Posted on Thursday, February 27, 2014
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced today that in only two years time they've discovered 715 exoplanets orbiting around 305 different stars with the majority of exoplanets having smaller masses than Neptune.
These planets were previously just candidates, but now they have been verified using a new technique called verification by multiplicity, which takes less time than follow-up observations of the candidate systems with ground-based telescopes.
This new data release has almost doubled the number of confirmed exoplanets.
Artist's conception of multiple transiting planetary systems.
Image Credit: NASA
These planets were previously just candidates, but now they have been verified using a new technique called verification by multiplicity, which takes less time than follow-up observations of the candidate systems with ground-based telescopes.
This new data release has almost doubled the number of confirmed exoplanets.
Artist's conception of multiple transiting planetary systems.
Image Credit: NASA
Labels: exoplanets, Kepler, nasa, news