Thursday, 27. February 2014

Hundreds of New Exoplanets Validated by Kepler Telescope Team


A huge new haul of planets has joined the tally of alien worlds discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope, scientists announced today. All of the new planets are members of multiplanet systems—stars with more than one orbiting satellite. Researchers used a new method for weeding out false signals from among the candidate planets found by Kepler, allowing them to add hundreds of "validated" planets to the count of Kepler's finds. "We studied just over 1,200 systems, and from there we were able to validate 719 planets," says Jason Rowe of NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who led the research. "This is the biggest haul ever."

scientificamerican.com

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