Today’s Pokemon GO update includes a LEGENDARY POKEMON RAID EGG – as you can see at the head of this article. The update to Pokemon GO’s second age has begun, and the app files needed to join are now available for download. Earlier today, Beta Testers began leaking the game’s update images and video. What we’ll see here is a … Continue reading
Security-minded company ProtonMail has announced that its VPN service ‘ProtonVPN’ is now out of beta and available to everyone. Even better, particularly for those who are unable to pay, is that ProtonVPN is free. According to the company, its VPN service improves upon the competing products available on the market, utilizing things like a Secure Core architecture to help protect … Continue reading
Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez aren’t afraid to show the world how happy they are.
Lopez recently shared some romantic shots from their recent trip to Paris on Instagram, dubbing the getaway “baecation.” And the former MLB player isn’t staying mum, either.
Rodriguez spoke to Extra on Monday during a press event for ABC’s “Shark Tank.” During the interview, he explained that he and Lopez prioritize spending time together despite their hectic schedules and are very compatible.
“If you want to be together, you are together,” he told Extra. “Our kids get along really well, we’re both from New York, we’re both Latin, we’re both in our 40s, we’re really enjoying life, but she really is one of the most impressive and smartest human beings I have ever met.”
The baseball star attended the “Shark Tank” press event as he prepares to become the first Hispanic “shark” on the show in the fall.
“The fact that (Hispanics) contribute over a trillion dollars annually to the economy is just a phenomenal feat,” Rodriguez said, according to CNBC. “I think in D.C. and other business communities, we should be having really smart conversations on how to double that number.”
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At some point in their lives, black men are forced to realize that no matter what they do, some people will never see their humanity.
To counter the negative perception of black men and boys, Chicago native Valerie Reynolds authored “The Joys of Being a Little Black Boy.” The book follows a blissfully innocent adolescent named Roy in Chi City as he gets to interact with historical black figures like Barack Obama, Frederick Douglass and Jackie Robinson.
“Roy takes readers on a journey of joy through a historic adventure reminding us that many remarkable black men were once joyful little black boys,” the book’s publisher, Hurston Media Group, said in a statement to HuffPost.
Reynolds told HuffPost why her book is so relevant to the present social climate.
“It is very important to ensure little black boys are aware of the joy that they possess, much like the historical figures highlighted in the book,” Reynolds told HuffPost in an email Tuesday. “Now, more than ever, it is critical to counter the dominant narrative that mostly portrays black men and boys as dangerous, violent and criminal.”
In order to ensure her message reaches the masses, Reynolds began a Kickstarter campaign. She aims to raise $7,500 not only for the book’s printing costs but also to donate copies to public schools throughout the country. As of Tuesday, the campaign has reached 70 percent of its goal.
On the book’s Kickstarter page, Reynolds points to the killing of Terence Crutcher by Officer Betty Shelby to illustrate the necessity of positive representations of black boys. In audio footage from a helicopter that hovered over the scene of the killing, a police officer is heard typecasting Crutcher by saying he looked like a “bad dude.”
“This ‘big bad dude’ scared her because her understanding of Black men has been shaped by distorted images, stories, and depictions of Black men that are conjured by the media … media misrepresentations have real and tragic consequences,” Reynolds wrote on the campaign page.
“We want this book to remind little Black boys who they are and whom they come from,” she continued. “We also hope that this book illuminates the humanity of Black boys and reminds everyone that we are more alike than we are different.”
The pledge levels start at $5, and each donation of $27 or higher comes with one or more copies of the book, along with other small items. Some pledge levels are named after young black men and boys who have lost their lives to police shootings or other racially charged violence.
Reynolds hopes that by August, the book will make its way to classrooms and be available in retail stores.
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The latest government numbers on opioid-related hospitalizations paint a picture of a country in a drug-related crisis.
Between 2005 to 2014, emergency room visits stemming from opioid use rose 99 percent and inpatient stays jumped 64 percent, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
In 2014 alone, opioid-related hospitalizations totaled 1.27 million.
The spike in hospital visits was driven largely by people ages 25 to 44. The report by the Rockville, Maryland-based agency also noted gender differences in the way men and women used hospital services.
Women were more likely to have inpatient stays, while men were more likely to visit the ER in 2014.
“Our data tell us what is going on. They tell us what the facts are. But they don’t give us the underlying reasons for what we’re seeing here,” Anne Elixhauser, co-author of the report and senior research scientist at AHRQ, told the Washington Post.
“It is no surprise that opioid-related hospitalizations rose significantly during that time period,” Dr. Peter Friedmann, associate dean for research at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and chief research officer at the nonprofit Baystate Health, told HuffPost.
“The surge of opioid use disorder and opioid-related overdose deaths that started in the late ’90s continues unabated in most of the U.S. Overdose deaths are the tip of the iceberg,” Friedmann said.
A U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report published in June found that between 2010 to 2015, North Carolina hospitals saw a 12-fold increase in patients suffering from endocarditis, an infection of the heart, that was linked to drug dependence
“As the U.S. opioid epidemic continues to grow, hospitalizations for infectious complications associated with injection drug use are likely to increase,” the report said.
The AHRQ report follows a New York Times Upshot analysis of data from health agencies around the country that estimated drug overdose deaths will top 59,000 in 2016. That’s up from 52,404 overdose deaths in 2015, a 19 percent increase that would be the largest such jump in U.S. history.
According to the Times, the numbers are expected to rise again in 2017.
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Nothing’s better than having your friends over, applying hydrating face masks, making some popcorn and popping in a good rom-com, right?
Eh, maybe.
These days, it appears the age of romantic comedies is behind us. No longer are we dedicated to following the hijinks of a couple as they try to make it work. We don’t want to pay $15 to watch two people fall in love over the course of an hour and a half. But why?
With the 20-year anniversary of “My Best Friend’s Wedding” on June 20, it got us thinking: has there really been a rom-com in the past 10 years that’s gained the repeat-watching status of the Julia Roberts-fronted movie? Sure, we’ve had “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “13 Going On 30,” “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” and “The Holiday.” But since the mid-aughts, there really hasn’t been a romconaissance, even if indies like “What If” or “Obvious Child” have tried to give the genre a boost.
There was a reason movies like this were so successful in the ’90s. They were romantic, hopeful, endearing. The quintessential rom-com could be described using all those adjectives, pulling at our heartstrings while making us root for a dreamy pairing. “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” in particular, really played with viewers’ emotions, teasing a happy ending yet finishing with an unexpected twist. This, star Dermot Mulroney says, is the reason it earned almost $300 million worldwide.
“It wasn’t about getting the guy, it was about her failing to break them up. And it kills people,” Mulroney told HuffPost last year.
“It took me this long to analyze why that movie stands out from the crowd of romantic comedies, it’s she’s a sad clown,” he added. “It’s a melancholy movie. You watch it and you think, ‘Oh God, she’s not going to … oh, no!’ And that’s what’s funny about it. It’s like somebody slipping on a banana peel, we love that.”
No one can deny that it’s nice to see the lead players end up together at the culmination of a movie. But what “My Best Friend’s Wedding” did was flip the script, something that’s much more common now than it was when the movie first debuted. Audiences expect a surprise ending these days ― whether it be in movie-musicals like “La La Land” or in suspenseful TV shows like “Game of Thrones” ― which might explain why the typical rom-com formula no longer works as well as it used to.
So maybe “My Best Friend’s Wedding” changed audience preferences, inspiring moviegoers to pine for the less predictable and ache only for the kinds of rom-coms that provide that perfectly surprising ending. The question is: are studios willing to make those films?
Nowadays, it’s harder to find original scripts, be it any genre in the industry. We’re living in a time of the sequel, where spinoffs and reboots own the headlines before succeeding or totally flopping at the box office, on streaming sites or premium channels. Rom-coms don’t necessarily get remade or rebooted ― new stories recycling the formula just have to fight against old faithfuls in a way that other genres don’t. One can simply rewatch a classic love story before running to see another.
“Annie Hall.” “When Harry Met Sally.” “While You Were Sleeping.” “Sleepless in Seattle.” “What Women Want.” “How Stella Got Her Groove Back.” “The Wedding Planner.” “Sixteen Candles.” “You’ve Got Mail.” “Clueless.” “Love & Basketball.” “Notting Hill.” To name a few.
Big-budget films ― think superheroes, action ― are what every company is after, and it appears those flicks in the mid-range are no longer important in the grand scheme of things. With so many people watching content in the comfort of their own homes, studios are looking to bet more on big-budget projects in hopes they’ll lure fans to the theaters. Again, not many people are wasting their hard-earned dollars on a movie theater ticket, unless it’s something worth seeing on the big screen, or in 3D and IMAX.
Take 2011’s “Something Borrowed” for instance: Warner Bros. spent $35 million on production, but the film only earned $60 million worldwide. Compare that to 1990’s “Pretty Woman,” which was made on a budget of $14 million but grossed over $463 million. As of late, flicks like “Just Go With It” (2011) and “Trainwreck” (2015) have made solid returns at the box office, but not one has landed in the top 10 highest-grossing romantic comedies since 2009’s “The Proposal,” which earned over $317 million worldwide.
And although the late Garry Marshall had success with his holiday-themed rom-coms like “Valentine’s Day” (2010) and “New Year’s Eve” (2011) ― thanks to some serious star power ― his most recent try, “Mother’s Day,” had a production budget of $25 million and only grossed $32 million worldwide. (”Valentine’s Day” earned $184 million more than that.)
Let’s also call out the rom-com mainstays who left the genre in the dust without finding ample replacements. Actors like Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts moved on from rom-coms, leaving Katherine Heigl to step in ― and that didn’t help anyone. Plus, Matthew McConaughey ― the category’s it guy ― started taking on grittier, well-rounded roles, and even won an Oscar. But did anyone fill his shoes? No. Because it appears young Hollywood isn’t interested in this area of filmmaking, but are more so looking to work with the top writers and directors in the industry. Just look at Rachel McAdams, who pretty much carved a path in the rom-com genre ― “The Notebook,” “Mean Girls,” “The Vow,” “About Time,” (let’s leave out “Aloha”) ― only to follow it up with critically acclaimed movies or box-office gold like “Spotlight,” “Southpaw” and “Doctor Strange.”
She sensed the shift early on in her career, telling Radio Free in 2005, “Most of the roles out there for women are the ingenue, the girlfriend, the daddy’s girl … you know, it’s all pretty sweet and straightforward. So I’m just really looking for roles whether they’re so-called ‘attractive people’ or not. I’m more concerned with the depth of the role and the uniqueness of the character.”
You can’t blame McAdams, it’s just, who’s willing to take on the task for the sake of rom-com history? (Again, no more Heigl, please.) Yes, studios aren’t making films that fit in this genre anymore, but actors don’t necessarily want to star in them, either. And let’s face it, A-list actors always help.
With the help of team players like Roberts, Ryan, Mulroney and McConaughey, rom-coms made a mark. But as viewers, studios and actors grow smarter, the draw of the rom-com dims. And that, my face-mask-wearing friends, is no fun.
You can be highbrow. You can be lowbrow. But can you ever just be brow? Welcome to Middlebrow, a weekly examination of pop culture. Read more here.
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Republicans say you shouldn’t blame them for the rushed, secretive way they are writing health care legislation. They say you should blame Democrats.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Tuesday got multiple questions about the legislation, now under consideration in the Senate, that would repeal the Affordable Care Act. Almost nobody, including most Republican senators, knows exactly what the bill would do, because leaders have tapped a small group of members to write the legislation and have done their best to keep the details out of public view.
They’ve submitted a version to the Congressional Budget Office for analysis and, supposedly, they will share text with their full caucus later this week ― which means details are likely to leak out to the public shortly thereafter. But the current plan is to hold a vote as soon as next week, with a minimum of formal public deliberation.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his allies have come under withering assault for writing such an ambitious and consequential bill in this manner. They are responding by saying that Democrats are to blame, because ― as this argument goes ― Democrats have made clear they won’t work with Republicans on a repeal bill.
Here’s what Spicer said Tuesday ― speaking about Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) ― in response to a question from MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson:
If you look at what Senator Schumer said, both in February to a MoveOn.org call, where he said no Democrat’s going to go near this, and what he said in a letter May 9, that no Democrats would be part of an effort that would repeal Obamacare, so they have chosen … not to make themselves part of the process.
Spicer also said this was a key difference between the process Republicans are using to repeal the Affordable Care Act now and the process Democrats used when they first wrote the law, back in 2009 and 2010. This has always been one of the GOP’s favorite talking points ― that, according to the party narrative, Democrats wrote the bill in secret and then rushed a vote before anybody really knew what was in it.
“We were very polarized because the Democrats did, frankly, exactly the same thing,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday. “So we had a very polarized bill that the public debated for years and years. I don’t think the parties are any different. I would give criticism equally to the parties.”
It’s true that, this year, Democrats indicated early that they wanted no part of a bill that would take away health insurance from millions of people, as every repeal proposal being discussed would do. (The House bill, on which the Senate has based its legislation, would take away coverage from 23 million people, according to a Congressional Budget Office projection.) Of course, it’s also true that Schumer and Democrats made it clear they would happily work on bipartisan reforms, even major ones, that would make coverage more secure or affordable without causing the number of uninsured to rise.
But the really important context for this debate is the Republican claims about what happened in 2009 and 2010 and how those claims hold up to scrutiny.
They don’t hold up well.
In reality, Democrats spent more than a year debating their proposal out in the open. Five separate committees, three in the House and two in the Senate, held literally hundreds of hours of hearings and produced testimony from experts representing multiple philosophical views and officials from pretty much every group or industry involved with health care. Republicans had opportunities to question those witnesses and to propose amendments, some of which actually ended up in the legislation.
You don’t have to mythologize the 2009-2010 process to see how different the 2017 process has been.
McConnell, as it happens, made his own vow of noncooperation ― later telling The Atlantic’s Joshua Green he wanted no GOP “fingerprints” on Democratic legislation. Even so, Democratic leaders tried desperately to win over a handful of moderate Republicans who seemed most likely to support health care reform. Then-Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and former President Barack Obama personally invested hours in one-on-one meetings with individual Republican senators, especially then-Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) ― who ultimately voted for the Finance Committee’s bill, even though she voted against the final Democratic legislation on the floor.
Before the final Senate vote, in December 2009, Republicans warned they hadn’t seen final details before voting on the bill. But by that point nearly a year had passed and the big questions were all settled. Later, as the debate dragged into early 2010, Obama personally engaged Republicans ― at length ― on two separate occasions, one at a Republican Party retreat in Baltimore and then at a daylong bipartisan session at the Blair House.
Writing legislation is almost never elegant and there was plenty of negotiation that went on behind closed doors. The result was some famously ugly deals, such as the “Cornhusker kickback” that would have boosted federal Medicaid payments to Nebraska to secure the vote of then-Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.). Many Democratic leaders were happy not to work with Republicans. (They were furious at Baucus for dragging out negotiations.) And of course the final legislation violated some key promises its supporters made ― chief among them, a vow to let people who liked their existing health care plans keep them.
But by and large the architects of the law were clear about what they were trying to do and how they proposed to do it ― in part because they’d been promoting and defending these ideas, in detail, ever since Obama had started his presidential campaign years before. And once in power they used the traditional committee process ― if not so much to write the legislative language then at least to give the media, interest groups and ultimately the public an opportunity to understand what was up for discussion and eventually form an opinion on that.
You don’t have to mythologize the 2009-2010 process to see how different the 2017 process has been. (Take it from other reporters who covered the Affordable Care Act, like Sarah Kliff and Julie Rovner, who have made this point already.) And it’s not hard to figure out why Senate GOP leaders are proceeding in the way they are.
Although those leaders haven’t indicated how they intend to resolve some key issues, the ultimate impact of the bill is already clear, as HuffPost’s Jeff Young has written. That proposal would take away insurance from millions, remove consumer protections that people value, and push insurance in the direction of greater exposure to out-of-pocket costs.
None of this is popular. None of this is what Republicans promised to do. Debating their bill openly would force them to admit that, and so they are trying to avoid public scrutiny for as long as possible.
Igor Bobic contributed reporting.
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QUEENS, N.Y. ― New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced a federal lawsuit Tuesday against anti-abortion protestors for the unlawful harassment of patients and their companions outside a New York City abortion clinic.
“The tactics used to harass and menace Choices’ patients, families, volunteers, and staff are not only horrifying ― they’re illegal,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “The law guarantees women the right to control their own bodies and access the reproductive health care they need, without obstruction. We’ll do what it takes to protect those rights for women across New York.”
The announcement was made outside Choices, an abortion clinic in New York City’s Jamaica neighborhood. Every Saturday for the last five years, local anti-abortion protestors have posted up outside of Choices to harass patients. This harassment has included following patients with 3×5 grotesque and heavily edited photos of aborted fetuses, following patients to the door of the clinic and attempting to go inside with them, preaching anti-abortion and misogynist rhetoric loudly just outside the clinic entrance, waiting for patients as they exit their cars, and waving pamphlets and fliers into the faces of the patients and their companions. (Full disclosure: I work as a clinic escort volunteer at Choices, and have seen all of this firsthand.)
This behavior from abortion clinic protestors is often defended under the guise of the First Amendment. But Schneiderman was quick to point out in the press conference that access to safe and legal abortion is also protected by the U.S. Constitution, and that there have always been laws that regulate freedom of speech.
“It is as old as the First Amendment that proper restrictions on time, place and manner of speech are totally lawful. There are many things that are ‘speech’ that are restricted by the law,” Schneiderman said Tuesday.
“You are not allowed to … harass, intimidate and try and prevent people from exercising their constitutional rights,” he added.
Theresa White, a longtime volunteer clinic escort from Queens and clinic escort supervisor who worked with Schneiderman to build the case against the anti-abortion protestors (or “antis”), told HuffPost that this is a serious win for the women of New York and the pro-abortion rights community.
“We’ve been working on this for over a year,” she said. “This just feels fantastic.”
Other women’s rights activists around the country see New York’s lawsuit against the antis as a loud statement against abortion clinic harassment ― and hope that their cities can follow suit.
Calla Hales, clinic administrator at A Preferred Women’s Health Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, told HuffPost that she hopes the city of Charlotte is paying attention.
Hales is used to hundreds of protestors every Saturday outside the clinic in Charlotte and faces ambivalence with local legislators when it comes to protecting patients.
“I feel so positive about this,” Hales said. “I understand that protesting and free speech are protected rights. However, it’s very clear that what’s occurring when these groups protest abortion clinics is not merely voicing a different opinion ― it’s harassment, it’s intimidation, and it’s simply cruel. I hope that other cities, Charlotte included, will take note of this.”
Jessica Gird, a clinic escort in Michigan at Northland Family Planning, told HuffPost that the city of Westland has done little to support patients and clinic staff.
“Legislation has really not done a whole lot that benefits patients and staff alike,” she said Tuesday. “In regard to what the antis can and cannot do, it’s relatively expansive in their favor, especially if looked at from the psychological and emotional effects from the patient’s standpoint.”
Gird said that choosing to terminate a pregnancy isn’t always an easy choice ― and that antis make the entire experience much more traumatizing than it should be.
“While there is no universal abortion experience, this can already be an emotionally charged collection of moments in time,” she said. “They shame our patients and staff, they use manipulation tactics with patients from black and brown communities and with people who are forced to arrive with children, they promote these ideas that have no factual basis to those in vulnerable states, and to me that is in direct opposition to the Christian belief system that they claim to adhere so closely to.”
Derenda Hancock, a clinic escort for Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Jackson, Mississippi, told HuffPost that she wishes the city of Jackson would do more to protect patients, too ― especially because “the Pink House” is the only remaining clinic in the state.
“We used to have an incredible relationship with the police department,” Hancock told HuffPost. But changes in the local government in November have made it difficult to have a good relationship with the city, and a peaceful one with protestors.
Hancock said that the antis sued the city of Jackson, and the city government caved ― the antis were given a consent decree and no longer have to follow city ordinances for noise levels, signage and buffer zones.
“They get away with all kinds of things,” she said.
As states continue to allow the constant interference that occurs outside of abortion clinics, New York’s lawsuit against aggressive anti-abortion harassment is a major win for clinic patients and the abortion rights community. The lawsuit has set a strong precedent for state and city governments to defend women’s health care access.
“We think it’s going to send a very powerful message,” Schneiderman said.
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WASHINGTON ― Rising American criticism of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spurred hopes that the U.S. will take a tougher line against his repression, according to a top opposition Turkish lawmaker.
“They can do more,” Hişyar Özsoy, a parliamentarian associated with Turkey’s pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, known as HDP, told HuffPost recently during a stateside visit to meet with members of Congress and Trump administration officials.
Powerful Republicans and Democrats criticized an attack by Erdogan’s security personnel on protesters during his visit to the U.S. in May. U.S. authorities have since taken the unusual step of announcing criminal charges against the foreign officials. This month, the House passed a unanimous resolution condemning the guards’ behavior.
“Every single one of them voted for it,” Özsoy said of the House resolution. (More than 30 members of the House did not vote; no lawmakers voted against the resolution.)
“For quite some time, the U.S. administration as well as politicians have been trying to somehow manage Erdogan, to ease his anxiety,” Özsoy continued. “But it seems that they are fed up, I think, and this was, they’re angry not simply because of this attack, but this was kind of a tipping point, and it seems that they are saying enough is enough, we are not going to tolerate you and manage your anxieties anymore, and you need to behave.”
Some Turkish officials believe the U.S., their ally in the NATO alliance, has underestimated their concerns about an attempted coup against Erdogan last year, and the growing power of a Kurdish militant group called the YPG, which is working with the U.S. against the Islamic State in Syria.
Erdogan sees the YPG as an extension of a movement called the PKK ― a Kurdish organization responsible for hundreds of deaths within Turkey and still engaged in conflict with the government. Both Turkey and the U.S. list the PKK as a terror group.
But U.S. officials say they’re confident the YPG will not threaten Turkey with its new American weaponry. And compassion regarding the coup has waned because of Erdogan’s response ― fresh attacks on the press (Turkey is the world’s most prodigious jailer of journalists) the firing of tens of thousands of ordinary people, and assaults on opposition politicians.
Erdogan’s post-coup state of emergency seems to “target criticism, not terrorism,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said in March. Humanitarian groups say the government overreach exacerbates problems caused by a brutal years-long crackdown in Turkey’s mostly Kurdish southeastern regions.
Erdogan has responded to international criticism with anger. “What kind of a rule, what kind of a law is this?” he said in reaction to the charges against his bodyguards. The Turkish leader has also grown closer to Russia, a move analysts say is meant to signal that he does not necessarily need Washington’s support.
American decision-makers should see that there is now no value in compromising to soothe Erdogan, Özsoy said. He wants U.S. officials to step up criticism of heavy-handed Turkish government actions, like the imprisonment of his party’s leaders, and challenge talking points from Turkey’s lobbyists, like the claim that Erdogan is open to peace with the PKK after having consolidated his power as president in a controversial recent referendum.
“At best, they can be forced to have some kind of negotiations,” the lawmaker said, referring to Erdogan and the ultra-nationalist, anti-Kurdish factions in Turkey’s military and politics, with whom the president has aligned in recent years.
The harsh rhetoric about Erdogan and broad support for the Kurds on both sides of the aisle suggests that more Capitol Hill pressure may well be possible.
Asked whether he believes President Donald Trump’s stated admiration for Erdogan will make it hard for the U.S. to challenge Turkey, Özsoy said he believes the president’s domestic troubles over Russia will make it hard for him to truly shape U.S. foreign policy.
“Even in the U.S. where the president is so powerful, foreign policy decisions are not based on whether the presidents like each other personally or not,” he added. “If Erdogan is investing in the Trump administration, I can say that he will be disappointed.”
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Scientists are now one step closer to answering whether life exists on other planets.
NASA released a list of 219 new “planet candidates” discovered by the Kepler space telescope, 10 of which are similar to Earth’s size and may be habitable by other life forms. The announcement Monday marks the end of Kepler’s search for planets orbiting other stars in the constellation Cygnus, bringing the telescope’s tally to 4,034 planet candidate discoveries.
Of those discoveries, scientists have verified 2,335 as planets. More than 30 of those confirmed planets are similar in size to Earth and in their star’s “habitable zone” ― the range of distance from a star where liquid water could pool ― while around 20 others that fit that description remain unverified, according to NASA.
Most of the planets they discovered are smaller than Neptune, which is about four times the diameter of Earth, Kepler research scientist Susan Thompson said at a press briefing Monday in Mountain View, California.
This survey catalog will be the foundation for directly answering one of astronomy’s most compelling questions: How many planets like our Earth are actually in the galaxy?
Susan Thompson, Kepler research scientist
Monday’s findings inch closer to solving one of humanity’s great cosmic mysteries, she said.
“This survey catalog will be the foundation for directly answering one of astronomy’s most compelling questions: How many planets like our Earth are actually in the galaxy?”
Beyond the additions to the Kepler catalog, scientists working on the mission revealed Monday that they’ve identified two distinct groupings of small planets, which range in size from Earth to Neptune.
About half are similar to Neptune in size and composition in that they have thick atmospheres and are mostly gas with “no surface to speak of,” Benjamin Fulton, a doctoral candidate who analyzed Kepler’s findings, said Monday. The other half are similar to Earth in size and are rocky with little to no atmosphere.
Discovering that distinction “sharpens up the dividing line between potentially habitable planets and those that are inhospitable to life as we know it,” Fulton explained, likening it to “the discovery that mammals and lizards are separate branches on the tree of life.”
It also revealed the likelihood that those rocky, potentially habitable planets are usually no bigger than 75 percent larger than Earth, he said.
Monday’s NASA announcement marks Kepler’s eighth release of data after a four-year mission and years of analyzing the findings. Since 2014, Kepler has been on a second mission to find more exoplanets in different areas of the cosmos.
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