Politics & Government

Kepler Scientists Find 26 More Planets

Researchers at NASA Ames help in discovery of distant planets and stars.

It's a big, big universe we live in.

NASA Ames Kepler scientists announced Wednesday that they've discovered 11 new planetary systems with 26 confirmed planets. This doubles their previous figure of planets and triples the numbers of stars known to have more than one planet. Such systems will help astronomers better understand how planets form, according to NASA.

The Kepler mission has found planets that orbit close to their host stars and range in size from 1.5 times the radius of Earth to larger than Jupiter; 15 range in size between Earth and Neptune. The geological makeup of these planets must still be investigated.

But unlike the Earth, which orbits its star the sun for 365 days, the orbit of these planets vary from six to 143 days. Their orbit is closer to their host star than Venus is to our sun, which would make it too hot for life to exist.

"Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky," said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits."

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Five of the systems–Kepler-25, Kepler-27, Kepler-30, Kepler-31 and Kepler-33–contain a pair of planets where the inner planet orbits the star twice during each orbit of the outer planet. Four of the systems–Kepler-23, Kepler-24, Kepler-28 and Kepler-32–contain a pairing where the outer planet circles the star twice for every three times the inner planet orbits its star.

Kepler-33, an older and more massive star than our sun, had the most planets. The system hosts five planets, which range in size from 1.5 to 5 times that of Earth and that are closer to their star than any planet is to our sun.

"The approach used to verify the Kepler-33 planets shows the overall reliability is quite high," said Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of the paper on Kepler-33. "This is a validation by multiplicity."

Ames manages Kepler's ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., managed the Kepler mission's development.

Earlier this month, Kepler discovered three other planets called KOI-96–much smaller than the Earth–but just as rocky. However, these orbit to close to their star creating conditions too hot to be habitable zone.

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Kepler discovers planets and planet candidates by measuring dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars to search for planets that cross in front, or "transit," the stars. Kepler requires at least three transits to verify a signal as a planet.

The properties of a star provide clues for planet detection. The decrease in the star's brightness and duration of a planet transit, combined with the properties of its host star, present a recognizable signature. When astronomers detect planet candidates that exhibit similar signatures around the same star, the likelihood of any of these planet candidates being a false positive is very low.


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