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NASA's Kepler mission uncovers 461 more potential planets to check out

C. Pulliam and D. Aguilar / CfA

An artist's illustration represents the variety of planets being detected by NASA's Kepler spacecraft, from worlds smaller than Earth up to Jupiter-type gas giants.





The new targets include KOI-172.02, a planet candidate that's about 1.5 times bigger than Earth and circles its sunlike parent star in a 242-day orbit. At that distance, liquid water, believed to be necessary for life, could exist on the potential planet's surface.

A Jupiter-sized planet known as PH2 b, discovered by citizen scientists participating in the Planet Hunters project, lies within its parent star's habitable zone.

"This is just a first step toward finding a habitable world elsewhere," Ji Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University and the lead author of a paper about PH2 b, said in a news release. "Any moon around this newly discovered, Jupiter-sized planet might be habitable. It’s very similar to what was depicted in the movie ‘Avatar’ — the habitable moon Pandora around a giant planet, Polyphemus.”

The Planet Hunters group also reported finding 42 candidate planets, including 15 that lie within habitable zones.




Earth-sized planets located about where Earth orbits the sun would take 365 days to circle their parent star. Those located closer, in Mercury-type 88-day orbits, transit more frequently. Scientists need at least two and preferably three or more cycles to determine whether an apparent transit is real or some other phenomena.

The Kepler roster also boosts the number of multiplanet systems. Of the 2,740 objects, 299 are in dual-planet systems, 112 are in triplets, 44 are part of four-planet systems, 11 systems have five planets and one system has six planets.

More about the planet quest:

This report includes information from NBC News. Reuters content: Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012. Check for restrictions at http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp