SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
"Solar Systems" Common Across the Galaxy
from National Geographic News
Last week NASA's Kepler mission added 26 new planets in 11 star systems to the roster of
confirmed extrasolar planets, or exoplanets. The find tripled the number of known planet systems
with multiple worlds that transit--or pass in front of--their stars.
Now, a new study based on Kepler data says that such multiplanet hauls will become more
common, because multiple-planet systems are much less likely than single candidates to turn out
to be false positives.
"What we are finding is that, if you see more than one planet candidate in a system, then it's
really likely that those are all real planets," said study co-author Elisabeth Adams, an
astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"So, of the 170 systems that Kepler has found with multiple planet candidates"--representing a
total of 408 possible planets--"probably all but one or two of the planets are real."
Read more...
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