Kayleigh Falvey
Staff Writer
It seems that there is even more to space than meets the eye as NASA’s space observatory Kepler has discovered 715 new planets outside our solar system, NASA confirmed yesterday.
John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’S Science Mission Directorate, said, “The Kepler team continues to amaze and excite us with their planet hunting results.” Adding,” 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 characterize the new worlds.”
NASA revealed in a statement, “Nearly 95 percent 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 then previously identified exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.”
NASA also revealed how Kepler looks for new planets:
“This method can be likened to the behavior we know of lions and lionesses. In our imaginary savannah, the lions are the Kepler stars and the lionesses are the planets candidates. The lionesses would sometimes be observed grouped together whereas lions tend to roam on their own. If you see two lions it could be a lion and a lioness or it could be two lions. But if more than two large felines are gathered, then it is very likely to be a lion and his pride. Thus, through multiplicity the lioness can be reliably identified in much the same way multiple planet candidates can be found around the same star.”
Kepler launched back in March 2009, with the task of finding “potentially habitable Earth-size planets” and has found over 3,600 possible candidates with 961 of these been verified as “bona-fide worlds”.
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