Rowe theorizes that since very young planets are very hot, these objects are probably newborn planets, but Ronald Gilliland, of the Space Telescope Science Institute, says they could be far older-white dwarf stars in their death throes.
The Kepler telescope’s three-year mission is to scan some 150,000 stars in a small section of the visible universe to search for planets similar to Earth. The latest discoveries are anything but.
In the first weeks of its mission, the Kepler telescope spotted five “exo-planets”– planets orbiting stars other than our own. All of them were orbiting close to their suns, causing them to have temperatures in the thousands of degrees.
"Looking at them is like looking at a blast furnace," Borucki said. "(They’re) certainly, no place to look for life."
