They should also watch out for the dips on the tables at many restaurants, a study warned yesterday.
The game does not account for the dips in renewable supply that occur at night or on still or cloudy days.
NASA's Kepler spacecraft, to be launched in 2007, will look for the dips in starlight caused by planets passing in front of their parent stars, and could find "hundreds of Earths," said Dr. Charles Beichman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Its mission is to determine the fraction of stars in the galaxy that harbor Earth-like planets by carrying out a survey of some 150,000 stars in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra, looking for the dips in starlight caused by planets passing, or transiting, in front of their suns.
Its official mission was to determine the fraction of stars in the galaxy that harbor Earthlike planets by carrying out a survey of some 150,000 stars in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra, looking for the dips in starlight caused by planets passing, or transiting, in front of their suns.
The radial velocity observations confirmed that a planetary body was responsible for the dips observed in Kepler-7's light curve, thus confirming it as a planet.
