David Kipping

over a decade ago now, I think.

And it discovered thousands of planets.

It's still the dominant source of exoplanets that we know about.

But unfortunately, it didn't last as long as we would have liked it to.

It died after about 4.35 years, I think it was.

And so for an Earth-like planet, that's just enough to catch four transits.

Before transits was kind of seen as the minimum.

But of course, the more transits you see, the easier it is to detect it because you build up signal to noise.

If you see the same thing, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, the more ticks you get, the easier it is to find it.

And so it was really a shame that Kepler was just at the limit of where we were expecting it to start to see Earth-like planets.

And in fact, it really found zero.

zero planets that are around stars like the Sun, that orbit similar to the Earth around the Sun, and could potentially be similar to our own planet in terms of its composition.

And so it's a great shame, but that's why it gives astronomers more to do in the future.

You're right in your description.

I think just to build upon that a little bit more, it might be almost like,

your vision is completely blurry.

Like you have an extreme, you know, eye prescription.

And so you can't resolve anything.

Everything's just blurs.

But you can tell that something was there because it just got fainter for a short amount of time.