LONDON: NASA officials announced that Kepler space telescope discovered eight more exoplanets during the annual winter conference of the American Astronomical Society. With this occasion, NASA reached a historic milestone of the 1,000th newly verified exoplanet during its Kepler mission.
Kepler has been hunting extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, since June 2014. But on January 6, NASA marked Kepler’s current exoplanet tally to 1,004. NASA’s Kepler telescope has also identified 3,200 space objects that are waiting for verification. Space experts say that nearly 90 percent of those objects should turned out to be verified exoplanets.
NASA also hopes that a number of those would be Earth-like planets with hospitable space conditions to host life. Two out of the eight newly found exoplanets announced Tuesday are Earth-like planets, NASA officials say.
Kepler was designed to find these Earth analogues, and we always knew that the most interesting results would come at the end. So we’re just kind of ramping up toward those most interesting results. There’s still a lot of good science to come out of Kepler,”
said Natalie Batalha, Kepler mission team member.
Exoplanet research is a recently new field. In 1992, the first alien world that didn’t belong to our solar system was confirmed, while in 1995, scientists found the first exoplanets revolving a sun-like star. The Kepler mission was first launched in March 2009 with the goal of measuring exoplanet frequency within the Milky Way galaxy.
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