More Than 1,000 Potential New Planets Found (NatGeo)
Ker Than
for National Geographic News
Published March 2, 2012
More than a thousand potential new planets have been found outside our solar system—nearly doubling the number of candidates discovered so far by NASA's Kepler space telescope, according to a new study.
The fresh batch of Kepler Objects of Interest, or KOIs, emerged from an analysis of mission data gathered between May 2009 and September 2010.
The data revealed 1,091 possible new planets, bringing the total count to 2,321—up from 1,235 candidates formally announced last February.
(Also see "'Solar Systems' Common Across the Galaxy, NASA Probe Hints."
What's more, "we have a statistical reason to think at this point that something like 90 percent of them are probably real planets," said study co-author Ronald Gilliland, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the Kepler team.
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more: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120302-new-planets-found-nasa-kepler-earth-like-space-science/
paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5852v1
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It seems like Kepler's mission is going very well but it's taking longer to confirm the planets than originally projected. The amount of data it's generating must be huge.
Thanks for the post.
R&
