, which posits that an interstellar cloud collapses out of a nebula to create a you ...

References

External links

NASA – Mission overview

NASA – Kepler Discoveries – Summary Table

NASA – Kepler-440b
at The NASA Exoplanet Archive.
NASA – Kepler-440b
at

The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia is an astronomy website, founded in Paris, France at the Meudon Observatory by Jean Schneider in February 1995, which maintains a database of all the currently known and candidate extrasolar planets, with indi ...

.
Habitable Exolanets Catalog
at UPR-Arecibo. {{Sky, 19, 01, 23.99, +, 41, 27, 07.94 440b Exoplanets discovered in 2015 Super-Earths in the habitable zone Transiting exoplanets Lyra (constellation)

Confirmed exoplanet

Habitability

See also

References

External links