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More Than Half of Kepler's Giant Exoplanets Were False Positives

Posted by timothy on from the let-the-universe-sort-'em-out dept.

StartsWithABang writes: By surveying an area of the sky containing over 150,000 stars visible to it, the Kepler satellite monitored each one over a multi-year period looking for periodic changes in brightness. Thousands of planetary candidates emerged via the transit method, where periodic dips of 3% or less were noted with regularity. However, a follow-up study has come out on the giant exoplanets, finding that over 50% of them aren't giant planets after all, but wound up being eclipsing binary stars. Perhaps our lone star Solar System is the oddity, after all.

7 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Giant science lever set to "Republican" no doub by halivar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind, and won't change the subject." -- Winston Churchill

  2. People in Texas must be loving this by macraig · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We all live in a lone star state, even those of us who don't live in Texas.

  3. a bit exaggerated by NostalgiaForInfinity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They are "false positives" in the sense that the stellar companion may be a small star or a brown dwarf instead of a "planet". But the distinction between a "big hot gas giant" and a "brown dwarf" is fairly academic, in particular if you're concerned with things like habitability.

  4. They didn't get it perfect. Must be useless by enjar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So someone comes up with a list of things that might be planets, then someone does further analysis and finds out that some aren't. Even (gasp) 52% of them! Science must therefore be useless.

    No, that's how science works -- you do an experiment, examine the results, then refine your experiment. Or someone else does. Repeat ad nauseum.

    1. Re:They didn't get it perfect. Must be useless by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

      More importantly, they found something using the technique. The technique worked.

      That they then looked closer and said "wow, not a planet, but another star" doesn't mean anything other than we're getting remarkably good at identifying candidates and then figuring out what they actually are.

      I'd say it's a great success, because they're actually finding things to look closer at. If some of those turn out to be not planets, but still actual things, then the technique is working just fine.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  5. Re:Confirmation bias by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I wouldn't really call it false positives since there's a sliding scale between giant planet and star.

    It would have been a lot worse if it was revealed that there was no object at all.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  6. 'Transit' method relies on planar alignment by BenJeremy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's terribly incorrect, to say, as the summary says, "Perhaps our lone star Solar System is the oddity, after all" - to the point of blunt stupidity.

    Kepler's transit method will find some exoplanets, or at least the signs that something is worth taking a closer look at, but it also relies on a system's elliptical plane being aligned just so such a large exoplanet can cross the path of the star - in other words, we have to be able to see that plan edge-on. This reduces the likelihood of practically using this method to actually find something around 100-to-1, if it even exists.