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

1% of a REALLY big number is still a big number.

[tarpitcod]

Even if 99% of the 2000+ exo-planets are not exo-planets, that's still 20 detected. Which isn't half-bad considering how long we've been seriously (space based telescopes etc) looking for them.

The conclusions in the article are weird to me. They are saying 52% of the exoplanets may not be exoplanets for this Kepler system example. Even if that holds, given the 2000+ exoplanets, if 48% are still probably exoplanets, that's 960 of them.

I'm assuming that Wikipedia's exoplanet count is sort-of right, and that it hasn't been already halved because we think 50%ish of them are probably other things.

Re:a bit exaggerated

[AK Marc]

If Jupiter were a brown dwarf, would that have prevented life from forming on Earth? If not, then the change in results is irrelevant to the search for Earth-like planets. In fact, it could help, as I've seen it postulated that Jupiter increased the chances of life on Earth by clearing the system of threats.