Over 100 new exoplanets from Kepler and Gaia (earthsky.org)

By Paul Scott Anderson in Space | December 7, 2018

At least 18 of the new planets are less than 2 times larger than the Earth, and are likely to have rocky compositions with atmospheres comparable to Earth’s.

In recent decades, astronomers have confirmed a few thousand exoplanets, or planets orbiting distant stars. There are thousands more exoplanet candidates. On December 3, 2018, an international team of astronomers announced a plethora of new worlds to add to the list – not just one or two – but 104!

Astronomer John Livingston at the University of Tokyo led the newest of two studies describing the new worlds. He also created the video visualization above, which depicts the newly discovered exoplanet orbits. In the visualization, small exoplanets are Mercury-sized, large ones are Jupiter-sized. The colors indicate those planets’ temperatures; blue indicates roughly Earth’s temperature; white shows temperatures similar to the surface of Venus; and red shows lava-like temperatures. That’s a lot of information, for these distant, newly discovered worlds!

In the meantime, Livingston and colleagues’ results have also been published in a new peer-reviewed paper in Astronomical Journal.

This new planetary haul is particularly exciting when it comes to smaller rocky planets like Earth. As Livingston noted:

Eighteen of the [newest] 60 planets are less than two times larger than the Earth, and are likely to have rocky compositions with little to no atmosphere.

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more: https://earthsky.org/space/over-100-new-exoplanets-kepler-gaia