Demotion

Just over a week ago, I had mentioned KOI 326.01 in a post. KOIs are Kepler Objects of Interest, possible exoplanets as yet unconfirmed. There is a wealth of information that the Kepler mission researchers must go through to confirm these things. Initially, as mentioned in my previous post, KOI 326.01 (glorious name isn't it) had high hopes being a relatively close, habitable zone inhabiting, Earth-sized, cream of the crop from Kepler's planetary harvest.

Well it's not. The researchers have made their way to make judgment of poor KOI 326.01, and it turns out it is not the planet it was pretending to be. Discover Magazine has the exclusive on it, so I am mostly just summarizing what their article says. The demotion of KOI 326.01 stems from an error in the cataloging of the planets. From my perspective, that means a grad student was up all night; tired and coding, they must have slipped up somewhere. Anyways, said fault means the properties determined for the planet are false. Even better, there is uncertainty about which star the planet orbits. There seems to be a fair amount of confidence that the planet does actually exist though.

It should be noted that this is NOT a failure. From the beginning these objects have been labeled of interest because the are 'planet candidates.' There was never any guarantee that the initial data would prove 100% correct, and that is why the researchers must sift through the data to find out what is real. It is all in the process of science. This one planet really doesn't effect a whole lot of the statistics that have been determined from the data thus far, such as the suggestion that 10% of stars have Earth-sized planets. I also said we would be hearing more about KOIs in the future, and this is just beginning. This will help future research know even better what to look for in the data.

I figured this was relevant and interesting enough to make an early post about, I'll have another one later today.

Posted in Exoplanet,Kepler,KOI 22 comments