The red dots are a few of the stars K2 examines in its search for transiting planets outside of our solar system. A few fast-moving asteroids make cameo appearances in the movie, showing up as streaks across the K2 field of view. Appearing from the left at day 24, keen-eyed observers can also spot the tiny moon Nereid in its slow 360-day orbit around the planet. The small faint object closely orbiting is its large moon Triton, which circles Neptune every 5.8 days. Neptune appears on day 15 but does not travel alone in the video. The 70-day timespan is compressed into 34 seconds with the number of days noted in the top right corner. The movie, based on 101,580 images taken from November 2014 through January 2015 during K2's Campaign 3, reveals the perpetual clockwork of our solar system. The movie illustrates 70 days of uninterrupted observation making this one of the longer continuous studies of an outer solar system object. In its new K2 mission, Neptune and two of its moons, Triton and Nereid, have been imaged. NASA's Kepler spacecraft, known for its planet-hunting prowess of other stars, is also studying solar system objects. and I do expect a couple of over-hyped announcements :-) Quote from: jebbo on 07:56 am I think that is a little over-optimistic (but not much). long observation of K2 / TESS discoveries or (worst-case) Plato results. We also might get lucky and get a few single transit events from K2 but really to find truly Earth-like worlds will take a while. There are a few KOI with very high ESI numbers which may be susceptible to ground based follow up (KOI-4878.01 springs to mind), which could happen this year and prove me to be a pessimist :-)

In the short term, I think the best chance for Earth-like worlds around sun-like stars is still from the main Kepler pipeline. K2 will find plenty more planets, but because of the decrease in sensitivity and short viewing window for each field, it is not really capable of finding long duration planets and the habitability/similarity of planets around M dwarfs is questionable (personally, I'm sceptical that you can call anything around an M-dwarf truly habitable due to tidal locking issues and flares). I think that is a little over-optimistic (but not much).

Kepler 22b telescope