Confirmed exoplanets are still pouring in from Kepler data, even after the 2013 malfunction that led to the rebooted mission, K2. The spacecraft has now added over a hundred more confirmed exoplanets to its impressive exoplanet hunting resume.
When it comes to spotting alien worlds, NASA's Kepler spacecraft takes the proverbial cake. Data from the craft is responsible for the discovery of more than 2,000 confirmed exoplanets.
And it doesn't seem to be slowing down in its second mission, dubbed K2. The K2 research team has just validated 104 more exoplanets, some of which show tantalizing signs of habitability.
This continued success suggests the 2013 malfunction that temporarily took Kepler out of commission was just a hiccup. Now scientists predict that 500 to 1,000 new exoplanets will be discovered over the course of K2's planned four-year mission, according to a paper published Monday in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series announcing the newly confirmed exoplanets.
The Kepler and K2 research team carefully cross-examined 197 planet candidates spotted during the first year of the reboot mission. Among those candidates, they identified 30 false positives and 63 candidates that still need more research to determine their status.
Some of the newly validated exoplanets could be rocky planets, like our own. There are four potentially Earth-like exoplanets, all between 20 and 50 percent larger than Earth, that the scientists find particularly intriguing.
These four exoplanets all orbit the same star, which is dimmer and less than half the size of our Sun. With orbital periods of 5.5 days to 24 days, these exoplanets orbit more tightly around their star than even Mercury around the Sun (at 88 days). But two of these alien worlds could be experiencing similar radiation levels from their dimmer star as the Earth does from the sun, according to the scientists' analysis.
Despite the differences in this system to our own solar system, there could still be conditions conducive to life on these exoplanets, said Ian Crossfield, lead author of the paper and a NASA Sagan Fellow at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
"Because these smaller stars are so common in the Milky Way, it could be that life occurs much more frequently on planets orbiting cool, red stars rather than planets around stars like our sun," Dr. Crossfield said in a W. M. Keck Observatory press release.
K2 may be better suited to investigate that type of stellar system than the original Kepler mission.
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