WASHINGTON — NASA’s new planet-hunting telescope has found two mystery objects that are too hot to be planets and too small to be stars.
The Kepler telescope, launched in March, discovered the two new heavenly bodies, each circling its own star. Telescope chief scientist Bill Borucki of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the objects are thousands of degrees hotter than the stars they circle.
“The universe keeps making strange things stranger than we can think of in our imagination,” said Jon Morse, head of astrophysics for NASA.
The new discoveries don’t quite fit into any definition of known astronomical objects and so far don’t have a classification of their own. Details about the mystery objects were presented Monday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington.
For now, NASA researcher Jason Rowe, who found the objects, said he calls them “hot companions.” Rowe suggests they are newly born planets.
Ronald Gilliland of the Space Telescope Science Institute says they could be white dwarf stars that are dying and stripping off their outer shells and shrinking.
The primary focus of the Kepler Telescope’s three-year mission is to find out how common other planets — especially Earthlike planets — are in the universe.
