Found: Three new planets

Planet after planet that was spotted in the earlier days of the search, when all we could detect were very large planets circling very bright stars, were not lined up the way they were supposed to be. More recently - especially since the 2009 launch of the Kepler Space Telescope - they have relied on the slight dimming in luminosity that occurs as a planet passes in front of its star, blocking a bit of its light. Sunspots rotate around the star and a planet has to be lined up with it precisely to cross over it at all. As he hoped, he detected both the dimming of a planet passing in front of the star and the slight reduction of that dimming as it sailed over the sunspot.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/time/scienceandhealth/~3/AeoxHo8yG4k/0,8599,2120548,00.html