Home / Channel / General Tech / Over 1,000 planets found by Kepler spacecraft

Over 1,000 planets found by Kepler spacecraft

Exciting news for our space faring readers today. The Kepler spacecraft, searching distances far beyond our solar system has found more than 1,000 possible planets which are orbiting distant stars, and it least 54 of them are within their suns ‘habitable zones', where environmental temperatures could support liquid water and therefore life.

William Borucki, chief scientist of the Kepler mission at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View said “It's very likely that life is common in our galaxy.” Borucki and his team released the results yesterday after four months of gathering data from Kepler's search for planets among 156,000 stars, which are more than 2,000 light years away from Earth.

Of the 54 planets recorded and whose orbits lie within the all important habitable zones, five are close to Earth's size while others range from twice the size of Earth to as large as our solar systems gas giant, Jupiter.

Six planets which have been found around a star like our own sun: 2,000 light years away. (credit Nasa/NASA)

Kepler has found 1,235 planets, which are technical refered to as ‘exoplanets', because they exist outside our solar system. They are a varied size, 662 are the size of Neptune, 288 are ‘super earths' (twice the size of our own), 165 are Jupiter size and 19 are much larger than Jupiter.

The search for planets has focused on a region of space where constellations Lyra and Cygnus exist. Debra Fisher, a Yale astronomer said “Kepler has blown the lid off everything we've known about exoplanets, Im amazed”.

Kepler has also found a new mini solar system, with five tightly packed small planets which orbit close to their star and a giant planet flying in orbit further out. Some of the planets discovered are still listed as ‘candidates' meaning that scientists have moer work to handle by computer to confirm that they really are planets and to ascertain their exact size, mass and orbit.

Kepler's telescope is only surveying 1/400 of the spacecraft's field of view in the visible sky which could mean that 3,000 light years from earth there must be at least 20,000 exoplanets in orbit. The telescope monitors 156,000 stars simultaneously every 30 minutes and measures infinitely small changes in their brightness

KitGuru says: Will we ever find life on another planet?

Become a Patron!

Check Also

Netgear Orbi 370 series brings mesh WiFi 7 to the masses

WiFi 7 is becoming more affordable by the day. This week, Netgear is launching its …

4 comments

  1. Exciting times ahead for everyone, imagine if they found life on one of these planets. and what stage in development it would be. They would clearly be behind us technologically, or they would have found us first.

  2. I guess we will find… some day…
    I wouldn’t be that much sure about their technological level… hell, mayb they already found us but don’t tell us – big brother is watching.. 😛 having fun… 😀

  3. that informations was so unbeleivable .. it is possible that we can transfer their ..

  4. дзякуй за цікавы блог

We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker.

Thank you for visiting KitGuru. Our news and reviews teams work hard to bring you the latest stories and finest, in-depth analysis.

We want to be as informative as possible – and to help our readers make the best buying decisions. The mechanism we use to run our business and pay some of the best journalists in the world, is advertising.

If you want to support KitGuru, then please add www.kitguru.net to your ad blocking whitelist or disable your adblocking software. It really makes a difference and allows us to continue creating the kind of content you really want to read.

It is important you know that we don’t run pop ups, pop unders, audio ads, code tracking ads or anything else that would interfere with the KitGuru experience. Adblockers can actually block some of our free content, such as galleries!