NASA Kepler Telescope News Today: 100 New Planets And A New World Discovered!
NASA Kepler Telescope News: NASA has declared that Kepler Mission has discovered more than 100 planets orbiting near our solar system.
The University of Arizona confirms this new discovery during the 27th American Astronomical Society Conference in Kissimmee, Florida (Jan.4 -Jan.8). In their report they announced that these newly found planets belong to multi-planet systems that are orbiting stars, which are hotter and brighter than other stars in the Kepler Field.
The recent NASA Kepler News is that the Telescope also sighted planets bigger than the earth and found some in an open star cluster near our planet known as 'Hyades Cluster'. Apart from finding these new planets, they have reported to have witnessed a planet that was being torn apart.
According to Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithisonian Center for Astrophysics, though they are still waiting for the official confirmation, the Kepler Mission has totally discovered 234 new planets.
And Tom Barclay of NASA has mentioned that Kepler is probing various kinds of planets and that its initial goal was to look for other interesting systems aside from the Milky Way Galaxy. He said "We are focusing on stars that are much brighter, stars that are nearer by, stars that are easier to understand and observe from the Earth. The idea here is to find the best systems, the most interesting systems", Cited ScienceTimes.
Bill Borucki (Former NASA principal investigator) expects this mission to unfold more exoplanets. Crossfield, on the other hand is excited about the number of new planets and extrasolar systems the telescope will discover in the years to come. "We're only a quarter or so of the way done, we hope," he said.
The Kepler spacecraft finds new planets by its 'transit method', noting the tiny brightness dips caused when a planet crosses its host star's face from its perspective. This technique requires very precise pointing, the ability it has lost since May 2013.
Ian Crossfield, an Astronomer at the University of Arizona said "This is a validation of the whole K2 programme's ability to find large numbers of true, bona fide planets", Cited TheHansIndia. He said that Kepler observed more than 60,000 stars and found 7,000 transit-like signals during the first five 80-day observation campaigns.
In its Mission from 2009 to 2013, the Kepler Mission has discovered as many as 1000 new planets. But due to some technicalities, its hunt for more new planets came to an end in 2014.
NASA Kepler Telescope News has also revealed that Data has been collected to reveal that the Solar system is 4.6 billion years old already and that an earth-sized new planet that has a potentially habitable zone to sustain life!
