NASA’s Kepler telescope Discovers New Planets

An interesting discovery has been made by the Kepler telescope, as it has located a pair of never seen before planets both of which are about the size of Saturn.

The Kepler telescope works by measuring the tiny changes in the brightness of stars as planets pass in front of them, and is by this method that the new planets were detected.

Kepler’s entire reason for being in orbit is to identify planets which are similar in size to earth and has the task of constantly monitoring an area of sky home to more than 150,000 different stars.

The planets have been dubbed Kelper 9b and 9c, and appear to orbit around a star more than 2,000 light years away in the constellation Lyra.

“This is the first confirmed system of more than one planet transiting the same star,” said Matthew Holman from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“This discovery is the first clear detection of transit timing variations,” he added.

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