Reanalyzing the data collected by the Kepler telescope after its "resurrection" has helped NASA scientists discover nearly a hundred new exoplanets, some of which are similar in size to Earth, according to an article in the Astronomical Journal.
“We have confirmed the existence of a planet in a 10-day orbit around HD 212657, the brightest star Kepler has ever observed. We are interested in such lifeless worlds because their properties can be studied using ground-based telescopes,”says Andrew Mayo of the Danish National Space Research Institute in Copenhagen.
After the launch of the Kepler orbiting telescope, scientists have discovered almost four thousand planets outside the solar system, several dozen of which are potential "doubles" of the Earth or are in the so-called "life zone". Their discovery prompted planetary scientists and astrobiologists to start developing methods that would assess their suitability for life or try to find traces of it in their atmosphere.
In May 2013, the telescope failed, but experts found a way to continue its work in the framework of the so-called K2 mission. Before the breakdown, "Kepler" was directed to one point in space and watched only a small corner of the sky, which is located at the junction of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.
After the "resurrection", the telescope monitors different parts of the sky, as NASA specialists have to constantly rotate it so that sunlight does not enter the telescope lens. In addition to new observations, Kepler's team continues to study the data collected during the first phase of the telescope's operation, using new techniques to analyze how the brightness of the stars changed during the four years that the telescope continuously observed them.
Mayo and his colleagues were able to immediately discover a hundred new exoplanets by analyzing the data that Kepler has collected since March 2014, when its work was officially resumed. To cleanse this data from noise and random flashes, the scientists say, they had to create new algorithms for processing information due to how the way the telescope operates in K2 has changed.
In total, according to Mayo, over the past four years, "Kepler" has managed to discover about three hundred candidates for the role of planets, some of which have already been confirmed during repeated observations of them. Not all of them were real exoworlds - only 149 candidates turned out to be real planets, and not double or triple stars or the results of malfunctions in the telescope matrices.
Almost a hundred planets from this list were not previously known to scientists, and among them, as NASA scientists note, there are several potential candidates for the role of "cousins" of the Earth and potentially habitable planets, as well as several worlds with extremely extreme, but interesting physical properties.
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Their study, planetary scientists hope, will bring us closer to the discovery of a full-fledged twin of the Earth and a fuller understanding of where extraterrestrial life may be hiding.