NASA: 2 New Planets Discovered by Kepler

By: Kara Gilmour
08/27/2010 08:29 AM ET

NASA: 2 new planets discovered by Kepler. The 2 new Saturn-sized planets were discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Named Kepler-9b and 9c, the 2 planets bring good news to NASA.

2 new planets, found by NASA’s space-based telescope Kepler, are the size of Saturn. It’s good news for the space agency which has come under controversy relating to false alarms in June. However, the exoplanet discoveries continue.

Planets are found all the time, but NASA wanted to give themselves time to do follow-up observations before releasing data to the public. The new telescope has officially made the first concrete observation of a gravitational tug-of-war between neighboring exoplanets. This will allow astronomers to pinpoint the bodies’ masses in unprecedented detail.

In addition, scientists will probe how these alien solar systems formed and evolved. The Kepler telescope, launched in March 2009, detects exoplanets by looking for a periodic dimming in stellar brightness, caused by a planet passing in front of a star. Previously, astronomers relied on follow-up radial velocity observations.

Those observations only observed gravitational pulls of other potential planets. Such measurements have a lot of uncertainty and has caused false alarms in the past. However, if two exoplanets orbiting the same star have a strong gravitational influence on each other, astronomers can use this information to calculate their masses more accurately.

Kepler researchers are calling the new discovery “the first definitive observation of such transit time variations in planets” and they’re named Kepler-9b and 9c. The scientists have been able to calculate that the two planets are just slightly less massive than Saturn. Additional observations in the years ahead should ultimately give much more accurate masses. “We will know the masses [of these planets] better than any planet outside of our Solar System,” Matthew Holman, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, said in a statement.

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