NASA’s dying telescope spotted three exoplanets in its final days

Five years after the retirement of the Kepler space telescope, a team of astronomers think they have found exoplanets captured by some of the veteran observatory’s last light.

Kepler was launched into space in 2009 with one primary mission: to search for new worlds. In its nearly decade-long period in solar orbit, Kepler has found more than 2,600 exoplanets, including some dormant planets. The so-called “Goldilocks Zone” for habitationsuggesting that they may have suitable life-enhancing conditions.

Kepler ran out of fuel in October 2018, so the mission is over. But Kepler’s data still holds cosmic secrets, and this week a team of astronomers announced the discovery of three planets that the telescope saw just before it was retired. The team was researched published This week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The planets were observed during Kepler’s latest series of observations, a campaign called K2 Campaign 19. As it neared the end of its time in space, Kepler was increasingly unstable, making it difficult for the spacecraft to hold its position long enough to get clear data on Earth. monitoring objectives.

Only one week of high-quality data has been produced by K2 Campaign 19, and by that time the telescope’s data has been very noisy. However, the choice to keep Kepler going until the bitter end appears to have paid off. “These discoveries demonstrate Kepler’s ability to detect exoplanets, even when it was literally powered by vapors,” the team stated in the paper.

The research team also used the help of the Visual Investigation Group, a group of citizen scientists observing the curves of light from stars that Kepler saw during the expedition. usually decreases in the light curve Indicates a transiting body – that is, an exoplanet. Other exoplanet researchers, Like the TESS spacecraftUse the same method to search for exoplanets.

Kepler didn’t see the planets, exactly, or at least not very well. Instead, the astronomy team reported three stars that fainted briefly from Kepler’s perspective, indicating that they may have been transported by an orbiting object. The team has identified two of the rovers as exoplanets, while the third is an exoplanet candidate.

Both confirmed planets are ‘hot little Neptune’. According to MIT News, which means they are twice the size of Earth and orbit close to their host stars. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology stated that both worlds are about 400 light-years from Earth. The candidate planet is larger, about four times the size of Earth, and much more distant, about 1,200 light-years from our planet.

“These are the last planets Kepler observed in chronological order, but each piece of the telescope’s data is incredibly useful,” Ellis Incha, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and lead author of the study, said. Tell MIT News. “We want to make sure none of this data is wasted, because there are still a lot of discoveries to be done.”

The Webb Space Telescope carries Kepler’s mantle as it searches for exoplanets near and far, increasing astronomers’ understanding of the diversity and spread of worlds beyond our own.Ular Ssystem. The search for habitable worlds is a top priority for science, According to the latest decadal survey conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

More: NASA reveals tantalizing details about successor to the Webb Telescope