Kapteyn b is 11.5 billion years old, making it the most ancient known planet that may be capable of supporting life. The oldest potentially habitable alien planetĪlso this year, astronomers announced the discovery of Kapteyn b, a super Earth that orbits in the habitable zone of a red dwarf located just 13 light-years away from our solar system. Kepler scientists expect about 90 percent of the candidates will turn out to be bona fide planets. Kepler's original mission netted nearly 4,200 planet candidates, nearly 1,000 of which have been confirmed to date. However successful K2 turns out to be, the new mission won't approach the exoplanet tally Kepler racked up during its pre-glitch operations. In December, researchers announced that Kepler had discovered a world called HIP 116454b, which is about 2.5 times bigger than Earth and lies 160 light-years away. The first K2 exoplanet is now in the books.
But the Kepler team devised a way to stabilize the observatory using sunlight pressure, and in May 2014, NASA approved a new, two-year mission for the spacecraft called K2, during which it has been hunting for alien planets, supernova explosions and other cosmic phenomena. Kepler's original exoplanet hunt ground to a halt in May 2013, when the second of its four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed. The first exoplanet of Kepler's new mission So the search for the first confirmed exomoon continues. Unfortunately, there's no way to follow up on the find, because microlensing events are random encounters. The researchers saw one lensing event caused by a foreground object that could be one of two things: a free-flying "rogue planet" with a rocky exomoon, or a small star that hosts a planet about 18 times more massive than Earth. The team used a technique called gravitational microlensing, which notes how a foreground object's gravity warps the light from a distant star when it passes in front of the star from Earth's perspective. Most worlds between these two extremes are probably "gas dwarfs," planets with rocky cores and thick hydrogen-helium atmospheres that never grew to the size of Saturn, Jupiter and other gas giants, the study found.Īstronomers may have detected the moon of an alien planet for the first time in 2014, but we'll never know for sure. Īfter studying more than 600 newfound Kepler planets, the researchers determined that worlds less than 1.7 times the size of Earth are likely to be rocky, while those at least 3.9 times bigger than our planet are gaseous. That's the conclusion of another 2014 study, which laid out the classification of "gas dwarf" exoplanets. Just as rocky planets can apparently be much larger than previously thought, gaseous worlds can be surprisingly small. Kepler-10c is therefore the first known member of a new class of exoplanets, the "mega-Earths." This "Godzilla of Earths," as one of its discoverers described Kepler-10c, orbits a sunlike star that lies about 560 light-years from Earth. Such hefty worlds were thought to be primarily gaseous, but Kepler-10c is rocky. Researchers confirmed this huge haul of Kepler planets using a technique called "validation by multiplicity," which relies on probability and statistics rather than additional observations by other telescopes.Īnother headliner from 2014 is Kepler-10c, a planet about 17 times more massive than Earth. More than 90 percent of the newfound planets are smaller than Neptune, and four of them are habitable-zone worlds less than 2.5 times the size of Earth, scientists said. While Gliese 832c may be habitable, it could also resemble scorching-hot Venus, whose thick atmosphere has led to a runaway greenhouse effect.Įxoplanet discoveries usually come in drips and drops, but in February, the Kepler team unleashed a torrent: Researchers announced the spacecraft had spotted 715 new alien worlds, nearly doubling the known population in one fell swoop. The exoplanet is a "super Earth" at least five times as massive as Earth, its discoverers say.
A world called Gliese 832c is also potentially habitable - and it lies just 16 light-years away, a mere stone's throw considering the vast scale of the universe.Īstronomers found Gliese 832c, which also orbits a red dwarf, using three different ground-based instruments. Kepler-186f isn't the only planet found last year that might be capable of supporting life. But Kepler-186f is a member of the family nonetheless, with its discoverers characterizing it as an "Earth cousin." Kepler-186f is not the elusive "Earth twin" that astronomers have long sought the planet circles a red dwarf, a star smaller and dimmer than the sun. The planet lies 490 light-years from Earth and is just 10 percent wider than our home world. As its name suggests, Kepler-186f was found by NASA's prolific Kepler space telescope.
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