Since its launch in 2009, the $600 million Kepler Space Telescope has been scanning the cosmos in search of exoplanets—planets outside our Solar System. To date, the planet-hunting telescope has identified over 4,000 potential planets, of which nearly 1,000 have been confirmed. Faulty reaction wheels (used to maintain the telescope’s orientation in space) resulted in the termination of Kepler’s primary mission in 2013. But thanks to some out-of-the-box thinking, scientists were able to harness photons from the Sun to act as a third reaction wheel, stabilizing and allowing the telescope to carry on.
Data from the first mission is still being analyzed, and the latest results to come out of it include a dozen planetary candidates that are similar to Earth in size and orbit within the habitable zone of their stars. As of today, one of these has been confirmed to be an actual planet.
Of the roughly 1,030 confirmed exoplanets that Kepler has detected, again, only a dozen are close in size to the Earth. This time last year, Kepler identified its first Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone: Kepler-186f. The habitable zone, sometimes referred to as the “Goldilocks Zone,” is the region around a star that has just the right conditions to find liquid water on a planet’s surface. And liquid water is a key ingredient in the search for life.
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