So reports Ethan Siegel at Forbes:
Yesterday, results were released from an international team led by Alexandre Santerne from Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, where they measured 129 objects-of-interest identified by Kepler for a period of five years. They did spectroscopic analysis, which means they studied the individual wavelengths of light coming from the star, and expected a false positive rate of about 10-to-20%, which is what most scientists estimated.
But they found, instead, that over half (52%) of the planetary candidates were, in fact, eclipsing binaries, with another three candidates turning out to be brown dwarfs.
…
But perhaps the biggest surprise is that the majority of these thought-to-be planets aren’t planets at all, but are massive stars (or almost stars) in their own right. Perhaps, with only one main star in our Solar System, we’re the ones who are the oddities, after all. More.
See also: “Behold, countless Earths sail the galaxies … that is, if you would only believe …”
Don’t let Mars fool you. Those exoplanets teem with life!
and
Copernicus, you are not going to believe who is using your name. Or how.
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