NASA’s revamped planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has discovered more than 100 confirmed planets orbiting other stars.The information was shared by University of Arizona’s Ian Crossfield at a conference of the American Astronomical Society.He added that each confirmed planet has just a 1 percent chance of being a false positive.
Kepler, which recently got crippled by a mechanical malfunction, discovered the alien planets during its second-chance K2 mission.The spacecraft finds planets by the transit method, noting the tiny brightness dips caused, when a planet crosses its host star’s face from Kepler’s perspective.
Kepler was launched in March 2009 tasked with determining how commonly, Earth-like planets occur throughout the Milky Way galaxy.The mission has been incredibly successful, finding more than 1,000 alien worlds to date, more than half of all exoplanets ever discovered.