Kepler-11g
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Kepler-11 was originally called KOI-157 when NASA's Kepler spacecraft flagged the star for possible transit events, which exhibit tiny and roughly periodic decreases in the star's brightness are measured as it passes in front of its star as seen from Earth.[2] Kepler-11's name is incorporated into Kepler-11g's name because it is the host star. As Kepler-11g and its five sister planets were discovered and announced at the same time, its planets were sorted alphabetically by distance from the host star, starting with the letter b. Because Kepler-11g was the furthest of the six, it was given the designation "g."
The Kepler team's scientists conducted follow-up observations to confirm or reject the planetary nature of the detected object.[5] To do so, they used the Keck 1 telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii; the Shane and Hale telescopes in California; telescopes at the WIYN (including MMT) and Whipple observatories in Arizona; Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands; the Hobby-Eberly and Harlan J. Smith telescopes in Texas; and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.[5] Because Kepler-11g orbits its star at a far greater distance than the inner five planets, fewer transits were observed, and radial velocity (the observation of a Doppler effect) interactions could not be easily discerned. As with the discovery of Kepler-9d, the Kepler team ran the information through numerous models to see if Kepler-11g's light curve could fit the profile of some other object, including an eclipsing binary star in the background that may have contaminated the data. The probability that Kepler-11g is not a planet but instead a false positive was determined to be 0.18%, effectively confirming its existence.[3]
Kepler-11g, along with its five sister planets, were announced at a NASA press conference on February 2, 2011. The findings were published in the journal Nature a day later.[1]
