The images of the stars themselves aren’t much to look at. If we’re searching for life in the universe, we should start by looking for the conditions we know to be conducive to it.įinding planets in habitable zones is no guarantee they’ll be hospitable, though: Mars, technically, is in the habitable zone of our solar system. As far as anyone on Earth knows, life requires liquid water. They can also determine if the planet resides within the star system’s habitable zone - that’s the distance away from the star where liquid water could possibly exist. (Huge planets the size of Jupiter are thought to always be made out of gas, while smaller planets are most likely rock.) Scientists can then make some guesses as to whether the planet is rocky or gaseous. NASAįrom these tiny blips of light, Kepler gathered enough data to determine the size of the planet and its distance to its star. This is called the transit method: The star’s light momentarily dims when a planet, in orbit around a star, crosses in front of it. In its orbit some 94 million miles above the surface of the Earth, Kepler kept close watch on the light emanating from thousands of stars. Kepler - and the many scientists and engineers that worked on the project and analyzed its data - mainly found planets by staring at stars. NASA’s Eye Exoplanet explorer How Kepler found so many planets There are so, so many more areas of the galaxy to explore. The bright white blob represents the area in which Kepler found planets. Here’s the final image from the GIF, zoomed in. But when you zoom out, you see it’s only been looking at a small slice of our galaxy. Every bright dot represents a planet Kepler has discovered. To really get the perspective of how both big and small,Kepler’s discoveries are, take a look at this GIF. Thanks to Kepler, we now know there are more planets than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Kepler even likely discovered a moon outside our solar system. When NASA finally retired the Kepler Space Telescope this week after it ran out of fuel, the mission had helped discover more than 2,600 exoplanets. These discoveries help us understand how special is the Earth in the grand scheme of the universe. Surveying and studying these exoplanets is the first step to finding out if there’s a planet like ours out there - one with oxygen, liquid water, and possibly life. When NASA launched the Kepler Space Telescope in 2009, astronomers had discovered a few hundred exoplanets - planets that orbit stars outside our solar system.
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