STOCKTON — A University of the Pacific professor is part of a team of scientists who have published a groundbreaking new catalog of exoplanets — planets that orbit stars beyond the solar system.

The catalog includes some exoplanet discoveries that were previously unknown to astronomers including Kepler-385, the first planetary system found to contain seven hot planets.

“Even the outermost planet at Kepler-385 receives more than eight times as much heat from its star than the Earth receives from the sun,” said Associate Professor of Physics Daniel Jontof-Hutter. “The Kepler dataset changed our ideas of what kinds of planets and planetary systems are typical in our galaxy.”

Jontof-Hutter collaborated with researchers from NASA Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and other universities around the country and in Canada. Pacific Alumnus Kadri Nizam ’19, now a graduate student at Penn State University, also worked with Jontof-Hutter.

Their findings will be published in the Planetary Sciences Journal and were shared in a news release from NASA’s Ames Research Center.

Other work by Pacific astronomers:

*Assistant Professor of Physics Dustin Madison is part of a team of international scientists that recently released breakthrough findings on gravitational waves;

*Associate Professor of Physics Guillermo Barro is among the first scientists selected by NASA to study images and data from the powerful James Webb Space Telescope;

*Professor of Physics Elisa Toloba recently published new discoveries involving the Virgo Cluster, a large grouping of galaxies near the Milky Way.