HD 212657 tagged posts

After detecting the first exoplanets in the 1990s it has become clear that planets around other stars are the rule rather than the exception and there are likely hundreds of billions of exoplanets in the Milky Way alone. The search for these planets is now a large field of astronomy. Credit: ESA/Hubble/ESO/M. Kornmesser

An international team analyzing the data from the K2 mission from the Kepler satellite has confirmed the existence of 95 new exoplanets. This brings the total for the K2 mission to almost 300 and the total number of exoplanets known to over 3,600. Kepler was launched in 2009 to study planets that transit in front of their parent stars. It has been an extremely successful mission but a failure in 2013 forced the researchers to change how the craft is operated...