"Initially flagged by volunteers sifting through archival Kepler data as part of the crowdsourced Planet Hunters project, the signal matched the profile of a tiny, rocky exoplanet passingor transitingin front of the star. After further analysis, a team of astronomers reported the possible discovery on Tuesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. If confirmed, this world would officially be called HD 137010 bbut confirmation has proved difficult, to say the least."
"Kepler's search strategy was to stare at a rich field of stars for years on end. By watching for telltale transits, it discovered thousands of exoplanets. Stars can dim for many nonplanetary reasons, however. So the mission's scientists sought a total of three observed transits for Kepler's smallest planetary candidates before the researchers would declare them to be genuine worlds."
A single 10-hour dimming observed in 2017 of HD 137010 — a star about 146 light-years away in Libra and slightly smaller and less luminous than the Sun — matches the transit profile of a small rocky planet. The candidate was flagged by Planet Hunters volunteers and reported in the Astrophysical Journal Letters as a possible Earth-sized, potentially habitable world to be named HD 137010 b if confirmed. Confirmation remains difficult because Kepler recorded only one transit and mission stabilizers failed, forcing a shortened K2 observing strategy that reduced opportunities to observe the required three transits for small planets.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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