More Than 1,200 New Planets Discovered, NASA Says
BALTIMORE (WJZ)—NASA says it's found more than 1,200 new planets orbiting other stars!
Alex DeMetrick reports, that brings the total to thousands of possible new worlds.
In 2009, nobody knew what the Kepler Space Telescope would find when it went into orbit, looking for other worlds around other stars.
"We are now able to say planets are incredibly plentiful in our galaxy," said Dr. Padi Boyd, with the NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
NASA says evidence from Kepler confirmed 1,284 new exoplanets have been detected, bringing the total to 4,700.
A handful are believed to be rocky worlds like earth, although larger. All were found in a narrow, but very deep slice of the Milky Way.
"It was watching 150,000 or so stars like the sun continuously without blinking to look for tiny dips in the light called transits," said Boyd.
Like the recent transit of Mercury moving between the Earth and the Sun. Although tiny, Mercury still cause a dip in the brightness. That's what Kepler picks up from other starts, inferring passing plants.
It's now estimated that there are 10 billion planets in our galaxy, the big question: are any like earth?
A new space telescope called Tess will start looking at nearby stars next year for closer exoplanets.
Those will then become targets for the Webb Telescope in 2018 which could answer what the atmospheres are made of and how much water is in the atmosphere.
Among all the exoplanets discovered, about a dozen orbit in the so-called "Goldilocks Zone", which is roughly the the distance the earth orbits the sun.
