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NASA announced that its Kepler telescope has verified 1,284 exoplanets in our galaxy, more doubling the number of known planets orbiting other stars. An boosted i,327 candidates take meliorate-than-fifty-fifty odds of being actual planets, but they aren't well enough substantiated to be called "verified," and volition crave boosted study. What'southward more, Kepler reports 9 confirmed exoplanets of Earth-like size in their star's Goldilocks zone.

At the cadre of Kepler's power to say it has constitute planets lie its methods of prediction and verification. Kepler finds planets by watching for stellar dimming: When a planet passes between its star and an observer, the star gets a little dimmer for a little while. This works fine as long as you lot can discover planets that pass directly between their parent stars and our telescopes, simply it'due south failed in the by, because planets aren't the only things that can dim a star'southward light. Binary stars or smaller, dimmer stars called dark-brown dwarfs tin also make for a point of lite that fluctuates regularly in brightness. These impostors have led to some astronomical disappointments.

But NASA announced at the press conference that a new method of analysis, developed by Tim Morton, can weed out dud planets from the candidate list en masse, without needing example-by-case confirmation from ground-based telescopes. Morton'due south method accomplishes this by running Kepler's list of candidates through a statistical filter based on how common impostors are in our galaxy. And so the new method compares the star's brightness and dimming to an ideal model of a star and planet with an "edge-on" orbit. This adds up to unprecedented accuracy in predicting whether a given star is really beingness eclipsed past a planet.

In keeping with their theme of "orangish is the new bluish," NASA showed the new Kepler findings in orange in these images from the briefing, and older Kepler discoveries or observations from other telescopes are shown in shades of blue.

Kepler was conceived from the start as a mission for finding World-like planets elsewhere in the galaxy, and its original mission was a success, returning conclusive evidence for nigh a 1000 exoplanets within the Milky way milky way. Only no program survives contact with the enemy, and in this example, the enemy is the cold, hard vacuum of space. Kepler has been plagued by problems in its reaction wheels, leaving information technology with a mechanical Charley horse that prevents information technology from looking smoothly around in the sky. And apparently even NASA sometimes has to ask "Take you lot turned it off and back on again?" Just Kepler just won't quit. So the footing squad decided, collectively, to do it live. They're applying these new methods of analysis and confirmation to wring as much science as they tin out of the telescope earlier its fuel runs out, sometime about ii years hence.

When Kepler finally does run out of fuel, it'll pass the billy to TESS and the James Webb Infinite Telescope, which volition sentinel the skies in the visible and IR bands as we continue to seek new worlds elsewhere in infinite.