Kepler telescope glimpses software#

The study, led by Iain McDonald of the University of Manchester, UK, (now based at the Open University, UK) used data obtained in 2016 during the K2 mission phase of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. The results include four new discoveries that are consistent with planets of similar masses to Earth, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 'The discovery of each new world provides a unique glimpse into the physics that play a role in planet formation.Tantalising evidence has been uncovered for a mysterious population of 'free-floating' planets, planets that may be alone in deep space, unbound to any host star. 'We need to look at a wide range of stars, not just ones like our sun, to understand that,' Zink said. This allowed the sizes and other characteristics of the exoplanets in the system to be measured. The five planets of Kepler 444, which are located 119 light-years from Earth, also move in resonance. This resembles the planetary system Kepler 444, an ancient system formed over 11 billion years ago and discovered in 2015 using the Kepler telescope. The team also found a planetary system in which the worlds move in harmony, known as a resonant multiplanet system. Zink said the team currently didn't know how this gas giant system could have formed, but the discovery of these worlds could be important in assisting scientists to understand the parameters for planet formation. It is rare to find planets this size orbiting so close to each other and to their parent star.

The discovery of two gas giants the size of Saturn in such close proximity is a special find. The ExoMiner program looked at previous exoplanet candidates in historical data and identified which ones were actually planets outside the solar system. The method used by the team, described in a paper published in The Astronomical Journal, is reminiscent of the discovery of 301 exoplanets previously reported by Newsweek made using another algorithm, ExoMiner. All the exoplanets are within the Milky Way, our galaxy, meaning that the number of planets discovered in other galaxies remains just one. This list will be integrated into NASA's wider exoplanet catalog, which currently contains 4,575 worlds.

Among the exoplanets discovered by the team, there are 57 planetary systems containing multiple worlds. This prompted the use of UCLA's Hoffman2 Cluster to process the data, which resulted in the compilation of a list of 366 new exoplanets and 381 other planets that had been previously identified.

Kepler telescope glimpses software#

Zink's algorithm searched through the entire dataset collected by the K2 mission: more than 800 million images of stars, adding up to over 500 terabytes of data.Īlthough data from K2 has previously been used to understand how the locations of stars in galaxies influence what kind of planets can form around them, Kepler's software was not sophisticated enough to determine these planets' size or their location relative to their star. Weird Exoplanets Made of Rocks Unlike Anything Found in the Solar System.Astronomers Find Scorching Hot Exoplanet Where a Year Lasts 16 Hours.

Astronomers Are Hunting Habitable Worlds in the Alpha Centauri Star System.'I have no doubt they will sharpen our understanding of the physical processes by which planets form and evolve.' 'The catalog and planet detection algorithm that Jon and the Scaling K2 team devised is a major breakthrough in understanding the population of planets,' Petigura said. Zink and Petigura, along with an international team of astronomers called the Scaling K2 project, then used the data to identify the exoplanets.

This is something that astronomers must usually do with follow-up investigations and can be incredibly time-consuming. Zink's algorithm analyzes dips in light output from stars that could be caused by orbiting planets, eliminating the ones that are not caused by planetary signatures. The finding was made possible thanks to a planet detection algorithm designed by a UCLA postdoctoral scholar, Jon Zink, which searched through data collected by the NASA Kepler Space Telescope's K2 mission. 'Discovering hundreds of new exoplanets is a significant accomplishment by itself, but what sets this work apart is how it will illuminate features of the exoplanet population as a whole,' said Erik Petigura, an astronomy professor at the University of California Los Angeles. The find could enable researchers to understand better the evolution of planetary systems as well as showing them how unique, or not, our solar system is in the wider Milky Way. These extra-solar planets, or exoplanets, add to the catalog of more than 4,500 worlds discovered that orbit stars other than our sun. Astronomers have discovered 366 new worlds outside the solar system, including a star orbited by two gas giants that are in extremely close proximity to each other.