Kepler finds 1284 more exoplanets

Los Angeles Times : On 10 May, the team running NASA’s Kepler space telescope announced that the spacecraft had identified another 1284 extrasolar planets, which brings the total number to 2325. The majority of the newly discovered planets are super-Earths or mini-Neptunes—both defined as planets roughly 1.25 to 10 times the mass of Earth. Nine of the planets orbit in the habitable zone of their parent star. The new planet haul resulted not from more data but from a new algorithm that determined how likely a signal detected by Kepler was a planet rather than a false positive. The algorithm was applied to the full dataset of 4302 candidate planets identified by the telescope, including the 984 previously confirmed exoplanets. The algorithm correctly identified the previously confirmed planets and pulled out the 1284 other signals that the team presented.