![]() ![]() TESS, which has mapped over 93% of the sky so far, recently celebrated five years in space. Researchers also used NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which was launched in 2018 with a similar goal as Kepler's, to validate K2-417 b's identity. But the third, unconfirmed exoplanet may have a "faint-red companion" orbiting very close to the star that is currently difficult to resolve. They found no such possible complications for K2-416 b and K2-417 b, further confirming their planet status. "I have visually surveyed the complete K2 observations three times, and there are still discoveries waiting to be found."įor further confirmation, the team scoured image archives from the past 70 years to rule out the possibility of any background stars leading to false positives. And even we can't catch them all," co-author Tom Jacobs, a team member of the Visual Survey Group, said in the NASA statement. "People doing visual surveys - looking over the data by eye - can spot novel patterns in the light curves and find single objects that are hard for automated searches to detect. They found that the stars' light curves had dipped at the same depth and duration as they had during the first detected transit, confirming the candidates to be genuine exoplanets.įor both transit detections, a team of citizen astronomers visually inspected the light curves of all 33,000 stars rather than relying on automated techniques commonly used in the search for exoplanets, according to the study. To validate the presence of K2-416 b and K2-417 b, the team looked for the planets' second transit around their respective stars. In those final moments, the telescope's thrusters were firing erratically, leading to sharp jumps in the collected "light curves," researchers said. The 10 biggest exoplanet discoveries of 2021 2 'super-Earth' exoplanets spotted in habitable zone of nearby star Facts about NASA's Kepler space telescope, the original exoplanet hunter Related: RIP, Kepler: NASA's revolutionary planet-hunting telescope runs out of fuel "And we're really pushing up against the last few days, the last few minutes, of observations Kepler collected." "We tried to see what last information we could squeeze out of it," study co-author Andrew Vanderburg, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in a different statement. To verify what they were seeing were really planets and not false positives because of, say, two closely orbiting stars, the team also pored over lower-quality data that Kepler had collected just over a week before being decommissioned. The third candidate, which circles a sun-like star named EPIC 245978988, has not been confirmed yet. ![]() They're enveloped by hot, tenuous atmospheres and are likely uninhabitable, researchers say. Two of those planets orbit cool, red dwarf stars and are what astronomers call mini-Neptunes: K2-416 b, which is 2.6 times wider than Earth and orbits its star once every 13 Earth days and K2-417 b, which is three times wider than Earth and circles its star every 6.5 days.īoth worlds are smaller than Neptune. In that limited dataset, which included information about 33,000 additional stars, the team spotted one transit each for three exoplanets around three dim stars. Kepler fought on for four more years and gazed at different slices of the sky once every 80 days, on a new mission known as K2 during which it discovered hundreds more exoplanets.īy late August 2018, Kepler's observation power had deteriorated so much that the month-long K2 Campaign 19 - Kepler's final observation cycle - yielded only a week of high-quality data, the team wrote in the new study. But two of its four reaction wheels - devices crucial to point the observatory at its targets - failed in 2013, and it was no longer able to focus on stars precisely.Ī year later, scientists implemented a work-around solution that used the telescope's two good reaction wheels and its onboard thrusters to maintain a slightly unstable but workable balance. Kepler's first four years in space went smoothly. The spacecraft documented dips in starlight that hinted at orbiting planets - a technique known as the "transit method." The Kepler telescope launched in March 2009 to stare at 150,000 selected stars in the constellation Cygnus, on a primary mission expected to last 3.5 years.
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