Discovered 18 strange planets the size of Earth from 'dead treasure'

Reviewing the legacy of NASA's planetary hunter Kepler with a new algorithm, scientists found 18 buried earth-sized planets at the same time.

The new study in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Sonneberg Observatory, Institute of Astrophysics - Georg-August University (Germany) has discovered 18 strange planets of the earth from data of the same time. Kepler Space Telescope. The finding is due to a new, superior algorithm that finds the planets described by Space as "buried".

18 Earth-sized extraterrestrials are compared to Earth (Earth) and Neptune (blue).In it, the green planet is the only planet identified in the habitable zone - (photo provided by the team).

The algorithm targets the "light curve" phenomenon that occurs with the parent star. Even though the planet is too faint and small, "buried" in the halo emanates from its star, but it can leave a trace as it travels across the face of the mother star, by blocking part of the light and making it Mother star dimmed a bit.

Adding a little computation based on this light curve, scientists not only identified the existence of the planet, but also knew a little about it, such as size and predictability of survival. at life.

These 18 identified planets belong to "Earth-sized" planets , defined as being 70% to twice the size of our planet. NASA is always eager to hunt these planets because that size is a big plus for the chance of survival.

The authors reported that most of these hard-to-see planets are in very close proximity to their mother stars, so extremely hot (up to 1,000 degrees Celsius) and unlikely to retain water in liquid form. Only a single planet orbiting a red dwarf is in a " habitable " area , which is capable of holding water in a liquid state.

All of these planets were the result of excavations from K2, data from Kepler's life-long observation program, before the space telescope stopped operating in 2018.

Before "death" , Kepler brought to mankind data of 100,000 distant stars, including at least 517 stars that are the center of another "solar system" , or at least one planet spin around.

The German team said it was intending to continue considering those 517 stars with new algorithms in hopes of finding more extrasolar planets (extrasolar planets). They estimate that at least 100 Earth-sized planets can be found using their algorithms.

The study has just published in two papers published in the scientific journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.