The authors used this approach to re-vet Kepler's data from more than 100,000 stars, hoping to find ways to more rapidly confirm
strong planetary candidates and boost the odds of validating borderline ones.
«It's like a big beach ball under the ice sheet pushing up on it, and the only way to keep it submerged is if the ice sheet is
strong,» said Hemingway, a doctoral
candidate in
planetary geophysics at UCSC and lead author of the paper.