The number of known alien planets has just gone up by more than 60 percent.
NASA’s Kepler space telescope has discovered 1,284 new exoplanets, including nine rocky worlds that might be capable of supporting life as we know it, astronomers announced today (May 10). This is by far the largest haul of alien planets ever unveiled at one time.
The total exoplanet tally now stands at about 3,200, and Kepler has found 2,235 of them, NASA officials said. [1,284 Exoplanets Found: NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope Discovery in Pictures]
“We now know that exoplanets are common, most stars in our galaxy have planetary systems and a reasonable fraction of stars in our galaxy have potentially habitable planets,” Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., said during a news conference today. “Knowing this the first step toward addressing the question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?'”
Indeed, data gathered by Kepler and other instruments suggest that about 25 percent of all the “normal” (main-sequence) stars in the Milky Way harbor roughly Earth-size planets in their habitable zones, that just-right range of distances at which liquid water can exist on a world’s surface.
[vc_btn title=”More on NASA finding new planets” style=”outline” color=”primary” size=”lg” align=”left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.space.com%2F32850-nasa-kepler-telescope-finds-1284-alien-planets.html|title:More%20on%20NASA%20finding%20new%20planets|target:%20_blank”][vc_message message_box_style=”3d” message_box_color=”turquoise”]By Mike Wall, Space.com, excerpt posted on SouthFloridaReporter.com , May 11, 2016 [/vc_message]
