After the first incident that has endangered the whole mission of the telescope Kepler before about three years and the second fright that took a few months ago, NASA scientists space telescope continues searching for solar systems and planets similar to our own solar system and planets like Earth.
Recently, the space telescope has detected a cluster of four exoplanets found orbiting a red dwarf called K2-72, which is located 181 light years away from Earth in the constellation of Aquarius.
The four planets are 20% to 50% larger than ours, suggesting rocky surface, both of them, and K2-72c K2-72e are in the so-called "residential area". Therefore orbit around their star, they should be far and close enough to have liquid water on their surface, which could mean that they harbor life. The findings were between a report with 104 promising planets announced last January, but only recently posted online.
The Kepler was the first space telescope designed to detect planetary systems, and launched in 2009 to find planets that are like our own Earth: that have similar size and are orbiting at a specific distance from the parent star to have liquid water on their surface. The telescope was designed to record small decreases in the brightness of stars that it had put target (in most cases such reductions are due to planets passing in front of the star). Unfortunately, the original and fundamental mission had to be abandoned because they require extreme precision in orientation of the telescope, which after the problem presented was not feasible. However, NASA managed to configure it in such a way so that it can detect smaller luminance stars, such as red dwarfs like K2-72.
Since this is a red dwarf, the "habitable zone" is much closer than in the case of our own star. For example, the K2-72c performs a full rotation about the K2-72 every 15 Earth days, but still is only by 10 ° C hotter than our planet. The K2-72e on the other, makes a complete rotation every 24 Earth days and is about 6% colder than the Earth.
