[ad_1]
Astronomers have discovered 1,284 more planets beyond our solar system, with nine possibly in orbits suitable for surface water that could bolster the supportive prospects for life, scientists said Tuesday.
The announcement brings the total number of confirmed planets outside the solar system to 3,264. Called exoplanets, most have been detected by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, which searched for habitable planets such as Earth.
The new planets were identified during Kepler’s four-year primary mission, which ended in 2013, and had previously been considered candidate planets.
Scientists who announced the largest single planet find to date used a new analysis technique that applied statistical models to confirm the lot as planets, ruling out scenarios that might falsely look like orbiting planets.
“We now know that there may be more planets than stars,” Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said in a news release. “This knowledge informs future missions that are needed to bring us ever closer to finding out if we are alone in the universe.”
Of the new planets, nearly 550 could be as rocky as Earth, NASA said. Nine planets are the right distance from a star to withstand temperatures at which water could build up. The discovery brings to 21 the total number of planets known with such conditions, which could allow life.
Kepler looked for small changes in the amount of light from around 150,000 target stars. Some of the changes were caused by orbiting planets crossing or transiting the face of their host stars, relative to Kepler’s line of sight.
The phenomenon is identical to the transit of Mercury through the Sun on Monday, seen from the perspective of the Earth.
The analysis technique, developed by Princeton University astronomer Tim Morton and colleagues, analyzed which changes in the amount of light are due to the transit of planets and which are due to stars or other objects.
The team verified, with an accuracy of more than 99 percent, that 1,284 candidates were indeed orbiting planets, Morton said.
The findings suggest that more than 10 billion potentially habitable planets could exist across the galaxy, said Natalie Batalha, Kepler’s chief scientist, with NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The closest potentially habitable planet is about 11 light years from Earth.
“Astronomically speaking, he’s a very close neighbor,” he said.
Source link
