Data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope constrains the number of nearby Earth-like planets. The task now is to find them.
The Kepler Space Telescope changed the way we think about the Universe. NASA launched this observatory in 2009 with the goal of spotting Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars. By the time the mission ended in 2018, the telescope had studied some 150,000 Sun-like stars and found 2,300 exoplanets, about half of all that are known.
That’s something of a surprise, even disappointment, when earlier estimates had suggested that there could be as many as 11 billion habitable exoplanets in the Milky Way. So how do Bryson and his colleagues arrive at their figure?Kepler looked for exoplanets by measuring changes in the amount of light received from a particular star. An exoplanet passing in front of a star blocks some of the light, albeit a tiny percentage. So Kepler looks for any small changes.
But in 2012 and 2013, two of the wheels failed leaving the spacecraft crippled. Lower precision observations continued until 2018 when the spacecraft finally died but the new data never quite made up for the problems associated with star variability. Kepler also studied a tiny area of the sky, amounting to about two scoops of the Big Dipper, near the constellation of Cygnus. So the numbers can be carefully multiplied to make them representative of the whole sky.
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