Using NASA’s revamped Kepler Space Telescope, an worldwide group of astronomers discovered more than 100 exoplanets, or planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. More than 3,200 of those have been verified as planets, with Kepler discovering 2,325 of those. Of those, 30 were false positives and 63 still need to be confirmed as exoplanets.
Advertisement
“The researchers achieved this extraordinary discovery of exoplanets by combining NASA’s K2 mission data with follow-up observations by Earth-based telescopes including the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, the twin Gemini telescopes on Maunakea and in Chile, the Automated Planet Finder of the University of California Observatories and the Large Binocular Telescope operated by the University of Arizona”.
One notable find in the latest discovery is a system with four rocky planets orbiting a star smaller than half the size of our Sun and significantly less luminous. A dwarf star is an average star, although it could be smaller.
Even though the planets rotate around their star even closer than Mercury orbits the sun, astronomers said two of them may have surface temperatures similar to Earth’s, as their star is cooler than our sun. The discoveries are reported in a paper to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters and now available online.
The telescope, which suffered a crippling equipment failure in 2013, was given a new lease on life with a innovative fix by NASA.
“Our analysis shows that by the end of the K2 mission, we expect to double or triple the number of relatively small planets orbiting nearby, bright stars”, Crossfield said.
K2-72c makes a complete orbit of its sun every 15 Earth days and is thought to be about 10 percent warmer than Earth.
For K2-72e, a year could last 24 Earth days, and because it is more distant, it could be about 6 percent cooler than Earth.
The new planets range in size from smaller than Earth to larger than Jupiter.
NASA’s Kepler space telescope has spotted four possibly rocky alien planets orbiting the same star, and two of these newfound worlds might be capable of supporting life.
To validate the candidate planets, researchers studied high-resolution images of the planet-hosting stars as well as high-resolution optical spectroscopy data. In these early days, planets also are assembled and by looking at the timescales of star formation, scientists gain insight into how our own planet formed.
“They’re between tens and hundreds of light years away, which sounds far away, but on a cosmic scale, they’re basically in our backyard”, Evan Sinukoff, graduate student at the UH Institute for Astronomy, said Monday in an interview on Hawaii News Now Sunrise.
“These targets allow the astronomical community ease of follow-up and characterization, providing a few gems for first study by the James Webb Space Telescope, which could perhaps tell us about the planets’ atmospheres”.
Scientists have confirmed 104 planets outside our solar system – so-called exoplanets – discovered by the Kepler telescope.
These newly confirmed worlds will now be added to the approximately 3,300 planets we know of outside the solar system. But not everything was lost.
The list was drawn up from 197 candidates found by Kepler during its K2 mission. Over a four-year period, Kepler monitored 150,000 stars in the northern and southern hemispheres for any change in brightness that could come from a passing planet.
Advertisement
Such observations are important for the exploration of the universe, as they represent a bridge from K2 to NASA’s other upcoming exoplanet missions.
