“We’ve assembled the most accurate list of Kepler planet candidates and their properties to date,” said Dr. Jack Lissauer. “NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered the majority of known exoplanets, and this new catalog will enable astronomers to learn more about their characteristics.”

Though NASA’s Kepler space telescope officially “retired” in October 2018, scientists are still pouring over data from the iconic exoplanet hunter that operated for more than nine years. Most recently, scientists came upon data that added four more exoplanets to the Kepler-385 system, which is located approximately 4,700 light-years from Earth and had previously been known to contain three exoplanets, all of which were discovered in 2014.

Artist’s illustration displaying two of the seven planets within the Kepler-385 system. (Credit: NASA/Daniel Rutter)

The data shows the sizes of all seven planets are between Earth and Neptune, also known as Super-Earths, with the two inner planets hypothesized to be rocky while the remaining five are hypothesized to be gaseous. All the planets are hypothesized to be exposed to greater amounts of radiation per area than all the planets in our solar system. This is due to its parent star being approximately 10 percent larger and 5 percent hotter than our own Sun. This finding comes as NASA is about to release an updated Kepler catalog, which contains almost 4,400 exoplanet candidates.

It rotates on its axis, revolves around the Sun, moves throughout the Milky Way, and gets carried by our galaxy all throughout space.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered most of the confirmed exoplanets that we know of. But its successor, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), is catching up. New research announces the validation of eight more TESS candidates, and they’re all Super-Earths.

TESS’s planet-hunting mission has a more refined goal than its predecessor, Kepler. TESS was specifically built to detect exoplanets transiting in front of bright stars in Earth’s neighbourhood. It’s found about 400 confirmed exoplanets, but there’s a list of exoplanets awaiting confirmation that contains almost 6,000 candidates. There are only two ways to confirm all these exoplanets-in-waiting: further observations and statistical methods.

What all those unconfirmed candidates amount to is data. They’re hiding in TESS’s data, waiting for clever scientists to validate them. Further observations can help uncover them, but not alone.

Back in the old days, finding out your location on Earth was a pretty involved endeavor. You had to look at stars, use fancy gimballed equipment to track your motion, or simply be able to track your steps really really well. Eventually, GPS would come along and make all that a bit redundant for a lot of use cases. That was all well and good, until it started getting jammed all over the place to frustrate militaries using super-accurate satellite-guided weapons.

Today, there’s a great desire for more accurate navigational methods that don’t require outside communications that can easily be jammed. High-tech gyroscopes have long been a big part of that effort, allowing the construction of inertial navigation systems with greater accuracy than ever before.