A multinational team led by astronomers from the University of California, Los Angeles, including 366 that had never discovered previously, discovered hundreds of potential exoplanets. There are less than 5,000 verified exoplanets so far. If these findings validated, it will add a large number of new objects to the list of worlds that exist outside of our solar system. The research, lead by Dr. Jon Zink and published in The Astronomical Journal, offers a novel method for detecting exoplanets based on data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope’s K2 mission, The detection algorithm can make more precise predictions about what is likely to be an observation and what is noise.
The optimal strategy normally necessitates human visual assessment of the data, but this research aims to get beyond that. By automating exoplanet-hunting with a high success rate, the Scaling K2 project may result in the discovery of additional candidate exoplanets.
In a statement, co-author Professor Erik Petigura of UCLA remarked, “The catalog and planet discovery method that Jon and the Scaling K2 team constructed is a tremendous step in comprehending the population of planets.” “I’m confident they’ll help us better grasp the physical processes that cause planets to develop and evolve.”
There were 747 distinct planet candidates and 57 multiplanet systems discovered by the algorithm. A star system with two gas giant planets rotating very swiftly around their stars, as well as a system with planets in resonance is among the never-before-seen contenders. That is to say, they circle in a regular pattern, with each planet’s year being proportional to the others.
The program analyzed the brightness of stars in 800 million photos, which totaled 500 gigabytes of data. The size of the assignment is one of the reasons why automating the process will save time.
“Discovering hundreds of new exoplanets is a remarkable achievement in and of itself,” Petigura continued, “but what sets our effort distinct is how it will expose properties of the exoplanet population as a whole.”
When it comes to the development of planets and how typical star systems like our own are, there are many unknowns. Finding answers to these concerns necessitates the finding of more exoplanets, which we are doing due to Kepler and other telescopes. With almost 2,600 candidates reported from the primary mission, NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) has already undertaken remarkable observations and identified new exoplanets.
