UBC: Student Discovers 17 New Planets, Including Potentially Habitable World
Posted: Sat Feb 29, 2020 4:08 pm
UBC Student Discovers 17 New Planets, Including Potentially Habitable, Earth-Sized World
University of British Columbia | 2020 Feb 28
Searching the Entirety of Kepler Data. I. 17 New Planet Candidates Including
One Habitable Zone World ~ Michelle Kunimoto, Jaymie M. Matthews, and Henry Ngo
University of British Columbia | 2020 Feb 28
University of British Columbia astronomy student Michelle Kunimoto has discovered 17 new planets, including a potentially habitable, Earth-sized world, by combing through data gathered by NASA’s Kepler mission.
Over its original four-year mission, the Kepler satellite looked for planets, especially those that lie in the “Habitable Zones” of their stars, where liquid water could exist on a rocky planet’s surface.
The new findings, published in The Astronomical Journal, include one such particularly rare planet. Officially named KIC-7340288 b, the planet discovered by Kunimoto is just 1 ½ times the size of Earth – small enough to be considered rocky, instead of gaseous like the giant planets of the Solar System – and in the habitable zone of its star. ...
The planet has a year that is 142 ½ days long, orbiting its star at 0.444 Astronomical Units (AU, the distance between Earth and our Sun) – just bigger than Mercury’s orbit in our Solar System, and gets about a third of the light Earth gets from the Sun. ...
Searching the Entirety of Kepler Data. I. 17 New Planet Candidates Including
One Habitable Zone World ~ Michelle Kunimoto, Jaymie M. Matthews, and Henry Ngo
- Astronomical Journal 159(3):124 (2020 Mar) DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ab6cf8