NASA Announces Discovery of 715 New Planets
Posted on February 26, 2014
NASA has announced the discovery of 715 new planets. The planets were discovered using the Kepler space telescope. The chart below shows the number of exoplanet discoveries per year. Today's announcement makes the number of exoplanets discovered in 2014 the largest by far even though we are only in late February.
Reuters reports that the discoveries were made using Kepler before it was sidelined by its pointing system problem. Reuters says the number of planets confirmed by Kepler has grown to 961 and the number of known exoplanets using all telescopes is now nearly 1,700.
Almost 95% of the newly discovered planets are smaller than Neptune, which is four times bigger than Earth. Four of these new planets are less than 2.5 times the size of Earth and orbit in their sun's habitable zone. One of these new habitable-zone planets, called Kepler-296f, orbits a star half the size and 5% as bright as our sun. Astronomers do not yet know whether this planet is a gaseous world or a water world.
Jason Rowe, research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., and co-leader of the research, says in a statement, "From this study we learn planets in these multi-systems are small and their orbits are flat and circular -- resembling pancakes -- not your classical view of an atom. The more we explore the more we find familiar traces of ourselves amongst the stars that remind us of home."
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