Nine of them are potentially habitable, meaning Earth-sized and in the Habitable (or "goldilocks") zone where liquid water can exist on their surfaces.
More info in source.
Science Alert wrote:NASA's Kepler Space Telescope mission has just announced the discovery of 1,284 new exoplanets - nine of which could be potentially habitable.
This is the largest number of new planets released at one time, and almost doubles the number of confirmed exoplanets out there in the Universe. The discoveries were made using a new technique that allows scientists to assess the probability that cool blips in the data really are planets, and aren't the result of other astronomical objects.
When Kepler looks for exoplanets, it's looking at the light coming from stars. Any sign of that light dimming slightly before it gets to Kepler could be a result of planet passing in front of its sun.
That's the best system we have so far for spotting these planets outside our Solar System, but it can also lead to a whole lot of false positives, because planets aren't the only thing that can dim a star's light.
In the past, we've had to follow up each of those candidate planet observations one by one from ground-based telescopes, which is incredibly time-consuming and expensive, and it's the reason we only had 984 confirmed exoplanets before this.
But the new validation technique instead assesses the probability that planet candidates really are planets en masse, without any follow-up required.
"Imagine planet candidates as bread crumbs," said Timothy Morton from Princeton University in New Jersey, who developed the new technique. "If we drop a few on the ground we can pick them up one by one. But if you spill a whole bucket full of small crumbs, you're going to need a broom to clean them up."
This new technique is that metaphorical broom. It works by simulating two things: first, how much the shape of a candidate's planet transit signal looks like a planet, statistically speaking; a secondly, how common false positives 'imposter candidates' are out there.
Putting this information together gives scientists a reliability score between zero and one for each planet candidate. Candidates with a reliability greater than 99 percent are called 'validated planets', without having to perform any follow-up observations.
Using this new technique, there are now 1,935 confirmed exoplanets in total, with 1,284 of those being new discoveries.
Of course, the point of all this planet-spotting is to try to answer the big question "are we alone in the Universe?" To figure this out, Kepler also uses the transit signal of planets to work out their size and how far they're situated from their sun - which provides some indication of whether they could potentially host liquid water and maybe even life.
