![]() Kepler has proven there are more planets than stars in our galaxy - and knowing that revolutionizes our scientific understanding of our place in the cosmos. NASA's Kepler mission revolutionized our scientific understanding of our place in the cosmos by discovering that: The Top Science Results from the Kepler Mission Kepler leaves a legacy of more than 2,600 planet discoveries from outside our solar system, many of which could be promising places for life. “As a result, the path toward a more complete understanding of early planet formation in the galaxy starts unfolding before us.After nine years in deep space collecting data that revealed our night sky to be filled with billions of hidden planets – more planets even than stars – NASA’s Kepler space telescope was retired. “From the first rocky exoplanets to the discovery of an Earth-sized planet orbiting another star in its habitable zone, we are now getting first glimpses of the variety of galactic environments conducive to the formation of these small worlds,” the astronomers wrote in their new paper. That discovery is going to help astronomers learn even more about the history of the Milky Way. “Planetary systems around stars have been a common feature of our galaxy for a long, long time.” This system tells us that planets were forming around stars nearly 7 billion years before our solar system. “Kepler-444 came from the first generation of stars. “This is one of the oldest systems in the galaxy,” Kawaler said of the Kepler discovery, noting that our Sun is 4.5 billion years old. That’s how Kepler does its primary job: finding distant planets by measuring tiny changes in brightness as they pass in front of their stars. Kepler takes high-precision measurements of those changes in brightness. Those sound waves affect the star’s temperature, creating pulsating changes in brightness that offer clues to the star’s diameter, mass, and age. To do that, Kawaler and the rest of the team studied sound waves within the star. Kawaler’s role within the research team was to help with the stellar seismology work that determined the size of Kepler-444. Steve Kawaler from Iowa State University said Kepler-444 is very bright and can be easily seen with binoculars. At that distance, they’re all much hotter than Mercury and aren’t habitable. Those planets are so close to their star that they complete their orbits in fewer than 10 days. The star’s five known planets have sizes that fall between Mercury and Venus. ![]() The paper describes Kepler-444, a star that’s 25 percent smaller than our Sun and is 117 light-years from Earth. “We thus show that Earth-sized planets have formed throughout most of the universe’s 13.8-billion-year history, leaving open the possibility for the existence of ancient life in the galaxy,” the astronomers wrote in their paper. Astronomers poring over four years of data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft have discovered a star that’s 11.2 billion years old and has at least five Earth-sized planets.
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