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The Kepler space telescope has undoubtedly been one of the most important space missions
humanity has ever launched. Scanning a tiny patch of the night sky for the tell tale dips
in light as a planet passes in front of a distant star, the £360 million spacecraft
has identified thousands of potential planets, hundreds of light years from our own solar
system.
And Kepler's just got a whole lot more successful, with a bumper haul of 715 new planet candidates
being confirmed orbiting 305 stars, bringing the total of confirmed planets to over 1800
in just two decades. Over half of those are Kepler's work.
What remarkable about this latest haul isn't just the number, it's the quality of the planets
discovered. In the early days, most of the planets we found were vast gas giants, up
to several times the size of jupiter. That's all change, however, as more precise data
has flowed in. 95% of the planets in this latest batch are smaller than neptune - that
is around 4x the radius of Earth. Four are not only less than 2.5 times the size of Earth,
they are orbiting within their stars' goldilocks zone, where liquid water could exist.
It's thought there are tens of billions of planets in our galaxy - Kepler has only been
scanning a tiny fraction of the sky, and following the failure of it's guidance wheels, it's
flood of data has slowed, at least for now. However, scientists will be sifting through
what's already been recorded for several years to come, so Kepler's achievements are far
from done.