The Kepler Space Telescope continues to paint a fantastic picture of planets in our galaxy outside the Solar System – exoplanets as they’re known. It has now found upward of 4,000 of them, 2,356 of which have been confirmed. It has done this by very accurately measuring the light intensity from about 150,000 stars.
Whenever a planet passes between the star and us, the light dims ever so slightly. Kepler is capable of detecting light dimming in the parts-per-million range, which gives it the ability to detect small planets like earth. Its primary mission lasted four years, enabling it to find many planets. Once a light curve with a characteristic planetary dip is found, this becomes a planet candidate. Follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes and other methods then move the candidate into either a confirmed or false-positive status.
For me, Kepler is the most exciting science NASA has ever done. It has given us a huge step forward into understanding the probability of finding life elsewhere in the universe. Two of the factors in Drake’s Equation, a mathematical description of the number of planets with intelligent life in our galaxy, are
1. The fraction of stars with planets in our galaxy
2. The number of planets per star that could harbor life
Kepler gives us the ability, for the first time in history, to determine the magnitude of both of these two numbers to a higher degree of certainty than just outright guesses.
Here are a couple of visualizations showing the size of the planets versus their orbital period. Since the main Kepler mission only ran for about 4 years, and the Kepler 2 mission only looks at 2½ month snapshots, finding planets with long orbital periods is not in the cards. I’ve included the planets from our Solar System on the plot for reference.
Note that the number of planets labeled as confirmed or candidates is different than I quoted above. The data I used in the plots came from the NASA MAST site (Milkowski Archive for Space Telescopes), which does not match the count from the NASA Exoplanet Archive site. Unfortunately, the latter site has been offline for some time, so I have not been able to determine why there is a difference. The plots are interactive, so feel free to click on some of the filters on the right side of the pane to zoom into different views of the data.
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