The US space agency NASA announced Tuesday that the mission space telescope Kepler could find the largest collection of planets ever. In total, 1284 new planets in other solar systems (exoplanets), which means double the planets had already been confirmed by this telescope. “This discovery gives us hope that, at some place around a star similar to our Sun, will end up discovering a planet like Earth,” says Ellen Stofan, NASA scientist, said in a statement the space agency.
NASA analyzed a catalog with 4302 candidate planets identified by the Kepler telescope. 1284 candidates likely to be a planet is greater than 99%, the minimum to be considered a planet. The “excluded” there in 1327 that failed to achieve this level of probability and which need further analysis. The remaining 707 will most likely be another kind of astrophysical phenomenon detected by Kepler. This analysis of NASA, the statement also confirmed and posted 984 candidates identified before by other instruments.
“Before the launch of the Kepler space telescope [in 2009], we did not know if the planets were common in [ our] galaxy. Thanks to Kepler and the scientific community, we now know that there may be more planets than stars, “said Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division of NASA. Second point, this knowledge can help future missions “to get closer to knowing whether we are alone in the universe.”
The first exoplanet was discovered in 1995 by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory (Switzerland), around the Pegasus-51 star, 50 light-years away from us. It was a giant composed of gas, half the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. And how much was on the star, gave him full circle in only 4.2 days. Prior to this announcement of NASA, the number of confirmed extrasolar planets already exceeded 2000 from gas giants to rocky small, that have firm surfaces such as Mercury, Venus and the Earth, and which are not gaseous like Jupiter and Saturn.
The statement from NASA explains that the Kepler telescope captures small regular changes brightness of the stars that occur when planets pass in front of him. A moment that can be compared to the solar transit of Mercury occurred this Monday, May 9. Since the discovery of the first extrasolar planets for over a decade that scientists are dedicated to a verification process each candidate bodies planets, underlines NASA.
This latest announcement, however it is based on a statistical method of analysis that can be simultaneously applied to multiple candidate planets. Timothy Morton, a researcher at Princeton University in New Jersey (USA), and lead author of the paper published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal , used a technique to assign a percentage of probability to each candidate planet identified by Kepler. It was the first time held an automated calculation – using a software called Vespa. – This range
“The candidate planets can be seen as bread crumbs,” said Timoty Morton, quoted in a statement from NASA. “If we drop a handful of crumbs on the floor, we can pick them up one by one. But if despejarmos a big bag of tiny crumbs, we will need a broom. This statistical analysis is a broom. “
In the newly validated collection of planets, almost 550 may be rocky like Earth, based on its size. Nine of these will be situated in an area zone of its orbit sun, ie at a distance from its star which can guarantee temperatures that allow the presence of liquid water. There are now a total of 21 exoplanets that are part of this exclusive group.
“It is often said that you should not count your chickens before they hatch the eggs, but this is exactly what these results do allow based on the probabilities of each egg (candidate) turn out to be a chick, “said Natalie Batalha, co-author of the paper and a scientist at NASA’s Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
2018, NASA will launch the next big mission headed in search of extrasolar planets: the space telescope Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which will monitor 200 000 nearby stars and look for planets the size of Earth and larger
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