American Space Station NASA has announced on Tuesday the discovery of 1,284 new planets outside the solar system. This is found with the help of the Kepler Space Telescope. Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA headquarters said: “This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth.”
Kepler Space Observatory is an unmanned Telescope launched in 2009. It has scanned over 150,000 stars for signs of orbiting bodies, particularly that might be able to support life. It works by observing a dimming in the light of a star each time an orbiting planet passes in front of it which is known as a transit.
“Of the nearly 5,000 total planet candidates found to date, more than 3,200 now have been verified, and 2,325 of these were discovered by Kepler,” NASA said in a statement. NASA has estimated that out of 1,284, nearly 550 could be rocky planets like Earth, based on their size. “Nine of these orbits in their sun’s habitable zone have surface temperatures that allow liquid water to pool.”
Kepler is a “statistical mission”, and is not designed to probe further into the environmental conditions of planets that exist in the so-called “Goldilocks zone” of their stars. “If you ask yourself the question, where is the nearest potentially habitable planet likely to be, you find that it is going to be within about 11 light-years,” said Natalie Batalha, Kepler mission scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
Astronomically speaking, she explained that one light-year equals about six trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers), and no spacecraft or technology exists to travel that far. But Kepler has opened a deal about the galaxy that surrounds us. Last month, Kepler has survived an emergency when some kind of “transient event triggered a barrage of false alarms that eventually overwhelmed the system,” NASA said.
The latest failure, which NASA described as leaving the spacecraft in a “fuel-intensive coma,” was discovered on April 8. Engineers on Earth were able to rescue Kepler and restored its ability to collect data on April 22. Such situations come where the scientists think of alternative ways and go on.