NASA Discovers 100 New Alien Planets

A few years ago NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft was crippled by a mechanical malfunction which really threw a wrench in the works but that wasn’t enough to stop the space agency. It’s revamped Kepler mission is proving to be just as successful as the original mission if not more, it has already discovered 100 new alien planets orbiting other stars.

Ian Crossfield of the University of Arizona confirmed that the revamped Kepler mission called K2 has turned up more than 100 confirmed new planets, the announcement was made at a conference of the American Astronomical Society.

Many of the newly discovered planets are different from the ones discovered in the original Kepler mission, some happen to be in multi-planet systems and are orbiting stars which are hotter and brighter than the ones in the original Kepler field. The revamped mission has also discovered a system which has three planets bigger than Earth. K2 is not only looking for new planets, it’s also keeping an eye out for supernovas as well as studying the planets that orbit our star.

Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics mentioned at the conference that scientists have actually discovered 234 potential planets which are still awaiting confirmation. The idea with these missions is to discover the best and the most interesting systems, stars that are much brighter and nearby which makes them more easy to understand and observe from here on Earth.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: General
Tags: Kepler, NASA