News in Brief Astronomy,Exoplanets Kepler tally grows: 104 more exoplanets confirmed
Space telescope’s second-life K2 mission finds grab bag of new worlds
By Christopher Crockett 1:00pm, July 19, 2016 
QUITE A CACHE Four tiny rocky worlds snuggled up to a cool star (illustrated) are a small sample from the Kepler telescope’s latest haul of exoplanets.
JPL-Caltech/NASA
EMail
Print
Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Google+
Sponsor Message
Despite being partially crippled by a series of malfunctions, the Kepler space telescope is still going strong. NASA’s premier planet hunter has found at least 104 worlds orbiting other stars during the first year since its resurrection.
Most of the confirmed planets are less than three times as wide as Earth, Ian Crossfield, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and colleagues report online July 18 at arXiv.org. Roughly a dozen are about the same size as Earth or smaller. Several worlds live in multiplanet systems such as K2-72, where four small, possibly rocky, planets are crammed into puny orbits — the longest only 24 days. And a few worlds, despite orbiting stars that are much cooler than our sun, receive about as much solar energy as Earth, which marks them as potentially habitable. The researchers combined observations from Kepler and ground-based telescopes with statistical calculations to verify each planet candidate.
From 2009 to 2013, Kepler stared at one patch of sky, during which time it cataloged over 2,300 exoplanets (SN: 6/11/16, p. 12). After failures in two components needed to keep the telescope steady, researchers designed a new mission, dubbed K2. Since 2014, the telescope has been scanning a band of sky aligned with Earth’s orbit, gazing at one spot for about 80 days before moving on to the next (SN: 6/28/14, p. 7).
Citations
I.M. Crossfield et al. 197 candidates and 104 validated planets in K2’s first five fields. arXiv.org. Published online July 18, 2016. arXiv: 1607.05263.
Further Reading
C. Crockett. Kepler telescope doubles its count of known exoplanets. Science News. Vol. 189, June 11, 2016, p. 12.
C. Crockett. Nearby exoplanet trio new target in search for life. Science News. Vol. 189, May 28, 2016, p. 6.
C. Crockett. New telescopes will search for signs of life on distant planets. Science News. Vol. 189, April 30, 2016, p. 32.
C. Crockett. Sun shines new life on Kepler space telescope. Science News. Vol. 185, June 28, 2014, p. 7.
- Printer-friendly version
- Send by email
Kepler tally grows: 104 more exoplanets confirmed
0 commentaires:
Enregistrer un commentaire