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Hochrechnungen der Kepler-Mission sagen: Mindestens 1,4 Milliarden!

They have found, definitely, 306 new extra-solar planets, including 5 systems with multiple planets. Unlike previous searches, most of the planets that Kepler found are Neptune-sized (the smallest gas giant in our Solar System) or smaller!

That’s very, very promising! But they’ve left us with the ultimate teaser: they are withholding data — for a year — on 400 particularly juicy candidates!

What did they find? Are they Earth-sized planets? Are they planets in the habitable zones around their stars? Are they “just barely” detections, and they want to get some more data?

If we assume that each one is a planet, that brings us to 706 planets around 100,000 stars. Since our galaxy has around 200 billion stars, we can figure out that there ought to be — wait for it — at least 1.4 billion planets in our galaxy!

And that, mind you, is a lower limit, as this only will see planets orbiting edge-on to their stars! But it’s the biggest lower limit we’ve ever been able to set, and you’re among the first to know!

Katalog der bisher bekannten Exoplaneten.
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