Kepler Finds Many New Exoplanets, But No Earth Analog

The Kepler Space Telescope has been through some hard times in its life. It's discovered hundreds of exoplanets, even as not one, but two of its stabilizers has failed, forcing the team behind Kepler to modify its mission. Then, in recent weeks, it went into emergency mode, raising concerns that even the extended mission would be brought to an end before its time. Luckily, Kepler made a full recovery, and now, it's in the news again. It's even good news this time. Astronomers announced that Kepler has discovered 1,284 new exoplanets. This is a huge number, for reference, before this announcement, we had discovered around 2,000 exoplanets. Thanks to these new planetary confirmations, that number has increased by about 60 percent. Even more remarkable is that of the roughly 3,200 confirmed exoplanets, Kepler has found 2,235 of them. It's done some good work.

Of course, we all know what the crown jewel of exoplanet hunting is, and the fact remains that we haven't found a true Earth analog yet. There are a couple of planets that stand out among this latest crop, but there's something about them all that plays spoiler. One orbits a star like ours, but is much bigger than Earth, another is the right size, but orbits a red dwarf and is almost certainly tidally locked. There is another Earth out there, there are probably millions, if not billions of them. We just haven't found it yet.