NASA’s Kepler telescope finds 1,284 new planets

Washington

Nine of the newly found planets may be potentially habitable, NASA said. “This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth,” said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler,” said Stofan.

Analysis was performed on the Kepler space telescopes July 2015 planet candidate catalogue, which identified 4,302 potential planets. For 1,284 of the candidates, the probability of being a planet is greater than 99 per cent — the minimum required to earn the status of “planet”. An additional 1,327 candidates are more likely than not to be actual planets, but they do not meet the 99 per cent threshold and will require additional study. The remaining 707 are more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also validated 984 candidates previously verified by other techniques.

“Before the Kepler space telescope launched, we did not know whether exoplanets (a planet that orbits a star other than the Sun) were rare or common in the galaxy,” said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA. “Thanks to Kepler and the research community, we now know there could be more planets than stars,” he said.

Kepler captures the discrete signals of distant planets — decreases in brightness that occur when planets pass in front of, or transit, their stars.

In the newly-validated batch of planets, nearly 550 could be rocky planets like Earth. Nine of these orbit in their sun’s habitable zone, which is the distance from a star where orbiting planets can have surface temperatures that allow liquid water to pool. With the addition of these nine, 21 exoplanets now are known to be members of this exclusive group.