Nasa telescope focuses on new planets

Nasa’s planet-hunting telescope is finding whole new worlds of possibilities in the search for alien life, the space agency said yesterday.

An early report from a cosmic census indicates that relatively small planets and stable multi-planet systems are far more plentiful than previous searches showed.

Nasa released new data yesterday from its Kepler telescope on more than 1,000 possible new planets outside our solar system – more than doubling the count of what astronomers call exoplanets.

They have not been confirmed as planets yet, but some astronomers estimate 90 per cent of what Kepler has found will eventually be verified.

Kepler, launched in 2009, has been orbiting the sun between earth and Mars, conducting a planet census and searching for earth-like planets since last year.

It has found there are more planets that are much smaller than Jupiter – the biggest planet in our solar system – than there are giant planets.

Some of these even approach earth’s size. That means they are better potential candidates for life than the behemoths that are more easily spotted, astronomers say.

While Kepler has not yet found planets that are as small as earth, all the results are “pointing in the right direction”, said University of California Santa Cruz astronomer Jonathan Fortney, a Kepler researcher.

Yale University exoplanet expert Debra Fischer, who was not part of the Kepler team but serves as an outside expert for Nasa, said the new information “gives us a much firmer footing” in eventual hopes for worlds that could harbour life.

“I feel different today knowing these new Kepler results than I did a week ago,” Ms Fischer said.