Will All These Young People Stop Discovering Potentially Habitable Exoplanets Already?
Astronomers have announced the discovery of 17 new exoplanets in a star system roughly 1,000 lightyears away from Earth.
One of the planets is Earth-sized and within its star's habitable zone.
This isn't the first time Kunimoto has discovered a bundle of exoplanets.
A graduate student in astronomy at the University of British Columbia just made an incredible discovery. Michelle Kunimoto was poring over data collected by NASA’s recently retired Kepler space telescope when she discovered not one, not two, but 17 new exoplanets circling a distant star.
One of the exoplanets is Earth-sized and lies in the habitable zone of its star. In the habitable zone, conditions are hypothetically just right for liquid water on the surface of the planet. "This planet is about a thousand light-years away, so we're not getting there anytime soon!" said Kunimoto in a statement.
The newly discovered Earth-size exoplanet, dubbed KIC-7340288 b, has a shorter orbital period than Earth—about 142.5 days—and is 1.5 times the size of our planet. The other planets Kunimoto discovered range in size from two-thirds the size of Earth to as much as eight times Earth’s size.
The team published the findings this week in The Astronomical Journal. During its original four-year tenure, Kepler only collected data on 15 Earth-sized planets within the habitable zone. In 2018, the telescope was retired after nine years of service. Kunimoto and her colleagues checked the Kepler data against observations made by the Near InfraRed Imager and Spectrometer on the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii.
Kunimoto is a planet-hunting force to be reckoned with. She previously found four other exoplanets during her time as an undergrad at the University of British Columbia.
"Every time a planet passes in front of a star, it blocks a portion of that star's light and causes a temporary decrease in the star's brightness," Kunimoto said. "By finding these dips, known as transits, you can start to piece together information about the planet, such as its size and how long it takes to orbit."
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