The “Dead” Telescope Finds Jupiter’s Twin From Above The Grave

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Kerins stated that “The difference between Kepler’s vantage point and Earth observers allowed us to triangulate along our sightline where the planetary system was located.”

Apart from the thrill of finding an exoplanet using an instrument that is no longer in service, Kepler wasn’t designed to find exoplanets with this phenomenon. Kepler’s mission was expanded in 2016. After two failures of the reaction wheels, it was suggested that Kepler be used in a K2 “second-light” mission to detect potentially habitable exoplanets. The extension was approved in 2014. The mission was extended well beyond the scope’s intended end date, until it ran out of fuel on October 30, 2018.

Kerins stated that Kepler was not designed to find exoplanets using microlensing. Kerins also said that future instruments, such as NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope or the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission could use microlensing to study them and be able further such research.

“Roman and Euclid will, however, be optimized for this type of work. Kerins stated that they will be able complete the Kepler-inspired planet census. “We will learn the typical architecture of our solar system. We will also be able to use the data to verify our theories about how planets form. This is the beginning of a new chapter in our quest for other worlds.

This discovery has been described in a study published on March 31 on the preprint server ArXiv.org. It was submitted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.