NASA's Kepler Mission Discovered 1,284 Planets Making It The Single Largest Planet Discovery To Date

Experts from Princeton University and NASA have confirmed that the objects observed outside the Earth's solar system by NASA's Kepler spacecraft are planets. It is considered to be the largest single announcement of new planets to date.

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), its Kepler mission has verified 1,284 planets which are considered to be the single largest finding of planets of all time. "This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler," said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth."

The researchers' discovery revolves around a technique developed at Princeton which allows scientists to efficiently analyze thousands of signals Kepler has identified to make sure which are most likely to be caused by planets and which are not caused by non-planetary objects like stars. This particular automated technique carried out using a publicly available software package called Vespa computes the chances that the signal is actually caused by a planet.

"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, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters. "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 analysis that was performed on the telescope identified 4,302 potential planets. For the 1,284 candidates, the probability of being a planet is greater than 99 percent, which was the minimum requirement to earn the "planet" status. An additional 1,327 candidates are probably planets as well; however they did not meet the 99 percent threshold so they need to be studied more. The remaining 707 are most probably part of some astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also validated 984 candidates who were previously verified by other techniques.

Science Daily also reported that the latest announcement was based on a statistical analysis method that can be applied to many planet candidates at the same time. Timothy Morton, associate research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey and lead author of the scientific paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, used a technique to assign Kepler candidate a planet-hood probability percentage. This technique is the first automated computation on this scale. It was also revealed that previous statistical techniques focused only on sub-groups on the greater list of planet candidates identified by Kepler.

Planet candidates can be thought of like bread crumbs," said Morton. "If you drop a few large crumbs on the floor, you can pick them up one by one. But, if you spill a whole bag of tiny crumbs, you're going to need a broom. This statistical analysis is our broom."