Researchers just announced latest batch of worlds that Kepler has detected, numbering a whopping 95, and pushing the space telescope’s total tally to over 2,400 new planets.
The Kepler telescope is currently in an extended mission phase after already completing its primary mission and discovering thousands of new worlds. This new effort, called “K2,” has already resulted in the discovery of nearly 300 new planets, proving that the telescope still has plenty of power to comb the heavens for undetected exoplanets.
In order to spot these new worlds, scientists began sifting through an immense amount of data that Kepler has sent back. Dating back to 2014, the wealth of observations produced a total of 275 “candidate” signals which may or may not have been planets. After sifting through the numbers one-by-one, 149 of the signals were shown to be exoplanets, and 95 of those are entirely new to science.
“Exoplanets are a very exciting field of space science,” Andrew Mayo of the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark said in a press release. “As more planets are discovered, astronomers will develop a much better picture of the nature of exoplanets which in turn will allow us to place our own solar system into a galactic context.” – READ MORE
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