The Kepler-90 planets have a similar configuration to our solar system with small planets found orbiting close to their star, and the larger planets found farther away. However, the eighth planet discovered orbits only at the Earth-Sun distance, so we have no idea what lies beyond, including if there are smaller worlds still left to discover. Planets are shown to correct relative size, but not to correct orbital scales. Image credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel.

Why NASA’s Kepler Mission Is Toast

The ‘big discovery’ is nothing of the kind. We need a new planet-finding mission to probe the next frontier.

Last week, NASA dropped a bombshell that it’s Kepler mission — the greatest planet-finding mission in history — had teamed up with Google’s AI to make a groundbreaking new discovery. Speculation ran rampant as to what it might be. An Earth-like twin? A signal unlike anything else we’d ever seen? Even a hint of alien intelligence, or life beyond our Solar System? Nope. Yesterday’s big reveal was an incredibly mundane announcement: Kepler-90, a star system previously known to have seven planets, was now found to have eight. While this makes Kepler-90 the only star system known to have as many planets as our Solar System, this mundane announcement highlights just how thoroughly the data from Kepler has been examined. Despite the headlines you’ll likely see in the future, bet on this: all of Kepler’s major discoveries are in the past.

Today, as shown in figure 10, we know of over 3,500 confirmed exoplanets, with more than 2,500 of those found in the Kepler data. These planets range in size from larger than Jupiter to smaller than Earth. In just a couple decades, thanks largely to Kepler, we have gone from suspecting exoplanets existed to knowing that there are more exoplanets than stars in our galaxy. Image credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Jessie Dotson and Wendy Stenzel.

The Kepler-90 system, even before the discovery of the eighth planet, was an objectively interesting one. First, it was a G-class star, the same class as our own. The orientation of this…