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

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.

Comments

Re:They didn't get it perfect. Must be useless

[gstoddart]

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.