The term ‘exoplanets’ is used to describe planets outside of our own solar system. The number of exoplanets that have been identified by astronomers totals fewer than 5,000 in all, so the identification of hundreds of new ones is a significant advance.
The team from University Of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) believe that studying such a large new group of bodies could improve understanding of how planets form and orbits evolve, and it could provide new insights about how unusual our solar system is.
“Discovering hundreds of new exoplanets is a significant accomplishment by itself, but what sets this work apart is how it will illuminate features of the exoplanet population as a whole,” said Erik Petigura, a UCLA astronomy professor and co-author of the research.
One challenge in identifying new planets is that reductions in stellar brightness may originate from the instrument or from an alternative astrophysical source that mimics a planetary signature...