University of British Columbia (UBC) astronomy doctoral student Michelle Kunimoto has discovered 17 new exoplanets outside the solar system by analyzing data from NASA's Kepler mission, which was completed in 2018. Since its 2009 launch, astronomers using the Kepler orbital observatory have found scientific confirmation of the existence of exoplanets - including the possibly Earth-like Kepler-452b - in other regions of our galaxy. According to NASA's website, the "Kepler Mission is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets." Kunimoto's findings were published in The Astronomical Journal on February 25. "Our search returned 17 planet candidates (PCs) in addition to thousands of known Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs), with a 98.8% recovery rate of already confirmed planets