NASA’s iconic Kepler Space Telescope, which has been there in an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit since March 7, 2009, and keeping an eye on the celestial activities for discovering the potential Earth-sized planets, has successfully managed to track down “219 Aspirant Planets” and a team of astronomers from NASA has detailed about the potentiality of those planets in a new comprehensive study paper, published today.
A confirmed by an official of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the NASA has released a new survey paper, detailing the new discoveries made by the Kepler Space Telescope. In the published paper, NASA has cataloged 219 candidate planets, which has high potential to accommodate extraterrestrial lives. Moreover, 10 of the herd of new exoplanets are similar in terms of size to the Earth and are spotted orbiting their respective star in the so-called inhabitable zone – a specific celestial region which features the liquid form of water and is made with a rocky surface.
As the paper detailed, Kepler Space Telescope, in its lifetime has discovered a total of 4,034 planets. But only 2,335 out of them have been confirmed as exoplanets. Moreover, Kepler also has identified 50 near-Earth-size candidates, orbiting in the inhabitable zone, 10 out of which are highly promising to accommodate lives. The data, collected from Kepler has helped the scientists at NASA to conclude the continuation of two different sized small planets, which have long-lasting insinuations on the continuous search for extraterrestrial life outside our planetary system.
NASA made the announcement while giving a brief glimpse of the discovery at the Ames Research Centre, located in California-based Silicon Valley. As a part of its Kepler program, the agency has revealed the latest findings made by Kepler under their planet-hunting endeavour. As said by NASA, of the ten new potential planets which could sustain alien life, seven are circling the stars which are not different from our Sun by any means and this has raised higher possibility about the presence of a new “Earth far from Earth”.