The Kepler space telescope is on a constant look for exoplanets.
NASA has announced that its Kepler space telescope has found 219 new planets, out of which 10 are near-earth size orbiting around their star’s habitable zone.
According to the press release of NASA, the 10 Earth-size planets are in a range from their stars where liquid water can form on their otherwise rocky surface.
The details of all 10 planets including the other 209 detected by the Kepler telescope has been mentioned in the catalog released by NASA on Monday.
The planets mentioned in the new catalog are all outside of our solar system and the data has been collected from Kepler’s first four years constant monitoring of exoplanets.
The catalog released on Monday is also the final from the spacecraft’s view of the patch of sky in the Cygnus constellation.
With the newly found 219 planets, the total number of planet candidates identified by Kelper had reached 4,034, the details of which are available in the public domain of NASA Exoplanet Archive.
Out of the 4,034 planets identified by Kepler, 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets and close to 50 near-Earth-size habitable zone candidates detected by Kepler, more than 30 have been verified.
The data accessed from Kepler has aided the scientists to conclude the existence of two distinct sizes of small planets, which have lasting implications on the search for life outside the solar system.
According to NASA, “The final Kepler catalog will serve as the foundation for more study to determine the prevalence and demographics of planets in the galaxy, while the discovery of the two distinct planetary populations shows that about half the planets we know of in the galaxy either have no surface, or lie beneath a deep, crushing atmosphere – an environment unlikely to host life.”
The findings were presented at a news conference Monday at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
“The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near Earth-analogs – planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth,” said Mario Perez, Kepler program scientist in the Astrophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Understanding their frequency in the galaxy will help inform the design of future NASA missions to directly image another Earth.”
The Kepler space telescope is on a constant look for planets by analyzing the drop in a star’s brightness that occurs when planet crosses in front of it, called a transit.
Susan Thompson, Kepler research scientist for the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and lead author of the catalog study said, “This carefully-measured catalog is the foundation for directly answering one of the astronomy’s most compelling questions – how many planets like our Earth are in the galaxy?”
“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 at Manoa, and lead author of the second study. “Finding two distinct groups of exoplanets is like discovering mammals and lizards make up distinct branches of a family tree.”