'We have found what are probably the last planets ever discovered by Kepler, in data taken while the spacecraft was literally running on fumes.'
In those final moments, the telescope's thrusters were firing erratically, leading to sharp jumps in the collected"light curves," researchers said. To validate the presence of K2-416 b and K2-417 b, the team looked for the planets' second transit around their respective stars. They found that the stars' light curves had dipped at the same depth and duration as they had during the first detected transit, confirming the candidates to be genuine exoplanets.
For both transit detections, a team of citizen astronomers visually inspected the light curves of all 33,000 stars rather than relying on automated techniques commonly used in the search for exoplanets, according to the study. "People doing visual surveys — looking over the data by eye — can spot novel patterns in the light curves and find single objects that are hard for automated searches to detect. And even we can't catch them all," co-author Tom Jacobs, a team member of the Visual Survey Group, said in the NASA statement."I have visually surveyed the complete K2 observations three times, and there are still discoveries waiting to be found.
For further confirmation, the team scoured image archives from the past 70 years to rule out the possibility of any background stars leading to false positives. They found no such possible complications for K2-416 b and K2-417 b, further confirming their planet status. But the third, unconfirmed exoplanet may have a"faint-red companion" orbiting very close to the star that is currently difficult to resolve.
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