NASA's Kepler Mission Announces Largest Collection of Planets Ever Discovered

NASA's Kepler mission has verified 1,284 new planets – the single largest finding of planets to date.

“This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler,” said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth.”

Analysis was performed on the Kepler space telescope’s July 2015 planet candidate catalog, which identified 4,302 potential planets. For 1,284 of the candidates, the probability of being a planet is greater than 99 percent – the minimum required to earn the status of “planet.” An additional 1,327 candidates are more likely than not to be actual planets, but they do not meet the 99 percent threshold and will require additional study. The remaining 707 are more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also validated 984 candidates previously verified by other techniques.

This is fantastic news for us as some of these new worlds are candidates for monitoring with the new GUPPI GBT receiver... looking forward to many happy years of searching (maybe a discovery would be nice too!)

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So many planets and no way to get there.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

So many planets and no way to get there.

...yet.

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I hope that this one (Kepler-62f) is being looked at...

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Where would they get the oxygen to make Carbon Di-oxide ?

Planet most certainly is not Earth-like and if it has water it would most likely be frozen.

Another hundred-plus exoplanets announced to add to these 1,284.

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A more universally readable entry from wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-62f


(Mr.Kevvy' link is to a page that does not accept users who are using add blockers)

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

(Mr.Kevvy' link is to a page that does not accept users who are using add blockers)

FWIW I'm using AdBlock Plus (FF) on both the Linux machine I posted it on and the Windows machine I'm on now, and both load it fine. There's a blurb line at the top about it but that is all.

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...action has changed in the last few minutes, no more big red banner that blocked the whole page :-)

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?