Kepler has Almost Doubled Number of Discovered Planets

This Thursday, NASA announced that Kepler had discovered 26 more exoplanets scattered across 11 systems. Up until this report, only 34 planets had been discovered. This is big, big space news that bodes very well for an Earth 2 being out there, probably close by.

Finding planets is incredibly hard, as I’ve mentioned before. Kepler has made it a bit easier, but it is still darn difficult. So Kepler discovering so many planets leads to one conclusion: they’re everywhere.

As little as a few decades ago, scientists debated whether there were even any other planets around other stars at all. Many felt that the conditions for planetary formation were so rare that it wasn’t likely to occur more than a couple times per galaxy. That also meant that the search for planets would be a costly waste of money. When the first planets were discovered, “hot Jupiters,” speculation switched to a dearth of rocky planets.

But while we haven’t found many, we have seen a few rocky planets, a couple the size of Earth. They are hard to see, thanks to their low masses and small size, but we have observed a few close to their stars.

The sheer quantity of planets Kepler has found means that there’s likely millions that could be considered nearby.

All the planets that have just been announced orbit closer to their star than Venus, thanks to distance increasing the difficulty of observation. Their masses range from 1.5 times the mass of Earth to even larger than Jupiter.

So far we have only seen planets in 16 star systems, most of them full of massive, Jupiter-sized planets orbiting close to their stars. But seeing as how scientists still feel that arrangement is rare, we are likely only seeing the less common planetary systems. Now that Kepler is refining the planet-hunting technique, we might start to see more planets further out.

So basically, this discovery gives me hope that we will find another Earth someday soon.

Gizmodo Photo by : NASA