A few days before he “fell silent”, the Kepler space telescope “gave” astronomers information about three new exoplanets.

The study, conducted with the help of civilian amateur astronomers, is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

More than 5,000 planets have been confirmed to exist outside our solar system, and more than half of them have been discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Shortly before it fell silent in October 2018, the telescope continued to record the brightness of stars, and a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin analyzed the high-quality data from the past week and he noticed three stars in the same part of the sky, whose brightness seemed to fade for a while. As they discovered two stars “host” the planet, while the third is a candidate planet that has yet to be confirmed..

The researchers presented their observations to the Visual Survey Group, a group of amateur and professional astronomers who look for exoplanets in satellite data. The team spent several days effectively studying the light curves of about 33,000 stars recorded by Kepler. This was data collected by the telescope just a week before it ran out of fuel. Even with this little data, the team was able to detect a unique transit in three different stars.

Professional astronomers then examined the latest, lower-quality observations made by the telescope over its last eleven days of operation to see if they could detect additional transits of the same three stars, indicating that the planet is periodically orbiting its star. This study confirmed the presence of two planets.

One planet is K2-416 b, which has approx. 2.6 times the size of Earth and revolves around its star approximately every 13 days. The second, K2-417 b, is a slightly larger planet that is just over three times the size of Earth and orbits its star every six and a half days. Both planets are about 400 light years from Earth.

The candidate planet (EPIC 246251988 b) is the largest of the three, nearly four times the size of Earth, orbits its star in about ten days, and is located just over 1,200 light-years from Earth.

“We found what may be the last planets ever discovered by Kepler in data taken when the spacecraft was literally running on smoke,” says Professor Andrew Vanderberg of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Source: RES