Keck Telescopes Find 18 New Exoplanets

KAMUELA, Hawaii—A whopping 18 new, bona fide exoplanets have been discovered and confirmed by a team of Caltech astronomers using the Keck Telescopes and two other ground-based observatories.  “It’s the largest single announcement of planets in orbit around stars more massive than the sun, aside from the discoveries made by the Kepler mission,” says John Johnson, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech and the first author on the team’s paper, which was published in the December issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The Kepler mission is a space telescope that has so far identified more than 1,200 possible…