The universe just got a little more crowded.

Nearly 100 new exoplanets – planets outside our solar system – have been discovered, scientists announced in a new study published on Thursday.

Using powerful telescopes, exoplanets can be detected as they orbit around their star, which causes a subtle dimming of starlight.

These most recent exoplanets were spotted using Nasa’s Kepler space telescope, now in orbit around the Earth. Though the spacecraft had a major mechanical failure in 2013, scientists were able to reconfigure it to enable it to keep watching for exoplanets.

“We started out analysing 275 candidates of which 149 were validated as real exoplanets,” said study lead author Andrew Mayo, a PhD student at the Technical University of Denmark. “In turn, 95 of these planets have proved to be new discoveries.”

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Since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995, about 3,600 exoplanets have been found, ranging from rocky Earth-sized planets to large gas giants like Jupiter.

But this is only the tip of a very big iceberg. Astronomers say there are likely hundreds of billions of exoplanets in our galaxy alone.

“Exoplanets are a very exciting field of space science,” Mayo said. “As more planets are discovered, astronomers will develop a much better picture of the nature of exoplanets which in turn will allow us to place our own solar system into a galactic context.”

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The research was published on Thursday in the Astronomical Journal. </s> Scientists have discovered 18 Earth-sized planets beyond the solar system, including one of the smallest known so far and another that could offer conditions friendly to life.

The exoplanets are so small that previous surveys had overlooked them, said researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany.

The study, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, re-analysed a part of the data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope with a new and more sensitive method that they developed.

The team estimates that the new method has the potential of finding more than 100 additional exoplanets in the Kepler mission’s entire data set.

Somewhat more than 4,000 planets orbiting stars outside our solar system are known so far.

Of these so-called exoplanets, about 96 per cent are significantly larger than our Earth, most of them more comparable with the dimensions of the gas giants Neptune or Jupiter.

This percentage likely does not reflect the real conditions in space, however, since small planets are much harder to track down than big ones.

Moreover, small worlds are fascinating targets in the search for Earth-like, potentially habitable planets outside the solar system.

The 18 newly discovered worlds fall into the category of Earth-sized planets.

The smallest of them is only 69 per cent of the size of the Earth; the largest is barely more than twice the Earth’s radius.

Common search algorithms were not sensitive enough, researchers said.

In their search for distant worlds, scientists often use the so-called transit method to look for stars with periodically recurring drops in brightness.

If a star happens to have a planet whose orbital plane is aligned with the line of sight from Earth, the planet occults a small fraction of the stellar light as it passes in front of the star once per orbit.

Their effect on the stellar brightness is so small that it is extremely hard to distinguish from the natural brightness fluctuations of the star and from the noise that necessarily comes with any kind of observation.

The team, including Rene Heller from MPS, has now been able to show that the sensitivity of the transit method can be significantly improved, if a more realistic light curve is assumed in the search algorithm.

The new algorithm does not search for abrupt drops in brightness like previous standard algorithms, but for the characteristic, gradual dimming and recovery.

This makes the new transit search algorithm much more sensitive to small planets the size of the Earth.

“Our new algorithm helps to draw a more realistic picture of the exoplanet population in space,” said Michael Hippke of Sonneberg Observatory.

“This method constitutes a significant step forward, especially in the search for Earth-like planets,” Hippke said.

“In most of the planetary systems that we studied, the new planets are the smallest,” said Kai Rodenbeck of the University of Gottingen in Germany.

Most of the new planets orbit their star closer than their previously known planetary companions.

The surfaces of these new planets therefore likely have temperatures well in excess of 100 degrees Celsius; some even have temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius.

Only one of the bodies is an exception: it likely orbits its red dwarf star within the so-called habitable zone.

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At this favourable distance from its star, this planet may offer conditions under which liquid water could occur on its surface — one of the basic prerequisites for life as we know it on Earth. </s> So far almost 4,000 planets have been discovered orbiting stars other than the Sun, and that tally is constantly growing. Now another 18 exoplanets have been added to the haul, but the difference this time is that all of them are roughly Earth-sized – much smaller than the Neptune-sized average found so far. The discovery was made in old data, using a new and more sensitive algorithm.

Since Earth is the only planet known (so far) to harbor life, worlds like our own are of particular interest to exoplanet-hunters. That makes this new haul pretty exciting, especially given that these planets are on the small side of the scale and are usually harder to find than Jupiter-sized gas giants.

The smallest of the bunch is only about two-thirds the size of Earth, making it the second-smallest exoplanet detected to date. Two others are also smaller than Earth, while the rest of the crop range up to about twice the size of our home world. The most exciting new planet though is one that appears to be cool enough to potentially host liquid water on its surface, meaning it could be habitable.

The 18 new exoplanets, to scale, as compared to Earth and Neptune. The green one, named EPIC 201238110.02, also appears to be cool enough to host liquid water on its surface NASA/JPL (Neptune), NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring (Earth), MPS/René Heller

These 18 new planets were discovered in old data by a team of German astronomers. Exoplanets are usually found using the transit method, which sounds simple enough in theory – essentially, telescopes like Kepler stare at stars and watch for sudden dips in their brightness. If that occurs on a regular schedule, it indicates that a planet is passing between the star and the telescope, blocking some of the light.

Obviously, larger planets make their presence known much more clearly, creating sharp drops in brightness. So it's no surprise that the majority of detected exoplanets are gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, and ice giants like Uranus and Neptune.

"Standard search algorithms attempt to identify sudden drops in brightness," says René Heller, first author of two new studies. "In reality, however, a stellar disk appears slightly darker at the edge than in the center. When a planet moves in front of a star, it therefore initially blocks less starlight than at the mid-time of the transit. The maximum dimming of the star occurs in the center of the transit just before the star becomes gradually brighter again."

This graph compares the older algorithm for detecting exoplanets as they transit their host stars, against the new, more sensitive algorithm that can detect smaller worlds ASA/SDO (Sun), MPS/René Heller

So the team developed a new, more sensitive method. It works on the same basic principle but rather than just looking for the abrupt changes, it takes into account the more gradual dimming and brightening that occurs when smaller planets pass in front of a star. They may not be as immediately obvious, but if they repeat regularly they're still a solid indication of a planet's existence.

To test out the new method, the researchers applied it to an old batch of data gathered during Kepler's second run, between 2014 and 2018. During that time the telescope identified 517 stars with at least one planet around them, and the team re-analyzed this group to see if they could find any smaller worlds that were missed the first time around. Lo and behold, 18 such planets emerged from the data.

Of course, this is just the beginning. There's plenty more data from Kepler and its planet-hunting successor TESS to trawl through in search of hidden Earth-like worlds.

Two separate studies were published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics [1], [2].

Source: Max Planck Institute </s> An international team of scientists have, over a period of four years, discovered 95 new exoplanets. The discoveries will allow scientists to better understand how solar systems are created, including our own.

While the scientists have been analyzing data from 2014, the story of these 95 new planets discovered outside of the solar system begins in 2009, when NASA's Kepler spacecraft was launched with the specific goal of finding exoplanets. It's found over 100,000 stars and 2,300 planets in the process.

However, a technical failure knocked the Kepler out of commission in 2013. The next year NASA sent up a replacement spacecraft known as K2. A product of worldwide collaboration, scientists from Harvard, NASA, Caltech, UC Berkeley, the University of Copenhagen, the Technical University of Denmark, and the University of Tokyo have been studying its findings. They've published their paper here.

K2 searches for exoplanets by looking for planetary transits. When a planet is rotating around its star and comes between that star and the Earth, it creates a dip in light. Scientists monitor these dips and determine if they are caused by a planet's rotation.

There are many false positives. "We started out analyzing 275 candidates of which 149 were validated as real exoplanets. In turn 95 of these planets have proved to be new discoveries," says PhD student Andrew Mayo at the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark, in a press statement.

According to Mayo, "some of the signals were caused by multiple star systems or noise from the spacecraft." But the noise didn't keep the team from missing the signal. "We also detected planets that range from sub Earth-sized to the size of Jupiter and larger," he says.

Although exoplanetry is a relatively new field with the first one only discovered in 1995, it has made up for lost time with at times what feels like a deluge of planets. Some of the most famous, like those in the TRAPPIST-1 system, often tantalizing possibilities of life-friendly conditions. Some scientists have taken to creating periodic tables just to keep track of all of them.

Together, Kepler and K2 represent one of the first steps in exoplanetry. NASA is hoping that the upcoming James Webb Telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), made specifically for this purpose, will help to show just how crowded outer space truly is. </s> Spotting new exoplanets with NASA’s Kepler space telescope is nothing new. Google even managed to automate the process with machine learning. Just add them to the pile with the 3,700 other exoplanets, right? Sometimes researchers still spot a planet of particular interest in the data that deserves additional study. Such is the case with one of 15 planets just uncovered by Japanese astronomers. It’s Earth-like and potentially habitable.

Kepler has been in operation for nearly a decade, scanning large numbers of stars in order to spot small dips in brightness. That dip could signify a planet is orbiting the star and passed in front of it from Kepler’s perspective. However, someone needs to go through the data to determine if the signal really does give away the presence of a planet.

Researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology spotted the latest exoplanets hiding in the data when examining readings collected by Kepler in the K2 phase. K2 started several years ago when reaction wheel problems limited the effectiveness of the satellite’s camera. Even in this limited mode, Kepler has found hundreds of new exoplanets to add to the total of more than 2,500 discovered since it started operating. Three of the 15 newly discovered planets fall into the Super-Earth category, meaning they’re rocky and between 1.5 and two times larger than Earth.

Of the three Super-Earths, one known as K2-155d is a tantalizing target for future study. It orbits a red dwarf star about 200 light years away, which is called K2-155. Red dwarfs are very long-lived stars, so life would have plenty of time to develop. They’re smaller and cooler than the sun, but an exoplanet orbiting close enough could still be warm enough to have liquid water on its surface. The flip side is that radiation would be more intense at that distance.

K2-155d is about 1.6 times the size of Earth, but we can’t say anything for sure about its density. Therefore, it may have more gravity than Earth or it could be very similar because of a lower density. Based on simulations of the exoplanet, the team believes it could have an atmosphere similar to Earth’s. Additional observations will help nail down the exoplanet’s properties and determine if it would be habitable by our standards.

NASA is set to launch the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) next month. This spacecraft will look at the brightest stars near Earth over a two-year period to gather data about exoplanets. As the brightest red dwarf visible from Earth, K2-155 could be on the list. </s> CLOSE NASA's Kepler spacecraft discovered more than 4,000 potential new planets outside our solar system, some of which are in the "habitable" zone of their star. USA TODAY

This artists’s conception gives an impression of how common planets are around the stars in the Milky Way. The planets, their orbits and their host stars are all vastly magnified compared to their real separations. (Photo: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

The universe just got a little more crowded.

Nearly 100 new exoplanets — planets outside of our solar system — have been discovered, scientists announced in a new study published Thursday.

Using powerful telescopes, exoplanets can be detected as they orbit around their star, which causes a subtle dimming of starlight.

These most recent exoplanets were spotted using NASA's Kepler space telescope, now in orbit around the Earth. Though the spacecraft had a major mechanical failure in 2013, scientists were able to reconfigure it to enable it to keep watching for exoplanets.

“We started out analyzing 275 candidates of which 149 were validated as real exoplanets," said study lead author Andrew Mayo, a PhD student at the Technical University of Denmark. "In turn, 95 of these planets have proved to be new discoveries.”

More: Distant Earth-like planets could harbor water — and maybe life

Since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995, about 3,600 exoplanets have been found, ranging from rocky Earth-sized planets to large gas giants like Jupiter.

But this is only the tip of a very big iceberg: Astronomers say there are likely hundreds of billions of exoplanets in our galaxy alone.

“Exoplanets are a very exciting field of space science," Mayo said. "As more planets are discovered, astronomers will develop a much better picture of the nature of exoplanets which in turn will allow us to place our own solar system into a galactic context.”

The research was published Thursday in the Astronomical Journal.

Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2ocj7t0 </s> Scientists have discovered nearly 100 new 'exoplanets' in the search for Earth-like planets that could support life.

It's a major breakthrough that reveals new planets that range in size from smaller than Earth to celestial bodies even bigger than Jupiter.

The findings were made by a team of international colleagues from the University of Denmark, NASA, the University of Tokyo and others.

Researchers studied information from the K2 Kepler telescope mission, which aims to track down new exoplanets across the universe.

Exoplanets are planets found outside of our solar system, the Milky Way, that orbit a star – just like how Earth orbits the Sun.

To find these, scientists use a space telescope to track dips in light caused by the shadow of an exoplanet crossing in front of its host star.

Lead author Andrew Mayo, who works at the National Space Insititute, has presented the findings in the Astronomical Journal, and revealed that he had been working on the project since the first K2 data release back in 2014.

"We started out analysing 275 candidates of which 149 were validated as real exoplanets.

"In turn 95 of these planets have been proved to be new discoveries."

The original Kepler spacecraft launched back in 2009, questing for exoplanets in a small patch of sky.

But a mechanical failure crippled the telescope in 2013, paving the way for a follow-up K2 mission that's proving much more successful.

It allowed researchers to uncover a new field of exoplanets, raising hopes for the prospect of life beyond earth.

The goal is to eventually track down exoplanets that are rocky, habitable, Earth-sized planets that could be capable of supporting life.

"Exoplanets are a very exciting field of space science. As more planets are discovered, astronomers will develop a much better picture of the nature of exoplanets, which in turn will allow us to place our own solar system into a galactic context."

Mayo says they "detected planets that range from sub Earth-sized to the size of Jupiter and larger".

This story originally appeared in The Sun. </s> There are 95 additions to the ever-growing list of exoplanets, as researchers analyzing data collected by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope discovered them scattered around our home galaxy, the Milky Way. About 3,600 exoplanets are known to exist outside our solar system now, most of them thanks to Kepler. Some planets have also been discovered recently outside the Milky Way.

An international team of researchers made the discovery while analyzing 275 potential exoplanet candidates that showed up in the Kepler data during the spacecraft’s second mission, called K2. In 2013, four years after its launch, there was a malfunction in Kepler that ended its first mission. But a repair was affected in 2014, and the second phase of its planet-hunting mission, which is still ongoing, was called K2.

Of the 275 candidates in the dataset — being compiled since the first K2 data release in 2014 — 149 were verified to be actual exoplanets, and of those, researchers found 54 had already been discovered earlier, leaving them with 95 previously unknown exoplanets.

“We found that some of the signals were caused by multiple star systems or noise from the spacecraft. But we also detected planets that range from sub Earth-sized to the size of Jupiter and larger,” Andrew Mayo, a Ph.D. student of the National Space Institute (DTU Space) at the Technical University of Denmark, who was lead author of the paper announcing the discovery, said in a statement Thursday.

Kepler finds exoplanets by looking for dips in the light from a star as a planet passes across its face during its orbit. But since the dips in light can have other causes too, all such candidates identified by Kepler need to be tested using other means to validate whether they are in fact exoplanets or something else. One of the new 95 discoveries was somewhat special.

“We validated a planet on a 10 day orbit around a star called HD 212657, which is now the brightest star found by either the Kepler or K2 missions to host a validated planet. Planets around bright stars are important because astronomers can learn a lot about them from ground-based observatories,” Mayo said.

Exoplanets were once thought to be rare, but it is general scientific consensus now that planets exist in the trillions all over the universe. Recently, the first discovery of planets outside the Milky Way was made in a galaxy about 3.8 billion light-years away.

Just like the planets in the solar system range in size from the tiny Mercury (18 of it could fit inside Earth) to the gigantic Jupiter (about 1,300 Earths could fit inside it), exoplanets come in a variety of sizes and masses too — some smaller than the moon and others a few times larger than Jupiter.

While thousands of exoplanets are already known, and there are thousands of other candidates, we still know precious little about what those worlds are like. The upcoming launches of missions like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite should further our understanding.

The research will be published in the Astronomical Journal, and is currently available on the DTU Space website. </s> Scientists have discovered 15 new planets, including a “super-Earth” that may have liquid water on its surface.

The planets are orbiting small, cool stars near our solar system that are known as “Red Dwarfs.”

One of the brightest Red Dwarfs, K2-155, has three “super-Earths,” one of which, K2-155d, could be within the star’s habitable zone. K2-155d, which has a radius 1.6 times that of Earth, may harbor liquid water, according to three-dimensional global climate simulations.

K2-155 is about 200 light years from Earth. A light year, which measures distance in space, equals 6 trillion miles.

The research also indicates that planets orbiting red dwarfs may be remarkably similar to planets orbiting stars that resemble the Sun, known as solar-type stars.

"It's important to note that the number of planets around red dwarfs is much smaller than the number around solar-type stars," said Teruyuki Hirano of Tokyo Institute of Technology's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, who led the research, in a statement. "Red dwarf systems, especially coolest red dwarfs, are just beginning to be investigated, so they are very exciting targets for future exoplanet research."

However, Hirano voiced caution about the conditions on K2-155d. "In our simulations, the atmosphere and the composition of the planet were assumed to be Earth-like, and there's no guarantee that this is the case,” he said.

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More research on K2-155d’s temperature and radius is needed to confirm whether the planet is indeed habitable.

Scientists based their research on data from K2, the second mission of NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. Follow-up observations were made by the Subaru telescope in Hawaii and the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) in Spain.

The findings are published in two papers in The Astronomical Journal.

PLANETS IN GALAXIES BEYOND MILKY WAY SPOTTED FOR FIRST TIME

The find is the latest in a host of new planet discoveries. In February 2017, an international team of astronomers announced the discovery of 60 new planets orbiting stars close to Earth’s Solar System, including a rocky “super Earth.”

In the same month, NASA revealed the discovery of seven Earth-like planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 40 light years from Earth. Three of the planets are in the “habitable zone” where liquid water can exist, according to scientists.

Two months later, in a separate research project, scientists reported that an exoplanet 40 light-years from Earth may be the best place to look for signs of life outside our solar system.

Earlier this year, for the first time, scientists announced the discovery of planets in galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory, a team of astrophysicists from the University of Oklahoma identified the extragalactic planets about 3.8 billion light years away. The space observatory helped scientists find about 2,000 objects with comparable mass to the Moon and Jupiter.
Eighteen Earth-like exoplanets are discovered via a new algorithm.