NASA to announce Latest Kepler Discoveries During Media Teleconference

NASA will host a news teleconference at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT) Tuesday, May 10 to announce the latest discoveries made by its planet-hunting mission, the Kepler Space Telescope.

The briefing participants are:

• Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington
• Timothy Morton, associate research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey
• Natalie Batalha, Kepler mission scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California
• Charlie Sobeck, Kepler/K2 mission manager at Ames

The teleconference audio and visuals will be streamed live at:

http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

When Kepler was launched in March 2009, scientists did not know how common planets were outside our solar system. Thanks to Kepler's treasure trove of discoveries, astronomers now believe there may be at least one planet orbiting every star in the sky.

Kepler completed its prime mission in 2012, and collected data for an additional year in an extended mission. In 2014, the spacecraft began a new extended mission called K2. K2 continues the search for exoplanets while introducing new research opportunities to study young stars, supernovae and other cosmic phenomenon.

Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

For more information about NASA's Kepler mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/kepler


News Media Contact

Felicia Chou
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0257
felicia.chou@nasa.gov

 

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http://phys.org/news/2016-05-planets-kepler-mission-largest.html

1,284 new planets: Kepler mission announces largest collection ever discovered
May 10, 2016

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NASA's Kepler mission has verified 1,284 new planets – the single largest finding of planets to date.

"This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler," said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth."

Analysis was performed on the Kepler space telescope's July 2015 planet candidate catalog, which identified 4,302 potential planets. For 1,284 of the candidates, the probability of being a planet is greater than 99 percent – the minimum required to earn the status of "planet." An additional 1,327 candidates are more likely than not to be actual planets, but they do not meet the 99 percent threshold and will require additional study. The remaining 707 are more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also validated 984 candidates previously verified by other techniques.



Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-05-planets-kepler-mission-largest.html#jCp

 

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http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-637X/822/2/86

Abstract
We present astrophysical false positive probability calculations for every Kepler Object of Interest (KOI)—the first large-scale demonstration of a fully automated transiting planet validation procedure. Out of 7056 KOIs, we determine that 1935 have probabilities <1% of being astrophysical false positives, and thus may be considered validated planets. Of these, 1284 have not yet been validated or confirmed by other methods. In addition, we identify 428 KOIs that are likely to be false positives, but have not yet been identified as such, though some of these may be a result of unidentified transit timing variations. A side product of these calculations is full stellar property posterior samplings for every host star, modeled as single, binary, and triple systems. These calculations use vespa, a publicly available Python package that is able to be easily applied to any transiting exoplanet candidate.

 

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http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~tdm/koi-fpp/ms.pdf