Twenty-six new exoplanets have been discovered by NASA scientists seeking to locate planets outside our solar system. The alien planets were found orbiting stars in 11 newly discovered solar systems by the Kepler telescope, which the U.S. space agency operates.
The exoplanets range in size from slightly larger than Earth to larger than the gas giant Jupiter in our solar system. They were discovered by Kepler, a space telescope which stares at 150,000 stars in a narrow sliver of the night sky from its perch orbiting the sun.
The alien planets orbit their host stars, which are bigger than the sun, once every six to 143 days. The largest of the newly-discovered solar systems, called Kepler-33, hosts five exoplanets ranging in size from one-and-a-half to five times Earth’s size.
Doug Hudgins is the program scientist with the Kepler mission. Hudgins says scientists do not believe any of the newly discovered exoplanets could support life.
“All of them are in orbits that are smaller than our Earth’s orbit around our sun. So they would be fairly hot planets,” Hudgins said.
In the two years since the Kepler began observing the cosmos, scientists have discovered 61 exoplanets and some 2,300 candidate planets that need to be verified through further observations.
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