New article on Inoreader

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdUd6y2PWh5l3gGE99ejY2QExoplanets: Are We Close To Finding A New Earth?- Space Science Documentary -

Sometimes planets turn up where you least expect - such as in data from the Kepler space-hunting telescope that had already been analysed.
The largest is a little over twice the size of Earth. The smallest, about 69 percent of Earth's size. They're so small that previous surveys missed them, but a new technique has brought them into the light.

And it could help us find the galaxy's 'missing' Earth-sized planets.

At time of writing, planet-hunting missions around the world have confirmed the existence of 3,970 exoplanets. Most of them are huge. Around 96 percent are significantly larger than Earth; most of the exoplanets we've found fall into the gas giant category, like Neptune, or Saturn, or Jupiter, and even larger still.

But if we use our own Solar System as a baseline, there should be a lot more rocky, Earth-like planets out there. We have four - Earth, Venus, Mercury and Mars. That's half the planets in the Solar System (not even including dwarf planets like Pluto, Haumea and Ceres).

So, scientists believe there should be more rocky planets out there - but the upper size limit for a rocky planet is believed to be around twice the diameter of Earth. The search algorithms used for analysing the Kepler data just aren't sensitive enough to detect planets that small.
It's there that astronomers have found a treasure trove - 18 Earth-sized exoplanets, including one that may be habitable.