Michelle Kunimoto, a student at the University of British Columbia (UBC), decided to listen a little closer to some of the signals being collected by NASA’s Kepler mission, and surprised her instructors by locating four potential new planets, even one that is in the zone around its star that could leave it warm enough to have liquid flowing water.
The physics and astronomy graduate focused her attention on signals that the original mission felt were too weak to investigate further, according to cbc.ca. She compared the process to listening to one person in a crowded room of talkers, adding just because you can’t hear them well, doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
After she discovered the planets, well, actually planetary candidates, as they are known until they are verified by independent research, she collaborated with Jason Rowe, who was member of the original Kepler mission and writer of much of the search code.
Kunimoto said, “When he was able to say, yes, these look like planets, that was just an amazing moment.”
The original Kepler mission looked at possible planets by watching for short interruptions in the light received from a star, indicating the possibility of a planet passing between the star and the telescope. Using the duration and period of these interruptions, scientists were able to calculate the size of the planetary candidate and its distance from the star which it was orbiting.
One of the planets discovered by Kunimoto looks particularly interesting to the researchers, because it lies in the habitable zone of its star, a distance at which it could be warm enough to have liquid water and life possibilities. The team says the planet candidate, dubbed KOI-408.05, is probably a gas giant, but the intriguing part is that planets of this one’s size sometimes have moon systems and those moons would also be in the habitable zone.
Kunimoto adds these moons could be large enough to sustain an atmosphere and could possibly have liquid oceans. At a distance of 3,200 light years from Earth, more research will need to be done to verify these new candidates as planets, but the discovery has scientists looking more closely.
Kunimoto and her supervisor, Jaymie Matthews, a professor of astronomy at UBC, have submitted their findings to the Astronomical Journal, and Kunimoto plans to return to UBC in September to search for more planet candidates that could possibly support life.