Four of the new candidates sit in the habitable zone around their stars, the not-too-hot, not-too-cold region where liquid water might exist on a planet's surface. One of these planets orbits a star with an effective surface temperature of 5,886 degrees kelvin, very similar to our own Sun, which has a effective surface temperature of 5,778 degrees kelvin.

I thought it would be fun to look at the raw data behind this new planet candidate, giving us some insight on how astronomers record and interpret transits. For help, I've been pestering Johanna Teske, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Arizona. She's been kind enough to indulge my many questions, but any misstatements here are surely my own.

To begin, let's pull up the planet candidate in NASA's Exoplanet archive. It is designated as Kepler Object of Interest (KOI) 172.02, which tells us something right away: it is one of two planet candidates orbiting this star. If you open the data validation report, you'll see that candidate 172.01 has a period of 13.7 days, shorter than even Mercury, which takes 88 days to make a lap around our Sun.

Candidate 172.02, however, has a period of 242.5 days, far closer to our standard Earth year. Its radius is listed as 1.4 Earth radii, making it a "super-Earth." This doesn't mean the planet is necessarily Earth-like in its composition, but it's close in size. That's not to say it isn't Earth-like as well, but as of now we don't know.

So where is it? The validation report for KOI 172.02 shows an RA (right ascension) of 19.55072930 hours, and a dec (declination) of 44.86889000 degrees. Those are celestial equatorial coordinates used to find objects in the sky, using the Earth as a reference point.

I use the free astronomy program Stellarium to browse the night sky. Stellarium doesn’t like coordinates in decimal form; it wants them in sexagesimal (minutes and seconds). So using a free converter (I used this one, but many others would suffice), we find KOI 172.02 has an RA of 19h 33m 2.62s, and a dec of 44 degrees, 52m, 8.00s. Plugging that into Stellarium’s search function, we find our star nestled in the constellation Cygnus, just below the star Delta Cygni (δ Cyg).