NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers 1284 Alien Planets, Nine Could Be Habitable

NASA's Kepler space telescope has found 1,284 new exoplanets, nine of which might be capable of supporting life, according to a recent announcement by NASA. The discovery reports the single largest haul of alien planets until now, taking up the number of known planets outside the solar system by more than 60 percent. The total number of extrasolar planets discovered to date now stands at 3,200, 2,235 of which have been discovered by Kepler.

"Before the Kepler space telescope launched, we did not know whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy. Thanks to Kepler and the research community, we now know there could be more planets than stars," said Paul Hertz from NASA. "This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever-closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe."

The data collected by Kepler and other instruments show that approximately 25 percent of all the normal stars in the Milky Way have planets which are roughly the size of Earth, and are present in habitable zones which means they are located at the right distance from their sun to have the probability of liquid water on their surface. Furthermore, according to Kepler mission scientists; there are at least 70 billion main sequence stars in the galaxy, which implies there are about tens of billions of Earth sized potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way.

The team of researchers made the announcement after taking a statistical approach, by devising a confirmation method based on probability using computer simulations to determine which of the alien candidates were bona fide planets, and not stars or failed stars (brown dwarf). The celestial bodies with more than 99 percent chance of being a real extrasolar planet were validated, as per the researchers.

In the newly confirmed batch of planets, nearly 550 could be rocky planets like Earth and nine of these orbit in their sun's habitable zone which means they could support surface temperatures that enable liquid water to pool. The addition of these nine planets takes up the known number of potentially habitable exoplanets to 21.

According to the NASA scientists, directing the Kepler mission, the sheer number of alien planets found by Kepler is impressive; however they are more interested in understanding the broad outlines to "design future missions to search for habitable environments and living worlds". The Kepler discoveries have also revealed that Earth like small, rocky worlds is the commonest type of planet in the Milky Way, apart from finding many super-Earths and mini-Neptunes.

The Kepler spacecraft will continue in its journey of finding alien planets during the K2 mission, as well as simultaneously study other cosmic phenomena and objects like asteroids, comets and supernova explosions. For now, the spacecraft has enough fuel to propel it until the middle of 2018.