Proving that the planet-hunting probe’s best days are not behind it, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft detected a stunning 234 new exoplanet candidates in 2014, astronomers announced today at the 227th meeting of American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Florida.
According to Gizmodo, the new planetary candidates were discovered by a team led by Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, and are spread throughout 208 different star systems. They have yet to be officially confirmed, but Vanderburg is confident they will be.
Furthermore, the website notes that each of the planets is located just tens of light years from the Earth, meaning that the odds are good that our little corner of the universe will out to be home to several previously undiscovered, multi-planet systems. All 234 of the planets were found during the first 12 months of Kepler’s K2 star-scanning mission, the researchers noted.
Kepler, which launched in 2009, has found a reported 4,600 candidate worlds and 1,918 verified new planets, including a handful that are close to the same size and are located roughly the same distance from their home stars, suggesting that they may be habitable.
More than 100 validated planets discovered
Prior to Tuesday’s announcement, the K2 mission had only discovered just over 100 planetary candidates and 32 confirmed new worlds. Now, Vanderburg and his colleagues have confirmed that it has more than doubled the number of potential planets detected to date.
At the conference, the Harvard astrophysicist said that the new planets were essentially as large and roughly the same in terms of orbital distance as those discovered during the first phase of the Kepler mission. He also hinted that there is “more to come” from the space telescope.
In July, NASA confirmed that a planet discovered by Kepler was the first planet that was about the same size of the Earth, and was located in the “habitable zone” of a sun-like star—meaning it orbited its host star at the right distance for liquid water to pool on its surface.
“We’ve been able to fully automate our process of identifying planet candidates,” Jeff Coughlin, Kepler scientist at the SETI Institute in California, said at the time, “which means we can finally assess every transit signal in the entire Kepler dataset quickly and uniformly.”
In all, a total of five K2 campaigns have discovered more than 100 validated planets, University of Arizona astronomer Ian Crossfield said Tuesday during a presentation at the AAS conference, according to NBC News. He called that “a a validation of the whole K2 program’s ability to find large numbers of true, bona fide planets.”
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Feature Image: An artist interpretation of a planet encircling Gliese 667Cb. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
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