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Kepler was one of the most successful exoplanet-hunting missions so far. It discovered 2,600 confirmed exoplanets \u2013 almost half of the total \u2013 in its almost ten years of operation. However, most data analysis focused only on one of the 150,000 targets it \u201cintended\u201d to look at. While it was making those observations, there were a myriad of background stars that also had their light captured incidentally. John Bienias and Robert Szab\u00f3 of Hungary\u2019s Konkoly Observatory have spent a lot of time looking at those background stars and recently published a paper suggesting there might be seven more exoplanet candidates hiding in the data.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n As with many space telescope missions, Kepler\u2019s dataset is open to the public. NASA maintains a database with the raw data collected during the space telescope\u2019s observations, and researchers are free to download it and analyze it as they see fit.<\/p>\n Plenty of interesting things are hiding in that data that were overlooked by the more than 3136 peer-reviewed scientific papers that have utilized Kepler\u2019s data. In the past, the authors have published other documents using the same datasets that described eclipsing binary stars and RR Lyrae stars, a type of pulsating variable star already existing in the data.<\/p>\n \n