NASA on Monday announced the Kepler space telescope team has released a catalog with 219 new planet candidates, including 10 which is a near-Earth size and in their stars’ habitable “Goldilocks” zone. There have been almost 50 planets that have been detected as the near-earth zone habitable zone candidates and 30 of them have been verified.
Ten of the new discoveries were orbiting their suns at a distance similar to Earth’s orbit around the sun, the so-called habitable zone, meaning surface temperatures could support liquid water and, hypothetically, life.
The presence of liquid water on these “rocky” Earth-like planets is seen as a key ingredient required for the existence of life.
NASA officials hailed the new findings as a milestone in understanding the formation of planets, with possible implications for the search for extraterrestrial life. Kepler’s main mission ended in 2013 after the failure of two of its four wheels that control its orientation in space.
The Kepler mission only looked at one particular part of the sky, so while it only identified a select number of planets and stars even though there are billions more out there.
The Kepler Space Telescope is still in space, with limited motion working on the K2 mission.
According to IANS, the telescope has been able to detect around 4,035 planet candidates till now, of which 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets.
Before Kepler was launched, astronomers had hoped that the frequency of Earth-like planets would be about one per cent of the stars.
Kepler’s data also provided a new way to assess whether a planet has a solid surface, like Earth, or is made mostly of gas, like Neptune. Dubbed a “transit”, the minuscule drop in brightness takes place when a planet crosses in front of its host star.
“We like to think of this study as classifying planets in the same way that biologists identify new species of animals“, said Benjamin Fulton, a doctoral candidate at the University of Hawaii in Manoa and lead author of the second study.
This illustration depicts a sample of the many planets discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
Kepler has spotted more than 4,000 planet candidates and confirmed more than half of those.
So far, these planets, which scientists refer to as “super-Earths” and “mini-Neptunes”, have not been found in Earth’s solar system, though scientists are on the hunt for a potential ninth planet far beyond Pluto.
Ten of the new discoveries were orbiting their suns at a distance similar to Earth’s orbit around the sun, the so-called habitable zone, meaning surface temperatures could support liquid water and, hypothetically, life.
The presence of liquid water on these “rocky” Earth-like planets is seen as a key ingredient required for the existence of life.
NASA officials hailed the new findings as a milestone in understanding the formation of planets, with possible implications for the search for extraterrestrial life. Kepler’s main mission ended in 2013 after the failure of two of its four wheels that control its orientation in space.
The Kepler mission only looked at one particular part of the sky, so while it only identified a select number of planets and stars even though there are billions more out there.
The Kepler Space Telescope is still in space, with limited motion working on the K2 mission.
According to IANS, the telescope has been able to detect around 4,035 planet candidates till now, of which 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets.
Before Kepler was launched, astronomers had hoped that the frequency of Earth-like planets would be about one per cent of the stars.
Kepler’s data also provided a new way to assess whether a planet has a solid surface, like Earth, or is made mostly of gas, like Neptune. Dubbed a “transit”, the minuscule drop in brightness takes place when a planet crosses in front of its host star.
“We like to think of this study as classifying planets in the same way that biologists identify new species of animals“, said Benjamin Fulton, a doctoral candidate at the University of Hawaii in Manoa and lead author of the second study.
This illustration depicts a sample of the many planets discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
Kepler has spotted more than 4,000 planet candidates and confirmed more than half of those.
So far, these planets, which scientists refer to as “super-Earths” and “mini-Neptunes”, have not been found in Earth’s solar system, though scientists are on the hunt for a potential ninth planet far beyond Pluto.