Kepler announces 1,284 new planets, nine could support life

Newly released data from the Kepler mission identifies 1,284 new planets, the largest group ever announced at once.

Of these planets, 550 are rocky like the Earth. Nine of these rocky planets orbit within their host star’s habitable zone, meaning that liquid water could pool on their surfaces and support life. This brings the total number of known exoplanets within their star’s habitable zone up to 21.

The Kepler team reached these findings by combing through data from the July 2015 potential planet catalogue with 4,302 possible candidates. Scientists must be 99% certain of a planet’s status for the Kepler mission to classify them as a planet– and 1,284 reached this milestone.

Some of the remaining 3,018 celestial bodies could still be planets, but scientists need to conduct more research to be completely certain.

“Before the Kepler space telescope launched, we did not know whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy. Thanks to Kepler and the research community, we now know there could be more planets than stars,” said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters.

“This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever-closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe.”

Developing a “data broom” for Kepler exoplanet analysis

This massive discovery relied on a new statistical analysis technique that can analyze many planet candidates at the same time. Timothy Morton, associate research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey and lead author for the paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, applied this technique to the Kepler data set.

“Planet candidates can be thought of like bread crumbs,” said Morton. “If you drop a few large crumbs on the floor, you can pick them up one by one. But, if you spill a whole bag of tiny crumbs, you’re going to need a broom. This statistical analysis is our broom.”

The analytical technique assigned each potential planet a percentage score– the first technique to automatically analyze an entire set of planetary data instead of focusing on subgroups within the data set. NASA hopes that this technique can be applied to future data sets provided by Kepler

“This work will help Kepler reach its full potential by yielding a deeper understanding of the number of stars that harbor potentially habitable, Earth-size planets — a number that’s needed to design future missions to search for habitable environments and living worlds,” said Natalie Batalha, co-author of the paper and the Kepler mission scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

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Image credit: NASA

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