NASA’s Kepler Mission Finds 100 New Alien Planets Orbiting Other Stars

“The idea here is to find the best systems, the most interesting systems”, said Tom Barclay from NASA’s Ames Research Center. This information was shared by Ian Crossfield of the University of Arizona at the American Astronomical Society’s 227th meeting that took place on January 4-8 at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center in Kissimmee, Florida. The reports suggest that during the first 5 days of the 80 day observation campaign, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope identified approximately about 60,000 stars along with around about 7000 transit-like signals. Each one of these campaigns was meant to look at a different sky area. A validation process whittled some of these signals down to planet candidates, and then finally to validated planets, each of which has just a one per cent chance of being a false positive, Crossfield added. Many new things were revealed to the public, and among them was that Kepler resumed its program, found over 100 exoplanets.

After being crippled by a mechanical malfunction, NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft is back in action and has found tons of planets orbiting other stars.

It has found a system with three planets that are bigger than Earth, spotted a planet in the Hyades star cluster-the nearest open star cluster to Earth-and discovered a planet being ripped apart as it orbits a white dwarf star.

Both Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b orbit stars smaller and cooler than our sun, making the habitable zone closer to their parent star, in the direction of the constellation Lyra.

The mission, dubbed K2, takes a look at multi-planet systems near stars that have much higher luminosity than other planets Kepler had previously observed.

The $US600 million Kepler mission launched in March 2009, tasked with determining how commonly Earth-like planets occur throughout the Milky Way galaxy. Over the course of four years, the spacecraft found more than 1,000 new planets, but in 2013 a malfunction caused it to lose its ability to observe at the exact same spot.

The observatory had four wheels that allowed it to maintain its orientation, a technique that required extremely accurate pointing.

This comes after Kepler was wildley written off in May 2013 when its steering failed.

But the Kepler team quickly figured out a way to keep the telescope stable, using solar radiation pressure as a sort of third wheel.

While the new mission, known as K2, has been very successful so far, it is expected to bring more discoveries to the table in the near future.

In 2014, it spent about 70 days observing Neptune.

The revamped Kepler mission is also looking at trying to spot planets wandering the galaxy without their own stars.