100+ new worlds found by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft

Artist concept. A crop of more than 100 planets, discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, includes four in Earth’s size-range orbiting a single dwarf star. Two of these planets are too hot to support life as we know it, but two are in the star’s “habitable” zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface. These small, rocky worlds are far closer to their star than Mercury is to our sun. But because the star is smaller and cooler than ours, its habitable zone is much closer. One of the two planets in the habitable zone, K2-72c, has a “year” about 15 Earth-days long—the time it takes to complete one orbit. This closer planet is likely about 10% warmer than Earth. On the second, K2-72e, a year lasts 24 Earth days, this slightly more distant planet would be about 6% colder than Earth. Credits: NASA/JPL

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, on its K2 mission, has found 197 new worlds, reports NASA on July 18, 2016. Four of which are promising planets and are orbiting the M dwarf star K2-72 at 181 light years away.

The host star for these four planets is half the size of our sun and less bright. The planets themselves are between 20 and 50 percent larger than Earth. Despite the fact that their orbits are closer than Mercury’s orbit around our sun, scientists cannot rule out the possibility of life.

Kepler is NASA’s first mission capable of finding Earth-size planets around other stars.

”The Kepler Mission, NASA Discovery mission #10, is specifically designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover dozens of Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets.”

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