An earlier Kepler News item, "NASA's Kepler announces 11 planetary systems hosting 26 planets," indicated that discoveries in Kepler-33 system were done by a very exciting new statistical method of confirming planets in multi-planet systems. "The approach used to verify the Kepler-33 planets shows the overall reliability is quite high," said Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of the paper on Kepler-33. "This is a validation by multiplicity."

The article, Almost All of Kepler's Multiple-planet Candidates Are Planets," by J. Lissauer et al, was submitted to The Astrophysical Journal last fall and published 2012 April 23.

Abstract excerpt: We present a statistical analysis that demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of Kepler candidate multiple transiting systems (multis) indeed represent true, physically associated transiting planets. Binary stars provide the primary source of false positives among Kepler planet candidates, implying that false positives should be nearly randomly distributed among Kepler targets.... There are more than one hundred times as many Kepler planet candidates in multi-candidate systems as would be predicted from a random distribution of candidates, implying that the vast majority are true planets....

Return to News Archive