NASA's Kepler mission has now been looking for transiting exoplanets for almost two years, and while we wait for the release of the next set of data and identified candidate exoplanets, they produced a very striking summary of what they got so far.
These are all 1235 exoplanet candidates from the first set of data releases!
The image shows the planet candidates and their host stars to scale, with the relative stellar size also shown correctly to scale, and the stellar colour rendered accurately.
This is a really really nice illustration of what Kepler has found to date.
It should be noted that some of these candidates are false alarms, due to unusually stable stellar spots, or blended triple stars.
The likely "false alarm" rate is somewhere around 10-20% given how the team cut the list of variable stars to find candidates, so these represent somewhere around 1,000 real planets.
We don't know which are real, yet.
Kepler, I gather, will be releasing more data fairly soon, this should both tighten up the this existing candidate list as some false candidates are ruled out, and some may be confirmed as exoplanets. Most will likely remain as candidates pending more data.
There will be significantly more exoplanet candidates, and in the nature of these observations, the new candidates should include more longer period planets, and more small planets.
Should be exciting, I am looking forward to it.
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Cool. that really is striking!
Are any of those candidates in the open clusters? IIRC some of the clusters in the Kepler field are several billion years old, would be nice to get some observational evidence of what the effects of the cluster environment over those kind of timescales do to planetary systems.
Talking of transiting planets, turns out 55 Cnc Ae is a transiting planet. Another example of a severely-irradiated terrestrial planet to go alongside CoRoT-7b and Kepler-10b.