Kepler

telescope

doubles

its

count
of

known
exoplanets
PLENTY OF PLANETS. The Kepler space telescope has added 1,284 planets to the
roughly 1,000 planets it has already discovered.
The galaxy is starting to feel a little crowded. Over 1,000 planets have just been
added to the roster of worlds known to orbit other stars in the Milky Way,
researchers announced May 10 at a news briefing. This is the largest number of
exoplanets announced at once.
Most of the 1,284 worlds are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. Many of
those are probably big balls of gas. But over 100 of the new discoveries are smaller
than 1.2 times the diameter of Earth. Those are almost certainly rocky in nature,
said Timothy Morton, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. Nine planets also lie
within the habitable zone, the distance from the star where liquid water could
conceivably collect on the surface of the planet. Morton and colleagues detail their
findings in the May 10 Astrophysical Journal.
This announcement roughly doubles the number of planets discovered by NASAs
planet-hunting workhorse, the Kepler space telescope, which has now found 2,325

exoplanets. Kepler spent nearly four years staring at about 150,000 stars in the
constellations Cygnus and Lyra, watching for subtle dips in starlight as planets
crossed in front of their suns. While Kepler has since moved on to other
investigations (SN: 6/28/14, p. 7), this latest haul comes from those first four years
of observing.
The planet bonanza comes courtesy of a new statistical calculation that allows
researchers to feel confident that a detection is a real world. Impostors such as
companion stars can mimic the signal from a planet. Traditionally, each planet
candidate must be followed up with intensive observations from ground-based
telescopes. But with over 4,000 candidates in the queue, confirming each one would
take a long time. The calculation takes into account the details of how a passing
planet should dim and brighten the starlight along with how common impostors
should be and provides a reliability score for each candidate. Planets in this study
are those whose score is greater than 99 percent.
Techniques such as these should help confirm planets detected by upcoming
missions such as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scheduled to launch in
late 2017. Some of those planets found by TESS will in turn come under the gaze of
the James Webb Space Telescope, which will launch in 2018 and investigate their
atmospheres (SN: 4/30/16, p. 32).
(source:https://www.sciencenews.org)

Mary Joy Villacora

BSA-I

INTRODUCTION
This article is related to solar system which is one of our topic. Pondering on the
existence of worlds other than our own has always piqued human interest. There
have been centuries of speculation on whether our planet, the Earth, and our
planetary system, the Solar System, were ones of many. As early as the 3 rd century
B.C., Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) said There are infinite worlds both like and unlike this
world of ours. For the atoms being infinite in number, as was already proven, there
nowhere exists an obstacle to the infinite number of worlds. But his point of view
was not commonly shared, as for instance by the philosopher Aristotle (384-322
B.C.) who claimed There cannot be more worlds than one. It was only in 1609 that
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) first observed with a telescope other planets in our Solar
System, confirming the idea of Copernicus (1473-1543) that the sun is orbited by
several planets, of which the earth is but one.
Our search for other worlds, need not to be limited to our Solar System.
Indeed, the search for exoplanets, planets around other stars than the Sun, has
already begun. However, unlike the planets in our Solar System which are close to
us and thus appear very bright, exoplanets are very difficult to observe directly. The
light of a planet is millions of times fainter than the light of its star. When seen from
tens to thousands of light years away, the planet appears very close to its star and
its faint light is diluted in the glare of its star.

Exoplanets are planets beyond our own solar system. Thousands have
been discovered in the past two decades, mostly with NASA's Kepler space
telescope. These worlds come in a huge variety of sizes and orbits. Some are
gigantic planets hugging close to their parent stars; others are icy, some rocky.
NASA and other agencies are looking for a special kind of planet: one thats the
same size as Earth, orbiting a sun-like star in the habitable zone .

REFLECTION

Upon reading the article I feel happiness because of the new discovery and it
made me curios about the worlds beyond our solar system. We're not yet on the
peak of discoveries upon the life around us yet were like in the bottom and still
starting to discover stuffs. I'm also amaze how people's curiosity managed and
discover a specimen and how they would differentiate planets to planets. Although
every discovery takes sacrifices and pain. I can see the hard works of the one who
discovered this through this educational article and which contributes a lot to us. In
everything we do it requires patience, perseverance, positive thoughts and prayers
to be able to continue to help one another, our society and the humanity. I admire
the team behind this work for their will to contribute this discovery even though
there are questions that bothered them and there are no answers yet.
After all I learned that "learning doesn't stop" and we should keep in touch with
the new discoveries and beyond. Life is full if undiscovered interesting facts but
then we enclosed ourselves on something we already know but then let's not limit
our learnings. Everything takes time.