NASA: 1,284 New Planets Have Been Discovered, 9 Are In The Habitable Zone
NASA has made an amazing discovery---1,284 new planets. It is more than double the number of confirmed planets that the Kepler telescope has managed to identify.
"Today, we're announcing the discovery of 1,284 new planets in the Kepler mission," said Tim Morton, an associate research scholar at Princeton University's Department of Astrophysical Sciences, in a NASA press conference held this afternoon. "This is the most exoplanets that have ever been announced at one time."
Hence, now the total number of confirmed planets found by any telescope is currently more than 3,200. Any planet can be thought to be "confirmed or validated" if the mission scientists measure with at least 99 percent certainty that the identified object is really a planet, not fake.
A paper explaining the planets was published today in the Astrophysical Journal.
More than 550 of the planets are thought to be rocky due to their size. Only nine of these are located in the "Goldilocks Zone" around the parent stars. Hence, water may exist and the planets may be habitable.
Natalie Batalha, a Kepler mission scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, said that conservative numbers calculate that there are "tens of billions of potentially habitable, Earth-like planets out in the galaxy."
Exoplanets are found by detecting decreases in the brightness of stars, even as planets shift before them, beaming transit signals. If other stars in the area affect the measurements and cause imperfections in Kepler's imaging, it could take some time to confirm the results.
The detection of so many verified planets simultaneously was due to new software on the space observatory. Earlier, every planet had to be individually observed through telescopes on the ground, to verify that it was really a planet, and not some debris or fake reading.
While it is not completely clear what the earthlings will discover next, the resources harnessed to examine them are at their highest point right now.
