NASA Confirms 100 New Alien Planets

ILLUSTRATION NASA/JPL-CALTECH/T. PYLE

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered 100 new exoplanets during its second-chance K2 mission.

After being crippled by a mechanical malfunction, NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft is back in action and has found a slew of planets orbiting other stars. Since the past two years, the quest had been put on hold.

Now that things are back to normal, a hundred new exoplanets have been detected. The $600 million Kepler mission set off on its journey six years ago. The main task was the discovery of earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy. 

“It’s probing different types of planets [than the original Kepler mission],” says Tom Barclay of NASA’s Ames Research Center. 

“We’re focusing on stars that are much brighter, stars that are nearer by, stars that are more easy to understand and observe from the Earth. The idea here is to find the best systems, the most interesting systems.”

“This is the best view, the longest view of Neptune we’ve ever had—this thing we’ve known about for hundreds of years,” Barclay says. 

“The area I get most excited about is the study of bodies in our own solar system. It’s just so new for us, it’s something we’ve never done before with the spacecraft,” Barclay says.

“Suddenly we can look at things we can see from our backyard.”

Over 1000 alien worlds have been found up until now and now with an addition of 100, the numbers are going up. Scientists announced the discovery of 100 new alien planets by Kepler during its second-chance K2 mission at the 227th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).

The search technology used is the transit method. This consists of the small lit-up dips caused when a planet passes in front of its star. Kepler captures this from its own perspective.

The whole procedure requires a lot of care and precision. It lost this capability in 2013, but the Kepler observatory team managed to fix the problem and then it was smooth sailing. The K2 mission of the spacecraft is well into its prime. 

The first five K2 mission searched different parts of the sky. As a result, these missions "have produced over 100 validated planets," Ian Crossfield, an astronomer at University of Arizona, announced at the AAS meeting (via Space.com). "This is a validation of the whole K2 program's ability to find large numbers of true, bona fide planets."

Over 60,000 stars were observed too. Hundreds of new exoplanets will probably be found in the future as well. Kepler is a venture of NASA and it is a sophisticated piece of equipment. It will go a long way in providing access to other worlds in space. 

Get more information about Kepler Discoveries here.