The data from the Kepler Space Telescope was used by UCLA researchers to identify hundreds of new exoplanets, including 18 planetary systems similar to the one shown here. Peter Devine is credited via NASA.
Thanks to a UCLA researcher, UCLA astronomy has identified over 300 new exoplanets. Their most noteworthy findings is a planetary system that consists of a star and at least two gas giant planets, each roughly the size of Saturn and located close to one another.
The paper about the discoveries is in the journal.
The term "exoplanets" is used to describe planets outside of our solar system. The number of exoplanets that have been identified by the astronomer is less than 5,000, so the identification of hundreds of new ones is significant. Studying a large group of bodies could help scientists understand how planets form and how our solar system is different.
"Discovering hundreds of new exoplanets is a significant accomplishment, but what sets this work apart is how it will illuminate features of the exoplanet population as a whole," said Petigura, a UCLA astronomy professor and co-author of the research.
Jon Zink is the lead author of the paper and he is a UCLA scholar. He and Petigura were part of a team that identified the exoplanets using data from the NASA K2 mission.
Zink developed a new planet detection algorithm. One challenge in identifying new planets is that there may be different sources of stellar brightness. Teasing out which ones requires extra investigation, which has traditionally been extremely time consuming and can only be accomplished through visual inspection. Zink's program is able to separate signals from noise.
Petigura said that Jon and the Scaling K2 team came up with a major breakthrough in understanding the population of planets. They will help us understand the physical processes by which planets form and evolve.
The original mission of the telescope was stopped in 2013 due to a mechanical failure, which left it unable to point at the patch of sky it had been observing for years.
Astronomers used the telescope to identify exoplanets near distant stars. Data from K2 is helping scientists understand how stars' location in the galaxy affects what kind of planets are able to form around them. The software used to identify possible planets was unable to handle the complexity of the K2 mission, including the ability to determine the planets' size and their location relative to their star.
The first fully automated K2 pipeline was introduced by Zink and his team.
The researchers used the new software to analyze the entire dataset from K2 to create a "catalog" that will be included in NASA's master exoplanet archive. The data was processed by UCLA's Hoffman2 Cluster.
The catalog shows 381 other planets that were previously identified.
Zink said the findings could be a significant step towards helping astronomy understand which types of stars are most likely to have planets circling them and what that tells about the building blocks needed for successful planet formation.
He said that we need to look at a wide range of stars, not just ones like our sun.
The discovery of the planetary system with two gas giant planets was significant because it's rare to find gas giants as close to their host star as they were in this case. Zink said that the finding could help scientists form a more accurate understanding of the parameters for how planets and planetary systems develop.
He said that the discovery of each new world provides a glimpse into the physics that play a role in planet formation.
Jon K. Zink and his colleagues wrote Scaling K2. There are four. A sample of a uniform planet for campaigns. There is a book titled "10847/1538-3881/ac2309".
The journal has information about astronomy.
Astronomers discovered more than 300 possible new exoplanets on November 23, 2021.
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