That more than doubles the number of confirmed planets in the catalog. Could some of this 1200 new exoplanets be our new home?
Jeff Coughlin, a SETI Institute researcher who helps NASA put together the Kepler catalog, said that the 1,284 new planets are validated to 99 percent certainty.
The new planets aren’t a result of the K2 mission, though. Instead, it’s about new software that enabled Kepler researchers to parse out the signal from noise in candidate planets.
The original Kepler data set comes from a little under four years of observation. So if an alien civilization had been staring at our Sun with their own Kepler, they probably would have detected Mercury and Venus, maybe detected Earth and Mars, and not detected any of the larger planets, as some of the dips in light may have happened only twice, once, or not at all. Kepler requires three transits to prove a planet’s status as real.
But there’s still more work to do. For instance, there are more than 3,000 candidate planets left in the Kepler data that are believed to be possible exoplanets.
Read the full article here.