Astronomy Student Discovers 17 New Planets, Including Earth-Sized World
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Listed on Forbes "30 under 30" for Science in 2017, Michelle Kunimoto has discovered 17 new, extra-solar planets.
Astronomy student discovers 17 new planets, including Earth-sized world:
University of British Columbia astronomy student Michelle Kunimoto has discovered 17 new planets, including a potentially habitable, Earth-sized world, by combing through data gathered by NASA's Kepler mission.
Over its original four-year mission, the Kepler satellite looked for planets, especially those that lie in the "Habitable Zones" of their stars, where liquid water could exist on a rocky planet's surface.
The new findings, published in The Astronomical Journal, include one such particularly rare planet. Officially named KIC-7340288 b, the planet discovered by Kunimoto is just 1 times the size of Earth-small enough to be considered rocky, instead of gaseous like the giant planets of the Solar System-and in the habitable zone of its star.
"This planet is about a thousand light years away, so we're not getting there anytime soon!" said Kunimoto, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of physics and astronomy. "But this is a really exciting find, since there have only been 15 small, confirmed planets in the Habitable Zone found in Kepler data so far."
The planet has a year that is 142 days long, orbiting its star at 0.444 Astronomical Units (AU, the distance between Earth and our Sun) - just bigger than Mercury's orbit in our Solar System, and gets about a third of the light Earth gets from the Sun.
Of the other 16 new planets discovered, the smallest is only two-thirds the size of Earth-one of the smallest planets to be found with Kepler so far. The rest range in size up to eight times the size of Earth.
More information: Michelle Kunimoto et al, Searching the Entirety of Kepler Data. I. 17 New Planet Candidates Including One Habitable Zone World, The Astronomical Journal (2020). DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ab6cf8
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