Kepler’s Remarkable Discovery: Seven Exoplanets Orbiting a Burned Star in Milky Way

2023-11-06 19:02:38

Astronomers have observed seven planets orbiting a star in the Milky Way galaxy, whose star had been burned by excessive radiation energy to which it was exposed. This discovery is the second largest number of planets discovered so far around any star outside our solar system. Archyde.com explained that this data was obtained by NASA’s now-retired Kepler space telescope. All seven planets are larger than Earth, and are the largest of the four rocky planets in our solar system, but smaller than Neptune, the smallest of the four gas planets in our solar system. They all have orbits closer to their star than Mercury’s average distance to the Sun. Astronomer Jack Lessauer, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, said that all the planets are “fried” more intensely than any planet in our solar system. Scientists have so far identified more than 5,500 planets outside our solar system, and observed hundreds of stars with multiple exoplanets. The Kepler Space Telescope, NASA’s first planet-hunting mission, stopped in 2018 and discovered exoplanets by observing small dips in a star’s brightness when a planet crosses in front of it from our view. The new study classifies approximately 4,400 planets observed by the telescope from its launch in 2009 until its retirement, and scientists continue to analyze its data.
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