NASA's Kepler Telescope achieves big milestone with 1,000th exoplanet discovery

January 9, 2015

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has achieved a big milestone after it had discovered 1000 exoplanet.
In order to achieve this milestone, planet hunting telescope had continuously monitored more than 150,000 stars beyond our solar system.
It has offered scientists an assortment of more than 4,000 candidate planets for further study and recently, 1,000 exoplanet was verified among these monitored stars.
Key facts

Using Kepler’s data, scientists have reached this millenary milestone after validating 8 more planet candidates that were spotted by the telescope.
Kepler team also has added another 554 candidates to the roll of potential planets. Among them 6 are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of stars similar to our Sun.
As per Kepler team, 3 of the newly-validated planets are located in their distant suns habitable zone. They are in the range of distances from the host star where liquid water might exist on the surface of an orbiting planet.
Of the three planets, two are likely made of rock like Earth. They were named as Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b.
Both Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b orbit stars smaller and cooler than our Sun. Thus making the habitable zone closer to their parent star, in the direction of the constellation Lyra.

Exoplanet: It is is a planet that does not orbit the Sun and instead orbits a different star, stellar remnant, or brown dwarf. It is also termed as extrasolar planet.

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