NASA discovers 1284 planets outside our solar system – La Prensa (Nicaragua)

NASA discovered 1,284 new planets outside our solar system thanks to the space telescope Kepler, a finding that doubles the number of exoplanets discovered and confirmed. “This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around similar to our sun, we will eventually discover another Earth, “said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist of NASA headquarters in Washington. Astronomers have a 99% certainty that these 1,284 bodies are planets and not another object class celeste.Kepler also confirmed 1,327 other candidates for the category of planets that require additional analysis. “Of the nearly 5,000 exoplanet candidates found to now, more than 3,200 have been confirmed, and 2,325 of them were discovered by Kepler, “said the US space agency said in a new 1,284 comunicado.Del finding planets, about 550 could be rocky planets like Earth, according to their dimensions, the agency added. “Nine of these orbit in the habitable zones, which is the distance around a star where rotating planets can have surface temperatures that can store liquid water.”

habitable zone

with these nine new exoplanets, are already 21, according to what is known today, are spinning in the habitable zone of their stars and can accommodate vida.Sin But Kepler is a “statistical mission,” said scientists NASA, and it is not intended to delve into the conditions of the planets that exist in habitables.Esto areas means that even the most advanced space telescopes built so far, including the James Webb may not be able to offer more light on the kind of life that could exist in any of these exoplanets. “Before the launch of Kepler did not know if exoplanets were scarce or abundant and now it seems there may be more planets than stars,” revealed Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division NASA. “This information will guide future missions to whether or not we are alone in the Universe”, agregó.El latest discovery of planets was confirmed by a new statistical method, instead of the observation process one by one method used above.This statistical analysis can be applied to many candidate planets at the same time, according to Timothy Morton, a research associate at Princeton University and lead author of a paper describing the findings in Astrophysical journal.

EMERGENCY

the space observatory unmanned Kepler, which was released in 2009, has scanned 150,000 stars for signs of orbiting bodies, particularly those that are in areas habitables.Kepler survived an emergency last month, when some ” transient event (…) unleashed a barrage of false alarms that saturated the system, “NASA said. The space telescope suffered another crisis in 2013, this time related to a problem with reaction wheels, a type of wheel used in space vehicles to change the time angular.La NASA repaired it and put it on a new mission called K2, to studying supernovas, star clusters and distant galaxies. The last failure, which NASA said the spacecraft left in a “state of intensive coma,” was discovered on April 8. Engineers from Earth could rescue and restore its ability to collect information on 22 April.