Discovery Alert! Kepler's First Planet Candidate Confirmed, 10 Years Later
Despite being the very first planet candidate discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, Kepler-1658b had a rocky road to confirmation. The initial estimate of the planet’s host star was off, so the sizes of both the star and Kepler-1658b were vastly underestimated. It was later marked as a false positive — that is, scientists thought the data did not really point to a planet — when the numbers didn’t quite add up for the effects seen on its star for a body of that size.
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