Of the nearly 5,000 total planet candidates found to date, more than 3,200 now have been verified, and 2,325 of these were discovered by Kepler.ĭon’t miss out on ET Prime stories! Get your daily dose of business updates on WhatsApp. "This work will help Kepler reach its full potential by yielding a deeper understanding of the number of stars that harbour potentially habitable, Earth-size planets - a number that's needed to design future missions to search for habitable environments and living worlds," said Natalie Batalha, Kepler mission scientist at NASA. With the addition of these nine, 21 exoplanets now are known to be members of this exclusive group. 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. In the newly-validated batch of planets, nearly 550 could be rocky planets like Earth, based on their size. The latest findings are based on a new method that can be applied to many planet candidates simultaneously. Since the discovery of the first planets outside our solar system more than two decades ago, researchers have resorted to a one-by-one process of verifying suspected planets. Kepler captures the discrete signals of distant planets - decreases in brightness that occur when planets pass in front of, or transit, their stars. "This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever-closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe," he said. "Thanks to Kepler and the research community, we now know there could be more planets than stars," said Hertz. "Before the Kepler space telescope launched, we did not know whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy," said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA. NASAs exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope has discovered more than 1,000 alien planets, including the eight small, potentially habitable worlds here. This analysis also validated 984 candidates previously verified by other techniques. The remaining 707 are more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena.
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