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27th February 2014

NASA confirms 715 new exoplanets

NASA has announced the discovery of 715 exoplanets by its Kepler mission, increasing the total number of confirmed planets outside our Solar System to nearly 1,700.

 

exoplanets

 

The newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-planet systems much like our own Solar System. Nearly 95% of these planets are smaller than Neptune, which is almost four times the size of Earth. This discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small-sized planets more akin to Earth than previously identified exoplanets.

"The Kepler team continues to amaze and excite us with their planet hunting results," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The fact that these new planets and solar systems look somewhat like our own, portends a great future when we have the James Webb Space Telescope in space to characterise the new worlds."

Since the discovery of the first planets outside our solar system in the mid-late 1990s, verification has been a laborious planet-by-planet process. Now, scientists have a statistical technique that can be applied to many planets at once when they are found in systems that harbour more than one planet around the same star.

"Four years ago, Kepler began a string of announcements of first hundreds, then thousands, of planet candidates – but they were only candidate worlds," said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Centre. "We've now developed a process to verify multiple planet candidates in bulk, to deliver planets wholesale, and have used it to unveil a veritable bonanza of new worlds."

 

exoplanet discoveries

 

Four of these new planets are less than 2.5 times the size of Earth and orbit in their sun's habitable zone, defined as the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature may be suitable for life-giving liquid water. One of these habitable zone planets, Kepler-296f, orbits a star roughly half the size and 5% the brightness of our sun. Kepler-296f is twice the size of Earth – but scientists do not yet know whether it is a gas world, with a thick hydrogen-helium envelope, or a water world surrounded by a deep ocean.

This latest find brings the confirmed count of planets outside our solar system to nearly 1,700. As we continue to reach toward the stars, each discovery brings us one step closer to a more accurate understanding of our place in the Galaxy. Launched in 2009, Kepler is the first NASA mission to find potentially habitable Earth-size planets. So far, it has discovered more than 3,600 planet candidates, of which 961 have been verified as bona-fide worlds. Details of the 750 planets announced this week are published in The Astrophysical Journal on 10th March.

 

exoplanet sizes

 

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