Ten of the planets are potentially rocky, close to the size of Earth and within the habitable zone of the stars they orbit — meaning they could support liquid water on their surface, Perez explained.
“The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near-Earth analogs: planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth,” he said.
With the addition of this latest release, Kepler has now identified 4,034 planet candidates, and 2,335 of them have been confirmed as exoplanets. The mission has also found 50 candidates similar in size to Earth, with more than 30 of them confirmed.
This new data from the Kepler mission also suggest that within the “family tree” of exoplanets found, the smaller ones fall into two distinct sizes: Earth-like planets and super-Earths, and gaseous mini-Neptunes.
The final catalog of planet candidates will help researchers discover how many planets in the galaxy are Earth-like.
With this new data, the catalog suggests that about half of the exoplanets in our galaxy are either gaseous, with no surface, or have such a heavy atmosphere that life as we know it would not be possible. But Kepler’s ability to find and confirm exoplanets and rocky Earth-size planets also provides candidates for future observation by space telescopes.
This is the final catalog detailing exoplanet candidates and confirmations from Kepler’s survey taken during the first four years observing part of the constellation Cygnus. The researchers also believe it to be the most detailed catalog of exoplanet candidates.
The news comes during the Kepler Science Conference and NASA’s Kepler exoplanet week, to celebrate the successes of these missions and the scientists who have made exoplanet discoveries possible.
Since launching in 2009, Kepler has been watching more than 200,000 stars in one part of the sky to determine exoplanet candidates, based on the slight dimming of light emitted by stars when potential planets pass across them.
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