NASA's Kepler Space Telescope spots 4 exoplanets

A study on the data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope’s 2016 K2 mission has found evidence of a number of ‘free-floating’ planets, or exoplanets, in the deep space that are unbound to any host star.

Kepler telescope, which retired in 2018, monitored millions of stars in the centre of our galaxy every 30 minutes. The gravitational lensing resulted in the discovery of four exoplanets that are consistent with planets of similar masses to Earth.

Exoplanets are planets beyond our own solar system. Over 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered in the past two decades, mostly with the help of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope.

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“These signals are extremely difficult to find. Our observations pointed an elderly, ailing telescope with blurred vision at once the most densely crowded parts of the sky, where there are already thousands of bright stars that vary in brightness, and thousands of asteroids that skim across our field. From that cacophony, we try to extract tiny, characteristic brightenings caused by planets, and we only have one chance to see a signal before it’s gone. It’s about as easy as looking for the single blink of a firefly in the middle of a motorway, using only a handheld phone,” Dr Iain McDonald of The University of Manchester, UK, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

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NASA Exoplanets took to Twitter to share the names of the two planets — Kepler-129d and GJ849c. The two new additions took the total of exoplanets to 4,424.

NASA tweeted, “Two new planets join the ranks of known worlds today. We are now at 4,424 confirmed exoplanets! Kepler-129d and GJ 849c are the latest discoveries in our exoplanet catalogue. Welcome, friends.”